Chile’s 1920 elections further exacerbated the tense situation. The stranglehold that Chile’s conservative upper class had maintained on Congress and the presidency for nearly three straight decades was under serious threat. In that year’s presidential election, the liberal Arturo Alessandri barely lost the popular vote to the conservatives’ candidate, but won a majority of the electoral college. Congress set up a special Tribunal of Honor to determine the outcome. Liberals were skeptical. In the meantime, Chile’s president, the conservative Juan Luis Sanfuentes, suddenly announced that his administration had reason (which it wouldn’t make public) to believe that Peru and Bolivia were planning a major attack on Chile in order to reclaim the territory they had lost in the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). He mobilized the army and, with the help of the press and other conservatives, fomented war fever throughout the country. The goal was to distract the public from the election, call into question Alessandri’s patriotism, and harness the newly intensified nationalist fervor to quash pockets of popular dissent.
Much of that dissent was coming straight from the student-labor movement. One of its leaders, Juan Gandulfo, was an outstanding orator, an anarchist, and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He would be very influential in Neruda’s life in the years to come. Gandulfo delivered a dramatic speech from the balcony of the FECh’s headquarters, criticizing many of the failed political policies but primarily blasting the government for its warmongering. He laid out a passionate plea for pacifism, demanding the release of more information about the supposed threats and urging people not to partake in the “patriotic” marches and events and to see that the government was using the threat of war to manipulate the public.
In the midst of this economic and political crisis, the oligarchy was perturbed by the threat to the social order posed by the surge of the student movement and its alliance with labor. On the chilly winter night of July 19, 1920, a multitude of “patriotic” young Chileans, many the children of oligarchs—and more than a few wildly drunk on whiskey—descended on the FECh headquarters looking for the “traitor” and communist Juan Gandulfo. One of them vomited on the federation’s piano, then wiped his mouth with the corner of a Chilean flag that a fellow young patriot had draped in his hands. They beat up Gandulfo until a few policemen appeared on the scene and escorted him away. No members of the attacking gang were arrested.
In the next two days, anti-FECh propaganda increased. An article in Chile’s largest newspaper, El Mercurio, criticized the group and actually placed the blame for the assault on Gandulfo’s “inflammatory” balcony speech. At the same time, various “respectable persons” had come out calling for the removal of the federation’s legal status. The tension built to the point that on July 21, a multitude of conservative youth descended on the FECh headquarters. A police report filed later noted nearly three thousand agitators advancing upon the students and their building. Six members of the police tried to hold them off at the door but were unable to prevent their entry. This time they didn’t just vomit on the piano; they destroyed it. They destroyed everything: windows, furniture, a pool table, paintings. They threw out onto the street the entire archive of Claridad’s precursor, the journal Juventud, and burned it. The FECh’s headquarters was in the center of the city on high-traffic streets. Agents from Santiago’s version of the FBI, Sección de Seguridad (Security Section), arrived in the midst of the chaos and collected documents and archives as intelligence on the “subversive” students. Yet the police commander wrote in his report that due to the “tumultuous nature of this assault, personnel in my charge were unable to take down the name of any of the assailants.” However, they did manage to arrest some of the students, especially their leaders. In fact, after the assault on the FECh headquarters, police and other government officials persecuted so-called subversives for four months in Santiago and Valparaíso. There was no set definition of what a subversive was. According to former student leader Daniel Schweitzer, who was a lawyer during this time, anything “that aspired to give human and social content to the actions of the State or of groups was labeled ‘subversive.’”
One of the student leaders, the poet José Domingo Gómez Rojas, was arrested for his involvement with the Industrial Workers of the World in Chile. Under harsh prison conditions, his mental condition deteriorated quickly. After only three months behind bars he was moved to a psychiatric home where he died, officially of meningitis, which the student movement did not necessarily dispute but saw as directly linked to his incarceration and poor treatment.
Gómez Rojas’s death was one of the most important events in the further radicalization of students at the University of Chile. It clearly shook Neruda, all the way down in Temuco. He had looked up to Gómez Rojas as an early contemporary example of a commitment to “the poet’s duty.” As Neruda wrote years later, “Within the national context of a small country, the repercussions of this crime were as profound and far-reaching as [would be] those of Federico García Lorca’s assassination” in Spain.
Claridad was born as a direct result of the headquarters’ destruction. A group of students rallied around the idea of launching a paper of protest, one that was “aggressive, combative, destined to show the public that the assault wasn’t enough to quiet the youth gathered at
