Category Archives: Interview with comrade/communique

Italy: To the Burning Hearts. Collective Text of Anarchists Arrested in Operation Renata in Trentino (October 18, 2019)

via:  amwenglish.com

The following is a collective text by anarchist comrades, arrested in the repressive operation Renata, in Trentino, Italy.

The anarchist does not look to success, to victory, to competition. Fight because it’s right. And in any fight the loss is part of life. He does not change his mind because he loses and even less renounces the subsequent struggle. The system feeds itself on the people who do not struggle, not because they are invincible. The work of the anarchist is to instill a revolt in the people, not in segments but continually. Like a wave that withdraws and then returns. You ask me if we will win? You ask me the wrong question. Ask me if we will fight and I will answer yes.
– Luigi Galleani

Today we decided to have our say on the “Renata” operation. In other writings the inquiry was analyzed, both in regard to the general repressive aspects of the State, and in regard to the technological, inquisitorial and juridical tools used to hit those who still dare to fight for something different and still are on the wings of freedom.

We have decided not to go to the Court that will judge us. It is not the courtroom where we choose to speak today.

We want to say in those places where we struggle, where there is still a critical spirit, wherever there are conscious men and women that so many things must be changed now, that this state of affairs must be revolutionized.

So we will talk about the facts we are accused of or that are included in the investigation.

These actions – nocturnal or diurnal, individual or collective – are part of a conflict that goes far beyond the specific facts or the territory in which they are located. They are the result of a wider battle, that between the exploited, the exploiters and those who defend them.

We share the spirit, ethics, method and goals of these actions, regardless of who performed them. They speak for themselves, they are understandable to most, they point to a path – that of liberation. They point the finger at those who live by exploitation and war, by hatred and violence, they hope for something more, something that puts an end to the worst atrocities and barbarism, but above all they aim to destroy the wall of resignation, in such poor times of human solidarity, of rebellion, critical thinking. Continue reading


Chile: Subversive Prisoners Joaquin Garcia Chanks and Juan Aliste Vega on Insurrection in Chile

via: https://es-contrainfo.espiv.net/2019

Statement by compañero Joaquín García Chanks on the context of Revolt.

We have witnessed a seemingly unpredictable phenomenon; thousands of young people from a virtually innocuous claim, have given free rein to their weariness with their daily life, destroying symbols and banners, fears, lies and, why not, certain modalities. It is not possible in this small text to try, perhaps in vain, to analyze the reason for this situation. I do not think it necessary to type the facts under superficialities and slogans or to attribute this catharsis to an accumulation of situations; sometimes everything is more simple. Today, I smile happily at the break of the order of things, the momentary breakdown of the status quo, from the fire to the symbols of lies and misery; I enjoy the potential of this break. It is not necessary to deceive oneself; it would be naive to believe that the Revolt carries our values or politics. That after catharsis, the Counter of the miseries of sustained existence will reach zero or an inevitable anarchic becoming; it is necessary to enjoy the revolt, enjoy the essential will that undermines all immobility, the flames of a moment becoming chaotic that only by constant combustion can survive and thus maintain its indomitable beauty. Today I smiled for a gift that nobody has given me. Continue reading


Turin, Italy: A text from Amma in “Le Vallette” prison (October 9th, 2019)

via: insuscettibilediravvedimento

Translated by act for freedom now!

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We are sharing this text written by Amma, imprisoned on 20th September 2019, along with Patrick and Uzzo, on charges of aggravated violence and resistance to public official, damage, spraying, for taking part in a demo on 9th February in Turin in solidarity with Asilo Occupato following its eviction and with those arrested during “Operation Scintilla”, and against the gentrification and militarization of the Aurora neighbourhood.

Amma wants to divulge and circulate among comrades face to face, via email and through publication in websites, more detailed information on what he’s going through in “Le Vallette” prison, the prison conditions and the screws’ violence during these weeks of incarceration.

Communication with Amma is difficult and the information we manage to get is incomplete. Many of his letters have been held, and so far the many telegrams we sent have never reached him. Outgoing letters have arrived in no particular order, over two weeks after being posted. Visits with his mother were granted three weeks after the arrest and we are still waiting for the response to a comrade’s request for visits. A request for house arrest has been rejected and we are waiting for the reasons to be made known.

