As Felipe Ríos’ support network has already communicated, through statements on the counter-information networks, for a month our comrade has been receiving continuous harassment from the Gendarmerie of $hile. Specifically, he is being transferred inside the CPP Bío Bío from one module to another, placed in isolation cells, deprived of his affections and under constant threat of punishment, for not bowing his head to each arbitrary order of the cops.
Pipe has been in prison for more than 4 years, after spending almost two years in hiding. Through their communiqués we have been able to learn that inside the prison they have not bent their conviction against the State and capital and that they have remained critical of the prison dynamics that pit some prisoners against others, promoting codes different from the authoritarian ones that are reproduced in the damned prisons. That stubborn conviction of the comrade implies an enormous challenge, because it is not the same path as that of the majority of the prison population. Therefore, it is mediated by a large quota of loneliness, but which he has faced with dignity and with his head held high at all times.
His writings, especially his communiqué “7 years after the 21 de Mayo case” has been received by us, in each of our clandestine trenches, as a war cry that brought us courage in difficult moments of the cobblestone road that we have had to travel for 6 long years. At this point, although our paths diverge, we arrived because we have known how to be consistent and call each other in silence. From the beginning it was clear to everyone that in the face of the pantomime of a trial full of irregularities that condemned us, collaboration to any degree with the yuta [police] and the prosecutors was never an option. We know that Felipe, as well as us, has remained consistent with this decision at all times, although he is taking the hardest part of it, serving a 12-year sentence.
The events for which we were convicted are the result of an incendiary insurrectionary event in a demonstration in Valparaíso in 2016, on the occasion of the public account of the then president Michelle Bachelet, who was in the second of her terms, both marked by the blood of the peñis [Mapuche word for “brother” or “comrade”] Matías Catrileo, José Quintriqueo, Johnny Cariqueo and Jaime Mendoza.
An important part of the outcome of that imposing fire in the center of Valparaiso was not the desire of any of the undersigned, and we carried that weight in the satchel of our escape. We were never indifferent to it. But along the way we had time to think about it seriously, to contrast it with so many losses in this struggle against the murderous and torturous Chilean State, and we understand that revolutionary violence does not always follow the path expected by those who light the fuse. If this 21 de Mayo case teaches us anything, it is that the insurrectionary overflow cannot be completely controlled in its outcome. To understand that is to mature in the struggle. Condemning that fire from a moralistic height harms the struggle more than our convictions, which remain intact in favor of continuing to promote the incessant attack against the State and capital.
Cawineo, defamation, attempts to revile are not new, they are spreading in the different revolutionary environments of all kinds in the territory. We are radically opposed to these practices and call for them to be nipped in the bud wherever they arise.
As is already evident, those of us who write this statement do not seek to appear, clandestinity is not compatible with making public statements. Going out to write this statement today is a risk that we assume because Felipe is a valuable comrade, of us and of the struggles that each one of us demands. We extend these words of solidarity with him, with his consequent way of carrying out political imprisonment and in response to the solidarity that we know he has shown towards other prisoners in these years.
To him and his network of friends our sincere revolutionary embrace.
A complicit greeting to all the comrades who have had to choose this path of clandestinity and escape, especially to Constanza and Rodrigo wherever they are.
All anarchist, subversive and Mapuche prisoners in the prisons of the Chilean State, to the streets!
Down with the prison walls!
Long live the relentless struggle by all possible means against the murderous state and capital!
Never victims, never repentant
Nicolas Bayer
Hugo Barraza
Miguel Varela
Source: La Zarzamora