A communiqué from Chile sent to us by comrades there on Oct. 29th, 2019. The translation is their own, but we edited a bit.

THE RIGHT TO LIVE IS NOT BEGGED FOR, IT IS TAKEN!

While drinking tea with a group of old fascists ladies, the fifth biggest Chilean millionaire thief (with a fortune of US$2.8 million), [the Chilean president] Piñera, gives us his paternal after-dinner sermon:

“Yesterday, I announced that we are in full swing with a process of normalization to confront the emergency situation that we have experienced and known in recent days. This is due not to the peaceful demonstrations of people, it is due to the action of small, organized, violent groups, which have caused a gigantic damage (…) this is against them, not against humble people, or peaceful people, or people who want to protest or manifest their discontent. Therefore, in order to quickly and successfully implement this process of normalization, which means reducing and lifting curfews and lifting the state of emergency, we need to achieve the safeguarding of public order, the protection of people security, the respect of human rights and also to ensure the freedom and the right of people to mobilize, to go to work, to go toschool, to make their lives worthwhile. (…) In order to achieve all of this our government will continue fighting, with all the instruments that democracy bestows us —the legitimate instruments of democracy —, these groups of violent people that with total bad will have caused so much damage to so many Chileans and so many of them humble people.”

We reply to him: the tradition of the oppressed tell us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

“Hasta que vivir valga la pena” 1 has been one of the mottos of this spontaneous movement. First, the obvious: living now is not worthwhile. Some proofs: 50% of the 11,000 people who retired this August did so with $48,000 clpas pension; 11 million Chileans live in debt; Chile has the second highest rate of teenage suicide in the OECD after North Korea; more than 50% of the country earns less than $350,000 clp per month [the poverty line in Chile is fixed by the State institutions at $420,000 clp], etc. But then, the underlying logic of such a slogan points to the vital fact that we all suffer as a result of the dictatorship of money: the commodification of all spheres of life. This is what the capitalist progress produces and it is the real state of emergency. It is sad that life is not worth living, but it is sadder that it must be worth –and the sadness– to want to live it.

The shameless mafioso Piñera assures us that he is protecting us against “the brutal violence, unleashed delinquency and massive destruction,” but for that he would have to remove himself from office, since nobody forgets, for example, his embezzlement of the Talca Bank during 1980s – when Piñera, with a debt of more than 200 million dollars associated to bank loans to phantom companies related to him, fled for 24 days – or his 30 years of tax evasion in one of his properties in Lago Caburga that popular wisdom tells us would cover more than 83,000school subway tickets.
The fact that the traditional media and politicians treat insurgents as criminals demonstrates the vulnerability of capitalism, which tell us ad nauseum that we must return to the normality that brought us here.
Since democracy from its origins has been based on the oppression of enslaved groups, Piñera is not wrong when he says he is using “the instruments that democracy bestows us” to silence the life impulse that is manifesting. Against democratic totalitarianism we affirm:

FREEDOM IS THE FREEDOM TO BRING DOWN ANY TYRANT!

• 1the content of this saying is “Until living is worthwhile” but the sentence literally says “Until living is worth the sadness”

Another communiqué from Chile sent to us by comrades there on Oct. 30th, 2019.

We’ve heard it repeated like a mantra: “We have to return to normality.” But their damn normality is the normality of a slow death. When the State is incarcerating us or shooting at us; regulating the way the rich poison the valleys, dry the rivers, destroy the seabed, clear-cut the forests, torture animals, etc. The system of exploitation which we rise up against also exploits the natural world!

It is only through a long process of being dumbed-down that we fail to perceive as madness that global devastation can somehow “matter less” than the priority given to monetary gains.
Our struggle is against the economy which the State traffics in. Against the economy which floods the markets with vegetables uprooted out of the earth with pesticides; meats filled with antibiotics which come from animals martyred in agricultural camps; against the economy which furthers the desertification of Chile with industrial agriculture; against the economy which shouts at us to COMPETE OR DIE!

