PERE BOADAS

Boadas i Rivas was born in Barcelona in 1894 and died in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1972. Together with Medir Mart and Pere Vandellós, he was one of the leaders of the first anarcho-syndicalist action group organised in Catalonia from late 1917 onwards, before the six-year period of "pistolerismo" erupted in Barcelona. He can, therefore, be regarded as the pioneer of those Barcelona anarcho-syndicalist action groups of which so much has been said; though little is known about the individual protagonists themselves.

From 1917 to 1924, when he was arrested for the last time in Barcelona, Pere Boadas was the coordinator of the many action groups that emerged in the course of the social warfare between anarcho-syndicalist activists and the employers' and police gunmen.

In 1927 he emerged from prison and, after a trip to Paris in 1928, he emigrated to Montevideo in Uruguay where he contacted the expropriator anarchist action groups carrying out holdups for the cause; the most active and most wanted of these groups in both Uruguay and Argentina was the one led by Miguel Arcángel Roscigno.

After an abortive armed robbery in Montevideo with another two Catalan anarchists, which left three dead and three people wounded, he was arrested and held in a Uruguayan prison for 25 years, which made him famous.

During his 25 years in prison he became a proselyte for anarchism and for the Uruguay's revolutionary movements, and acquired notoriety for radicalising and introducing the revolutionary idea to many ordinary prisoners who had, initially, been merely criminals.

The man who became president of Uruguay in 2012, José Mugica, a former guerrilla chief with the Uruguayan Tupamaros group from the late 1960s and the early 1970s, has stated that as a young man he made Pere Boadas's acquaintance during the 1950s and that Boadas was one of his revolutionary mentors.

Dettagli