Active Solidarity with Luciano Pitronello, Tortuga – September 22 (Chile)

Sept, 20, 2011 325 Magazine

For the spreading of action

Anarchist and anti-authoritarian dissidence has grown explosively in Chile
since 2004. In the streets, neighbourhoods and universities a presence has
increased without a doubt, showing the rejection of authority, State and
Capitalism.

In this context many diverse groups have decided to pass to the offensive
illegal struggle against the State.

In this optic they have attacked various bank agencies, police stations,
churches and amusement centres of the bourgeoisie and the rich with
explosive devices.

Each one of the attacks is claimed in political communiques with names of
dead fighters we want to remember. They are carefully planned not to hurt
or damage anybody, only the structures chosen to be attacked.

This fact is not insignificant, because there is evidence of a precise
recognition of what is the enemy, and where it hides itself, not confusing
it with anyone. This demonstrates in the long term, a projectuality of
struggle and not the simple desire to appear, as happens with militarists
drifts, the adrenalin fetish, or ego-driven action.

So, the attacks follow one another, increasing in boldness and complexity
over the years. Power is tricked from the very interior of the panoptical
city, which is why it is made to feel the hysterical rage sweating out
from the ministerial palaces. So the hunt begins, the judicial but also
media persecution unfolds. Known anarchists, ex- political prisoners and
those who have transformed practical vindicated solidarity into a
continuous way of life, are threatened and persecuted by pro-government
and official means.

After years of investigations, interception of telephone calls, pursuits,
shootings and search points, the diverse police organisms are incapable of
finding the people responsible for the attacks.

But one freezing dawn of the month of May was to make the police lighten
their step. The 22 of May of 2009, anarchist comrade Mauricio Morales (27
years) is killed. The explosive charge that he was carrying blows up in
his hands, killing him in the act.

He was on his way to the gendarmerie school, an institution that has links
with the jails of the whole country, directly responsible for the
confinement of hundreds of thousands of prisoners.

Following the death of the comrade Mauri the police immediately dart
towards his surroundings and circle of comrades. So, the anti-cultural
spaces that Mauri visited are pointed at and attacked, the same day and
over the following months.
Houses searched, comrades kidnapped, okupas (squats) are evicted and the
circles are narrowed. Beyond the accuracy or falsity of the conjectures of
power, what is certain is that those with relations of affection and
comradeship will be struck and harassed.

Anybody that has shared something with the comrade Mauri and who does not
accept remaining in silence as a form of memory, will be immediately swell
the list of suspects.

In spite of the adverse context, there are still clenched fists, comrades
that do not shut up, that are still not resigned… there are those who
smile with each overflowing act of rebelliousness. The pain is terrible,
but many attacks change the pain into rage. The permanent scar will remind
them every day of the loss of the comrade.

The attacks follow and the look of shame on the powerful takes a walk
exasperated, because direct action even arrives two blocks away from the
president’s home. The anarchists are laughing and they are laughing
loudly.

Power will take revenge for its incapacity to discover those responsible
for the actions, attacking 14 comrades, prisoners, under the gross and
fictitious accusation of forming an illicit terrorist association. This
group would be responsible for at least 30 of the attacks produced in the
capital city.

The investigations, denominated by the press the “Bombs case”, forcibly
and capriciously regroups 14 people who did not know each other, that have
no links in some cases, even politically.

The charges that weigh on the comrades are a gross and ignorant blow,
because historically anarchists have never have regrouped around a leader
or cupola. The illicit association, as a concept , attacks the basis of
anarchist horizontal organization, the only real thing about the
application of this charge and concept is the increasing of possible
sentences.
Power is smiling through the press, because revenge has been unleashed on
a diffuse area that questions the very existence of authority. It’s
raining insults and the fear is spreading, making many retreat and stay in
silence and remaining silent as their only answer.

In spite of that, not everything is silenced, there still exist those who
use all the instruments possible to fight against power.

Sadly, on June 1, of 2011, a terrible accident stains a new date in the
calendar with blood. That cold dawn comrade Luciano Pitronello, Turtle,
(22 years) takes the terrible blast of the shockwave of a homemade bomb
placed in a bank. The comrade Turtle advances wounded and in shock, while
the security cameras record those crucial minutes. The fire devours his
clothes while his steps are disoriented by the pain.

