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Hello and welcome to Kid Happen here. I'm back with Get Rusty Davis. Hello, and I'm Andrew Sage or Andrewism on YouTube. Now, previously, we explored a lesser known chapter in Mexico's radical history. Before Magon, before the Revolution, when a Greek emigre named Plotino Reconnati arrived in the 1860s convinced that Mexico's indigenous communal traditions could form the basis for a new anarchist society. Through schools, pamphlets and mutual aid societies, he helped sow the first seeds of anarchist thought on Mexican soil. Some of his students pushed even further and flirted with many burgeoning streams of anarchism, even as Porfirio Diaz's regime clamped down on anything that challenged his drive for order and progress. Rhoda Canati faded from view, and many of his students and associates had to go underground for a time. But the ideas would live on like quiet sparks awaiting for the next revolt. And the next revolt would come in 1910, when the Mexican Revolution erupted. But keep in mind the context here. When we talk about revolutions, the focus tends to be on the flashpoint, the gunfire, the slogans, the major figures, and I will do a lot of focus on some of the major figures throughout this history. But we have to keep in mind the revolutions have roots that run deep, run deep below the surface. The revolutions are often shaped by decades or centuries of injustice. And Mexico's revolution was no exception. Because for over three decades, Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico with what was basically a velvet glove over an iron fist. He brought railroads and electrification, but also grave, grave costs for the rural poor, the indigenous communities and the working classes. By 1910, thanks to his efforts, almost all the land in Mexico was in private hands. The rural poor now found themselves as peons and haciendas, while those that fled to the city found themselves proletarianized, made to work at various industries for long hours, low pay and little protection. Despite appearance stable and efficient and orderly, the system in Mexico was profoundly unjust. And yet many saw it as a model for progress in a region full of instability, a description that seems eerily familiar to the situation that's currently taking place in El Salvador. Beneath the polished veneer, tensions were brewing. Workers were organizing, journalists were risking their lives. Teachers and lawyers, and even wealthy landowners began to murmur about the need for reform. And in the countryside, those old communal memories refused to die. Even after the land was taken, the land was remembered. By the turn of the 20th century, Diaz approached his 80s with no successor in sight and the people were getting fed up. Which brings us into the first phase of the Mexican Revolution. According to Angel Cappelletti, the author of Anarchism in Latin America and the main source of this episode, Francisco Ay Madero wasn't quite a revolutionary in all honesty. He just wanted to tweak the status quo to keep a free market, but ban the re election of president. He came from money. He was an upper class intellectual, a believer in parliamentary democracy and in free markets. He read the revue Spirit religiously. It was a spiritualist journalism and he believed in a kind of metaphysical liberalism where good governance and good intentions could steer history in the right direction. Madero's party, the Partido Democrata, was formed with a single clear goal, ending Porfirio Diaz's decades long grip on power. But to more radical forces like Ricardo Flores Magon and the Partido Liberal Mexicano, or plm, Madero's vision was nowhere near enough. Don't get fooled by the name. By the way, the PLM had some revolutionary credentials. It started off as a simple anti clerical, anti dictatorial party, but perhaps with the influence of North American and Spanish immigrant anarcho syndicalists. It eventually took on a libertarian character, guided also in part by the ideological evolution of Magon himself. It was neither liberal nor truly a party in the end, but rather a truly revolutionary libertarian organization. We'll get back to Magon's story in a second, but the point is, where Magon was calling for social revolution, land redistribution and workers control of production, Madero merely wanted electoral reform. He had no real program for agrarian justice and was generally indifferent to the problems of the Mexican masses, as Cappelletti put it. Still, Madero's 1910 campaign electrified all of those who were yearning for change, revolutionaries and reformists alike. His challenge to Diaz helped ignite a broader uprising that managed to bring Madero into power in 1911. Before we get into what happened during the Madero presidency, let's go back in time to follow Ricardo Flores Magon's