Appeal sentence for Juan (Venice, March 28, 2023)
We report that last March 28 our Juanito, sentenced in first instance to 28 years in prison for an action against the League’s headquarters in Villorba (TV) in 2018, had his sentence reduced to 14 years and 10 months by the Venice appeals court. This is still a very high sentence for an action that-beyond the intentions of the anonymous attackers-did not result in any deaths or injuries.
Full solidarity with Juan!
On this matter, see:
https://ilrovescio.info/2022/07/15/lo-stato-condanna-juan-a-ventotto-anni-di-carcere/
https://ilrovescio.info/2022/07/14/col-sangue-agli-occhi/
To write to Comrade:
Juan Antonio Sorroche Fernandez
C. C. of Terni
Campore road 32
05100 Terni
[Taken from https://ilrovescio.info/2023/03/31/venezia-sentenza-dappello-per-juan/]
[Received by e-mail and posted at https://lanemesi.noblogs.org/post/2023/03/29/sentenza-dappello-del-processo-contro-lanarchico-juan-sorroche-il-compagno-e-stato-condannato-a-14-anni-e-10-mesi/]
Treviso, Italy : Northern League premises attacked by Haris Hatzimihelakis Cell/Black International (1881-2018)
Tired of being silent, tired of seeing systematic violence every day through racism, sexism and waged labor that take place in society, whose essential values are authority and profit. Sick of exploitation we see all political parties as main responsible, as they repress freedom with the state, reformist and repressive apparatus (TV, the mass-media, associations, the army, the civil protection, etc.) The state and capital are the biggest criminals, they even violate their own laws, they steal through taxes, they kill through wars and waged labor, rejections of migrants’ boats in the sea, concentration camps for immigrants in Europe and Africa, they contaminate irreversibly men, animals and the entire planet, all for their profit and power.
Let’s not forget the hypocritical complicity of society made of citizens who pretend not to see the horrors of present and past racism and nationalism. This acceptance is the pillar of totalitarianism and democracy: in the course of time the authority based on indifference, fear, apathy was able to create Gulags and nazi concentration camps, and today the concentration camps in Libya and outside our homes. It’s history that repeats itself.
12/08/2018
In the early hours Northern League premises were attacked in Treviso with a device. We claim the placing of the device against politician, cops and their lackeys. We don’t want to be accomplices of all this, we’ll oppose the State’s indiscriminate violence with indiscriminate violence against those responsible for all this. The almost total pacification in Italy, where the masses are busy in making war between the poor, one of our goals is that of opposing resignation, impotence and stillness. The State and capital use all forms of technology and violence to divert attention from the real problems of the exploited, the main one being the hatred between the most vulnerable and dispossessed, between borders, genders, skin colors.
Needless to say, no authoritarian insignificant politicians’ faction would ever be able to fulfill our desires. You’re talking about ‘green-yellow’ government, leftist and right wing, we want the state to be destroyed. You’re promising wage increases, reduced taxes, jobs, we want the elimination of money, goods and work. You’re fighting for better government conditions but we only want to have fun over the ruins in flames of your cities. You do politics, we do social war.
Things are difficult, there’s an existential abyss between us and there’s no space for dialogue. So to us all this makes clear where to strike! To strike racism and exploitation in particular. To strike the state, capital and those responsible. Direct action makes clear why and how to us.
For Anarchist, rebel, internationalist solidarity!
For a world without borders or authority!
With this action we welcome the call launched by the comrades of the ‘Santiago Maldonado cell’, who proposed to increase attacks on the peace of domination’s representatives and accomplices.
We welcome any Anarchist individuality and cell which continues to spread the flame through action, here and now!
‘Today it’s us who take anarchist’s torch in our hands, tomorrow it will be someone else. As long as it doesn’t get extinguished!’[1]
Solidarity with all prisoners, Tamara Sol, Juan Aliste, Juan Flores, Freddy, Marcelo, J.Gan, Marius Mason, Meyer-falk, Dinos Yatzoglou, Lisa Dorfer, CCF and Revolutionary Struggle members.
To anarchists in Florence, Turin, Naples, Cagliari, Chile, Russia, Germany, Poland, of operation Scripta Manent.
And to all the rebels locked up in jails all over the world!
