Biofilo Panclasta

Vicente Rojas Lizcano (Chinácota, Colombia, 1879 – Pamplona, Colombia, 1943), known as Biófilo Panclasta, was a political activist, writer, and Colombian individualist anarchist. In 1904 he began to use the pseudonym by which he was later known: Biófilo, lover of life, and Panclasta, enemy of all. He traveled to more than fifty countries, agitating for anarchist ideas and taking part in worker and union demonstrations, in the course of which he befriended such people as Kropotkin, Maxim Gorky, and Lenin.

The son of Bernardo Rojas and Simona Lizcano, a working-class woman, Biófilo began his studies in Pamplona, a city close to Chinácota. From 1897 to 1898 he was in the Escuela Normal of Bucaramanga, from which he was expelled for publishing a small periodical in which he denounced the re-election of president Miguel Antonio Caro. Here is a popular quote of his: "Being ruled over is just as repulsive a thought to me as being ruler. Each man must be his own road, I don´t follow and I´ll never ask to be followed"

In 1899 he left school and traveled to Venezuela, where, with Eleazar López Contreras, he founded the first Public School in the town of Capacho Nuevo, the capital of the Independencia municipality (State of Táchira). That same year he signs up for the army of the Venezuelan Cipriano Castro, which had as its goal the downfall of president Ignacio Andrade. He soon left this group behind and wandered around Venezuela with other revolutionary groups that prowled through Trujillo, Portuguesa, Cojedes and Carabobo. He arrived at the city of Valencia in January 1900. In November 1904 he traveled to the Colombian city of Baranquilla, now as a coronel in the army of Cipriano Castro; he offered his support as a fighter to the Colombian forces against the Panamanian separatists supported by the United States.

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