Aldo Aguzzi

Son of Luigi Aguzzi and Francesca Pantera. Influenced by the ideas of Errico Malatesta, he served from his youth in the anarchist group of Voghera. While studying at the Technical Institute, he frequents the Chamber of Labor. On April 13, 1920, he was arrested after giving a speech during a demonstration of solidarity with an anti-fascist. Once released, he invited the militants of the anarchist weekly Il Libertario de La Spezia (Liguria) to wage a “holy battle” to remove the deserters of World War I from prisons. To escape the fascist aggressions, he left clandestinely for Argentina with his partner Maria Agnese Caiani, a weaver from Voghera, with whom he will have two daughters, Aura and Verità.

He arrived in Argentina in August 1923, immediately linking with other Italian anarchist exiles. He constituted the L’Avvenire Group, being one of the main animators of his newspaper (L’Avvenire, Buenos Aires, 1923-1925) along with other militants such as Carlo Fontana, Pasquale Caporaletti, Camillo Daleffe, Giacomo Sabbatini, Luigi Tibiletti, Dionisio Di Giustino, Francesco Barbieri, Nicola Recchi and others. In addition to L’Avvenire, from whose pages both Italian fascism and the Bolshevik regime in Russia were accused, the group edited two special newspapers of solidarity with prisoners and persecuted: Agire! (Buenos Aires, February 1925) and Libertà (Buenos Aires, June 1925). Apparently, that same year he edited in Buenos Aires a newspaper today lost: La Voce Antifascista. Organ of the Proletarian Antifascist Alleanza.

He promoted from his group different anti-fascist acts, as well as networks of solidarity with different libertarian prisoners, such as the two Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, condemned to death in the United States. He is one of the organizers of the May 1, 1925 event in the exhibition “XX Settembre”, organized by the Italian Antifascist Alliance (AAI), where other Italian anti-fascists such as Luigi Zanetti, Severino Di Giovanni, Giuseppe Pellegrini, Romeo Gentile and Clemente Daglia take the floor. A month later he participated with Severino Di Giovanni of the boycott of the philofascist act held on June 6, 1925 at the Teatro Colón for the 25th anniversary of the assumption to the throne of Victor Manuel III. On June 21, 1925 he appeared as one of the speakers in the Act of Remembrance of the Assassination of Socialist MP Giacomo Matteoti, along with G. Parpagnoli (Italian Socialist Sezione) and Silvio Raveto (Italian Communist Group).

On September 20 of that same year he participated in the act of the Italian Antifascist Alleanza held in the “20 de Septiembre” Hall in Buenos Aires. Aldo Aguzzi (for the Anarchic Group L’Avvenire), Severino Di Giovanni (for Anarchici of the Group “Renzo Novatore”), Giuseppe Pellegrini (for the Unione Reduci di Guerra), A. Doglia (for the Muratori Syndicate of Affini) and Romeo Gentile (for the Metallurgical Sezione), calling for a large anti-fascist public demonstration.

In April 1926 he traveled to General Pico, Province of La Pampa, as part of a propaganda tour to participate in an event on May 1st. He founded L’Alba dei Liberi (1926), the Italian supplement to the anarchist newspaper Pampa Libre (General Pico, La Pampa, 1923-1930).

With the same group of L’Avvenire, and always in the anarcho-communist line of Errico Malatesta although open to dialogue with the individualist and expropriative anarchists (Miguelañez, 2014), he edited other Ital-speaking anarchist press bodies such as Il pensiero (Buenos Aires, 1927), L’Allarme. Foglio Anarchico di Propaganda e d’Agitazione (Buenos Aires, 1928-1929) and Anarchia (Buenos Aires, 1930), the latter in collaboration with Severino Di Giovanni and América Scarfó. From Il pensiero paid tribute to the Mexican anarchist Práxedis G. Guerrero and Ukrainian Néstor Makhno, and promised to avenge the death of Sacco and Vanzetti. L’Allarme actively participates in the campaign for the freedom of the anarchist vindicator Simon Radowitzky. In 1927 Aguzzi was a speaker, next to Horacio E. Roqué, Rodolfo González Pacheco, Alberto S. Bianchi and M. Ramos, in a series of events held in the Plaza del Congreso, Plaza Once and Plaza Constitución in the City of Buenos Aires demanding the freedom of Radowitzky. Aguzzi intervened in Italian.

