Communique on the incendiary attack carried out against SEDESOL for a Black June
To peoples, barrios, and communities
To everyone who is organizing and struggling
To our comrades
To the free media
To all Mexicans
You propose scorched earth
whether it be cultivated soil
or ground laid to waste
I will not be the dog who watches your shadow
if you don’t want me to be free
you will have to see me dead.
Ten days from the beginning of Black June the territories have been wrapped in a maelstrom of struggles and battles, burning barricades opening the path to self-determination and building autonomy.
Recalcitrant and warlike since the first hours of Black June, we launched an incendiary attack against the seat of the Federal Ministry of Social Development – SEDESOL – at about 4:40 AM in Jalapa, Veracruz.
The attack was as quick as it was effective, and it was reported that:
“The disaster destroyed the better part of the furniture, papers, office equipment, electrical installations, and digital networks.”
In sum, the place more or less went to hell.
We left a slogan painted, “DOWN WITH CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT (A) BLACK JUNE”
Now, why would we have destroyed SEDESOL with fire and rage?
Well, we have had stories waiting to be told for a while. First, they invented a sickness for us, one that they called “poverty”, and they convinced us that we suffered from it – only to sell, give, and force us to ingest the “cure”: The idea of development.
It cures us in that it exterminates us, and bleeds out life to better entrap us in its game, its idea of life, its social “should be” of citizenship.
Development has meant nothing more than the continuous extermination of forms of life, species of flora and fauna, ways of living and organizing, thinking, loving, speaking, and celebrating.
How many languages, words, or forms have been strangled, asphyxiated by kilometers of concrete and cement? Or flattened with “mandatory, free, and public education”, or “aid” programs? If these are nothing more than cruel and vile forms of counterinsurgency, it is because “public policy” is the name which governments give to their most deadly weapons: Those with which they have and continue to scar the countryside, depopulate territories.. They have displaced, marginalized, and intoxicated.
They have waged this kind of war against us for decades, because they knew beforehand that territories and ecosystems are formidable, strong when life flows through them, and that their inhabitants and defenders resist precisely because they are part of strong ecosystems, and would never submit if they were confronted head on.
They know that to construct their deadly mega-projects (be they subdivisions, ports, highways, hydroelectric dams, wind turbines, mines, or nuclear plants) they need to weaken the territories, imprison their waters, divide the land, run the rivers through pipes, spill cyanide from the mines and toxic fracking liquid into the earth to pollute the aquifers, such that – trapped and without the ability to support life – we would submit to the tyranny of society and money.
Essentially they have spent decades carrying out military maneuvers on our environment, setting loose a kind of total war that we and others call social war. We see social war as all of these conflicts (macro and micro) that are released in order to submit communities, families and groups to the blueprints and dynamics of Society: To the practices and values that have been put in place to constrain us, mutilate us, and suppress us.
We do not understand social war as that which we wage against the system (in the forms of and as a substitute for what fascists of the hammer and sickle insist on calling class war), but as a great offensive employing all types of resources: From public policy, with its “models for national education” to TV series, the internet, etc, with their bombardment of dynamics and stereotypes. In order for these to be reproduced permanently, social war does not try to strike at its enemy or force it to surrender, but to completely erase it, to eliminate any way of thinking or being that does not contribute to the usufruct of capital, of the World Bank, the IMF, and patriarchal logics, however they may be dressed.
In sum, development – whether it is capitalist, socialist, fascist, or Lopez-Obrador-ist, is nothing more than:
War against the native
War against the different
War against the diverse
War against joy
Because we know that their crusades against hunger are wars – crusades, at the end of the day –
against families
to poison diets
to corrode the social fabric
Because we know that selling a watershed to French, Brazilian, or Mexican corporations is a savage war against the livelihood of everyone and everything.
And if they want war, they’ll have it.
And war is what they get. In this communique we also want to emphasize that, ten days in to this Black June, the smell of burned gunpowder, spilled gasoline, and the smoke rising from tires in burning barricades has marked diverse territories in what has been a historic month, where electoral boycotts in villages, neighborhoods, and communities were carried out in an atmosphere that resounded with incendiary attacks, sabotage, and detonations that did not wait, but filled the air with the sweet scent of insurrectionary breezes.
It is indubitable that something has begun, between the deployments and retreats, skirmishes, barricades or battles such as those in Huajuapan (perhaps the most intense we have seen in many years), Tixtla or Juchitán. On June 7, the Mexican State was confronted in many of our towns and territories; from the Chiapan highlands to the Purepecha plateau, passing through the valleys, plains, mountains, and beaches of Oaxaca to the rivers and brush of the Yaqui trenches were opened against the system of electoral democracy, dealing the blow that it should be dealt:
More and more savagely, landing punch after punch to its sides,
barricades on its highways, we might open the wounds and keep digging
trenches of autonomy
barricades of dreams
riots of liberty with which we might have the possibility of deciding how to live
and what we live for
These have been heavy weeks, but we know that we can’t discern an end to this – nor do we pretend that someday we might see it. Autonomy is not given with civic associations, nor is it begged for in negotiating committees, nor is it protected with human rights commissions. It must be fought for savagely – At Daggers Drawn – against the existing system, its defenders, and its false critics.
Because “the system”, the hydra of the world system, Damn Capitalshit or however you want to call it, exists only to the extent that we reproduce its values, attitudes, behaviors, and dynamics.
Capital is not fixed somewhere in heaven
or on earth
It flows through every day and every moment in which we relate or behave ourselves according to its norms, laws, rites or diversions.
