Despite what can only be described as considerable success during the 1870’s, the Mexican anarchist movement suffered inherent weaknesses which rendered it exceedingly vulnerable to government attack during the next two decades. The anarchists demonstrated little preparedness for the sustained campaign conducted against them between 1880 and 1900. The government offensive was begun in 1880 by President Manuel González, who served in Díaz’ stead until 1884 when the strongman took charge again.
A number of apparent weaknesses plagued the anarchists: despite the semisecret nature of La Social, the tactic of using the working-class press to publicize plans and actions made the revolutionary socialists openly visible and easy victims of official harassment. Their antipolitical doctrine disrupted the urban labor movement and left them open to counterattack from a government that offered the working class social and economic growth and stability for the first time in Mexican history, and even provided some financing for urban and rural cooperatives. They isolated themselves by claiming governmental incapability of initiating meaningful reform, something which some members of the regime actively sought to disprove.
Although operational anarchism theoretically does not require great numbers for its sustenance, organized masses are needed to protect anarchism from hostile government. The slow growth rate of the Mexican economy before 1880 and the restriction of industrial growth largely to the central area of the country affected too small a percentage of the population to provide adequate numbers or sufficient strength for a mass-based urban working-class movement capable of confronting a hostile government. The
campesinaje thus constituted the only sector of the working-class population large enough to support such an encounter. When armed conflict between the regime and the working class did occur, it took place in the agrarian sector, but communitarian revolution in the countryside also occurred prematurely. After 1876 the Mexican government consolidated its strength behind the astute political maneuvers of President Porfirio Díaz, who, after a tenuous first four years, commanded the loyalty of most of the army and the regional strongmen. The Mexican peasantry, scattered and unmanageable, could not carry out a mass uprising. That kind of upsurge would have required many years of proselytization in the
municipios and on the haciendas. For example, in Spain the organization of the peasantry, under much more favorable geographic and other circumstances, took place for two generations with only partial success before the unsuccessful revolution of 1936. Zapata, during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, despite widespread sympathy, found it impossible to attract mass support outside the four-state area of Morelos, Puebla, the southeastern portion of the state of México, and part of Guerrero. In fact, his area of operations covered little more than the territory over which Negrete had exercized hegemony and in part of which Chávez López had conducted his uprising.
A dispute within the urban labor movement over the question of involvement in national politics heralded the beginning of a troubled epoch. In January 1880 the representatives of the Zacatecas Gran Círculo steadfastly insisted upon their support for General García de la Cadena in his quest for the presidency of Mexico against the Díaz-sponsored candidate, General González. Meanwhile, anarchists continued to espouse the idea of noninvolvement in national politics. Despite the mass rallies at Columbus Park on September 16 and December 14, 1879, and the seeming agreements reached there, the labor congress eventually fell apart and had to be reorganized because of this issue. Between January and April, delegates representing more than fifty thousand working-class men and women in affiliated organizations attended its meetings. During these months the delegates consistently elected La Social representatives and their antipolitical supporters to the directorate of the Congreso. On February 1, 1880, the delegates elected Villareal as president, José María González as vice-president, Félix Riquelme as first secretary, and Juan Orellana as third secretary.
1By April 20 it became clear that La Social’s dominance of the Congreso prevented its endorsement of García de la Cadena’s presidential bid. Ramón Sandoval, one of the representatives from the Zacatecas Gran Círculo, announced to the assembled delegates on that date that, in view of the fact the Zacatecas group endorsed García de la Cadena and the Congreso denied him its support, the Zacatecas delegation had no choice but to withdraw. A number of sympathizers joined in the walkout and the disrupted congress adjourned. Then the editors of
El Socialista, who originally endorsed García de la Cadena on January 8, 1880,
2 tried to rally his supporters with a proclamation on April 29 announcing their alliance with the Zacatecans in order to bring about his election.
3From the beginning of the campaign García de la Cadena demonstrated why he had such avid support with ringing denunciations of Díaz that included a program for social change virtually identical to that espoused by the Congreso. This platform included land reform controlled by the local
municipio rather than at the national level, autonomy for local municipalities, encouragement for workers to organize cooperative and mutualist societies, and the right to strike.
