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In the closing years of the nineteenth century, labor organizations gathered
force, first as mutual aid societies and then increasingly as trade unions. In
the opening decades of the twentieth century, labor organizing, unrest, and
strikes reached new levels of intensity. In the northern nitrate and copper
mines, as well as in the ports and cities, workers came together to press
demands for better wages and working conditions. Attracted strongly to
anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, and socialist ideologies, they were harshly
repressed during the Parliamentary Republic. The government carried out several
massacres of miners in the nitrate camps; the most notorious took place in
Iquique in 1907. Thus, a pattern of violent clashes between soldiers and workers
took shape.
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