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Title: Baja California: Attempted Insurrections Author: Octavio Alberola Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: AJODA, AJODA #42, insurrectionist, Ricardo Flores Magón Notes: Translated from the Spanish by S. Brodard, & then from the French version (published in the anarchist review Itineraire) by Doug Imrie. Published also in “Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed” #42, Fall ’95 — Vol. 14, No. 4.
“Let the people take possession of the factories, the mines, etc.” The
insurrection had to light the fuse of the revolution, and the latter had
to lead to the social emancipation of the workers. For five months hope
would last ... until it was defeated by a coalition of political
interests.
On July 1, 1906, the program of the Mexican Liberal Party was published.
The program, of a democratic nature, was used to unite the Liberals and
direct the insurrection, which became the main preoccupation of the
P.L.M. The groups armed themselves on their own or with the
collaboration of the Junta, which took care of smuggling the weapons.
According to Enrique Flores Magon’s account, five insurrectional zones
were organized in this way. In its instructions for the uprising, the
Junta asked that “Liberals who are prepared to take up arms must commit
themselves quickly and act...without waiting for further notice or
signals from the Junta.” It also ordered the groups to start applying
the program during the revolution without waiting for legislation on the
matter, to proceed immediately to suppress the tienes de raya, to impose
the eight-hour day and establish the payment of a minimum wage of one
peso. Later, the P.L.M. was not to change its position; it
systematically demanded the accomplishment of the transformations while
the revolution was still in progress. The Junta hoped that by attacking
a few strategic points, the insurrection could spread.
The first attack had to be directed against the customs post at Agua
Prieta (Sonora) to open a breach that would facilitate actions in the
South. But the plans of the Douglas group in Arizona were discovered and
its members arrested on September 5,1906. On the 26^(th) of the same
month another group attacked Ciudad Jimenez (Coahuila), but federal
troops dispersed the rebels. On the 30^(th) at Acayucan (Veracruz), an
uprising assembled more than a thousand men, led by Hilario C. Salas.
They were routed, but most of them managed to take refuge in the sierra.
In the surrounding villages, other uprisings took place at the same time
(Coxcapa, Chinameca, Ixhautlan, etc.). Unfortunately, the most important
uprising, which was to take place at Cuidad Juarez and was to be the
signal expected by many revolutionary groups throughout the country, did
not take place. The Governor of Chihuahua, Enrique C. Creel, laid a trap
for the revolutionaries, and on October 19 he succeeded in capturing
their principal leaders: Juan Sarabia, vice-president of the P.L.M.,
Cesar Canales and J. de la Torre. At El Paso, American police captured
Antonio I. Villareal, Lauro Aguirre and journalist J. Cano. These
imprisonments seriously disrupted the insurrectional movement, forcing
the P.L.M. to go into a period of withdrawal before attempting new
insurrections.
In the following months, the leaders of the P.L.M. who managed to escape
the repression strived to restructure the party’s press: Ricardo Flores
Magon managed to escape to Sacramento (California), Antonio I. Villareal
escaped after having been arrested, and others like Librado Rivera,
Lazaro Gutierrez de Lara and Modesto Diaz took refuge in Los Angeles
(California).
On June 1, 1907, the newspaper RevoluciĂłn was published in Los Angeles.
The people in charge of the newspaper immedand Siately received the
cooperation of Praxedis Guerrero and Ricardo Flores Magon. The latter
left his hideout in Sacramento to put himself at the head of the Junta
in Los Angeles, in late June. As leaders of the Junta, Ricardo Flores
Magon and Villareal appointed Praxedis G. Guerrero as a special
delegate, so he could “incite the workers to make an imminent uprising
in Mexico against the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.” The lack of money
and the repression the Liberals came up against in Mexico and the United
States represented a serious obstacle to the preparation of the armed
movement. However, despite the arrests, the activities of Enrique Flores
Magon and Praxedis G. Guerrero allowed the insurrection to continue. As
it was at the time of the previous insurrection of 1906, the country in
1908 remained divided into zones in which sixty-four armed groups were
distributed.
On June 7 and 8,1908, Ricardo Flores Magon took stock of the groups’
very incomplete state of preparedness. However, Ricardo did not want a
postponement of the insurrection, as he thought it should serve as an
example to start a rebellion of anti-government forces and with it, the
revolution. The important thing was to light the fuse. In a letter
addressed to Praxedis G. Guerrero and Enrique Flores Magon, Ricardo
insisted on the need to orient the revolutionaries’ behavior in an
appropriate way, to influence the process in a decisive way. He would
say with foresight: “After its triumph, no revolution has succeeded in
winning acceptance for or putting into practice the ideals that created
it, for it is thought that the new government will do what the people
should have done during the revolution.”
Worried about the bourgeois turn the revolution had taken, Ricardo
recommended advising “the workers to arm themselves on their own, to
defend what the revolution gave them.” For him, the important thing was
“to work as anarchists,” although this is not what we call ourselves:
“giving the land to the people during the revolution” and also “let the
people take possession of the factories and mines, etc.” To accomplish
that, he insisted that the Junta approve accomplished facts, for “what
is gained by the workers themselves will be more solid than what is done
by decree of the Junta.” According to Ricardo, libertarian militants had
an essential role to play in the revolution, as much political as it was
military, and to accomplish that he was in favor of bringing many
European anarchists to Mexico.
