Do I stand alone again in my endless search for freedom? Challenging their might, defeated? Falling helplessly away Crawling from the wreckage, their destiny is my future? I feel the coldness as I step out into their darkness So I stand alone the same in my hopeless chase for freedom Clawing, I call, I call out, but again, I’m never answered You stand there in your lonely world, in your careless search for freedom While we struggle on, you turn hopelessly away Destroyed and recreated, our destiny is the future Now I feel the warmth, as the eclipse is forced away
As every March 29, with greater or lesser intensity, a new Day of the Young Combatant is commemorated in different parts of the territory dominated by the Chilean state. This year the date fell on Saturday, causing that on Thursday 27 and Friday 28 high school students from Liceo de Aplicación, Liceo Manuel Barros Borgoño, INBA, Liceo 1, Instituto Nacional and Liceo Eduardo de la Barra (Valparaíso), university students at the Juan Gómez Millas campus, Universidad de la Frontera (Temuco) and Universidad de Playa Ancha (Valparaíso), and comrades in general, were rioting and confrontations with the police in high schools, universities and in the center of Santiago, also different gestures of agitation accompanied all these days.
On the night of Saturday 29th the streets of Cerro Navia, Estación Central, Quinta Normal, San Bernardo, Huechuraba, Peñalolén, among others, lit up. With Molotovs, stones and homemade or industrial weapons, comrades confronted the police in a new commemoration of the Day of the Young Combatant with combative memory for Eduardo and Rafael Vergara Toledo, Luisa Toledo, Mauricio Maigret, Claudia López, Mauricio Morales, Sebastián Oversluij, Luciano Pitronello, Belén Navarrete, among so many other dead comrades who still remain present through anarchic action absolutely far from any iconic, symbolic role or elements of admiration.
Finally, the day left a total of 42 detainees who went to detention control and were released in the course of the following day.
“A spoil towards the lazy louse It is not a simple whim I reflect myself in your eyes To demonstrate my old commitment Hip-hop I wet the towel that cleans The red fist I wave in battle My people are no longer silent awake with their anger The rich with their gold filling themselves with praise The poor with their flowers filling themselves with love We will be the actors of revolutions”
Jhonny Cariqueo Yañez
Seventeen years ago, in the framework of the Young Combatant’s Day in 2008, one of the most violent days of political street violence took place. Specifically, in the commune of Pudahuel, during the commemoration of the previous September 11, corporal Vera had been killed by a bullet in the head, while on March 26, 2008 a powerful explosive device was detonated in a bank of the commune, creating a subversive atmosphere and a spirit of revenge on the part of the police.
Jhonny Cariqueo Yáñez, 23 years old, a young rapper and anarchist who participated in different hiphop and neighborhood collectives, was arrested on March 29, 2008 at the intersection of La Estrella and San Francisco in the commune of Pudahuel, after a commemorative activity for the Day of the Young Combatant. He was taken to the 26th Police Station where he was brutally beaten, during the detention Jhonny began to feel strong pains in his arm and chest and was taken to an emergency center where it was suggested that he undergo tests, however, the miserable police refused to accept the check-ups. On the morning of March 30, he is taken to the 1st Police Station in Santiago, where he is released at 4:00 p.m.
The following day, March 31. Jhonny lies down on his bed and begins to show symptoms of cardiac arrest and is assisted by his family; however, in a few minutes comrade Jhonny Cariqueo dies.
The anarchic memory has been able to maintain the memory of the comrade present in the street, through incendiary action, activities, documentaries, murals, spaces, explosive actions and projects with his name, demonstrating that no death of our comrades is a sentence to oblivion.
Jhonny Cariqueo Presente
Nothing is over, everything continues.
