Isolation

$hile: Update on anarchist comrades Aldo and Lucas Hernández

Posted on 2025/03/22 by darknights

It has been more than two years since December 22, 2022, the day of several raids orchestrated by the South Metropolitan High Complexity Prosecutor’s Office, where six homes were raided, five of them in the Metropolitan Region and one in the Valparaiso Region, all searched by police groups OS9, GOPE and LABOCAR, resulting in six detainees, four of whom were remanded in custody. Two correspond to the brothers and comrades Aldo and Lucas Hernandez, in the course of the months the comrades will remain under investigation for the explosive attack on the National Directorate of Gendarmerie of Chile, Aldo is indicated as the alleged bomber of the device, he is also charged with crimes under the Law of Arms Control, as well as Lucas charged with various offenses under the Law of Arms and Explosives Control.

Months later, the comrades were asked for a re-formalization hearing, adding for both of them the case of manufacture of weapons and manufacture of explosive devices for various items found in the home raided in Pedro Aguirre Cerda.

In this process we have seen how the prosecution through trickery and dirty games have tried to harm and intimidate this environment with jail, seeking information and even informations in order to complete the investigation and to prove what the prosecution accuses, having a negative result to the harassment, since all the detainees after the raids have remained dignified and integrated to the mediocre attempts of the Prosecutor Claudio Orellana, demonstrating in practice complicity and loyalty to the principles of anti-authoritarian comradeship.

In the course of the months the comrades have lived diverse and different prison realities, since from the beginning the comrades have been separated trying to break their family ties without having contact and sharing the same physical space for more than two
years.

At this moment the comrades are waiting for the oral trial preparation hearing, which has already been postponed twice due to different legal situations.
While waiting for the trial, which has taken more than two years, the comrades are still unable to meet due to security issues, violating their rights to preserve the family ties that unite them.

In that trial they risk exemplary sentences, for comrade Aldo the prosecution requests a sentence of 90 years and for Lucas a sentence of 26 years, we point out that exemplary since this excessive amount of years only seeks to intimidate the environment and those who decide to return blow after blow without turning the cheek or waiting for illusory and idealized opportune moments to go after our enemies. The comrades remain intact and with the impetus intact to continue contributing to strengthen the anarchic walk outside and inside the prisons, clinging fiercely to their ideas and their values, contributing to various comrades who have been deprived of freedom like them, making their ideas a real threat to the range of harmful behaviors inside the prison and practicing prison solidarity, continuing to position themselves against the prison and their jailers inside their own homes (prisons).

The power continues to strike, reprisals are part of the daily life of our brothers. The last event was the transfer of Aldo to the maximum security module 2 in the prison of “La Gonzalina”, on December 24 last year, changing his prison regime. He is currently under a schedule of 21 hours of confinement and 3 hours of yard time, this added to restrictions such as the prohibition of electronic devices (TV, kettle and radios). This transfer was the result of a raid carried out in module 12 (module in which Aldo had been for two years) on December 18, in which the personal information of the 16 gendarmerie officers injured on the day of the attack to the national directorate on December 27 2021 was found inside Aldo’s cell. This information was contained in the respective investigative files of the case, which is why the high command of La Gonzalina decided to isolate him.

The practice of violence continues more than ever, and it is blood to pump the hearts of our brothers in prison. Each accurate action, propagandistic gesture reveals the vulnerability of a predatory system that is sustained by a false security that is nothing more than a breakable mask and within reach of our hands full of conviction and courage.

Actions such as attacks with weapons-bombs to institutions-police-apparatuses that protect the interests of power and the rich are just a sample of that, that the fear is felt by those who imprison us, that the bullets have names and surnames, that our energies are capable of creating what our imagination once thought, that every idea overflows in the minds of those who see that the violent struggle is possible.

Fire and death to the spectator, the scavenger, the martyr and the vulture.

Freedom for the convinced, certain and courageous who go against domination!

Anarchists, subversives and Mapuche prisoners to the streets!

Let’s dare to create the forbidden!

