Declaration of start of hunger strike by anarchist Anna Beniamino in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito, alongside Juan Sorroche and Ivan Alocco, against 41 bis (Italy, November 7, 2022)
Here the translation of the declaration about the beginning of the hunger strike by anarchist Anna Beniamino, imprisoned in Rebibbia women’s prison in Rome, in solidarity with anarchist Alfredo Cospito, who went on hunger strike, indefinitely undertaken since October 20th, against the 41 bis prison regime to which he was transferred on May 5th and against life imprisonment without possibility of parole. The comrade started her hunger strike on November 7th. We recall that comrades Juan Sorroche (in Terni prison, since October 25th) and Ivan Alocco (in the French prison of Villepinte, since October 27th) also went on hunger strike for the same reasons. Revolutionary solidarity with Alfredo Cospito, Juan Sorroche, Ivan Alocco, Anna Beniamino and all imprisoned anarchists and revolutionaries.
On October 20th, in the prison of Bancali (Sassari, in Sardinia), Alfredo Cospito began an all-out hunger strike against the 41 bis regime and life sentence without parole.
The regime 41 bis was assigned to him from May this year, being accused of maintaining relations through correspondence and editorial activity with the anarchist movement through public writings and interventions from the Maximum Security section where he had been locked up for years.
Life imprisonment without parole is likely to be the outcome of the appeal – made by the cassation ruling of July 2022 of the Scripta Manent trial – for the recalculation of the sentence passed as 285 of the penal code, “political massacre”, for a double attack on the carabinieri school of Fossano, signed by FAI-RAT [Federazione Anarchica Informale – Rivolta Anonima e Tremenda, ‘Informal Anarchist Federation – Anonymous and Tremendous Revolt’].
The sentence for 285 c. p. constitutes the keystone of an accusatory architecture which established the existence of a “subversive association with terrorist aims” (made up of only three promoters and with a sporadic existence, to overcome contradictions due to the outcomes of previous trials) and the activity of “instigating” through anarchist blogs and newspapers published over the past 20 years by those convicted.
In short, a monstrous sentence where one is head/factotum of an “association” with uncertain contours, as well as instigators and perpetrators of a “massacre” that never happened and above all never defended as such. That is, as has been repeatedly stated in times past, revolutionary violence is defended by anarchists, and by me among them; massacre is not.
What the court papers and the directives of the secret services and prevention apparatuses variously call internal subversion or terrorism and comes to be enclosed in a series of offences (subversive association, massacre, devastation and looting…) taken verbatim from the Rocco Code still in force, are actually pieces of the revolutionary tension and the quest for freedom and social justice. That the latter and the justice administered by the courts are antithetical worlds is no news to anyone with a minimum of knowledge of the historical and political history of movements, ideas and practices that are refractory to the status quo: the bigger and more complex the accusation, the more difficult it is to bring events back to reality. Along these lines, one finds oneself a defendant in trials with farcical “truths”, where it is the political identity, not the facts, that constructs the crime that buries you alive. Continue reading “Italy: Declaration of start of hunger strike by anarchist Anna Beniamino in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito, alongside Juan Sorroche and Ivan Alocco, against 41 bis” →
