The trouble had simple roots. For decades, beef came to Chile the hard way, hauled by cart and driven on foot over the high Andean passes from the Argentine pampas. When a railroad linked Buenos Aires to Mendoza in 1885, cattle could move cheaply, and meat prices in Chile fell. Then the government moved to protect Chilean ranchers by raising tariffs on Argentine cattle. Prices climbed again, and for the families of Santiago, a city of roughly 320,000 souls, the math was brutal. Working people who already lived close to the edge now found a basic food slipping out of reach. The anger was not abstract. It was the daily, grinding knowledge that you could work and still not feed your children well.

On October 22, they came together at La Alameda, the broad avenue that still runs like a spine through the city. The gathering was enormous and organized: ten neighborhood associations, alongside forty-one trade unions and mutual aid societies, the self-built institutions through which the poor of that era looked after one another when no one else would. They marched toward La Moneda, the presidential palace, carrying a petition for President Germán Riesco. This was not a mob. It was a citizenry exercising the only leverage it had, the right to assemble and to ask. They wanted to be heard by the man who governed in their name.

The president was not at the palace. A small delegation was directed to his nearby residence, where leaders were let inside to present their petition and talk. The conversation stretched on. Outside, the vast crowd knew none of this. As the hours passed, a rumor moved through the streets that Riesco had refused them, that he had even left the city. The sense of betrayal was immediate and electric. Violence broke out, and the response was overwhelming. Demonstrators struck at police stations, telegraph and telephone lines, and shops; the authorities answered with force. What had begun as a request for cheaper meat collapsed into open conflict in the heart of the capital.

Over the days that followed, the army was turned loose on the city, and the killing was not careful. The dead were carried to the Santiago morgue in numbers the city had rarely seen, and historians who later combed those records counted the toll in the hundreds. More than five hundred people were wounded, including sixty-five police officers, and over eight hundred were arrested. The names of the workers who died are mostly gone now, swallowed by a century and by official indifference. But they were real: men who had marched on their day off, bystanders caught in the street, people whose only crime was to be poor and visible at the wrong moment. The Red Week earned its name in their blood.

The Meat Riots became a turning point in Chile's long, often violent reckoning between labor and the state. They were among the first great explosions of an organized working class that would not be quiet, and they foreshadowed darker massacres still to come in the mining towns of the north. Today the Alameda is simply a busy avenue, lined with traffic and statues, and La Moneda still governs from its colonnaded face. There is no grand monument to the dead of October 1905. But the city carries them anyway, in its memory of a week when ordinary people asked for fairness and were answered with rifles.