blar-drinot 17.10.03 9:15 Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1±29, 2004 The 1934 Southern Railway Strike in Peru1 PAULO DRINOT St Antony's College, Oxford, UK This article examines the 1934 Southern Railway Strike, a largely neglected yet important episode in Peruvian labour history. The strike, which pitted the British-owned Peruvian Corporation and its workforce, resulted in victory for the company. Drawing on a variety of original primary sources, I examine the factors that shaped the development and outcome of the strike. I pay particular attention to the strategies developed by the company managers to defeat the workers. The success of these strategies, I suggest, owed in no small measure to the volatile political situation created by the insurgency tactics of APRA and the Communist Party, which made victory for the workers politically impossible. Keywords: Industrial relations, labour, business, populism, nationalism, informal imperialism. Although largely ignored by Peruvian labour historiography, the 1934 Southern Railway dispute was, after the 1931 general strike, arguably the second most important industrial dispute in the 1930s.2 The dispute lasted between April and August 1934, though its origins are traceable to late 1933 and the dispute's aftershocks were felt well into 1935. Arequipa was the epicentre of the dispute, but Mollendo, Puno and Cuzco, and to a lesser extent Lima and Trujillo were all shaken. Though essentially a railway dispute, both white-collar and blue-collar workers from a number of industries became directly involved. The `immediate' causes of the dispute were unremarkable. As in other industries, the workers of the Southern Railway, owned by the Peruvian Corporation, a British company, 1 This paper is based on material consulted in the following archives: Archivo General de la Nacio n, Lima; Archivo Departamental de Arequipa; Archivo Enafer (Central Railway), Lima; Biblioteca Nacional del Peru , Lima; Peruvian Corporation Archive, University College, London; Foreign Office papers, Public Record Office, London (Abbreviated hereafter as AGN; ADA; FCP; BNP; PC; FO). I am grateful to the ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support and to Rory Miller and Lewis Taylor for their comments and suggestions. 2 The strike is not mentioned in regional studies, such as Flores Galindo (1993), Caravedo Molinari, (1978) or in labour histories, such as Sulmont (1975). On the 1931 general strike see Dawson (1981). ß 2004 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1 blar-drinot 17.10.03 9:15 Paulo Drinot believed they had been made to bear the brunt of the world slump. As the southern economy began to recover, workers could not fail to notice the increased activity in the rail shops and on the tracks. Joined in a single strike committee, white and blue collar workers demanded a part of the new prosperity. Taken to arbitration, the dispute ended with a ruling on 17 May 1934 that was highly favourable to the workers. However, little over a year later, the railway company had succeeded in replacing the ruling with a compensation of 200,000 soles, which it then used to divide the workforce. The joint committee was disbanded and most of union leadership shipped off to jails in Lima. The company then created new unions to rival the white and blue collar unions and effectively neutralised militancy among its workforce. This paper concentrates on the factors ± the economic and (local and national) political context ± that shaped the strike and on the strategies employed by the Peruvian Corporation during and after the dispute, which helped defeat the workers. I draw on a number of sources, culled from archives in Arequipa, Lima, and London. Unfortunately, these sources say little about the relationship between the union leadership and the rank and file. The dynamics of decision- making within the unions can only be hinted at from available sources.3 On the other hand, other types of documents make it possible to examine other no less important questions. The documents of the arbitration tribunal, which consist of the workers' pliego de reclamos (list of grievances), letters from the opposing parties and the tribunal's rulings, are invaluable windows onto the negotiations that took place between the workers' representatives, the company, and their lawyers. Reports from police spies who infiltrated union sessions offer us a glimpse of how the unions attempted to deal with pressures exercised by the radical political parties that were formed in this period. Most important perhaps, internal company documentation and reports from the British minister in Lima to the Foreign Office give us an insight into how the company viewed the strike, its own workforce, and the Peruvian state, and how it developed a series of strategies to confront the striking workers. Given the strategic importance of railways in Latin America in the export age and