A. Panama
The construction of the trans-isthmus railroad from 1850 to 1855, the French plan to open a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in 1880, and the canal’s eventual construction by North Americans from 1904 to 1914 brought to Panama a mass of workers from Europe, Asia, and the Antilles.1 From the viewpoint of the history of the workers’ movement, those facts differentiate the Isthmus Republic, which gained its independence from Colombia in 1903, from its Central American neighbors. In the first construction phase under French control some 20,000 workers arrived. The majority of them were from Spain, France, and Italy. In the second, North American, phase some 40,000 workers arrived from Central America and especially from Jamaica and the Caribbean. Jorge Turner notes that these workers brought the seeds of class-consciousness and anarcho-syndicalism to Panama.2 Those who distinguished themselves most were libertarian workers from Spain, “because of their organizational and combative capacities.”3 Already during the construction of the trans-isthmus railroad a number of strikes erupted seeking improvement in wages and working conditions, which were extraordinarily deplorable, causing sickness and death among workers. In 1895, during the French phase, strikes again erupted, some of them successful, and mostly led by European anarchists.
The combative spirit anarchists brought to Panama’s working class explains the fact that Article 5 of Law 72 (passed on June 11, 1904, regulating immigration) prohibited entry to anarchists.4 In 1905, during the North American phase, the governor of the Canal Zone, General George W. Davis, made a special effort to hinder all construction work by anarchist workers. Nonetheless in 1907, 2,000 Spanish laborers struck for better wages, undoubtedly encouraged by anarchist co-nationals. There was no lack of violent episodes. At the fringes of the Federación Obrera, formed with the assistance of the liberal president Belisario Porras, anarchists organized among Panamanian workers, making a few converts, and in 1925 promoted a tenants’ strike, just as Argentinean, Chilean, Brazilian, and Mexican anarchists had done.
In 1924 a predominantly anarcho-syndicalist group founded the Sindicato General de Trabajadores, eventually gaining thousands of members. It was the first Panamanian workers’ central. In the founding group were the Spaniards José María and Martín Blásques de Pedro, the Pole Sara Gratz, and the Peruvian Esteban M. Pavletich, who later joined the Sandino forces. The Panamanians included anarchists and workers with various other ideologies, including the Marxists Eliseo Echevez and Domingo Turner, future founders of the Partido Comunista in 1930. Also participating was Diógenes de la Rosa, who would later be one of the leaders of the Partido Socialista, also founded in 1930.5
Among the workers who arrived from Europe in the early twentieth century there were, curiously enough, a number of Stirner individualists influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy who saw in syndicalism a potential enemy of their anarchist ideology. They formed several affinity groups that, according to Nettlau, numbered twenty in 1912. In 1911 the newspaper El Unico appeared in Colón, self-identifying as an “individualist publication.”6
B. Costa Rica
In the first decade of the twentieth century, a number of newspapers appeared in Costa Rica that to one degree or another expressed an anarchist ideology. Vladimir de la Cruz listed the following: La Aurora Social, Hoja Obrera, Orden Social, El Trabajo, El Amigo del Pueblo, Grito del Pueblo, La Lucha, El Derecho, and La Causa del Pueblo, whose style, de la Cruz writes,
not only insinuated characteristics of libertarian discourse of the time, but also undeniably made reference to anarchist publications in other regions of Latin America, as well as to journals and weeklies published in Barcelona, and in the Spanish regions of Levante and Andalusia.7
De la Cruz also discerned that the anarchist “danger” was already present in Costa Rica in the last few years of the nineteenth century, based on a warning given by Bishop Thiel in his sermon of December 25, 1892.
Anarchist groups organized various demonstrations in San José after the 1909 assassination of Francisco Ferrer, just as they did in all other Latin American countries. Near the end of the same year, a Centro de Estudios Sociales Germinal was formed and adopted the red and black colors. Active in it were intellectuals like Omar Dengo, Joaquín García Monge, Carmen Lira, and the worker-leader Juan Rafael López.8 On January 15, 1911 the journal Renovación was launched. It had clear anarchist tendencies, and was led by the poet J. M. Zeledón. It published more than seventy issues, an unusual achievement. A while later in Santiago de Puriscal the French-language anarchist newspaper Le Semeur appeared. Although not an anarchist paper, El Sol, published in Alajuela, frequently welcomed contributions with anarchist tendencies—even until recent days. In San José around 1926 a group formed for the specific purpose of libertarian action.9
We should recall that in 1914 Kropotkin wrote two letters to the Costa Rican chemist and anarchist Elías Jiménez Rojas explaining his position on the war that had just begun, a position that was not shared by the majority of anarchists and received the explicit rejection of figures like Malatesta, Rocker, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Sébastien Faure, Domela Nieuwenhuis, Luigi Bertoni, and others. In those letters, Kropotkin elaborated on his anti-Prussian views: “You understand that in similar circumstances every effort should be made to impede an imperial stranglehold on Europe.”10
The influence of anarcho-syndicalists on Costa Rican workers in the early twentieth century is unquestionable. Rojas Bolaños writes:
For example, in the 1905 strike by bakers seeking the eight-hour day several Spanish anarcho-syndicalists played leading roles, among them Juan Vera, who was exiled to Puerto Rico upon the success of anarchist action. And the national leaders of the strike movement were confined in the Alajuela prison.