4 From a major presidential candidate such a program was unprecedented.
The urban labor opponents of political participation quickly reacted to the smaller faction that endorsed García de la Cadena. First, they reconvened the Congreso on May 8, 1880, and elected Carmen Huerta president and González first secretary. Then, in conjunction with the Gran Círculo of Mexico City, they published a joint proclamation in
El Hijo del Trabajo which condemned
El Socialista, the Zacatecas Círculo, and all working-class groups that supported García de la Cadena. The Congreso and the Mexico City Círculo represented the vast majority of organized Mexican workers. An indication of anarchist strength at this time can be seen by the fact that Huerta and José María González signed the proclamation for the Congreso; so did Juan Villareal as president, and Félix Riquelme as first secretary of the Mexico City Gran Círculo. All were members or sympathizers of the libertarian socialist faction.
5By the end of April the dispute between the supporters of García de la Cadena and those who supported the anarchists caused the complete rupture of the Congreso. The García de la Cadena supporters assumed the risk of the Congreso’s destruction with their withdrawal because they felt the workers’ only real hope of defeating Díaz lay in García de la Cadena’s election.
6 At the same time the anarchists steadfastly refused to commit themselves to a candidate for national office. The presidency, they felt, would ultimately oppress the people regardless of the individual in power.
7What at first appeared to be only another episode in a seemingly endless series of disputes over participation in national elections ultimately proved to be a critical turning point for both the anarchists and the working-class movement. While the dispute itself was not fatal to either, the resultant organizational disunity and political factionalism served to isolate the anarchists from the moderates and drastically weakened them both. The task of the Díaz government when it moved against them and independent organized labor thus became much easier.
The Congreso did not die; on the contrary, it continued to gain strength for the next two years. By 1882 it regained its losses of 1880 and claimed 50,236 members in its affiliated organizations.
8 Several factors counted in this remarkable recovery : The greater unity of the remaining members permitted them to function more smoothly. They conducted an intensive campaign to establish new labor associations, especially cooperatives. Many García de la Cadena supporters later returned to the fold after his losing effort in the election.
But valuable time had been lost. Even though the Congreso appeared to be gaining strength, in reality the anarchists’ and the entire independent working-class movement’s downfall had been sown. The first setbacks occurred in 1878 when the Díaz regime, provoked by strikes, persistent political campaigns against his government, and agrarian insurrections, began to react. First, the Sociedad Artística Industrial, a group controlled by La Social, found that the building received as a gift from President Juárez had been given by Díaz to the then-moribund, pro-Díaz Mexico City Gran Círculo.
9Then, shortly before Díaz turned his office over to incoming President González, a series of political arrests took place. In June 1879 government troops apprehended Colonel Alberto Santa Fe in Puebla at the height of his campaign for agrarian reform. Shortly before his arrest, Santa Fe agitated against the government and persistently argued the validity of land claims by local
campesinos against a hacienda owned by General Cuéllar in the valley of San Martín Texmelucan, mid-way between Mexico City and Puebla. Cuéllar had obtained the land during his stint as military commander of the area and Díaz supported his claim.
10 Santa Fe’s Ley del Pueblo promised sweeping agrarian reform and gained him a considerable following in and around the state of Puebla. As a result, his followers constituted a genuine threat to the pro-Díaz
hacendados of the area. Díaz moved against Santa Fe with confidence.
The president’s optimism was well founded because, since coming to power in 1876, he had greatly increased the strength of the government. During the tripartite civil war of 1876 the rurales, or national rural police who supported a losing cause on behalf of President Lerdo, were decimated and scattered. In 1876 Díaz had been virtually without a law-enforcement agency. In order to consolidate his power he spent several years rebuilding both the rurales and the federal army. By 1879 he felt strong enough to suppress dissidents and also to step down for one presidential term as the constitution required and allow his supporter, General González, to serve until 1884.
