Ricardo Flores Magón
Mexican anarchist journalist whose writing helped ignite the revolution he did not live to see
Ricardo Flores Magon trained as a lawyer in Mexico City but turned to journalism, founding the newspaper Regeneracion in 1900 to attack the corruption and repression of Porfirio Diaz's long dictatorship. The paper's exposes of forced labour, rigged elections and the seizure of peasant land got it shut down repeatedly and its editors jailed; Flores Magon was imprisoned several times before fleeing to the United States in 1904, from where he kept publishing and organised the Mexican Liberal Party.
In exile he moved steadily further left, adopting anarchism and calling for the expropriation of land and factories rather than simply a change of president. His writing and the strikes his party helped organise, including a 1906 miners' strike at Cananea broken with American strikebreakers, are credited by historians with helping prepare the ground for the Mexican Revolution that broke out in 1910, even though Flores Magon refused to support moderate revolutionaries like Francisco Madero who eventually took power.
American authorities, uneasy about an anarchist organising Mexican and American workers along the border, prosecuted him repeatedly for violating neutrality and postal laws. He died in Leavenworth federal penitentiary in Kansas in 1922, officially of a heart attack, though supporters believed he was murdered by a guard.
Mexico later reburied him in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons, honouring a man Washington had treated as a dangerous subversive.