Cipriano Ricardo Flores Magón (Spanish: [riˈkaɾðo ˈfloɾes maˈɣon]; known as Ricardo Flores Magón; September 16, 1874 – November 21, 1922) was a Mexican anarchist and social reform activist. His brothers Enrique and Jesús were also active in politics. Followers of the Flores Magón brothers were known as Magonistas. He has been considered an important participant in the social movement that sparked the Mexican Revolution.
Ricardo Flores Magón was born on 16 September 1874, in San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca, an Indigenous Mazatec community. His father, Teodoro Flores, was Zapotec and his mother, Margarita Magón was a Mestiza. The couple met each other in 1863 during the Siege of Puebla when both were carrying munitions to the Mexican troops.
Flores Magón explored the writings and ideas of many early anarchists, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but was also influenced by anarchist contemporaries Élisée Reclus, Charles Malato, Errico Malatesta, Anselmo Lorenzo, Emma Goldman, and Fernando Tarrida del Mármol. He was most influenced by Peter Kropotkin. He also read from the works of Karl Marx and Henrik Ibsen.
He was one of the major thinkers of the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican revolutionary movement in the Partido Liberal Mexicano. Flores Magón organised with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and edited the Mexican anarchist newspaper Regeneración, which aroused the workers against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.
Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, which Flores Magón considered a kind of anarchist bible, served as basis for the short-lived revolutionary communes in Baja California during the Magonista Revolt of 1911.
The Flores Magón brothers were from a family of modest means in Oaxaca and all three studied law at the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia (today Faculty of Law of the UNAM). Ricardo initially attended the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. During this time, he participated in student opposition to President Porfirio Diaz and was jailed for five months. Nevertheless, he graduated and then transferred to the National School of Law. While there, he worked as a proofreader for the student newspaper El Demócrata and narrowly escaped arrest when the entire staff was arrested by the police. He was in hiding for three months but continued his studies and received his law degree in 1895. He passed the examination of the Barra Mexicana-Colegio de Abogados (Mexican Bar and Advocate's College), and practiced law for a short time. He continued to study for a higher degree but was expelled from the school in 1898 because of his political activities. In 1900, he and his brother Jesús founded the newspaper Regeneración in which Ricardo wrote numerous articles attacking Díaz. He also wrote articles for the opposition periodicals Excélsior, La República Mexicana, and El Hijo del Ahuizote. He joined the PLM in 1900. In February 1901, Flores Magón attended the first congress of Liberal Clubs, where he met Librado Rivera, another revolutionary who later became one of the leading figures of the Mexican Liberal Party and the anarchist movement in Mexico as a whole. The congress focused primarily on anti-clericalism and the criticism of the Díaz dictatorship. Open criticisms of the government by Flores Magón, such as calling the government a “den of thieves” soon led to his arrest for “insulting the president”. He was sentenced to twelve months in prison, released in April 1901. Once released, Flores Magón quickly resumed his activism by working in the anti-government/anti-diaz movement, as well as through the satirical weekly paper, El Hijo del Ahuizote. His writings were critical of the government and pushed for rebellion against Díaz's administration, leading to Flores Magón's arrest and a further five months of imprisonment.
In 1904, Flores Magón fled Mexico when the courts banned the printing of his writings and he remained in the United States for the remainder of his life. Half this period was spent in prison. He resumed publication of Regeneración and led the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) from abroad. In 1906, he went to California. Around this time PLM uprisings occurred in Mexico which were crushed by the Mexican government. The US sympathized with the Mexican government and started taking PLM leaders in the US into custody. Magón was fearful that he would be caught and be returned to Mexico, where he faced the possibility of execution.
In 1907, an American detective by the name of Thomas Furlong was employed by Enrique Creel, at that time governor of Chihuahua, to locate Mexican dissidents in the U.S. The American headquarters of the PLM was in St. Louis, Missouri, at that time. There were a large number of expatriates who knew of its whereabouts and as a result, Furlong had no difficulty locating the dissidents in the city. Flores Magón, however, was living in great secrecy in Los Angeles. He used a pseudonym, and only two other persons in the city knew his real identity. If they needed to see him, they did so between midnight and dawn. The dissidents in St. Louis soon became aware that they were being sought by agents working for the Mexican government. Librado Rivera left the city in order to evade capture and although he was constantly on alert for agents who might be shadowing him, he failed to elude them. He was followed to Los Angeles and to Flores Magón's place of residence. Furlong kept the house under surveillance for some time. Finally, on August 23, 1907, Flores Magón, Rivera and Antonio Villarreal were taken into custody by Furlong, two of his assistants and some officers from the Los Angeles police department. Continuing his work, after being arrested in Los Angeles and imprisoned in Arizona, Flores Magón was able to smuggle out "Manifesto to the American People", a list of the goals of the PLM movement as well as the explanations as to why he and others were improvised by U.S. authority, as well as what were “plans for a second uprising and in June 1908 insurrections by PLM groups occurred in the states of Baja California, Coahuila and Chihuahua." While in prison, Flores Magón wrote to his brother as well as Praxedis Guerrero, a fellow anarchist, poet and journalist, about his own views on anarchism and liberalism. This detailed his original intent for calling himself a liberal, stemming from the belief that he and others wouldn't have been listened to if they called themselves anarchists due to the larger public beliefs of anarchists. In practice the actions of the PLM should remain anarchist in theme and practice even if members continue to call themselves liberal, “We should continue to call ourselves liberals during the course of the revolution, and will in reality continue propagating anarchy and executing anarchist acts."
Flores Magón and other PLM members had organized a brigade of revolutionaries in Douglas, Arizona, in the years preceding his move to Los Angeles. An expedition was sent to the Cananea copper mines about thirty miles from the southern border of Arizona with the alleged intention of exterminating all Americans employed in and about the mines. The brigade had been pursued by the Arizona Rangers who put them to flight, capturing a few of them. Flores Magón and his companions were extradited to Tombstone, Arizona, where they were charged with violating U.S. neutrality laws. Although the American and Mexican left rallied to their defense, they were convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in Yuma Territorial Prison, later being transferred to Arizona State Prison Complex – Florence. They were released in 1910 and again resumed publishing Regeneración from an office in downtown Los Angeles. The Mexican Civil War began that same year, and the Magonistas, as the PLM forces were known, were involved in combat throughout Mexico, along with the forces of Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza and Francisco I. Madero. In late 1910, the Mexican Revolution began to take off with the leadership of Francisco I. Madero, a landowner with whom Flores Magón disagreed. Even with the revolution against the dictator whom Magon wanted out of government, he continually spoke out against Madero and his beliefs: “Do not expect then, that Madero will attack the right of property in favor of the proletariat. Open your eyes. Remember a phrase, simple and true and as truth indestructible, the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves.” Overall, Flores Magón rejected the notion of a purely political revolution, believing in having a full “social revolution" in order to return freedom and power to the working citizen.