Simón Radowitzky

Simón Radowitzky (10 September or 10 November 1891 – 29 February 1956) was a militant Argentine worker and anarchist. He was one of the best-known prisoners of the penal colony in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, where he was held for the assassination of Ramón Lorenzo Falcón, a head of police responsible for the brutal repression of Red Week in 1909 in Buenos Aires.

Radowitzky was pardoned after 21 years, he left Argentina and fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. He died in Mexico where he worked in a factory making toys. The story of his life is described in the travel book In Patagonia by the English author Bruce Chatwin.

Early years
He immigrated to Argentina in March 1908; he settled in the city of Campana, Buenos Aires where he worked as a mechanical worker in the workshops of the Central Argentine Railway. There, he maintained close contacts with the growing local anarchist community, reading La Protesta, the newspaper of the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina; through the Federation he came into contact with a group of intellectual anarchists of Russian origin, including Pablo Karaschin — author of an attack on the occasion of the funeral of Carlos de Borbón — José Buwitz, Iván Mijin, Andrés Ragapeloff, Máximo Sagarín, and Moisés Scutz. After living in Campana, he moved to the city of Buenos Aires where he lived with some of these while serving as a blacksmith and mechanic.