It was with this orientation that the Magonists threw themselves into
insurrectional action again, but as in 1906, the small number of
revolutionary uprisings and the dictatorship’s military repression
forced the revolutionaries to evacuate the villages they had succeeded
in liberating and go into hiding. The repression went after the P.L.M.
unrelentingly after these revolts, which forced them into a phase of
reorganization again. Above all, it was necessary to maintain relations
between the armed groups of Arizona and Texas (in the United States) and
the Mexican groups. This task was assumed by Praxedis G. Guerrero, who
was one of the principal animators of the P.L.M. Guerrero also published
Punto Rojo [Red Point] in El Paso (Texas) in August 1909, aided by
Enrique Flores Magon. Punto Rojo circulated in the working class centers
of Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Puebla and other Mexican States, as well
as in the southern United States. It had a print run of 10,000.
Praxedis Guerrero’s activity and Magonist activity in general vigorously
gave an impulse to Mexican workers’ participation in the revolutionary
process in these years. As a result, and to prevent political factions
that had arisen in the new Mexican context from capitalizing on growing
agitation against the dictatorship, the propaganda of the P.L.M. strived
to strengthen the movement’s proletarian nature and to distinguish
working class and peasant objectives from the interests of opportunistic
political factions. It was in this spirit that the P.L.M. launched many
insurrectional actions in late 1910. The rebellion in November, fomented
from the United States by Francisco I. Madero, produced only poor
results at first. On the other hand, the P.L.M. succeeded in impelling
an insurrectional movement in Chihuahua through the activity of Praxedis
Guerrero, who attacked Casas Grandes and took the village of Janos,
where he died on December 30, 1910. But other guerrilla leaders took his
place, and the military activity of the P.L.M. continued at a high
intensity in Chihuahua.
In January of 1911, with the help of the I.W.W., an insurrection was
launched in Baja California. It became Magonism’s best known
insurrectional action during this period. Baja California was a
strategic area. Enrique Flores Magon planned to concentrate military
equipment and provisions there, to facilitate the revolutionary struggle
in the rest of the country.
By starting the insurrection in January 1911, the Magonists set out to
spread the anti-dictatorship movement and make the P.L.M.’s offensive
coincide with the one being prepared by Madero. This is why, on January
29, 1911, a group of seventeen Magonist revolutionaries attacked and
occupied Mexicali, a border town with several thousand inhabitants. The
American journalist John Kenneth Turner, who supported and supervised
the movement from the American side of the border, began a solidarity
campaign with the Mexican Revolution known as “Hands Off Mexico!”, to
denounce the movement of United States troops toward the border.
Porfirio Diaz’s army answered the challenge made by the seizure of
Mexicali, but even the intervention of the 9^(th) federal battalion
(commanded by Colonel Mayol) was unable to dislodge the Magonists from
Mexicali. As the Magonists had anticipated, the revolutionary struggle
spread to the rest of the country. Francisco Villa in the North and
Emiliano Zapata in the South kept Porfirio Diaz’s troops at bay. This is
how on February 13, 1911, Madero decided to enter Mexico to head the
insurrection, break off relations with the P.L.M. and demand that
Magonist forces place themselves under his command. In April the
conflict worsened and Madero accused Magonists in the region of Casas
Grandes (Chihuahua) of insubordination, as they wore the P.L.M.’s red
cockade instead of the tricolored one. Madero mobilized Francisco Villa
to disarm the Magonists, which caused the P.L.M. to break definitively
with Madero.
This hardening of Madero’s attitude led the leaders of the Socialist
Party of the United States to abandon Magon-ism. Even Turner ceased his
activity on the P.L.M.’s behalf and tried to persuade a few Magonists to
back Madero: the P.L.M. then underwent a split. In this context, it had
to face up to a campaign that called its activity in Baja California
“filibustering.” This term was invented by the press of the United
States, led by the Los Angeles Examiner, from February 1911.
With the occupations of Tecate and Tijuana on May 8, the Magonists
proved in spite of everything that they were maintaining their positions
in Baja California, where they forced the railroad companies to raise
the minimum wage and respect the eight-hour day. The Magonists wanted to
consolidate their positions to carry out the expropriation of rich
foreigners, the point of departure for an egalitarian society. But the
development of Madero’s anti-reelection movement and the ambiguous
attitudes of a few Magonist leaders ended up by isolating the P.L.M.,
facilitating the tragic end of this revolutionary adventure in Baja
California and its disappearance in the rest of the country.
The decisive factor in the fall of Magonism was the American
government’s support for Madero, aiding him militarily and repressing
the P.L.M., for he knew that the anti-reelectionist movement could
pacify the country and prevent the “social revolution” from continuing.
Magonists who continued the struggle were subjected to violent
repression. The new government concentrated its forces in Baja
California until Maderism triumphed. Troops clashed with revolutionary
groups that had already been weakened. In mid-June federal troops
stationed in Ensenadas left for Tijuana. The noose tightened further. On
June 22, the Magonists were routed and abandoned Tijuana. A few crossed
the border and were arrested by American army patrols. These events led
to the collapse of the P.L.M.’s military activity, and this is how
Magonism’s military adventures came to an end.