[5][2] At least two Argentine soldiers (privates Fernando Pablo Fischer and Domingo Montenegro), three local policemen (sergeant Tomás Rosa and constables Ernesto Bozán and Juan Campos) and a number of ranch owners and their relatives also died during the strife.

The low demand of wool inventories, which had been accumulated at the end of the First World War, and the fall of the price from $9.74 to $3.08, thus returning to the normal level of quotation in times of peace, gave rise to a regional crisis.

[13] During the 8 years preceding the Patagonia Rebelde, the Argentine economy and government was making efforts to move away from a mostly agricultural mode of production and diversify and industrialize, following a trend among nations of the period.

As the unrest spread, the government of Hipólito Yrigoyen ordered Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela's 10th Cavalry Regiment immediately to the affected area and the Argentine Navy seized the various ports and key facilities in the province.

The new police chief in Santa Cruz, Oscar Schweizer, under orders of the new governor of the province, radical Ángel Ignacio Yza, instructed Varela to avoid bloodshed and the army colonel was able to work out a deal with the strikers and the ranch owners, and prohibited the payment of wages in Chilean money.

In May 1921 the cavalry regiment returned to Buenos Aires but their leave was cancelled in October as strikes broke out again in the province when the ranch owners reneged on their promise of fairer working conditions.

Manuel Carlés, president of the Argentine Patriotic League is reported to have violently broken up one of the demonstration of the strikers in Río Gallegos with one dead and four injured in the resulting clash.

At the same time, the Chilean government grew alarmed at the prospect of facing similar unrest in southern Chile and deployed a strong carabineer force under colonel Carlos Ibáñez del Campo to the city of Puerto Natales.

According to captain Elbio Carlos Anaya, a company commander in the 10th Cavalry Regiment, the Chilean carabineers guarding the mountain passes, let the strikers cross back and forth into Argentina armed with weapons and without any hindrance on the part of the authorities.

At Paso Ibáñez a large column of some 900 demoralized armed strikers tried to negotiate a favorable surrender with Colonel Varela but were soon rebuffed and retreated to regroup at Río Chico and Estancia Bella Vista after freeing those they had taken captive as hostages.

The armed strikers, knowing there would be no mercy, made a desperate last stand at Tehuelches train station but were defeated after a one-hour long battle and the survivors marched off to firing squads.

[21] The 10th Cavalry Regiment having accomplished its mission of putting the uprising soon received orders to return to Buenos Aires, but some 200 soldiers were left behind under the commands of captains Anaya and Viñas Ibarra.

In Argentina, he worked as a stevedore at Ingeniero White and Bahía Blanca, as a farm worker in Alto Valle del Río Negro and as a correspondent for the anarchist newspapers Alarm of Hamburg and The Syndicalist of Berlin.

Although he claimed to be an adherent of Tolstoy's pacifism, Wilckens killed Varela in a gun and bomb attack outside the officer's recently acquired home at Humboldt-Santa Fe in January 1923 because of his desire "to wound through him the brazen idol of a criminal system".

Wilckens himself was killed in Villa Devoto prison while awaiting sentencing, by José Pérez Millán Temperley, a young man from an aristocratic family belonging to the Patriotic League.

He was however declared insane 14 months later and admitted to Las Mercedes mental hospital in Buenos Aires, where he was eventually shot and killed by another inmate instigated by Russian anarchist Boris Wladimirovich.

[24] In June 1921, Argentine parliamentarians debated a proposed law giving the state the power to control unions, declare strikes illegal, and reimpose the ten-hour workday.

The repression of the 1920-1922 strikes culminated both the Patagonian labor movement and the initial colonization of southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and inaugurated the effective erection of border patrols by the Argentinean and the Chilean militaries.

While some 850 workers under the command of Facón Grande flee towards the Paine mountain and the border with Chile, another 40, among them the chilotes Otey and Rivera, decide to die for their comrades and remain barricaded in a storehouse to make Varela's men lose time in combat.

Pavel Oyarzún, novelist and poet born in Punta Arenas (Chile), wrote in 2004 the novel "El Paso del Diablo" (The Devil's Passage), in which he describes the escape of the workers who went on strike and who were chased by the soldiers of the 10th Cavalry Regiment.