Author Archives: girasoli

FISSAZIONE DELL’UDIENZA PRELIMINARE PROMETEO, UN RESOCONTO E QUALCHE RIFLESSIONE – 14 giugno 2020

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Il 21 maggio 2019 i carabinieri del Ros, guidati dai pm Piero Basilone e Alberto Nobili del pool antiterrorismo di Milano hanno dato il via all’operazione Prometeo che ha portato all’arresto di Natascia, Robert e Beppe accusati di 280 (attentato con finalità di terrorismo) in relazione all’invio di alcune buste esplosive a Roberto Sparagna e Antonio Rinaudo, pubblici ministeri impegnati da anni nella repressione di chiunque lotti contro questo mondo di gabbie e sopraffazione, e a Santi Consolo, ex direttore del Dipartimento dell’Amministrazione Penitenziaria, responsabile di rendere le carceri dei veri e proprio luoghi di tortura.
Per mesi i tre compagni sono stati sballottati in diverse prigioni della penisola, collocati in sezioni in cui di norma non sarebbero dovuti stare, come le AS2 islamiche di Sassari e Rossano, l’AS3 di Piacenza e la sezione protetti di Pavia.
Il 2 dicembre 2019 Robert, prigioniero nell’AS2 di Sassari, è stato scarcerato senza alcuna misura cautelare, e la decisione è arrivata dal tribunale del riesame dopo che la cassazione a ottobre aveva annullato l’ordinanza del GIP per mancanza dei “gravi indizi di colpevolezza”. Il ricorso per cassazione era stato chiesto per lui e Beppe, e purtroppo a Beppe era stato rigettato. A distanza di una settimana lo zelante pm si è opposto alla scarcerazione di Robert presentando ricorso in cassazione ma il tutto gli è stato rigettato e dichiarato inammissibile.
A metà febbraio le indagini sono state chiuse, e le ripetute richieste di domiciliari per Beppe e Natascia sono state rigettate.

Dopo oltre un anno dagli arresti è stata fissata l’udienza preliminare per il 22 giugno alle ore 10 al tribunale di Milano. Con la scusa del COVID, e soprattutto del tipo di reato contestato, si sarebbe sicuramente svolta in videoconferenza, se non fosse che le aule destinate al collegamento da remoto risultano inagibili per l’incendio che a fine marzo ha distrutto svariate aule del palazzaccio di giustizia. Dunque Natascia e Beppe potranno essere presenti in aula ma l’udienza sarà a porte chiuse.
Durante tutta la carcerazione l’accanimento dello stato si è concretizzato con l’arroganza della procura di Milano, e in particolare del pm Basilone, noto ormai da anni per indagini in cui ha tentato di seppellire compagni e compagne sotto anni di galera, dai processi per svariate occupazioni, gli scontri per lo sgombero dell’ex cuem nel 2013, l’indagine per devastazione e saccheggio dopo il corteo no expo del 2015, fino all’operazione Prometeo.
In quest’ultima inchiesta l’onnipotenza inquisitoria di  Basilone si è caratterizzata dalle continue richieste di trasferimento dei compagni rinchiusi, per non farli venire in contatto con individualità affini con la scusa di un “potenziale inquinamento di prove”. I trasferimenti a Sassari, Rossano, Piacenza e Pavia sono stati infatti chiesti da lui stesso, che ha dato poi carta bianca all’amministrazione penitenziaria per tentare nuovi esperimenti carcerari (in barba allo stesso principio del DAP di omogeneità fra detenuti) mischiando componenti agli antipodi e confinando a sfregio Beppe nella sezione dei protetti di Pavia in cui sono rinchiusi per lo più stupratori, infami e collaboratori di giustizia. Inoltre la censura sulla corrispondenza durata 6 mesi ha comportato ritardi, sparizioni della posta e difficoltà nella comunicazione fra i prigionieri e l’esterno.
Dall’inizio del 2019 con le operazioni antianarchiche Scintilla, Renata, Prometeo, con le pesanti condanne scaturite dal processo Scripta Manent, fino ad arrivare alle ultime due operazioni, Ritrovo e Bialystock, le procure ritirano puntualmente fuori l’accusa associativa del 270 bis o del 280 per i fatti specifici utilizzando accozzaglie ridicole di presunte prove per far fuori quelle esperienze di solidarietà fra ribelli, di azione diretta contro lo stato e i suoi sgherri, di lotta contro le galere sotto ogni forma.
Lo stato legittima l’immane violenza che esercita quotidianamente sulle persone mentre chiama “terrorismo” la determinazione di quegli individui che hanno il coraggio di non stare fermi a guardare e di non essere complici di quest’ordine annichilente in cui prevale la legge della forza e della prevaricazione.