They say we need money to learn; so that we can stay healthy, so that we can feed ourselves… Money is like the blood of the social body which circulates the oxygen of commodities. But this is only so because private property has dispossessed us of everything and we must atone for our existence with work.

If we don’t find a way out of this economic reality and create a human one, we will then allow for a return of the barbarism of the market, which we are now rising up against, to continue existing.
Money is a fiction! We can live without it!

We are savoring the abundance of life in the streets within the solidarity which appears at every moment of the struggle; everything is within our reach if we decide to take it. The dignity which we demand, which is the emancipation from the dictatorship of money, can only be realized by us and for us!1
To take back our existence we don’t need more theory than that of immediate practice!

• 1Note: the comrades here make use of the gender neutral suffix -x, nostotrxs

A third communiqué from Chile sent to us by comrades there, late on Oct. 30th, 2019. We reproduce these texts so that their content can inspire us in places either in revolt, or still on the cusp of it. The initial text before the line break was included in the email which is not included on the original .pdf or .pngs. The following is our translation.

Compañerxs,

Today, Wednesday, the 30th we drafted up the following call for a spontaneous assembly in Plaza Italia [Santiago, Chile] at 5:30PM, before the State started its repression.

May this replicate itself across all plazas in Chile.

Resistance is fertile!

– Evade Chile 2019

LET’S CONSTRUCT OUR OWN NORMALITY
PLAZA ITALIA, EVERY DAY AT 5PM
Music, theater, dance, open talks, spontaneous & planned assemblies, workshops, expositions, exchange & giveaway of food, books, clothes, free kitchens, pichangas1

The Decisive Moment!

Hermanxs2 , we have a right to defend ourselves!

Until recently this system of exploitation has survived only because the majority of us were apathetic, and wanting to avoid problems, we cooperated [with this system] so that we could get by.

But during these last few days of insurrection, which has pushed us to shake of this feeling of powerlessness, as well as the obligation to work and consume carrying us to our death. If this moment has shown us something, it is the enormous creative potential, which breaks through without reservation, when we stop serving the god of money. We have the opportunity to make this moment eternal.

Akin to an abusive relationship, the politicians and their entourage of experts have promised us that now they are going to listen to us, that now things are going to change. Let them be consumed in their lonely funeral debates on how to respond to our impulse towards life.

As they lose themselves drafting action protocols, bills, petitions, executive priorities and agendas, we move forward in the practical destruction of the old world by creating our own forms of education, our own networks of mutual aid, our own sources of energy, our own methods to revitalize the earth, etc.

The new social organization built on our desires, passions and dreams does not fit into their “new social pact.” Only we can, day by day, create the conditions for the liberation, development & practical realization of this new social organization. If this is the direction we take, then no weapons can stop us!

Our happiness is fed by what is living. We will never relent on our desires now that we have tasted our creative potential.

• 1Pichangas in Chile refers to football games with less or different rules
• 2untranslatable word using the gender-neutral -x which would denote brothers,sisters without gender, akin to siblings

The following is the fourth communiqué sent to us by Evade Chile 2019. We received it yesterday and here is our translation. More fiery words, for fiery times! Hacia la vida vamos!

THE EXPERTS WILL COME TO EXPLAIN TO US HOW LIFE FUNCTIONS AND HOW WE CAN ARRIVE AT POSTPONING LIFE ONCE AGAIN: THEY SHALL NOT PASS!

PUBLIC UTILITY NOTICE ON THE AGONY OF THE OLD WORLD

We deplore their offers and demands for education, health services, public transportation, pensions, etc. Why must we accept to be part of the camps where the market selects its servants? Why would we want to be their “healthy functionaries” in a world which sickens us? And why would we desire to arrive more quickly to centers of exploitation which devour our vital energy?

It matters little that these things could be obtained “for free” with a “just redistribution by way of taxes.” Are the large agricultural landholders at Aconcagua really going to pay? How about the mining operations? Or rather, are those who will pay continue to be the lands they turn into deserts, the rivers they dry and the waters they contaminate?

