Avalanche - The Anarchist correspondence zine Avalanche - The Anarchist correspondence zine 1 | Page 6
If they touch one of us
Solidarity with Mónica and Francisco
January 2014 - Spain
It’s already been two months [four months now] since
Mónica and Francisco, along with three other comrades,
were arrested, isolated and the former two subsequently
jailed under the harsh FIES regime, and the others on
conditional release (with weekly sign-in) awaiting trial
for the same charges.
Many comrades from different places remarked to us
of the apparent aura of “secrecy” perceived around
everything related to the comrades’ situation with the
case itself, and that following the media hype around
everything about the arrests a statement should have
been made. What is certain is that, as we already know,
against the propaganda of the regime and its ideologues,
that is, against the press, little can be done as counterweight; it can be proven, seen how they weave their
webs, and how, closely with the state, they are carving
a niche to fill with the next internal enemy: Islamists,
Galician independistas, animalists accused of opening
cages, anarchists… These –those who do not wish to
go through the orthodox ritual that mandates representation or using the proper channels (that is, democratic,
legal, etc.)– will be those who fill the vacancy created
by ETA, a vacancy that serves the purpose of not only
occupying the position of internal enemy that feeds into
the bureaucratic, repressive and judicial arsenal, the
call for anti-terrorism (itself an institution that refuses
to go away and therefore has to prove its effectiveness
and existence as necessary), a vacuum which can also
be noted in the cells to be filled and in the pages of the
press, that would leave room for other things in the reader’s mind; the evictions matter little, or that millions of
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people have no way to make a living –not even through
channels of slave labor–, that the politicians fill their
treasure chests and laugh in our face. There are very
dangerous phantoms, they tell us, of whom to be truly
afraid: the immigrants, the terrorists, etc.
Those who have seen the news these days will remember all the charged xenophobic language used by these
media props, the journalists and ideologues of the regime, to described our comrades. The intention is clear:
to generate false myths. They tell us of the “Mediterranean triangle”, that “they are outsiders”, of these “foreigners who come to do bad things”, of “bad anarchists
who come from the outside” and of “Greek and Italian
anarchists who come to instruct those here”, etc. What
these lying “experts” fail to recognize is that in the Spanish State there is a long tradition – so to speak – that
is anarchist, huge, diverse and fluctuating, but almost
as old as anarchism itself: from the struggles of the Andalusian libertarians, the reverberations of propaganda
by the deed, the Tragic Week of 1909, the Revolution of
1936, the anti-Franco guerrillas, the millions of people
in the free Barcelona of 1977, anarcho-syndicalism, all
moments and events that make it clear that here, identification with anarchist practice is nothing new.
As for the investigation against our arrested comrades,
it is closed , which doesn’t mean that new evidence can’t
appear overnight. What we also know is that there is another open investigation that appears to seek to create
an international anarchist organization, with strong harassment of several comrades. We have no idea where