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 |6| 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