It has been a little more than a month since the comrades Mónica and Francisco have been in preventive detention, accused of being responsible for various actions that attempted against figures of state power. It is not the intention of this communiqué to discuss their innocence, since as enemies of the State and its institutions, we do not identify with the sense of “justice” nor much less with the moral system of innocence and guilt which offers the service of truth and its legal forms. Nor will we use the convenient concept of “montage” to refer to the way in which the state and the government attack and act against the comrades, since we have never considered such a spectacle (along with the fetishes, sensationalisms and apologies that it expires) as a defense against the alleged innocence of anarchists. As they bordered on “Neither guilty nor innocent, just anarchists” or “guilty or innocent? Anarchists!”.
We share the recent reflections that Monica and Francisco wrote about their arrests, the struggles and their consequences. We always embrace the anarchic re-affirmation of what we believe, their blows and counter-blows, and we are proud to hear the revolutionary conviction in the face of punitive punishment, even – I have independently – if they are considered innocent or not from any political spectrum, For we believe that innocence in these cases is nothing more than a misunderstanding of the uncertainties or repressive certainties of those who consider themselves at war with the state, since recognizing the potential danger of what we believe is a sufficient argument for power to initiate and articulate its persecutions, assassinations and imprisonments against those who attempt to defend freedom and life. And well, we have to clarify that our idea of “attack” is committed much more than an explosive impact, it includes a wide and multiform field of actions, sensations and gestures that undertake the challenge of autonomy in coexistence with the struggle against the established. By this we mean that we consider an explosive device to be as dangerous as a book, an action in memory of a fallen comrade to be as vindicative as solidarity for the victims, squatted spaces and libraries to be as dangerous as a presence in the street with rallies and concentrations, and more examples in a not so long etc. that we find necessary to discuss and rethink from the political and insurrectionary point of view, as well as from the psychological and social point of view.
We are not afraid of direct action, and we coin violence when we assume the consequences of it. We believe it is necessary to divest ourselves of the armed imaginary and its diverse explosive connotations when forming our impressions of what we construct and its respective repercussions. This does not mean that we do not claim such actions that are committed in an armed way or from the initiative of the traditional “attack”, on the contrary, we are happy to see how the structures of power, their symbols and accomplices are attacked, but we also believe that the importance and dangerousness of what we do expands in large part in/from the convictions we place on such actions, as individuals and/or collectives, into unconditional force so we believe, in its broadest anarchic sense, that it can compromise an initiative or project in the war against power. It is the personal decisions that we make in our continuous motivation for destruction, which expresses the different faces of the struggle, its consequences and learning. It is from commitment to oneself that one assumes and determines one’s actions.
We always regret that our comrades fall into the hands of the jailers and for that reason we always show our solidarity for their early freedom. Never defeated! Because prison is not the end of principles, much less a glorious achievement for someone’s “journey”. To think of confinement for the individual as an act of recognition or glory, is to continue reproducing the classic figure of the martyr that the left used to project in political or subversive prisoners, as well as to enlarge, through the construction of an imaginary heroic, the individual only by his condition of prisoner. The iconoclastic feeling provides us with the destruction of the martyr and its vertical vindictive content of the image.
We do not demand that the state reconsider its actions, we do not expect anything from what they call justice or common sense. We do not relax or stop beating about the “humanitarian” conditions that democratic states presume, even if they agreed to uphold “human rights” through international covenants. One of the “state’s most ingenious tricks” is to make people believe that the system, however imperfect, will change. Under this premise, can the prisons, however reformed, be reconfigured to such an extent that they will no longer be considered centers of extermination? For some this answer could be answered with a half-hearted “yes”, perhaps because of the hope that there will be better conditions in confinement or the absence of gendarmes in the process of social “reinsertion”. The truth is that we do not share the idea that prison, no matter how much “improvement” is made to it, for the well-being of the prisoners, can be transformed into something other than a death center. Even so, we are in solidarity with those who mobilize for their own under these expectations and parameters, not sharing the discourse of reform but accompanying the destruction of prison society. This will never mean an abandonment of those who mobilize along these lines, whether they believe in the guarantees of the judicial system or not, whether they believe in prison reform or not, whether they believe in innocence or not. We always call to be present and active for the prisoners of yesterday and today, because “those who forget their prisoners abandon the struggle.
Currently, there are coordinators, networks, organizations, collectives and individuals that have worked hard to maintain an important node of communication between the prisoners and the outside, as well as constantly agitating against the prison and making visible the filth of the institution that is the prison. It is the existence and constancy of this antiprison solidarity in the practical field that allows for a more “pleasant” prison for those who survive inside, because every gesture makes a difference, for them, for the same people and for the torturing intentions of isolation, because we do not keep silent, we do not give truce to abandonment, on the contrary, We attack him and we hit him where it hurts most, with the always unbreakable support networks, because as they say “solidarity is a weapon”, and there are recent examples in our anti-prison history of that, of having seen comrades locked up for the simple – but never passive – act of presence, for not forgetting and following them, with more rage, in the path of anarchy and its flashes.
The week of international solidarity with the anarchist prisoners always draws a deep sigh, because it is a reminder that there are still fellow prisoners around the world and what is frustrating: the conservation of the punitive structure and its prevailing logic in the prison society, where punishment is considered the tool of the wrongly called reinsertion. Here in the territory dominated by the Chilean state, there in the territory dominated by the Spanish, French, Italian, Indonesian, Belorussian, North American, Greek, English, Portuguese, Chinese, Mexican, etc. Presxs companions of diverse anarchic tendencies continue of which we are nourished and discussed. We consider vital the communication (by whatever means and -in-formality it may be) and retribution to the distance (reflections, greetings, reminders of the wide world in which we live), in the so called internationalism of which we are always accompanied by readings and actions that are shared without recognizing frontiers and that encourage to continue being present in the path and insurrectional dialogue.
With much more to say, long live anarchy!
A strong greeting to the comrades Monica, Francisco, Joaquin, Marcelo, Juan Aliste, Gabriel Pombo da Silva, Dinos Giagtzoglou, Christos Rodopoulos, Anna Beniamino, Marius Mason, Marco Bolognino, Mumia Abu-Jamal, to the anarchist comrades of Santiago 1, and to all those who are on the warpath!
An affectionate call to solidarity with the Mapuche communities in war and their political prisoners, many of whom are currently on hunger strike (PPM)
In memory of Mauricio Morales and Xosé Tarrio
From the territory dominated by the Chilean state, an anarchist bookstore
August 25, 2020
