Letter from Marcelo Villarroel: To the Brothers and Sisters in Argentina

From Hommodolars Contrainformación (February 26, 2011):

Fondly remembered brothers and sisters in the various corners of the Argentine region:

It seems like it was just yesterday when, after crossing the mountains, so many faces and hearts, names and stories, convictions and desires began to appear in my life as a result of my repressive circumstances. I felt all this brotherly and sisterly solidarity so powerfully that my 22 months of imprisonment in Neuquén province became a kind of intense complicity, whose incomparable alliances still jolt like the continuation of a war experienced by the many lives now scattered throughout the streets, mountains, forests, pampas, cities, and prison cells of these Cono Sur territories we silently roam once again. Accept, brothers and sisters, my most sincere, intimate, and affectionate greetings, full of the deepest anticapitalist love and hate, which stirs heart, desire, and reason to attack this rotten class society, this dictatorship of commodities, this democracy of nonlife.

In the daily unfolding of imprisonment, in the suffocating monotony of sensory deprivation imposed by prison here, there, and everywhere, continuous acts of resistance to the everyday totality of this human meat-grinder find echo and resonance in the most humble, rejected, and uncontrollable human beings, who have little or nothing to do with politically conscious space, with militancy, but who are mired in the reality of the most severe and unimaginable misery, in the reality of the historically stigmatized: “the lumpen proletariat.”

I say this because it is from there, from that human reality I now cope with, that I have managed to better and more completely understand the various dimensions of the diverse conditions, of the human condition, that bandits and social rebels discover in the intensity of conspiracy, in class hatred, in the solitude of the scorned, in the subversive complicity of the fugitive who fights with dignity and without fear against the police, against the vast abyss of authority. And that, that I found in Junín, in Cutral Có, in Neuquén, and now here in Santiago. I also recognize it in the experiences of many anonymous brothers and sisters who have lived and live with intensity underground, creating day-to-day affinities in which the spectacular phenomenon of politics doesn’t exist, in which formalities don’t exist, simply because when we regain control of our lives we recover our individual sovereignty, which instinctively guides us toward wider spaces of freedom. And that’s how a neighbor, a stranger, or a confidant has wound up doing much more for the potential spread of revolt than the countless politically organized groups that every day turn meetings, chitchat, and self-importance into thoroughly putrefied forms of social interaction. Politics is repugnant and rots everything it touches. Revolt has no leaders, managers, or obedient soldiers. Revolt is passion, need, and desire. It is the splendid chaos of destruction leading to boundless creation. It is the multiplication of the most sincere affections in pursuit of life in all its forms and expressions. Now, dear brothers and sisters, you must know that the shit country I was born in is controlled by power’s most devoted and vile faction, a faction entirely possessed by capitalism, neoliberalism, and ultraconservativism, repressively imposing its morals and social control. A poorly cloned mutant pieced together from the remnants of José María Aznar, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Bush, and Uribe. A crude copy of the worst is always best for capitalist interests and their project of planetary infestation.

It is in this reality that the most radical expressions, located on the subversive fringes of anarchist autonomy, have had to continue their decisive attacking operations against the social peace of the rich. In the midst of skillfully technologized state repression, an exasperating social fog, and paralyzing fear, we have witnessed the most fantastic series of television-style set-ups to justify the repressive, fabricated, shameless machinations of a state = prison = capital that bases its way of life on oppressive wage-slavery and blind obedience to the police-boss. This is “my Chile,” brothers and sisters. The day-to-day and the geographic distances may be different, but the goal is the same: Proletarians at war, subversion is our motto! And here there are encounters and proximity, differences that limit us, homes, hearts, affections, ideas, and practices that unite us, emphasizing the same path. Rebelling, attacking, radicalizing, respecting the intensity of each one who imparts her own experience. Here there are neither boundaries nor excuses. Here there is nothing to stop us from fighting.

Also know that here is the actual reciprocity of your brotherly and sisterly complicity and affection, that there are brothers and sisters who lend a hand to foster closeness and integration, that there is the will to come together and think, carrying out an attacking resistance whose origin is the historical memory of the oppressed, knowing that each and every one of us clashes with domination because we are the rebel children of the proletariat, because we hate each nation’s judges, each homeland’s bourgeoisie, each country’s gendarmes.

In any home on this strip of earth, whether in Santiago or Buenos Aires, Temuco or Neuquén, Iquique or Salta, wherever we may meet again, it will be to continue experiencing the intensity of the war to be free, dignified, and happy to never again put up with all this shit.

An embrace, a kiss, thousands of dreams of rebellion and social revolution.

For the spread of autonomous anticapitalist cells.

Toward assistance and collaboration on prisoner escapes.

While there is misery, there will be rebellion!

—Marcelo Villarroel; Anarchist Prisoner; High-Security Prison; Santiago, Chile; Tuesday, February 15, 2011