story. Magon was born in 1873 in the village of San Antonio Ilocochitlan in Oaxaca. His roots straddled both indigenous and mestizo heritage. As a law student in Mexico City, he found himself swept into the tide of anti government agitation. Before he even turned 20, he was jailed for the first time. He joined the radical press in 1893 with El Democrata, an anti diaspor that the regime quickly snuffed out. But he wasn't deterred. In 1900, he co founded Regeneration, the publication that would become the voice of the Mexican left in the 20th century. It was while behind bars where he often found himself that Magon encountered the ideas that would shape his life's work. Thanks to the library of liberal landowner Camilo Arriaga, he read the writings of Kropotkin and Malatesta, and through those texts, crystallized his anarchist vision. Now, even though Magon's ideology incubated quietly in his early political life, it didn't stay buried for long. As its conflicts with the Diaz regime intensified, so too did the radicalism of his actions. He edited El Hijo del Aguizote, a satirical rag that earned him yet another stint in prison. And after his release in 1904, Macron fled to Texas, where he relaunched Regenacion with renewed purpose. By 1905, the paper helped spark the creation of the Partido Liberal and Chicano, or pll, which as I said, wasn't much of a political party as it was a radical organ. Though it did have some reformist demands mixed in. They were trying to soften their language at times to appeal to conservative sympathisers of reform. Away from Diaz, the PLM sought the abolition of the military tribunals, free secular education, workers rights like the 8 Hour Workday and minimum wage, and the expropriation of idle lands. In short, it went further than the 1917 Constitution. That would come a decade later. And it could be seen as the crystallization of many of the Mexican Revolution's most popular aims. Magon and the PLM established alliances across borders, particularly among the industrial workers of the world. But that put a target on Magon's back for both Mexican and U.S. authorities. You already know you can't be having solidarity like that. The Pinkertons rolled up, backed in part by Diaz himself. And they were on Magon's tail constantly. They even ended up as far north as Canada, just trying to escape their constant harassment. But despite the repression, their momentum could not be killed. Between 1906 and 1908, the PLM helped organise a string of strikes and uprisings. The most infamous was the Kania Nia copper strike. Mexican miners were paid starvation wages, while their American counterparts earned double for the same work. When the miners struck for fair pay and better conditions, they were met with deadly force. The rebellion that followed saw American rangers and Mexican troops massacre more than 200 people, and thousands were jailed. Another uprising ignited in Rio Blanco, where textile workers already paid a pittance, organized with the leadership of Jose Niera, a student of Magon. When negotiations failed and repression ramped up, the workers responded not with another petition, but with insurrection. On January 7, 1907, they stormed the mill, freed prisoners, cut wires and declared open rebellion. The state responded with a bloodbath. Entire families were dragged from their homes and executed. Another one of the uprisings was a peasant revolt that began in 1906 in Akayukan and spread through Tuxtlas, Minatitlan and Tabasco. It was crushed, of course, in 1908 in Villascas, though their plans had been leaked to the authorities, Revolutionaries had a firefight with police and freed a town jail. Just two days later, in Las Vacas, other students of Magon were fighting for justice. Another set of guerrillas arose in Palomas, but they failed. Yet another insurrection happened in Valladolid, Yucatan, and they suffered summary executions. And all those events, all those small revolutionary bans challenging the states, they. They failed. But they emboldened the dream of a different world with their will to act. McGon was jailed again in 1907, but it wasn't over for him yet. And I really don't like to romanticize, you know, this idea of, you know, these uprisings that they feel, but, you know, they're still inspiring. We don't go too far into that where, you know, self sacrifice, for self sacrifice sake. But I think it's important to point out that there were multiple failed attempts before the successful uprising that ushered in the Mexican Revolution. It wasn't, you know, a first time successful attempt. By the time Magon was released from prison in 1910, the revolution had already begun to burn across Mexico. And that is in part in thanks to the efforts of those uprisings, even though those individual uprisings failed. The Catalan immigrant Amadeo Ferez pumped up this energy