On 24 December 1927 he was arrested after the bombs placed by Di Giovanni at the City Bank's headquarters in Buenos Aires, but was released a few days later. Aguzzi takes a distance from the attack from the pages of L’Allarme. On 23 May 1928 a bomb set up by Di Giovanni exploded in the Italian Consulate causing numerous casualties. Aguzzi is arrested an hour after the explosion, being sentenced to 30 days in prison for the illegal arrest of two pistols.

Aguzzi initially condemns the fact from the pages of L’Allarme, which sparks controversy with Di Giovanni. It is then partially rectified, which renews the alliance with the anarchist vindicator.

Aguzzi corresponded with Luigi Frabbri, then exiled in Montevideo, and other Malatestian groups in Marseilles, Geneva and Paris according to security reports from Italian authorities who kept him “rigorously guarded” (Migueláñez, 2014). He regularly sent chronicles and theoretical articles to L’Adunata dei Refrattari, the newspaper of Italian anarchists in New York. From the pages of this newspaper he defended Severino Di Giovanni from the criticism of Diego Abad de Santillan and the group of the newspaper La Protesta. According to the latter’s testimony, Aguzzi repeatedly went to the headquarters of La Protesta to call for the cessation of criticism of the expropriator anarchist. He also collaborated with Di Giovanni on the Scritti Sociali edition of Eliseo Reclus in Italian. According to Osvaldo Bayer’s interpretation, Aguzzi was a sort of “alter ego” by Di Giovanni. “Aguzzi is still the outrageous pacifist who wants to convince with the arguments of reason, but who admires the procedure of Di Giovanni, his courage, his decision, his altruism” (Bayer).

In the late 1920s he appeared collaborating with articles in Spanish in organs of the Argentine anarchist press such as Superación (Buenos Aires, 1925), and Elevación (Buenos Aires, 1929). He also collaborates in Di Giovanni’s Italian publications such as Culmine (Buenos Aires, 1925-1928) and Anarchia (Buenos Aires, 1930). In 1928 he argued with Diego Abad de Santillán from the pages of Humanity (Buenos Aires, 1927-1929), the magazine that directed Horacio E. Roqué. Santillan responded from the Biweekly Supplement of La Protesta (No. 282, 16/4/1928).

He had to go into exile in Montevideo after the coup d’état of September 1930, where he continued to edit for some time Anarchia (Montevideo, 1930). Upon his return in Buenos Aires, he collaborated with the magazine Nervio (Buenos Aires, 1931-1936) and was able to carry out seven issues of his newspaper Sorgiamo! (Buenos Aires, 1932-1934), where he published under the pseudonym Massimo Amaro. The Sorgiamo Group! It was an attempt to reunify scattered anarchist tendencies: that of the individualists, on the one hand, and that of L’Avvenire and Umanità Nova, on the other (Miguelañez, 2014). In 1935 two issues of the newspaper La Fiamma came out clandestinely in Buenos Aires, apparently also directed by Aguzzi and administered by Pietro Di Cesare (Miguelañez, 2014). At the time he established links with the group of the Editorial Imán, where his book Economía fascist (1935) and his foreword to The Hungarian Commune by Pierre Ganivet (1937) appeared.

He arrived in Spain at the beginning of the Spanish Revolution with other exiled Ilian anarchists in Argentina, such as Pietro Di Cesare and Federico Fontanive, where he participated in the different vicissitudes of the contest: militias, confrontation with communists, propaganda, etc. (Miguelañez, 2014) In Barcelona he established close ties with Camilo Berneri, publishing articles in Guerra di Classe (Barcelona, 1936-1937), whose leadership he assumed when in 1937 Berneri was assassinated by the Communists. Shortly thereafter, the newspaper Solidaridad Obrera (Barcelona, 1907-1939), the organ of the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) was linked.

He adhered from Spain to the “Manifesto addressed to all the anarchists of Argentina” of the Argentine Anarcho-Communist Federation (FACA) of November 20, 1937, which were elaborated by Jacobo Maguid, Jacobo Prince and José Grunfeld. From that moment he maintained regular correspondence with the FACA, becoming his delegate in Barcelona.

In May 1938 he settled in Marseilles, where he denounced the repression carried out by the communists during the Spanish Revolution. He returned to Argentina in early 1939, assuming the edition of the third era of La Obra (Buenos Aires, 1936-1952) under the name of “Agal”.

The hard defeat suffered in Spain and the disagreement with his partner when returning to Argentina surely stressed his decision to take his own life by ingesting a dose of cyanide. Aguzzi died that same day, May 31, 1939, at the age of 36. His remains were buried in the Chacarita Cemetery. He was dedicated to L’Adunata dei Refrattari obituaries in New York and Studi Sociali of Montevideo.