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n May 1892 there was a riot in Mexico City for the re-election of Porfirio Díaz. Police held the 19-year-old student, Ricardo Flores Magón, responsible. Among the protesters were his two brothers: Enrique, 15, and Jesús (21). Thus began the revolutionary biography of the three brothers. The following year Jesús, the eldest, participated in the newspaper the democratsuppressed months later.
On August 7, 1900, the brothers published the first issue of the weekly Regeneration. On February 5, 1901, they attended the Liberal Congress in San Luis Potosí. On October 7, the police stormed the printing press, Jesús and Ricardo were arrested and tortured. Before being released, Jesus told his brothers that he had decided to get married and was withdrawing from the fight.
Two years later, Ricardo and Enrique founded the newspaper The Son of the Ahuizote, which was also suppressed. They remained in hiding until 1905, when they moved to the United States. On September 28 they relaunched Regeneration.
In 1906 they published the Program of the Mexican Liberal Party and in June of that year the strike broke out in Cananea. From the clandestinity they summoned the militants to prepare to start the revolution on October 20 in Ciudad Juárez. They were betrayed and several leaders were apprehended. Ricardo and Enrique managed to escape, but they could not return to San Luis, Missouri, where the police had occupied the premises of Regeneration.
In December 1906 the textile strike began that led to the massacre of January 7, 1907 in Río Blanco. On August 23, Ricardo was arrested in Los Angeles and was imprisoned for three years. He was released in August 1910. On September 3 he reappeared Regeneration, where he spoke out against the movement headed by Francisco I. Madero. On November 19, he wrote an article calling on the people to unite under the banner of the Liberal Party and under the cry of land and freedom! It was the time of the people, they had fought against tyranny for 15 years, they had prepared the conditions for the revolution, but it was not the Mexican Liberal Party that was reaping the fruit. He affirmed that the revolution called by Madero was a hoax that would lead the people to a useless sacrifice.
Despite Ricardo’s opposition, some militants unconditionally joined Madero’s movement, others joined under the banner of the Liberal Party, but failed to advance. The young leader Práxedis Guerrero abandoned responsibility for him in the party, formed his army in northwestern Chihuahua, without confronting the Maderistas; Perhaps he was the one who best understood what the position of the PLM militants and followers should be at that time, but he fell in combat on December 30, 1910.
On January 29, 1911, an attempt was made to liberal revolution
of Mexicali, which ended up suffocated, leaving the unjust accusation of filibuster and traitor to the country against Ricardo Flores Magón.
In the following years, he continued the campaign against the Madero government, but on June 25, 1912, he was sentenced along with his brother Enrique and other liberals to serve 23 months in prison for violating the neutrality laws. He was released in January 1914, resuming the publication of Regeneration until January 18, 1916, when the two brothers were arrested again, Enrique was sentenced to three years, Ricardo was released after six months. On June 23, 1917 he published in Regeneration an article against the war, accusing capitalism. On February 9 of that year, he announced that his brother Enrique and Teresa, his wife, were leaving the newspaper. The last redoubt of the party was crumbling. The few militants were divided, some followed Ricardo’s positions, others those of his brother.
On March 16, 1918 Ricardo published the manifesto addressed to the anarchists and the workers of the world, announcing the end of the bourgeoisie. He hailed the triumph of the Russian revolution and in the same issue he wrote an article extolling Lenin. The confrontation with the capitalism of the United States could not have been more crude and determined. It was the last number of Regeneration. Days later Ricardo was imprisoned along with Librado Rivera, 20 years for him, 15 for Rivera. Ricardo’s indomitable and persistent rebellion caused the United States government to sentence him to prison until it rotted
; This is how he himself expressed it in a letter.
Ricardo’s health began to collapse in the following years without money and feeling abandoned; However, when the deputy Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama proposed in Congress that a pension be allocated to him, Ricardo categorically rejected it because it came from the government.
In 1920 a light arose in his life, the young anarchist Lily Sarnoff wrote to him under the name of Ellen White, beginning an epistolary relationship until the day he died. From that exchange, 42 letters from Ricardo were preserved, the first from October 6, 1920, and the last from November 12, 1922, in which he expressed his desire to obtain permission to stay in the United States for two months before being deported. At the end of that letter he wrote: “When, from my native cliffs, I try to perceive the vague contours of the northern shores where the wreckage of so many other hopes lies scattered, I will murmur with a sigh: ‘I wanted to tell you something – my fair brothers–, I wanted to tell you something, but you couldn’t understand me’”.
Nine days later, on November 21, 1922, Ricardo Flores Magón died. According to the biography written by Claudio Lomnitz, since the transfer of the remains, conflicts arose between María, the widow, and Enrique. He also tried to prevent Nicolás Bernal, leader of the anarchist group Ricardo Flores Magón, from publishing the letters and his work, which led the members of this group to remember that María was not really Ricardo’s wife, nor was Lucía his daughter, who both were using Ricardo’s prestige to pervert his ideals as an anarchist.
The revolutionary biography of Ricardo Flores Magón is amazing. He was born on September 16, 1873, he lived 49 years, dedicating 30 to fighting for the people. The bibliography dedicated to that fight is immense; however, of his last years, of his separation from Enrique, of his estrangement with his wife, of his sentimental relationship with Ellen White, and of his murder, very little is known.