Make ideas a real threat!

Aldo and Lucas Hernandez to the streets!

February, 2025.

Source: Informativo Anarquista

Chile: Update on the isolation situation of anarchist comrade Francisco Solar

Posted on 2025/03/22 by darknights

Francisco has remained in Maximum Security modules for almost 5 years, since he was arrested in 2020 accused of attacks against repressors and the powerful.

Once sentenced, the isolation regime became even harsher, remaining for more than 6 months with a regime of strict isolation, restrictions on visits, 21 hours of confinement, no TV or radio.

By March the administrative authorities will decide whether or not the comrade will remain in solitary confinement. We call to remain attentive to the next information.

Facing the hardening of the prison regime: Solidarity and action!

Source: Informativo Anarquista

Anna Beniamino: Pathophysiology of the prison monster: poisons and antidotes (October 2024)

Posted on 2025/02/07 - 2025/02/07 by darknights

Anna Beniamino: Pathophysiology of the prison monster: poisons and antidotes (October 2024)

Article translated and published in Spanish in “Tinta de Fuga,” periódico anárquico contra las prisiones y la sociedad carcelaria, no. 7, segundo semestre 2024.

PHYSIOPATHOLOGY OF THE PRISON MONSTER:
POISONS AND ANTIDOTES

Stories of mice and men

In pharmacology laboratories, antidepressants are tested with an experiment of exquisitely human cruelty: a mouse, drugged or “nature,” is submerged in a glass cylinder half-filled with water and the time of desperate swimming before immobility overtakes is calculated.
Usually the rodent without psychotropic support tries to climb along the cylinder and jump for 5 minutes before giving up; antidepressants lengthen desperate swimming attempts by a few minutes before resignation overtakes.
Stripped of the cynicism it conveys, the Porsolt or “desperate swimming” test is a useful allegory to illustrate the current situation in Italic jails and this summer’s trickle of suicides and riots in the overcrowded, dilapidated communal sections1, a charcoal of forced cohabitation in cramped spaces, in a word humiliating human dignity: drug-induced apathy and depression, the ubiquitous “therapy,” desperate attempts at reaction that often take self-harming forms, backyard hegemonies, desolidarization, childish brawls, where there is a constant pouring of suggestions and models from TV dramas, which is then the lobotomizing diversion that overcomes “therapy” in the pervasive echoing from cell to cell.
To the pathological infantilization of the individual, the prison works methodically, depriving him not only of freedom of movement, but also of that of minimal choice in the course of the day: the idiotic and incomprehensible regulations, the extreme bureaucratization of every minutia of daily survival. Depersonalizing mechanisms that deprive one’s humanity, the application of which essentially serves to establish the pressure of the repressive structure (and the individual’s capacity for resistance or adaptation), are handled aseptically, feeding a meat grinder where reactions can cover the entire range between anesthetized apathy and revolt as an assertion of subsistence in life rather than claim.
This Dantesque bedlam is overlaid and counterbalanced by the fragmentation and consequent isolation of differentiated sections and circuits. In most compas one finds oneself as well as in small numbers, divided from the rest of humanity in chains, locked between high-security sections and, even more isolated, in 41bis2 circuits.
High-security sections have an additional internal separation to avoid contact between those accused of “terrorism,” domestic and international (AS2) and those of “mafia-style criminal conspiracy” (AS3) and related offenses, to avert, in the eyes of the legislature, monstrous criminal chimeras due to cross-species interbreeding3. Or, more prosaically, even if only to prevent the spread of a basic knowledge of one’s rights as a prisoner, a subject on which political prisoners are normally better versed, as they come from more literate backgrounds on the subject and are more prone to the consequent dialectic.
In AS, with the rubber stamp of the “mafia” or “terrorism” formula, an opposite strategy is applied to the overcrowded common sections: separation between prisoners, removal from the place of residence to make contact with family members more difficult, reduced contact with the outside world (fewer interviews, 4 hours monthly, and fewer phone calls, 2 monthly of 10 minutes each), heavier sentences, with less if any possibility of alternative sentences under the aegis of 4bis o.p. 4.
Then there is 41bis, the bottom of the well, the bottleneck of the repressive funnel where it is easier to get in than to get out, in the highest degree5, with a further exacerbation of solitary confinement, intracarceral and extracarceral: a one-hour interview per month with partitioned glass and audio-video recording; almost total postal censorship; limitation of items allowed in the cell, including books and music CDs, the purchase of which is in any case made very difficult, if not impossible; one hour of air time per day in cramped, netted yards and with socializing with up to three other prisoners (in fixed groups selected by management).
This prologue, unpleasant, is to explain a minimum the difficulties and contradictions experienced, as antiauthoritarians, in facing and fighting prison these days in these shores.
The strategy of isolation, sterilization of human contacts and rescission of solidarity networks is obviously not an Italian prerogative but, as our Chilean comrades are well understanding, a practice that is spreading and being perfected there as well, as in the aggravation of Francisco’s conditions of isolation and the restructuring of the Alta Seguridad. Just as everywhere the restructuring of detention facilities combines punitive logics toward the individual refractor with those of a “Fordist” efficiency of preventive repression aimed at creating compartmentalized and incommunicative levels to more effectively and aseptically manage control, inside as well as outside. Continue reading “Anna Beniamino: Pathophysiology of the prison monster: poisons and antidotes (October 2024)” →

