Lovers and destroyers. A History of Anarchism

Foreword

In August 1907 two major events took place in Holland: the First Anarchist Congress, in Amsterdam, and the Second International Peace Conference, in The Hague. The first one was intended to bring together the rebels around the world in order to undertake a social revolution; meanwhile, the second sought to establish the strategic guidelines of an "armed peace" for the benefit of the imperial powers. Despite the evident imminence of a war, none of these meetings raised international policies to prevent the disaster that finally broke out on July 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Two Colombians of dissimilar origins concur then in the Netherlands: Vicente Lizcano (also known as Biófilo Panclasta), a transhumant rebel, allegedly Jewish, who traveled from Buenos Aires on behalf of the Argentine Regional Workers Federation to the Anarchist Congress, and Santiago Pérez Triana, a diplomat and skilled arms dealer (and the son of former president Santiago Pérez Manosalva) who was part of the official delegation of Colombia at the Peace Conference. A letter from the Dutch government sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia announcing the arrest in this country of one of its representatives for participating in a dynamite attack threatens to disrupt international diplomacy and causes a political incident that serves as a pretext to understand the infamy of Western reality.