in 1911 with El Tipografo Mexicano, yet another newspaper with a fierce anarcho syndicalist spirit meant to mobilise urban workers. At the same time, bold anarchist typographers were not only printing their message, they were forming unions like the Union de Canteras Mexicanos. In mid-1912, Juan Francisco Moncaliano arrived from Cuba and quickly rallied a diverse group of workers into Grupo Luz, set on establishing a progressive education platform a la Francisco Ferrer. By September 1912, these unions and Grupo Luz united to form La Casa del Obrero, forging a distinctly anarcho syndicalist identity. They organised lectures, built libraries of classic anarchist works and launched a new bi weekly called Lucha, all while energising a massive May day rally in 1913, where 20,000 workers rallied. Like Magon, these radicals saw through the hollow promises of Madero's democracy. Voting for a new president wouldn't free the peasantry. Legislative seats wouldn't redistribute land. No Congress, no matter how liberal, would ever voluntarily dismantle the system that fed it. For them, revolution was no less than putting land and production in the hands of the people. No bosses, no landlords, no masters, just workers organizing life on their own terms. Madero's revolution, if it could even be called that, had mobilized peasants, workers and radicals. But that moderate phase was about to end. Because once seated as president, Madero leaned heavily on old elites. He really siphoned energy away from genuine social change with that reformist push that he was doing, a move that sounds all too familiar. Madero's refusal to enact meaningful change lost him his allies very quickly. Figures like Pascual Orozco and even Emiliano Zapata, who had initially supported the rebellion against Diaz, became disillusioned. So while Madero governed, the PLM continued its fight. Now against the emerging new regiment in northern Mexico, PLM aligned forces initially rose alongside Madero's, but they did not make common cause with him. When strategic positions in Chihuahua were lost, with the middle class and Orozco siding with Madero, the Magonists turned their attention elsewhere. Their next target was Baja California. In early 1911, they began seizing towns Mexicali, Los Alcodones, Tecate and finally Tijuana, seeking to establish a libertarian society, a model for what they called a free America. But the backlash was swift. American, British and French businesses owned pretty much all of Baja California. Landowners and newspaper moguls in California, usa, which were often the same people panicked and ended up smearing the Magonists as secessionists trying to hand over Mexican land to the us. In truth, as Magon wrote in Regeneracion, does Baja California belong to Mexico? It does not. It is under the control of foreign capital. Mexicans owned nothing of it. The PLM's campaign was not about taking Mexico apart, it was about reclaiming it from the hands of foreign elites. Nothing less than land and liberty, as Cappelletti put it. On the contrary, McGon's goal was nothing other than a classless and stateless libertarian society that would provide the archetype and point of departure for the Mexican and world revolution. The downfall of the Baja California campaign came at the hands of bourgeois champion Madero, backed by the US government and capitalists. By mid-1911, the Magonist uprising in Baja California had effectively been extinguished. Yet the saga didn't end there. On 14 June in 1911, Magon and three of his associates were arrested, tried in Los Angeles and Magon himself was sentenced to McNeil Island Prison in Washington State, a fate he endured until 1914, which meant that Magon wouldn't be present in Mexico for the death of one of his biggest opps. Since Madero failed to gain the support of radicals or secured the loyalty of reactionaries, the conservative military overthrew and assassinated him, installing Victoriano Huerta into power in 1930. And just like that, the so called moderate phase of the Mexican Revolution ended in blood. Huerta's dictatorship tried to turn back the clock to the Porphyrian era. Huerta ruled with military force and repression, the usual stuff, persecuting labour organisers, shutting down radical spaces, deporting foreign activists, jailing dissenters, murdering people. Crackdowns eventually hit La Casa de Lobrero's publications and destroyed the anarchist library. But out of this repression emerged a new tactic. They basically said, you know, you could burn our books, that's fine, do what you have to do, but you're not going to stop us from spreading our message. They established grassroots orators, the Tribunal Roja, who took the revolutionary message directly to the working classes, giving speeches where they were at and sharing the message even without access to literature. By May 1914, a new