December 21, 1907: The Santa María School Massacre

December 21, 1907: The Santa María School Massacre occurs. It was the mass murder of striking workers, mostly saltpeter works (nitrate) miners, along with wives and children, committed by the Chilean Army in Iquique, in the South American nation of Chile. The number of victims is undetermined, but is estimated to be over 2,000.

The site of the massacre was the Escuela Domingo Santa María School (Sunday Saint Mary School), where thousands of miners from different nitrate mines in Chile's far north had been camping for a week after converging on Iquique, the regional capital, to appeal for government intervention to improve their living and working conditions.

Rafael Sotomayor Gaete, the Minister of the Interior, decided to crush the strike, by army assault if need be. On December 21, 1907, the commander of the troops at the scene, General Roberto Silva Renard, in accordance with this plan, informed the strikers' leaders that the strikers had one hour to disband or be fired upon.

When the time was up and the leaders and the multitude stood firm, General Silva Renard gave his troops the order to fire. An initial volley that felled the negotiators was followed by a hail of rifle and machine gun fire aimed at the multitude of strikers and their accompanying wives and children.

The massacre occurred during the peak of the nitrate mining era, which coincided with the Parliamentary Period Chilean political history (1891–1925). With the massacre and an ensuing reign of terror, not only was the strike broken, but the workers' movement was thrown into limbo for over a decade.

For decades afterwards, there was official suppression of knowledge of the incident, but in 2007, the government conducted a highly publicized commemoration of its centenary, including an official national day of mourning and the reinterment of the victims' remains.

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December 21, 1907 was a Saturday. Baseball was out of season. Football season had just ended. And professional basketball and hockey barely existed.

There were games played in England's Football League. In one of them, Everton and Woolwich Arsenal played to a draw, 1-1 at Goodison Park in Liverpool. Woolwich was in South-East London. In 1913, they moved to North London, and became simply Arsenal.