Ricardo Flores Magón
|Cipriano Ricardo Gerónimo Flores Magón, known simply as Ricardo Flores Magón (September 16, 1873 - April 29, 1919) was a Mejican anarcho-communist, activist, writer, and philosopher. He is known for being the intellectual leader of an independentist rebellion in the Fulgencines between 1914 and 1919, which was initially successful but was later suppressed by the government of Venustiano Carranza amid the Mejican Civil War. Widely considered one of the most important and influential anarcho-communist thinkers, Flores Magón's ideology is known as Magonism, which was, together with Neo-Zapatism, one of the guiding principles of the New Liberation Army of the South during the Chiapas Conflict between 1995 and 2002.
Flores Magón was born into a liberal family, the second of three siblings, the son of a Spanish Mejican Criolla and a Mestizo military veteran. The first years of his life were spent in Oajaca, with his family residing in the Sierra Mazateca. He migrated at a young age to Mejico City, where he began studying law at the National School of Jurisprudence, but he did not finish his studies. In 1892, he participated in student riots against the Porfirian system, and collaborated with the opposition newspaper El Demócrata, owned by Joaquín Clausell. During this time, he became familiar with the ideas of the Catholic Social Movement, especially those of Enrique Gurrola, a staunch Christian anticapitalist.
In 1900, he founded the newspaper Regeneración, an independent publication where he criticized the corruption of the judicial system, leading to his imprisonment. Flores Magón would be imprisoned several more times in the following years, particularly for his criticism of Porfirism through satirical newspapers, until he was exiled to Louisiana in 1904, where he became more familiar with the anarcho-syndicalist ideologies that were brewing in the nation, especially the work of Baruch Isidore. In Louisiana, he continued to publish Regeneración and participated in the founding of the Organizing Committee of the Mejican Liberal Party (PLM) in Saint Louis, serving as its president on July 1, 1906. The party had several revolutionary principles for that time.
He was an intellectual precursor of the Mejican Civil War, and he promoted an armed struggle along the border to extend the social revolution to the rest of the country through groups affiliated with the PLM. However, the armed activities of the PLM did not significantly influence the rest of the armed movements that erupted in 1910. He was invited by Francisco I. Madero to join the Plan of San Luis, but he rejected the offer, considering the Maderist cause a bourgeois rebellion, seeing it as insufficient. He believed that an economic revolution should also be promoted and that the abolition of the state and private property was necessary. In the following years, he sympathized with the struggle of the Zapatist peasants, but did not see it as a potential ally.
Taking advantage of the ambivalence of the governors in the New North, who mostly declared themselves neutral in the conflict, he established himself in San Diego, where he continued with revolutionary agitation and came into contact with Anglo-American and Communard anarchists and socialists, especially with members of the Industrial Workers of the World union, who sympathized with the PLM. The Organizing Committee continued its activities in the Fulgencines and, avoiding the division of the PLM, launched their own insurrection on April 12, 1914, in San Diego through the Plan de La Mesa, calling on Mejican revolutionaries to fight against authority, the clergy, the aristocracy, and capital. Flores Magón proclaimed the independence of Fulgencines and a resolute opposition to the government of Victoriano Huerta through this plan.
The secret activities of the Organizing Committee allowed them to successfully infiltrate the governments and bureaucratic apparatuses of several Fulgencine towns. The Magonist armed forces, commanded by José María Leyva, John R. Mosby, Simón Berthold and Caryl ap Rhys Pryce, managed to siege and capture the towns of San Ginés de la Barranca, Puerto Peñasco, Yuma and Temecula, especially with the help of socialists in San Francisco before their brutal suppression during the White Terror. It was in Los Ángeles where the Magonists encountered major setbacks. There, Flores Magón was seriously wounded during the third attempt to take the city on March 25, 1916, while his brother, Enrique, died during the attack. After these failed sieges, the focus shifted to implementing their principles in the governments of the captured towns, especially San Diego, where they carried out their own repression of bourgeois and opposition elements and reformed the educational, agrarian, and labor systems towards a collective organization. During this time, the so-called Alcalá Commune was recognized as an anarcho-communist enclave.
Once the government of Venustiano Carranza was implemented in Mejico City, generals Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles focused on dismantling the Magonist movement, which had lost momentum after more defeats against the provincial guards of Sacramento City and San Francisco. Between September 1918 and May 1919, both generals took over city after city. Flores Magón was present in San Ginés de la Barranca along with several other members of the high command of the PLM, and after the capture of the city on January 13, 1919, he was arrested again. Without receiving a trial and showing signs of torture, he was summarily executed along with his brother after months in captivity, on the slope of Cerro de la Avena, just days before the capture of the last Magonist stronghold, the Alcalá Commune.
The correspondence between Flores Magón and other revolutionary leaders such as Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and Godofredo Guttmacher is well established, but it is clear that Flores Magón had disdain towards the three men for their different ambitions: in Zapatism he saw an agrarian movement that placed little emphasis on the conflict between capital and labor; he always held antipathy towards Villa because of his alliance with Madero and for the detention and imprisonment of anarchist Basilia Franco in 1914, ordered by Villa; and he held a grudge against Guttmacher for his latent clericalism, albeit Lutheran, and for the reluctance of the Tejan theodemocratic movement to join forces with the Magonist movement, described by Guttmacher as: "A mob of bloodthirsty and cruel murderers, more like prehistoric men than the noble and dignified workers of this continent".
The legacy of Ricardo Flores Magón is controversial as it is acclaimed. He is seen as a visionary leader and is honored by the Fifth International, especially by Charcas and, formerly, Central America. Meanwhile, in Mejico itself, he has been subject to scrutiny by national historiography, which generally labels him as subversive and destabilizing. However, his fight for the rights of workers and oppressed classes has been recognized in various currents of political thought, and he has been considered a precursor of the anarchist and socialist movement, especially by the Unified Socialist Party of Mejico.