Initiatives - We want to break a taboo

Peru, June 19, 1986: In response to prisoner uprisings and struggles against living conditions and the neoliberal policies of Alan García, a brutal crackdown took place in the prisons, resulting in the killing of nearly 300 comrades. Over time, this day acquired symbolic international significance. Remembered as the day of the massacres of El Frontón and Lurigancho, it is dedicated to revolutionary prisoners around the world.

We have chosen this date both to emphasize its international character and because the resistance of prisoners belongs, within the conflict between the exploited and the exploiters, the oppressed and the oppressors, to a broader revolutionary and class movement.

We remember the struggle of Irish revolutionaries in maximum-security prisons against the H-Block system; the struggle of RAF comrades in Stammheim prison and their deaths, which in the 1970s sparked a strong solidarity movement, including significant protests in Italian streets; the fierce repression in Italy against mobilizations supporting prisoners held in the “death wings” where members of guerrilla organizations were imprisoned; the uprisings in American prisons within the context of the African American movement and opposition to the war; the Japanese Red Army, which fought alongside the Palestinians for the liberation of prisoners; the struggles in Turkish prisons against F-type cells and isolation; and the significant experience of prisoners in Israeli prisons and, more generally, in the West, together with the solidarity movement that developed around them. This experience tells us that prisoners and political imprisonment cannot be separated from resistance: to remove them from their context is to empty them of meaning and thus serve the enemy.

We are faced with a system in crisis at its foundations. The expansion and pervasiveness of war processes, the continuous search for authoritarian solutions, the worsening of social conditions, and the dismantling of achievements won through past struggles increasingly target political movements and activists. The aim is to suffocate struggles for resistance and liberation and to prevent social contradictions, discontent, and conflict from finding organized political expression.

It is in this context that the war against the memory of the struggles of the 1970s must be understood, and it is within this context that we can understand the silencing and erasure of revolutionary prisoners.

We are speaking of the comrades referred to in the appeal “Let’s Break a Taboo,” who for more than 40 years have endured harsh detention conditions and endless imprisonment; of three others who for over 20 years have been subjected to the maximum-isolation regime known as 41-bis; and of another comrade who has been under the same regime for four years. We also speak of all those comrades who pass through prisons under high-security regimes, of young people, and of the entire movement that today faces not only a highly repressive campaign through decrees and legislative proposals, but also an ideological and media attack, involving manipulation, distortion of content, and rhetoric centered on bourgeois legality.

The reasons behind this attack—which affects everyone from those who rescue migrants at sea, to logistics workers’ struggles, environmental and antifascist movements, and those who express solidarity with the Palestinian people and their resistance—must be sought in the state's need to pacify, control, and homogenize society. Its goal is to prevent movements from uniting into a collective force, from building projects and perspectives for revolutionary transformation, and instead to keep them fragmented, divided, isolated, and forced each time to start over from scratch.

This meeting aims to contribute to finding forms and continuity for this reflection and to connect it concretely with social struggles and their movements, while supporting their internationalist and anti-imperialist character.

It is also a contribution toward overturning the outlook of distrust, fear, isolation, and defeat that suffocates struggles and prevents us from coming to terms with a history that belongs to us in all its expressions. These prisoners, like the prisoners of today’s movements, are the expression of important and often courageous experiences. They must be part of our struggle; they must be defended and supported.

No one saves themselves alone. Together, we can do everything.

·       Presentation of the appeal “Let’s Break a Taboo”

·       Prisoners and resistance in Palestine: GPI (Young Palestinians of Italy), Samidoun (Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network)

·       41-bis, isolation, and the mobilization for Alfredo Cospito: Anti-Repression Fund of the Western Alps and lawyers

·       “The SRY-Type Isolation Prisons and the Resistance” with a comrade from the Anti-Imperialist Front and IS4PP (International Solidarity for Political Prisoners)

·       Yesterday and today, the same imprisonment, the same reasons: intervention by a comrade from Pisa

·       Memory and Resistance: CPA Florence

·       Si.Cobas: the right to strike in a wartime economy

·       Collettivo Antudo: prospects for struggle and repression of dissent in times of war

·       CALP Genoa: the war begins here — dockworkers’ struggle against war

·       Ultima Generazione: mobilizations against war and rearmament

·       Rete Liberi e Libere di Lottare: state of war and policing

Top of Form

Bottom of Form