One cause that many IWW members held as dear as their own struggles in the United States was the struggle of Mexican workers, often against US-owned companies, across the border.
This concern dated back to the strike of Mexican copper miners working for a US company, the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company, in Cananea, Sonora, in June 1906. The Mexican strikers demanded the same pay as the US miners employed by the company, an end to abusive behaviour from American foremen and more generally equal treatment in their own country.
A demonstration was fired on by company gunmen, provoking a riot. In order to protect US property, nearly 300 armed men, led by the Arizona Rangers, crossed over the border from the United States to occupy the town, shooting a number of strikers and arresting others. They handed over to Mexican police and troops, who finished off the crushing of the strike movement. What particularly concerned American mining companies was the help, funds, propaganda materials and organisers given to the Cananea strikers by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM).
The US armed intervention in the strike caused outrage across much of Mexico, graphically demonstrating the extent to which the wholly corrupt and brutal Porfirio Díaz regime was a creature of US banking, railway, oil and mining interests. It helped begin the process that eventually led to Díaz’s overthrow.
Fighting against the Díaz regime was the anarchist Ricardo Magón, who had fled Mexico in fear of his life in 1904, taking refuge in the United States. Magón was the leader of the revolutionary Partido Liberal de México (PLM) and edited its newspaper, La Regeneración. The paper was to reach a weekly sale of 25,000. The PLM, despite calling itself “Liberal”, in fact advocated worldwide working class socialist revolution, starting with the liberation of Mexico and the ending of the country’s colonial relationship with the United States. For the PLM, the political stage, in its own words, was “the whole surface of the planet” and their objective was “to smash, tyranny, capitalism and authority”. It had enthusiastically supported the Cananea strikers and had a close relationship first with the WFM and later with the IWW.
The PLM attempted to launch an uprising against Díaz soon after the bloody suppression of the Cananea strike in September 1906, but the attempt miscarried. In August the following year, Magón, together with other PLM leaders, was arrested and eventually bought to trial for violating the US neutrality laws. He was not released from prison until August 1910. The leader of the Socialist Party left, Eugene Debs, campaigned for his release.
While Magón was in prison, his brother Enrique together with Práxedis Guerrero assumed the leadership of the PLM. It was Guerrero who originally coined the phrase “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees”. The PLM attempted another uprising in the summer of 1908, but coordinated police raids on both sides of the border, seizing weapons and arresting activists, effectively smashed the movement for the time being.
At the end of 1909 and into the following year, the American socialist John Kenneth Turner began publishing a series of articles in the socialist newspaper the Appeal to Reason and in the International Socialist Review (ISR), that exposed the brutal realities of class rule in Mexico and the US role in sustaining it. His “The American Partners of Díaz”, that appeared in the ISR, opened with the blunt statement that: “The United States is a partner in the slavery of Mexico”. It went on to detail the involvement of US companies in the exploitation of the country and how the Díaz regime waged war against its own people on behalf of the United States. The articles were collected and published as a book, Barbarous Mexico, in January 1911. Both the articles and book had an impact far beyond the socialist left in the United States.
Díaz’s position was weakening all the time, however, and in May 1910 his regime finally fell. The moderate, Francisco Madero, replaced him as president, but from the first faced opposition both from the right and from the left. Madero had no intention of interfering with the rights of private property and was condemned by the PLM for betraying the revolution. The PLM once again stepped forward to fight for a social revolution in Mexico. In December 1910, Guerrero was killed in battle, removing the movement’s most effective leader.
The PLM leadership recognised that they did not have the strength to raise the standard of revolt throughout the whole of Mexico, so instead they planned to invade Baja California on the US border, and to establish a revolutionary base from which they could then advance through northern and into central Mexico. The IWW provided them with funds, weapons and volunteers. The Wobbly volunteers elected their officers and were organised along democratic lines. Among those assisting in recruitment and fundraising in Los Angeles was Joe Hill. He was soon to cross the border to join the fight.
The IWW had always recruited Mexican workers and published a number of Spanish language newspaper in different parts of the country. Its members rallied to the PLM cause. On 28 January 1911, a small armed band seized control of Mexicali in Baja California. Early the next month rebels led by a Wobbly volunteer, William Stanley, hijacked a train and steamed into the town of Algodones, taking it by surprise attack. Soon after, Tecate was taken. Stanley was to be killed in the fighting in April. Then, on 9 May, a rebel force made up mainly of Wobblies captured Tijuana. Here they made a point of expropriating the massive San Ysidro Ranch, owned by a consortium of Los Angeles businessmen. Jack Mosby, one of the leaders of the Wobbly volunteers, issued a revolutionary manifesto in Tijuana, proclaiming that “the revolution will be carried on in all the states of Mexico until the Mexican people are freed from the present military despotism and slavery, peonage abolished and the lands returned to the Mexican people, which have been stolen from them by the Mexican and foreign capitalists”.
The US authorities moved to contain the revolutionary contagion, with Ricardo and Enrique Magón both being arrested on 14 June 1911. When they were finally sentenced in January 1912, protesters fought with the police outside the court. They were not released until January 1914.
Meanwhile Madero moved against the Baja California rebels, sending troops to drive them out. The rebel forces were forced to retreat back across the border, where many of them were rounded up by US troops. Mosby, a deserter from the US Marine Corps, was put on trial for desertion and sentenced to six years. He was shot dead when he tried to escape.
There was a real fear at this point that the US government intended a full-scale military intervention in Mexico to protect US business interests. In the October 1912 issue of the ISR, Bill Haywood warned that the government was looking “for a pretext to begin the bloodletting”. The working class of the two countries were “to be driven to butcher one another in the interest of a handful of capitalists”. He urged preparations for a general strike to stop any intervention.
IWW efforts at assisting the Mexican revolutionaries continued even after the defeat of the PLM in Baja California. In 1913, a party of Wobbly volunteers, led by Charlie Cline and Jesus Rangel, taking weapons across the Texas border was intercepted by US troops. They were captured after a fight in which two of their number were killed, one was beaten to death and a spy working for the Americans was shot. Cline, Rangel and their comrades received sentences ranging from 25 to 99 years.
The Mexican Revolution continued with the PLM increasingly left on the sidelines. Although Magón was regarded as a popular hero in Mexico and his ideas were certainly influential, the PLM itself remained weak and ineffectual. Emiliano Zapata was certainly influenced by Magón and indeed offered a home to Regeneración in revolutionary Morelos, but the offer was refused. The PLM continued to preach revolution, but its forces were too weak for it to make any real impact.
This did not stop the Magón brothers being arrested yet again in the US and being tried under the Espionage Act in 1918. They both received sentences of 20 years. They were sent to join the Wobbly prisoners in Leavenworth. Ricardo Magón died in prison on 21 November 1922. It was generally believed at the time that he had been murdered either by guards or a fellow prisoner recruited as an assassin. According to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, when he was finally buried in Mexico on 16 January 1923, 250,000 people followed his coffin.