The news we got only served to increase our rage. On 8th October there was a hearing at the court of review. While Amma was being taken to the court and during it there were heated exchanges and confrontations with the State’s servants, the investigating judge and the public prosecutor in particular. After he was taken back to “Le Vallette”, the loathsome guards laid into Amma. The result: a perforated eardrum due to the screw’s blows; beatings, provocation and threats. Continue reading


UK: Letter from John Bowden, long-term radical prisoner

via: 325

There is a group of prisoners who although imprisoned for non-political offences subsequently become politicised or radicalised whilst in jail, and in both the USA and Britain this is a phenomenon that has become increasingly widespread.

In the USA during the 1960s and 70s the radicalisation of ordinary black prisoners, in particular, was fostered by the centrality of imprisonment in the experience of black activists and revolutionaries like Malcolm X (who described prisons as “universities of revolution”), Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, H Rap Brown, Angela Davis and others. George Jackson described his own politicisation succinctly: “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me”.

Thus those whom W.E.B. Dubois described as an “army of the wronged” increasingly defined themselves as political prisoners who were the products of an oppressive political-economic order. This belief underpinned the praxis of radical groups such as the Black Panthers and Symbionese Liberation Army, and prisons were seen as the epicentre of a broader social and political revolution. The call for recognition of radicalised prisoners claim to political status underpinned prisoners’ demands in a series of protests that punctuated the 1970s in U.S. Prisons such as Folsom, Soledad, San Quentin and, later, Attica.

The radicalisation of ordinary prisoners in both the UK and the USA was channeled through both identity politics and the prisoner union movement. In the UK such groups during the 1970s were highly active in organised protests and uprisings against oppressive prison conditions, particularly for long-term prisoners. The politicisation of ordinary prisoners who link their imprisonment to broader social and political inequality and oppression, and prison as the epicentre of their struggle, transforming them into proto-revolutionaries striking out against the capitalist state, is a spectre that terrifies those responsible for managing and enforcing prison repression. Continue reading


France: Letter from Vincenzo from the prison of Rennes

30 August 2019
Ciao, this is an open letter…
My name is Vincenzo Vecchi, I have been wanted in Italy on two European arrest warrants since 2012 because of sentences of the courts of Genoa and Milan, one in 2006 and the other in 2001. I was arrested by the police of the flying squad and it was their captain who told me that he was very satisfied with this operation between the police forces of two European countries. A structure, said the captain, whose collaboration is obviously working better and better.
“It is financed by Interpol…” he told me in a confidential tone… captain I don’t think there is anything new in this…I know well about collaboration in “police operations” and that is precisely why I don’t want to be sent back [ndr. to Italy]. “France is better than Italy?”… just to make it clear, I am not interested in expressing a preference between the prisons of one country or another, indeed I have already expressed my point of view on more or less democratic prisons (and on the countries that are their mirror, as someone rightly said), in broad terms that is the reason I have already done time in prison. They cooperate among themselves on topics such as “regulation”, reception, the movement of individuals on European soil (a subject that concerns me in first person), are able to give birth to monstrous agreements like “Frontex” … they give directives which as a result add to the already macabre figures of boats sunk with their “load of poor” every day. If you want to keep your feet on the ground, aren’t the operations at the borders of Libya or Tunisia where those poor people are repelled home, militarily, (concentrating them in camps on the way) the result of this cooperation? I call this war.
So that is why I don’t want to be dispatched, that is why I don’t want to find myself being the result of a good police (co)operation carried out by two allied States in times of war … even if I still have a chance, since I have still dry feet … I wanted to tell the captain all this, I wanted to tell him that I am against this war … but he was too busy taking selfie upon selfie with his colleagues from the flying squad … and the prison door opened in front of us …
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Rete Evasioni (Evasion Network)

Letter from Anarchist Prisoner Toni Chavero on Rotating Hunger Strike in Spanish Prisons

 

A rotating hunger strike began this September in Spanish prisons to draw attention to the horrible situation in Spanish prisons, tortures, deaths, the basicly nonexistent medical attention, terrible food, bad communication inside/outside, isolation confinement for rebellious prisoners, etc. etc. There are thousands of denouncements of this situation in the offices of the European Union Tribunals, at least from the last 20 years. No one there cares about this nonexistent human rights in Spanish prisons! So the prisoners, with the support of solidarity groups from outside, try to continue the long tradition of struggles against this fascist prisoner system in Spain. So from last September 1st, a small group of prisoners started this rotative hungerstrike and Toni Chavero, an anarchist comrade, actually encaged in the prison of Estremera (Madrid) wrote this letter:

Letter from anarchist prisoner Toni Chavero about the rotating hunger strike in Spanish prisons

Bunker of Estremera (Prison Madrid VII)

5th September, 2019

Cheers, comrades, I am Toni Chavero. I hope that on the arrival of these letters you will find yourself with strength and courage. We need strength, determination and a firm position. I want to thank you, first of all, for joining these rotating hunger strikes. I have been on strike for five days today, but I didn’t even have to start it, the reprisals came earlier. I have been cut off from communications with three comrades for “reasons of security and good order of the establishment.” Since they lack the arguments or connections that lead to this intervention, they continue to violate our rights and freedoms through the nose, we will see what the court says. Although I know this goes on for a long time, I have set out to recover communications with my comrades.

The dentist and the oculist don’t even call me. Reprisals or a Hippocratic oath? Or hypocrite?

The objective of this strike is obvious and necessary: to demand the application of Articles 104.4 and 196 RP to the comrades with chronic diseases, their release without the fascist requirement of having to be in terminal phase, I mean, dead. We’re not gonna stand for this. At least they won’t shut us up. That’s clear to us. Continue reading


Chile: Statement by Anarchist comrade Marcelo Villarroel on Political Prison in Chile

via: amwenglish

From the high security jail of Santiago de Chile I send these words of greeting to all who meet today in Villa Francia to share visions and experiences around the political prison.

The jail that I live in today is the same one that has taken more than 20 years of my life.

I arrived here at the age of 21, transferred from the former penitentiary at its inauguration on February 20, 1994, leading me in 2004 with the anti-jail fight started with Kamina Libre in 1996.

The KAS was then used to imprison and annihilate the military political subversion of the left. Rodríguistas, Miristas and Mapucistas lautarinos [members of MAPU-Lautaro, an armed left-wing group] were recipients of the perverse dirty war of the government of Aylwin and Frei that managed to defeat the armed projects embodied in the FPMR, the different MIR and the Mapu-Lautaro.

There were many factors that caused this defeat and the prisoners of that generation began to leave after a decade of confinement, one of the toughest in Chilean carceral history.

The composition of social reality was severely transformed by the State and the Capital in the process of bourgeois remaking, thus transforming paradigms, ideas, practices and tensions.

It was in the second half of the ‘90s that the subversive reality began to change definitely as well as the ideas of forces that serve as references and guides for action. Continue reading


Greece: Contribution to the international meeting against the techno-sciences (Italy – July 2019) by anarchist Dino Giagtzoglou, prisoner of the Greek state.

 

via Resistenze al Nanomondo

IT: Contributo per l’incontro internazionale contro le tecno-scienze (Italia – luglio 2019) dell’anarchico Dino Giagtzoglou, prigioniero dello stato greco

GR: Ντίνος Γιαγτζόγλου: Συνεισφορά Στη Διεθνή Συνάντηση Ενάντια Στις Τεχνο-Επιστήμες

Contribution to the international meeting against the techno-sciences (Italy – July 2019) by anarchist Dino Giagtzoglou, prisoner of the Greek state

Comrades

I start this letter with a certainty. I am sure that our life experiences are very different as well as the starting points of the struggle of each and every one. I also think that with many of you we have different ideological origins and disagreements or contrasts on individual issues. But I firmly believe that the will to resist the plans of Domination, stemming from the awareness of the fundamental social alienation that alienates us from ourselves and nature as a whole, and the revolutionary passion for the destruction of the mega-machine of Power unite us in a common vision of a world free from the shackles of civilization. By going through a variety of analyzes, striding kilometer distances and eliminating in practice the language obstacles, since we recognize that there is the community of struggle for total liberation, we can really keep the flame of the revolt lit and the wager of the social revolution open. I therefore send a warm greeting to the Resistenze Al Nanomondo collective and to all the participants in the international meeting against the techno-sciences, expressing in advance my eagerness to fill the gaps in knowledge, that my absence will undoubtedly cause, by studying your reflections, your conclusions and everything you can get me through the actions and collaborations that will come from your fermentations in Italy.

But let’s take things in turn. For 21 months now, I have been pre-trial detained in the Greek prisons because I made the decision, like many fighters around the world, to realize my ideas by taking a battle position in the social war and fighting against power, here and now. So I am in prison because I put my ideas into practice beyond the limits of the law and certainly not by accident.

