you
your name is synonymous with coherence. Of intolerance, in the best sense of the term (the one defined by Slavoj Zizek in In defense of intolerance). You never negotiated, you never gave up, not even in the face of death. You fought against everything and everyone, sometimes with thousands of companions, sometimes with a handful of irreducibles. From the rostrum, the balcony, exile and jail… How many years in the shade, adding up all your sentences?
You are mythical from the cradle: they say that you were born in the upper Mixteca, two years after Jesus, four before Enrique, and that your parents were heroes. Margarita, a woman from Puebla with big eyes who harangued the patriots in the fight against the French; Teodoro, a fine-looking Mixtec caudillo who told you when you were children that the land should belong to everyone. This is how they grew up, between radical liberalism, closer to Francisco Zarco and Ignacio Ramírez than to your countryman Benito Juárez, and the tradition of community resistance and attachment to the land of the Mixtecs.
What was it like for you to move to a distant, big city, to study in the classrooms of positivism and social, discriminatory and racist Darwinism? I don’t know, but I would bet that although you passed with good grades (not as much as Jesús, who did graduate; nor as Enrique, who was rewarded in person by the tyrant), you hated school, although you kept your rebellion for better causes… not because of a long time: you were born a rebel. As students they became involved in the opposition and very soon you stood out as a powerful combat journalist. Before your 27th birthday, you founded the emblematic, definitive Regeneration.
It was as director of Regeneration that you were invited to San Luis Potosí in 1901, to the founding Congress of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM)… I am not sure that you began your participation in the congress with the exordium What we must attack is the Díaz government, because the Díaz government is a den of thieves!
nor that Congress has gone from booing to the most thunderous applause, but I do know that it was largely thanks to you that the PLM emerged from San Luis as a party in opposition to tyranny and that Regenerationunder your direction, became his combat organ.
How many jails did you step in, how many times was the printing press destroyed until you had to go into exile? Perhaps the turning point was the open defiance of that February 5, 1903, when Enrique, you and your companions hung that sign on his balcony: the constitution is dead
.
Exiled in the United States, Enrique and you (together with Práxedis, Librado, Antonio, Anselmo and other comrades) approached the labor movement and gradually connected their community tradition with the demand for land and liberty!
And in 1906 they broke with the founding core of the PLM (including your older brother, Jesus) and called for the overthrow of the tyrant through armed revolution!
The rupture was sown in that spectacular document that we remember as The 1906 programthat although it was an eminently liberal program, they were already looking at the anarcho-syndicalism that they would openly assume from 1908 perhaps, without a doubt from 1911: the conviction that the solution to the problems of the world and of humanity requires the elimination of government and private property of the means of production, and that the ways to achieve those objectives were the organization of the workers and the armed revolution.
The attempts of 1906 and 1908 failed, but I know for a fact that half of the generals and leaders of the great revolutions of 1910 and 1913 were politically formed in the ranks of what since 1906 has been called magonismo, in the factories, the conspiracies, the defense of the land, the attempts of armed struggle against tyranny, freedom! And I know for certain that you felt betrayed by many of them, those who compromised for you, those who joined Maderismo and Carrancismo. And I also know that you came close to the true social revolution, the defeated one, that of chief Zapata, the bogeyman of tyrants.
You were an enemy of all governments and all systems of oppression, you were an enemy of the borders between countries and, in addition to promoting the revolution in Mexico, you collaborated closely with the workers’ organization in the United States, when the workers there were almost all European migrants expelled by hunger, and that they found hunger and oppression in the paradise of democracy. And in 1918 you were sentenced to 21 years in prison along with Librado.
After four years of harsh prison you were sick and almost blind. Then, the Mexican syndicalists, agrarists, anarchists and communists who emerged from the great social revolution demanded your freedom. The government that was said to have emanated from that revolution interceded for you, although you, always consistent, rejected its mediation. At last your release was ordered and, coincidentally, you hanged yourself
. 100 years ago you were assassinated by orders of the empire.
Shall I tell you one last thing? I know that you would not be with us today (I mean #4T and Morena); But you would be with us, with the Zapatistas, the community members, the searchers for the disappeared, the relatives of the 43, those who fight against femicides, the defenders of the forest and water, the alterglobalists…
At 100 years you are alive, comrade Ricardo.
