💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › praxedis-g-guerrero-i-am-action.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:16:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: I Am Action Author: Praxedis G. Guerrero Date: 2018 Language: en Topics: action, Mexico, Mexican revolution, Magonismo Notes: Translated and introduced by Javier Sethness-Castro
The militant Mexican anarchist and revolutionary martyr Praxedis G.
Guerrero arguably merits his comrade Ricardo Flores Magón’s laudatory
characterization of him as a “sublime figure in the revolutionary
history of the world.”[1] This self-described “warrior, apostle, and
philosopher,” born in 1882 to an aristocratic family in the highlands of
Guanajuato State, was “destined to be one of the principal precursors”
of the Mexican Revolution, according to his biographer Ward S. Albro.[2]
During his short but highly illuminating life, Guerrero participated as
a central figure in the transnational revolutionary network established
by the Organizational Council of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), which
was dedicated firstly to deposing the tyrant Porfirio DĂaz and
thereafter to promoting anarchist revolution throughout Mexico according
to the slogan Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Freedom”).
As MagĂłn writes in his reminisces about Guerrero following his death
early in the Revolution, there was little immediate indication from the
childhood of Praxedis, whose father was a local indigenous chief and
whose mother was the daughter of a Spanish count, that he would be
anything other than bourgeois. His family’s hacienda in Los Altos de
Ibarra, Guanajuato, comprised thousands of acres that were worked by
hundreds of farmhands. Yet Praxedis was privileged to have developed an
“exceptional sensitivity” and an “exceptional brain” that led him to
adopt the revolutionary proletarian cause upon his maturation.[3] At
eighteen, he left with his brother for San Luis PotosĂ, where they
worked for a number of months in a brewery and smelter. Thereafter he
returned to Guanajuato to work in the family business for some time
before enlisting in the Second Military Reserve under General Bernardo
Reyes, DĂaz’s minister of war and appointed governor of Nuevo LeĂłn
State. Rising to the rank of Second Lieutenant of cavalry, Praxedis
received the military training that would later serve the PLM’s cause.
He resigned his post after the 2 April 1902 massacre in Monterrey
ordered by Reyes against Liberal protesters who were mobilizing in favor
of another gubernatorial candidate. Around the same time, Guerrero
became acquainted with Mexico’s Liberal oppositional press, including
the satirical newspaper El Hijo del Ahuizote (“The Son of the
Ahuizote”),[4] edited by Juan Sarabia from August 1885 until July 1902,
when Ricardo and Enrique Flores MagĂłn rented out the press, and
presumably Regeneración (“Regeneration”), founded by Jesús and Ricardo
Flores MagĂłn in August 1900.[5] After resigning his military post, he
returned to Guanajuato to attend to his ill father and manage the
family’s hacienda, and it was from his father’s bookshelf that Praxedis
first encountered the writings of Victor Hugo, Maxim Gorky, Lev Tolstoy,
Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin.
In 1904, consummating the dream Tolstoy had envisioned but could never
effect, Guerrero definitively abandoned his aristocratic upbringing.
With his comrades Francisco Manrique and Manuel Vázquez, he left Mexico
for the U.S., where he sold his labor as a miner in Colorado, a
lumberjack in Texas, a longshoreman in San Francisco, and a copper and
coal miner in Arizona. He founded the newspaper Alba Roja (“Red Dawn”)
with Francisco and Manuel while in San Francisco, and it was likely in
this way that he brought himself to the attention to the newly
established Organizational Council of the Mexican Liberal Party, founded
in St. Louis in 1905 by the exiled radicals Ricardo and Enrique Flores
MagĂłn, Juan and Manuel Sarabia, Librado Rivera, Antonio I. Villarreal,
and RosalĂo Bustamante. In Douglas, Arizona, Praxedis met and befriended
Manuel Sarabia and requested successfully to affiliate himself with the
PLM. Days after the suppression of the June 1906 Cananea strike in the
desert of Sonora, which had been launched by thousands of Mexican miners
demanding an eight-hour work day and higher wages, Praxedis founded the
organization “Free Workers” with his comrades toward the end of
propagating the Liberal ideal among the miners of the region. He also
established a local PLM group in Morenci counting some fifty members, as
a counterpart to the Liberal Club of Douglas. The failure of the
Council’s plans for an insurrection against the dictatorship in the
border towns of Ciudad Juárez, Nogales, and Jiménez—a plot that was
organized to coincide with Independence Day, 16 September 1906—and the
subsequent arrest of Ricardo, Antonio, and Librado in Los Angeles for
having violated existing neutrality laws between the U.S. and Mexico
launched Guerrero into the position of principal responsibility for the
cause. Indeed, as Albro argues, Praxedis effectively led the PLM’s
struggle during the three highly significant years of 1907 to 1910,
corresponding to the time that the Council’s better-known organizers
were imprisoned, and ending with his death in the Revolution.[6]
Praxedis was named a “Special Delegate” of the PLM’s Organizational
Council in June 1907, and the next month he distributed a public call
for justice in the case of Manuel Sarabia, his comrade and roommate in
Douglas, Arizona, who had been kidnapped, deported, and imprisoned in
Hermosillo, Sonora, at the hands of DĂaz’s henchmen. This crime sparked
an international outcry that resulted in Sarabia’s release following a
show trial that acquitted the militant’s captors. Then, following the
arrest of another exiled Liberal, Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, Guerrero
moved to Los Angeles to collaborate with Sarabia and Enrique Flores
MagĂłn in editing and publishing the newspaper RevoluciĂłn, which began
its run in June 1907. Sarabia was soon arrested on the very same charges
as MagĂłn, Villarreal, and Rivera, but was subsequently rescued by
Elizabeth Trowbridge, a socialist activist and heiress from Boston, who
paid his bail, married him, and escaped with to England. Although
Praxedis cut off communication with Manuel over this decision to elope,
Sarabia nonetheless would circulate Guerrero’s writings throughout much
of the European continent.[7] Praxedis had his first meeting with
Ricardo, Antonio, and Librado in the Los Angeles jail in November 1907;
the next month, he was named Second Secretary of the Organizational
Council. RevoluciĂłn was subsequently shut down, its press destroyed and
its editors incarcerated by L.A. police acting on behalf of the Mexican
State. Whereas Praxedis and Enrique saw the light of day thanks to the
efforts of some comrades, their co-editor Modesto DĂaz died in
prison.[8]
Seeking to relaunch the Revolution against DĂaz, Praxedis left Los
Angeles with Francisco Manrique for El Paso, where they organized a
widespread insurrection in Mexico, set for 24–25 June 1908. Guerrero
commanded some sixty armed Liberal groups divided across five
geographical zones comprising Mexico that were prepared to revolt.[9]
Nonetheless, as in the case of the uprising organized two years prior,
this new revolutionary plan was largely foiled by the two States’
transnational spy network: hundreds of conspirators were arrested and
sent to the San Juan de UlĂşa prison in Veracruz, where many perished.
Still, Liberal forces managed to engage in three battles against federal
troops during this time: in Las Vacas, Coahuila, a village which the
Liberals likely would have taken, had they not run out of ammunition
during the firefight; Viesca, Coahuila, where the insurgents liberated
the local jail, expropriated State funds, and proclaimed the PLM’s
program, but were driven out by DĂaz’s forces; and Palomas, Chihuahua,
an attack that Praxedis personally led, but which led to the death of
his comrade Francisco. Guerrero commemorates these three revolutionary
episodes in heroic chronicles translated in this volume. The pathos
permeating the “Palomas” chronicle celebrates Francisco’s martyrdom,
serving both to foreshadow Guerrero’s own end and to laud the
revolutionary commitment of his childhood friend, who, like Praxedis,
had been born into wealth but who had repudiated such privilege to
dedicate himself wholeheartedly to the struggle.
Despite the failures of the 1908 uprisings, Guerrero continued
organizing the Revolution unfazed. In early 1909, he traveled to central
and southern Mexico on a mission authorized by the Council to coordinate
a new simultaneous uprising on both sides of the border. During this
trip, he also visited his family in Guanajuato for the last time,
announcing to them that he had become a vegetarian because “it hurt him
that animals were sacrificed” and that he renounced the inheritance left
to him by his late father for being inconsistent with anarchism.[10]
Upon return to the U.S., he undertook a tour of the Midwest to request
support from the Socialist Party for the coming Revolution. By this
time, U.S. and Mexican authorities had come to realize the threat posed
by Guerrero, with the Mexican consul referring to him as the “revoltoso
chief” and the Secretary of State identifying him as a “notorious
revolutionist who is still at large.”[11] In fact, in Houston in early
1910, the militant narrowly escaped capture at the hands of a U.S.
marshal by reportedly climbing out a third-story hotel window.
Thereafter, in El Paso, Praxedis founded Punto Rojo (“Flash Point”) as a
successor to RevoluciĂłn, and this periodical enjoyed an estimated weekly
circulation of ten-thousand copies, primarily among Mexican laborers in
the U.S. Southwest. Guerrero also founded the Pan-American Labor League
in San Antonio in the summer of 1910. Once Ricardo, Antonio, and Librado
were released from prison in August 1910, Praxedis left Texas for Los
Angeles, where the Organizational Council was reconstituted and
RegeneraciĂłn relaunched. Guerrero had dozens of his most important
articles published in this newspaper during the three months he spent
with his comrades before his final departure, and several more were
published in its pages posthumously.
Upon the proclamation of the Mexican Revolution in November 1910, as
issued by Magón’s reformist rival Francisco I. Madero, Liberal
combat-units were activated throughout much of the country: in Sonora,
Chihuahua, Tlaxcala, Morelos, Durango, Oaxaca, Tabasco, and Veracruz.
Believing that his aloofness from the battlefield contradicted his
anarchist principles, Praxedis departed Los Angeles for El Paso to join
the Revolution, much to the consternation of MagĂłn and other comrades on
the Council. Leading a group of insurgents who flew the red flag
emblazoned with the slogan Tierra y Libertad across the border into
Mexico on December 19, Guerrero had planned to liberate a number of
communities in Chihuahua before marching on the state’s capital city.
After having attacked the Cruz González hacienda and taking the train
south to Guzmán station, destroying bridges along the way, the rebels
divided into two groups, with the column commanded by Praxedis
attempting first to take Casas Grandes. Such a task appeared impossible
due to the vast discrepancy in forces between the Liberals and federal
troops, so the insurgents retreated northwest to the town of Janos,
which they took on December 30 after fierce fighting. Nevertheless,
federal reinforcements arrived shortly after this victory, and it was
during this battle that Guerrero and some eleven other militants lost
their lives. Greatly moved by the deaths of their comrades, the Liberal
troops repelled the reinforcements, though they ultimately had to
withdraw and leave the bodies of Guerrero and the others behind. Thus
ended the life of Praxedis, the revolutionary anarcho-communist whose
existence “had given off such intense light.”[12]
Though his position as commander of the multitude of PLM armed units and
his tragic death on the battlefield of the Mexican Revolution may give
one the impression that Praxedis was first and foremost a guerrilla
fighter, he instead understood his primary obligation as a revolutionary
to agitate through his writings. This “free man, of a prodigious
intelligence, of indomitable courage, blessed with an astonishing energy
and with love for the people, without limits or duplicity,” as described
by Isidoro Lois in the Cuban anarchist newspaper ¡Tierra!, closely
mirrors the example of his comrade MagĂłn.[13] He is also reminiscent of
his teacher Kropotkin, whose volumes he was often seen carrying around,
leading those close to him to call him the “apostle of Kropotkin.”[14]
Indeed, in the article “Laboring” (1910), Praxedis defines the task of
the revolutionary as “ignit[ing] with the fire of his [or her] word the
extinguished consciences, sowing rebelliousness and discontent.” This
task, which the militant often accomplishes using naturalistic imagery
and extended metaphor, was one to which Praxedis dedicated himself for
the last decade of his life, from adolescence to the Mexican Revolution.
The present volume includes the translation of forty articles by
Guerrero and five entries by Magón, including two of the latter’s short
stories, doubtlessly written with the revolutionary martyr in mind. The
work is a translation of Praxedis’s collected writings as published in
1924 by the Grupo Cultural Ricardo Flores MagĂłn, being comprised of
Nicolás Bernal, Librado Rivera, and Diego Abad de Santillán. These
combative-journalistic writings demonstrate the faithful observation
Praxedis made of the revolutionary task he set for himself and others,
illustrating his passionate championing of the cause of the oppressed
against the three-headed hydra of Capital, Authority, and the Clergy.
They serve as a testament to the optimism and commitment of one of the
central figures of the PLM’s Organizational Council who, together with
the MagĂłn brothers and Rivera, advanced a redemptory anarcho-communist
vision that contrasted with the gradualist opportunism evinced by
Antonio Villarreal and Juan and Manuel Sarabia, who would side with
Maderismo early on in the Revolution. Dialectically, though, the split
between incrementalists and radicals in the PLM would finally allow the
Council openly to proclaim its anarchism, as it would do in the
Manifesto it issued nearly a year after Praxedis’s death, thus
overturning the more reformist Program it had first published in 1906.
Yet, however revolutionary were and are Guerrero’s life and writings,
the conscious contemporary reader may find some of his formulations
rather disconcerting. For one, though he identified as an anarchist,
racism is hardly overthrown in his essays, considering the problematic
association he makes between Africans and barbarism in an essay
denouncing a white-supremacist gang for burning a Mexican youth alive in
Texas (“Whites, Whites,” 1910). In point of fact, seemingly greatly
taken with the progressivist-rationalist aspects of anarchism, Praxedis
expresses Eurocentric perspectives, given his view of various cultural
aspects of pre-Hispanic Mexican society as being barbarous: for example,
human sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli, “the worship of lizards,” and body
piercings (“Women,” 1910). In keeping with this—perhaps retaining pride
in his half-Spanish heritage—Guerrero repeatedly cites Columbus in a
positive light! He was surely no indigenist.
Furthermore, though he defended the cause of women’s
emancipation—stipulating this as one of the “grand principles” of the
“Program of the Pan-American Labor League” (1910), and dedicating a few
articles to women’s struggles—he expresses his opposition to mainstream
contemporary feminism, vehemently upholds the gender binary, and at
times portrays women in sexist ways. What is more, his writings on
sexuality are traditionalist and heterosexist, as they seemingly favor
monogamy and explicitly condemn homosexuality—this, despite the rather
homoerotic descriptions Praxedis would pen of his martyred Liberal
comrades in the revolutionary chronicles detailing the summer 1908
uprisings, especially Francisco Manrique.
This chronological translation of Guerrero’s writings goes to press
under the Trump regime, which represents a regurgitation of DĂaz from
the past—and, as in Mexico a century before, a despotism that only
revolution would be able to end justly. In this sense, it is significant
for present-day struggles that the last two essays Praxedis had
published while alive address some of the various customs and practices
that uphold patriarchy on the global stage and the previously mentioned
murder by incineration of a Mexican migrant worker at the hands of Anglo
proto-fascists: “Women” and “Whites, Whites.” Guerrero’s commitment to
social transformation across borders and the militant’s emphasis on
direct action undoubtedly retain all their relevance today.
—Javier Sethness-Castro
This translation is based primarily on Praxedis Guerrero’s ArtĂculos
literarios y de combate; pensamientos; crĂłnicas revolucionarias, etc.
published by the Grupo Cultural Ricardo Flores MagĂłn in 1924. That
volume is also the source of the letter and articles included here that
were written by Magón after Guerrero’s death, as well as of the version
of Guerrero’s “Flash Points” that is translated here. Please note that
these do not include all of the “Flash Points,” but rather those chosen
by the original volume’s editors: Nicolás Bernal, Librado Rivera, and
Diego Abad de Santillán. I have complemented the 1924 volume with the
more complete version ArtĂculos de Combate, published by Editorial
RedeZ, “Tejiendo la UtopĂa” in 2013. All of Guerrero’s writings
translated here were originally published in the periodicals RevoluciĂłn,
Punto Rojo, or RegeneraciĂłn, and are indicated as such. The pieces from
the latter publication date from Regeneración’s fourth edition, which
began in September 1910 and ended in March 1918. The two short stories
by MagĂłn included here, which feature protagonists strongly suggestive
of Guerrero, appear in Obra Literaria: Cuentos. Relatos. Teatro, by
Ricardo Flores MagĂłn, edited by Jacinto Barrera Bassols (Mexico City:
Consejo Nacional Para La Cultura y Las Artes, 2009). When one considers
that the first of these stories (“The Apostle”) came out in the issue of
Regeneración published a week after Praxedis’s martyrdom, and that the
second (“A Catastrophe”) appears in the periodical a year and two weeks
after the youth’s premature death, it becomes clear that Magón meant
“the Delegate” and “Juan,” respectively, to represent Guerrero.
All footnotes are mine unless otherwise indicated. I wish to kindly
thank Claudio Lomnitz; my mother, MarĂa Castro; and Charles Weigl for
their help improving the translation.
I Am Action is dedicated to all Mexican, Syrian, and Palestinian
revolutionaries: past, present, and future.
The voice of the people has risen, angry and righteous; popular action
drives the authors of the kidnapping of Manuel Sarabia to the dock of
the accused.[15] They are all there: the drunk rogue Maza, the police
officers who sold the vileness of their consciences, and the despicable
chauffer who set a record for criminal complicity. Not even the chief of
the Cossack bandits is missing; nor is this other bench empty, for it is
occupied by the ferocious supreme judge who ordered the crime and who
paid the mercenary hands that strangled Sarabia and wrung out the
American flag. The tribunal is forming; the proceedings begin. Let us
cross-examine one of the suspects.
Antonio Maza, a man with base instincts, drunk, sycophantic, cowardly,
and servile—a professional thug—was the director of the abominable
attack.[16] He used trickery, corruption, and infamy to take advantage
of an innocent man. He worked, according to his testimony, out of love
for the Tsar and under the belief that the Consul would assure him
impunity for trampling universal justice and mocking an entire
nation.[17]
The ruffians, who sold their dignity for a few coins and covered the
star-spangled banner with a heretic’s sackcloth, handed over the victim
to his tormentors.[18] In their defense they allege complete ignorance
of honor and patriotism. Savages would be ashamed to have them as
compatriots.
The chauffer: this man had no scruples and, like the others, a rather
elastic conscience that was at the disposal of the highest bidder; he
was offered a generous tip and worked wonders to earn it. For half a
dozen dollars, he would have helped rob half of humanity.
The Cossack colonel, the praetorian Kosterlizky, obeyed superior orders:
being the loyal attack dog of the dictator DĂaz, his task is to bite the
Tsar’s enemies.[19] He does not think about the iniquity of the act; the
pleasure he takes in exercising his savage Tatar instincts against the
defenseless populace suffices.
Let us consider the other, the one with white hair and the look of a
decrepit feline: that bloody Maztla, who stirs in his lair of impure
senility, terrorizing, ordering crime after crime, rape after rape, and
one execution by firing-squad after another. The shadow of the rights he
has murdered haunt and pursue him; sometimes this specter takes the form
of a woman, while at other times it is a child or an elder, and Abdul,
shaken by remorse and fear, orders his janissaries to carry out another
massacre. [20] Feverish and ferocious, Tiberius arises, galvanized by
ignoble ambition upon hearing the sigh of freedom from this side of the
Bravo River, exclaiming, “Who dares to call herself free while I
live?”[21] But let’s not narrate his life; let’s not make a funereal
procession of the legion of martyrs sacrificed by this dwarfish brother
of Timurlane and Christian II, this accomplice of Ludovico the Moor and
Estrada Cabrera. [22]
We speak of a single act: the scandalous assault committed against the
defenseless dignified Mexican, Manuel Sarabia.
Porfirio DĂaz was the hand that moved all the threads of the drama. Not
satisfied with having caught the Mexican nation in the trap of Tuxtepec,
not content with having robbed even the shirt from a wretched people, he
wants more. After stabbing popular suffrage in the back and slaying the
Constitution, after filling the prisons with citizens and causing free
thought to die in slavery, as he was admiring the corpse of freedom
hanging from an ahuehuete in Chapultepec, he devised yet another
injustice. [23] He told himself: the work of pacification isn’t
complete; my spit must reach Capitol Hill and the boots of my thugs must
splatter the land of Lincoln with mud, so that those Mexican rebels who
don’t live under my whip will die like dogs. And nothing stopped him
from carrying out his sinister projects; he did not retreat before
Jefferson’s frown. He pampered his lackeys with the prospect of abject
honors; he encouraged his brutal agents, scattered the gold stolen from
the people, and cynically entered the honor of the American people as an
item in his accounting book. But... senseless man! Believing himself
wrapped in shadow, he did not see that an irritated and angry eye was
watching him. Surrounded by buffoons, he thought that the atmosphere of
servility and adulation around him extended throughout the American
continent. Fool! At this moment, Human Right, the guardian and defender
of the weak, has caught him by the throat like a vulgar criminal and has
dragged him before the final tribunal of public opinion.
The punishment of the perpetrators begins now; some will be subjected to
the law, while others, perhaps the more responsible ones—those who carry
decorations on their uniforms and the red-hot mark of universal disdain
on their foreheads—nervously await the cry of Spartacus; they see appear
the threatening silhouette of the gallows built by the serfs.
Wielding the whip of its virile civic sense, the American people have
lashed the nation-killer Porfirio DĂaz in the face, which pales not from
shame but from fear. The Mexican people must cleanse the Porfirian stain
from their country’s name. To us—flagellated, humiliated, sold-out, and
outlaws in our own country—falls the vindication of our honor! We are
lost if fear restrains us! Eternal curses on the coward, on those whose
lack of patriotism disowns our glorious past! Let us erase the word
tyranny from the country’s soil and replace it with another word, on
which rests the only peace acceptable for humanity: JUSTICE!
RevoluciĂłn no. 9, 27 July 1907
From the cluster of clouds that the hurricane swirls around, darkening
the sky, emerges the flaming sword wielded by an invisible arm that
writes with dazzling zigzags on the roaring page of black smoke the
words “MAKE WAY!”[24] The denser is the shadow, the greater that sword’s
brilliance shines.
From the storm of hatred that surrounds us, from the black bosom of the
tempests that tyranny unleashes over our heads, come the invulnerable
sword of the Idea, writing with the lightning of the word, in that very
heart of darkness, pages honoring the inextinguishable cry of “MAKE
WAY!”
We climb without faltering toward the summit; we encounter obstacles,
but the rocks do not detain us. If we come across chasms that cut off
our path, we cast over them, as if they were a bridge, the words “MAKE
WAY!”—and we cross. Amidst the sinister jungle of daggers, we push aside
the undergrowth and jump from field to workshop, from dungeon to tomb,
from school to barracks, all the while scourging traitors and spies; we
advance saying, “MAKE WAY!”
Our progress does not stop to contemplate the crude walls that oppress
our brothers: their indomitable spirit has broken the locks and passed
beyond the security forces.[25] It has scornfully told the sentinels,
“MAKE WAY!” and it has joined us on the path to the future.
Chimerical men, hurled by criminal decadence to the summit of
power—dullards, sleepwalkers—do you not feel the gestation of fire? The
mountain will launch you into the abyss when it explodes, roaring, “MAKE
WAY!”
From the depths of the ancient chest that holds the historically
cherished relics, one has been removed. Beautiful, delicate hands will
encircle the guerrilla’s chest with it: the red shirt, terror of all
banners, which tells the Praetorians: “MAKE WAY!”
The old saber of Ayutla and the Reforma explodes angrily from the rusty
scabbard—“MAKE WAY” for the heroic weapons of the redeeming
struggles![26]
We arrive with serene hearts at the door of glorious death and we knock
with hilts of steel, crying, “MAKE WAY!”
RevoluciĂłn no. 14, 14 September 1907
Do you hear? It is the wind that sways the fronds of the mysterious
jungle! The breeze of the future that awakens the still and sleepy
undergrowth: it is the first sigh of the virgin rainforest after
receiving the kiss of the impetuous Aeolus upon her bowed head.[27]
Do you hear? It is the wind that rips an invisible mantle from the
recesses of the sleeping mountain, the wind of an idea that blows
through the branches of the immense people, the forest of souls; it is
the initial gust that shakes the oak trees, the open face of the
hurricane that sweeps, from depths and summit, the confused mist of
sterile resignation.
A gentle and fecund breath traverses the jungle; each leaf that it
touches is a voice that is born, each branch that moves is an arm being
armed: a voice that joins the heroic concert that salutes the redeeming
future, the arm that reaches to find the breast of a tyrant.
This is the breath of the Revolution.
Do you feel it? It is the tremble of cracking granite, beaten by the
iron fists of Pluto;[28] it is the heart of the world beating within an
enormous chest; it is the igneous spirit of a giant shattering his
prison to launch his fiery word into space.
It is the earthquake that announces the birth of a volcano.
Do you feel it? Those are the vibrations of divine hammers pounding in
the depths of the abyss. It is the life that sprouts from the black
vortex, shaking death’s asylum, where dismal vampires reign.
It is the thrust of the advancing Revolution.