people emancipation Obrera was launched. Though it too fell prey to the regime's brutality. Thankfully, the regime wouldn't last long because Huerta's power didn't go unchallenged. From the north, Venustiano Carranza and the constitutionalists rose to oppose him, claiming to defend Madero's legacy from the south, Emiliano Zapata refused to accept any government that ignored the demands of landless peasants. And throughout the country, armed struggle reignited. Which brings us to Emiliano Zapata himself. He was doing his own thing politically, but he was inspired in part by the anarchist supporters of Magant. His ideology was rooted in the calpuille, the collective land systems of his indigenous ancestors. He eventually adopted the slogan Tierra y lirutad and rallied behind the Plan de Ayala demanding land redistribution and local self governance. He had little tolerance for political maneuvering. He saw the false promises of figures like Huerta and Carranza. For Zapata, revolution was not about elections or modernisation. It was about giving land back. That's really all he cared about. In contrast, as the Wario to his Mario, there was Pancho Villa. He was a charismatic northern general and a populist who worked with and against Carranza. As Magon described him, Zapata delivers riches to their true owners. The poor Villa executes the proletarian who takes a piece of bread. Though both were opposed to Carranza, their goals, strategies and ethics were far apart. Like I said, Mario Tezuairu Huerta didn't last long. As I mentioned, he was ousted by 1914, so just about a year of being in power and being a violent dictator. And after Huerta fell, Finostiano Carranza rose to fill the vacuum. Like I said, he claimed to be continuing Madero's legacy. And his vision of Mexico was just as top down. He wasn't exactly fond of anarchists or the radical left in general. But faced with pressure from the Zapatistas in the south and various forces in the north, he courted labour organisations like Casa del Opprero Mundial offer gestures of support, a few favourable labour reforms and even physical space, like giving them the Jesuit college Santa Brigida as headquarters. In return, Carranza hoped to build a loyal base of organized workers, integrate them into his constitutional army and neutralise the more Radical strains of revolution, and I'm sorry to say that it partially worked, he was able to buy off some of these workers. While this alliance gave La Casa de Lobrero space to organise workers throughout the country and ramp up educational and proselytising efforts, much like what would take place in Spain years later, the anarchists began to lose their anarchist roots from the collaboration instead of back in Zapata. In February 1915, La Casa signed a pact with the Constitutionalist forces and created Red Battalions within Carranza's army. But although La Casa expanded its influence and managed to mount strikes among miners, teachers, drivers, bakers, oil workers, textile workers, carpenters, button makers and Barbers in 1915, in response to the economic pressures of inflation and unemployment, by early 1916, their government allies were cracking down on them. Not long after hiring the Red Battalions, they fired the Red Battalions. They shut down La Casa's offices. They sent key figures to jio. In response, the Workers Movement held a National Congress in Veracruz. And out of this emerged a new labour federation built on anarchist syndicalist principles, committed not to capturing power, but to dismantling it, the Confederacion del Trabajo de la rion mexicana. In May 1916, a general strike erupted in protest of the imprisonment of La Casa's leadership and to demand urgent economic relief. While the strike was an immediate success, its ease led many young militants to believe that change could come through a benevolent state. Notably, Luis Morones, who would later lead the Confederacion Regional Obrera Mexicana, signed agreements with Carranza's government. Matters intensified 10 months later when a second strike broke out due to low pay. In response, Carranza ordered mounted police to break up assemblies and declared martial law. The strike was crushed, its committee suspended all activities and one prominent leader was nearly executed before his sentence was finally commuted. La Casa shut down and the strike failed, but the anarchists endured. By mid-1917, new groups like LOOS and several local Casas had reappeared throughout the country. However, internal debates culminated in the October 1970 National Workers Congress, where reformist forces led by Luis Morones properly marginalised the anarchists, setting the stage for the rise of the CROM and a more moderate pro management approach aligned with, of all people, the American Federation of Labour, the afl. Carranza's crowning achievement came in that same