The upper Bio-Bio region had recently been opened for Chilean and foreign settlers due to the occupation of the Araucania, and huge extensions of former Mapuche land were available.

On the one hand, the massive Colonization plan promoted between 1881 and 1914 by the Chilean Government, with the consequent installation of 15,000 foreign settlers (Germans, French, Swiss, Austrians, etc.)

Finally, the decision of the company Sociedad Puelma Tupper to evict the "occupiers" or "usurpers" of the lands that the Government had ceded to it, caused a break between the indigenous communities and the State.

Faced with this situation, the government of President Arturo Alessandri Palma sent a unit of Carabineros and military forces to the area, which began to attack the insurgents, which, far from dissolving the revolt, caused the fusion of workers and peasants from the Mapuche communities in a single front.

According to other information provided by Olga Ulianova, a Chilean nationalized Russian historian, according to Comintern documents, the Communist Party had a direct participation in the revolt.