RevoluciĂłn no. 21, 9 November 1907
We force our way through and multiply our action. As long as the nation
is enslaved, we should not take a single hour of rest. As long as prison
deprives our fallen brothers of movement and light, it is criminal to
shackle our feet with indolence. Let us advance; the path lies before
us, awaiting. The removal of the warriors surprised by betrayal shows us
the dangers at hand, not so that we avoid them but rather so that, in
defeating them, we overcome them.[29]
We cannot pause for a moment because the cry of our
comrades—traitorously imprisoned heroes—calls us to fulfill our duty. We
cannot sleep because our conscience keeps vigil in the night of
misfortune, showing us the bloodied body of the nation, abandoned to the
teeth of the jackal, the curved beak of the vulture, the ferocious fury
of the executioner. Our eyes, always open, cannot turn away from this
Dante-esque vision, nestled in shadow. Let us enlarge the flame of our
torch by blowing on it with all the force of our lungs until it dispels
the horrific scene with its red resplendence.
The wounds of the mother country are infected; let us take up the
red-hot ember and apply it to them without delay. The fire chases the
beasts away; let us add fuel to our bonfire, and its radiance will grow.
By overwhelming the tiger’s oblique pupil, we will strengthen the cause.
Let us not waste a minute. Let us not squander even a second at leisure.
Let us give our nerves the rapid vibration of an electric current to
shock the atmosphere out of the dreadful quietism that suffocates our
land. The scourge of tyranny falls implacably on our martyred brothers;
its continuous crack is a shameful whistle that reaches our ears, that
rings provocative and bloody above our heads, wounding our indomitable
souls and exciting the tempest of our hatreds.
Fighters, let’s get to work! Our task is to struggle without pause. We
will not let the number of sacrificed burgeon without reducing the
number of those who sacrifice others. Let us unleash the blows of our
fists and untie the torment within our minds. If we cannot advance
toward freedom by walking, let us jump. Let us expend our energy without
fearing exhaustion. Patriotism and will have an endless flow of power.
To delay our march and to stay behind those who fall without rushing
forward to avenge them, to remain silent, to catch our breath instead of
taking up the sword and storming into the breach to crush the enemy is
to desert the glorious vanguard. Let us double our efforts. We can rest
when the body of the old buffoon of Tuxtepec, hanging at the end of a
rope, serves as a plumb bob for the architect of the Future to raise the
walls of the people’s house.[30]
RevoluciĂłn no. 21, 9 November 1907
The tough fight we have kept up has not weakened our forces; the
rebellions of our souls continue to hurl the accusatory lightning bolt
at the heads of the wicked ones. We have been on the edge of an abyss,
the hatred of the powerful, and we have stepped forward without a tremor
in our hearts because we know that the heights become a summit when they
are approached by the truth.
Many of our comrades have fallen, and a threat hangs over us; a starving
pack of hounds besieges us, waiting for the moment to sink its fangs in.
Today, tomorrow, at any hour, in whatever place, we might succumb; but
in the meantime our pen, a tireless and destructive claw, continues
inexorably and tenaciously to storm the trenches of crime, opening the
path to a vengeful and just future, because the vengeance of the people
is the justice of human rights, when these are judged against the
privileges of the master.
Our silence will only come with death. But still, the rebellious pen
that we clutch will keep relentlessly slitting Caesar’s cloak to show
the sword the path to his rotten heart. The immortal spirit of the
Revolution that identifies with this sword will find a hundred hands
ready to succeed us in the struggle. The tyrants may very well eliminate
us as well as our comrades, but they would not advance even an inch by
doing so. They will only succeed in making the bonfire of rebellion even
bigger. They will only more quickly have to face the ultimate collar:
the noose.
Our battle is epic; we have our chains as weapons, which we will break
over the heads of despots. We will not cover our breasts: naked as they
are, we offer them to the shots of the henchmen. We have laid out the
dilemma in this way—life or death: life for us is triumph, and death is
the only force that can block our path.
We stand upright, and will never kneel to any power. We will face the
enemy; we will not turn our back to any danger.
RevoluciĂłn no. 26, 14 December 1907
The waves of the sea become choppy in order to kiss the clouds; the
Furies of the wicked bubble spit onto what is above their baseness.
The conscience of despots, a dirty pool, can only mimic the ocean’s
turbulence.
The deep and bitter waves of the ocean’s liquid abyss open an immense
tomb for men and ships, their rickety toys. The turbid mire of the
tyrants’ vile souls tries to turn its bosom into a narrow grave for that
which is as great as infinity, free thought, the rebellious word, truth,
justice, and liberty—but the stingy, the contemptible, and the awful
will never have the magnitude of multitudes.
The boiling swamp will not usurp the whirlwind’s frenzy.
The miasma that poisons will never be the cloud that incubates
lightning.
Though DĂaz and his brothers-in-crime feel infernal fury, they will
always be ponds that can only produce bubbles.
Though snakes may scale mountains, they still have to crawl to reach
those they hope to bite.
At the heights of their all-embracing power, DĂaz and his accomplices
never stood higher than the rest of the reptiles. Never will they, like
an eagle, fall upon the enemy from above: they’ll always be hidden in
the thicket, waiting for a bare foot to bite—spying on their victims’
dreams in order to strangle them. Vile hatreds ferment in their wicked
breasts.
Vile hatreds engage us in combat.
We are not in the lair of the tiger, but rather in the rattlesnake’s
nest. To fight against tigers would be beautiful; to crush snakes is
revolting.
The swamp’s vapors want to reach our lungs. The circling birds of prey
dream of our throats.
Vile hatreds glide by our door.
RevoluciĂłn no. 29, 25 January 1908
In the damp corners of miserable dwellings are produced dark, viscous
beings, often clumsy, who also engage in the struggle for life,
exploiting the environment that produces them—the infected, noxious,
unwholesome mire—without which their existence would not provoke the
disgust of beings who grew in different environments.
It is possible that the bug comes to believe itself, in good faith, the
protector and savior of the black, humid corner and that it endeavors to
prevent the sun and the broom from entering, revolutionizing, and
transforming the medium by destroying it and its products. Doing so
fulfills its duty of self-preservation, because where would it go
without miasmas, darkness, and putrefaction?
Passivity writhes in resistance to the progressive impulse of
revolution.
The myriapoda[31] and the arachnids, the scorpions and burying
beetles—the world of vermin living off the poverty of the
people—practice postures and skillful slitherings to dodge and delay the
blow of the broom and the rays of the sun.
They defend their environment of conventionalism and enervation, because
it guarantees their vitality to the constant detriment of the mass of
producers.
The quiescent ones raise an outcry calling themselves apostles of
evolution, condemning everything that has any hint of rebelliousness;
they appeal to fear and make pathetic patriotic calls; they resort to
ignorance and go so far as to advise the people to let themselves be
murdered and insulted during the next round of elections, to again and
again peacefully exercise their right to vote, so that the tyrants mock
them and assassinate them over and over. No mention of leaving the fetid
corner, which they propose to improve by adding more and more filth,
more and more cowardice.
A somersault within a cubic centimeter of slime, they say, represents a
salvational evolution, a peaceful and necessary evolution—necessary,
that is, to those who are in their element, in the medium that creates
and nurtures them—but not for those of us who seek a pure, clean, and
healthy environment, one that only the Revolution can create by
destroying the existing despots as well as, very essentially, the
socio-economic conditions that have produced them and that would cause
new ones to sprout, if we were foolish enough to only end the effects
and to allow the causes to remain—that is, if we were to evolve as do
they, the inert ones, taking a dive in their cubic centimeter of mud.
True evolution that will improve of the lives of Mexicans, rather than
their parasites, will come with the Revolution. The two complement each
other, and the former cannot coexist with the anachronisms and
subterfuges that the redeemers of passivity employ today.
To evolve we must be free, and we cannot have freedom if we are not
rebels, because no tyrant whatsoever has respected passive people. Never
has a flock of sheep instilled the majesty of its harmless number upon
the wolf that craftily devours them, caring for no right other than that
of his teeth.
We must arm ourselves, not using the useless vote that will always be
worth only as much as a tyrant wants, but rather with effective and less
naive weapons whose utilization will bring us ascendant evolution
instead of the regressive one praised by pacifist activists.
Passivity, never! Rebellion—now and always.
Punto Rojo no. 3, 29 August 1909
Where do you go, extending your fleshless hand, with your gloomy and
dejected appearance?
What do you seek with the plaintive plea emerging tremulously from your
discolored lips?
Breadcrumbs and tatters, insulting gifts, and caustic compassion: this
is all you will get with such sad attitudes and means.
Beggar, it is not by bowing one’s head and extending one’s hand that you
will satisfy your cruel hunger for bread and your fervent thirst for
justice. It is by lifting your head and raising your arm that you will
succeed in your objective.
Beggar for freedom … beggar for bread … stop at once imploring and make
demands instead. Stop waiting, and take!
Crawl no longer, beggar …
Punto Rojo no. 3, 29 August 1909
There are beings who in appearance resemble men: beings who speak of
energy, honor, dignity, integrity, independence, masculine superiority,
and other things that make up their subtle disguise, which allows them
to approach you ladies without disgusting you, to take advantage of your
innocence, to bleed your intimate feelings dry, and make you lifelong
slaves of their whims and brutalities. There are men numbering millions
who only seek you out and desire you in order to satisfy their foolish
vanity, to walk all over your gentleness with their cowardly pride and
overflowing sense of superiority, and to make your sensitive souls pay
for the indignities and baseness they endure daily from the despots who
oppress them and treat them like beasts, taking advantage of their
pusillanimous spirits.
Women, whom do you love?
You love a stag who employs no energy to liberate himself or you, but
who does vilify you. You love a being who possesses nothing more than
the clumsy courage of insulting you and not infrequently flogging you.
You love that shameful individual who demands preeminence over you and
who forces upon you a doubly ominous yoke, because it brings the
overwhelming weight of an immense ignominy … a yoke that descends from
the neck of someone who is himself subdued.
Whom do you love? Whom do you love? To whom will you give that
tenderness that only a dignified and free person knows how to
appreciate, deserve and conserve, grow and defend?
Ah! If you would like to see behind that mask through which the men who
aspire to be your owners, or who already are, look at you … what an
enormous wave of indignation and shame would stir your beautiful hearts!
What a roaring swell of infinite scorn would leap from your overflowing
bosoms onto the faces of those men who claim to love you, when what they
really desire is to possess you as things and enchain you to their
domination, much sadder for you than many mishaps, given that they come
from slaves who, sunk in abject servility, have the imprudent audacity
of making you women—who should be the sweet comrades of strong men—the
seat of their ruin.
Women, whom do you love?
Punto Rojo no. 3, 29 August 1909
Do you wish to rejoice in the disgusting presence of the assassin-tyrant
Porfirio DĂaz?[32] Do you think that this dismal bandit’s visit is a
great honor? Remember your history: it has indelible pages, as fresh as
pond scum, and you cannot help but feel shame to think that this odious
festival for him is held in your name. Thousands of victims watch you
and await an expression of fiery dignity protesting the vileness of
Porfirio DĂaz’s lackeys.
Remember at least the crimes that this evildoer has committed against
you. Keep in mind that it was DĂaz who paid the assassins who took the
life of Dr. Ignacio MartĂnez in Laredo, Texas;[33] that he was the
author of the kidnapping of Manuel Sarabia in Douglas, Arizona; that he
is the one who has infested your city with thugs; that it is he who, day
by day, with the dark complicity of your authorities, defiles with
abominable attacks the memory of Lincoln, which should be dear to you.
It is probable that DĂaz, though he has offered to do so, will not come
in the end, because the assassin is a coward and he is afraid of
approaching the border. In any case, you should protest the comedy that,
in your name, is being made to his blood-and-filth-soaked name.
In Mexico, those who pretend in the presence of the Tyrant have an
excuse; that excuse is terror. But you do not and cannot have this
excuse, and if you accept your assigned role in this degrading farce,
there will be no subterfuge worth it. Not even the waters of a hundred
biblical floods would be able to cleanse the stain that you will have
brought on yourselves.
Maintain your dignity or wait for me to brand your face with the word
that will become the emblem of your future: Wretches!
Punto Rojo no. 3, 29 August 1909
A woman: the wife of a journalist complicit with the regime, who cannot
be suspected of revolutionary sympathies, has been incarcerated in the
Mexican capital, having been placed in strict solitary confinement in a
dungeon in the Belem prison, celebrated for its dreadful and disgusting
nature.
PĂ©res de LeĂłn, the judge of freedom-killing sentences, who has
distinguished himself as an evil persecutor of those whom DĂaz-potism
marks with the color red, is the one who has closed, with the luxurious
barbarity of isolation, the cell of Paulino MartĂnez’s wife, and who
shutters the printing-press of The Voice of Juárez, whose owner is one
of the most ardent defenders of the existing peace and order, but who
somehow has gotten mixed up in the suffragist agitation born from the
interview with Creelman, and which has disturbed the man who wanted to
let this discovery be known.[34]
MartĂnez was fleeing when his female comrade was taken from her children
and thrown into Belén to satisfy justice—for a trifle, for nothing:
merely a kind word for the Army, a word of which the owner and director
of The Voice of Juárez was not the author.
This crude and cowardly outrage, targeting a woman (who is allowed, out
of pure deference, two quilts in prison), fills the timid spirits of
many dupes who, singing the old and tremulous psalm of order, peace, and
respect for the law, hope that tyranny might spare them mistreatment and
reward their passivity with a freedom whose conquest they fear to
undertake in a dignified and virile fashion.
Brutal disillusionment makes its bitter voice heard to the poor babies
for whom everything had the color of milk.
Paulino MartĂnez’s work is for peace; he has advised compliance with the
authorities to a sublimely naĂŻve degree, and yet, despite this, the
Dictatorship persecutes and injures him as though he were a
revolutionary or a rabble-rouser—because tyranny is tyranny, and it can
never be the cautious nanny of any movement that has even vague hints of
liberation.
DĂaz does not like half-servants, and in this he shows more logic and
experience than the patient evolutionists.
For many, many years, we have been witnessing and tolerating the
Dictatorship’s atrocities. What is happening has taken place thousands
of times, with even darker details. Yet still there are those who
continue to maintain that through unarmed and humble civic action—or
action armed with an electoral ballot, which amounts the same
thing—everything will be achieved.
You have seen many infamies and swallowed much shame; you are now
contemplating new crimes and will see and endure still more—yet you
remain passive.
Punto Rojo no. 4, 16 September 1909
In a year’s time, a century will have passed since an epic of redemption
began with the courageous disobedience of an old visionary, of a utopian
who gathered the humble and exploited of 1810 around his banner of
rebels.[35]
Soon it will be the Centennial of that illegal act.
The anniversary of 1810 greets the present generations with a formidable
rebuke.
An immense interrogation rises on the Mexican horizon, as though it were
a flaming comet approaching us at unstoppable speed.
1810 accuses; 1810 interrogates.
Mexicans, how do you respond?
The mission of those shirtless ones, rather than progressing, has been
drowned in the apathy and fear of their descendants. Mexico has
regressed by train far beyond from where it set off with naked feet.
Celebration, then, seems profoundly ironic.
We live under the claw of the rapacious North, and one fears provoking
the anger of the senile despot simply by breathing. Autonomy and freedom
are for the Mexican populace two miserable paradoxes, and yet the idea
of throwing commemorative celebrations of dignified and glorious acts is
still considered.
The slaves directed by their committees sing victory odes to the freedom
that has been renounced and to the courage that has been exchanged for
docility.
Hot air, smoke, and genuflections—this is what the ritual of the
historical moment prescribes for the enthusiasms of those who feed on
illusions, and for the gravediggers of the Mexican race.
Will the sun of the Centennial burn the backs of the flock or kiss the
fiery brow of a people?
Respond, Mexicans: now is the time to wash our rags so that they glisten
in the first light of the Centennial of the liberatory effort of 1810.
Punto Rojo no. 4, 16 September 1909
The latest news has arrived to us from Yuma: on the twelfth of this
month, our comrades Rivera, MagĂłn, and Villarreal were transferred to
Florence, Arizona.
The abuses they experienced in Yuma will doubtless continue in
Florence—that is the watchword. In Yuma they held Librado Rivera for
several days in a section called “The Snakes,” which is the same as the
“Purgatory” of Ulúa.[36] Rivera was gravely ill, and so the hit men of
Yuma subjected him to a diet of bread and water—all of this under the
supervision of Captain Rynning, who led to Cananea, in 1906, the
invading troops that Izábal and Greene had requested to murder the
striking Mexican workers.[37]
Punto Rojo no. 4, 16 September 1909
imprisoned in the San Juan de UlĂşa prison in Veracruz in the lead-up to
the widespread insurrection that Praxedis had organized for late June
1908. According to Elena Azaola Garrido, author of RebeliĂłn y derrota
del magonismo agrario (MĂ©xico, D.F.: SecretarĂa de EducaciĂłn PĂşblica,
1982), approximately 80 percent of the Liberal and indigenous Zoque and
Popoluca guerrillas who participated in PLM uprisings in the
municipalities of Acayucan and Soteapan of Veracruz in 1906 perished in
UlĂşa due to unhygienic conditions and torture (156, 195).
Throw an evil secret into the deepest chasm: bury disgrace under
countless mountains and depart from the place where you plan to leave
them forever, immobile and mute; wash your face and hands; cover
yourselves with gold and dress yourselves with adulations. Go on; go as
far as you can, and at the end of each stage and throughout the journey,
the evil secret that you threw into the chasm and the disgrace that you
left below those countless mountains will come out to greet you.
No chasm can hide, nor mountain cover, filthy secrets and cowardly
ignominies.
Disgusted with the assassins, the pained soul of the prisons allows its
roar or lament to be heard every so often. UlĂşa, that Vitellius of the
coral reefs emerging off the Atlantic coast, devours precious lives,
stopping only as long as it takes to vomit corpses.[38] In a stomach
gorged with sacrifices, it feels the breath of a martyr who thrashes the
tainted flesh of a Republic that still has submission on its brow and
prayers for the Beast that strangles it on its lips.
The horror enfolded by the tragic dampness of an implacable devourer
erupts like a clarion call to proclaim a poem full of iniquities.
In a bit over a year, a hundred prisoners, whether revolutionaries or
simply suspects, have perished in UlĂşa, victims of the special regime to
which they are subjected. Two hundred other comrades are being quickly
pushed to the same end. Among the horrible conditions under which these,
our brothers, pass their days include: foul bathrooms, rotten or
poisoned food, endless solitary confinement, insults, lashes, and a
thousand other undignified, despicable, and cowardly things used against
them with a refinement that would please the grim imagination of a
Philip II or a Stambolov.[39]
With a few extremely rare exceptions, the so-called independent press is
quiet, and the champions of pacifist redemption silence these crimes,
while they call freedom-loving martyrs the royalist officials who were
sent to Yucatán for their ambition to become part of the future
Praetorian Guard of the Caudillo of Galeana.[40]
Yet it’s better that they remain silent! Those timid, malleable servants
for idiosyncrasy cannot protest. Their brains are hothouses for courtly
flowers that spread themselves across the libertine’s bed, taking care
not to cause a single bothersome crease. Their silence is better than
their syrupy word.
Hiding within themselves, they honor the heroism that succumbs on the
dictatorial racks.
And we revolutionaries do not carry out protests that are erased and
forgotten: Let us avenge our brothers!
Vengeance today is the same as justice.
Let us be avengers, and let us be just.
Punto Rojo no. 4, 16 September 1909
The impatience of the present moment sinks its spur of fire into our
nerves.
Our desires advance anxiously with the development of events.
The struggle has moments of anticipation that suffocate like the
embraces of rattlesnakes.
We want to once again fire our weapon against the old enemy, and we are
forced to hope that our firearms have been adequately tempered, so that
their impact is terrible, destructive, and tremendous.
The Beast remains in front of us, and there, in the bloody depths of its
perfidious pupil, challenges and injuries glow, while its claws emerge
voluptuously stained by coagulated libertarian blood—our blood.
So it takes a great sacrifice to await … to await the arrival of the
moment to cut open his wicked head, remove his nation-killing claws, and
kick and smash his repulsive black heart.
How can one be patient? How to wait, if they make us inhale their
treasonous breath, if we are feeling the death rattle of so many, if we
hear the cries of thousands of mouths contorted by desperation and
hunger; if we see an entire people writhing on the ground, bristling
with injustice, ferociously trampled by the Beast?
And, if impatience sinks its spur of fire into our nerves, let us
increase the effort a hundredfold, so it becomes the fast steed that
leads us to the realization of our ideal.
There is a brake for our impatience: ceaseless activity.
Let each of you push aside the obstacles before you; let each of you
work with all your energy, so that soon—very soon—we will all be ready
and united.
We are the mechanism of the clock: if we always are in agreement and
hurry to march, soon we will notice in its face the beautiful and
smiling hour of emancipation.
Punto Rojo no. 4, 16 September 1909
The apologies of the resigned disappear.
Relative economic well-being, with which some Mexican migrant workers’
stunted aspirations for improvement were satisfied, has left their
homes, mocking the hopes of the oppressed.
No longer is it just the exclusion of Mexican children from the “white”
schools, against which a dignified minority has protested.
No longer is it just the insulting “No Mexican Allowed” that slaps the
eyes of our compatriots in certain stores or other public establishments
in Texas.
No longer is it just the “Mexican Keep Away” that has kept our
compatriots stupefied at the edges of certain towns on the North
American border.[41]
No longer is it just the violent insult of the racist mob or the abusive
police that, inebriated with the savage spirit of Lynch, has bloodied
its hands taking the lives of the innocent and defenseless.
No longer is it just that. The final illusion leaves us...
The bitter ration of bread is diminished. The mouthfuls that made
harassment and disdain manageable become considerably reduced,
foretelling the return of the slave gangs, full of privations and
miseries, which crossed over from Mexico.
In Oklahoma, in Texas, in Arizona, and in all the other States where the
Mexican element is abundant, events take place that contain more
eloquence for the passive or indifferent workers than even the strongest
moral incentives. Forced labor glides towards us, that horrible forced
labor that had remained within the fog of a memory of ignominy floating
in the hovels of the haciendas.
The landowners of counties in Texas have held several meetings to
establish certain reforms to their sharecropper system with the Mexican
farm workers. The new conditions will put these workers completely at
the mercy of their masters. The idea is to demand from them the unpaid
cultivation of land that could be cultivated with a handful of mules,
care for the beasts of burden and for the bourgeoisie’s promenades, also
unpaid; the purchase of all the necessary tools for cultivation, the
prohibition against freely selling that part of the harvest that might
belong to them; a commitment to giving preference as buyers to their
masters or those recommended by them, and not others. Iniquitous and
unjust! In turn, a small group of farm workers has begun forming a
Resistance Union, which will not achieve anything practical unless it
adopts active tactics in solidarity with conscious elements that by
different revolutionary routes dedicate themselves to the struggle
against tyrants and exploiters.
In Oklahoma this year, the government tripled the rent of the lands
worked by some Mexican peasants. Previously, they had been charged two
pesos annually per acre; now, they are forced to pay six pesos for the
same land, with just a day’s notice to pay up. The suddenness of this
rent hike and the imperative nature of the short notice did not allow
several men to satisfy the government’s demands, so they were expelled
brutally with their families from the land.
In Arizona, where two years ago the minimum wage was two dollars a day,
the same has now been decreased in the Morenci workshops, for example,
to $1.50, while, in the same workplaces and for the same work, Blacks
are paid $1.75 a day, and Italians are paid two dollars.
More cases like these could be cited, which, alongside the rising price
of basic consumer goods, squeeze industrial and agricultural workers of
the Mexican race in this country in a terrible tourniquet.
The situation has become intolerable and it could not be otherwise,
given that the bourgeoisie here know that a great quantity of Mexican
proletarians, upon reaching this land, submit without protest to the
conditions imposed by the exploiters, contenting themselves with being
the first to become fatigued and the last to be paid.
Yet the sad apology of our resigned fellows no longer prevails. Poverty,
hunger, and abuse are in Mexico. Shame, humiliation, and hunger are
here. They are the universal companions of the powerless. Where will the
docile ones go, or the subjugated ones, the resigned ones, so that they
are not spat upon and robbed? Now that no contemptible apology can
guarantee your next meal, will you remain passive, will you continue to
ignore those who struggle so that humanity can eat bread that hasn’t
been kneaded by disgrace? Will you continue placing your malnourished
muscles at the service of the slave drivers, instead of using your
strength to hasten the disappearance of the shared evils?
If the ideals have not been capable of uprooting the herd mentality of
certain men, we will have to await something more than the harsh squeeze
that today places them between two hungers.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 1 (fourth edition), 3 September 1910
In seeking happiness, many people spend time devoting their strength to
the defense of false interests, moving away from the objective point of
all their efforts and aspirations: individual improvement. They convert
the struggle for life into a ferocious war against their fellow humans.