$hile: Gendarmerie wants compañero Francisco Solar to serve his sentence in an exceptional maximum security regime April 22, 2024

Posted on 2024/05/02 by darknights

After the 86-year sentence against the anarchist comrade Francisco Solar was ratified and became final, the gendarmerie made a new maneuver in the comrade’s intrapenitentiary situation. After being held in Maximum Security Module 2 of the Rancagua prison, what would have been appropriate would have been his transfer to High Security Module 1 as a condemned prisoner along with the rest of the anarchist and subversive comrades. But this time seeking to deepen the legal revenge the comrade is taken to a floor in the same maximum security module 2 to serve his sentence in an exceptional regime of punishment and isolation.

Solidarity and complicity with those who attack the powerful!

Let us fight against the life imprisonment and solitary confinement of the anarchist comrade Francisco Solar!

Source: Informativo Anarquista

UK: ‘Human Beings’ By Kevan Thakrar

Posted on 2023/06/27 - 2023/06/27 by darknights

When the state imprisons people, they disappear us. The whole process of becoming a prisoner is designed to strip the person of their personal autonomy. Individuality is something that must be removed and replaced with complete conformity, implemented through the oppressive control and restrictions of the prison environment. From the prison issue clothing, the degrading, routine searching of the person, to the uniform design of the cells, people are transformed by this state dominance into products to be handled within the warehouses that are prisons.

When the prisons disappear people, they segregate us. The restrictions and conditions are so much more severe than anywhere else within the Segregation Units of the High Security Prisons of the men’s prison estate. Deliberately so: intended to break the spirit of the men who, for various reasons, find ourselves detained within these punishment blocks.

These environments inflict solitary confinement upon their victims, often for an indefinite period of time. It can mean more than 22-hours a day locked in a cell in isolation and kept separated from all other prisoners during the brieftime allowed to shower and/or get locked in a cage outside like an animal for ‘exercise’ – and, in my case, it has continued for 13-years so far. Remember how it felt to have to stay at home during the Covid lockdown? Imagine how many more restrictions you could have survived, yet we must endure within segregation daily.

