On Wednesday the 13th of April at five in the morning the Mossos d’Esquadra [Catalan autonomous police] began an operation in Barcelona in which they raided and searched two private addresses and one social centre in the neighbourhood of La Salut, “los Blokes Fantasma”, where the twenty inhabitants were held during twelve hours.

Besides the plundering and destruction that accompanies every police raid, the operation resulted in the arrest of a comrade who had already been imprisoned following Operation Pandora, and for whom there had been a European arrest warrant issued since the 11th of April based on the accusation of having participated in expropriations of banks in the German territory.

After passing in front of the Audiencia Nacional [Spanish special high court], judge Eloy Velasco sent our comrade to preventive arrest. She has been transferred to the prison of Soto del Real. Given that she is also facing charges in the Pandora process (currently in investigation phase) and that she has expressed the wish not be be extradited, our defence has requested a “condition” to the European extradition order, demanding that she will serve preventive arrest in Spain awaiting the court case that she has pending here. Within a period of maximum two months (extendible with one more month), the Audiencia Nacional will need to decide whether the handing over of our comrade to the German authorities will be temporarily suspended or not. From the news articles published in the German press we have learned that it concerns an expropriation that took place two years ago in the city of Aachen, during which – always according to the press – the group of assailants took a notable sum of money from the bank without causing any personal injuries or damage.

Whatever the outcome of the judicial process, we want to publicly show our support towards the comrade, vindicating as our own her revolutionary political goals, her struggle and her militant activity. Those who know her well know that she has truly deserved everyone’s solidarity. We are speaking of a person who is a fighter and an anarchist, who since years has been active in several anti-racist, feminist and libertarian projects in Barcelona, always in solidarity with the persecuted, always ready to help wherever she could, always ready to act, always generous, happy and smiling to those around her, always uncompromising and firm against everything that she perceives as unjust.

The attempt of the media to transform her into a public danger could not prove more perverse. Above all when this operation of mediatic manipulation implies presenting the banks as victims, in a total reversal of reality that dignifies those who have been robbing us, bleeding us dry, cheating us, dispossessing and cutting us down with impunity for years, while it criminalises those who rebel against its order and dare to attack it. We could not care less whether the comrade is actually responsible for the robberies or not. The expropriation of banks is an ethically just and politically legitimate practice, a method of struggle that forms part of the history of every revolutionary movement.

In fact, in spite of the constant attempts of Power to reduce this method in the scope of the “common crime”, motivated by personal interest and greed, what is certain is that the expropriation of places of accumulation of capital is constant in our history: from the anarchosyndicalist groups that at the beginning of the twentieth century robbed banks to maintain strikes or to help the families of the imprisoned comrades to the different autonomous groups of the ’70s and ’80s like the MIL, the OLLA or the Erate (formed by workers of the SEAT) that redirected the money accumulated by the rich to several projects of the exploited in struggle, to Maquis groups like those of Sabaté or Facerías that in the postwar period practised robberies in order to finance the resistance to the Francoist regime. Expropriation, both in its form as a tactical expression of a general political struggle and in the form of social banditism in which that what the banks are stealing from us is recuperated in order to free itself from the chains of exploitation of work and unemployment, to us does not seem something that is in principle reproachable – rather the contrary. That there are people that are sick of systematically being trampled under foot and exploited by the legal maffia confirms that “we are not commodities in the hands of the politicians and bankers” and that fortunately the human condition resists submissively accepting the dictatorship of capital over our lives.

The policial and mediatic hunt deployed because of the robberies in Germany should not let us forget our perspectives nor confuse us as to who are our enemies. The true public danger is power, represented by criminals such as Wolfgang Schäuble and Angela Merkel, the power that has not emptied a few heavy safes, but the social wealth of entire people and territories. It is the power of transnational elites that has pushed millions of people into misery in order to impose austerity measures that serve their neo-liberal and imperialist project. The arrest of our comrade is only another motive to fight these elites and the system they represent, a system only moved by the accumulation of money in the hands of a few at the expense of the suffering, dispossession and exploitation of everyone else. Neither the policial persecution nor the massive propaganda of the regime can hide what is already obvious to everyone, which is, as the poet said, what crime is robbing a bank compared to founding one?