With all the strength afforded by frightened ignorance, the privileged
oppose the emancipation of the proletariat; they see it as a horrible
disgrace, something like a catastrophe or the end of civilization—when
it is truly the beginning of such—and a danger that must be fought with
iron and fire, using all the weapons of cunning and violence. They
oppose it because they do not understand their true interests, which are
the same for every human being.
To steal bread from others is to imperil one’s own sustenance. To
deprive others of happiness is to fetter oneself. To destroy others’
happiness in order to fabricate one’s own is idiocy. Seeking to raise
the same upon the poverty and suffering of others is equivalent to
wanting to fortify a building by destroying its foundations.
Nevertheless, most people, deceived by the appearance of false
interests, walk through the world in search of wellbeing like this,
carrying as a banner the absurd principle: profit by harming others.
In the complete satisfaction of moral and physical necessities, in the
enjoyment of life, without threats or charges that bring sorrow, are
rooted both the particular interests of individuals as well as those of
the collectivity. Those who oppose the latter, breaking the ties of
solidarity that nature established among the members of the species,
work against themselves; hurting others makes impossible one’s own
well-being, which can be neither enduring or certain in a society that
sleeps on thorns. A society where hunger walks its livid face past the
doors of full warehouses; where one portion of humanity, working to
exhaustion, can only dress badly and eat worse; where another portion
snatches from the producers what their hands and intellects make and
hands it over to the moths or useless stagnancy; in this unbalanced
society, where both wealth and poverty abound; where the concept of
justice takes on such cruel meaning, barbarous institutions are
maintained to persecute and martyr the innocent victims of the
aberrations of the system.
Heredity, education, and inequalities in life circumstances will have
created profound moral and even physical differences between the
bourgeoisie and proletariat, but a natural law keeps them united in a
single sense: individual improvement. There lies the true interest of
each human being. Knowing this, it is necessary to act rationally,
transcending one’s class prejudices and turning one’s back on
romanticism. Neither Charity nor Humanitarianism nor Self-Sacrifice has
the power necessary to emancipate humanity, as conscious egoism does.
Where the bourgeoisie is wise enough to understand that the
transformation of the present system is inevitable and that their
interests are better served by facilitating this transformation rather
than opposing it with stubborn resistance, the social problem that
agitates all the corners of the world at this time will lose its aspect
of tragedy and will gently be resolved to the benefit of all. Some will
have won through freedom the complete right to life; others will have
lost, along with the superfluous, the fear of losing it all. And without
a doubt, the privileged of today will benefit most. In general, and this
should make them feel ashamed, they are incapable of serving themselves;
there are some who, even in order to eat or go to bed, need the help of
a slave. When this slave is absent, they will acquire different habits
that will make them useful and active beings, able to unite their
impulses to the collective effort that will then be applied to the
brusqueness and roughness of nature, no longer in the idiotic struggle
of man against man.
Yet, if false interests continue to exercise a dominant influence upon
the minds of the bourgeoisie, and if a part of the workers continues, as
it has so far, opposing through passivity or treason the cause of
labor—their own cause—change will be imposed by a violence that crushes
those who block progress.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 2 (fourth edition), 10 September 1910
The pacified multitudes made a noise like a flock at the shearer’s shop;
brutality, infamy, flattery, lies, and vanity surrounded me; my nerves
exhausted me; I fled from the city because I felt imprisoned there, and
I came to this solitary rock which will be the mausoleum of my
frustrations. I am alone at last; the city and its noises remained very
far away; I am free from them. I will breathe another environment; the
murmur of nature will be the sweet song that my ears hear.
Standing atop the high ledge, the vagabond smiles.
A light breeze arrived; and into the vagabond’s lungs something
asphyxiating penetrated; he heard a strange voice moaning in his mop of
coarse hair.
“From where do you come, light breeze, you who cause anxiety and mad
sorrows?”
“I come from a long pilgrimage. I passed by the cabins of the peasants
and I saw how these slaves are born and raised; with my subtle fingers I
touched the coatless flesh of the little ones, the gaunt and droopy
breasts of the ugly mothers, brutalized by poverty and abuse; I touched
the features of hunger and of ignorance; I passed through the palaces
and recovered the grunt of envy, the belching of excess, the sound of
the coins counted feverishly by the greedy, the echo of the orders that
kill freedom. I felt in my hand invisible tapestries, golden marble, and
jewels that adorn to give worth to worthless people. I passed by the
factories, workshops, and fields, and I was soaked with the saltiness of
unrewarded sweat; I allowed myself the briefest peek into the mines and
collected the tired breath of thousands of men. I went through the naves
of churches and found crime and laziness moralizing; I took from there
the acrid smells of evil incense. I slid through the prisons and I
caressed childhood prostituted by the justice system, thought enchained
in dungeons, and I saw how myriads of little insects eat the flesh of
larger insects. I forced my way into barracks and saw in their quarters
humiliation, brutality, repulsive vices, an academy of murder. I entered
school classrooms and saw science befriending error and prejudice; I saw
intelligent youth fighting to acquire certificates of exploiters, and I
saw in the books the iniquitous law that gives the right to violate all
rights. I passed through the valleys, through mountain ranges; I
whistled in the tyrants’ lyre, formed with the taut ropes of those
hanged from forest branches. I carry pain, I carry bitterness, and for
that reason I moan; I carry resignation, I come from the world, and for
this reason I am asphyxiated.”
“Go then, light breeze; I want to be alone.”
The breeze left, but human anguish remained trapped in the coarse mane
of the vagabond.
Another wind arrived then in strong gusts, intense and formidable.
“Who are you? Where do you come from?”
“I come from all the corners of the world; I carry the just future; I am
the breath of the Revolution.”
“Blow, hurricane; comb my hair with your terrible fingers. Blow, gale,
blow over the cliff and valleys and in the abysses, and turn through the
mountains; tear down these barracks and these churches; destroy these
prisons; shake that resignation; dissolve those clouds of incense; break
the branches of those trees from which the oppressors have made their
lyres; awaken from that ignorance; uproot those gold mines that
represent a thousand misfortunes. Blow, hurricane, whirlwind, north
wind, blow; lift those passive sands upon which camels’ hooves and
serpents’ bellies tread, and turn them into burning projectiles. Blow,
blow, so that when the breeze returns, it does not leave the horrible
anguish of human slavery imprisoned in my head.”
RegeneraciĂłn no. 3 (fourth edition), 17 September 1910
Without me, the conceptions of the human mind would be but a few wet
matches in a moldy matchbox.
Without me, fire would not have warmed the homes of men, nor would steam
have launched, on two steel tracks, the rapid locomotive.
Without me, the home of humanity would be the forest or the cave.
Without me, the stars and suns would still be the brilliant patches that
Jehovah nailed to the firmament for the pleasure of his people’s eyes.
Without me, Columbus would have been a madman; Bernard Parlissy,
demented; Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno,
liars; Fulton, Franklin, Röntgen, Montgolfier, Marconi, Edison, and
Pasteur, dreamers.[42]
Without me, the rebellion of conscience would be a cloud of smoke
trapped in a nutshell, and the desire for freedom the useless flapping
of the wings of an enchained, imprisoned eagle.
Without me, all aspirations and ideals would spin in the minds of people
like fallen leaves swirled by the north wind.
Progress and Freedom are impossible without me.
I am Action.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 3 (fourth edition), 17 September 1910
“Why is it that, if you desire freedom, you do not kill the tyrant and
thus avoid the horrors of a large fratricidal war? Why do you not just
kill the despot who oppresses the people and has put a price on your
head?” This I have been asked several times.
“Because I am not an enemy of the tyrant,” I reply, “because if I killed
the man, tyranny would still persist, and it is against this that I
fight; because if I were to launch myself blindly against him, I would
do what the dog does when biting a stone, unconsciously injuring itself,
without discerning or understanding where the pain comes from.”
Tyranny is the logical result of a social illness, which has as its
present remedy the Revolution, given that peaceful resistance according
to the Tolstoyan doctrine would only produce at this time the
annihilation of the few who understand its simplicity and practice
it.[43]
Inviolable laws of nature govern beings and things: the cause is the
creator of the effect; the environment determines in an absolute way the
appearance and qualities of the product. Where there are putrefying
materials, worms live; wherever an organism arises and develops, this
means the elements for its formation and nutrition have and continue to
exist. The bloodiest and most ferocious tyrannies and despotisms cannot
transgress this law, which has no loopholes. They exist, therefore,
because around them prevails a special environmental state, of which
they are the result. If they offend, if they harm, if they hinder, one
must seek their annulment through the transformation of this morbid
environment, not just through the simple assassination of the tyrant. In
order to destroy tyranny, the isolated death of one man is ineffective,
whether he be Tsar, sultan, dictator, or president—such assassination
would be like trying to drain a swamp by every now and then killing the
vermin that are born in it.
If it were otherwise, nothing would be more practical or simple than to
go after the individual and tear him to shreds. Modern science gives us
powerful instruments that have assured and terrible effectiveness, ones
which, upon being used once and creating an insignificant number of
victims, would realize the freedom of the people. Then the Revolution
would have no excuse or purpose.
For a majority of people, revolution and war have the same meaning: this
is an error that in light of mistaken criteria makes the last resort of
the oppressed appear to be barbarism. War has the invariable
characteristics of hatred and national or personal ambitions; from it
comes a relative benefit for a given individual or group who is paid
with the blood and sacrifice of the masses. The Revolution is an abrupt
shaking-off, the human tendency toward improvement, when a more or less
numerous proportion of humanity is subjected by violence to a state that
is incompatible with its necessities and aspirations. Against humanity
wars are waged, but never revolutions; the former destroy, perpetuating
injustices, while the latter mix, agitate, confuse, disrupt, and melt in
the purifying fire of new ideas the old elements poisoned by prejudice
and eaten away by moths, to extract from the ardent crucible of
catastrophe a more benign environment for the development and expansion
of all species. The Revolution is the torrent that sweeps over the
dryness of the dead countryside, spreading the silt of life that
transforms the wasteland of forced peace, where only reptiles reside,
into fertile lands suitable for the splendid flowering of superior
species.
Tyrants do not emerge from the people by a self-generating phenomenon.
The universal law of determinism raises them onto the backs of the
people. The same law, manifesting itself in powerful revolutionary
transformation, will make them fall forever, asphyxiated like the fish
that is deprived of its liquid abode.
The Revolution is a fully conscious act, not the spasm of a primitive
bestiality. There is no inconsistency between the idea that guides and
the action that is imposed.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 3 (fourth edition), 17 September 1910
The abuses of the powerful, the poverty of the people, the injustices
that bloody the backs of the oppressed, the hunger and exploitation that
create premature old age and ill prostitutes, call one day at the door
of the sensibility of a strong and just man. His dreams of freedom
become extremely vehement desires; his aspirations of social improvement
shore up his energies, converting idealism into action, and this
individual, temperamentally ready for great struggles, arises as a
warrior, apostle, and philosopher. Sometimes uniting the three in one
person, he perseveres, fights, and struggles with the strength of mind
and fist, until he perishes or wins the victory of his cause. Either he
dies or he reaches victory helped by other men like him, determined to
engage in great struggles for great ideas. If the former, either he
passes into the shadow forgotten, or the fetishism of the masses places
him on a ridiculous pedestal for idols. If the latter, if he survives
until triumphant, the admiration and gratitude of the multitudes divert
his justice-oriented impulses, and he is instituted as arbitrator of a
common future, ending up transformed into a glorious tyrant. The
gratitude of the people is the most fecund creator of despotism. It
ruins good men and opens the path of power to the ambitious.[44]
Robust workers and selfless, constant fighters undermine the granitic
base of a power that sows terror and death on the plains that groan
under their feet; the mass creaks and shakes; the blocks of stone split
open, and the ruin of the giant is announced, closer and closer with
each blow of the pick. It will come down, but the foundation’s
excavators are weak; their hands bleed, their foreheads gush sweat, and
exhaustion threatens to explode their chests. They rest for a moment to
prepare the last, decisive push that will take down the monster who
teeters at the edge of his grave. This is the propitious moment of
ambitious opportunism: disguised as a redeemer and hero, a man surges
from the mass of spectators who mocked that project and hindered it as
much as possible; and seeing its end approaching, he strikes the last
blow, winning him the people’s general gratitude, which turns the rubble
of the old despotism into the throne of the new, which is praised by the
liberator through political calculation.[45] In the heat of a brief
freedom new chains are formed. AgustĂn de Iturbide is a typical example
of the opportunistic REDEEMER.[46]
In both cases—in that of the sincere man who struggles for the
satisfaction of his proper aspirations for justice, who seeks his own
happiness in the well-being of those who surround him, and in that of
the individual converted into HERO and SAVIOR, due to mere utilitarian
opportunism—the people’s gratitude is groundless, lacking any reason
that could justify it. There are actions worthy of esteem, but not of
gratitude. Gratitude is born from a false supposition, the origin too of
cruel authoritarian justice: the supposition of the individual free
will. It turns out to be inappropriate in its manifestations, occupying
a principal place among the causes of slavery. This often makes
countries pay for an illusory freedom with the loss of their true rights
and freedoms, so that on their shoulders—still sore from the whip of a
defeated master—stupidly perches the tyrannical power of their
liberators, who from this moment cease to be such and assume the role of
slave-buyers, regardless of the fact that the money with which they make
their transactions comes from the blood and suffering of the populace.
What gratitude is for the people, it is the same for individuals: a rope
that binds more tightly than the fear and paralysis that makes the arm
of human right falter; a gag in the mouth of justice; and a barrier to
serene criticism, which is the genesis of all reforms.
Gratitude is the flower of servility; the libertarian rejects it because
it smells like a slave-dungeon.[47]
The admiration that is a great recruiter of flocks helps gratitude, that
great forger of chains, to perpetuate its yokes.
The people owe no gratitude to their liberators, just as they owe no
love to their tyrants.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 4 (fourth edition), 24 September 1910
The shadow is a shroud for impostures, vanity, and glitter; it is for
that reason that so many hate it.
The shadow kills the useless beauty of the precious stones that
captivate primitive minds.
In the shadows are born the tempests and revolutions that destroy but
also fertilize.
Coal, a dark rock that stains the hands that touch it, is strength,
light, and movement when it roars in the fire of the cauldron.
The rebellion of the dark proletariat is progress, liberty, and science
when this vibrates in its fists and shakes in its minds.
In the depth of the darkness, beings take form, and the palpitations of
life begin.
In the belly of the furrow germinates the seed.
The darkness of the cloud is the fertility of the fields; the darkness
of the rebel is the freedom of the people.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 4 (fourth edition), 24 September 1910
Soon, a year will have passed since the assassination of Francisco
Ferrer by the enemies of civilization inside the Montjuich fortress in
Barcelona.[48] The rationalist schools he founded suspended their
teachings, thus obeying the brutal imposition of the Spanish Government,
and their books, the source of healthy ideas and knowledge, burned in
the bonfires started by the fanatics of error. Only a few copies were
saved, and of these some remain protected in our care, awaiting the
possibility of making new editions to supply the workers’ schools that
are beginning to be founded based on the impulse and desire of a number
of groups of Mexican workers.
When I heard the news about the crime of Montjuich, a great desire to
protest invaded me, but not in the declamatory form that by force of
repetition following each attack by despotism has become useless—like
the rage of foam against granite—but rather something that would be,
instead of words or complaints, an action. I proposed therefore to the
workers of Mexican raza the establishment of schools and the founding of
small rationalist libraries, using our own funds, which are rather
scarce but not entirely inefficacious, to slowly develop a free
educational system for our children, and for us as well. My proposal was
accepted by some groups, which have been working to realize the idea,
struggling continuously with the difficulties of poverty and lacking the
appropriate books for school, given that, as already noted, the works
edited by the Modern School of Barcelona were burned on the orders of
the foolish Spanish authorities. Several libraries exist that have a few
excellent volumes, collectively put together by workers’ groups of the
Pan-American League,[49] true centers for social study where books are
read and discussed and solid and long-lasting fraternity is established
through the interchange of ideas—the product of the disappearance of old
prejudices that are drowned in the new environment. Each day they
progress, increasing the number of comrades who visit them and of the
books that are bought by anyone who is capable of doing so.
The schools unfortunately have not been able to establish themselves
completely according to the modern plan: books and teachers are lacking.
A means of resolving the question occurs to me now that the anniversary
of Ferrer’s assassination approaches, as many friends of his work plan
to celebrate it with protest demonstrations and other sympathetic acts.
Why don’t we Mexican workers celebrate this anniversary by making an
effort to promote modern schools? This would be the best form of
protest, the most logical, the most conscious, and the most effective.
Screams and threats are not necessary, only action—immediate and
constant action—so that our protest reaches the heart of despotism and
becomes, within it, a healthy poison that cuts short its days. In many
parts of the United States, Mexican workers pay what are called “school
taxes,” so that their children can receive education in the official
schools; in other parts, there are private schools where ancient methods
are followed that damage children more than help them; while in others,
despite how numerous the Mexican element is, there is no school at all
for their children, who are expelled from the “white” schools for not
having colorless skin. Why not found and sustain our own schools where
children can learn to be good and free at the same time that they taste
the delights of science? With the same amount that is paid to the
government for schools that teach very little—or what is spent in the
private schools established following the ancien régime—and, if
necessary, with a small further sacrifice, new editions of the works
published by the Modern School of Barcelona might be made and some
educators who have fled the persecutions in Spain might be brought. In
this way, we could overcome the two principal challenges facing the
birth of rationalist education in America.
In New York, the group Workers’ Solidarity and its organ “Proletarian
Culture,” working together with some advanced intellectuals, also seek
to do something practical, in the same sense; but, like us, it seems
that they do not have a great deal of money.
It would be good for these comrades and those of the South to agree to
work rapidly and seriously to advance a common cause.
Let our affection for Ferrer not degenerate into lyricism or idolatrous
fantasies. His work is in the hands of those of us who love freedom. In
continuing it, we protest against his executioners and we injure
despotism directly.
Let our children have the intellectual bread that invigorates their
minds, rather than the indigestible food that weakens them.
Free education will assure the victories that the armed revolution will
achieve.
Let us convert the final exclamation of the martyr of Montjuich into a
fulfilled prophecy. Let us make the Modern School live.[50]
RegeneraciĂłn no. 5 (fourth edition), 1 October 1910
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery?”
—Patrick Henry
The Mexican Press speaks of bloody events that took place during the
celebration of the Centennial of Independence. It refers to the
dispersal of peaceful demonstrations by cavalry, mass-incarcerations,
murders of defenseless men and unarmed women, children wandering through
the forests, filled with hunger and fear; abandoned, cold, and deserted
houses, because into them has penetrated the terrible broom of official
terror; rural gangs entering surprised villages, riding their galloping
horses and firing their weapons at the shopkeeper who had stood calmly
in his store’s doorway, at the poor innkeeper who was awaiting his
regular customers, and at all those who didn’t have time to hide upon
hearing the droves of killers; bodies disfigured by machete strikes,
abandoned in the bedrooms, assaulted at midnight by the thugs; women
using stones torn from the road to force into disgraced flight the
tyrant’s soldiers, who flee only to avenge their defeat upon the first
passerby who has the misfortune of crossing their paths; the body of a
woman riddled by bullets, serving as food for the starving and vagabond
dogs … All of this, amid the Centennial of Independence.
The police of the Capital city trample the protestors, beating with
their sabers all who stand in their way, regardless of sex or age; they
throw men and women in jail and brutally drive away the ragged people
outside the aristocratic places. The soldiery of Tlaxcala sows death and
desolation, sacrificing men, women, and children.
Mexico is no longer that bit of land bordered by the Bravo and Suchiate
Rivers: it is the Borgia Company, dug up and converted into the fetid
reddish mire.[51] Mexico has had brutal tyrants who have been selling
off its lands, who have shot down philosophers and thinkers in times of
war, who have sacrificed the doctors and injured in hospitals, who have
robbed, incarcerated, and killed without pause—yet no one other than the
present despotism has been the executioner of children and women.
The priests of Servile Peace laid their impure hands on the multitudes
and debased their foreheads with the ash of submission and ordered their
knees, trembling from cowardice, to genuflect on the land prostituted by
crime. Barbarism arrogantly and vainly passed its flag of extermination
above the withered flock. Everything was sacrificed on the altars of
myth: dignity, rights, freedom, the children’s bread, women’s chastity,
the human conscience, the future of the raza, the memory of the
indomitable and battling ancestors, and thought, the very engine and
rail for progress and civilization. The national cult had an immense
altar, and the idol, grossly made up, demanded thousands of victims—no
longer taken as formerly upon the battlefield, but rather in the
workshops, mines, factories, haciendas, and in the corners of their
hovels. The song of the new liturgy is a combination of sinister noises
that entangle themselves at the extreme of their echoes; the prayer, the
lament, the whistles of the whip, the cracking of the bones crushed
beneath horseshoes, the creaking of the doors of the prisons, the curse
of the assassin, the fall of the bodies into the ocean waters, the
crackle of the burning ranches, the cautious footstep of the spy, the
whispering of the informant, the laugh of the lackey, the clamor of
adulation, the cry of little boys, and the monotonous murmur of stupid
prayers …
Sweet peace; divine peace. We adore peace. Let us conserve peace at the
price of tranquility, of the dearest affections, and even at the price
of life—these have been the words that abject lips have pronounced
ceaselessly into the ears of the sacrificed populace, making it deaf and
destroying it, so that it cannot hear the voice of the rebellious
iconoclast that tears across space, seeking virile ears. Cananea moaned
with affront, murder, and robbery; Acayucan screamed with an epic and
defiant tone; RĂo Blanco exhorted in martyrdom; Viesca, Las Vacas, and
Palomas roared; Tehuitzingo, Tepames, and Velardeña spoke, while Ulúa
and Belén yawned like sated beasts; the Yaqui launched war cries of
agony; the National Valley arose like a bloody specter; Valladolid
tragically raised its fist and... the national passivity remained on its
knees.[52] Children and women died in Sonora; they have died in Veracruz
and Tlaxcala;[53] children and women, with their backs bloodied, their
faces saddened, and their limbs weakened, live enslaved and imprisoned
in Yucatán and the MarĂa Islands, while... we enjoy peace—tender peace,
divine peace—bought with the martyrdom of those beings we should defend
with our lives, ashamed at being enslaved.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 5 (fourth edition), 1 October 1910
A rowboat in which Filogonio and his companions were traveling capsized
while crossing a river. Some of them, knowing how to swim, tried to
reach the riverbank, while towing those who due to fear or ineptitude
let themselves be carried away by the current. Though Filogonio knew how
to keep afloat for a few minutes, he did not swim toward shore, nor did
he tow anyone. He just spoke in the name of prudence and the common good
with those who fought for their lives against the waters.
“Idiots! What are you doing? You are reckless! Do you not see that with
such efforts and such strokes we could all die of exhaustion? We fell
into this odious current because of one of you; now the prudent thing
would be to curse and protest against it, not make such movements,
because it could happen that we die of fatigue, which is the worst of
deaths.”
So Filogonio, yelling increasingly irritably at those who struggled to
reach shore, drifted away, dragged by the river. He disappeared among
the waves swallowing water, and when he returned to the surface, he once
again exclaimed, “Imbeciles! You will die of exhaustion.”
The story appears implausible. Regardless, throughout the world there
are a number of clever and prudent “patriots” who use and abuse
Filogonio’s argument without appearing to be insane, but rather seeming
very intelligent and sensible.
The threat from the North—the North American danger—has been and
continues to be for many the most significant patriotic reason for
opposing oneself to the revolution. The fear of a Yankee takeover,
exploited by the Dictatorship and by certain elements of a platonic
opposition and the compromised ministry, has made the Mexican people
forget, in part, the real danger in which the State traffickers have
placed them.
During the violent Porfirian peace, the threatening current of Yankee
capitalism has engulfed the large and small interests of Mexico: the
natural sources of wealth, mines, forests, land, and fisheries; and
dependency on U.S. financiers has rapidly become a national fact in the
political and economic orders. The will of Yankee billionaires is at
present the most potent factor in the Mexican status quo. This is known
and “felt” by Mexicans and recognized by foreigners. Peace in Mexico, as
it is today, constitutes the most favorable means for its complete
absorption within the ambitious current of Northern imperialism, which
works to conserve this arrangement, as it understands that a
revolution—if it did not completely remove the prey from its hands—would
indeed considerably reduce its preponderance as well as the probability
of absolute domination that it now has over Mexico’s future.
Some in bad faith and others because of ignorance say that the U.S.
awaits a revolutionary movement in Mexico so that it can intervene,
sending its squadrons and troops to declare an annexation by any means.
They advise that peace be conserved at all costs, even at the very price
of slavery, so as not to give the powerful and omnipotent Government of
Washington reason to declare us a Yankee province.