Documentary “Jhonny Cariqueo – The Permanent Revolt” (2010)[in Spanish]
Documentary “Jhonny Cariqueo – Memory and Resistance” (2009)[in Spanish]
Publication “Ícaro, a unique publication on the events of March 29th in Pudahuel” (2009). [in Spanish]
On October 31 our anarchist comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris was killed and our anarchist comrade Marianna M. was severely wounded in an explosion in an apartment in Athens. She was brought to the Evangelismos Hospital, where she was treated under constant police surveillance, and later transferred to the pre-detention prison in Korydallos. In the aftermath of what happened that day also our anarchist comrade Dimitra Z, our comrades Dimitris and Nikos R. and another person have been arrested and imprisoned in the same case.
Since then sorrow and rage have been present in our lives. Sadness for losing a comrade who committed to the fight to the end and by all means; anger because it is this capitalist, racist and patriarchal system that killed him. Kyriakos did not choose to close his eyes on the economic and political interests of a few who condemn us to a life of misery through the sale of houses to vulture funds, labor precariousness, feminicides, borders and wars. In the city of Berlin Kyriakos he has been committed for years in the defense of released spaces and against gentrification, in the internationalist struggle, in the abolition of prisons, as well as in all social and class struggles.
His passion and believes for a new world free of oppression leave a huge emptiness in those who were around them, as well as in the struggle itself. However, his imprint through words and actions encourages us to keep the thread of the insurrection alive, thus continuing the vision of the social revolution present in our hearts and minds. A revolutionary action that understands the armed struggle as a decisive medium in favor of those of the bottom in the balance of power, which tries and manages to return to the state part of the violence that every day imposes us.
We understand that through the defense of his memory we also stand next to all those who gave their lives or and were imprisoned to fight against injustice, inequality and exploitation.
For all this reason and collecting the call of February 7 and 8 of the Greek comrades from Athens, we want to face those who try to pervert this memory. As well as express our solidarity to the comrades imprisoned in the same case. For this reason we decided to have a short wild demo through Friedrichshain where we had shared together many collective moments of happiness and rage. Obstacles were put on the streets, graffiti in memory of Kyriakos were sprayed. Afterwards in Rigaer Street arriving forces of the occupiers were fought with stones.
This neighborhood of Berlin, as well as other metropols in the world, has faced a huge process of gentrification. In the last years where collective spaces where evicted to be transformed in yuppi restaurants and shops, people with low sources are getting displaced to the periphery, the airbnb are rising while the rents are becoming unbearable and the policies about how to use the public space are more repressive.
We, as Kyriakos did, can’t turn our eyes away of this process that destroys the city and the different communities living there. We, the ones that believe in a better world, want to go out of this precarity where the ones not conforming the norm are condemned. For this reason, as many other protest and answers are taking place in different cities, we want to stand against it and continue the path that we already walk with our friend and comrade Kyriakos. This path that cost his life. Him in our minds, his ideas in our hearts. Together taking back the streets of Berlin and Athens again. Revolutionaries hearts burn forever!
Freedom for our comrades Marianna M., Dimitra Z, Dimitris and Nikos R.!
04/11 Incendiary Attack to Bus Red del Transantiago in población La Victoria 6 years after the death of comrade Kevin Garrido, in the place were found pamphlets with the phrases:
“War to death against all bastard authority!”;
“Compañerx Kevin Garrido present!”;
“May solidarity not be just a manhandled word, may solidarity be an angry action that gives injections of strength and energy to the heart of every brother in captivity”;
“For the destruction of all prisons! Compañerxs Joaquin Garcia Aldo and Lukas, prisoners of July 6th and every comrade in prison to the street! With our dead in memory and in action Kevin Garrido, Freddy Muñoz, Alonso Verdejo, Lupi, Belen, Bau, Mauricio Morales, Sebastian Oversluij, Luciano and every comrade assassinated present! Solidarity with the comrades of the inba”.
Claudia López Benaiges was murdered on September 11, 1998, after being shot in the back by cops on a barricade in the La Pincoya neighborhood of Santiago, in the context of mobilizations commemorating the Coup d’État in Chile. López was an active feminist, anarchist militant and poet, in addition to studying Spanish pedagogy and dance.