The human is the only animal capable of realizing its dreams by changing the world and up until now it has only realized the exchange of its vital power for production and an accumulation of commodities. The history which we lead with every stop of progress is not one guided by our desires. It is the history of a moribund civilization which today is on its way to bury us under the weight of its absence of life.

We are overjoyed by seeing the looting and burning of supermarkets, banks, newspaper, the malls, the toll booths, the factories, the trains but not because of their end result; but rather for a change of understanding which occurs with such acts: a rupture with what stops us from enjoying everything and an intolerance for anything obstacle blocking pleasure.

Nonetheless, we know that some of these acts are organized by repressive State forces to set the uprising against itself, creating divisions between the poor who defend their place in the slaughterhouse and those who are even poorer and are fed up of dying as they live.

Dawns, whether red or black, matter less to us than the spark of life which ignites them. Our passion is directed towards an overcoming, towards a violence of life which relents at nothing and not a violence, breaking out due to being contained, falls back on itself and its own tail like the rage of a chained dog. We will destroy what dehumanizes us without offering anything in returns!

We reject all intellectuals and groupuscules who take themselves as directors or representatives of “the people.” It is them who will sit to negotiate with the State and it is them who will end up drafting measures to reorganize our daily ruin. We will not accept any other guide outside of our own desires!

Confronting capitalist survival, we have no other option than to attempt the impossible: the potential of life realized here and now is the only weapon which none of their arms could ever subdue!

The fifth communiqué by Evade Chile 2019. Received yesterday (Nov. 1st). This is actually a letter they received from Belgium, hence the change of rhetoric & style (which we actually don’t agree with very much: too much humanism, moralism and a lack of class analysis). What follows is its translation.

Is it possible to exit the spiral of violence?

This is a question we have to ask the government and have them remember the words of Blanqui: “Yes, gentlemen, this is a war between the rich and the poor. This is how the rich have wanted it and they are, in effect, the aggressors. With the particularity that they consider it disastrous the fact that the poor oppose them with resistance. When referring to the people they will only state circumlocutions: [the people are] a ferocious animal which defends itself when it is attacked.” Blanqui’s project, which advocated for armed struggle against the exploiters, deserves to be examined, scrutinized under the light of its evolution in conjunction with capitalism and the worker’s movement, which struggled to end it.

The proletarian conscience which aspired to found a classless society has been a transitory form which has acquired human consciousness in history, in an era where the productive sector had not yet given way to the colonization of consumerism. This is the human consciousness that resurfaces today as an insurrection in many places and of which the revolt in Chile is an omen. We witness the emergence of insurrectionary pacifism that, armed only with the irrepressible will to live, and which opposes itself to the the destructive violence of the government. The State cannot and does not want to listen to the demands of a people whose public good has been taken away long ago, its res republica.

Clearly, human dignity and the tenacious determination of the insurgents are precisely what is saving the mafiosos in power from a wave of violence which would physically hit them, even in their ghettos of dirty money.

To top off the absurdity, they find nothing better than to throw darts against a movement that is avoiding a fair reaction against their violence. They sick their guard dogs of the media & police. They take out eyes, imprison. They kill with impunity. They proliferate provocations, exhibiting towards the most disadvantaged their external & derisory signs of wealth. The care they put into denouncing, or even effectively instigating those who light barricades and those who break windows…doesn’t it show that they are not looking for a real civil war but rather its simulacrum, its staging? As everyone knows, chaos is good for business.

The leaders have no support other than profit, whose inhumanity corrodes them. They have no more intelligence than the money they harvest. They are barbarism whose usurped illegitimacy which the insurgents will not stop at annulling.

Privilege being human1 ; organize without bosses or self-appointed delegates; ensure the preeminence of the conscious individual over the individualist moo of the populist flock; such are the best guarantees of the collapse of this oppressive system and its destructive violence for the insurrection in progress and for the peoples of the world.

• 1We do not condone this message. - Ediciones Inéditas

The sixth communiqué from Evade Chile 2019. What follows is the translation.

HOW TO (NOT) ORGANIZE IF WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS TO SUBVERT THE COMMODIFIED & PATRIARCAL LOGIC OF MONEY.