This argument is childish, and its advice naĂŻve. The U.S. Government, as
instrument and servant of capitalism, does not await or desire a
revolution in Mexico; to the contrary, it fears this. All of its acts
have shown this fully. Trampling the most trivial principles of justice,
the Yankee State has worked to annihilate the Mexican revolutionaries,
launching against them a viciousness unprecedented in its history, which
is inscribed with acts of varying indulgence toward all the
revolutionaries who have sought refuge in its territory and who have
organized from there many triumphant or failed movements. This
persecution has involved incidents that reveal the special interest that
Yankee capitalism has in preventing the prevailing peace from breaking,
an interest that is very far from being the simple desire of hurrying
the influence of international treaties to save the power of a despotic
friend. Rather it is the desperate effort of someone who fights against
a proper enemy, someone who feels deprived of a treasure of which he
believed himself the indisputable owner. Otherwise, the Government of
Washington would not have knocked with such frequency and audacity at
the door of disrepute, nor would it have stirred up with its violence
and abuse the great swell of indignation that forced the investigation
being carried out in Congress to clarify the crimes committed against
Mexican Liberals in the United States.[54]
In the U.S., as elsewhere, there are honorable people who oppose the
imperialism of their Government and the rapaciousness of capitalism that
increasingly undermines ancient republican freedoms.[55] Socialism, a
force that is continuously developing itself, extends over the meadows
of the West, scales the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, incites in the
enormous cities of the East, penetrates the jungles of the South, finds
a place at the desk of the intelligentsia. It spreads through the mines,
railways, farms, and factories, and rises up before Capitalism to tell
it, “You will not pass.” The labor unions, each day more numerous and
radical, gain ground in their disputes with the bosses; and thanks to
the work and persecution of the Mexican revolutionaries, the unionists
have opened their eyes to the Mexican question to see the relation that
slavery and peonage in Mexico has with their own situation. Cheap labor
over there is the grand enemy of organized labor here. Yankee capitalism
takes into account these two factors: socialism and syndicalism. It adds
it to the plight of Blacks, which worsens daily, to the pending
liquidation of Japan, the emancipatory ferments of the Philippines, the
discontent of Hispanic America, the growth of the civilizing idea that
rejects wars of conquest, the resistance that a people in rebellion can
offer to the armed domination of an extensive territory covered by
mountains. For these reasons, it knowingly seeks to prolong the existing
peace, which allows it to use Mexico as a warehouse of cheap slaves and
an endless deposit of material resources.
Perhaps if the Mexican revolution were led by an ambitious man and
lacking, as it does, powerful tendencies toward social and economic
reform, Yankee capitalism, through its puppets in the Government, would
seize the opportunity to aid the pretender to the throne, so as to enjoy
with him privileges equal to the ones it has with the old tyrant, who
becomes weaker and will disappear by force. In any case, the enterprise
of conquering Mexico through blood and fire would be an adventure with
bad consequences.
The U.S. does not want revolution in Mexico: this is clearly shown in
its conduct. The danger of absorption and conquest is not a future
threat. When the Mexican people desires to obtain its freedom through
the only practical means—that is, revolution—it is a present danger; it
is the current that carries us, one from which we will not easily
escape. We are now in the midst of it and it is necessary to swim
vigorously toward shore, even if Filogonio screams at us that, that way,
we could die of exhaustion.
Flocks of sheep win no one’s respect. Only Don Quixote could see in them
squadrons of fighters.
A passive populace is slavery. It is icing on the cake for ambitious
exploiters. A revolutionary populace seeking its freedom and rights
becomes fearsome to the conquerors.
Let us leave Filogonio and the “prudent ones” to argue about the dangers
of fatigue. Let us swim to escape from the current.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 6 (fourth edition), 8 October 1910
Over the fallow land that shimmers in the sun’s rays, with his skin
tanned by the inclemency of the elements, his feet and hands chapped,
the farm worker labors. Over the furrows he comes and goes; the morning
finds him on his feet, and when the night comes, he is still wielding
the tools to work, work. Why does he work? To fill granaries that are
not his; to heap up staples that rot awaiting a shortage, while the farm
worker and his family barely eat; to acquire debts that tie him to the
feet of the master, debts that will be passed on through the generations
to his descendants; to be able to vegetate for a few years and produce
serfs who, after he dies, will work the fields that consumed his life,
and to render some female playthings to the bestiality of his
exploiters.
Sweating and panting in the humid depths of the mine, a man struggles
against rock. Living as a man caressed by the death that the pallor of
his face resembles, he hammers and dynamites; he works with rheumatism
filtering through his skin and with tuberculosis weaving its mortal
arabesques in the softness of his suffocated lungs. He works and works.
Why does he work? So that some vain beings adorn their dresses and
homes; to fill the cash-boxes of sordid misers; to exchange his flesh
for a few metallic discs, which were created using the very rocks that
he has brought to the surface in tons; to die young and abandon his
beloved children to poverty.
In a dilapidated shack, sitting in a humble chair, a woman sews; she has
not eaten well, yet still she sews without rest. While others go out,
she sews; while others sleep, she sews. The day passes, and using the
light of a lamp she continues to sew, and slowly her chest falls and her
eyes need greater proximity to the poor lamp that steals her brilliance,
and her cough becomes the companion of her evenings. Silks, beautiful
and fine fabrics, pass under her needle; she works and works. Why does
she work? So that idle women, aristocratic ladies, can meet at the
tourney of ostentation and envy; to fill luxurious wardrobes, where the
dresses will be eaten by moths while she clothes her premature old age
in tatters.
Shrouded in flashy adornments, wearing acrid perfumes, with her withered
face dyed and affecting sweet tones, the prostitute lies in wait for the
men passing her door, cursed by the same prudishness that obligated her
to put the ephemeral enchantments of her body on the labor market. This
woman works her horrible job; she is always working, always working. Why
does she work? To acquire dirty illnesses; to pay the moralizing State a
vice tax and, in disgust and filth, to atone for the crimes of others.
Seated at a luxurious desk, the king of industry, lord of capital,
calculates; numbers are born in his head, and new combinations go, far
from the opulent abode, to cut off the heat of the homes and the bread
crusts of the proletarians. He works and works; he, too, works. Why does
he work? To amass superfluities in his palaces and to worsen poverty in
the hovels; to remove the bread and the coat from the hands that produce
them, and who build his riches; to prevent the dispossessed from some
day having the assured right to live that nature gave to all; to ensure
that a large majority of humanity remains as a flock that exhausts
itself without protest and without danger.
Unflaggingly, the judge searches the volumes that fill the bookcases of
his study. He consults books, annotates chapters, and goes through
cases; he leafs through proceedings; he delves into the statements of
alleged criminals; he strains the criminological inventiveness of his
mind; he works and works. Why does he work? To excuse social errors with
legal pretexts; to kill natural law with written law; to ensure that the
whims of despots are respected and feared; to always present the
frightening head of Medusa to the eyes of men in the witness stand of
“justice.”
Listening, the henchman passes the doors; his beady eyes probe through
the cracks, studying demeanors, trying to discern the characteristic
features of rebelliousness. His ears perk up, attempting to perceive all
the noises despotism finds disquieting. He disguises himself, but cannot
hide. The henchman has his own smell that gives him away. He can as
quickly become a serpent as a worm. He rattles, he sways, he slips
through the crowd, wanting to read their thoughts. He sticks to the
walls, as though he wanted to suck out the secrets they guard. He beats,
kills, and enchains: he works and works. Why does he work? So that the
oppressors stay calm in their palaces, erected atop misery and slavery;
so that humanity does not think, does not stand upright, nor marches
toward its emancipation.
Pointing to the sky with his simonious finger and divining the pages of
absurd books, the priest runs to the house of ignorance;[56] he preaches
charity and enriches himself through looting; he lies in the name of the
truth, prays and deceives, works and works. Why does he work? To stupefy
the people and divide the ownership of the land with despots.
Dark and pensive, the revolutionary meditates. He leans over any piece
of paper and writes powerful sentences that injure, that shake things
up, that vibrate like clarions of thunder. Roaming, he ignites
extinguished consciences with the fire of his word, sowing
rebelliousness and discontent; he forges weapons of freedom with the
iron of chains that he tears apart. Restlessly, he goes to the
multitudes, bringing them ideas and hopes; he works and works. Why does
he work? So that the farm worker might enjoy the product of his labor,
and so that the miner, without sacrificing his life, can have abundant
bread; so that the humble seamstress can sew dresses for herself and
also enjoy the sweetness of life; so that love is a feeling that unites
two free beings, ennobling them and perpetuating the species; so that
neither the king of industry nor the judge or the henchman will spend
his life working to the detriment of humanity; so that the priest and
prostitute disappear; so that tyranny, despotism, and ignorance die; so
that justice and freedom, by rationally equalizing human beings, make
them builders of the common good in solidarity; so that each has
ensured, without descending into the mire, the right to life.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 6 (fourth edition), 8 October 1910
This organization, as its name indicates, belongs to the workers, men
and women of all nations of America, and their program, directed toward
the improvement of the human species, has the following as its
principles:
1. Propaganda and support for Rationalist Education.
2. Women’s emancipation.
3. Destruction of the racial and national prejudices that at present
divide humanity.
4. Participation of the proletariat of all American nations in the
social affairs that affect any of them.
5. Improvement of wages and other working conditions.
6. Abolition of war.
Organizational Plan
I. The comrades, no less than five in number, who live in the same place
or district can form a group.
II. Isolated individuals can also join the League by adhering to the
group nearest to their residence or by requesting their membership card
from the International Office.
III. Each group will have international secretaries, organizers, and
treasurers who will function provisionally until the first Convention of
Group Delegates.
IV. All officers will have a one-year term.
V. The initial dues of all members will be five gold cents, and this
same amount will be paid weekly.
VI. The groups will create an emergency fund that will conserve their
strength, giving monthly reports of the existing quantities to the
International Office.
VII. The collection of dues for new and regular members will be used for
the organization’s expenses and propaganda.
VIII. The emergency fund will be employed in cases of strikes and other
analogous workers’ movements.
IX. Comrades who hold the same office can form Special Unions within the
League.
X. At whatever time, members of the League can depose the officials who
are undeserving of it, naming others in their place.
XI. All members have the right to initiate and revise.
XII. When the number of organized groups requires it, the International
Secretary will organize a Convention at which the delegates of the
League’s groups will establish definitive statutes in accordance with
its program.
Exposition
The Pan-American League takes as its region of action the New Continent
and the islands surrounding it, without discrimination toward supporting
and contributing in solidarity toward workers’ movements in other parts
of the world; a simple question of tactics is what motivates the
organization to be regional, though based on universal principles.
For a long time, the scholarly education of proletarian children has
been in the hands of the dominant and exploiting classes, which have
used this to mold them for obedience and servitude. There are many
workers who struggle against the masters in different ways, but whose
children go to the schools that the latter maintain to restrict humanity
to the path that serves them. In this way, with the enemy at home and
the developing brains under control, workers’ struggles have nearly
sterile results, as they succeed in achieving victories and advantages
during one generation, only to have these lost because the following
generation has been educated by the enemy.
Proletarian education should be in the hands of the workers so that it
can be beneficial, respond to their necessities, and be a true
foundation of emancipation. The League will strive for Rationalist
Education by founding schools, libraries, centers for social education,
and by advancing a libertarian press.
In mentioning the improvement of the human race, clearly we understand
all the problems that are related to this, including women’s
emancipation; but the League has made of this one of its grand
principles because we consider it a matter of great importance that is
deplorably ignored by many individuals who maintain despotism at home
while seeking freedom elsewhere. The injustice of existing social
conditions certainly is hard for men, but it is much heavier for women.
If in reality one wishes to contribute to liberatory labor in the world,
this should begin in the family—this, by dignifying our mothers,
daughters, female companions, and sisters. The League will perform the
tasks of interesting women in the work of collective emancipation,
facilitating the means and opportunities of developing their
individuality outside the deformed mold of superstitions and so-called
social conventions that in many countries oppress them.
A river, a mountain-chain, a row of small monuments suffice for keeping
two peoples hostile and estranged from each other; on both sides there
is mistrust, jealousy, and resentment over the acts of previous
generations. Each nationality seeks to be, through whatever means, above
the rest, and the dominant classes, which are the owners of the
education and wealth of the nations, develop within the proletarians
silly superiority complexes and pride in order to preclude any union of
the efforts workers separately make to liberate themselves from Capital.
Generally speaking, the various racial hatreds, and above all the
hostilities among nations, have their origins in the crimes of a few
committed with the unconscious force of multitudes enthralled to
patriotism.
Racial and national prejudices, adroitly manipulated by tyrants and
capitalists, prevent peoples from approaching one another fraternally:
by destroying these prejudices, the peoples will remove a powerful
weapon of the ambitious. Many organizations and individuals have taken
up the matter already. The Pan-American League only follows in these
footsteps.
If the workers of all the American countries directly participated in
the social issues that affect one or more proletarian groups, many
difficulties would soon be happily resolved; strikes, reforms of all
kinds, and liberatory movements would triumph easily in the region when
they take place with the solidarity and support of the international
proletariat, whose complete emancipation contributes to victories
secured anywhere. The League will endeavor to effectively wield the
united action of the American proletariat.
The increase in wages, the decrease in the number of work-hours, and the
humanization of all working conditions will bring with it better means
and opportunities for the evolution of the workers. These small
advantages, being indispensable reforms for the moment, should not be
dismissed while we strive for the disappearance of the unjust
wage-system.
Using arms made by proletarian hands and riches snatched from the
proletarian masses, with the blood and sacrifice of the workers, wars
are waged for the profit of capitalists and tyrants. The principal
elements for wars are the proletarian multitudes, from which armies and
taxes flow: withdrawing this element from the dominant classes, making
at least some of the workers decidedly opposed to the interventions,
conquests, and robberies covered up with pretexts of humanitarianism,
national honor, and patriotism, we will render impossible the horrible
collective massacres that the famous Peace Congresses organized by
governments cannot prevent, as they are comprised of the same
instruments that are interested in prosecuting them. Civilization
demands the abolition of war, while we proletarians can prevent it,
precisely by presenting to the governments who seek it the most
effective forms of collective protest.
A people who struggle at this time for their true emancipation cannot
count the oppressors at home as their only enemies; they must take into
account the strength that these enemies receive from abroad. They must
also do battle with an international enemy; they must fight over their
rights with the common enemy of all the workers of the world. For this,
then, they need the solidarity of all workers, and are obliged in their
own interest to support all workers’ struggles.
The League does not propose new ideas; it comes only as a new unit of
struggle to make practical the principles that orient humanity toward
its improvement.
Workers, meditate on the principles of this Program, and if you find
them just and worthy of your efforts, organize in favor of them.
We have been united to obey and submit to the will of the masters, and
the result has been the aggrandizement of a few and the poverty of many.
Let us unite now to struggle together, and the result will be the
emancipation of all.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 8 (fourth edition), 22 October 1910
The old question of armed intervention by the U.S. government in Mexico
grows in interest while the factions of the revolutionary movement
accuse one another through the rips in the secular mantle of the
Porfirian peace.
With different interests and tendencies come different opinions, fears,
and hopes evoked by the much-exploited intervention. The Mexican
oligarchy seeks intervention and believes that it can attract the U.S.
Army into upholding Porfirio DĂaz’s regime, or that of the successor
that the same oligarchy chooses. One part of the populace, certainly
quite small, fears the intervention after having heard so much from the
dictatorship’s journalists and other parasites analyzing the American
threat. Some politicians, who intend to install themselves as the
oligarchy to replace the present one, use the possibility of
intervention as the strongest argument for combating the revolutionary
idea, which is inconvenient for their projects and ambitions. But the
majority of Mexicans, though the belief that the intervention will take
place predominates among them, find themselves prepared to resist it
until the end; they consider it to be an inevitable threat that must be
fought until victory or defeat. In the U.S., the government and the
capitalists would rather prevent the revolution than become involved in
an interventionist adventure that could cause disastrous complications
for their imperialist politics. A war of extermination would have to be
launched against Mexico: and could one calculate what that act would
provoke and shake up in Spanish America and in the U.S. itself? One part
of the Yankee populace, the patriotic jingoists, who are not lacking
anywhere, favor armed conquest, and they believe this would be an easy
task to accomplish: just a few artillery barrages on the defenseless
Mexican ports, two or three massacres misnamed as battles, in which the
number and superiority of American war-machines give them victory,
patrols by squadrons along the Mexican coasts, a triumphant march of
regiments and battalions through the country, and soon the submission of
the defeated, with domination established. Sincerely naĂŻve and
superficial people also support the interventionist idea with the
humanitarian aim of putting an end to the atrocities of Porfirian
tyranny, thinking that annexation would be good for the Mexican people,
because in this way the laws and freedoms that exist here would improve
their situation over there. The jingoists and naive ones are mistaken,
however: neither would the violent conquest of Mexico be easy to
accomplish, nor would intervention produce an improvement for the
oppressed. Soon we will see why. A third element that could block the
imperialist policy of Wall Street and the government in Washington
opposes intervention: this element is comprised of socialists,
anarchists, trade unionists, and free-thinkers known as liberals,
iconoclasts, and agnostics. Also to be included would be the
Anti-Imperialist League and the Anti-Interference League, which have
begun to organize and will not take long in extending themselves
everywhere.[57] Here militant energies and veterans of the diverse camps
join together, where they struggle as individuals or organizations to
seriously resist and even impede the predatory actions that the White
House and its instigators—the owners of concessions and monopolies—seek
to enact against the Mexican people.
In reality, intervention is not a certain danger but rather merely
probable, given things as they are at this time. The increase or
nullification of the probabilities that now face us depend on the
elements I just mentioned, which present problems that should not be
disregarded.
The Mexican oligarchy with DĂaz, Corral, Creel, or whoever else at its
head will call directly or indirectly for intervention from Washington,
undoubtedly playing a double role, as it already has on other occasions,
for they would not be Mexican tyrants if they refrained from villainy
large or small.[58] But Washington will have to meditate carefully on
its acts, weighing the national and external factors that could drag it
into a disaster instead of bringing it a quiet victory and the apogee of
its expansionism. Even if said factors, which these days are almost
potentials, are reduced to nothing by unforeseen circumstances, or if
the vanity of the U.S. mandarins grows to the point of total blindness
and the armed intervention takes place, the first result of this will be
the immediate fall of the Mexican oligarchs and the unity of the people,
the army, and the bourgeoisie struggling jointly to reject the conquest.
Part of the army, a small part, may remain loyal to the government, but
it will be crushed before the Yankee troops arrive to rescue it; there
will be no lack of pacifying leaders who advise submission to tyranny at
home as the best way to oust the enemy, although no one will listen to
them in such moments of terrible effervescence. These leaders will not
offer more resistance to revolutionary activity than straw in a storm.
The war will initiate an endless war of extermination, without quarter;
the old resentments and hatreds that slowly had gradually cooled or
slept will awaken rabidly, blazingly, and indomitably, because the
stupid intervention will stir and shake them as the energies of a people
long and atrociously oppressed arise to struggle for their vindication.
The trench of ethnic prejudice will deepen into an abyss that
civilization will likely spend centuries filling back in; the
intervention will accomplish deeds contrary to the dreams of the
humanitarians who see it as salvation; it will result in psychological
regression for both peoples; and, too late unfortunately, will make the
jingoistic Yankees understand the blunder they have committed, because
the dispute will not be decided in grand battles: battleships, armies,
and big artillery are useless in modern guerrilla warfare, the supreme
weapon of oppressed peoples, with which the invisible force of the
oppressed can, day by day and year by year, destroy the powerful
military apparatuses.
The domination of the Philippines, despite the alliance of Washington
with the friars, causes little more than annoyance; it is a ridiculous
medal pinned to flesh. Vanity and the need to conserve a formidable
power’s prestige keep it stuck to the victor’s chest, even if his face
cannot hide a look of disgust: sooner or later, the medal will fall,
leaving a wound in the flesh that had held it in place while rotting
away.
An annexed or invaded Mexico would be worse than the
Philippines—incomparably worse. The Mexican shoe is much too small for
Yankee imperialism’s foot; if it wears it by intervening, it will soon
find itself limping pitifully, stumbling not to grand days of triumphant
ambition but rather to the shame of failed efforts without glory,
dragging the nation with it.
The intervention of Yankee imperialism is not just a question of
nationalities and flags; it implies serious complications in the social
problem whose solution is sought by advanced minorities in all
countries. By avoiding intervention, a given State does not protect
itself, but rather reasonably avoids a terrible mistake for both
peoples.
The Revolution arrives, defying the interventionist threat; we Mexicans
have the right to make sure that despots around the world do not look
down on us. Lovers of justice must think of the consequences of the
intervention and prevent it, no matter what form it takes, whether on
behalf of tyranny or ostensibly on behalf of the Mexican people, because
it would be foolishness with tragic results.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 9 (fourth edition), 29 October 1910
Since El Imparcial began to understand that it is impossible to keep the
Mexican proletariat from becoming aware of the international workers’
movement and identifying with it, it has abandoned its scornful attitude
and converted itself into a friend and mentor of those whom it has so
disregarded and stolen from in partnership with the Dictatorship. One
editorial after another has highlighted the yellow sheets of the
technocrats that address workers’ affairs with apparent confidence, in
order to guide the Mexicans toward the interests of the State and
bourgeoisie; but it barely hides its anxiety when it mentions a “problem
that we see from a distance, but that continues to interest us due to
its dreadful and unquestionable significance.” A dreadful problem—yes,
for those vain exploiters the labor problem is dreadful, for its
solution draws near through the abolition of privilege, as the
revolutionary general strike gains ground in Europe and America.
Financed by Porfirio DĂaz using the money he robs, the yellow sheets
advise the workers—if nothing else, the advice of these editorials has
the charming quality of suggesting ends contrary to the reasons they
were written, true Ambrosio carbines, which couldn’t be more efficient
if they had been designed by MondragĂłn.[59] They are less ingenious than
that crook Agrippa Menenius, who told the first Roman strikers the fable
of the body, in which the stomach was the patricians and the arms and
legs were the plebes, who should work to provide sustenance for the
stomach that pays for their services by producing blood for them. The
yellow sheets insist that those who suffer from the general strike will
not be the rich, who have cars and can come and go as they please and
eat as usual because they have well-supplied stores, but rather the
workers who can neither change their workplace to find another master to
exploit them nor satisfy their hunger because they lack storehouses or
reserves of any kind. The editors believe they have found a profound and
dramatic argument here, capable of making the workers faint from
hopelessness and fear: why go on strike if the masters will only laugh
at our refusal to work, given that we will be the only ones who are
harmed? This is impartial wisdom, ignorant of the implications of its
friendly advice.
The masters have stores full of everything needed to live a long time,
as long as the slaves decimated by hunger resume their job of
replenishing those stores with that which their masters have consumed
during the strike; the masters have cars to go where they please,
thumbing their noses at disobedient servants left with the dilemma of
exploding from hunger within hours or of exploding from fatigue in a few
days’ time; the masters laugh at the strikes because the greatest harm
they can endure is having the accumulation of their wealth paralyzed for
a short time, only to recoup it upon the remorseful and chaste return of
those they exploit. The masters are invulnerable to the paltry weapon of
the strike. Good. The first thought of any worker who has the misfortune
of reading such friendly advice from El Imparcial should be very simple.
If strikes are counterproductive for the workers, if the rich laugh at
the imbecility of the slaves who condemn themselves voluntarily to
extreme hunger for demanding improved working conditions, this is
because, upon declaring a strike, they leave—being both generous and
foolish—all that they have produced in the hands of the exploiters. The
rich would not laugh at the strike, nor would the workers surrender
shamefully out of hunger, if they added to the strike the expropriation
of the storehouses, factories, mines, and lands, filled or made
productive through their labor, all due to their effort.
The yellow sheet of the technocrats is right to condemn the peaceful
strike, an incomplete rebellion with null or adverse results; the
peaceful strike makes the bourgeoisie laugh and is contrary to the
interests of the workers, because it does not remove from the hands of
the usurpers the means of subsistence and production that belong to the
worker.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 10 (fourth edition), 5 November 1910
Tyrants and common criminals are equally subject to the natural law of
determinism, and although their acts horrify us and cause us
indignation, we must agree, in all fairness, that both are
irresponsible. However, without making any sweeping generalizations, it
can be said that tyranny is the more excusable of the crimes, because no
individual can commit it without a concurrent set of complex
circumstances that are independent of his will and beyond the control of
even those best suited and supplied with evil qualities. In effect,
could a tyrant exist above a people who hadn’t given him the elements to
maintain himself? A common criminal can commit his misdeeds without the
complicity of his victims, but a despot does not live or tyrannize
without the complicity of his, and a large number of them. Tyranny is
the crime of collectivities that do not think for themselves, and it
should be attacked as a social illness by means of revolution,
considering the death of tyrants as an inevitable moment in the
struggle: an incident, no more—not an act of justice.
Such weights and measures have no use in the libertarian approach.
Science, in negating the free will of individuals, destroys the basis of
the present barbarous penal institutions. We revolutionaries do not
establish different criteria for the acts of the grand evildoer and the
small one, nor do we use subterfuge to varnish the violence that
inevitably and necessarily accompanies the liberatory movement. We
deplore such violence, and it disgusts us, but facing the dilemma of
either remaining enslaved indefinitely or appealing to the exercise of
force, we choose the passing horrors of armed struggle, without hatred
for the irresponsible tyrant, whose head will not roll to the ground
because justice requests it, but rather because the consequences of the
longstanding despotism people have suffered and the needs of the moment
will require it at the hour when, upon the breaking of the bonds of
passivity, desires for freedom are released, exasperated by the
confinement the people endured, and the hardships they had always
protested.
