On Wednesday April 13 at 5am an operation of the Mossos d’Esquadra began in which two private homes and a squat in the neighbourhood of La Salut, the “Blokes Fantasma” were raided and the twenty or so people living in the building were detained for twelve hours.
In addition to the looting and destruction that accompanies any police search, the operation resulted in the arrest of a comrade who had already been imprisoned within the framework of the Pandora Operation, and for whom since 11 April there was a European arrest warrant on charges of participation in bank expropriations in Germany.
After her transfer to the Spanish National Court, judge Eloy Velasco ordered preventive detention for our comrade, who has been transferred to the prison of Soto del Real. As she is also charged in the Pandora trial (currently under instruction) and that she herself has expressed her desire not be extradited, our defence has called for a “conditioning” of the European extradition order, claiming that she be held in custody in the Spanish State until the trial pending here is held. Within a maximum period of 2 months (extendable for another month), the High Court would have to decide whether the handing over of our comrade to the German authorities can be temporarily suspended or not. From the German press we learned that she has been linked to an expropriation that occurred two years ago in the town of Aachen, during which, again according to the press, the assailant group took a significant amount of money from the bank without causing any injuries or personal damage.
Whatever the evolution of the judicial process, we want to publicly show our support to the comrade, vindicating as our own her revolutionary objectives, her struggle and militant activity. We who know her well, know that she has totally earned the solidarity of all. We are talking about a fighter and anarchist, a person active for years in various anti-racist, feminist and libertarian projects of Barcelona, always in solidarity with the persecuted, always willing to help wherever she could, always willing, always generous, cheerful and smiling with whom she is close, always intransigent and firm against everything that she perceives as unjust.
The media attempt to turn her into a ‘public danger’ could not be more perverse. Especially when this operation of media manipulation involves presenting the banks as victims, in a total inversion of reality, that glorifying those who have stolen, squeezed like lemons, swindled, deported and made drastic cuts with impunity for years, while criminalizing those who revolt against their order and dare to attack them. those of us they have been stealing from, squeezing, swindling, evicting with impunity for years while criminalizing those who rebel against their order and dare to attack them.
We are not interested in knowing whether the comrade is actually responsible for these robberies or not. Expropriation is an ethically just and politically legitimate practice, a method of struggle that is part of the history of all revolutionary movements.
Indeed, despite the constant attempts by Power to reduce this method to within the scope of a “common crime”, moved by interest and individual greed, the fact is that the expropriation of places of accumulation of capital is a constant in our history: from the anarchist-syndicalist groups in the early twentieth century who robbed banks to support strikes or help the families of imprisoned comrades, to the various autonomous groups of the 70s-80s such as the MIL, the OLLA or ERAT (formed by workers of the SEAT) which diverted the money accumulated by the rich to various projects of the exploited in struggle, through groups of maquis such as those of Sabate or Facerías, which in the post war period carried out robberies to finance the resistance against the Franco regime. Expropriation, both in its tactical expression of a general political struggle, as in the form of social banditry in which is recovered what the banks rob from us to break free from the chains of labour exploitation and unemployment recovers, we do not think is something reprehensible under any principle, but rather the opposite. The fact that there are people who are tired of being systematically trampled and squeezed by the legalized mafia confirms that “we are not merchandise in hands of politicians and bankers” and that fortunately the human condition resists against meekly accepting the dictatorship of capital over our lives.
The police and media hunt deployed following these robberies in Germany must not make us lose perspective or confuse who is the enemy. The real public danger is the power represented by criminals like Wolfgang Schäuble and Angela Merkel, power that has not just emptied a couple of safes, but the social wealth of whole peoples and territories. It is the power of the transnational elites that have doomed millions of people to misery to impose austerity measures functional to their neoliberal and imperialist project.
The arrest of our comrade is just one more reason to fight these elites and the system they represent, a system fanatically driven by the accumulation of money in a few hands at the expense of suffering, dispossession and exploitation of the rest. Neither the police nor the massive propaganda of the regime can obscure what is already obvious to everyone, and that is, as the poet said, what is the crime of robbing a bank compared with the crime of founding one?
Immediate freedom for the comrade imprisoned in Madrid!
Let’s block the extradition process!
Solidarity with the Blokes Fantasma and all persecuted fighters!
NEITHER GAGGED