(San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca, 1873 - Leavenworth, Kansas, 1922) Mexican politician and journalist who is considered a precursor of the Mexican Revolution. His figure has remained as that of one of the most upright fighters and consistent with the cause of the workers during the times of the Revolution. Indefatigable and indefatigable, his thought and his struggle inspired many of the workers’ conquests and some rights that would be included in the Mexican constitution.

The son of Indigenous parents, Ricardo Flores Magón studied law at the University of Mexico. In 1892 he was arrested along with his brother Jesús de him during a student protest against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. After collaborating with the short-lived daily El Demócrata, he founded with his brother the newspaper Regeneración, whose first issue appeared on August 7, 1900 and from whose pages the Porfiriato was permanently lashed out.

Harassed by the government, he had to go into exile in the United States in 1904. In the city of Saint Louis (Missouri), he founded in 1906 the Mexican Liberal Party, of socialist/anarchist ideology, claiming a revolutionary program of state interventionism. He demanded the eight-hour day, Sunday rest and the distribution of land to the peasants, with which his ideas had repercussions on the Mexican labor movement. Closer and closer to anarchist socialism, his party was behind the strikes in the mining town of Cananea and the Rio Blanco industrial zone in Veracruz (1906-1907), violently repressed by the Díaz regime.

After the outbreak in 1910 of the revolution that would force Porfirio Díaz to resign, in 1911 he promoted the insurrection in Baja California with his brother Enrique. They came to take the cities of Mexicali and Tijuana and tried, without success, to found a socialist republic. Lacking aid, they were defeated by government troops and had to retreat to the United States. Convinced that the governments were to blame for the oppression of the working class, they continued to fight the rulers who, during the turbulent period of the Mexican Revolution, succeeded Díaz: Francisco I. Madero and Venustiano Carranza.

President Francisco Madero sought his help, but Flores refused to collaborate with the bourgeois revolution. Many of his claims were admitted in the Congress of Querétaro (1917). In 1918 he drew up a manifesto addressed to anarchists around the world, for which he was sentenced to twenty years in prison by the American authorities. After suffering a cruel and ruthless prison regime, he died almost blind on November 20, 1922, in Leavenworth (Kansas) penitentiary.

– Anarchism in Latin America :meow-anarchist:

– Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940 :anarchy-heart:

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