A letter

Comrades,

It’s time I used my typewriter, considering the requests from many compas from different areas of the world, including Mexico, who repeatedly asked me to tell them what situation I was going through. I’d like to start by apologizing for not giving news for many months, more than 6 to be precise. Never mind, I haven’t done so for different, very personal reasons.

For now I’m going to say only a few things, starting from the judicial ones. The trial against me is continuing but there have been some changes and there is no sentence so far. Well, a week ago my case became competence of the tribunal 20 dealing with non serious offences. This is due to the reform of the law according to which I was accused, with the result that my case is now regarded as a non serious one in the Mexican penal code: break of the public peace, with a sentence ranging from 6 to 30 years without possibility of bail, has been changed into non serious offence, with a sentence ranging from 4 to 7 years. This is the reasons why anarchist lawyers demanded my release.

The tribunal 32 based in Recusorio Varolin Preventivo Sur, which took up my case at first, made a request for it to be transferred to another tribunal. Of course the prosecution appealed against this but a couple of months later the appeal was rejected and the transfer went on. This involved some problems for a couple of weeks but finally I had notification of the transfer.

This may seems a good change but it is not completely good because a new trial will have to start, whereas the previous one had almost concluded.

The change will give the prosecution a new opportunity for gathering more evidence against me and rebuild the case, which presented a number of faults. For example, during a hearing which I attended while being detained at the Reclusorio Sur the prosecutor called a witness, a woman of the antiriot police who had nothing to do with my imprisonment. She had been involved in a previous arrest following minor incidents against bullfighting in 2009. Moreover she no longer works with the institutions. Naturally my lawyers dismissed this alleged evidence, only due to the prosecutor’s intention to prove my tendency to breach the public peace. We demanded this phase of evidence to be acquired as it was, which implied 3–4 months of trial and the risk to get a maximum sentence of 7 years imprisonment.

During these months I have been waiting (along with you all) for the decision concerning the appeal presented by the prosecution after my release – they call it freedom but I can’t define it as such only because I was released from prison, for me freedom must be absolute. The appeal was rejected and I am still free awaiting trial, while both the prosecution and the defence were granted more time to gather evidence, which we believe is useless and only serves to confirm the presence of the prosecutor in this case. We renounced this extra time. It was then that the tribunal 32 decided to transfer the case to the court dealing with non serious offences, and the prosecution made an appeal.

Personally I want to publicly declare that I maintain my position. The considerations that can be drawn from my situation should be of strategic and tactic nature, especially as concerns ideas and not only the judicial consequences that they may produce. We may say, quite often this is the price of waging a war, an individual and collective conflict, and we can’t ignore its consequences in a cowardly way by not taking into account the sentences or the incertitude that the comrades hit by the repression of the state suffer or will suffer. We must take on these consequences individually or collectively when we decide to engage in a direct struggle against the State/Capital.

Usually I don’t agree with those who picture the revolution as an easy one, a non violent change without repercussions or repression from the State apparatus. Not that I want this to happen but I’m aware of the fact that we need to reduce risks to a minimum. At the same time we also have to be aware of the fact that repression along with criminalization are the weapons the state use to stop what disturbs its dominion, if our activity is to be placed outside the legal parameters of the system and our forms of struggle are to overcome the limits imposed by ideologies in a straightforward conflict against the Authority.

I’m not saying we have to worship violence or revolutionary violence; it is simply something that the anarchist movement has taken from the past and brought into the present in order to struggle against the State/Capital. Always bearing in mind that violence is not the climax of our individual/collective intervention we have to reject the false dichotomy imposed by both the system – especially the police state we have today with DF, just to make an example – and by its defenders and supporters – leftists, pacifists, reformers, etc – in order to undermine the insurrection process or obstruct it with false dilemmas, which end up in irreconcilable splits.

For me attack is not only the armed one or the explosive one. It is any form of anarchist intervention that questions and criticizes reality, make propositions and heads towards the climax of individual and generalized insurrection.