We head into the violent struggle without making it our ideal, without
dreaming that the execution of tyrants constitutes the supreme victory
of justice.
Our violence is not justice: it is a necessity fulfilled at the expense
of sentiment and idealism, which are not enough to declare any achieved
progress in the lives of the people.
Our violence would have no object without the violence of despotism, nor
would it be justified if most of the tyrant’s victims were neither
consciously nor unconsciously complicit with the present unjust
situation. If the evolutionary potential of human aspirations would find
a free environment to extend itself through a social medium, producing
and practicing violence would be senseless; now it is the practical
means of breaking ancient molds that passive evolution would take
centuries to gnaw away.
The goal of revolutions, as we have said many times, is to guarantee all
the right to live by destroying the causes of poverty, ignorance, and
despotism, dismissing the sentimental complaints of the theoretical
humanitarians.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 10 (fourth edition), 5 November 1910
RegeneraciĂłn Group during the evening of Sunday, 6 November 1910, in the
Labor Temple [Bernal, Rivera, and Santillán].
Children and women always have been special victims of barbarism, and
only in certain countries have women enjoyed the beginnings of some
privileges that occasionally place them above men socially, as in the
primitive clans where matriarchy existed. But they still do not occupy
the rightful place in society that belongs to them as women.
The Bible, which consecrates the impurity of women, tells us that the
Jewish people treated women and children contemptibly: fathers had
absolute rights over their daughters, selling them like slaves or
sacrificing them, as is seen in the celebrated case of Jephthah, and the
atrocious cult of Moloch, which put in practice the burning alive of
children, especially girls, throughout the Semitic peoples.[60] The Jews
made customary the monopoly of women by the rich. Solomon gives us an
example of that, and because of this we see produced—naturally among the
poor—the repugnant vices that same Bible speaks of, giving rise to the
abasement of customs, whose preferred victims were women.[61]
In ancient Egypt, where the poor peasants constructed by force of whip
and stick gigantic monuments to servility and pride which the wind
erosion has not been able to destroy over the course of millennia, women
had extraordinary privileges: they freely stipulated the terms of
marriage contracts, could obtain divorce by simply expressing their
desire to not continue together with their husbands, and not
infrequently they obligated their husbands to serve them, precisely in
the way that husbands today, calling themselves “civilized,” demand
servitude of their wives.
Women in India, in contrast to Egyptian women, suffered the tyranny of
horrible customs: widows were burnt alive upon the death of their
husbands. They were not obligated by violence to sacrifice themselves;
men found a way of leading them voluntarily to the pyre by inculcating
in them absurd notions of honor and exploiting their vanity, pride, and
caste, for it bears mentioning that only wives of celebrities would burn
themselves alive. The poor women, belonging to castes considered
inferior, debased themselves with their sons in confusion; their lives
offered nothing attractive.
China is another of the most terrible countries for women: paternal
authority was and is despotic there, as is the authority of the husband.
“The woman is no more than a shadow or an echo in the house,” says the
proverb; the woman cannot manifest her preferences because the precepts
of modesty would be offended. She should consider herself to be happy
with the husband that is assigned to her, old or young, repellent or
tolerable; marriage is just a transaction. The morbid sensuality of the
Chinese leads even to the mutilation of women’s feet and other cruelties
that are common among the rich. As in India, the suicide of widows in
China is customary, although without the use of the bonfire, but with a
reward of eulogistic inscriptions in the temples. Infanticide, too, is
common, above all for girls.
Greek men, despite all their powerful mentation, were not very humane
with their women. Aeschylus, the poet and philosopher, defender of
patriarchal institutions, arrives at the ridiculous theory that women
are not the mothers of children, but rather temporary depositaries for
the child of the man. The gynaeceum was the space destined for Hellenic
women,[62] although they trained frequently in the gymnasia. At one
time, young girls came to receive special education in the ways of love,
but never were they seen as the actual equals of men. Marriage was not a
question of attraction. The most robust and beautiful male youths were
united with the most attractive maidens, as occurs among cattle for the
improvement of the stock. Children received a military education, and,
to maintain themselves above their slaves and neighbors, Greek men were
soldiers from the cradle, healthy in body, but mutilated in spirit,
given that the Greek intellect, brilliant as it was in certain facets,
remained dark in many others, despite the exaggerated praise that
Athenian culture receives. The Greeks killed rickety and deformed
children, conscripting the rest for battles, races, and corporal games.
They made good warriors, having agile and strikingly beautiful bodies,
but with such discipline the intellectual development of the race was
stunted. If it had been otherwise, the mind could have reached even
greater heights and splendors.
A tribe in Madagascar, the Hova, could serve as an example of good
treatment of women for many of the peoples considered to be civilized.
Hova women also know how to understand their situation, as they
designate their female neighbors, the Black women of Senegal, forcibly
civilized by the French, as “mules,” because these unfortunates live
subjected to the rudest and most humiliating labor.
The defamed nomadic Bedouins have characteristics to their credit: among
them a criminal can liberate himself from his punishment, if he succeeds
in placing his head below the cloak of a woman, exclaiming, “I place
myself under your protection.”
Different, as has been seen, has been the luck of the woman. Among the
Jews she was an impure slave who could be sold: the absolute property of
the father. In Egypt she could exercise tyranny over the man; in India
she was an appendage that should disappear with her owner; in China, a
victim of masculine sensuality and jealousy, she had and has a sad fate;
in Greece she was considered, with some exceptions, an object; while
among the Hova, the Bedouins, and other tribes, she has enjoyed relative
freedom and a very sympathetic status. We must look at her now in terms
of the diverse situations she confronts in modern nations.
The morality that the ancient civilizations inherited from the first
social nuclei, known as clans, has been modified with the evolution of
custom, as seen in the disappearance of certain needs and the birth of
others. In general, woman remains outside her rightful place, and the
son who receives from her the initial impulse of his psychic life will
be responsible, upon becoming a man, for perpetuating the discord
between the two parties that form humanity. No longer are widows burned
with the corpses of their husbands, nor do fathers have the right to
decide matters of life and death regarding their children, as happened
in Rome; no longer are armed raids performed to provide women for the
men of a given tribe, nor are children burned alive under the nose of
Moloch. Established laws and simple social conventions serve as the
women’s executioners. Male power manifests itself still in thousands of
oppressive forms; the “trafficking of white women” to supply harems for
potentates takes the place of the violent raids, and infanticide, the
result of poverty and prudishness, is an all-too-common occurrence among
all social classes.
Beyond the camp of liberalism—which vindicates the equality of women and
men—the tendency of the times, which still remains too weak to break
with all the obstacles that block women’s emancipation, has motivated a
deviation known as “feminism.” Not being able to be a woman, the woman
wants to be man; she launches herself, with an enthusiasm worthy of a
more rational feminism, in pursuit of all the ugly things that a man can
be and do. She seeks to play the role of cop, shyster, political tyrant,
and to elect, with men, the masters of humanity. Finland leads this
movement, followed by England and the United States. Feminism serves as
the basis for the opposition of the enemies of women’s emancipation.
There is certainly nothing attractive in a female gendarme, in a woman
alienated from the sweet mission of her sex in order to wield the whip
of oppression, or in a women fleeing from her beneficent feminine
individuality to dress in the hybridity of “mannishness.”
The biblical theory of the impurity of women has lost its infallibility;
it is substituted by the modern “inferiority of women,” a concept that
is allegedly supported by science.
“Woman’s inferiority?” To be sincere, we should instead say, “Woman’s
enslavement!”
An innumerable number of generations have passed submitting themselves
to the rigors of an education regarding women, and in the end, when the
results of this education manifest themselves, when the prejudices
accumulated in the feminine brain and the material burdens that men pile
on to weigh down their lives and impede the true flight of their
intellect in the free space of the idea—when all that surrounds her is
oppressive and false, one comes to the conclusion that women are
inferior, so as not to admit or confess the inequality in circumstances
or lack of opportunity, which despite everything have not prevented the
initiation of woman’s emancipation, through her own heroic efforts.
Being morally emancipated, revolutionary women victoriously challenge
the charge of superficiality made against their sex. They provoke
contemplation with respectful sympathy of the sum total of courage,
energy, will, sacrifice, and sorrow that their labor represents: this is
the greatest merit of their rebelliousness, compared to that of men. The
act of the Russian female revolutionary who disfigured her face because
her beauty was an impediment to the struggle for freedom reveals a
superior mentality. Compare this action with that of Pompey’s soldiers,
fleeing Caesar’s troops, who had the order to hit their opponents in the
face.[63] See Maximilian of Austria rejecting an attempt at escape for
not wanting to shave his beautiful beard.[64] On which side lies
superficiality, stupid coquetry, and foolish vanity? Women are accused
of fragility, yet does this indiscretion condemning moral hypocrisy
compare with the homosexual deviation, with that infamous prostitution
of men, that extends through all countries of the world and is practiced
scandalously by representatives of the supposedly cultivated classes,
including the men of State and the refined nobility, as was publicized
by the irreverent pen of Maximilian Harden of Germany, and as was
discovered sensationally in Mexico at an intimate dance of
aristocrats?[65]
Religion, regardless of the denomination through which it presents
itself, is the most terrible enemy of women. Under the pretext of
consolation, it annihilates her conscience; in the name of a barren
love, it deprives her of love, the source of life and human happiness.
With rude phantasmagoria, sketches of a sickly poetry, it separates her
from the strong, real, and immense poetry of free existence.
Religion is the auxiliary of the despots of home and country; its
mission is that of the animal-tamer. Caress or lash, cage or lasso, all
that it employs leads primarily to the taming and enslaving of women,
because woman is the mother and teacher of the child, and the child will
become an adult.
Woman has another enemy no less terrible: established customs, these
venerable customs of our ancestors, which are always broken by progress
and always reestablished by conservatism. Women cannot be women; they
cannot love when they love or live freely with a male comrade, because
custom opposes itself to this, and transgressing custom brings contempt,
jeers, insults, and condemnation. Custom has sanctified her enslavement,
her eternal minority of age, and she should continue being a slave and
pupil, according to custom, without considering that the sacred customs
of our ancestors included cannibalism, human sacrifices at the altars of
the god Huitzilopochtli, the burning alive of children and widows, the
piercing of noses and lips, and the worship of lizards, bulls, and
elephants. Yesterday’s holy customs are criminal or infantile nonsense
today. So why such respect for and observance of the customs that impede
women’s emancipation?
Freedom frightens those who do not understand it and those who have
created their environment through the degradation and poverty of others;
for this reason, the emancipation of women finds a hundred opponents for
every man who defends or works for it.
Libertarian equality does not attempt to make women into men; it gives
the same opportunities to both factions of the human race so that both
can develop without obstacles, serving mutually to support each other,
without taking away each other’s rights, and without disturbing the
place that each has in nature. We women and men must struggle for this
rational equality, the harmonizer of individual and collective
happiness, because without this there will perpetually be in the home
the seed of tyranny, the offshoot of slavery, and social misfortune. If
custom is a yoke, we must break with custom, regardless of how sacred it
appears. By offending custom, civilization advances. Custom is a brake,
but brakes have never liberated the people, satisfied hunger, or
redeemed slavery.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 11 (fourth edition), 12 November 1910
They burned a man alive.
Where?
In the model nation, in the land of the free, in the home of the brave,
in the piece of land that still has not emerged from the shadow cast by
John Brown’s gallows: in the United States, in a town in Texas called
Rock Springs.
When?
Today, in the tenth year of the century. In the epoch of airplanes and
dirigibles, of wireless telegraphy, of the marvelous rotary press, of
peace congresses, of humanitarian and animal-welfare societies.
Who?
A multitude of white “men,” to use the name they prefer; white
“men”—whites, whites.
Those who burned this man alive were not hordes of cannibals; they were
not Blacks from Equatorial Africa; they were not savages from Malaysia;
they were not Spanish Inquisitors; they were neither red-skinned Apaches
nor Abyssinians; they were not Scythian barbarians, nor troglodytes or
naked illiterates from the jungles: they were descendants of Washington,
Lincoln, and Franklin. They formed a well-dressed, educated horde that
was proud of its virtues and civilized; they were citizens and white
“men” of the United States.
Progress, Civilization, Culture, Humanitarianism. These lies turn to ash
with the charred bones of Antonio RodrĂguez.[66] They are dead
fantasies, asphyxiated by the pestilent smoke of the pyre of Rock
Springs.
There are schools in each town and each ranch of Texas. Through these
schools passed, as children, the “men” who formed the lynch mob, and in
them their intellects were molded. From there they went out to bring
embers to the flesh of a living man, and to say days after the murder
that they had done well, that they had acted justly.
True schools educate their students in order to lift them above the
level of beasts.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 12 (fourth edition), 19 November 1910
One needn’t be afraid of the means used to conquer freedom, calling
rebellious activity barbarous and brutal. It is absurd to beat against
iron with a wooden hammer, although some oppose the sacrifice of a few
consciences to benefit the passive, backward masses.[67]
The opportunistic and hypocritical politicians who wish to cover up
their cowardice and egotistical interest with the finery of a
civilization they don’t even know, making a show of sentimentality and
hysteria, believe themselves to be sitting among a plaza of brothers,
when in reality they find themselves at the moral level of three
inferior animals: the hyena, the crocodile, and the rat—because they
like to eat corpses, because they cry, and because they are the scourge
of public granaries.
Oppressive force must be destroyed by liberatory force, without fear
regarding the fatal necessity of violent means.
Ideals that do not march toward practice are mere ideals: sterile
romanticism in terms of the world’s progress.
A flying thought needs an energetic, strong, and daring hand that will
open—in fact, break—all the doors that close it off from the space of
reality.
Death … What does death mean, when life is slavery and shame? When it
binds us against our will at the feet of despotism? The present epoch is
a painting in which certain characters do not fit: if it is not
enlarged, it will be shattered.
To be dragged into the turmoil of the passive flock and to pass one
hundred and one times beneath the shearer’s scissors, or to die alone
like a wild eagle above the hard peak of an immense mountain: this is
our dilemma.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 25 (fourth edition), 18 February 1911
In an article published in Monitor Democrático that seeks to improve the
reputation of Don Francisco I. Madero, the newspaper’s favored candidate
for Mexican president, it is said that that capitalist is an
agricultural worker, and that he has sweated by the side of his workers.
These sentences might be useful for creating sympathies among
proletarians who do not know him, but they are very untrue. Madero has
been and clearly continues to be a capitalist who has never worked the
plow that the Monitor claims he abandoned to wield “the pen of the
apostle,” when others had already been denouncing with integrity the
crimes of the dictatorship[68] (which Madero believes to have governed
only with a minimum of terror) and after many selfless people had
sacrificed their lives for the freedom of the people. He is no
agricultural worker but instead a large landowner, a rancher like others
who have, with more or less piety, exploited the Mexican worker.
There are differences to consider between the worker who works the land
and the master who takes advantage of such work. If there were not, one
would have to admit that the Terraza, Molina, and Creel families are
also comprised of agricultural workers because they have accumulated
enormous amounts of lands.[69]
Idols should not be dressed up in tissue paper, because they tend to
sweat during processions.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 40 (fourth edition), 3 June 1911
The cause of freedom also has women who are in love with it. The breeze
of the Revolution does not stir solely the crowns of the oak trees: it
passes through the flowery garden villas and sways the white lilies and
tender violets. The breath of struggle and hope, caressing the fragrant
passionflowers, transforms them into red and proud camellias.
Our cry of rebellion has raised tempests in many feminine souls,
nostalgic for glory. The ideal conquers its disciples through their pure
hearts; justice chooses as priestesses the heroines who worship
martyrdom. The irresistible seductions of danger have the same magnetic
attraction for all great spirits. For this reason, when the hatred of
the despots attacks us more fiercely, the number of proud and valiant
female fighters multiplies.
We do not envy Russia its revolutionary beauties; around our flag
riddled with bullets, the workers of the revolution gather, at the mercy
of savage persecutions and infamous betrayals. Thanks to the overflowing
furor of the tyrants, the purity of our cause has found true asylum in
the delicate breast of the woman. The redeeming struggle that we carry
on has made us love beauty, and love it, not with useless platonic love
but rather with an ardent, active, and selfless passion that leads the
apostles to their sacrifice.
Resignation cries in the sad shadow of the gynaeceum; fanaticism
uselessly shatters its knees before the sorrow of senseless myths; but
the strong woman, the comrade in solidarity with man, rebels. She does
not anesthetize her children with mystical psalms, does not hang
ridiculous amulets on her husband’s chest, does not detain in the web of
her caresses the fiancé she loves; virile, resolved, splendid, and
beautiful, she lulls the little ones to sleep with songs of the
Marseillaise, lights in the heart of her husband the talisman of duty,
and impels her lover to combat, showing him by example how to be
dignified, to be grand, to be a hero.
Oh, you female fighters who feel suffocated in the atmosphere of
ignominious peace! How much envy your spark of divine illumination
causes in weak men, meek men who form the fleeced flock that stupidly
bows its head when it feels the insult of the strong at its back!
You women, inspired by the igneous spirit of the sublime struggle; you
women, strong, just, sisters of the rebel slave and not the debased
servants of the feudal lords; you who have made your consciences
independent when thousands of men still live in the fearful shadow of
prejudice, when so many sinewy hands remained locked in gestures of
supplication before the implacable and hateful whip of the masters; you
who raise your indignant arms, grasping the red torch, and who raise the
dreaming faces in an epic attitude of defiance, are the sisters of Leona
Vicario, of Manuela Medina, and of la Corregidora.[70] You make the
irresolute blush with shame; you make the vile long for the disgrace of
the dungeon. How you will make the wicked tremble when the angry
lightning of your beautiful pupils flashes above them, anticipating the
blow of the libertarian sword!
When the woman fights, what man, however miserable and pusillanimous he
may be, could turn his back without blushing in shame?
Revolutionary women: the day that you see us vacillate, spit in our
faces!
RegeneraciĂłn no. 123 (fourth edition), 11 January 1913
made on current events. They appeared in Regeneración ’s fourth edition,
nos. 2–12 (10 September–19 November 1910). However, as mentioned in the
translator’s preface, not all of Guerrero’s “Flash Points” appear here;
neither do they appear in their chronological order.
Freedom is not attained by wearing the brake of legality. Each liberator
has been an illegal, each advance of civilization an attack on the laws
considered sacred by conservatism, the enemy of progress.
 ~
Respect the existing order and submit to the laws that make it
inviolable for cowards, and you will eternally be slaves.
 ~
Sow a small seed of rebelliousness, and you will reap a harvest of
freedoms.
 ~
Tyranny is not the crime of despots against the people; it is the crime
of collectivities against themselves.
 ~
Proletarian, what is this life you love so much that you would shelter
it from the revolutionary wind by gladly squeezing it into the mill of
exploitation?
 ~
Hatred is not necessary in the struggle for liberty. Without hatred
tunnels are opened; without hatred dams are placed on rivers; without
hatred the land is broken open to sow grain; without hatred despotism
can be annihilated. The most violent action can arise without hatred
when it becomes necessary for human emancipation.
 ~
Passivity and docility do not imply goodness, just as rebelliousness
does not signify savagery.
 ~
The horrors of repression approach; fear is overthrown, and rebellion
will respond with action.
 ~
“When this becomes formal,” exclaim those suffering the delirium of
failure; “when it is a sure thing, I will do this and that.” And they
remain so fresh in their role as critics of those who struggle, hoping
that the work to achieve freedom becomes formalized, so that they no
longer have to do anything but open their mouths to savor it.
 ~
“They are useless efforts. They are sterile sacrifices. Do not move.
Remain still. That’s it; this way you will be well-trained bipeds; eat
your bitterness with the bread of meekness, so that in the end you do
not die satisfied.”
 ~
The multitudes follow the ambitious who sacrifice them with greater ease
than the very principles that would emancipate them.
 ~
Tyranny is the best propaganda for rebellion; it gives the organizers
ground.
 ~
The word, as a means of unifying tendencies; action, as a means of
establishing the principles of practical life.
 ~
The right to life is the first of all rights. To appreciate and defend
it, the jurisprudence of the proper conscience will suffice.
 ~
Freedom is not the privilege to choose one’s master; it is instead the
impossibility of having one.
 ~
What, are you afraid? Fine; is there anyone who is fearless? What is
needed is to transcend such fear and not allow it to control us like the
first despot.
 ~
To love life when it sacrifices itself daily to satisfy the avarice,
pride, and lust of despots is the most foolish of loves.
 ~
It is quite easy to supplant an idol in the conscience of the idolaters;
idolatry is not destroyed in this way. It is for this reason that
usurpers have better luck than reformers.[71]
 ~
Laziness is content with being grateful, but if everyone did their part
in the conquest of general freedom, no one would have to be ashamed of
being grateful.
 ~
There are people who believe themselves humiliated if they do not return
the glass offered to them by a neighbor or friend, yet they accept
without blushing the well-being and freedom that others prepare by
sacrificing their lives.
 ~
When the producers understand their interests better and declare a
generalized state of emergency for the exploiters, the latter will be
impotent in trying to break this.
 ~
The hoarding of land into a few hands, the monopolization of the
necessary means of life, tyranny, ignorance, cowardice, and the dreadful
exploitation of man by man are the sources of bourgeois wealth and of
proletarian misery.
 ~
There are people who are humanitarian in the extreme when it comes to a
revolution that would benefit the people, but who forget all scruples in
terms of a war that serves their own ambitions.
 ~
The saying, “We are hungry and thirsty for justice,” is heard
everywhere, but how many of these hungry persons dare to take the bread
themselves, and how many of the thirsty take the risk of drinking the
water that is found on the path to revolution?
 ~
If you believe that you will not reach freedom by walking, then run.
 ~
If you cannot be a sword, be lightning.
 ~
Let us live to be free, or die to cease being slaves.
 ~
In the current times, one humanizes oneself when the instrument of
torture is changed.
 ~
The apparent minuteness of the star is due to the weakness of our view.
 ~
Justice is neither bought nor requested as a handout; if it does not yet
exist, it is made.
 ~
Moral triumphs do not suffice for the emancipation of the people, just
as spiritual food does not nourish anybody.
 ~
The same people who condemn laborers rebelling against their masters as
disloyal and who demand imprisonment for those who commit small
robberies moralize society by offering rewards to informants and
traitors.
 ~
You speak of love for your children while your passivity prepares for
them lives of slavery. Someday they will bless your love, when they are
treated as beasts.
 ~
For some sensitive souls, it is more painful and barbarous for a
thousand men to die in the revolution than for millions of men, women,
and children to live and die imprisoned and exploited.
 ~
The whip that one day lashes the back of a comrade could another day
remove our own skin.
 ~
Solidarity with others is protection for ourselves.
 ~
Through the physiognomy of the tyrant one can discern the parentage of
the nation that obeys him.
 ~
To perform a thousand daily efforts for the benefit of an idler is to
labor sanely; to perform only one for the general well-being is madness.
 ~
It is the epoch of oaths. Henchmen swear oaths; the newspapers swear
oaths; children are forced to swear oaths, too; but as Aeschylus said:
It’s not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.
 ~
Wherever oaths are used, lies are abused.
 ~
Who is more responsible: the tyrant who oppresses the people, or the
people who produced him?
 ~
The revolution, with all its violence, will put an end to the
possibility of wars.
 ~
There are many who await the hour of liberation impatiently, but how
many work to bring it closer?
 ~
Nature still does not produce trees that give fruits of justice and
well-being. Let us sow and cultivate.
 ~
Accompany action with desire, and you will have a certain chance of
satisfying both.
 ~
A docile person can be a martyr, but never a liberator.
 ~
“LAND!” was the cry that saved Columbus. “LAND!” is the cry that will
save the slaves of capital.
 ~
It is better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.
 ~
The protest against burning a man alive does not belong to a particular
nationality; it is for the entire human race.[72]
 ~
No brutal punishment will stop brutal lynchings. It takes a true
civilization, established through rational education.
 ~
It is fashionable for personalistic parties to call themselves “parties
of the future,” an inadvertent prophecy. Their future is broken, because
each day there are fewer workers to turn the mill-wheels.
 ~
There is a brake for our impatience: activity without respite.
 ~
Some independent newspapers assure us that our well-disciplined army
could not forget its obligations by entering into liberatory plots. I
deny this. There are many officials and generals who mingle in such
efforts in order to betray them and so polish their military
credentials.
 ~
We revolutionaries are the clock’s mechanism. If we always agree and
rush to march, we will soon set the time of the beautiful and smiling
hour of emancipation on the clock-face.
 ~
The workers’ organization among the Spanish comrades is progressing
rapidly, despite fanaticism and states of siege. Soon, working Spain,
free Spain will become greater than conquering Spain.