Poem by Claudia López
The celestial litanies that fill the nights of the worlds, they incessantly question the anxious daughters of uncertainty. They explode dazzlingly like bodies that stretch through the walls, that burst forth through the whispers of light, that confront the airy and torrid abysses. The dark bodies of insurrectionary anxiety, of the subversive desire of the lunar chains, that poured onto the earth, they seek their names, those they do not yet have, that lie buried in the roots of the jungles.
The anti-authoritarian comrade Kevin Garrido was captured by the Chilean dirty police on November 19, 2015, after placing and detonating an artisanal explosive device at one of the entrances to the San Bernardo gendarmerie school. After his capture, he was also accused of carrying out an explosive attack outside the 12th police station of San Miguel on October 29 of that same year, which was attributed to the International Conspiracy for Revenge – Gerásimos Tsakalos Explosion Cell. During the early hours of November 19, the police also captured comrade Joaquín García Chancks, accusing him of belonging, along with Kevin, to this cell responsible for the attack against the 12th police station.
After a long trial, Kevin was sentenced to 17 years in prison for attacking both police institutions with explosives, and Joaquín García was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the explosive attack and carrying a firearm that he had at the time been recaptured after escaping from house arrest in 2016.
On November 2, 2018, after having lived 3 years of imprisonment as a space of conflict against all types of authority, the comrade Kevin Garrido had a fight with an unworthy and cowardly prisoner who attacked him from behind. Although his injuries were very serious, Kevin did not receive the medical assistance he needed inside the Santiago 1 prison/company and the ambulance took 1 hour and 15 minutes to transfer him to the Barros Luco hospital, where he died after a high-risk intervention.
Comrade Kevin Garrido Present in the anti-authoritarian and insurrectionary memory!
6 years after his cowardly murder, we do not forget the irreducible path that he followed from an early age, until the end of his days.
“On the street – and wherever I find myself – I am a mutinous complicit in everything criminal and in prison I do not cower nor do I have a submissive attitude towards the jailers and any authoritarian bastard who passes through here. I don’t choke on nice speeches or phrases like: “death to all authority”and after a while I became victimized by a few coming blows from the Authority, an authority that I intend to assassinate with my hands. I assume the “consequences” of my actions that never go hand in hand with passivity. Because this is my War, HERE AND NOW.” (Kevin Garrido, February 2016)
Comrade Joaquin García to the street
Comrade Freddy Muñoz Present
Down with all prisons and forms of authority
(Chile) Incendiary actions at Liceo Manuel Barros Borgoño, Liceo 7 and Instituto Nacional in memory of Mauricio Morales
Between May 24 and 25 high school students from three different high schools in Santiago, took to the streets to erect barricades, deploy banners and confront each other with Molotov cocktails against the presence of (COP), in memory of comrade Mauricio Morales for a new Black May and in solidarity with all those affected by the eviction of the May 17 occupation in Cerro Navia.
Text by Marco Camenisch for the day of Memory and Kontrakultura
Dear comrades and brothers and sisters,
To begin with, thank you very much for this initiative of commemoration by our dear compa and brother Punky Mauri and for being able to participate from a distance (geographically!) with some poor words.
On the one hand, commemorations do not excite me too much. Because dear compa and brother Punki Mauri is present and alive in my mind and in my life many days of each year. At this moment or another or without specific occasion as a presence that gives me courage in moments of courage, joy and sadness, reminding me of our common courage, our common struggle in the past.
And present and future! For this reason, on the other hand, this commemoration is very just and important. Comrade and brother Punki Mauri with all our other fallen reminds us and continues to live in our common duty (individual duty in front of our conscience!) to consolidate and give continuity to this struggle in a historical moment in which the situations, the reasons and the necessity of our resistance and struggle become more and more urgent and just as the only hope for our life, for the life of our planet! And for living a dignified life! Reminding us that we are nature, freedom and life that defends itself by attacking those who definitely want to exterminate us!
In this sense, this commemoration is very important for the continuity of our struggle, transmitting from generation to generation our experiences and “historical” memories as a living contribution to the present and future struggles.
And alone, but firmly, in these struggles of all our past, present and future fighting generations our brother Mauri and all our fallen comrades and brothers and sisters remain and will always remain alive!
