In the austral winter of 1934, a rebellion erupted in southern Chile. Hundreds of rural workers, led by what at the time was Chile's largest agricultural workers' union, the Sindicato Agrícola Lonquimay, took up arms in an effort to expropriate regional landowners and estate managers and to foment a socialist revolution. This was the Ránquil rebellion. It ended with rebels either on the run, in the midst of a snowy winter, or detained and never to be seen again. Of the hundreds of rebels who rose up, only some 56 ended up in Temuco's jail. The vast majority disappeared or, more to the point, were actively disappeared by Chile's police.
Thomas Klubock's Ránquil is a powerful history of that rebellion. It is a double act of historical recuperation, simultaneously rescuing the rebellion from historiographical neglect and unearthing the disturbing history of state repression, extrajudicial murder, and forced disappearance that quashed...