In 1913, under direction of the Centro de Estudios Sociales Germinal and several workers’ unions, May Day was first celebrated in Costa Rica as the Día Internacional del Trabajo. Also, the Confederación General de Trabajadores was formed, exerting significant influence throughout the 1910s.11
C. El Salvador
The first Salvadorian syndicates to take up the workers’ struggle and organize resistance societies were formed by anarchists, both national and foreign. The influence of Spanish, Mexican, and Panamanian anarcho-syndicalists is undeniable. Anarcho-syndicalist elements were predominant in the Unión Obrera Salvadoreña, founded in 1922, and in the Federación Regional de Trabajadores de El Salvador, founded in 1924 and led by Marxist militants after 1929.12
There was a Centro Sindical Libertario operating in the national capital, San Salvador, in 1930; it probably disappeared after the brutal repression of 1932. The very combative French anarchist Anselme Bellagarigue, who published L’Anarchie-Journal de l’Ordre in Paris in 1850, may have died in this country. But it is impossible to know whether Bellagarigue penned any articles or otherwise spread his ideas during his stay in El Salvador or his time as a teacher in Honduras. Nettlau mentions the literary journal Ritos, first published in San Salvador in 1908, as influenced by anarchist ideas.13
D. Guatemala
The publication Orientación Sindical began to appear in Guatemala after 1926. It called for direct union action outside political parties and sometimes in opposition to them. Communists promoted the founding of the Federación Regional Obrera de Guatemala and began publication of the newspaper Vanguardia Proletaria. But Spanish and Peruvian workers independently chose to join with Guatemalan workers’ and student groups to form the Comité Pro Acción Sindical, which embodied the ideas and purposes of anarcho-syndicalists.14 The military dictatorship ended the Comité and all public manifestations of anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism in the country.15
E. Honduras
In the last decade of the nineteenth century mutual aid societies formed in Honduras, such as La Democracia, founded in 1890. During the first decade of the twentieth century workers in mines and banana farms began to organize with the purpose of social struggle and defense. In March 1909 workers at the North American–owned Rosario Mining Company struck and were brutally and bloodily repressed.16 In July 1916 workers at the Cuyamel Fruit Company also struck, and some four hundred were jailed in the Castillo de Omoa.17 Foreign anarcho-syndicalists almost certainly participated in these early strikes as well as in the organization of the first resistance societies among miners and banana farm workers, though assigning precise dates is not always easy.
F. Nicaragua
The Federación Obrera Nicaragüense was founded in 1918 with the assistance of several workers’ mutual societies like Sociedad Central de Obreros, Sociedad Unión Zapateros, Unión de Panaderos, Unión de Sastres in León, and others in Chinandega, Granada, and Managua.18 Individuals from the traditional political parties, that is, conservative and liberal, had always been in charge of the mutualist and artisanal unions.
Militant workers then formed the Grupo Socialista. In the May 24, 1924 issue of their newspaper El Socialista, they denounced manipulation by intellectuals who attempted to use the new Federación to gain political posts. The Grupo was made up of workers like Leonardo Velásquez, Alejandro González Aragón, Victor M. Valladares, and the poet Apolonio Palacio.19 While they were militant and rebelled against political intrigues, like those by the poet Salomón de la Selva, we cannot infer from their anti-political position an anarchist or revolutionary syndicalist attitude. They were ultimately reformists or social democrats. Although León memorialized the Federación Obrera Nicarangüense on May Day with the battle cries “Long live the martyrs of labor!” and “Long live the social revolution!” it is important to recall that he first sought the approval of employers for their laborers to join in.20 Salomón de la Selva did all he could to annex the Federación Obrera Nicarangüense to the Confederación Obrera Panamericana, organized by the American Federation of Labor. Professor Sofonías Salvatierra, while critical of a relationship with Yankee unionism, never went beyond mutualist solidarity and liberal nationalism, and opposed all forms of revolutionary internationalism.21
Thus we cannot say that there were anarcho-syndicalist worker associations in Nicaragua, although it is quite possible that foreign libertarians—Spaniards and Mexicans, among others—were active in the most important stevedore strikes in Corinto in 1919. And we cannot forget Sandino’s great sympathy for Latin American anarchism. He felt much closer to it than to Marxist-Leninism, and even chose the anarchists’ red and black colors for his own flag.
1 Luis Nava, El movimiento obrero en Panamá (Panamá: Editorial Universitaria, 1974), 61.
2 Turner, “Raíces históricas y perspectivas del movimiento obrero panameño” in P. González Casanova, Historia del movimiento obrero en América Latina, 2 (México: n.p., 1985), 291.
3 Viñas, Anarquistas en América Latina, 99.
4 Turner, “Raíces históricas y perspectivas del movimiento obrero panameño,” 294.
5 Ibid., 296.
6 Nettlau, “Viaje Libertario,” Reconstruir, 76, 34.
7 Vladimir de la Cruz, Las luchas sociales en Costa Rica, 1870–1930 (San José: n.p., 1970), cited in Viñas, Anarquistas en América Latina.
8 Ibid.
9 Nettlau, “Viaje libertario,” 42.
10 The two letters remained unpublished until 1960. They appeared in Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, vol. II, no. 7, translated to Spanish by Alain Vieillard-Baron.
11 Manuel Rojas Bolaños, “El movimiento obrero en Costa Rica (Reseña historica),” in González Casanova, Historia del movimiento obrero en América Latina, 256.
12 Rafael Menjívar Larín, “Notas sobre el movimiento obrero salvadoreño,” in ibid., 73–74.
13 Nettlau, “Viaje libertario,” 42–43.
14 José Luis Balcárcel, “El movimiento obrero en Guatemala,” in González Casanova, Historia del movimiento obrero en América Latina, 25–26.
15 Nettlau, “Viaje libertario,” 42.
16 Victor Meza, “Historia del movimiento obrero en Honduras,” in González Casanova, Historia del movimiento obrero en América Latina, 131.
17 Ibid.
18 Gustavo Gutiérrez Mayorga, “Historia del movimiento obrero en Nicaragua 1900–1977,” in ibid., 200.
19 Ibid., 201.
20 Ibid., 204.
21 Ibid., 205–10.