The government’s greater ability to maintain order in the countryside also resulted in the arrest of Francisco Zalacosta, editor of La Internacional, who had evaded the authorities for almost two years. The agrarian uprisings he stirred up were crushed by the federal army before his internment and execution in Querétaro in 1880. Federal forces also stifled two other agrarian revolts at the same time—one led by the radical General Negrete, who promulgated a plan patterned after the Ley del Pueblo; the other, by the supporters of Santa Fe after his arrest.
Tiburcio Montiel and his
campesino followers in the Liga Agraria de la República Mexicana next felt the government’s wrath. Montiel, active in the labor and agrarian movements since the early 1870’s, founded the
liga after serving as the lawyer for Zalacosta’s Gran Comité Conmunero in 1876. Unfortunately for Montiel, his aggressive stand on behalf of the
campesinos in the Chalco area implicated him in the agrarian uprising led by Zalacosta. Authorities arrested him in August 1881 after his aggressive essay “Comunismo” appeared in
El Socialista. His complaints about agrarian conditions and specific charges of acts of violence, land seizures, and cattle rustling by large landholders against the villages of San Buenaventura and San Ignacio Nopala in the state of Hidalgo and Tepexpan and Yuxtepec in the state of México earned him the title of “Communist” and he went to jail for it.
11 Shortly thereafter he was sent into exile at La Paz, Baja California.
By 1882, with Zalacosta and Montiel eliminated and Rhodakanaty’s escuela refused permission to reopen, the Mexico City leftists were isolated from Chalco and the Mexican countryside. Defeated in an abortive uprising after Montiel’s arrest, the Chalco campesinos passed into a state of relative quiescence that endured until they rallied to the banner of Emiliano Zapata thirty years later.
The agrarian uprisings between 1878 and 1884 would perhaps have overwhelmed earlier liberal governments, but the federal forces moved with swift efficiency and defeated the revolts which spread to Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Michoacán, and Chihuahua. Anarchist attempts to coordinate the uprisings failed with the elimination of Zalacosta’s band.
12 The Díaz government depended on the
rurales and the federal army for the extension of its control over the agrarian population.
Rural patrols were set up to police the quelled
campesinos.13 The government completed its pattern of agrarian suppression with a campaign that nearly exterminated the troublesome Yaqui Indians in the northwest during the late 1880’s and 1890’s.
14The urban labor movement also felt the sting of the government’s anger. In Veracruz on June 24, 1879, nine persons involved in a port strike under way in that city were shot and killed during a street demonstration.
El Hijo del Trabajo loudly declared that the governor of the state, Luis Mier y Teran, had ordered the shooting. The newspaper concluded : “It is necessary for Mexico to rid itself of that kind of
bribón [scoundrel] if it does not want them to continue killing and assassinating.”
15 More important than the moral outrage felt by the
El Hijo del Trabajo staff on behalf of the “Mártires de Veracruz” was the evidence that they were intimidated. A mourning frontispiece appeared on the front page of the paper for over a year and the names of the revolutionary essayists who used its pages were deleted from their articles and pseudonyms were attached.
The government’s suppression of the labor movement, considering its belligerence and vulnerability, developed slowly. A high degree of tolerance toward organized labor seemed to exist during the period 1876–1879.
El Hijo del Trabajo, as the voice of the Gran Círculo, first found the outer limits of government tolerance in 1876 when President Lerdo suspended publication from October 16 to December 14. Following the Veracruz massacre
El Socialista joined
El Hijo del Trabajo, complaining of threats and adopting the use of pseudonyms,
16 but, after a brief period of editorial outrage, the papers fell silent.
17 Late in 1880,
El Socialista endorsed Díaz for the governorship of Oaxaca.
18 In 1881,
El Hijo del Trabajo endorsed General González as president of the Republic with this justification : “We were irreconcilable enemies of the past administration because its treatment of us was hard and unjust, but we will always be close friends of the present one, because we have always—to this time—been inspired by the ideas of conciliation, peace, and progress.”
19 After this dramatic change in approach,
El Hijo del Trabajo refrained from revolutionary themes and even ceased its coverage of labor news, a serious blow to the urban working-class movement.