year with the signing of the Constitution of 1917. On paper, it was progressive land reform, limits on church power, labour protections. But to many revolutionaries, including Magon, this wasn't the revolution fulfilled. Far from it. It was a revolution managed Their wildest dreams trimmed down to a policy. Even its better reforms were hardly enforced. But with the Constitution of 1917, Carranca could still claim legitimacy. He could claim progress and he could claim that the revolution was over. But what happened to the revolutionaries? Zapata was still fighting for land in the south, but Carranza would assassinate him. By 1919, Magon was imprisoned in the USA, denouncing the betrayal from behind bars. Workers were still struggling for real power in their workplaces, and the vast majority of rural Mexicans remained poor, dispossessed and disillusioned. In case you're wondering what happened to Magon in 1916, he was jailed in the US until a group of exiled anarchists led by Emma Goldman and Alexander Bergman paid his bond. Now that feels like a cameo or crossover episode of some kind, right? And then in 1917, the year of the new Constitution, he was back in jail again for speaking out against the First World War and calling for a social revolutionary war instead of. He was sentenced to 20 years and his health deteriorated steadily. He wasn't a fan of Carranza at all. He called him a strikebreaker, an assassin and a wolf in sheep's clothing. When Carranza's government offered him a pension, he said, all money obtained by the state represents the sweat, the anguish and sacrifice of workers. If this money came directly from workers, I would gladly and even proudly accept it because they are my brothers. But when it comes to the intervention of the state, after being compelled from the people, the money would only burn my hands and fill my heart with remorse. So, long story short, he didn't accept the money. When the US said they might let him go if he said sorry and petitioned for a pardon, he said in many words, hell no. Among his more beautiful words, he said, repentance. I have not exploited the sweat, anguish, fatigue and labor of others. I have not oppressed a single soul. I have nothing to repent for. My life has been lived without my having acquired any wealth, power or glory when I could have gotten these three things very easily. But I do not regret it. Wealth, power and glory are only won by trampling others rights. My conscience is at peace, for it knows that under my convict's garbage beats an honest heart. So he died in his jail cell in 1922, possibly assassinated. Zapata, like I said, was assassinated by Carranza in 1919, and Carranza himself was assassinated in 1920. In case you were keeping track, both of Magon's major ops, he ended up outliving. Right. He outlived Madero and Then he outlived Carranza, but he still died in jail, which is, you know, kind of tragic. The Carranza's successor, Alvaro Obregon, was both friendly with reformists in the CROM and not as hostile to the anarchists as Carranza, which gave the anarchists an opportunity to regroup. Strikes built up across the country. Miners, oil workers, textile workers, dock workers and more. Some 65,000 workers in July 1920 alone. Out of this momentum came the Federacion Comunista del Proletariado Mexicano, or fcpm. It was an ideologically mixed group, but leaned in anarchic direction and starkly contrasted itself with the reformist ways the CROM and their international ally, the afl. The FCPM went on to establish the Confederacion General de Trabajadores, or CGT in 1921 as a direct challenge to the Crom. They were fully declaring their independence from state and party. Their focus was on class struggle. The Mexican government flirted with socialist language from time to time. But the anarchists saw through the charade. They called out that so called socialist light government's deportation of anarchists and socialists. They even called Moroni, the guy who started crom, Mexico's Mussolini, an interesting insult. The CGT stood against the Moscow backed Third International and instead allied with councillors like Rosa Luxembourg and Anton Panakoek. They also formed a specifically anarchist section within the group, meant to play the same role played by the FAI for the Spanish CGT. The Mexican CGT backed strikes, including in 1921 when they backed a real workers strike against US companies. And in 1922 they expelled CGT leaders who had flirted with electoral politics. Reiterating their anti party stance. They would not allow themselves to be retaken and capitulated to reformist aims. That same year, May Day protests turned into confrontations when right wing thugs killed a demonstrator's child in front of the U.S. consulate. And they didn't stop there. Anarchists in the CGT helped organise tenant strikes in Mexico City and