Ricardo Flores Magón

Brothers Ricardo (left) and Enrique Flores Magón (right) at the Los Angeles County Jail, 1917.

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Ricardo Flores Magón (September 16, 1874 – November 21, 1922) a noted Mexican anarchist and social reform activist, was born on Mexican Independence Day, in San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca. He died at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, USA.

Flores Magón explored the writings and ideas of many anarchists; he examined the works of early anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon but was also influenced by his anarchist contemporaries: Élisée Reclus, Charles Malato, Errico Malatesta, Anselmo Lorenzo, Emma Goldman, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Max Stirner. However, he was most influenced by Peter Kropotkin.

Flores Magón also read from the works of Karl Marx and Henrik Ibsen. He was one of the leading inspirers of the Mexican Revolution, and the Mexican revolutionary movement in the Partido Liberal Mexicano. Magón organised with the Wobblies (IWW) and edited Regeneración, which aroused the workers against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, which he considered a kind of anarchist bible, served as basis for the short-lived revolutionary communes in Baja California during the "Magonista" Revolt of 1911. Flores Magón remained from 1904 in the USA, half of this period in prison, driven from city to city. His last arrest was in 1918, receiving a twenty year sentence for "obstructing the war effort", a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. This was directly following the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, which created a fever pitch of fear of anarchists and bolshevists that culminated in the Wilson administration's Palmer Raids, a wholesale crackdown on war dissidents and leftists that also swept up notable socialists such as Eugene V. Debs.

The cause of Flores Magón's death has been the subject of some controversy. Some suspect that he was deliberately murdered by prison guards. Others contend that he died as a result of deteriorating health caused by his long term of prison confinement, possibly exacerbated by medical neglect on the part of Leavenworth penitentiary officials and staff. Flores Magón apparently wrote several letters to friends complaining of debilitating health problems and of what he perceived to be a lack of concern and purposeful neglect on the part of the prison staff. [1] Yet others have contended that he likely died while in prison due to natural causes. [2]

His movement fired the imagination of both American and Mexican anarchists. In 1945 his remains were repatriated to Mexico, and now rest in the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres in Mexico City. In Mexico, the Flores Magón brothers are considered left-wing political icons nearly as notable as Emiliano Zapata, and numerous streets, towns and neighborhoods are named for them.

An organization of indigenous peoples of Mexico formed in the 1980s based in the state of Oaxaca, the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magón" (Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magón", or CIPO-RFM), is named after Flores Magón.

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