My grandpa was one of the last to work for La Forestal. They came to the Argentine Chaco to extract tannin from the quebracho tree. He tells me that every time a huge quebracho was cut down, it fell on the new little trees, not giving the forest time to grow back. A job from sun to sun, on lands stolen from the native peoples of the Chaco, who, along with criollos and immigrants, were also forced into gangs to cut down trees so hard that broke down axes, with trunks meters in diameter, to be pulverized in sweatshop factories and sent as tanin podwer to European industries. La Forestal did not pay you in pesos; you had a coin (my grandpa still has his, it says "Obrero Nยฐ 14"), which you presented at the company store, and they gave you whatever (food, booze) they cared to give you, or what they said they had; after all, as my grandfather says, if you didn't know how to read or write, how would you know you were getting less than they said?
And if you went on strike? And if you formed a union? And if you wanted to resist, like the indigenous peoples did? Some boys with a blood-red cap, the Cardenales, criminals taken from prison, would come and kill you, in broad daylight if you were striking, in the middle of the forest if you were alone. Many books tell about hacheros yelling one last long sapucai before killing themselves, because they couldn't stand it anymore.
Who were the owners of this terrible company? English. In the La Forestal HQ in the north of Santa Fe, a beautiful mansion (I understand that it is now a ruin) while the workers lived in mud huts with roofs of palm leaves, every day, the Union Jack was hoisted over Argentine soil, and of course, at five o'clock it was tea time, while all the tannin, loaded on barges and on railways worked by Argentines but owned by the British, went to Europe, and the wealth, of course, to London.
My grandfather lived through the last of this. Perรณn already came by that time, with worker's rights, unions, rural schools and clinics, the nationalization of railways... Nevertheless, he still had to hunt to eat and work from a young age at the machines of the company, as the company was leaving the country and couldn't even bother to pay a pittance to its workers. It eventually closed most of its operations and came into Argentine hands. But don't think it was because the English had a change of heart. They just found a better source of tannin, the acacias in their African colonies. God knows what crimes they committed there, if this is what they did in the territory of a 'sovereign' country.
And this is the side of the story I know. I cannot yet speak for all the territories the British owned in the Patagonia, some of which are still owned by English millionaries today. Don't come to tell me that the poor innocent English had nothing to do with the genocide that was done to the indigenous peoples in this country.