Non ci interessa la distinzione fra colpevoli e innocenti. Di fronte a questo mondo alla rovescia ribadiamo la nostra solidarietà con Natascia, Beppe e Robert, con i compagni e le compagne recentemente arrestate nelle operazioni Bialystock e Ritrovo,  con tutte e tutti quelli che ancora si trovano rinchiusi per le operazioni degli scorsi anni, e con tutte quelle individualità che continuano a lottare senza paura e senza compromessi.

Ricordiamo le coordinate per contribuire alle spese legali e detentive di Natascia e Beppe

– Postepay evolution
intestata a Vanessa Ferrara
n° 5333 1710 9103 5440
IBAN: IT89U3608105138251086351095
– Postepay evolution
intestata a Ilaria Benedetta Pasini
n° 5333 1710 8931 9699
IBAN: IT43K3608105138213368613377

GLI INDIRIZZI PER SCRIVERE A NATASCIA E BEPPE

NATASCIA SAVIO
C/O C.C. SAN LAZZARO
STRADA DELLE NOVATE 65
29122 PIACENZA

GIUSEPPE BRUNA
C/O C.C. DI PAVIA
VIA VIGENTINA 85
27100 PAVIA

LIBERTA’ PER NATASCIA E BEPPE
LIBERTA’ PER TUTTE E TUTTI

Arresti a Roma

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Arrestati  compagn* a Roma: Daniele, Nico, Francesca, Paska, Flavia, Claudio e Robi juve, forse per  270 bis e istigazione. 

SEGUIRANNO AGGIORNAMENTI…

Chiamata “operazione Bialystock”, secondo i giornali sette compagn* sono stati arrestati con l’accusa di associazione con finalità di terrorismo o di eversione dell’ordine democratico, atto di terrorismo con ordigni micidiali ed esplosivi, detenzione e porto di materiale esplosivo, istigazione a commettere delitti contro la personalità dello Stato oltre che incendio e danneggiamenti aggravati dalla finalità di terrorismo ed eversione dell’ordine democratico. 

Le indagini sono state avviate dopo l’attentato esplosivo alla Stazione Carabinieri di Roma San Giovanni del 7 dicembre 2017.

Fanno anche riferimento a un documento “clandestino” chiamato Dire e Sedire e alla solidarietà portata avanti negli ultimi anni con i compagn* arrestat* per “l’operazione panico””

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/06/12/roma-scoperta-cellula-anarchica-che-organizzava-attentati-sette-arresti/5832447/

https://www.lastampa.it/cronaca/2020/06/12/news/roma-attentato-alla-stazione-dei-carabinieri-sette-arresti-1.38958676

https://www.rainews.it/dl/rainews/articoli/cellula-anrchici-roma-attentato-san-giovanni-carabinieri-7ce1f0a3-921a-43a4-9694-3bd6bdfca8c8.html

https://www.ilmessaggero.it/roma/news/cellula_anarchica_attentati_centro_sociale_arresti_roma_ultime_notizie_news-5283542.html

Detainment is Death in the Pandemic!

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Umaapaw na raw ang kulungan. [The jails are overflowing.] Nearly 30,000 people were reportedly arrested under the quarantine in the Philippines, with more than 4,000 of these arrested detained, based on a report dated April 18, 2020.1 Doubtless, more have since been arrested and detained since then. The police even went on record saying there will no longer be any more warnings to the alleged “quarantine violators” and will arrest people as they see fit,2 likely straining the capacities of the already overstretched jails and prisons.

As the recent proletarian demand “tulong, hindi kulong” [“aid, not detentions”] suggests, there is already a collective experience where the state is more felt in its punitive instruments of violence and policing more than its capacity to deliver aid. Indeed, every evening on the news we watch helpless as more and more injustices are wrought onscreen as police inflict more and more violence upon people and communities. A man suffering from PTSD was shot and killed by police in broad daylight.3 There were mass arrests of people demanding food aid.4

Police maul a street vendor for not wearing a face mask.5 Watching these unfold fill us with loathing for the police.

Instead of the state providing people with face masks when its agents see people without these, they detain them, putting them more at risk of contracting the dreaded COVID-19. Instead of providing enough food and medicine to remove the need for people to go out, the state and its agents arrest people for a smallest deviation of procedure when people leave their homes to get food and medicines. It is clear then the state cares little for the well being of the people under this pandemic—it only cares for its “peace and order.”

