Eduardo Colombo has died

Eduardo Colombo 1929-2018

A great anarchist fighter left us

Today, Tuesday, March 13, the sad news of the death of Eduardo Colombo strikes us painfully. With Eduardo not only disappears an endearing and fraternal companion, but also a leading thinker and an anarchist militant of unshakeable convictions.

It was during the 1940s that the young student Eduardo Colombo became intensely involved in the anarchist movement of his native Argentina, participating in the anarcho-syndicalist struggles of the FORA (Federation of Workers of the Argentine Region), collaborating and assuming management responsibilities in his renowned newspaper, La Protesta . Since then, a long period of over seventy years has elapsed during which Eduardo Colombo did not give up for a single minute his early and intense commitment to "the idea" and the cause of this social revolution for which he fought all his life with inexhaustible enthusiasm.

Doctor and psychoanalyst, he was also professor of social psychology at the University of Buenos Aires until the military coup of 1966 expelled him from his teaching duties and forced him a few years later to ask for asylum in Paris, where he arrived with his companion Heloisa Castellanos in 1970. There, despite the difficulties to reintegrate professionally and socially, he did not hesitate to get involved immediately in the activities of the anarchist movement in France, while by reinforcing links with the anti-Franco struggle of libertarian exile.

His willingness to permanently link thought and action has led him to position himself as one of the most important theorists of contemporary anarchism, while participating in dozens of events at the international level. To give one example of his indefatigable international activity, let us mention his participation as a lecturer at the libertarian days of Barcelona in 1977, his contribution to the organization of the extraordinary international anarchist meeting in Venice in 1984, or his interventions at the meeting. international anarchist of Saint-Imier in 2012.

His numerous books and articles have contributed to his constant invitation to conferences, especially in Italy, Greece, Spain, Argentina and various Latin American countries; he was also one of the founders in 1997 of the french anarchist magazine Refractionsand one of his leading animators for two decades. It will be time to discuss in more detail this unforgettable character and his precious intellectual contributions, which go far beyond the proper anarchist framework and which also cover the field of psychoanalysis and philosophy. But we can not finish this brief summary made in the emergency without insisting that the one who left us today was an anarchist militant of incomparable integrity and worth, besides being a beautiful person and endearing.

Tomás Ibáñez

Barcelona March 13, 2018