 ~
We must work hard and constantly to put an end to the horrors of peace,
so beloved by lambs and their pastors.
 ~
If you feel the desire to bow before a despot, do so—but pick up a stone
to finish the salutation in a dignified way.
 ~
To kill oneself for a candidate is absurd. Will those who seek only a
change in masters understand this?
 ~
Written rights are only written; they mock the people, mummified by
constitutions.
 ~
To instruct the brain is to make the arm’s strike more effective; to arm
the arm is to give strength to the brain’s conceptions.
 ~
Freedom is neither a goddess who demands adoration nor a fairy who
bestows gifts on those who invoke her with sweet words; it is a
necessity that dignified and conscious beings seek to satisfy by putting
brain and brawn in play.
 ~
Unity to obey and respect the executioners has brought humanity
oppression and misery; unity for disobedience and disrespectful action
will give the slaves bread and freedom.
 ~
So you cannot be lions? Fine. Then simply be humans.
 ~
Do you fear the revolution? Renounce injustice, and your fear will end.
 ~
Imagine a tiger, a wolf, or whatever rabid or hungry beast attacking
your comrades or threatening your own life. Suppose that some of you
have humanitarian sentiments, a certain value and serenity of spirit,
and you have a weapon within your reach. What would you do to avoid the
harms of the beast? Would you choose the plea, the moralizing sermon,
the threat of the judgment of history—arguments incomprehensible to the
beast—or would you take up the weapon to kill it—a logical and effective
argument for the violence that blindly kills and devours?
 ~
A cause does not triumph due to its goodness and justice; it triumphs
through the efforts of its adepts.
 ~
Behind religion is tyranny; behind atheism, freedom.
 ~
There are individuals who become habituated to life while imprisoned;
would it be so strange, in this society of sanctified inequality, to see
slaves who take the lashes of their masters as caresses?
 ~
A group of men has to lift a weight that everyone wants to replace, but
the majority abandons the task. They march off, laughing and whispering
about the meager strength of those who they left in their posts with an
excessive burden to lift. The fault is ours, the blame elsewhere.
 ~
Many “men” say they love a woman when what overflows in them is a
proprietary feeling.
 ~
Curse the discontent, you who love the stability of fungus; discontent
is the most powerful spur of progress.
 ~
There can be water without fish and people without tyrants: but there
can be neither fish without water nor tyrants without people.
 ~
Create an idol and you will take on the yoke.
 ~
We workers have no need for merciful friendships that offer us salvation
in exchange for a benign or paternal presidency or dictatorship. We want
comrades who struggle with us, conscious of their interests.
 ~
Oh yes, there are many thieves in Mexico. There are people so depraved
that they will steal even an insignificant piece of bread when they
could afford the luxury of starvation.
 ~
Fortunately for the satisfied, in Mexico there is a justice that sends
hungry children from the capital to Pacific prison, spending several
millions entertaining itself without remorse.
 ~
The Argentine students, gathered in mobs of fanatics, destroying
workers’ libraries and newspapers in Buenos Aires, have erected the best
monument to bourgeois education, which cultivates brutal passions.
 ~
Alfonso, the murderer of Montjuich, has sent to Porfirio DĂaz, the
butcher of RĂo Blanco, Charles III’s Grand Necklace, used by the late
Edward VII.[73] According to the Court’s heralds, this necklace is a
treasure of art and honor. It bears the Latin inscription “Virtuti et
Merito.”
The Revolution, which also knows how to reward virtue and merit,
prepares another necklace for the Hero of Peace, made of Indigenous
materials: a necklace of ixtle.[74]
Which will feel better on the respected neck?
 ~
According to El Imparcial, the sources of misery are drunkenness,
intemperance, a lack of savings, subversive meetings, strikes, and
premature marriage.
Our aristocrats are drunk, intemperate, wasteful, friends of colossal
revelries, eternally on strike, and, very young, they have three or four
women instead of one. They drink abundantly from the impartial fountains
and yet they do not live in misery.
 ~
This world is a “vale of tears,” or better said, a perpetual Icamole for
certain boys of the press.[75]
 ~
It is more sensible to sacrifice all and die like a poor rat to enrich
the masters than to risk one’s life to achieve freedom and, with that,
certain well-being. Isn’t that how it is, you sane, passive ones?
was simultaneously the director of the newspaper Reforma, Libertad y
Justicia [Bernal, Rivera, and Santillán].
As it had rained tenaciously during the night, their soaked clothes and
the persistence of the mud that clung to their boots made the march
difficult.
Dawn arrived. The sun on 26 June 1908 announced itself by tinting the
horizon with a blood-colored gauze. The Revolution waited vigilantly
with a raised fist. Despotism also waited, clutching the freedom-killing
weapon nervously, with an alarmed eye scrutinizing the brush, where even
still floated the ambiguous shadows of the night.
The group of rebels came to a stop a kilometer from the village of Las
Vacas. They performed roll call. The number of fighters did not reach
forty. They took up initial positions for the attack, organizing
themselves into three formations: the central one led by BenjamĂn
Canales, the one on the right by EncarnaciĂłn DĂaz Guerra and JosĂ© M.
Rangel, and that on the left by Basilio RamĂrez. The barracks were
indicated as the meeting point for the three columns, with the enemy
between to be swept away.
The insomnia and work of many hours, taken together with the storm and
mire of the march, had not broken the spirits of freedom’s volunteers.
In each pupil gleamed a ray of heroism and on each brow shimmered the
conscience of emancipated humanity. In the light wind of the dawn, one
could breathe in a glorious atmosphere. The sun was born and the saga
was about to be written with redder characters than those of the
fleeting hues of the gauze fading in the distance.
“Comrades!” cried a voice, “the long-awaited hour has finally arrived!
We will die or conquer freedom!”[76]
“We will fight for the justice of our cause!”
At that moment an epic painter could have created an admirable work.
What interesting faces! What expressive and resolved attitudes!
Marching toward the village, the three tiny columns arrived at the edge
of a stream. Suddenly someone at the front yelled, “Here are the
mochos!”[77] And the stream was quickly crossed, with the water
waist-deep. The soldiers who were lying down on the ground in the brush
arose in disorder before the charge of the rebels, some of them seeking
cover in the homes, while others deserted by swimming across the river
to get into the United States.
The streets of Las Vacas were crossed in just a few minutes, and battles
at point-blank range started up against the rest of the garrison, which,
divided into different sections and, protected by buildings, sought to
halt the libertarians. Canales, at the head of the central group of
guerrillas, was the first to arrive a few steps from the barracks; shots
surrounded his fiery figure; his large and beautiful eyes, normally as
placid as those of a child, shone brightly. Amid the rain of steel, his
classic profile stood out pure, virile, and magnificent, and his fight
was brief: firing his carbine and crying “¡Viva!” to freedom, he was
approaching the entrance of the barracks when he received a dreadful
bullet in the middle of his forehead—that beautiful forehead, where so
many just aspirations and dreams of freedom had made their home, from
which so many noble thoughts had taken flight. BenjamĂn died with his
head destroyed and his arms extended. He would not live to see what he
had wanted so much: freedom for Mexico.
Dislodged a number of times, the defenders of tyranny sought a position
that could allow them to escape the thrust of the libertarians, who,
inferior in number and armaments, prevailed due to their reckless
fearlessness and their terrifying marksmanship. As the combat began, the
tyrannists counted close to a hundred, including infantry and judicial
police; two hours later, their numbers had decreased considerably due to
desertions and bullets. It was in this first period, during which
weapons were fired, often scorching the clothes of the enemy, that the
majority of our comrades fell.
First of all was Pedro Miranda, a revolutionary as much due to
idiosyncrasy as to conviction, the Pedro Miranda whose caustic quips are
still repeated by the comrades who knew him; he was action and strength
incarnated in a body made for struggles against nature and unjust
men—the same one who spent years working without rest, dedicating to the
Revolution every cent he saved from the bourgeois vultures. His
carbines, an always-increasing arsenal, could be found at all hours
ready to spring into action for freedom. Among the comrades, the
invariable condition of Pedro’s weapons has come to be proverbial. When
one wishes to mean that a person or thing is in very good condition, one
says that they are like Pedro Miranda’s carbines. His final words were:
“I can no more … Press on!”
NĂ©stor LĂłpez, the active and sincere propagandist, admirable for finding
resources for the cause, had his leg broken a block from the barracks.
The brave Modesto G. RamĂrez, author of a letter full of conscious
heroism written on the night before the combat that was subsequently
published in the North American press, fell close to a fence of
branches, besides two brave ones who had died minutes before in that
fatal place. A comrade passed, and Modesto in agony asked him, “Brother,
how are we doing? Give me water … and press forward.”
Juan Maldonado encountered death as he daringly advanced to dislodge the
enemy.
Emilio MungĂa, a coldly reckless youth, also died.
Antonio MartĂnez Peña, an old and constant worker for the cause, there
ended his life of sacrifices when he gave himself away close to the
mouths of the Mausers.
Pedro Arreola, a revolutionary who had been persecuted since the times
of Garza,[78] and for many years one of the men most feared by the thugs
on the border between Coahuila and Tamaulipas, died with a mocking
phrase on his lips and the indomitable expression on his face. Struck by
a bullet that severed his spine above the waist, he strove to reach the
carbine that had fallen out of reach as he collapsed; a comrade
approached him and placed the weapon in his failing hands. He smiled,
attempting without success to place a new cartridge in the carbine’s
chamber; he asked about the fate of the struggle and through his tragic
smile slowly slipped the final sentence of his rough philosophy: “The
cause will triumph; do not pay attention to me—one goat dying doesn’t
mean the herd will be lost.”
Manuel V. Velis, less than two meters from the enemy, fired with
astonishing calm, supporting himself on a thin shrub and contesting with
much phlegm all the attempts to force him from that site swept by
fusillades. He remained, serving as a target until his cartridge belt
had nearly run out, and then went to reunite with his comrades. A bullet
shot from a house brought down this serene fighter, whom no one had ever
seen quarrel—this man of pleasant and hardworking habits and profound
libertarian convictions, in whom conscience dominated temperament.
There were others killed whose names I have not determined; at the time
of the fight, they joined our own. It is said that one was from
Zaragoza, and that another had lived in Las Vacas, and that upon hearing
the noise of combat and the exclamations of the fighters, the solidarity
of the oppressed awakened in him: cinching his cartridge belt, he took
up his carbine, sprang into the streets with the cry “Long live the
Liberal Party!” and launched himself bare-chested against the soldiers
of despotism. A fusillade left him in the middle of the street.
For a long five hours the combat lasted. After the first two, the shots
from the tyrannists were no longer as deadly; their pulse had notably
changed, regardless of the fact that some dashed toward cover. The
libertarian carbines spoke eloquently. The barrel of a Mauser would
appear, and within ten seconds the wood of the box jumped, reduced to
matchsticks by the Winchester bullets. A military cap would appear
somewhere and would soon be turned into a sieve by the 30-30s. The
libertarians were decimated; there were many injured; but their advance
was powerful, and their valor great. DĂaz Guerra fought in the front
lines with his revolver; his many years in exile had suddenly became the
light and bold age of the guerrillero of the Intervention.[79] A
fragment of a bullet injured him in the jaw, while another fired at him
point-blank from a window penetrated his arm. That wound resulted in the
burning of a home. Non-combatants were advised to leave, and the edifice
was set alight. Meanwhile, Rangel maintained an unequal struggle: only
barely did he hold in checkmate a group of soldiers, led by a sergeant,
who trimmed Rangel’s furious leonine figure with the whistling steel of
their rifles.
Everywhere, scenes of heroism unfolded among the volunteers for freedom.
Each man was a hero; each hero an epic painting driven by the epic wind.
A youth, blonde as a Scandinavian, ran from one danger to another with
his clothes torn and bloody; a shot had touched his shoulder, another a
leg below the knee, a third in the thigh, and a fourth hit him in a rib
above his cartridge belt. The force knocked him down. But the
freedom-killing projectile had found in its path the steel of
libertarian bullets and ricocheted, leaving intact the life of the
courageous youth who, regaining his footing, pressed on with the fight.
Calixto Guerra, injured as he was, maintained his position with
admirable courage and energy.
A group of eight soldiers and a sergeant found themselves cut off from
their colleagues and assaulted on the flank by the rebel’s fire. Beside
them was the barracks, but to reach them, the soldiers would have to
cross a street controlled by four rebels.
Determined to leave the untenable position into which he had been forced
by one of the libertarians’ sudden charges, the sergeant appeared in the
street waving a white handkerchief to signify peace, followed by the
soldiers carrying their rifles with the butts up; the rebels believed
that they were surrendering and allowed them to advance. But suddenly,
when the treasonous thugs were near the door of the barracks, they
turned their rifles and fired on those who had spared them.
No more than three fired without effect and ran to enter the barracks,
but they did not succeed. The bullets of the 30-30s prevented them from
ever repeating their cowardly scheme.
In the barracks there was a heap of corpses; others were seen in the
streets. Bullet-holes were everywhere. Houses presented a bleak
appearance. It was after ten o’clock; the libertarians’ ammunition was
exhausted; the soldiers of tyranny numbered fewer than fifteen,
quartered in the houses where families lived; the rest had died or
deserted. The captain, being chief of the garrison, tenaciously defended
himself with the sad valor of servile loyalty. This would have ended in
a complete triumph for the revolutionaries, but … there was no
ammunition. Rangel made another effort: having four bullets in his
revolver and some comrades alongside him, he attempted a decisive
attack. He advanced a bit and was shot in the thigh—this was the last
libertarian blood shed on that tremendous day.
The retreat was initiated; step-by-step the survivors reunited and
abandoned the village. No one wanted to leave behind a victory that was
theirs, amid the corpses of so many comrades. But … there was no
ammunition. One rebel refused to leave; he still had some cartridges,
and would not leave with the rest until completing the triumph. He found
a place and alone remained facing the enemy until three o’clock.
His carbine and cartridges emptied, he left, being untouched by bullets,
to continue the struggle for emancipation.
Later the name of this hero, and of those of all those who participated
in the action of Las Vacas, will be heard when we speak of sacrifices
and greatness.
“A failure,” murmur some voices.
“An example, a lesson, a stimulus—the immortal episode of a revolution
that will triumph,” says logic.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 2 (fourth edition), 10 September 1910
The organization of this upsurge had been laborious work executed amid
great difficulties and dangers. The indiscretion and cowardice of the
masses, the vigilance of the authorities supported by the dirty work of
spies and informants, the lack of monetary resources—all of this was
overcome or avoided by the revolutionaries of the Viesca group. Their
organization acquired vigor and consistency through the constant
momentum employed by a few of these libertarian workers. One by one they
collected weapons for the group: one day it was a pistol, another a
carbine. They slowly furnished themselves with ammunition. Double
privation had to be imposed to work three times as hard as normal to pay
a few coins more than necessary to cover the right to live; but in the
end, when the date of insurrection approached, they had some elements
that were extremely valuable considering the miserable conditions that
surround all principled fighters.
The Revolution has never had capital. The rich have difficulty serving
the struggles for human emancipation; at the most, they risk a certain
part of their capital in this or that political game. They are suicidal
egoists who want even unnecessary things for themselves, even if their
excess causes them to explode. For this reason, Tolstoy and Kropotkin
are two extraordinary figures for the times.[80]
The night of 24–25 June [1908], the anniversary of the murders in
Veracruz,[81] was the designated date to initiate rebellion in different
parts of the country. The Viesca group enlisted themselves silently;
they had taken extensive precautions; but all of them together could not
prevent their work becoming evident, so clearly and threateningly that
the principal local authorities fled terrified on the eve of the
uprising. Furthermore, the betrayal of Casas Grandes revealed to the
government the existence of a vast conspiracy, and—what was most
important for the success of its plans—the very date on which the rebel
attack would commence.[82]
The telegraph had communicated hurried orders to all the villages and
cities, so that the civilian and military authorities would do
everything possible to suffocate the Revolution, while an ambassador was
prepared to present himself in Washington to request the most shameful
support in favor of Mexican tyranny.
The comrades met at midnight assigning each one their place, and the
work commenced. The police sought to resist; a cross-fire followed that
injured one person on each side and killed one of the gendarmes. The
jail was then opened all the way, so that no one was left inside. The
Liberal Program was proclaimed, and the power of the Dictatorship was
declared null and void.
A requisition of horses was carried out, and the scarce funds that were
in the public coffers were appropriated. The Revolution took complete
control of the town, without a single case of violence or abuse of
families or neutral persons.
José Lugo, who had not participated in the preparatory activities,
became very active at the moment of action.
The denunciation paralyzed the movement of many groups, while others
that could have risen up at the opportune time failed in their
obligations of solidarity, maintaining a shameful silence.[83]
The government began to deploy troops to the Laguna region, and then the
flood of slander and insult came down on the brave insurgents of Viesca.
Hacks who boast of being liberal and friends of the proletariat
undertook the task of raising the blind hatred of national patriotism
against the rebels.[84] Sometimes it was insinuated—while other times
assured—that the revolutionaries’ weapons had been provided by the
United States, which, avidly desiring to become the owner of Mexico,
launched to mutiny a few bad, treasonous, or deluded Mexicans who were
compared with those of Panama, being bandits and outlaws. The most
benign epithet applied to them was rabble-rouser.
In this way, the “friends of the people” showed who they are and what
they value. They sought with their poor declamations to facilitate the
crushing of dignified people by the mercenaries of power and the
ignorant patriotism of the masses. The brutality of repression could be
exercised against them as broadly as despotism wished; there were now
among the same liberals those who condemned the few who, being ashamed
of the flock, had broken with passivity and docility. But these voices
that carried all the notes of base passions—those whispers that were the
grumbling of an envious impotence—expired upon reaching the ears of the
pariahs, the brothers of the rebellious “bandits.”
Despite the cowardice, abjection, and the debasement that depress the
character of the masses, the calumnies of the “friends of the people”
were not entirely believed. In general, the bold ones, who knew how to
resolutely employ the power that frightens the despicable, were loved
and admired. The evacuation of Viesca was ordered; the volunteers for
freedom left the precinct, bid farewell by the loving and hopeful gazes
of the proletarian women, whose sympathies deliriously had awakened for
these transformers of peace and order, who carried on their indomitable
backs the title of bandits, a title that all initiators of reform have
carried and that liberators of all time have merited.
Toward the range of friendly mountains their steps headed. There the
nucleus broke, obeying a new plan: the group fragmented into units that
projected in all directions to go and create new rebellious
organizations, repeating the biological phenomenon of certain zoological
species that reproduce themselves through their fragments.
Viesca introduced characters such as Lugo and others whose names it is
not yet time to mention.
Viesca unmasked the liberals of convenience and excluded from the
Revolution elements damaged by fear or incompetence.
In 1908, the troops of tyranny did not triumph anywhere. Treachery
crushed the triumph of the revolution: that is all.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 3 (fourth edition), 17 September 1910
This chapter of libertarian history should be entitled “Francisco
Manrique” to commemorate that youth, nearly a child, who was killed by
tyranny’s bullets on 1 July 1908, in the frontier village of Palomas.
The events trace his silhouette above the hazy depths of this
semi-unknown day, fading away in the gray panorama of the desert.
Only eleven libertarians could come together when persecution fell like
hail on the revolutionary fields.[85] Eleven and no more attempted with
a bold move to save the revolution that appeared to flounder in the
rough waters of betrayal and cowardice.
The red dawn of Las Vacas had already shone, and Viesca, evacuated by
the revolution, resounded still with the subversive cry of our
“bandits,” when this tiny group formed amid repressive violence and
launched itself with a fistful of cartridges and a few bombs, hurriedly
constructed with substandard materials, against an enemy that was
prepared to receive it with countless elements of resistance; against a
tyranny strengthened by stupidity, fear, and disloyalty; against the
secular despotism that sinks its heels into the disgraceful rug of still
backs known as national passivity.
Palomas was found on the path that the group was supposed to follow; its
capture was unimportant for the development of the adopted strategic
plan, but it was advisable to terrify the rural and judicial police
guards who had a garrison there, so that the group crossing the desert
would not be bothered by surveillance.
On the way, the telegraph lines were cut section by section.
With their carbines held tightly and ready to fire, their sombreros
pushed back, their steps cautious but firm, ears attentive to every
sound, and brows furrowed to concentrate the visual ray that fought with
the blackness of night, the eleven revolutionaries arrived at the
vicinity of the Customs House. Two bombs thrown at it showed that the
building was empty. The rural and judicial police guards, forcing local
men to take up arms, had holed themselves up in the barracks. Before the
attack, the libertarians checked the houses along the way so that no
enemies were left in the rear, reassuring the women in passing and
explaining to them the object of the revolution in brief sentences.
Soon their hands touched the adobe of the barracks, and soon the
battlements and rooftops showed, through the muzzle-flashes of rifles,
the number of defenders. Inside there were twice or more the number of
men outside. The struggle started on unequal terms for those who
arrived. The adobe walls were a magnificent defense against Winchester
bullets, and the bombs that would have resolved the situation in just a
few moments turned out to be too small.
Francisco Manrique, the first to face all dangers, advanced toward the
door of the barracks; fighting bare-chested two steps from the
treasonous battlements spitting lead and steel, he fell, mortally
wounded.
The struggle continued, with bullets continuing to whistle from above
downward and from below upward. The horizon turned pale with the
approaching sun, and Pancho also grew pale, invaded by the death which
advanced through the body that had been proud, agile, and reckless just
a few hours before.[86] The day began, blurring its paleness with that
of the fading revolutionary star.
It was necessary to continue the march toward the heart of the mountain
ranges. It was imperative to quickly bring the fire of rebellion to
every possible place.
The final bomb served to destroy a door and take some horses.
Pancho, unconscious, appeared to have died.
The cause had sacrificed the life of an exceptional fighter, and that
same cause cruelly required the abandonment of his body in front of
those adobe walls splattered with his blood, spectators of his agony,
witnesses of his final beautiful act of sublime stoicism.
Pancho regained consciousness shortly after the retreat of his ten
comrades. He was interrogated, and he had the serenity of answering
everything, attempting with his words to indirectly help his friends. He
remained incognito until death, thinking lucidly that if his real name
were known, despotism could, by deducing who had accompanied him, ensure
their annihilation if the revolution were defeated. From him, they
learned neither plots, nor names: nothing to serve tyranny.
Pancho loved truth. He never lied to avoid responsibility or benefit
himself. His word was frank and loyal, sometimes crude, but always
sincere. And he, who had spurned life and well-being bought with
falsity, died lying: a sublime lie, wrapped in the anonymity of a
conventional name—Otilio Madrid—to save the revolution and his comrades.
I had known Pancho since childhood. At school we sat at the same bench.
During adolescence, we made pilgrimages together through exploitation
and poverty, and later our ideals and our efforts joined together in
revolution. We were brothers as few brothers can be. No one penetrated
the beauty of his feelings as I did. He was a profoundly good youth,
despite having a nature as untamed as the tempestuous sea.
Pancho renounced the work that he had at the Treasury of the State of
Guanajuato to become a worker and later a dedicated paladin of freedom,
at whose altar he sacrificed his existence, so full of intense squalls
and enormous pain, which he knew how to tame with his diamond will. His
two great loves were his kind and excellent mother and freedom. He lived
in poverty, suffering from bourgeois exploitation and injustice, because
he wanted to be neither bourgeois nor exploiter. When his father died,
he renounced the inheritance left to him. Though he could have lived off
a governmental post, he became the State’s enemy and struggled against
it from the summit of his voluntary and proud poverty. He was a rebel of
the moral type of Bakunin: action and idealism joined together in his
brain. Wherever the revolution needed his activity, he went there,
whether he had money or not, because he knew how to open paths by force
of astuteness, energy, and sacrifice.
That was Otilio Madrid, whom they called the “ringleader” of the
“bandits” of Palomas. That was the man who lived for truth and expired
shrouded in a sublime lie and on whose pale lips palpitated two names
during his final moments: that of his beloved mother and that of my own,
his brother who still lives to do justice to his memory and to continue
the struggle for which he shed his blood; who lives to address the
passivity of a people with the heroic and youthful silhouette of the one
sacrificed at Palomas.
How many were the men from the government who died in that combat?
Tyranny knows how to cover that up.
Nature has allied itself with despotism.
The group was defeated by that terrible Amazon of the desert: thirst, a
flame that embraces, a serpent that strangulates, an anxiety that makes
one mad—the voluptuous companion of the restless and soft dunes …
Neither the sword nor the rifle … Thirst, with the indescribable grimace
of its caresses, burning the lips with its kisses, horribly drying out
the tongue with its ardent breath, furiously scratching the throat, it
halted those atoms of rebellion … And, in the distance, the mirage of a
crystalline lake laughing at the thirsty man who dragged himself,
clutching a carbine, impotent to fight against the wild Amazon of the
desert, rabidly biting the ashen grass that provided neither shade nor
juice.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 4 (fourth edition), 24 September 1910
Following the shudder of Viesca, the prisons received an abundant
supplement of guests. Besides the elder and the man arrived the
adolescent to sink into the dimly lit dungeons. Rebels and those
suspected of rebellion piled up confused in the infected facility of
prison. After the spy and the soldier came the judge with the sentence
in his pocket. The guilty ones appeared to respond to the charges
against them before the prison-bars of despotism. The juridical process
developed—a process like all others that are characterized by blindness,
fear, and passion. The sentences were pronounced.