The press arrives at the spot almost immediately. Like the good
mercenaries that they are, they point their cameras with morbid intention
to hurt the feelings of Turtle and his dear ones.

This is the way that the comrade is filmed : wounded and naked, covered in
gunpowder and screaming in pain. These images will be repeated
continuously as the best advertisement of the misery that represents
capital and its culture of arrogance.

“A comrade is wounded and in the hands of the police, that is reason
enough to support and show solidarity”….

Turtle is transferred to a hospital, where his right hand and three
fingers of the left one are amputated from him. His eyes are seriously
damaged and he is only able to distinguish indistinct forms. His hearing
has also been damaged, and he has had dozens of skingrafts of his own
skin.

He is badly wounded and his condition is serious. Even so, he manages to
go forward, to push his body in spite of facing a very complex situation,
as much in terms of health as in the moral and judicial consequences.

Almost 4 months after Turtle’s accident, the comrade left the clinic where
he was being held, and transferred to the home of his mother, where he
remains under police and family monitoring.

Sadly, in all these months, not only has his nuclear family collaborated
with the police organisms giving the names of Turtle’s circle of friends,
but they have also publicly discredited the ideas and way of life of our
comrade Turtle.
This lamentable fact reminds us of other experiences, where even brothers
or couples decided to collaborate with the police, due to fear or for
economic reward.

Very different from the combative and supportive attitude that other
parents and families who have come out into the streets for many years,
demanding the freedom of their dear ones or rescuing their names from
oblivion.
Respect for the ideas and decisions of their sons and daughters is
essential for those who do not become collaborators of their relatives’s
enemies.

Turtle’s partner, with whom he has a 3 year old daughter, has been
supportive of the comrade, but also has been the target of the revenge of
the press and of justice. Her home has being raided and her personal life
has been put on display as a way to break her morale.

Face to face with the enemy

This September 22, the comrade Turtle will have to face the formalization
of charges in front of the Chilean judges. That day Capital, the Chilean
State and its powers, will wreak revenge on the comrade. Revenge that has
been meticulously orchestrated and prepared, for every detail strikes him
accurately.

Comrade Luciano, still convalescing from his wounds and wearing a special
suit for burns, will have to appear before a crowded room not only of
judges, lawyers and gendarmes, but also of mercenary journalists. Who will
no doubt photograph each of his wounds and film any difficulty the comrade
has in moving.

Therefore the revenge that he will receive is composed of two factors, one
entirely judicial, because the comrade will face a court who represents
the bourgeois and democratic social order. A court that will not hesitate
a second in sentencing him to one long sentence in some modern
extermination centre. With this, looking to give a clear signal to all
those who decide to go beyond the submissive citizen routine and the peace
of cemeteries imposed by normality.
But a second aspect, no less important, of the revenge orchestrated by
Power against Luciano, has to do with the level of media exhibition.

The morbid spectacle that they will erect in that room of the court, has
the aim of destroying the comrade, to make him collapse politically and
psychically, to attack his moral and annihilate it. As also to strike
those close to him and who are like him and support with him.

Power yearns to turn the life of our comrade Turtle into the example of
punishment, to instill fear and stagnation into all the dissident sectors
of the democratic theatre.

By punishing Turtle, they will try to punish all those who refuse to
swallow the story of the social pact; there are already groups,
anarchists, who are taking upon themselves an open offensive against
capital state/, with its symbols and organizational forms, like also all
the groups and individual students that in insurrectional ways are taking
to the streets and leaving in them the sweat and the blood, after long
days of confrontations with the police.

All of the context lived recently on that piece of land named Chile,
constitutes one more of the scenarios of the social war like in various
parts of the “globe”.

The overflowing of the “citizen protests ” of the uncontrollables, once
again surpasses with deeds and words the desired social control and sense
of normality that is installed through mass means.

It is in this same path of struggle and action, of persistence and
courage, that Turtle took words and dreams, turning them into arms,
attacking in spite of the possible consequences that we all know.

The State/Capital through its legal/mediatic/policial institutions is
trying to establish its authority unquestioned. Public defamation,
repression, jail and bullets will be some of the varied weapons that they
will use with in the object of breaking the will and the actions of the
irreducible ones that do not look for dialogue, because they are consumed
in war against all authority.

