Ricardo Flores Magón
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Ricardo Flores Magón (September 16, 1874 – November 21, 1922) was born on Mexican Independence Day, in San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca, Mexico. 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 the leading inspirer of the Mexican Revolution, 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. 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".
The cause of Magon‘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. Magon 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.
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 Magon" (Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magon", or CIPO-RFM), is named after Magon.
