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The Santa María School massacre was a massacre of striking workers, mostly saltpeter works (nitrate) miners, along with wives and children, committed by the Chilean Army in Iquique, Chile on December 21, 1907. The number of victims is undetermined but is reliably estimated at over 2,000. It occurred during the peak of the nitrate mining era, which coincided with the Parliamentary Period in Chilean political history (1891–1925). With the massacre and an ensuing reign of terror, not only was the strike broken, but the workers' movement was thrown into limbo for over a decade. For decades afterward there was official suppression of knowledge of the incident, but in 2007 the government conducted a highly publicized commemoration of its centenary, including an official national day of mourning and the reinterment of the victims' remains. The site of the massacre was the Domingo Santa María School,〔named after former Chilean president Santa María〕 where thousands of miners from different nitrate mines in Chile's far north had been camping for a week after converging on Iquique, the regional capital, to appeal for government intervention to improve their living and working conditions. Rafael Sotomayor Gaete, the minister of the interior, decided to crush the strike, by army assault if need be.〔 The Alchemy of Air Thomas Hager, http://www.amazon.com/The-Alchemy-Air-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0307351793 〕 On December 21, 1907, the commander of the troops at the scene, General Roberto Silva Renard, in accordance with this plan, informed the strikers' leaders that the strikers had one hour to disband or be fired upon. When the time was up and the leaders and the multitude stood firm, General Silva Renard gave his troops the order to fire. An initial volley that felled the negotiators was followed by a hail of rifle and machine gun fire aimed at the multitude of strikers and their accompanying wives and children. ==Historical background== Chilean society faced a crisis from the late 19th century onwards: what was delicately referred to at the time as the "social question"〔"fenómenos que a partir de la década de 1880 fueron conocidos bajo el nombre de «cuestión social»" phenomena which from the 1880s on were known under the name of «social question»; Grez 1995, Presentación, opening sentence〕—namely, "the problem of worsening living and working conditions in the country's mining centers and major cities"〔Barr-Melej 2001:3〕〔Collier and Sater 1996:164ff〕 The nitrate miners' strike of December 1907 was the last of a series of strikes and other forms of unrest that began in 1902, chief among them being the strike in Valparaíso in 1903 and the meat riots in Santiago in 1905.〔Correa et al. 2001〕 In Chile, the workers' movement in general, and syndicalism in particular, got started among the nitrate miners. Geographically, the region Chileans today have come to refer to as the Norte Grande (Big North) lies within the Atacama Desert, the driest region on Earth. The Norte Grande and the Norte Chico immediately to the south belong to the Chilean ''pampa'', a vast plain located between the Pacific Ocean and the western foothills of the Andes mountains. The Norte Grande, which administratively consisted (before 1974) of the two Provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta,〔Regions of Chile〕〔Under the administrative structure of Chile as of 2007, the Norte Grande includes what are now termed the Regions of Tarapacá, Antofagasta, and Arica and Parinacota. The latter region was created in 2007 by subdividing the Tarapacá Region.〕 had been seized by Chile from Bolivia and Peru in the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), giving Chile an area rich in minerals, principally copper and saltpeter (sodium nitrate). Tensions provoked by the control of the mines had been one of the leading causes of the 1891 Chilean Civil War, when pro-Congress forces triumphed. The mining of nitrate had become the mainstay of the nation's economy at the end of the 19th century, Chile being the exclusive producer worldwide. According to the census of November 28, 1907, Tarapacá Province held 110,000 inhabitants.〔Zolezzi 1999〕 In the provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta about 40,000 workers were active in the nitrate industry, of whom about 13,000 came from Bolivia and Peru.〔 Life in the mining camps—a nitrate works was known locally as an ''oficina'', "office", a term whose use extended to the adjoining settlement—was grueling and physically dangerous.〔Collier and Sater 1996:163〕 The enterprises exercised a severe control over the life and working conditions inside the mines, which rendered the workers extremely vulnerable to arbitrary actions perpetrated by the owners. Each ''oficina'' was a company town in which the mine owner owned the workers' housing, owned the company store (known in Chile as a ''pulpería''), monopolized all commerce, and employed a private police force. Each mining camp ran its own money system, paying its workers in tokens, which could be spent only within the mining camp. Mine managers frequently put off paydays for up to three months.〔 At the beginning of the 20th century, the above mentioned "social question" prompted unrest among the workers at the nitrate ''oficinas'' in the Tarapacá Province. They began to mobilize politically, repeatedly petitioning the national government in Santiago to get involved and bring about improvements in their dreadful living and working conditions. The Parliamentary Period governments, however, were reluctant to intervene in negotiations between employers and workers, and they tended to see large scale workers' movements (especially if accompanied by massive demonstrations) as incipient rebellions.〔Collier and Sater 1996〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Santa María School massacre」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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