El Familiar

In the sugar mills of northern Argentina, above all in Tucumán, Salta and Jujuy, the laborers tell in terror of the Familiar, a huge snake or a black dog dragging chains that lives in the mill's cellars. According to belief, the factory owner made a pact with the devil to secure his business's prosperity: in exchange for wealth and good harvests, he had to hand the Familiar the life of one or more workers each year. The creature, fed in secret by the boss, would carry off at night the unruly hands, those who demanded better wages or threatened to organize; they simply vanished and were never heard from again. Beyond the supernatural, many read this legend as a metaphor for workplace terror and the unpunished deaths of laborers on the plantations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Familiar is the diabolical pact turned into a social denunciation of the northern cane country.