In memory of Alfredo M. Bonanno
(Catania 04/Mar/1937 – Trieste 06/Dec/2023)
…no one is totally the fruit of himself and each person, individual, it is certain that he is within a framework of relationships that can provoke him and affect his reactions, emotions and even the logic brought to that point.
– Antonio Lombardo
Before I began to think about these lines, I had given myself the task of searching and compiling data to write -with the intention of leaving a clue- about some of the many insurrectionary anarchist actions in contemporary Mexico that, although they have been sporadic, have not been recorded by the “official” historiography, either from “our side” or from the academy. The year 2023 marked the sixtieth (60) anniversary of some small attacks in the city carried out by the Libertarian Youth of Mexico, but I left it on the back burner, because I was taken by surprise by the news of the death of comrade Alfredo.
I did not have the opportunity to exchange impressions with him, the closest I got was when I briefly collaborated in the coordination -ten (10) years ago- of the Informal Anarchist Days / International Symposium, in Mexico City. [i] I did not consider it necessary to have a direct approach -because I refuse to pay homage to personality-, since in my opinion everything said about the “insurrectional project” (including the debate around insurrectionalism), was already circulating in our language since the beginning of the year 2000 in some anarcho-virtual forums, and to a lesser extent, in printed form his ideas were also circulating in some publications although only short articles or one or another lecture were disseminated. Unfortunately, no complete text of this tendency could be found; for this reason, in 2005 I acquired several copies of the Cuadernillos Incendiarios collection from the Chilean region, in order to distribute them in these latitudes.
Insurrection vs. Revolution
…there are people who are so miserable that even talking about them makes you dirty. And then, in the society in which we live and with which we have to deal with; we have many other more powerful (and even more serious) enemies and adversaries that we can easily overlook the “bites” of some “mistake”.
– Gianfranco Bertoli to Alfredo M. Bonanno
In spite of the little dissemination of these contributions in our region -which by then were no longer a novelty-, in 2001 informal actions began in different states of the country. At the time, these first attacks would not be claimed. This shows that the “insurrectional project” was already being debated in small groups among a few comrades and was being put into practice by concretizing the praxis. That is to say, from the need for action and, from the experience acquired in a sequence of attacks, theory was generated which, in turn, fed back into action to later distribute in print the new theoretical contributions and consolidate the debate through the international exchange of similar positions. Finally, some Bonannist postulates were abandoned and the attacks began to be vindicated by the different informal groups in operation. Continue reading “Mexico: In memory of Alfredo M. Bonanno”
