Río Blanco strike

Río Blanco strike, 1907

The Río Blanco strike of January 7 and 8, 1907 was a workers' riot related to a textile strike, near Orizaba in the Mexican state of Veracruz.

Following a two-week railroad strike in the summer of 1906, further labor unrest developed among cotton and textile workers in the neighboring states of Tlaxcala and Puebla. Central Mexican textile workers had organized as the Gran Círculo de Obreros Libres ("Great Circle of Free Workers"), and 93 of the factory owners, most of them French, had formed a trade group called Centro Industrial Mexicano.

After a Christmas Eve lockout by the owners, the administration of President Porfirio Díaz reached a temporary labor settlement. Some workers of the large Río Blanco mill near Orizaba had not joined any strike. Still they were blacklisted, left locked out of work, and were refused access to provisions from the monopoly company store.[1]

On January 7 a stone-throwing crowd of about 2000 rioted, with many of the attacks focused on the stores. On the first day the mob ransacked the homes of the wealthy, released prisoners from jail, and went afield to Nogales and Necoxtla to burn and loot their company stores as well. By the end of the day, locally stationed soliders had killed 18. Hundreds more had been arrested or chased into the surrounding hills.[2]

Federal troops arrived on the 8th on the personal orders of Díaz. Six strike leaders were identified by evening and executed, on the smoking ruins of the company store, the next morning. Conservative casualty figures range from 50 to 70 dead, and hundreds wounded.[3] The incident became linked with the Cananea strike of June 1906 as two symbols of the Díaz administration's corruption and civil repression. They became "household words for hundreds of thousands of Mexicans".[4]

References

  1. ↑ Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico, by Michael S. Werner, published by Taylor & Francis, 2001, page 283
  2. ↑ Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development By Paul J. Vanderwood, Rowman & Littlefield, 1992, page 147
  3. ↑ The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940, by Michael J. Gonzales, UNM Press, 2002, page 64
  4. ↑ The Cambridge History of Latin America, by Leslie Bethell, Cambridge University Press, 1986, page 66
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