The Argentine Regional Workers' Federation (Spanish: Federación Obrera Regional Argentina; abbreviated FORA), founded in , was Argentina's first national labor confederation. It split into two wings in 1915, the larger of which merged into the Argentine Syndicates' Union (USA) in 1922, while the smaller slowly disappeared in the 1930s. Background From the second half of the 19th century up to around 1920, Argentina experienced rapid economic growth and industrial expansion, becoming a world economic power. Foreign capital was the driving force for this development, with 92% of the workshops and factories in 1887 being owned by non-Argentines, according to a census. Similarly, most of the workers in this period were immigrants; 84% according to the same census. In 1876, the country's first trade union was founded, and in 1887, the first national labor organization. Both the industrialization of the country and its labor movement were centered on the capital Buenos Aires and by 1896, there were more thirty trade unions in the city alone. From 1896, the labor movement started developing a clear working class program and the first sympathy strikes began taking place. In the 1880s and 1890s, the anarchist movement in Argentina was divided on the question of participation in the labor movement. The anti-organizers claimed that such participation would cause anarchists to lose their revolutionary edge and become embroiled in reformism. The pro-organizers viewed unions as a weapon in the class struggle. During his 1885–1889 visit to Argentina, Errico Malatesta, an anarchist of international renown, bridged the divide and encouraged anarchist involvement in the labor movement. His departure strengthened the anti-organizers, but this trend was reversed in the mid-1890s. Pietro Gori, an Italian anarchist who immigrated to Argentina in 1898, and Antonio Pellicer Paraire, who arrived from Spain in 1898, were two key figures on the pro-organization side. In a series of articles in 1900 in La Protesta Humana, a newspaper launched in 1897 that bolstered the pro-union anarchists' cause, Pellicer Paraire argued for a dual organizational structure for anarchists, composed of a labor federation and a specifically anarchist political organization. The extent of anarchism's influence in the labor movement is disputed: Ronaldo Munck claims that the "dominant tendency in the labour movement was [...] represented by the anarchists of various persuasions", while Ruth Thompson holds that "a closer examination of Argentine trade unions around the turn of the century suggests that the importance of anarchism has