The framework of this martial law cloaked in quarantine is always the peace and order for the state; fulfilling the needs of those in quarantine are secondary, if they are even considered at all. This regime of policing would detain people for any little slight, regardless of personal context. The state narrative frames people as “pasaway” [stubborn and willful] or “tigas-ulo” [stubborn, literally hard-headed], deliberately erasing the contexts of people to fit their image of automatic guilt. Like Duterte’s “war on drugs,” this narrative that people are pasaway, or tigas-ulo justifies the harshest of repressions. To these agents of the state, everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Installing a climate of fear and culpability seems to be the only method that this government knows in addressing issues.

Let us be clear: the state cares not about your lived experiences and motives. It cares not if you are at risk of starvation and you must leave your home to get food. It cares not that you have run out of medicines and you must obtain more. It only cares that you are outside your homes and thus breaking its pronouncements. What the state cares about most is punishing whom it pleases. The paltry provision of aid compared to the deployment of violence is testament to that.

The state is uncaring, and its prisons and jails more so.

Remember that it will always be the poor that bears the brunt of the state’s policing and incarceration. Remember the arch-plunderer and widow of the dictator Marcos is still a free woman despite being already declared guilty.6 Remember that the senator Koko Pimentel that brazenly risked infecting others with COVID-19 because he refused to quarantine himself is still free with the law taking its sweet, sweet time to prosecute this quarantine violation.7 Quarantine violators among the proletariat face warrantless arrests while quarantine violators among the privileged do not even face a slap on the wrists. The law will always take its time punishing the wealthy and privileged for they are the ones that drafted and adopted the laws and it is people of privilege who comprise the police to begin with. The state and its laws will always protect property and privilege for that is what the state was made for. They made the laws and they can break them. Only in rare circumstances where the balance of power goes against wealthy and powerful defendants that they are imprisoned.

The mass arrests and tortures inflicted by the state in the time of pandemic only convinces us more on the necessity of prison abolition. We are for prison abolition because the prisons are always machines designed to make those with less privileges to suffer. How many in prison are there for crimes motivated by need? How many are in prison because of the “war on drugs” whose addiction was penalized instead of treated medically? How many of those arrested for alleged quarantine violations were out of their homes due to need? We are under no illusion that arch-plunderers would go to jail anyway, so why pretend that those who are imprisoned actually deserve it? Prisons and jails are overwhelmingly for punishing the poor.

In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the institutions of imprisonment becomes institutions of death. There is no quarantine on the inside of prisons and jails. Detentions risks becoming death sentences as jails and prisons are all highly vulnerable in pandemics. People deprived of liberty do not deserve to die, much less die in such putrid conditions. Indeed, state has already practically sentenced many to die with its dragging of its feet on releasing people from detention. In some prisons the plague has already started to make its course, with 63 persons on the inside of a jail in Cebu City test positive for COVID-19.8 In other prisons like in the New Bilibid Prison, bodies are starting to pile up—suspected to be because of COVID-19—but the Bureau of Corrections remains silent on their cause of death and of how many inmates have already been killed by their negligence.9

We demand the police stop its campaign of public harassment of people. We demand that the state cease its program of mass incarceration of so-called pasaway and alleged quarantine violators. We demand that the persons deprived of liberty be released at once, so that they may care for their health and their families without the violence of detention getting in the way. We demand that non-violent convicts be released back into society before the prison system destroys what is left of their humanity and before the pandemic kills them on the inside.

In time, we demand that prisons be abolished and instead of incarceration, a regime of rehabilitation. In time, we demand an end to policing and instead of cops, non-violent reconciliations based on care and need. But until that day, we struggle against the policing of the current order.

Tulong, hindi kulong!

Bigas, hindi bala!

Image from the Twitter account of Bangued Police Station. The emoji over the detainee’s face was added by the account holder.10