The government waited until late in 1881 to finally close down the by then anarchist-dominated Mexico City Gran Círculo. President González temporarily lifted the suspension in March 1882, but the hard-put Círculo had to advertize to lease its meeting hall : “… the reasons for being suspended having ceased, the Círculo offers the use of its salon to those who might want to use it.”
20 In 1883 the Gran Círculo de Obreros de México permanently closed and passed into history.
21The Congreso managed to avoid problems with the government for a considerable length of time. In typical fashion it issued an official statement that it intended “to be the expression of all the workers’ societies in the country that send delegates. We support, in principle, the laws of the land. We hope for domestic tranquility and declare that insurrection will only be resorted to when it is intended that the rights of man be taken from him.”
22 However, in 1881, the Congreso invited trouble with Díaz by affiliating with the anarchist international in Europe. Nathan Ganz, an American anarchist and publisher of the
Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Review of Boston, contributed some articles to
El Socialista and served as the Mexican delegate to the London convention of the anarchist international in 1881.
23Near the end of 1882, shortly after reaching an all-time high in membership, the original Congreso passed into oblivion. No reports of its demise or of its activities after 1882 appeared, but several new organizations surfaced shortly thereafter and their involvements provide some insights. In late 1884 Pedro Ordóñez was praised as “a liberal, and president of the
TRUE Círculo y Congreso de Obreros … and he is a property owner.”
24 The
TRUE Círculo y Congreso was created as a unified organization in 1884. It cooperated freely with the government in formulating a social reform program acceptable to both Díaz and moderates within the labor movement. The description praising the much toned down Ordóñez as “a property owner” was unprecedented in
El Socialista. Urban workers, previously troublesome for the regime, now combined as government supporters under a leader who just a couple of years earlier had enjoyed great prestige among Mexican libertarian socialists and radical labor organizers.
25The government provided extensive financial aid to the
TRUE Círculo y Congreso for the development of rural agrarian cooperatives. Some of these cooperatives soon featured surprisingly complex and integrated economies.
26 Although the
TRUE Círculo y Congreso itself failed to become a viable and growing organization, the government-sponsored cooperatives survived until the mid-1890’s. The government justified this blatant violation of laissez faire by arguing that the colonies ensured development, social tranquility, and immigration. Despite some successes, by 1897 the government abandoned the cooperatives in favor of the now-notorious development companies.
27Another, more militant, labor group also emerged in the wake of the Congreso’s demise. The Junta Privada de las Sociedades Mutualistas de México, claiming the right to strike and seek “social justice,” surfaced in the mid-1880’s headed by Carmen Huerta, the former Congreso president and La Social member. Ordóñez also held membership. The Junta Privada, despite its more militant inclinations in contrast to the
TRUE Círculo y Congreso, took pains to praise the government and the political system,
28 but it survived only a few years. The Díaz regime had gained nearly complete control over the labor movement.
The anarchists did not give up despite the setbacks. In July 1884 the Club Nacional de Obreros Libres announced its presence and invited working-class support. The leadership claimed the inviolate right to strike and urged workers to resort to this weapon if other means failed.
29 American anarchists from the Knights of Labor assisted the Club Nacional in its effort to organize among Mexico’s textile workers during the middle and late 1880’s.
30 The Club Nacional did not survive into the 1890’s as an entity, but its adherents, reinforced by sporadic American support, continued their activities, especially in the north.
A small group of die-hard revolutionaries organized Los Grupos Revolucionarios de Emigrados Españoles en Varias Regiones in 1885. They issued a call “to all of the exploited in general, and to Spanish immigrants in particular … to rise up and throw off the yoke of the oppressor.”
31 Government records list 9,500 Spaniards living in Mexico with immigrant status in 1887.
32 This organization provides another example of the influential role played by Spaniards, such as Muñuzuri and Villareal, in the nineteenth-century Mexican working-class movement. The anarchists, despite their defeats, had a residual strength that became the basis of their survival.
The government declaration rendering cooperatives illegal represents one of the hardest blows struck against the anarchist campaign for cooperativism in the nineteenth century.