Lorenzo Robledo: twenty years’ imprisonment.
Lucio Chaires: fifteen years.
Juan B. Hernández: fifteen years.
Patricio Plendo: fifteen years.
Félix Hernández: fifteen years.
Gregorio Bedolla: fifteen years.
Leandro Rosales: fifteen years.
José Hernández: fifteen years.
Andrés Vallejo: fifteen years.
Juan Montelongo: three years.
Julián Cardona: fifteen years.
All eleven of them, to be sent to Ulúa—to the old Ulúa, of inquisitorial
barrels.[87]
José Lugo received the death penalty. His vigorous youth, his boldness,
his pleasant and resolute personality wounded the irascible minds of the
executioners. They would shoot the Revolution in the breast of that
youth, so courageous and fiery.
The coldness of his corpse would extinguish the sparking ember.
Lugo confronted the consequences of his libertarian action without
perturbation; he refused to inform on his comrades and slapped with his
word of freedom and justice the hitmen who sent him to the gallows. The
execution was delayed, and Lugo spent long months imprisoned, waiting
daily for death with the calmness of the conscious, treating with
fraternal goodness the friend who had clumsily handed him over to the
oppressors. Neither recrimination nor complaint emerged from his lips.
Mighty was that youth who frightened his judges with the greatness of
his character.
In the end came the moment that despotism believed to be opportune, and
José Lugo was driven to a farmyard; they wanted to blindfold him, but he
scornfully rejected this offer. He stood upright, serene, without
altering his pulse in front of the squadron of pale soldiers, who fired
their weapons at his heroic breast.
Later, the slab: the savage exhibition of a corpse riddled by bullets to
terrorize the spirits of others. His desolate mother; the weakest
tyranny; the Revolution upright. José Lugo is immortal! This is a date
we will not forget: 3 August 1908. The fiery Yucatec Siberia had a
beautiful jolt of rebellious energies; its vibrations still fill the
tragic aridity of its steppes. The HYDRA, cut up in pieces, is
reproduced in each one of them.
After Valladolid, the events that shook Viesca repeat themselves: the
swelling of prisons, absurd persecutions, useless murders, and
repressive cowardly cruelties.
RamĂrez Bonilla, Kankum, and Albertos were taken violently to a War
Council:[88] justice there was not the cunning and underhanded shyster,
but rather the uniformed beast. Quickly, with the accusatory rapidity of
official panic, a summary execution was pronounced, and the three rebels
received death penalties, as they did not wish to dedicate their lives
to submission and servility.[89] Their magnificent serenity did not
change upon hearing the verdict. Two of them called their fiancées to
hold their weddings beside the gallows: strong women, dignified comrades
of these valiant ones! Life palpitated intensely above the abyss that
opened.
RamĂrez Bonilla, Kankum, and Albertos rolled on the ground in front of
the fateful scene to arise as lessons in strength and rebellion. Later
came the mourning of widows. The vile newspapers applauded the acts or
rationalized justice; tyranny agonized.
The Revolution marches! A new error hastens the unhinging of the old
world.
And the people...?
Ah! If Lugo, Albertos, RamĂrez Bonilla, and Kankum do not move the
conscience of Mexicans, I will deny this people even the contempt of my
spit!
RegeneraciĂłn no. 1 (fourth edition), 3 September 1910
The latest news from our representative in El Paso, Texas, confirms the
rumors that had been circulating about the fate of the secretary of the
Organizational Council of the Mexican Liberal Party, Praxedis G.
Guerrero, in the mountains of Chihuahua.
Guerrero has died, says the Council’s delegate. During the glorious
fight in Janos, the young libertarian Praxedis G. Guerrero bid his
farewell to life.
Praxedis has died and I still do not want to believe it. I have
collected data, received information, analyzed these data, and
scrutinized such information in the most severely critical light.
Everything tells me that Praxedis no longer lives, and that he has died;
but against my deductions from reason rises floods of lamentation that
cry: “No, Praxedis has not died; the beloved brother still lives… ”
I see him everywhere and at all times; sometimes I believe I will find
him working in the office in his favorite places, but upon reminding
myself of his eternal absence, I feel a knot in my throat. The brother
who was so good and so generous has left.
I recall his words, which were as highly developed as his thought. I
recall the confidence in which he held me. “I do not believe that I will
survive this Revolution,” the hero would tell me with a frequency that
filled me with anguish. I also believed that he would die soon. He was
so brave!
Praxedis was a tireless worker. I never heard from his lips a complaint
regarding the fatigue induced by his hard labor. He was always seen bent
over his work-table, writing, writing, writing those luminous articles
that honor the revolutionary literature of Mexico—articles immersed in
sincerity, being extremely beautiful for their form and profound
meaning. Often he would tell me, “How poor is language; there are no
terms that translate exactly what one thinks; thought loses much of its
vitality and beauty in being put to paper.”
And still, that extraordinary man knew how to create true art-works with
the crude materials of language.
Being a selfless and extremely modest man, he wanted nothing for
himself. Several times we insisted that he buy himself dress clothes,
but never did he accept. “Everything for the cause,” he would say,
smiling. Once, seeing that he was losing weight quickly, I advised him
to eat better, considering that he lived off just a few legumes. He
replied, “I could not tolerate rewarding myself with better food when
millions of human beings do not at this moment even have a piece of
bread to place in their mouths.”
All this he said with the sincerity of the apostle, with the simplicity
of a true saint. There was no pretense in him. His high and luminous
forehead reflected all his thoughts. Praxedis came from one of the rich
families in Guanajuato State. Together with his brothers, he inherited a
hacienda. With the products of that hacienda he could have lived
comfortably in idleness, but before everything else, he was a
libertarian. What right did he have to deprive the farmhands of the
product of their labor? What right did he have to hold in his hands the
land that the workers irrigated with their sweat? Praxedis renounced his
inheritance and came to unite himself with his brothers, the workers, to
gain with his own hands the piece of bread to take to his mouth without
the remorse of securing it through the exploitation of his fellow
humans.
Praxedis was nearly a child when, after having renounced luxury, wealth,
and the nearly beastly satisfactions of the bourgeoisie, he adopted
manual labor. He did not enter the proletarian ranks as one defeated in
the struggle for existence, but rather as a gladiator who enlisted in
the proletariat to place his effort and great brain at the service of
the oppressed. He was not a ruined man who saw it necessary to take up
the pick and the shovel to survive, but rather the apostle of a grand
idea who voluntarily renounced the pleasures of life to propagate by
means of example what he thought.
And El Imparcial refers to this magnificent man as a bandit: in large
font that despicable rag, upon learning of the events in Janos, reports
that there died “the fearsome bandit Guerrero.”
Bandit? Then, what is the definition of a good man? Oh, rest in peace,
beloved brother! Perhaps I am destined to be your avenger.
In speaking of Praxedis G. Guerrero, it is impossible not to mention
that other hero who fell, riddled by the bullets of the henchmen during
the glorious action of Palomas during the summer of 1908… Do you
remember him? He was called Francisco Manrique, another youth from
Guanajuato who also renounced his inheritance so as not to exploit his
fellow humans. Praxedis and Francisco, a beautiful couple of dreamers,
were inseparable comrades whom only death could separate—but only for a
short while …
Praxedis was the spirit of the libertarian movement. Without
vacillation, I can say that Praxedis was the most pure, most
intelligent, and most selfless man, the bravest when it came to the
cause of the dispossessed. The gap that he leaves behind may well never
be filled. Where to find a man without any type of ambition, being fully
brain and heart, brave and active like him?
The proletariat perhaps has not realized the enormous loss it has
suffered. Without hyperbole it can be said that it is not just Mexico
that has lost the best of its sons, but also humanity itself that has
suffered this loss, because Praxedis was a libertarian.
And still I cannot believe the terrible reality. Every so often I feel
that a consoling telegram will arrive, reporting that Praxedis lives.
The brutal truth cannot annihilate in the depths of my heart a remainder
of hope that burns like an oil lamp that is about to be extinguished. My
tortured spirit believes that it will still find him in his favorite
places—in the office, where he and I dreamed so much about the beautiful
morning of social emancipation—the martyr, bent over his work-table,
writing, writing, writing.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 20 (fourth edition), 14 January 1911
It was a year ago that the young anarchist Praxedis G. Guerrero,
secretary of the Organizational Council of the Mexican Liberal Party,
died in Janos, Chihuahua State.
The battle of Janos has the true proportions of an epic. Thirty
libertarians made hundreds of henchmen of the Porfirian dictatorship
bite the dust in an embarrassing defeat, but during the action, the most
sincere, selfless, and intelligent member of the Mexican Liberal Party
lost his life.
The battle unfolded during the darkness of the night. Our thirty
brothers, carrying the Red Flag—the insignia of the dispossessed of the
world—threw themselves with courage against the town that was strongly
garrisoned by the assassins of Capital and Authority. They were resolved
to take the village or lose their lives in the attempt. The enemy’s very
first shots caused Praxedis to fall, mortally injured, never to rise
again. A bullet had penetrated the right ear of the martyr, destroying
the cerebral mass—that mass that had given off such intense light,
making visible to the humble the path toward emancipation. And it must
have been the hand of a dispossessed man—one of those who he wished to
redeem—who fired the projectile that ended the life of the libertarian!
The combat lasted throughout the night. The enemy, convinced of its
numerical supremacy, did not wish to surrender, hoping that it would
forcibly crush the handful of the bold. The shots were fired at
point-blank range, and combat proceeded hand-to-hand in the town’s
streets. The enemy attacked fiercely, as though it were assured of
victory, while our own repelled such aggression with courage, knowing
that they, being inferior in number, had to make marvels of courage and
audacity.
The fight lasted throughout the night of December 30, until the approach
of dawn, when the enemy fled, terrified, for Casas Grandes, leaving the
countryside in the control of our brothers and a heap of corpses in the
streets of Janos. The sun on December 31 shed light on the scene of
tragedy, where two of our own lay: Praxedis and ChacĂłn.[90]
Praxedis was simply a man, but a man in the true meaning of the word:
not the atavistic, egotistical, calculating, evil mass-man, but rather
the man freed of all types of prejudices, a man with an open
intelligence who launched himself into the struggle without love for
glory, love for money, or sentimentality. He went to the Revolution
convinced of its merit. “I have no enthusiasm,” he would tell me; “what
I have is conviction.”
Onlookers might imagine that Praxedis was a nervous and exalted man,
affected by the spur of excitability. But no: Praxedis was a calm man
who was extremely modest, both in theory and in practice. Being the
enemy of silly vanity, he dressed very poorly. He did not drink wine
like many frauds who boast of being abstinent: “I do not need it,” he
would say when he was offered a glass, and indeed, his calm temperament
did not need alcohol.
Praxedis was heir to a rich fortune that he repudiated: “I have no heart
for exploiting my fellow humans,” he said. So he put himself to work
shoulder-to-shoulder with his own farmhands, suffering their fatigue,
participating in their pains, sharing their poverty. He was a child
then, but he did not shirk before the very hard future that awaited him
as a wage-slave. He worked for years in Mexico as a farmhand on the
haciendas, as a stable boy in the rich houses of the cities, as a
carpenter where he was given that sort of work, and as a mechanic in the
railway workshops. At last he came to the United States, avid to learn
about and see this civilization that is discussed so much in foreign
countries, but like all intelligent men, he was disappointed at the
supposed grandeur of this country of the dollar, of its intellectual
insignificance, and of its most stupid patriotism.
Here, in the land of the “free,” in this home of the “brave,” he
suffered all the assaults, savage treatments, and humiliations to which
the Mexican worker is subjected by the bosses and the North Americans
who, in general, believe themselves to be superior to us Mexicans,
because we are Indians and mestizos of Spanish and Indigenous blood. In
Louisiana, a boss for whom he had worked a few weeks was going to kill
him for the “crime” of requesting the payment of his wages.
Praxedis worked in wood-cutting in Texas, in the coal mines, on the
railways, on the wharfs of the ports. A true libertarian proletarian, he
had a special aptitude for carrying out all types of manual labor. That
was how that large heart warmed up: through misfortune. He was born in a
rich crib and could have died in a rich bed, but he was not one of those
men who can calmly eat when his neighbor is hungry.
Praxedis was, then, a proletarian, and due to his ideals and acts, an
anarchist. Wherever he traveled, he preached respect and mutual aid as
the strongest basis on which the social structure of the future should
rest. He spoke to the workers of the rights that aid all human beings to
live—and to live means to have an assured home and food, and to enjoy,
furthermore, all the advantages offered by modern civilization, given
that this civilization is nothing more than the joint efforts of
thousands of generations of workers, sages, and artists. As such, no one
has the right to appropriate these advantages for himself, leaving the
rest in poverty and destitution.
Praxedis was very well known by the Mexican workers who reside in the
Southern States of this country, and the news of his death caused great
consternation in the humble homes of our brothers living in misfortune
and poverty. Each one of them had a memory of the martyr. The women
recalled how the apostle of the modern ideas brandished the axe to help
them split the wood with which to cook their poor foods—this, after
having spent the entire day enclosed in the depths of a mine or having
suffered the sun’s rays working on the railways for twelve hours, or
having worn himself out cutting down trees on the edge of the
Mississippi. And the families, convening at night, heard the friendly
and knowledgeable talk of this unique man who never walked alone. In his
modest backpack he carried books, pamphlets, and revolutionary
newspapers that he would read to the humble ones. The workers and their
families remembered all of this upon learning that Praxedis G. Guerrero
had died. No longer would the friend, the brother, and the teacher stay
in those honest homes …
And what will the son of the people have gained, he who upholds the
capitalist system by having cut short the fertile life of the martyr?
Oh, soldiers who serve in the ranks of the State: each time that your
rifle kills a revolutionary, you add yet another link to your chain!
Return to reason, soldiers of Authority; you are poor, and your families
are poor, so why do you kill those who would sacrifice everything to see
all human beings free and happy?
Soldiers, turn the muzzles of your rifles against your chiefs and join
the ranks of the rebels of the Red Flag, who struggle with the cry of
Land and Freedom! Do not kill any more of the best of your brothers.
And you workers, think on the exemplary life of Praxedis G. Guerrero.
See his face: it is a farmhand’s shirt that he wears, and the attitude
in which we see him now is the same he displayed when he had some sheets
of paper in front of him onto which he generously poured his exquisite
thoughts.
Praxedis G. Guerrero was the first Mexican anarchist who irrigated with
his blood the virgin soil of Mexico, and the cry of “Land and Freedom”
that he launched in an obscure village of Chihuahua State is now the cry
that is heard from one side of the beautiful land of the Aztecs to the
other.
Brother, your sacrifice was not in vain. When your drops of blood fell
to the ground, they inspired thousands of heroes who will continue your
work toward the goal of economic, political, and social freedom for the
Mexican people.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 70 (fourth edition), 30 December 1911
Federal Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas, July 23, 1922
To Nicolás T. Bernal, Mexico City
My beloved Nicolás:
The idea of this editorial group—to make known the incomparable works of
Praxedis—is extremely brilliant.[91] Those works are not very well
known, though they were published during a time when RegeneraciĂłn had a
print run of more than twenty thousand, if I do not recall incorrectly.
It is unfortunate, however, that there is not a comrade there who had
had the fortune of personally knowing our unsung Praxedis. If there were
some such person, he could inform the slave, for whom the hero suffered
and died, about the life of this exceptional man—poet, philosopher, and
revolutionary—who shed such intense and pure light during his ephemeral
existence. When I say exceptional, I do not refer solely to his literary
labor that by itself speaks with exquisite eloquence to the marvelous
character of Praxedis’s brain, but also to his behavior as a man of
principles, as a sincere apostle of the anarchist ideal, considering
that, if anyone has lived within the Ideal and struggled in conformity
with it, it was Praxedis, the landowner-farmhand, the capitalist-worker.
Son of a powerful landowning family of the LeĂłn District in Guanajuato
State, the child Praxedis had his delicate flesh wrapped in silk and
brocades from the beginning of life. In this case, the poetic tradition
regarding the extremely humble origin of the redeemers of the people was
broken. Praxedis was not born in a manger; he was born rich and amidst
wealth. He entered life to live the idle existence of the powerful, as
immense were the lands that were his to inherit, and immense was the
number of slaves that had to sweat and suffer for him. Everything
indicated that the child Praxedis would be raised and live as a
bourgeois, but here enters the extraordinary aspect of the case: the
child Praxedis entered life with an exceptional sensitivity, and with an
exceptional brain, too. He could understand that those farmhands who
squandered their lives stooped over the bitter furrow, poor in
intellectual light and material wealth, orphans of all rights and on
whose scrawny shoulders rest all of society’s weight, were his
brothers—men whose only crime to merit the pitiful life of the beast of
burden was the whim of a Fortune that did not want them to be born, like
him, among silk and brocades, and the child’s heart wept blood …
The child grew, and being a youth, he studied. He wanted to know; he
wanted to investigate. In the presence of the Universe and in the stream
of life his restless spirit asked, “Why? For what? From where? To
where?” And as religion gave him no response that would satisfy his
reason, he asked Science, and this, being always friendly, opened the
dense curtains of the faith with which superstition limits the horizon
of human knowledge, allowing him to glimpse the mysteries of the Cosmos
and of Life … Then he understood that it was not Fortune that was
responsible for the iniquity that was unfolding before his eyes, but
rather social injustice, and against this injustice that reduces the
human being to a beast of burden, his conscience rebelled, and he became
a revolutionary. It was in this way that, upon the death of his father
and when he was about to inherit formidable wealth, that he renounced
his right to this and launched himself at the world to gain his bread
with the sweat of his brow... Is this not extraordinary? There is an
abundance of men of talent and geniuses—and Praxedis was a genius. But
what is not in abundance is that generosity and constancy in the Ideal
that make Praxedis G. Guerrero a sublime figure in the revolutionary
history of the world, one whom we survivors love, just as we love that
other giant of character known as Peter Kropotkin.
A revolutionary of action, he took an active part in the insurrectional
movements of September 1906, June 1908, and November 1910 against the
despotism of Porfirio DĂaz, and at the front of a handful of brave ones
he lost his invaluable life, at the young age of twenty-eight, in Janos,
Chihuahua State, during the night of December 30, 1910, fighting for
Land and Freedom. Words fail to relate the exemplary life of this
distinguished revolutionary, whose strong relief could only be
represented in marble or bronze. His life was short, but extremely
fertile, and his death was a real loss for the cause of human
emancipation. If he had not died, perhaps there would no longer be
chains; if he had not died, perhaps man would have stopped exploiting
and oppressing man. Who can know? His emancipatory work included the
oppressed throughout the world, convinced as he was that evil was not
exclusively a Mexican but rather a global issue, and that humanity
suffers throughout the vast expanse of the planet, wherever there is
someone who says, “This is mine!” or wherever there is someone who
cries, “Obey!”
My congratulations to the beloved comrades who make up the editorial
group, including you, my good and beloved Nicolás, for the happy idea of
publishing the work of our unforgettable Praxedis.
With a strong embrace, your brother who loves you bids you farewell.
Journeying through the fields, traversing roads, advancing through the
hawthorns and stones, and with his mouth dried by devastating thirst
goes the Revolutionary Delegate on his catechist enterprise, below the
sun that appears to avenge itself against his audacity by beaming down
onto him its darts of fire. But the Delegate does not stop; he does not
want to lose even one minute. From some hovel or another emerge sickly
dogs to persecute him, being as hostile to him as the miserable
residents of the hovels, who laugh stupidly at the passage of the
apostle of the good news.
The Delegate advances; he wishes to reach that group of small friendly
houses that give off light in the hillside of the high mountain, where
he has been told comrades exist. The heat of the sun makes the journey
intolerable; hunger and thirst debilitate him as much as the fatiguing
march, but in his lucid mind the idea is conserved freshly and clearly
like the water of the mountain, being as beautiful as the flower that
cannot be touched by the threat of the tyrant. Such is the idea: it is
immune to oppression.
The Delegate marches and marches. The barren fields oppress his heart.
How many families would live in abundance if these lands were not in the
hands of a few ambitious men! The Delegate continues his journey; a
snake sounds its rattle beneath some dusty brush; the crickets fill the
warm air with strident rumors; a cow lows in the distance.
At last the Delegate arrives at the hamlet, where he has been told there
are comrades. Alarmed, the dogs bark at him. Through the doors of the
homes peer indifferent faces. Below a vestibule there is a group of men
and women. The apostle approaches them; the men frown; the women regard
him with distrust.
“Good afternoon, comrades,” says the Delegate.
Those in the group look at each other. No one responds to the greeting.
The apostle does not give up, but repeats:
“Comrades, I come to give you good news: the Revolution has broken out.”
No one responds; no one unlocks his lips; instead, they once again look
at each other, their eyes trying to escape their orbits.
“Comrades,” the propagandist continues, “tyranny is tottering; energetic
men have wielded arms to bring it down, and we only await that all
without exception assist those who struggle for freedom and justice in
whatever manner.”
The women yawn; the men scratch their heads; a hen passes through the
group, persecuted by a rooster.
“Comrades,” continues the indefatigable propagandist of the good news,
“freedom requires sacrifices; your life is difficult; you have no
satisfactions; the future of your children is uncertain. Why do you
express indifference in the face of the selflessness of those who have
launched themselves into the struggle to conquer your happiness, to make
you free, so that your little children will be happier than you? Help;
help in any way you can. Dedicate a part of your wages to fomenting the
Revolution, or take up arms if you prefer: but do something for the
cause. At least propagate the ideals of the grand insurrection.”
The Delegate then paused. An eagle passed swaying in the clean air, as
though it was the symbol of the thought of that man who, walking among
human swine, preserved himself very tall, very pure, and very white.
The buzzing flies entered and exited the mouth of an old man who was
asleep. The men, visibly annoyed, filed out one by one; all the women
had already left. In the end only the Delegate remained in the presence
of the old man who slept through his drunkenness and a dog who launched
furious bites at the flies that sucked on his mange. Not a cent had
emerged from those squalid pockets, nor did they offer a drop of water
to that extremely firm man who, casting a compassionate look at that
lair of egotism and stupidity, traveled to another little house. Passing
in front of a tavern, he could see those miserable ones with whom he had
spoken finishing glasses of wine, giving to the bourgeoisie what they
did not wish to give to the Revolution, riveting their chains, and
condemning their little children to slavery and shame due to their
indifference and egoism.
The news of the arrival of the apostle had now spread through the whole
village and, as the residents had been warned, they closed the doors of
their homes upon the approach of the Delegate. Meanwhile a man, who
according to his appearance should be a worker, arrived panting at the
doors of a police station.
“Sir,” said the man to the chief of the henchmen, “how much will you
give us to hand over a revolutionary?”
“Twenty reales,” said the thug.
The deal was closed; Judas had lowered the price. Moments later a man,
bound hand and foot, was taken to the jail. Shoved, he fell, and after
kicking him, the executioners picked him up, guffawing like drunken
slaves. Some men took pleasure in throwing handfuls of dirt at the eyes
of the martyr, who was none other than the apostle who had journeyed
through the fields, traversed roads, advanced through hawthorns and
stones, with his mouth dried by devastating thirst, but carrying in his
lucid mind the idea of the regeneration of the human race by means of
wellbeing and freedom.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 19 (fourth edition), 7 January 1911
“I will not kill myself so that others live,” said Pedro the miner in a
clear voice when Juan, his co-worker, showed him a copy of the newspaper
RegeneraciĂłn, full of details of the revolutionary proletarian movement
in Mexico. “I have a family,” he continued, “and a fine beast I would be
if I presented my belly to the bullets of the federal troops.”
Juan received Pedro’s observation without astonishment: that is how the
majority speak. Some of them even tried to beat him when he told them
that there are places where the farmhands had refused to acknowledge
their masters and made themselves owners of the haciendas. A few days
passed. Juan, after having bought a good carbine with an abundant supply
of cartridges, traveled to the mountains where he knew rebels were. He
was not interested in knowing which flag the revolutionaries flew, or
which ideas they advanced. If they were his own, that is, of those who,
flying the red flag, fight to make themselves strong so as to found a
new society, in which each would be the master of herself and the
executioner of none, very good—he would join them, thus adding with his
person both to the number of fighters and to the numbers of brains
involved in the great redemptory mission, which needs rifles and brains
capable of illuminating other brains, as well as hearts capable of
setting alight other hearts with the same fire. But even if those who
prowled nearby were not his own, that didn’t matter; he would join them
in any case, as he considered it an obligation as a libertarian to
intermix with his unconscious brothers to make them conscious by means
of skillful conversations regarding the rights of the proletariat.