All attacks against power that have followed one another since 2007 are the results of some uprisings that we can see today in the streets. This is this force that today is animating the anarchist impulse, and is also going beyond it. It is the force that has allowed many comrades to gain full awareness and take important steps in discussion and action, without splitting theory and practice. What you think you do, regardless of the fact that some comrades agree or not with interventions such as sabotage or individual actions.

I think these issues – explosive attacks, various acts of sabotage – are not the climax of our struggle. Perhaps they are such in the current moment but I think these actions are individual interventions, of claim, of attack, and at the same time they add to propaganda – books, publications, protests and various activities. They are part of the same commitment towards insurrection when there are certain conditions. But this too is part of the awareness of the intervention in favour of irrational uprisings so that the latter turn into conscious and generalized insurrection.

We can’t believe that our actions, even including the minor ones, won’t have any repercussions. Anarchism is illegal in itself and thoughts of freedom are incompatible with the parameters imposed by the system. The challenge of the destruction of the society of capital is the only existing community.

The absurd difference between legal and illegal is not only an excuse used by those who fill their mouths with fine words and nostalgia and see anarchism as something obsolete. I believe our struggle is there to grab total and absolute freedom; it is an incorruptible struggle that has always been ready to use all the means at its disposal in order to achieve its goal: individualist critique, destruction and construction.

Now I’d like to comment on an article appeared in the magazine Proceso, issue 103, April 2013. The investigative article is entitled ‘Alarm for Mexican anarchists’. First of all I’d like to say that the article is not that bad, if confronted with what is being said about anarchists in this kind of magazines. To tell the truth, Proceso has always published very accurate articles. The article refers to a fact that many comrades have noted for a long tine: the birth of an international insurrectional network. The collaboration between European intelligence services represents a more serious problem than that of the CISEN – which based an investigation against anarchist groups on their facebook accounts, alleging that three of these groups had ‘some firearms’ at their disposal, a statement that I find absurd because we are in a country where anyone has weapons, weapons are everywhere, and to get them it is sufficient to intimidate some absent-minded cop walking where they shouldn’t do so… etc.

The article of the CISEN seems to be made in order to create alarm and sensation, unlike that of the magazine Proceso, which I think deserve some attention. The question concerning Europol is that this obscure police body has the task of gathering information on the struggle of the groups of anarchist action operating in Europe. And the Italian DIGOS maintains its theorems in order to create illegal associations of anarchist that seems to be drawn from some gangsters novels: hierarchical armed associations, which in most cases are just the product of the imagination of the judges in charge of solving cases of attack or execution occurring in the country, and which are claimed by anarchists or are attributed to the latter. By the way the collaboration between intelligence services and the Europol itself only reproduce this kind of imaginary models.

Finally, as I was asked to do so, I’d like to clarify that I have no reason to thank the student Movement 132 for having being released from prison. The doubt comes from the fact that the change in the law made by the GDF would be due to the ‘pressure’ exercised by this group. I believe that this decision is just a strategically political one, as it came along with the appointment of Mancera in the government of DF and in relation to the repression of December 1. What would it be my fault? Think of Ebrad, who after being acclaimed as the best mayor in the world has violated all human rights. This change in the law only served to neutralize the protests of these reformists who act according to the law and always respect the established rules, thus reproducing the strategy of social democracy, which is that of Demand – I’m not talking about the single exceptions that can be found in their ranks but about their general position. What happened is that the lawyers of the GASPA evaluated, demanded and obtained my release. A critique is not always contempt and those who see things that way can’t distinguish the one from the other. How can we progress if we always feel accused and offended?

I say goodbye now, hoping I have not been too untimely, as I often am. I’d like to thank the anarchist comrades of affinity for their support and solidarity, which they showed me when I was in prison and also now that I’m out. Warm greetings to the comrades: Nikos Maziotis, Pola Roupa and little Victor Lambros, who at the age of three is on the run along with his parents.

Mario Antonio López., México DF- 31 Julio 2013