It would not be permissible to keep an animal in places like these, and there would be total outrage if a woman were to suffer such mistreatment, but men are seen culturally as tougher and much more deserving of this brutal inhumanity. From personal experience, I can confirm this differentiation of the sexes that comes through the bad politics of the chauvinistic and anti feminist approach – which portrays women as ‘damsels in distress’ in need of help, and men as warriors capable of toughness only seen in the ‘stronger sex’ – is absolute nonsense (and it is this concept that sets the foundation for the perpetuation of the culture of toxic masculinity and misogyny that this country is drowning in). No human could possibly survive such inhumanity undamaged. Continue reading “UK: ‘Human Beings’ By Kevan Thakrar” →

Italy: Statements of Alfredo Cospito & Anna Beniamino at the hearing on June 19, 2023 at the Turin Court of Appeals

Posted on 2023/06/25 by darknights

We are circulating Alfredo Cospito’s statement at the June 19 hearing in the court of appeals in Turin on the calculation of sentences against Alfredo himself and Anna Beniamino as part of the Scripta Manent trial. The comrade was connected via video-conference from the Bancali prison in Sassari (as known, the regulations do not require in-person presence). Replications and sentencing against the comrades are postponed to a later hearing scheduled for Monday, June 26, at 12 noon, also at the Turin court.

Alfredo Cospito: Statement at the June 19, 2023 hearing at the Turin Court of Appeal

This statement of mine is closely related to the trial because it goes into the merits of the sanctioning treatment you imposed on me. Sanctioning treatment that is unconstitutional and contradicts your own laws. Sanctioning treatment, 41 bis, that distorts the very meaning of my imprisonment, imposing on me a senseless censure that limits my right to defense.

It is obvious to all how my trial affair has been used as a sort of cudgel by one political party, “the government,” against another political party, the so-called “opposition.” My last-minute transfer from one section to another in anticipation of the arrival of PD parliamentarians is a striking example. Which shows how the DAP and 41 bis have been exploited for political purposes.

These facts are closely related to this trial because they are the product of past political dynamics that led to our disproportionate prosecution and conviction for political slaughter. To shut my mouth now, at the only time I can defend myself would mean endorsing this dangerous and totalitarian drift. Before talking about Fossano and the so-called “massacre” (although there is little to say, it would be enough to look at the images of the damage of the tremendous explosion) for just two minutes I will have to mention three deaths, two of which I am somehow responsible for, the third death that of Cosimo occurred at the clinical center of Opera, ward 41 bis. Continue reading “Italy: Statements of Alfredo Cospito & Anna Beniamino at the hearing on June 19, 2023 at the Turin Court of Appeals” →

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for hammer attack on Italian vehicle dealerships

Posted on 2023/05/14 - 2023/05/17 by darknights

The anarchist Alfedo Cospito, a political prisoner of the Italian state, started a hunger strike on 20/10/22 (and was finally vindicated) against the very harsh 41bis detention regime. The comrade has been in prison for more than 10 years in maximum security sections. The 41bis regime involves a series of sophisticated systems of surveillance and sensory isolation of prisoners accused of “terrorist crimes”, in common, a torture aimed at revenge and extermination of prisoners.

Prisons, as the most violent mechanism of deprivation of liberty, and especially such detention systems, are an extension of the repressive policies of states, a place designed to act as a deterrent for anyone who dares to challenge the power of the state and capital. A warehouse of souls in which thousands of people are stewed in very bad conditions, to make an example of themselves and of those ‘from below’ in general.

As anarchists we fight against all forms of oppression and power, against everything that limits our freedom. We stand in solidarity with the struggling prisoners by uniting our voices against prison brutality. We fight until the last prison is cleared.

In solidarity with Cospito, we carried out attacks with hammers on 2 Italian vehicle dealerships in Agios Eleftherios and Caesariani on 2/4.

STRUGGLE FOR THE DEMOLITION OF THE LAST PRISON

NO CRIMINAL, NO POLITICAL, STORM AND BURN EVERY PRISON.

SOLIDARITY TO THE 4 COMRADES IN CUSTODY FOR THE ATTACK ON THE PIRAEUS POLICE STATION WHO ARE ON TRIAL THESE DAYS

Anarchists

Source: athens.indymedia

Greece: Thanos Chatziangelou | 9/5/76 – ‘Living hearts in dead wings’

Posted on 2023/05/14 by darknights

Political tribute of the imprisoned member of Anarchist Action Thanos Chatziangelou on the 47th anniversary of the murder of RAF fighter Ulrike Meinhof.

Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.

Ulrike Meinhof

9 May 1976

RAF fighter Ulrike Meinhof is murdered in Stammheim solitary confinement. This is preceded by the murder of hunger striker Holger Meins, who was constantly subjected to force-feeding, and a year later Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe are murdered in Stammheim solitary confinement cells, and Ingrid Schubert is murdered in Stadelheim.

The fighter Ulrike Meinhof was a revolutionary, flesh and blood of the armed anti-imperialist struggle, born and died on the path of contributing to the struggle for individual and collective liberation. She abandoned legitimacy during action to free the imprisoned revolutionary Andreas Baader and became an organizational member of the first generation of the Red Army Faction.

She was a charismatic person who balanced theory through practice, playing a leading role in both the theoretical formulation of the RAF’s ideological and political line, without ever leaving the operational field of armed metropolitan resistance. It was a key part of those initiatives that carried the legacy of the Latin American guerrilla movements on their backs, building the armed ‘metropolitan front’ in the European centres. Who took the hostilities to the “heart of the beast”, putting solidarity into practice with the peoples of Vietnam, Palestine and the third world countries that were fired upon by the imperialist interventions of the United States.

At a time when Schmidt’s German chancellery was an imperialist centre of decision-making and operations, carrying Nazi droplets in the mechanisms of power, the flourishing of the urban guerrilla put into practical question and annulment both the regime’s omnipotence and the oppositional tolerance of imperialist crimes by the reformist left. The history of revolt and resistance was written in the blood of those tortured in the internment hellholes, those murdered in ambushes and anti-terrorist operations by the special SoKo B/M department of the Federal Criminal Investigation Service – BKA and those executed in the death wings of the sensory isolation cells.

Comrade Ulrike was just that disobedient star. Her theoretical and practical contribution to the birth of the armed struggle in Germany and the unification of the resistances in Europe and the Middle East categorized her as a central target for elimination in the BKA’s lists. From slandering her political integrity and standing, to spreading false news of her death while she was struggling in an illegal regime, to her exterminating treatment in the isolation of the dead ward, the social democratic chancellery initiated Ulrike’s execution in the Stammheim hellhole, citing the obviousness of suicide. Indeed, state revanchism was not content with Ulrike’s death, desecrating her dead body when it removed her brain in secret to conduct investigations.

Revolutionary history is written in blood and gunpowder. In this history, personalities like Ulrike and the other RAF comrades are taken out of the matrix of the class struggle for social liberation. They stand unscathed, translucent through time like the brightest stars, with the same integrity that challenges and denigrates the monopoly of tyranny. The life and death of comrades and comrades like Ulrike are a cry to the rebellious hearts that yearn for the enduring revolutionary necessity, deafeningly declaring themselves to their persecutors: I was, am and will be.

Honour to our comrades Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Andreas Baader, Ingrid Schubert who were murdered in the sensory isolation cells by the German state.

Honour to our comrades Petra Schelm, Georg Von Rauch, Thomas Weissbecker, Katharina Hammerschmidt, Ulrich Wessel, Siegfried Hausner, Werner Sauber, Brigitte Kuhlmann, Wilfriend Böse, Willi-Peter Stoll, Michael Knoll, Elisabeth Von Dyck, Juliane Plambeck, Wolfgang Beer, Sigurd Debus, Johannes Thimme, Jürgen Peemoller, Ina Zipman, Gert Albartus, Wolfgang Grams who dedicated their lives to the anti-imperialist struggle for liberation through the ranks of the German urban guerrilla .

“Behind all of us lies a common history – we will meet again on the unknown and complicated paths of liberation.”

Thanos Chatziangelou, captured member of the Anarchist Action Organization

C’ Wing, Larissa Prison

9/5/2023

Source: athens.indymedia

Italy: About the recent searches ordered by prosecutors of Rome and Massa as part of the investigations concerning some initiatives in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito (March 3 and 9, 2023)

Posted on 2023/03/12 by darknights

We publish in English two updates on recent investigations by the prosecutors of Massa (searches and precautionary measures of March 9th) and Rome (searches of March 3rd).

