Statement by Marcelo Villarroel

From Act For Freedom Now

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.

Perhaps the last act that reflects the end of a cycle is the escape-rescue of the FPMR here in the KAS in December 1996.

After this, the autonomous construction of the anticapitalist expressions gave way to the birth of an Autonomous and Libertarian Subversion of the insurrectional tendency as an inevitable prelude to the anarchist practices of action.

The way of seeing and understanding the conflict changed forever, and the theoretical tools of the armed left were assumed as a living reflection of an endogenous inability to rethink the road.

All of us who continue without vacations or temporary withdrawals at the time understood the need to build from horizontality, from affinity, attacking the State and Capital, building culture for social warfare through the daily life in the collective, in the band of music, publishing books and fanzines, in the squatter, in the library, in the high school and university as individuals exploited promoting the revolt and not as square militants of closed organizations fighting fictitious wars.

Likewise, since the end of the ‘90s, we found ourselves with peñis [Mapuches] rebuilding their nation from a real autonomy in a war of liberation that until today remains alive and strong as the blood that sustains us.

For more than 15 years now, the reality of political prison has begun to be different. Since the imprisonment of the first peñis at the end of the ‘90s, as well as the prisoners of the street struggle and libertarian struggle for various actions from 2005 onwards.

Occupiers and hooded ones; prisoners for bombings and sabotage, with overalls in armed propaganda, for carrying weapons, bank robberies and dead police…

Mostly a subversive world in Santiago and regions come from the black world of Anarchy in its different expressions and illegal practices.

Without family groups, without human rights lawyers, without partisan apparatus or militants in full-time as proto-bureaucrats. With all the hatred of the State and those who sustain it and maintain that autonomous libertarian subversion is not in their official accounts. Permanently denied even stigmatizing their actions as montages when there really are honest people who are decidedly attacking the present without giving explanations to anyone.

Because this subversion has neither bosses nor leaders nor obedient soldiers. It has no commanders or untouchable characters.

The humility of one who learns by doing without commanding or obeying, guided only by the insurgent conviction of attack on normality.

The political prison has always existed, only the reality of confinement and the prisoners have changed.

Never forget that while many make their lives in full respect of the normality imposed, there are hundreds of us who are twins in the Wallmapu [Mapuche territory] and in the city from a position of real confrontation with the State.

Because reality exceeds any theoretical budget of enlightened ones or youth that think only in the past.

The struggle for total liberation is lived here and now, it continues in every insurgent heart that does not rest until we see the total destruction of the last bastion of the prison society.

Long live the Mapuche resistance.

Long live the anarchist resistance.

For all our dead from yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Against the State and the Capital: social warfare!!

While there is misery there will be rebellion!

Marcelo Villarroel Sepúlveda

Libertarian prisoner

Cas. Sep 15, 2019.

Add new comment