Immediate freedom for the comrade imprisoned in Madrid!

Let’s stop the process of extradition!
Solidarity with the social centre Blokes Fantasma and all the persecuted people in struggle!

While there is misery, there will be rebellion!

Comrades of the prisoner,
 15th April 2016 
Barcelona

[Translated from Catalan] 
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/503679/index.php

Here is something we wrote about the arrest, detention and release of our friend and comrade.

Long months have passed since the hot summer day at the beginning of July when our friend and comrade got arrested at a passport control at the Greek-Bulgarian border. The Europe-wide arrest warrant against her had been issued by the prosecution office of Aachen, Germany, on the 24th of June 2015. After having spent three weeks in Bulgarian cells she got handed over to the German cops at the airport of Sofia.

In Germany she got locked up under the ‘U-haft‘ (Untersuchungshaft) regime in Cologne because of a presumed involvement in an armed bank robbery that had taken place two years earlier (2013). Under this regime prisoners awaiting trial are locked up, officially for a maximum of six months, which in reality very often is extended up to a period of over a year. In her case the restrictions put in place meant that at each visit (2 hours per month) there were two cops, a guard and a translator present, that she was not allowed to make any phone calls and that all post was first directed to the prosecutor’s office where it was read and then given to her after one month delay.

Her detention was based on a single piece of evidence: a DNA trace found on two gas pistols discovered in a closet of the bank by an employee 11 days later. A few weeks ago, on the 2nd December, after months of investigation the prosecution formally charged her with bank robbery, hostage taking and weapon possession. These charges were brought in front of three judges, who had to decide whether to pursue them in court or not. On the 16th of December, the court called the prison instructing them to release our comrade because all charges were to be dropped, since the “evidence” that five months of investigation produced was not sufficient for this case to be brought to court.

Now, our comrade is back with us. However, the joy that this brings us does not replace, nor lets us forget our anger towards the isolating restrictions, towards the ridiculousness of the uniform circus, and towards any authoritarian system that plays with people’s lives in such a way. The biggest source of strength came from the uncompromising and uncooperative stand our comrade took: she always kept her head up and her defiant spirits alive.

As most rebels and anarchists know, repression can hit us at any moment, because the State will go to very far extents to maintain its law and order and to prevent our ideas from spreading. In these moments it is easy to feel lured and trapped in a game of strategy and fear, the exact essence of our enemies.

In these moments we have to remember that we have other tools and practices to fight this asphyxiation. Only by facing their strategy with our own rebellious intelligence and grounded ethics, and fear with confidence in our complicities, affinities and struggles, can these moments become something more than just resigning ourselves to the technical and juridical aspects of the State imprisoning one of us.

Precisely in these moments of stress, anger and sadness it is crucial to not to let ourselves be intimidated or be tempted to doubt our ideas, our relationships and our struggles. Although keeping our feet on the ground, our mind sharp and our heart burning can be challenging during these moments, we are the ones who let them take from us much more than the freedom of a comrade, we are the only ones who can fight against their logics nesting inside of us.

Our ideas and struggles are forged in the hatred against prisons and the world that needs them. The fight against these structures and those who make them possible involves to express and extend our desire to open all their doors and destroy these pillars of this authoritarian and capitalist society. Confronted with any repressive attack it is crucial to not forget these ideas, nor to put them aside; we can only build a perspective through active solidarity, in the continuation of our projects of struggle against all the manifestations of this prison-society.

We agree with the words of our comrade and refuse to speak in terms of ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt’. These words belong to the language of prosecutors and judges in service of politicians and bosses. Words that support their system of exploitation and control. As anarchists it is a language we refuse to speak, we spit on it.
The reason we did not and are not publishing her name is to not fuel the often distracting and distorted role of hero or victim that anarchist prisoners are sometimes subjected to. She was an imprisoned anarchist comrade among many others, who will neither be forgotten nor exulted, but who are present in the continuation of our struggles and projects and in our acts of subversion towards this established order.

Solidarity with all those fighting against prisons, inside and out.

Solidarity to those who faced with repressive blows still feel the need and courage to keep living and fighting for their ideas and projects.