Haris Hatzimihelakis cell/Black International (1881-2018)
[1] Santiago Maldonado Cell/FAI-FRI’s claim of an explosive attack on carabinieri barracks (07/12/2017)
State sentences Juan to twenty-eight years in prison
On July 9, our friend and comrade Juan was sentenced in the first instance to 28 years in prison, and subsequent three years of supervised release, for the charge of 280 bis (attack with the purpose of terrorism) for the explosive attack that damaged the headquarters of the League of Treviso in 2018. A sentence evidently already written, entirely incorporating the PM’s demands despite the fact that the prosecution’s reconstruction was punctually refuted during the course of the trial (particularly with regard to the alleged DNA “evidence”), and brazenly aimed at burying Juan alive under decades of imprisonment, even in the absence of the charge of massacre, withdrawn by the PM himself during the indictment. Juan has been an inmate for three years now in the High Security section of the Terni prison, from which he has always continued to make his voice heard within the anarchist debate, with writings, contributions to assemblies and initiatives, hunger strikes in solidarity with other prisoners, and claiming, even in the Treviso trial, his own anarchism and support for the practices of attack and direct action. At the time of his arrest, he was to serve a combined sentence of eight years, and currently, after the dismissal of the proceedings in which he was under investigation for 280bis for the action against the POLGAI police school in Brescia, he is charged on an additional 280bis charge for an attack dating back to 2014 against the Trento probation court. In the same proceeding, two other comrades are charged with aiding Juan’s absconding in the years prior to his arrest, and a third comrade, Massimo, is in pre-trial detention under house arrest on extortion charges for attempting to have a text read during a radio broadcast about the March 2020 prison massacre. It is clear that the disproportion of the charges (massacre and terrorism, for Juan, extortion for Massimo) to what materially happened is not the gamble of some PM suffering from delusions of grandeur, but a choice aimed at taking out of circulation, for an indefinite period of time (in Juan’s case essentially for life) comrades with whom the state has wanted to do away with for decades, for their contribution to the struggles and because they were determined to make anarchism a living and dangerous force for power, far from any appeasement and renunciation about their ideas and practices, convinced that the time for action is here and now and that the revolutionary perspective is not a dream to be postponed to an indefinite future but a concrete endeavor to be enacted in the present.
The same treatment is being meted out to Alfredo and Anna, defendants in Operation Scripta Manent: not only has Alfredo been transferred to a 41 bis regime (total solitary confinement, defined as a form of torture even by less-than-revolutionary institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights), but the court of cassation has redefined an earlier conviction for massacre into “political massacre,” which carries life imprisonment as the base penalty. In the same trial a number of comrades received sentences of up to two and a half years on charges of incitement to commit crimes for editing newspapers and sites: the attempt to end the practices of attack is flanked by the attempt to silence propaganda; Alfredo’s transfer to 41 bis can also be interpreted, among other things, as aimed at interrupting the contribution of writings, books, interviews, and correspondence that the comrade has always continued to get out of prison.
Behind convictions that find no precedent in the last decades of the anarchist movement’s history lies an overall plan explicitly defined since the establishment of the National Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism Directorate: in addition to extending the use of 41 bis, to close the game with an area, the anarchist area, which, beyond its actual strength, has never lent itself to compromise or repentance, and which decades of investigations for 270 bis (association for the purpose of terrorism) or for criminal association have failed to disarticulate: operations for associative crimes continue to be produced on a continuous cycle (in recent years alone: Bialystok, Sibilla, Panico, Lince, Scripta Manent, Prometeo, Diamante, Scintilla, Renata, Ritrovo…) and involve long periods of pre-trial detention, but rarely reach conviction, precisely because the rigid structuring provided by the definition of associative crimes ill suits the informality and horizontality of affinity relations among anarchist comrades. Better then, in order to put an end to those comrades who, in spite of everything, still insist on talking about conflict, insurrection, revolution (and act accordingly), to use imputations that provide for disproportionate punishments: a guarantee that a handful of subversives will not see the light of day for a few decades, a warning to those who, remaining at large, intend to continue on the path of struggle and attack, prevention of anarchist “contagion” among the exploited (who will approach you anymore if the practices you have always claimed involve life imprisonment?).
The attempt to put an end to revolutionary and conflictual anarchism is not an all-Italian stunt, but rather a European trend, given the numerous investigations and detentions involving fellow anarchists in England, France, Germany, Greece, and it is clear that the attack toward anarchists cannot be understood except in the context of the permanent emergency and deployed war in which we have been immersed for two years now. Years of strengthening the state, its grip on the territory and its control over the population, of increasing police powers and the use of the army on the home front, of experimenting with red zones, green passes and bans on demonstrating, of harsh repression in the streets (from charges against those protesting against the green pass to precautionary measures against students who took to the streets after the deaths in the school-to-work alternation) and in the workplaces, of increasing technological control and prices of essential goods, on the brink of an economic crisis and general impoverishment whose consequences, including in terms of conflict, are hard to imagine, but with respect to which the state is already preparing its countermeasures, and in which anarchists might have something to say, and a chance to meet the anger of other exploited and impoverished people. Better then to lock them up and throw away the key: they may be few and disorganized, but there is no other way to get them out of the way.
As for the accusation of terrorism, we do not have much more to say than what Juan has already said in his statement to the court in Treviso: revolutionary violence knows how to choose its targets, indiscriminate violence belongs to the state, which, in the very months when the League headquarters was being attacked, was causing thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean and at the borders, which inaugurated the terrorist management of the epidemic with a real state massacre (14 dead) in prisons.
The grief and anger caused by knowing one of our comrades has been hit with a sentence whose end we cannot see only strengthens our convictions: we will continue on the path of struggle, of permanent conflict, of direct action. As always, but from today with one more reason. For the umpteenth time, the state has miscalculated.
SOLIDARITY WITH JUAN
SOLIDARITY WITH ANNA, ALFREDO AND THE DEFENDANTS OF OPERATION SCRIPTA MANENT
FREEDOM FOR ALL
THE STATE IS THE TERRORIST
anarchists of Trento and Rovereto
[Taken from: https://ilrovescio.info/2022/07/15/lo-stato-condanna-juan-a-ventotto-anni-di-carcere/]