Searches and precautionary measures for the demonstration in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito and all revolutionary prisoners on September 10, 2022, in Marina di Carrara

Yesterday, March 9th, searches were carried out against three comrades in Crotone, Lecce and Spoleto. The three were also given the precautionary measure of being obliged to present themselves daily at the police station for facts dating back to last September in Carrara where, during a demonstration in solidarity with Alfredo, a Lega electoral stand was encountered. There are seven suspects in total, five for robbery, two for defacement and all seven for election campaign interruption.

Some of those under investigation

Searches in Rome and Umbria in connection with two initiatives in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito on hunger strike (March 3, 2023)

At dawn on March 3rd, a conspicuous number of agents of the repressive forces – including DIGOS of the state police and ROS of the Carabinieri, on a warrant from the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office in the person of the public prosecutor Francesco Dall’Olio, already responsible for other investigations against the anarchist movement – appeared at the doors of some homes in Rome and Umbria to carry out searches on eight anarchists, all under investigation in connection with two initiatives in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito held in Rome last November. In addition to carrying out house searches against the suspects, we learn that other comrades present in the same homes and, lastly, a space (Circolo Anarchico ‘La Faglia’, in Foligno) were also searched.

The charges against the suspects are ‘manufacture or possession of explosive materials’, ‘unannounced demonstration’ and ‘private violence’. The searches involved seizures inside the homes, especially of anarchist and revolutionary publications.

We publish the communiqué circulated on the morning of March 3rd and – in order to give an overview of the initiatives on which this new ‘incursion’ by the servants of the state focused – the text read during the interruption of the play at the Argentina Theatre on November 26th.

Searches in Rome and Umbria

Searches have been in progress since the morning of today, March 3rd, in Rome, Spoleto and Foligno against eight anarchist comrades, on charges relating to an initiative in front of the RAI headquarters in via Romagnoli in Rome on November 13rd (art. 435 of penal code and art. 18 TULPS) and the interruption of a play at Teatro Argentina, also in Rome, on the following November 26th (art. 610 of penal code). Both initiatives took place in the context of the mobilisation in solidarity with anarchist comrade Alfredo Cospito, on hunger strike against 41 bis prison regime and life imprisonment without possibility of parole since October 20th. Furthermore, in the context of the same repressive operation, anarchist space Circolo Anarchico ‘La Faglia’, in Foligno, is currently being searched.

Solidarity with the investigated and searched comrades.

Alfredo out from 41 bis! Solidarity with all imprisoned anarchists and revolutionaries! Continue reading “Italy: About the recent searches ordered by prosecutors of Rome and Massa as part of the investigations concerning some initiatives in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito (March 3 and 9, 2023)” →

Oaxaca, Mexico: Claim of explosive attack against Banco Bienestar – Anarchic Informality/F.A.I.

Posted on 2023/03/09 by darknights

We claim the detonation of a homemade explosive device placed at an ATM of the Banco Bienestar located on the outskirts of the city of Oaxaca, a territory dominated by the Mexican state.

In the early morning of 14/02/23. We ignited the explosive. In the distance we heard the bang and the alarms of the bank. We calculated a more powerful impact that would cause greater damage to the ATM, and break for a moment with the tedium of social peace. This time the action was silenced by the henchmen of order and the press. We will sharpen the knife better for the next one. This seditious gesture is a combative salute to Alfredo Cospito and his irreducible war against prison and the 41 B.I.S. isolation regime.

It is clear to us that insurrectional solidarity needs will, courage and gunpowder.
We must intensify the conflict by pushing forward the attack!
For the extension of the combat and the seditious solidarity!
DOWN WITH THE 41 B.I.S. ISOLATION REGIME!!!
For the practice of anarchic vandalism against the established order!

Informalidad Anarquica [Anarchic Informality]
F.A.I.

Source: Contra Info