Anarchism in Argentina - Major Clashes With Police

Major Clashes With Police

In 1909, police fired on a May Day demonstration in the Plaza Lorea in Buenos Aires organized by FORA. Several workers were killed. The anarchists responded by declaring a general strike leading the government to shut down the workers' centers and arrest 2,000 people. This strike lasted nine days. As the Chief of Police Ramón Falcón was widely blamed for the killing, the young Jewish anarchist Simón Radowitzky killed him and his secretary by throwing a bomb at the car they were in on November 13. An unprecedented repression against the anarchist movement ensued. Martial law was declared and remained in place until January 1910. The offices of La Protesta were raided and its machinery destroyed, as were the workers' centers. Within 48 hours thousands were arrested, many sent to Ushuaia prison in Tierra del Fuego. Non-Argentinian activists were generally deported.

Although martial law was lifted in January 1910, this year also saw the next major clash between the government and the anarchists. 1910 was the hundredth anniversary of the May Revolution of 1810, which led to Argentinian independence. Anarchist agitation was on the rise, a new anarchist daily newspaper, La Batalla, was founded in March, and the FORA planned protests against the Residence Law, but was somewhat hesitant as it scented a lack of militancy among workers. The moderate syndicalist Argentine Regional Workers' Confederation (CORA), the successor of the General Workers' Union, however, pushed for confrontation and the anarchists were forced to follow suit. They threatened to call for a general strike on May 25, the day of the anniversary festivities. Therefore, the government once again declared martial law on May 13. Police arrested the editors of La Protesta and La Batalla and FORA leaders. Meanwhile, right-wing militant youths attacked union offices and workers' clubs while the police ignored or even encouraged them. Because of this, the general strike was moved to May 18, but it was suppressed by the police and the right-wing militants. 1910 also saw the sentencing of Simon Radowitzky. As a minor, he could not be sentenced to death, so he was condemned to life in Ushuaia. He would be pardoned and released from prison in 1930.

Argentine anarchist historian Angel Cappelletti reports that in Argentina "Among the workers that came from Europe in the 2 first decades of the century, there was curiously some stirnerian individualists influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche, that saw syndicalism as a potential enemy of anarchist ideology. They established...affinity groups that in 1912 came to, according to Max Nettlau, to the number of 20. In 1911 there appeared, in Colón, the periodical El Único, that defined itself as ´Publicación individualista´".