33 When later legalized, the government ensured domination of the cooperatives with the proviso that all such enterprises were subject to government control and regulation. Government hegemony over all police and civil activities, including education, further limited their independence. No cooperatives of the type envisioned by José María González could exist under those stipulations.
34The consolidation of power by the Díaz regime affected the anarchists and the working-class movement in ways other than direct intervention. The most important episodes in this regard involved the regime’s conflicts with Generals García de la Cadena and Negrete. Both men long supported revolutionary sociopolitical programs and frequently sided with the most militant elements of the urban labor and agrarian movements in their relations with the liberal governments of Juárez, Lerdo de Tejada, and Díaz.
35García de la Cadena, after years of opposition to Juárez and Lerdo from his Zacatecas stronghold, openly challenged Díaz for the first time in 1879 when the Zacatecas Gran Círculo received his support against the Díaz-dominated Gran Círculo in Mexico City.
36 García de la Cadena, an honorary guest at the inaugural meeting of the Zacatecas group, guaranteed the delegates that he would “protect them.”
37 The Zacatecas Gran Círculo’s quick success against its rival in Mexico City could only aggravate the injury felt by Díaz.
A short time later García de la Cadena published a letter in
El Socialista which opposed Díaz over the issues involved in a proposed new tax on Mexican industry. The text provides insight into his political philosophy: “… it will mean hardships for the Mexican workers who will be laid off their jobs; … [the large estate owners] want this tax instead of one that would apply to them.”
38Then, in 1880, García de la Cadena opposed González’ candidacy for president with an appeal to organized labor. His rivalry with Díaz continued until 1886 when he supported an unsuccessful revolt led by Negrete. Federal troops invaded Zacatecas, captured García de la Cadena, and executed him. His fate had by then become a familiar story in Mexico. The government newspaper,
EI Diario Oficial, announced his death while “trying to escape”—the
ley de fuga. An immediate public outcry led by several respectable newspapers in Mexico City followed the announcement.
El Siglo XIX issued a typical commentary : “García de la Cadena has been killed by the
ley de fuga; a good man has been murdered.”
39After his abortive revolution of 1879–1881, Miguel Negrete enjoyed a reputation as a vehement opponent of Díaz and as an advocate of the agrarian cause. For the next five years Negrete chafed as he watched the dictatorship increase its hold over the country and the agrarian situation deteriorate. Finally, in 1886, he could tolerate no more and prepared for a final confrontation. He promulgated his reasons in a revolutionary plan that denounced the government’s policies and called for the free autonomous village, the
municipio libre, which he believed should be the fundamental political and economic unit of the nation. His proclamation called for a complete agrarian reform: land was first to be redistributed to the
municipios and then the villages themselves would allocate it to individual farmers or retain it in common, whichever method was more consistent with local tradition. He proposed agrarian banks in order to provide necessary funds for irrigation, farming implements, and overall development. Negrete’s new government offered the urban labor movement its support in order to establish a system of free cooperatives and mutualist societies. It also promised higher wages, the right to strike, and better working conditions.
40Porfirio Díaz, after the usual precautions of determining security in other areas, crushed the revolt. After a few nervous weeks Díaz managed to isolate other rebellious army units from Negrete. Then, in the summer of 1886, government armies invaded Puebla in a sustained and difficult campaign in which the federal troops experienced considerable privation.
41 Negrete finally retreated toward the south, but government troops intercepted and surrounded his forces and captured Negrete.
42 García de la Cadena, who had supported Negrete in 1864–1866 and 1868, violated Díaz’ orders and fled the Federal District to Zacatecas in order to rally his troops. Pursued and captured by order of Minister of War Pedro Hinojosa, García de la Cadena died in the field at the hands of a firing squad.
43 Almost twenty-four years of armed resistance against the general politics and the labor and agrarian policies of Juárez, Lerdo, Díaz, and González had come to an end. With Negrete and García de la Cadena eliminated, the working-class movement lost its military allies and all immediate hopes for a revolutionary redress of workers’ grievances.