  1. Eimor Santos, “Nearly 30,000 quarantine violators arrested nationwide in a month,” (CNN Philippines., April 18, 2020). https://www.cnnphilippines.com/news/2020/4/18/quarantine-violators-arrested-coronavirus-lockdowns.html (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]
  2. Rambo Talabong, “PNP begins to arrest lockdown violators without warning,” (Rappler, April 21, 2020). https://www.rappler.com/nation/258570-pnp-begins-arrest-coronavirus-lockdown-violators-without-warning (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]
  3. Vince Ferreras and Gerg Cahiles, “Retired soldier shot dead by police at checkpoint in Quezon City,” (CNN Philippines, April 22, 2020). https://cnnphilippines.com/news/2020/4/22/Retired-soldier-shot-dead-by-police-.html (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]
  4. CNN Philippines Staff, “21 protesters demanding food aid arrested in Quezon City,” (CNN Philippines, April 1, 2020). https://cnnphilippines.com/news/2020/4/1/quezon-city-protesters-arrested-.html (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]
  5. Rambo Talabong, “QC officials maul, drag fish vendor for not wearing face mask,” (Rappler, April 28, 2020). https://www.rappler.com/nation/259289-quezon-city-officials-maul-drag-fish-vendor-not-wearing-face-mask (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]
  6. Lian Buan, “What’s taking the Sandiganbayan long to issue warrant vs Imelda Marcos?,” (Rappler, November 13, 2018). https://www.rappler.com/nation/216601-where-is-arrest-warrant-vs-imelda-marcos (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]
  7. Dona Z. Pazzibugan, “DOJ sets Pimentel probe in May,” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 15, 2020). https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1258792/doj-sets-pimentel-probe-in-may (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]
  8. Dale Israel, “63 persons inside Cebu City jail test COVID-19-positive,” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 25, 2020). https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1264619/63-persons-inside-cebu-city-jail-test-covid-19-positive (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]
  9. Lian Buan, “Concern over deaths in Bilibid mounts in the face of the pandemic,” (Rappler, April 30, 2020). https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/investigative/259317-concern-bilibid-deaths-mounts-coronavirus-pandemic (Retrieved on 2020-04-30) [↩]
  10. PNPAbraBangued. @PNPAbraBangued. Twitter Post. 11:48 AM, April 19, 2020. https://twitter.com/PNPAbraBangued/status/1251719226022170625 (Retrieved on 2020-04-29) [↩]

https://bandilangitim.noblogs.org/post/2020/04/30/detainment-is-death-in-the-pandemic/

Survival of the Fittest in the Time of Pandemic

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People often equate Charles Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest” with competition. People think that the natural way of the world requires some sort of battle. This is also often translated in how we deal with other people. “It’s either myself or others,” that’s how many people justify cruelty and domination. But if we think closely, survival of the fittest does not always mean competition.

Survival of the fittest simply means that if a specie is not able adapt to the changes in the environment, that’s when it starts to die out. If your fur is not thick enough, then you might die in the winter of Alaska. If your fur is too thick, then you would die like a Siberian Husky in the tropics. If you can not grow claws, you might not be able to catch prey, or be able to climb tress to avoid predators. Strength is not enough in survival. If we only consider strength, then no animal now can match the dinosaurs who were much bigger in size and appetite. They have walked the earth for millions of years, but eventually, they became extinct because they were not able adapt to climate change.

As pointed out by a former Russian prince turned biologist and anarchist named Peter Kropotkin, few people realize that mutual cooperation is as much a factor of evolution as competition. If we think about it, there are quite a number of species which might have not survived if they did not practice cooperation amongst themselves or with other species. Canines work in packs. Gigantic sea mammals like whales and sharks may die of parasites if they did not allow smaller fishes to ride on their backs. Bees (which are prehistoric in origin) or ants can not survive without the hive or colony.

Another misconception which may arise here is the conception of the alphas. Herds and packs tend to have alphas but these alphas are not there to terrorize their own specie. Alphas become alphas because they have the capacity to protect and search for food. Their position is not permanent. Being alpha in the animal kingdom does not have a time frame. Quite different from the human conception that alphas should reign for as long as six years even when he or she is not capable of feeding and protecting the group. We should also take note that in many species, alphas are of the female gender.

In the bee or ant colony, there are also roles taken by each individual. There’s the “queen,” the “soldiers,” and the “workers.” But this is entirely different to how we look at queens, soldiers, and workers in the human context. In the colonies of such arthropods, the queens are also replaceable, the soldiers do not harass the workers, and in contrast, the workers can become the heroes. In colonies, the queen or the soldiers do not have authority over workers. They do not make rules and they do not assert self-righteousness. Each individual act on their own will and understanding to preserve the colony. When a worker finds a good tree to establish shelter, it dances, to tell the others of the location, so others can verify if the claim is true. They require a constant check and balance similar to how internet open-sources work. Dictatorship does not work in nature.

Of course, there are instances where competition is evident in many species. But take note that this is only true when resources are scarce. In the human world, resources are more than enough to feed everyone in the world for multiple times. Scarcity is a myth repeatedly told by hoarders. Competition is only acceptable in scarcity, not in the abundance that we have now. Poverty and hunger, therefore, are crimes committed to the poor, most especially during a pandemic. Thankfully, instead, we witness cooperation almost everywhere during these times.

Survival of the fittest is not only about competition. Survival is also about adaptation and mutual cooperation.

https://bandilangitim.noblogs.org/post/2020/05/05/survival-of-the-fittest-in-the-time-of-pandemic/