the fact that many were foreign-owned, the study of railway disputes, such as the 1934 Southern Railway strike in Peru, offers a privileged perspective on a series of key issues in early twentieth century Latin American history. First, this article contributes to interpretations of how labour disputes in the 1930s shaped politics and industrial relations in Latin America.4 In the case of Peru, the 1930s 3 When I visited Arequipa in 1998, I was unable to find the archive of the Southern Railway. Flores Galindo (1993: 301) suggests that it may have been lost. The ENAFER archive in Lima contains information on the Central Railway workforce, but not on the Southern Railway's. Although I visited the offices of the white-collar railway confederation in Arequipa, I never found anyone there who could give me information on the union's activities. 4 Recent studies of railway disputes in Latin America, include Bak (1998) and the chapters by Andrea Spears, Marc Christian McLeod and Marõ a Celina Tuozzo in Brown (1997). 2 ß 2004 Society for Latin American Studies blar-drinot 17.10.03 9:16 The 1934 Southern Railway Strike in Peru saw the creation of a new form of politics, populism, which brought organised labour into the political arena and tied workers (or more vaguely `the masses') to charismatic leaders (Stein, 1980). In the process, the relations between labour and the state, on the one hand, and unions and the new political parties, on the other, were redefined. Labour disputes now transcended the domain of industrial relations and became a key arena of political contestation. As the 1934 Southern Railway strike shows, the actions of both the workers and the company's managers, and the outcome of the dispute, were shaped by this new political context. Second, the article also contributes to the growing literature on how foreign companies in Latin America came to terms with nationalism from the 1930s onwards (Brown 1997; O'Brien 1996). In the case of Peru, O'Brien has argued that a series of disputes between workers and US-owned companies in the 1930s were defined by nationalism, which `legitimized the struggles of the popular forces and enabled them to form alliances with an array of national political movements, including Aprismo and SaÂnchez Cerrismo. Despite the repression of the early 1930s, their struggle defined the course of popular resistance within the national political process for the next three decades' (O'Brien, 1996: 158).5 As I will show, nationalism played a key role in the 1934 Southern Railway strike. Widespread and cross-class support for the strike was a direct consequence of anti-Peruvian Corporation feelings fuelled by nationalist sentiments. The railway workers proved adept at garnering these sentiments to their cause. However, as the political consequences of a workers' victory in the strike began to dawn on the nationalist backers of the strike, the cross-class alliance was promptly abandoned. Finally, the strike provides an insight into British business and government relations in Latin America. Recent studies (Miller 1993; DaÂvila and Miller 1999) have tried to go beyond the arguments that fed the debates on informal imperialism and dependency, and to examine the relations between British business and Latin America in a new light, drawing on sources that had previously been largely neglected or improperly researched and new theoretical and methodological perspectives. What emerges from these approaches is the need to broaden the scope of analysis beyond interpretations that hone in on political and economic control and neglect the cultural dimensions of informal imperial relations.6 The availability of company documents makes it possible to examine up-close the perspectives and strategies of the Peruvian Corporation's managers during the strike. In providing an insight into how the company's 5 To some extent O'Brien's argument echoes Bergquist's suggestion that `workers, especially those engaged in production for export, have played a determining role in the modern history of Latin American societies. Their struggle for material well-being and control over their own lives has fundamentally altered the direction of national political evolution and the pattern of economic development in the countries of the region' (1986: [vii]). 6 On this issue the literature on US-Latin American relations has made far greater inroads. See Joseph, LeGrand and Salvatore (1998). ß 2004 Society for Latin American Studies 3 blar-drinot 17.10.03 9:16 Paulo Drinot managers perceived and dealt with the Peruvian government, nationalist critics or militant workers, the study of the 1934 Southern Railway strike can help us better understand the mentalities of historical actors, who, through their actions as representatives of a company that was perceived as the embodiment of British economic imperialism in Peru, played a key role in shaping populist and nationalist politics in the 1930s.