On this day, 21 November 1922, Mexican revolutionary leader of Zapotec and mestizo descent, Ricardo Flores Magón, died after months of illness and neglect in Leavenworth Prison, Kansas.
His anarchist communist ideas were highly influential in the Mexican revolution, and he was a leader of the revolutionary Mexican Liberal Party (PLM). Flores Magón also organised with the Industrial Workers of the World union and edited the newspaper Regeneración, which helped spark the initial rebellion against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. He popularised what became the central slogan of the revolution: “Tierra y libertad” (“Land and Freedom”).
Flores Magón and other editors of Regeneración fled Mexico to the US in order to keep publishing after constant raids and repression by Mexican authorities. But he then began to be persecuted by US authorities, who were working with the Mexican government. After playing a cat and mouse game with agents for several years, Flores Magón was eventually arrested and imprisoned for supposedly obstructing the US war effort during World War I.
While in prison, he described how he experienced the persecution of the US government, and how he felt “caught by the formidable mechanism of a monstrous machine, and my flesh may get ripped open, and my bones crushed, and my moans fill the space and make the very infinite shudder, but the machine will not stop grinding, grinding, grinding.” https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2141099816075157/?type=3