Italy: Imprisoned anarchists Alfredo Cospito and Sergio Maria Stefani on hunger strike

As of Tuesday, January 29th, 2013 anarchists Alfredo Cospito and Sergio Maria Stefani, who are incarcerated in the AS2 wing of Alessandria prison, are conducting a hunger strike until communication and visits from their respective companions are granted.

We recall that Alfredo has never been authorized to talk to or meet with his companion since the time of his arrest, on September 14th, 2012 because officially they were both being investigated in the same case.

Sergio was typically allowed meetings with his partner, but since she was also remanded as a result of the same investigation, they didn’t see each other until her release on December 21st, 2012. Ever since Sergio had been granted three visits, until the investigation was transferred from the public prosecutor’s office of Perugia to the one in Milan, which banned visits from his companion.

What follows is a brief message through which Sergio and Alfredo wanted to make their gesture public:

‘The mercantile world, the techno-industrial society, the civilization itself rest on foundations which are not made up of individuals—by their very nature different and unpredictable—but a mass that’s homogenized by education, morality and law. In this world, all sincere and deep relationships become suspicious, and ties of affinity become synonymous with “criminal” association, while solidarity is reduced to mere execution of a command. But we refuse to reduce our desires to realism or to tame our passions. We live our lives without mediation, with discontent which draws the smile of joy to our faces that never abandons us. For this reason we can’t allow anyone to cut off our ties, thus we begin this hunger strike relishing the sweetness of our companions’ embrace.’