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220 Epilogue In February 1910, more than 1,000 stevedores, steamboat crew members, and railroad workers walked off their jobs in Barranquilla after their employers cut wages by 25 percent. Canal diggers, female and male factory workers, and shop laborers soon joined them, and after a week of escalating conflict across the coastal city, the shipping consortium conceded, restoring the original wages and ending Colombia’s first general strike. Three years later, employees of the same enterprises again stopped work, this time to demand a 25 percent wage increase and a reduction in hours. Fearing another shutdown of the national transportation sector and a halt to the country’s coffee exports, Barranquilla’s municipal officials quickly negotiated a settlement. Then in January 1918, during a time of mass unemployment, rising food prices, and other economic dislocations brought on by the First World War, men and women went on strike in Barranquilla, Cartagena, Santa Marta, the banana zone of Magdalena, and several points along the Magdalena River. This uncoordinated and, for Colombia, unprecedented wave of strikes was led by tens of thousands of working people across more than 100 miles of the coast. Although the January 1918 Caribbean strikes provoked the government to declare a month-long state of siege over the region, they succeeded in gaining new concessions from employers and won for all of Colombia’s wage workers the legal right to strike.1 Deteriorating social conditions had triggered many of the strikes even as working people’s actions had been shaped by the expectations for and limitations of political reform in the wake of the Thousand Days’ War. After assuming office in 1904, President Rafael Reyes included Liberals in his cabinet and handpicked Assembly, yet he also suspended the constitution and Congress. Mass protests against his increasingly autocratic rule and, especially, his ill-timed treaty with the United States over Panama led to his government’s collapse in June 1909. Constitutional reforms enacted the following year raised anticipation of democratic change through the reinstatement of press freedom, the abolition of capital punishment, limits on presidential powers, more authority for the restored and popularly elected Congress, the direct election of the president for the first time since 1856, and guaranteed minority party representation in Congress. The bipartisan lettered leadership in Bogotá that controlled the reform process, Epilogue221 however, did not reinstitute universal manhood suffrage.2 The continuing exclusion of illiterate and propertyless men, the ongoing influence of antiReyes demonstrations after the president’s fall from power, and the return of partisan politics were all catalysts for the Caribbean general strikes. As older forms of disenfranchisement and dispossession persisted amid calls for change, Caribbean wage workers expressed demands for political and economic freedom as inseparable in their attempts to remake citizenship after 1909.3 The strikes had other immediate and unintended effects that included a more institutionalized Jesuit coastal mission. Labor militancy, Vatican dictates, and the bipartisanship that followed the Thousand Days’ War transformed missionary objectives from stamping out Caribbean Liberalism , as had been the goal during the Regeneration, to confronting class conflict. Jesuits tended to the coastal region’s “honorable poor,” the “stevedores ,” and the large “floating population” searching for work in the rapidly expanding sugarcane fields, banana plantations, factories, and transportation sector.4 In the old Enviadista hotbeds along the Magdalena River and in districts where rural warfare or vast accumulations by cattle ranching had displaced colonos from provision grounds, parishioners refused entry to the priests.5 Yet other populations welcomed them, and in addition to their impressive statistics in marriages and baptisms performed , priests could draw personal inspiration from the story of Agustín Macías, “an old disciple of that false messiah,” who renounced El Enviado to become a parish rector and a supporter of the visiting priests.6 According to Antonio José Uribe, the Jesuits’ most fervent proponent in Congress , the missions’ attention to the social question made them successful “simultaneously in their arduous labor of winning citizens for the patria and souls for heaven.”7 If the church mandate on the social question was guided by the hope of an orderly inclusion of restive working classes into national life, the official and lettered response to the strikes nonetheless marginalized Caribbean people once more. In Bogotá and Medellín, wage workers came to be incorporated into priest-run organizations guided by the papal Rerum Novarum encyclical urging reconciliation of labor and capital, whereas the Jesuits’ coastal mission fell under the purview of a 1912...

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