Participating
Collaborating
The desire to take resources handed down and use them to combat the system
or resort to refuge within institutions
None of this does anything but strengthen the enemy
because they replicate it
because they multiply it
because they internalize it
And they realize it
Not passively, but so that it exists with an insatiable voracity, hoping that we all will eat the same frozen trash, genetically modified shit, drinking the same Coca Cola in Somalia and Patagonia.
Beyond reducing our existence to a cog, nut, or spring, it twists us into the reproduction of the dynamics and attitudes of the machinery that makes capitalist world war possible.
We will say it endlessly: The organizations defending “human rights” are a crucial part of the enemy. Before industrialization, Modernity consecrated its triumph with the universal declaration of human rights; at the moment of writing and reaching agreement on what are and are not “universal rights”, they obliterated any possibility for constructing liberty and autonomy in their western nations with a few strokes of the pen.
We will never tire of shouting that to turn to them is to collaborate with the enemy, in a way that is even more low, horrid, and servile than turning out to the streets to demand “more democracy”, though not as low as promoting citizen candidacies, but a little more than sending signatures to an entity in support of or against some law.
All of this strengthens national institutions – that is, it is nothing more than asking the butcher to put down his crude, dull machete and take up a katana, with a brilliant edge that we ourselves have sharpened. But what’s more, to resort to these instances and methods reproduces logic, modes of being, roles, and dynamics that do not just permit, but make possible the capitalist world war. This war is unleashed against us, as well as everything else, living or not, and is the same thing that scorches children in daycare centers and runs slave camps in OaxaCalifornia.
We don’t want to be included in the national project, we don’t want a larger, stronger Mexico, a winning and transparent Mexico in which corruption has ended. Fuck all that!
Countries are an invention of the 19th century, a deal brought about by an aristocracy unwilling to cede power and a thriving bourgeoisie that hoped to break through the barriers of the ancient regime. Democracy: The frankenstein that they came up with together, faced with the conclusion that “everything must change, so that everything can stay the same.”
As such, Mexico is in turn a collection of systems, institutions, and discourses with which they wage social war.
Mexico is the great idea for whose realization it is necessary to commit permanent ethnocide.
Mexico has been the extermination of languages, ways of thinking, watersheds, wetlands, woods forests and mountains, many of which were put up in front of a firing squad while others were struck down with no more process than a few signatures, with no sound but the closing of a folder.
All with their minutes counted, facing the development of Mexico, facing the development of capitalism, a development that takes place if and only if we reproduce the dynamics that the sons of their bastard fathers have put in place. These dynamics were established deliberately, so that – forced to choose between Chana or Juana – we construct our daily lives in their style. We forge our chains on a daily basis, such that you who read this shit are the chief jailer of your own prison, the prison which you have been weaving with your own life, and in the links that we make between our personal prisons, we together form prisons of flesh and bone – and also of concrete – where they have us submissive, trapped by our fears, tied by values that they have taught us since we were small, demanding more and more
more chains
more democracy
more locks
more development
more extermination
Thus, we need to attack and injure, cause breakages, enlarge those that exist, interrupt the dynamics of daily life that we are submerged in – or that they hope to force us into – because much of their success consists in keeping us always racing this way and that, from this problem to that necessity, only opening spaces when they serve the logic imposed by the exercise of power.
Because of what they are, it is often necessary to burn heaven in order to find a space to sit down and simply coexist, and build together without the intervention of the State. Or even just to contemplate the advance of the capitalist world war. Meanwhile, they prepare more ammunition, always prepared to jump aboard.
It is because of what we have said above – and because it makes us very, very happy – that we came
to place our grain of sand to destroy your country
to burn down your ministries
to boycott your elections
to confront your pigs whenever you send them for us
to end, once and for all, your Pax
your armed peace
your wars of extermination, baptized as “development”
We will not forgive. And no, we never forget.
A strong and very spirited hug to the compas in Cheran, Aquila, Ostula, Uripuchuaro and other Purepecha and Nahuatl villages in the regions of Michoacán, struggling for self-determination with dignity in their chests, arms at hand, and their traditions in mind.
To the Yaqui compas who proudly resist and persist.
To the comrades in San Quintín whose subversion has burst into the media, reminding us that you are there, working from sunrise to sunset bringing jitomates to the markets and strawberries to the donuts of the same pigs who strangle them. Many of us can’t see a strawberry without thinking of you, comrades. May the armored vehicles you bashed in with rocks serve as an example for many.
To the comrades of Eloxochitlan, Huautla, Guixhiró, and all the corners of ungovernable Oaxaca, Magón’s cradle and the godmother of insurrection, who have spent the last few days confronting the military, the feds, police, and other sons of bastard fathers who want to force us to govern and be governed.
To the Zapatista comrades of Bachajón and La Realidad, we wish we could stand shoulder to shoulder with you in this moment, but you already know that it’s a hard thing, and they are bringing war to us here as well.
To the other comrades in the jungles and mountains in Chiapas, greetings from one masked face to another, for your great determination and delicious tobacco, this is a demonstration of anarchist solidarity.
To our anarchist comrades, we remind you that the libertarian struggle can’t be done with red arms, to hell with their backstabbing, fuck the dialectic. We shit on their power and the forms they want to present it.
Solidarity with the prisoners of war Abraham Cortés, Fernando Bárcenas and Fernando Sotelo!!
To the black hordes of the gutters:
NOTHING HAS CHANGED! THE WAR CONTINUES!
Ten days into June
Unsigned but with much rage.
BLACK JUNE!