One day the wives of the miners crowded together at the entrance to a
mine. A landslide had closed off one of the mine’s galleries, trapping
more than fifty workers. Pedro was among these and, like the others, had
no hope of escaping death. In the darkness the poor laborer thought of
his family: he would confront a horrifying agony, deprived of water and
food, but in the end, after a few days, he would enter into the rest of
death—what of his family? What would become of his wife or his little
children? Then he thought angrily about the sterility of his sacrifice,
and recognized too late that the anarchist Juan was right when, having
shown him RegeneraciĂłn, he had spoken to him enthusiastically about
social revolution and the necessary class struggle, being indispensable
so that man ceases to be the slave of man, so that all could bring food
to their mouths, so that once and for all crime, prostitution, and
poverty would come to an end. The poor miner then remembered that cruel
sentence that he once had launched at the face of his friend Juan, as
though it had been spit: “I will not kill myself so that others live.”
While the buried-alive miner was thinking about working so that the
bourgeois owners of the business lived, the women, weeping, writhing
their arms, cried for their husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers to be
returned to them. Groups of volunteers presented themselves to the
business manager, requesting that he allow them to do something to
rescue those unfortunate human beings, who awaited, in the mine, a slow
and horrible death from hunger and thirst. The rescue operation began,
but how slowly it advanced! Moreover, was it assured that the miners
would be found alive? Had all forgotten that the bourgeoisie, so as to
share and divide greater profits, did not provide sufficient wood to
support the galleries, and that the very gallery in which the
catastrophe had taken place had been the worst-reinforced? Regardless,
men of good will worked, taking turns, day and night.[92] The families
of the victims, being impoverished, did not receive from the bourgeois
owners of the mine even one handful of maize with which to make a few
tortillas and a bit of atole,[93] despite the fact that their husbands,
brothers, sons, and fathers were owed wages for several weeks’ work now.
Forty-eight hours had passed since the catastrophe had taken place.
Outside, the sun illuminated the desolation of the miner’s families,
while in the bowels of the earth, in the darkness, the horrible tragedy
came to its final act. Crazed by thirst and possessed by savage
desperation, the miners with the weakest minds beat their picks
furiously against the hard rock for a few minutes—only to fall prostate
soon thereafter, some of them never to arise again. Pedro thought … “How
blessed would Juan be at this moment: free like everyone who has a
weapon in his hands, he is; satisfied like everyone who has a grand idea
and who fights for it, he is. He, Juan, would at such moments be
fighting against the soldiers of Authority, Capital, and the Clergy,
precisely against the executioners who, out of a desire to not reduce
their profits, were responsible for my being buried alive.” Then he felt
fits of fury against the capitalists, who suck the blood of the poor;
then he recalled Juan’s talks, which he had always found so boring, but
which he now recognized for all the value they had. He remembered how
one day Juan, as he was rolling a cigarette, spoke to him of the
astonishing number of victims that industry produces annually in all
countries, exerting himself to show Pedro that more humans die due to
derailments, shipwrecks, fires, collapsed mines, and an infinity of
workplace accidents than in the bloodiest Revolution, to say nothing of
the thousands upon thousands of people who die of anemia, excessive
work, malnutrition, and illnesses contracted in the poor hygienic
conditions of the homes of the poor and in the factories, workshops,
foundries, mines, and other sites of exploitation. He, Pedro, also
recalled the disregard with which he had listened to Juan that time, and
with what brutality he had rejected him when the propagandist had
advised him that he send a contribution, however little it might be, to
the Revolutionary Council that works for the economic, political, and
social freedom of the working class. He recalled that he had told Juan,
“I am not such a blockhead as to give away my money. Better to use it to
get drunk!” And something like remorse tortured his heart, and in the
anguish of the moment, with the lucidity that sometimes comes at
critical times, he thought that it would have been preferable to have
died defending his class than to suffer this dark, odious death in order
to give life to the crooked bourgeoisie. He thought of Juan lying prone,
dodging the shots of the henchmen of tyranny; he imagined him radiating
with joy and enthusiasm, bearing in his fists the blessed insignia of
the oppressed, the red flag, or magnificent and beautiful, with his hair
floating in the air in the middle of combat, throwing dynamite bombs
against the enemy’s trenches, or he saw him in front of a group of brave
ones, arriving at a hacienda and telling the farmhands: “Take it all and
work it yourselves, like human beings and not beasts of burden!” And the
poor Pedro desired that life of Juan’s, which he now understood as being
fertile; but it was too late now. Though he was still alive, he was dead
to the world …
Fifteen days have passed since the catastrophe in the mine.
Disheartened, the rescuers abandoned the project. The relatives of the
dead miners had to leave the countryside because they could not pay the
rent for their homes. Some of their daughters, sisters, and even widows
sold kisses in the taverns for a piece of bread... Pedro’s oldest son
found himself incarcerated for having taken a few floorboards from the
firm’s yard to provide a bit of heat for the little room in which his
mother found herself lying ill as a result of the moral shock she had
suffered. All the relatives had gone to the mining company’s offices to
request the wages in arrears of their lost ones, but they received not a
cent. The owners calculated the amounts in the manner of the “Great
Captain,”[94] and the dead came out indebted, and the poor families had
nothing to pay the rent for their little homes. One beautiful day—given
that nature is indifferent to human misery—when the sun broke its rays
in a nearby pond and the birds, free of masters, worked in their own
interests seeking out insects for themselves and their little chicks—on
this beautiful day, a representative of Authority, dressed all in black
like a vulture, accompanied by armed police, went from little house to
little house throwing all these poor people into the street in the name
of the Law and for the benefit of Capital.
That is how Capital pays those who sacrifice themselves for it.
RegeneraciĂłn no. 72 (fourth edition), 13 January 1912
[1] See “A Letter from Ricardo Flores Magón” in this volume.
[2] Ward S. Albro, To Die on Your Feet: The Life, Times, and Writings of
Praxedis G. Guerrero (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 1996), 2.
[3] See “A Letter from Ricardo Flores Magón.”
[4] The ahuizote (from the Nahuatl ahuitzotl, “spiky aquatic thing”) is
a creature from Aztec legend that likely refers to the axolotl
(Ambystoma mexicanum), an amphibian species that characteristically does
not metamorphose upon maturation.
[5] Diego Abad de Santillán, Ricardo Flores Magón: El apóstol de la
Revolución mexicana (México, D.F.: Editorial RedeZ, “Tejiendo la
UtopĂa,” 2011), 26; Claudio Lomnitz, The Return of Comrade Ricardo
Flores MagĂłn (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 83.
[6] Albro, 138.
[7] Ibid., 112.
[8] Ibid, 35–37.
[9] Benjamin Maldonado, “Biographical Sketch” in Dreams of Freedom: A
Ricardo Flores MagĂłn Reader, eds. Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter
(Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 83.
[10] Eugenio MartĂnez Núñez, La vida heroica de Práxedis G. Guerrero
(MĂ©xico: Instituto Nacional de Estudios HistĂłricos de la RevoluciĂłn,
1960), 51.
[11] Albro 55–59.
[12] Ricardo Flores Magón, “Praxedis G. Guerrero,” in this volume.
[13] Jacinto Barrera and Alejandro de la Torre, eds, Los rebeldes de la
bandera roja: Textos del periódico anarquista ¡Tierra!, de La Habana,
sobre la RevoluciĂłn mexicana (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de
AntropologĂa e Historia, 2011), 215.
[14] Albro, 104.
[15] This article denouncing the July 1907 kidnapping of RegeneraciĂłn
editor Manuel Sarabia was distributed broadly among the populace of
Douglas, Arizona.
[16] Antonio Maza (1872–?), Mexican vice-consul in Douglas, AZ.
[17] The allusion to the Tsar is a reference to Porfirio DĂaz, given
that he was often likened by Mexican radicals and their supporters to
the Russian Emperor.
[18] This sackcloth (sanbenito) was a garment worn by heretics condemned
in the Spanish Inquisition.
[19] Emilio Kosterlizky (1853–1928), the Mexican general who arrested
and imprisoned Manuel Sarabia upon receiving him from his US captors.
[20] A reference either to the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid I (1725–1789)
or Abdul Hamid II (1842–1918). Janissaries are elite Turkish infantry.
[21] Tiberius Claudius Nero (42 BCE–37 CE), the second Emperor of the
Roman Empire.
[22] Timurlane, also known as Timur (1336–1405 CE), was a Turkic-Mongol
military leader who attempted to restore Genghis Khan’s Empire. Praxedis
presumably refers also to Christian II of Denmark (1481–1559 CE), known
as “Christian the Tyrant,” among the Swedes, who infamously slaughtered
much of the Swedish nobility after conquering the country. As Regent of
Milan, Ludovico Maria Sforza, known as “the Moor” (1452–1508), entered
into an alliance with the French Charles VIII to counterbalance the
coalition forged between Naples and Rome, leading to the French
occupation of both Naples and Milan. The Guatemalan President Manuel
José Estrada Cabrera (1857–1924) notoriously granted vast concessions to
the United Fruit Company and engaged in repressive strike-breaking.
[23] “Tuxtepec” refers to the Tuxtepec Revolution of 1878—first
announced in the eponymous Oaxacan city in 1876—whereby DĂaz seized
power from the Liberal President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Ahuehuete is
a tree (Taxodium mucronatum), otherwise known as Montezuma cypress,
while Chapultepec alludes to the forested region of Mexico City (meaning
“hill of grasshoppers” in Nahuatl) that served as a retreat for Aztec
rulers and later as the site of residence for the colonial rulers of
Mexico, a function it still serves.
[24] As a demonstration of our complete impartiality and solely with the
healthy purpose of telling about the rapid evolutionary process suffered
by the privileged brain of that profound thinker, Praxedis G. Guerrero,
we reproduce this beautiful literary article, “Make Way!,” which was
published by that great warrior in RevoluciĂłn (Los Angeles, California)
in 1907, two years before he wrote the beautiful articles and thoughts
published in Punto Rojo and RegeneraciĂłn [Bernal, Rivera, and
Santillán].
[25] A reference to the contemporary imprisonment of Ricardo Flores
MagĂłn, Librado Rivera, and Alejandro Villarreal in Arizona for having
participated in the 1906 insurrection against DĂaz.
[26] An allusion to the Plan of Ayutla (1854) declared against the
dictatorial General Santa Anna and the Liberal Reform period that
followed, producing the Constitution of 1857 From Ayotlan, Nahuatl for
“near the place of many turtles.”
[27] The Greek god of wind.
[28] Pluto, otherwise known as Hades, the Greek god governing the
underworld.
[29] “Betrayal” is a reference to Praxedis’s imprisoned comrades from
the PLM’s Organizational Council. See footnote 2 in “Make Way!” above.
[30] Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, where DĂaz announced his insurgency against the
Liberals in 1876. See footnote 9 in “Justice!” above.
[31] A subphylum of arthropods that includes centipedes and millipedes.
[32] An allusion to a cross-border meeting between DĂaz and President
Howard Taft planned for October 16, 1909, to demonstrate U.S. support
for DĂaz’s re-election in exchange for the Mexican dictator’s protection
of U.S. foreign investment.
[33] Dr. Ignacio MartĂnez (1844–1891), a former Mexican general, was a
favored opposition candidate in the run-up to the 1892 presidential
election against DĂaz. He was forced to flee Mexico and subsequently
settled in Laredo, Texas, where he was murdered by assassins operating
on the orders of Nuevo León’s Governor Bernardo Reyes.
[34] In 1908, journalist James Creelman (1859–1915) published a telling
interview he had held with DĂaz in Pearson’s Magazine in which the
dictator claimed that Mexico was ready for democracy and that,
accordingly, he would stand down during the 1910 election. The interview
was soon thereafter translated and published in much of the Mexican
press, inspiring the suffragist activity Praxedis mentions, including
that of the Anti-Reelectionist Party founded in 1909 by Francisco I.
Madero.
[35] An allusion to Miguel Hidalgo (1753–1811), the Catholic priest who
initiated Mexico’s independence from Spain with the “Grito de Dolores”
made on September 16, 1810.
[36] The San Juan de UlĂşa prison in Veracruz state, where many Liberals
perished as political prisoners. See the next article, “Ulúa Speaks.”
[37] Guerrero is referring to the Cananea miners’ strike of June 1906.
Rafael Izábal (1854–1910) was governor of Sonora during the strike;
Colonel William Cornell Greene (1852–1911) owned the Cananea mine;
Captain Thomas H. Rynning (1866–1944), of the Arizona Rangers, led the
cross-border attack to suppress the strike, with the assistance of
Mexican rural police and federal troops.
[38] Vitellius Germanicus Augustus (15–69 CE), a Roman Emperor who
reigned briefly during the Year of the Four Emperors that followed
Nero’s death in the year 68, was known for being quite the glutton.
[39] Philip II (1527–1598), king of Spain at the height of the Spanish
Empire; Stefan Stambolov (1854–1895), Bulgarian Regent and Prime
Minister known for his authoritarian policies.
[40] Presumably a reference to royalists from Galeana, Nuevo LeĂłn, who
served the invading French military during the Franco-Mexican War
(1861–1867) in opposition to Liberal forces based in Monterrey.
[41] Both discriminatory messages appear in English in the original.
[42] Bernard Palissy (1510–1590), a French Huguenot who divined the
origins of fossils and applied hydraulics theory practically to
transport water; Robert Fulton (1765–1815), inventor of steamboats;
Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923), discoverer of electromagnetic radiation in
the form of X-Rays and recipient of the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physics;
Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740–1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier
(1745–1799), inventors of hot-air balloons; Guglielmo Marconi
(1874–1937), inventor of radio and telegraphy and co-recipient of 1909
Nobel Prize in Physics.
[43] An allusion to Tolstoy’s theory of pacifist non-cooperation with
Tsarism and militarism, based on the novelist’s anarchistic
interpretation of the Gospels. See The Kingdom of God Is Within You
(1894).
[44] Compare Bakunin in “Science and the Vital Work of Revolution”
(1869): “Take the most radical of revolutionaries and place him on the
throne of all the Russias or give him dictatorial powers … and before
the year is out he will be worse than the [Tsar]Alexander [II] himself.”
[45] Praxedis alludes here to Francisco I. Madero.
[46] General AgustĂn de Iturbide (1783–1824), who secured Mexico’s
independence from Spain by leading the liberation of Mexico City in
1821, only to proclaim himself Emperor during a reign that lasted a
year.
[47] In Spanish, ergástula (“ergastulum”) refers to a Roman building in
which slaves were held in chains; these ergástula were formally
abolished by the Emperor Hadrian (76–138 CE).
[48] Francesc Ferrer i Guà rdia (1859–1909), Spanish anarchist and
founder of the Modern School movement, which sought to educate
working-class children using rationalist, secular, and non-compulsory
methods. Ferrer was executed by a military tribunal in the Montjuich
castle on charges of sedition for supposedly having inspired the events
of the “Tragic Week” of summer 1909, which saw the mobilization of
Spanish troops to northern Morocco in the Second Rif War—launched to
protect colonial mining interests—leading to the declaration of a
general strike in Barcelona by the anarcho-socialist union Solidaridad
Obrera. This uprising, having strong antimilitarist, anticolonial, and
anticlerical elements, met the State’s declaration of martial law and
ultimate military suppression.
[49] The Pan-American Labor League was a formation founded by Praxedis
in San Antonio in summer 1910 that promoted rationalist education,
women’s emancipation, internationalism, syndicalism, and antimilitarism.
See Guerrero’s “Program of the Pan-American Labor League” below.
[50] Ferrer’s last words before his execution reportedly were: “Aim
well, friends; you are not responsible. I am innocent. Long live the
Modern School!”
[51] An allusion to the Italo-Spanish House of Borgia, which became
politically and religiously hegemonic in Europe during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
[52] Regarding the Cananea strike (June 1906), see footnote 2 in
“Wretches” above; the Acayucan Rebellion (September–October 1906), an
insurrection organized by Liberals among landless indigenous peasants in
Veracruz, being one of the plots that avoided prior detection by the
State; RĂo Blanco, Veracruz, site of a strike involving six thousand
textile workers demanding improved conditions and the abolition of child
labor in the factories—they were suppressed by the military, with
hundreds killed (January 1907); about the Viesca, Las Vacas, and Palomas
battles of June 1908, see the articles referring to each in section III
below; in Tehuitzingo, Puebla, and Tepames, Colima, revolts broke out
following the shuttering of clubs opposed to DĂaz; in Velardeña,
Durango, dozens of miners were shot down for demonstrating publicly
(1909); the San Juan de Ulúa and Belén prisons, to which hundreds of
Liberal insurgents were sent following the crackdown against the planned
uprising of summer 1908 (see “Ulúa Speaks” above); the Yaqui Indigenous
people had constantly been at war with the State since colonization, and
for this were targeted by DĂaz for enslavement and genocide through
deportation and mass-death by overwork in the National Valley and the
Yucatán, as exposed internationally in John Kenneth Turner’s Barbarous
Mexico (1910); regarding the Valladolid Rebellion of June 1910, see
footnote 2 in “The Death of the Heroes” below.
[53] During the celebration of the first Mexican centennial in Tlaxcala,
anti-Porfirian protests were met with violence by the State; Praxedis
presumably refers to Yaqui women and children with his comment about
Sonora.
[54] This investigation was ordered by a majority vote of the U.S. House
of Representatives at the initiative of representatives Nolan
(California) and Wilson (Pennsylvania), and it was supported by a number
of senators, including the Republican Senator La Follette (Wisconsin).
This investigation demonstrated that the dictatorship of Porfirio DĂaz
hired U.S. federal authorities, sheriffs, and border police to harass
Mexican revolutionaries, thus causing a great sensation throughout the
country and obliging the media to strongly denounce the illegal acts of
Porfirio DĂaz, who since then has begun to lose all the prestige that,
through the strength of gold and servile feathers, he had conquered on
the other side of the Rio Grande [Praxedis Guerrero].
[55] Praxedis refers to the revolutionary socialism that was being
propagated at that time in the U.S. [Bernal, Rivera, and Santillán].
[56] Simony is the formerly prevalent Catholic practice of selling
indulgences, supposedly for redemption.
[57] The U.S. Anti-Imperialist League, founded in November 1898 to
resist the imperialist domination of the Philippines following Spain’s
defeat in the Spanish-American War; the San Diego Anti-Interference
League, founded in early 1911 by socialists affiliated with the PLM’s
Organizational Council who sought to prevent U.S. military intervention
during the Mexican Revolution.
[58] RamĂłn Corral (1854–1912) was DĂaz’s vice president from 1904 until
the Revolution. Enrique Clay Creel (1854–1931) was governor of Chihuahua
twice during the Porfiriato and also served as ambassador to the U.S.
and Minister of Foreign Affairs before the Revolution.
[59] An “Ambrosio carbine” is an idiom denoting a useless object; Manuel
Mondragón (1859–1922), a Mexican military officer who infamously
designed weapons for DĂaz.
[60] In the biblical book of Judges, the Israelite commander Jephthah
sacrifices his daughter to observe an oath he had sworn before leading a
campaign against the Ammonites; worship of the beastly Canaanite god
Moloch (Hebrew for “king”) involved the sacrifice of children.
[61] Presumably an allusion to Solomon’s reported hundreds of wives and
concubines.
[62] The gynaeceum refers to the “women’s part of the house” in
classical Greece, often the innermost quarters, isolated from the
street.
[63] A reference to the battle of Pharsalus, Greece, in 48 BCE, where
Julius Caesar’s legions defeated the much larger Pompeian army defending
the Republic. Caesar is said to have ordered his victorious troops to
hit Pompey’s forces in the face.
[64] In 1867, Maximilian I of Austria, colonial usurper over Mexico,
refused to shave his beard in order to facilitate an escape plan devised
after his capture following the fall of Querétaro City and his impending
execution by Benito Juárez’s forces.
[65] The journalist Maximilian Harden (1861–1927) infamously accused
Germany’s ruling house of Hohenzollern of homosexual acts, criminalized
at that time; the “Scandal of the 41” refers to a police raid of an
upper-class gay men’s ball in Mexico City in November 1901.
[66] Antonio RodrĂguez was tied to a post, doused in petroleum, and
burned alive by a mob of savage Texans on 3 November 1910 [Praxedis
Guerrero].
[67] In this sentence, which appears in Praxedis’s first posthumously
published article, the author may be alluding to the conflict he had
with MagĂłn near the end of his life, as MagĂłn did not wish for Guerrero
to risk his person by joining the revolutionary armed struggle.
[68] Guerrero is in all likelihood referring to the PLM and RegeneraciĂłn
here.
[69] Praxedis alludes to major landowning families of the
pre-revolutionary period. The Terrazas, for example, held fifteen
million acres of land in Chihuahua. Regarding Enrique Clay Creel, see
“The Probable Intervention” above.
[70] MarĂa Leona Vicario (1789–1842), Manuela Medina (1780–1822), and
Josefa Ortiz DomĂnguez, also known as La Corregidora ([“magistrate’s
wife”]1773–1829), were insurgent heroines of the Mexican War of
Independence.
[71] Presumably another reference to Francisco I. Madero. See “The
Inconvenience of Gratitude” above.
[72] See “Whites, Whites” above.
[73] Alfonso XIII (1886–1941) and Charles III (1716–1788), kings of
Spain; Edward VII (1841–1910), king of the United Kingdom and British
Empire, son of Queen Victoria.
[74] Ixtle (Nahuatl) is a fiber of tropical agave or yucca plants. The
“Hero of Peace” is DĂaz.
[75] Icamole, Nuevo LeĂłn, was the site of a defeat for DĂaz’s forces
against the government during the “Tuxtepec Revolution” (20 May 1876)
that led the future dictator famously to burst into tears.
[76] This was the voice of JesĂşs M. Rangel, the first to rise up on the
border in 1906 to destroy the tyranny of Porfirio DĂaz. In 1908 he was
one of the combatants in the battle of Las Vacas, Coahuila. Later, after
having served a sentence in a North American Bastille, he fought in
Chihuahua (1911) against the Maderista forces and was injured and
arrested, being subsequently imprisoned in the Federal Penitentiary of
Mexico in Mexico City until the death of the pseudo-apostle of
democracy, Francisco I. Madero. Rangel currently [in 1924] finds himself
incarcerated in the Penitentiary of Huntsville, Texas, enduring a
ninety-nine-year sentence imposed by a Texan jury for suspected homicide
during a campaign that was launched in 1913 to enter Mexican territory
and struggle for the libertarian principles set forth in the Manifesto
of 23 September 1911, published by the Organizational Council of the
Mexican Liberal Party [Bernal, Rivera, and Santillán].
[77] Federales, or federal troops.
[78] An allusion to the Garza Revolution (1891–1893), which began when
Catarino Garza led a group of insurgents across the Rio Grande into
Coahuila with the aim of overthrowing DĂaz.
[79] The French Intervention of 1861–1867, which temporarily installed
Maximilian I as Emperor.
[80] Given, that is, that both these anarchists were aristocrats.
[81] An allusion to the execution in Veracruz of nine Liberal supporters
of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, as ordered by DĂaz himself.
[82] According to Bernal, Rivera, and Santillán, the Casas Grandes PLM
cell was one of the largest in the run-up to the planned 1908
insurrection. Precisely how it betrayed the cause is unclear.
[83] This is presumably another reference to the betrayal of which
Praxedis accuses the Casas Grandes cell.
[84] As took place with the uprising prepared by the Revolutionary
Council from Los Angeles, California, to take Baja California and from
there prosecute the emancipatory Revolution toward the center of the
country [Bernal, Rivera, and Santillán].
[85] Among those participating in the action were Praxedis G. Guerrero,
Francisco Manrique, Enrique Flores Magón, Manuel Banda, and José Inés
Salazar. The last of these subsequently betrayed the Revolution by
joining Victoriano Huerta [Bernal, Rivera, and Santillán].
[86] “Pancho” is a common nickname for Francisco.
[87] Most likely a reference to the barrel pillory, a torture device
sometimes known as the “Spanish mantle.”
[88] Maximiliano RamĂrez Bonilla, Atilano Albertos, and JosĂ© E. KantĂşn
were militant opponents of DĂaz who helped organize the insurrection of
1,500 peasants in Valladolid, Yucatán, on 4–9 June, 1910.
[89] Presumably because they were offered an alternative life sentence
of hard labor.
[90] Who ChacĂłn exactly was is unknown; presumably, he was a PLM
militant serving with Praxedis who died during the battle of Janos.
[91] MagĂłn is referring to the group comprised of Bernal, Librado
Rivera, and Diego Abad de Santillán, who edited and published the volume
on which this translation is based.
[92] Compare Kropotkin’s discussion in Mutual Aid, chapter 8, of
volunteer rescuers in Lifeboat Associations and among the miners of the
Rhonda Valley in Wales who risked their lives to save their trapped
comrades.
[93] This Nahuatl word refers to the traditional Mexican maize-based
beverage.
[94] An allusion to Gonzálo Fernández de Córdoba (1453–1515), the “Great
Captain” under Ferdinand II (1452–1516) who infamously invented an
exorbitant list of expenses to be sent to the king following the Naples
military campaign of 1506.