You'll always be with us, Joan

You'll always be with us, Joan

from alasbarricadas.org

This past Thursday, June 17, our friend and comrade Joan Liébana (1991-2021) lost his life while working as a firefighter in an machine shop in Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona).

No private property deserves to be saved at the expense of any worker’s life. For that reason, we demand clear answers and that they assume all the necessary institutional responsibilities: this tragedy stinks of negligence and job insecurity. For that reason, we’ll always be together along with his family demanding to know the truth about what happened in that fateful workshop.
That being said, we didn’t want the confusing and rabidly tragic situation that lead to his death dilute, not even for a moment, the extraordinary humanity of Joan.

For those who did not have the privilege of knowing him, we don’t have words that could express all that he was, as a friend and as an anarchist, but even then we still want to carry out an act of remembrance from the place of the struggle and the anarchist spirit which impregnated him.

In the year 2015 he began to engage in militancy along with us, in Heura Negra, the anarchist assembly of Vallcarca, where he participated until 2017. He lived a couple of years more after that in the neighborhood and, still to this day, the ties he wove -like the electricity that runs through the electrical installations of many homes and that give power and heat to half of Vallcarca- still endure.

We learned many things from Joan. One of the most important ones was to always fight with a smile. Often anarchists (and activists in general) become subsumed in the rage, the frustration and the hopelessness which this shit system drives us to. We need people like Joan, that remind us that we’re free while we fight, that the world that we carry in our hearts is also full of smiles and songs.

Joan was hard-headed and had a huge heart. You know that overwhelming energy that children have? Well he never lost it, maybe thanks to one of his favorite phrases: "Never grow up, it’s a trap!"

Heura Negra, Vallcarca’s Anarchist Assembly, Barcelona.

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