With the firm conviction that the revolution will either be lawless or it will be nothing, I wanted to give a concrete example – in the first person and in the present tense – of what revolutionary solidarity could mean, beyond the dipoles of innocence and guilt, of legality and illegality, by providing shelter to a persecuted comrade. That is why I am buried in tons of cement and iron, risking to be condemned for the “terrorist” attacks with booby-trapped letter envelopes on EU officials, executives of economic organizations and credit rating agencies sent in the spring of 2017, with which I have denied my correlation since my arrest, but the odds of my conviction for them remain high. Of course no one was found in prison simply because one decided to fight against oppression and exploitation. My current status is the actual proof that I made mistakes. Mistakes in some decisions I made in relation both to myself and to other individuals with whom I misguidedly felt we have been sharing a common struggle. Mistakes that cost dozens of years of imprisonment, mistakes that may be unforgivable, but certainly neither them nor prison itself can cancel my permanent determination for struggle, struggle, struggle… under any circumstances. So I can only breathe through the endeavors of the comrades who are outside the walls and continue the struggle. I want to support such efforts because through them I am inspiring and essentially exist, I live for them! And so I see these three days too. Continue reading


Chile: Statement by Marcelo Villarroel on Political Prison in Chile

via AMW English

From the high security jail of Santiago de Chile I send these words of greeting to all who meet today in Villa Francia to share visions and experiences around the political prison.

The jail that I live in today is the same one that has taken more than 20 years of my life.

I arrived here at the age of 21, transferred from the former penitentiary at its inauguration on February 20, 1994, leading me in 2004 with the anti-jail fight started with Kamina Libre in 1996.

The KAS was then used to imprison and annihilate the military political subversion of the left. Rodríguistas, Miristas and Mapucistas lautarinos [members of MAPU-Lautaro, an armed left-wing group] were recipients of the perverse dirty war of the government of Aylwin and Frei that managed to defeat the armed projects embodied in the FPMR, the different MIR and the Mapu-Lautaro.

There were many factors that caused this defeat and the prisoners of that generation began to leave after a decade of confinement, one of the toughest in Chilean carceral history.

The composition of social reality was severely transformed by the State and the Capital in the process of bourgeois remaking, thus transforming paradigms, ideas, practices and tensions.

It was in the second half of the ‘90s that the subversive reality began to change definitely as well as the ideas of forces that serve as references and guides for action. Continue reading


Hamburg, Germany: Letter from One of the Park Bench 3 from Holstenglacis Prison

Saturday August 10, 2019

Hello everyone !

It has now been a little over a month since we three of the Park Bench were arrested and, in a second time, two of us were taken into custody. In this letter, I would like to describe a little bit about my personal situation, here in jail. I can not say anything about the charges or the progress of the court process, because we can not communicate between people involved. I can only agree with the council not to indulge in speculation, gossip and panic.

The solidarity and support we receive here are wonderful and breathtaking. The many letters, the words of greetings, the photos and the gather give us strength and confidence. You are awesome.

Now, preventive detention. This means, here, at least during the first months, 23 hours of confinement in 10 square meters, with bed, table, chair, wardrobe, toilet and sink. An hour’s walk in the courtyard, in my case with the other prisoners on my floor, alternately morning or afternoon. We wake up at 6:30, with a loud alarm, lunch is at 11:30, dinner is served at 16:30 and must also be enough for breakfast, because in the morning there is only hot water or tea. Food is usually enough to make ends meet, but those who want a balanced diet depend on the “canteen” to buy things from the prison. Every Wednesday, the lists of orders, in German language, are collected the next day. Saturday, we will get our order. It’s not exactly cheap and it’s paid with the money from our account at the prison. On top of that there is the money we had in our pocket at the time of the arrest, the money sent from the outside and our insignificant salary, if we work during preventive detention. Unlike detention following a conviction, here work is not an obligation and we work mainly in prison services – cooking, cleaning, painting, laundry ….

Other “privileges” – a rental radio, a rental television, participation in sports groups, discussion circles, courses, etc. must be requested from the school management and, of course, all the prison bureaucracy works only in German. Processing of these requests takes at least a few weeks. The prison guards are extremely abrupt and all information on daily life in prison must be drawn through their noses, the questions annoy them and they give answers reluctantly and in anger; only a few speak English. Continue reading