Actividades de las autoridades argentinas y la embajada española sobre los anarquistas antes de la Ley de Residencia

Abstract

The present paper studies the role of the Spanish Embassy in Argentina concerning the entry of immigrants with anarchistic tendencies during the late 19th century and the fi rst two years of the 20th century. It also examines the Embassy’s interest in keeping track of their wanderings in the country. The study provides diplomatic documentation where the Spanish Embassy is shown to have been in permanent contact with its consulates in Argentina in order to exchange information with them, as well as with the central government and the Argentine authorities. A task best described as “ideological intelligence” emerges from documentation sources that reveal the Embassy’s thorough knowledge of the anarchists and their ways of transportation into the country, their trades and occupations, their whereabouts, their relationships, the conditions in which they lived and very detailed physical descriptions of those considered suspects. This policy confi rms the joint participation between the Spanish Embassy and Argentine institutions in the effort to rid themselves of those elements deemed “undesirable”. Other ties between the Argentine and Spanish anarchist movements are also considered, and the importance of the revolutionary press is analyzed, even in its far-reaching effects on Spain itself. The Embassy’s surveillance activities over these immigrants and its attempts to control the Spanish anarchists in Argentina, who were involved in events that had repercussions in Spain, offer clear evidence of the Spanish Government’s concern regarding the issue of anarchism.