Luis Emilio Recabarren
Luis Emilio Recabarren (born July 6, 1876 in Valparaíso , † December 19, 1924 in Santiago de Chile ) was a Chilean politician and is considered the founder of the Chilean labor movement .
Life
Recabarren founded several workers' newspapers, such as "El Trabajo" in his native Valparaíso, for which he was sentenced to eight months in prison, and in 1905 "La Vanguardia" in Antofagasta , the mining center in northern Chile. In 1906 he was elected to the Congress for the Partido Demócrata . Because he, as an agnostic, refused to swear an oath on God, he was not allowed to take up his mandate. After long periods of exile in Argentina and Europe, he returned to Chile in 1908, whereupon he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. When the Partido Demócrata, previously founded as a progressive movement, formed an electoral alliance with the conservatives in 1912 , Recabarren founded the Partido Obrero Socialista (POS), the Socialist Workers' Party in Iquique (together with Antofagasta, who focused on saltpeter mining) in June with almost 30 like-minded people . The party and the Communist Party , which emerged from it in 1922 , remained a splinter party until the 1930s.
When Recabarren returned to Chile in 1918 from another exile in Argentina (where he took part in the founding of the Communist Party of Argentina), he began to bind Chile's most important trade union, the Federación de Obreros de Chile (FOCH), to his party. In 1919 he became chairman of the union and the two organizations de facto merged.
As early as 1920, a party congress decided to rename the Communist Party of Chile , but this only took place after participating in the 3rd International in 1922. It was only under the impression of repression by the dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo that he was accepted into the Comintern in 1927 . At that time, FOCH and POS together had around 200,000 members (and Chile 4.3 million inhabitants) and the POS two of 118 seats in the House of Representatives.
Shortly after a trip to the Soviet Union, Recabarren killed himself in 1924. Manuel Hidalgo succeeded him as chairman of the Communist Party.
Works
(Excerpts, freely available online in Spanish)
- Patria y patriotismo (1 MB; PDF file)
- Proceso oficial contra la Sociedad Mancomunal de Tocopilla: respuesta a la acusación fiscal (5 MB; PDF file)
- El pensamiento de Luis Emilio Recabarren (7 MB; PDF file)
- La Rusia obrera y campesina (2 MB; PDF file)
Web links
- Literature by and about Luis Emilio Recabarren in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by Luis Emilio Recabarren in the Marxists Internet Archive (Spanish)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Recabarren, Luis Emilio |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Chilean politician and is considered to be the founder of the Chilean labor movement |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 6, 1876 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Valparaíso |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 19, 1924 |
| Place of death | Santiago de Chile |