Veracruz. They led general strikes in textile mills and rallied against state violence. They protested in solidarity with international struggles from Spain to Boston. From the murder of Salvador Segui to the jailing of Sacco and Vensetti. They also had to deal with efforts to defame them through misinformation, such as the accusation that they were embezzling workers funds. Throughout the early 1920s you had some new libertarian publications jumping out. You had Verbarojo, you had Lahumaidad, Sagittario, Tierra Libre, Alba, Anakiqua, and so on. And by 1924, under President Calles, who followed the assassinated Obregon, the tides began to shift. Calles was more hostile to the anarchists than Obregon and openly favoured Crwen. He gave Morones a cabinet post, passed laws to undermine CGT organising and escalated repression. The CGT held its ground, organizing general strikes, occupying textile mills, confronting the police, expanding to the countryside. All their usual stuff. They fought for short term relief and long term revolution. By 1926, CGT had grown into a federation of 157 affiliated groups. Unions, syndicates, agrarian communities, all included. And yet, by the late 1920s, things started to fray. The CROM was declining due to their attachments to a government that was no longer conciliatory to their political ambitions. And the CGT couldn't capitalise on that decline of the Cromwell. The government sought to marginalize them entirely. Thousands of former CROM members joined the cgt, while the CGT itself began to make some slides toward concession and reformism. And so it reached a point where they were calling themselves anarchists. But the anarchism was nowhere near the roof. And yet anarchism didn't die. It morphed, it migrated and it regrouped. After the fall of Spain. In 1939, exiled members of the CNT and FAI arrived in Mexico, reinvigorating the scene for a time. They published Tierra y Libertad, built new organisations and kept the memory and the fight alive. A few anarchist impulses managed to emerge within the Mexican Communist Party into the early 1930s as well, at least according to Kirkschaeffer. President Calles ended up founding what became the Institutional Revolutionary Party. A contradiction if I ever heard it. And they basically ran the show in Mexico for 71 years straight from 1929 to 2000. Their administration co created the conditions that would birth the neo Zapatismos in 1994. They're not anarchists, as they have been very clear to state. But maybe they'll get a two parter in the future, going into their history in more depth. The history of anarchism in Mexico has been quite the story, I must say. And with that we've reached the end of that classical history. Its modern history is still being written, still being told. But this is the end of our exploration for now, not just of Mexico's anarchist history, but of this entire series of anarchism in Latin America. I joked about making an episode about Quebec's anarchism scene, but that may remain a joke for now. We've journeyed a very long way together. From the Andes to Buenos Aires to Montevideo to Sao Paulo to all over, we've seen how long before the name anarchism arrived on Latin America's shores, people were resisting hierarchy through indigenous forms of autonomy, African maroon communities, and peasant traditions of land sharing and reciprocity. We saw how these anarchic and anarchish instincts met new ideas, genuinely and intentionally anarchist ideas coming from Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, brought over in pamphlets and in the minds of exiles and immigrants in Mexico, those forces took on a revolutionary scale. Rhoda Canate planted the seed. Magon amplified its voice. The workers, the peasants, the students, they all gave it their all, their fire. And even when that fire was smothered by reformists, by nationalists, by reactionaries, by capitalists, by the bullets and the bribe, it never truly went out. Across the Americas, these movements rarely won in the traditional sense. They were often betrayed, suppressed, and erased from history. But although anarchy was not achieved, anarchists and the anarchist idea will survive. Anarchist thought is radically resilient, and it never really disappears. It usually just goes underground or into the margins or into new forms, from student collectives to feminist organizations to squats to ecological struggles, inspiring movements that aren't necessarily anarchist, but lean in a direction that questions some of the familiar patterns of authority. Thank you for walking this journey with me. I've been Andrew Sage. You can find me on YouTube @Andrewism and support the work over at patreon.com JanetHrew all sources, citations and further reading can be found in the show notes. This has been it could happen here. War. Power to all the people. Peace.
