Anarchism in Argentina
Until his departure in 1889, Malatesta helped bridge this gap and minimize the tensions and rivalries between the two wings, but after he left, they broke out once again.
[7] The pro-organizers were strengthened in 1891 by the arrivals of the Spanish anarchist Antoni Pellicer in 1891 and the Italian Pietro Gori in 1898.
It led to the passing of the Residence Law, which gave the government the power to deport "subversive foreigners".
This law was used to expel hundreds of anarchists,[8] while a great number of them fled to Montevideo in Uruguay only to reenter the country afterwards.
They renamed the union as Argentine Regional Workers' Federation (FORA) as a sign of the organization's internationalism in 1904.
70,000 anarchist workers marched in the streets of La Boca (Buenos Aires' total population was of 900,000).
[13] In 1909, police fired on a May Day demonstration in the Plaza Lorea in Buenos Aires organized by FORA.
The anarchists responded by declaring a general strike leading the government to shut down the workers' centers and arrest 2,000 people.
Meanwhile, right-wing militant youths attacked union offices and workers' clubs while the police ignored or even encouraged them.
[2] The Law of Social Defense, passed as a reaction to the Falcón assassination, allowed the government to deny any foreigner who committed crimes punishable under Argentine law entry into the country, prohibited the entry of anarchists, banned groups disseminating anarchist propaganda, and granted local authorities the power to prohibit any public meetings which subversive ideas could be expressed at.
[18] Meanwhile, the moderate syndicalist CORA grew in size as a result of its pragmatic approach, which included participating in negotiations with employers in place of direct action as advocated by the anarchists.
Striving for labor unity, the CORA set up a fusion committee with some non-affiliated unions to push for a merger with the FORA.
At the April 1915 FORA congress, its ninth, a resolution which reversed its commitment to anarchist communism was passed, paving the way for the CORA unions to join.
The falling of wages and a net migration back to Europe created poor premises for any kind of labor activism and the anarchist FORA V struggled to adapt to this.
[20] In December 1918, a strike broke out at the Vasena metalworks in the Buenos Aires suburbs of Nueva Pompeya.
Anarchists like Miguel Roscigna and Severino Di Giovanni engaged in expropriations affiliated with the criminal world to fund the social revolution, publishing, and political prisoners.
[23] On September 6, 1931, José Félix Uriburu came to power in Argentina via a coup d'état starting a series of military governments known as the Infamous Decade.
A number of distributors of La Protesta were arrested or killed within a year of Uriburu's ascension to power.
Deciding it had become impossible to distribute the paper, the publishers of La Protesta ceased making it and disseminated an underground newspaper named Rebelión instead.
The congress set up a regional committee for anarchist co-ordination, which eventually led to the founding of the Argentine Anarcho-Communist Federation (FACA) in 1935.
Various anarchists left to fight in the war and the FACA's official newspaper Acción Libertaria published special editions dedicated to it.
In 1952, following the imprisonment and torture of several FORA members, anarchists of all factions launched a campaign to inform the public of this situation.
After the violent coup that overthrew Perón in 1955, anarchist periodicals reappeared openly once again, among them La Protesta and Acción Libertaria.
[27] The FACA became the Argentine Libertarian Federation (FLA) in 1955, but like its predecessor organization was never able to gain a mass following.
In 1985, the FLA replaced its newspaper Acción Libertaria with a new political journal called El Libertario.
