Via :sansnom Translated by Act for freedom now!
Claim for the explosion against the headquarters of the Bolivian Episcopal Conference (CEB)
Reproduced via Spanish from anarquiainfo, 28 November 2021
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In the early hours of Wednesday 24 November, avoiding the numerous patrols in the area, and a few meters from a police car on guard, we placed and detonated a device against the entrance to the headquarters of the Bolivian Episcopal Conference (CEB), the highest authority of the Catholic Church in Bolivia.
This action speaks for itself. The aim was to damage the infrastructure of the CEB and send a clear message that the abuses of the Church will not go unchallenged. This is the only possible response to an institution that persists in torturing bodies to perpetuate its hypocritical morality.
Recently, once again, this institution forced an 11-year-old girl to give birth (1). They prolonged her rape pregnancy as long as they could. Every day that this child spent sequestered by the Bolivian archdiocese, under the duress of moral threats, is clearly a form of torture.
Rape is and always has been a political strategy to subdue, discipline and conquer bodies through fear. The Church has much practice and experience in this area.
But it is not enough for it to entrench its pastoral power by torturing and raping children of both sexes under its tutelage, it also claims to have the power to decide over the bodies of women and girls, hovering like a vulture over rural communities, neighborhoods, schools and hospitals, looking for someone to force into labour in the name of God.
These entrepreneurs of the faith, so-called spiritual guides of divine authority, know that controversies serve their propaganda and keep them in place. They also know that opposing the idea of a “conservative Church that opposes reason” leaves the door open to further proposals for a “renewed Church”, which is simmering within progressive states. It is not a crusade for life, ethics, or even morality that they claim to impose. It is a political strategy for self-preservation, built on the instrumentalisation of a young girl’s body.
For this reason, while we discuss the contradiction between the Church and the State and the place or role the former should have in the latter, we are only prolonging the system of oppression that both embody, because in the meantime what underlies this false critique escapes us: pastoral power is merely the predecessor of modern governance. It is the same technology of power exercised over each and every one of us, based on the subjugation and submission of the individual. It will have changed its form, but not its mechanism.
This attack is not, therefore, a request to the state power regarding the margin of action it leaves to the Church. It is a frontal attack on the political rationality that underlies both.
Who, if not the police state, has come out today to defend the precious walls of the Catholic institution? Or is it not the state that is still striving to delegate to the latter its share of control over the fundamental sectors of people’s daily lives? “I am the one who decides about this girl’s body and life”, the rapist, the Church and the State shout in unison. Thus, all three embody the logic of patriarchal power.
In all cases, the result is the same: the body subjugated, the will broken. We [women] know that what matters to them in life is to administer it in order to perpetuate their privileges.
We do not echo the slogan “Church and State are a separate matter”, but rather say: we will not rest until both are a thing of the past. Let them know that they will never get our passivity in the face of their systematic violence.
Let their temples and their morals burn!
For the end of patriarchy, the state and capitalism!
Until the end of all forms of oppression!
Anonymous for the Destruction of Patriarchy