In that sense fear, paralysis, passivity or silence concerning the
situation that faces Luciano means to hand oneself over to the enemy. Our
resignation against what happens with the comrade will give a victory to
power and its control mechanisms.

The role of the journalists/police in the conflict.

The State, shamed by the lack of concrete results to give the people
charged with the explosive attacks, is elaborating ridiculous theories,
that they are trying to sustain with police stupidity, mass media and
massive indifference.
Lamentably, Turtle’s accident grants them the perfect occasion to create
an immense apparatus in the style of the old Roman circus to apply its
laws.

In this process of public lynching not only police and judges have become
jumbled, but the great mass media, who play a fundamental roll.
Contributors, accomplices, collaborators and central place in the power
relationships.

Not only do they work openly with the police, in addition they do not
scrimp in efforts to publicly and morbidly exhibit the bodies of the
comrades in the prisoners’ dock, exhibit their wounds or their dead
bodies.

They exhibited our brother Mauri, showing his dead body, causing deep pain
to his dear ones and comrades. They invented a supposed interview to false
comrades of Mauri, eager only to discredit him and systematically attacked
his surroundings of affection and commitment. They validated with infamous
news articles, all the repressive game of the bomb case.

The insult that we have received from the journalists cannot be forgotten,
it cannot be standardized and ingenuously believed that they are just the
excesses of precise people. They have attacked, they have harmed our
dignity and the privacy of our brothers and that humiliation must be
returned, blow by blow, until they back down.

It is the work of the press, more and more committed in the direct fight
against those who take up the offensive, that has generated gross
stereotypes of those who fight. Their news articles instill paranoia and
demonisation, generating concepts like “ vandals ”, “ soulless ” and “
violent ”, to mention a few.

In these days they give a prize to the good citizen, decree the minute of
fame, for the stupid idiot ones that collaborate with the control
organisms, or assume reactionary positions as informers in the student
mobilizations.

But the footmen journalists have not stopped there, they took a further
step in persecuting, coarsely denouncing and defamating the comrades in
incredible ways. They have arrived at the point from which journalists
like Max Frick and F.A.V.P. appear as protected witnesses in the Bomb
case.

Their testimonies, plagued with lies and personal revenge, are trying to
condemn the comrades in one of the most media orchestrated cases of recent
times. For their declarations these two idiots receive protection and
money from the State… their lives get fat and comfortable, while our
brothers undergo confinement.

Our answer: solidarity

It is against these facts and against the police attack, that we must make
clear that revolutionary solidarity, internationalism and active memory
are substantial and indissoluble elements in all the process of struggle.
To the comrades who are in the front firing line receiving the blows of
the power, we, from this small written gesture, shout with all our lungs:
solidarity, memory and action!!!

All those directly facing Capitalism are our brothers, and we shout tears
for those no longer physically with us. We have not forgotten them, we are
all with you and in all the possible ways, always present, eternally
present.

This is the moment in which the slogan “nobody is alone in the social
war”, must acquire a special practical meaning. It depends on us,
certainly, and on our real will to realise the common effort of
solidarity.

All actions are extremely valuable and urgent: letters, pamphlets,
discussion, agitation, bombs and fire, are feeding the indomitable spirit
of our comrades.

For that reason the call is to organize solidarity this September 22. We
must make our brother and comrade feel by means of all type of gestures,
that the fighters of all parts of the globe are sharing this hard trial
with him. Because the fight for freedom is one, inside and outside.
Forgetfulness and silence… are characteristic only of traitors.

Debate, spread, attack, not one step back in front of the enemy.

Fire and more fire for Capitalism, their defenders and their false critics.

A fraternal greeting and total support to comrade Luciano at this
difficult moment and those that may come.
Rebel spirits: they are not satisfied with being affected by what happens
to Luciano… from words to acts, the actions will make us brothers, no
matters how dark the night appears.

Active solidarity, with the comrades in Chile, Greece, Switzerland,
Mexico, the USA and all the accomplices of the revolt in each corner of
the world.

Freedom to all political prisoners! Fire to the jail, flight to the rebels!

To the streets for the young people assassinated during the student
protests: Manuel Gutierrez and Mario Parraguéz, we do not want bourgeois
justice, we look for revolutionary execution …..

In memory of our dear comrade Claudia Lopez, young anarchist assassinated
by the police on September 11, 1998 in area of La Pincoya.

Black September of 2011.