In all 30,000 officers and men of the Argentine Army would take part in the fighting and subsequent mopping-up operations in Buenos Aires in January 1919. On Friday 10 January, Private Luis Demarchi from the 8th Cavalry Regiment is shot and killed defending the Once de Septiembre Railway Station. That day there were no newspapers; markets, stores, hotels and bars were closed, and transportation and communication networks (including the telephone lines) were stopped. On the night of 10–11 January, two policemen, Corporal Teófilo Ramírez and Agent Ángel Giusti, were reported killed defending their police stations as thousands of strikers tried to storm 8 police stations and seize their armouries as well as the police headquarters building in downtown Buenos Aires. In the meantime, 30 gunmen using the cover of darkness, attempt to ransack the armoury of the 8th Infantry Regiment in Campo de Mayo Army Barracks but the attackers are forced to retreat by the defenders in the form of a rifle platoon under Lieutenant Horacio Orstein. In the fierce fighting, police reinforcements in the form of vigilantes from the Argentine Patriotic League, emerged. Targeting the city's sizable Jewish population, the right wing League sought pogroms, and brought an ever-growing list of dead and wounded Jews to the newspaper columns. Mobs were running the streets, shouting "death to the "Rusos"," a reference to Argentine Jews, who were mainly Russian, and identified in the minds of those in the League and the like-minded as anarchists and Bolsheviks. The Russian Jewish sections of Buenos Aires were invaded, and terrified Jews were dragged from their homes, beaten, shot and killed; some escaped by pleading they were Italians. Food shortages in the city became acute, and eggs that were selling for 90 cents a dozen in the morning reached 3 pesos (US$1.35) by evening. The railroad union voted to stop trains all over the country in a sympathy strike. The union ordered its members back to work, and issued a statement disclaiming all responsibility for the killings. The Montevideo police had informed the authorities of Buenos Aires that they had uncovered a Communist plot to seize both sides of Río de la Plata with the taking of the capitals of Argentina and Uruguay. On Sunday the police informed the press that they had broken into a private apartment where 40 persons, all of them Russian Jews, were in session as the "First Soviet of the Federal Republic of Argentine Soviets." On 11 January, strikers in the suburb of Barracas tried to seize the local police station but were forced to retreat after a 4-hour gunbattle, leaving behind several dead when firemen armed with rifles and army reinforcements from the 4th Infantry Regiment arrived.