1 Organization cannot depend on the internet.
2 The participants should agree on: first, a periodicity (daily, weekly, monthly, annually, etc.); then an amount of time to gather (an hour, 6 hours, 3 days, etc.) and finally a physical place (house, park, neighborhood meeting, workplace, etc.)
3 These above factors will depend on the urgency of the objectives and security of the context.
4 During the gathering all necessary logistical work will be done so that the organization produces (discussions, actions, texts, videos, art or anti-art, etc.).
5 Over time internal commissions can be created to expedite certain tasks.
6 No position is above any other, the division of labor is not tied to any political or technical ideology; it must respond to the deepest imaginary possible.
7 Rotation [of tasks] is advantageous & cyclical. Authority is paralyzing and tends towards obsolescence.
8 All organizational activity occurs during the period of time which is physically shared. Organization lives in physical bodies filled with emotions and ideas.
9 Communication via the internet or telephone cannot replace face-to-face communication.
10 No longer shall it be asked “what can we give to the organization.”
11 Success, or failure, will depend on the motivations, initiative, clarity, and above all, the capacity for the participants to communicate and mutually accept each other.
12 This was the form of organizing communities that preceded us, not virtual, but real: organization on a human scale.
13 The feeling of “atomization” and generalized separation that we live, the interminable list of teams and parties to belong to or defend, are inexorably tied to the real virtuality of value-money-capital.
14 Organizing is not an end in itself.
15 This is only the beginning.

The following is the 7th communiqué we’ve received from Evade Chile 2019. And it is probably our favorite so far. What follows is our translation.

[FRONT OF FLYER]

Osorno [Chile] / 2.15AM / Saturday, Nov. 2nd

“Today torrents of information are no longer about what is not happening, about what I don’t have, about what I can’t do, nor buy, nor aspire to because I don’t have money. Today the torrent of images which flash on my smartphone screen are about what is happening all around me; above all what we are suffering; above all about those who struggle; above all about what is happening to me; about what pains me and the anguish of the world I live in; about the misery of normality; and above all also about everything that which here and now could be if we keep alive this enthusiasm. At last images have meaning: it’s all about life itself; about my life and those of everyone showing that at last we have the opportunity to take it back. Today everything is possible.”

#EstoNoHaTerminado #ThisIsNotOverYet

[BACK OF FLYER]

In light of the uprisings these past days a Leftist deputy stated on TV that to respond to the insurrection we are living in, political parties must consider “how do we involve people in a change.” It’s evident that these satraps still do not understand anything; they are too worried about losing their jobs as dispensers of social justice. Change is already here and it was brought by, lived in and revived by the masses from the liveliness found in the streets, in the squares and in the towns!

We don’t want to be integrated into anything. It is you, you scourges, who have to join in on our change and to that end you have to step down from the carriage of power. We know all too well the old vampirization of fresh blood by the economy and power to reheat their frozen veins. Through the experiences of students which have sat at your dialogue tables, to just end up being deceived, we learned that the State apparatus is a dead mechanism, which only ends up drying up the impulse of the living with agendas and compromises, which [the State] likes to laud.

You cannot pretend to modify some problems with the means that administer the relations that created them. The much talked-over “political de-legitimacy” does not only point to the de-legitimacy of politicians: we no longer believe in political mediation as a way of organizing the reproduction of our lives!

We want everything. Our struggle is not based on particular demands: we know the ecological crisis is the other side of the social crisis; that pollution is linked to industrial production; that industry seeks profits at all costs; that profit comes from our enslaving labor and that labor produces an abstract wealth that renders us poor. ‪We seek to liberate ourselves from money, the commodity, wage-labor, Capital & the State by organizing the production in common of our very lives!

We don’t need politicians or experts to come to show us how to organize our lives. Our organization exists in the here and now because this is how we have been able to survive with hunger wages.

While all the politicians and businessmen want us to “return to normality” or “lower the fever of the situation”: we feel that we can’t return to how it was before.

They ask us to “give them time,” that things “do not change overnight.” But we have effectively seen how united we can change everything; change our daily isolation, indolence; change those eternal days at work where we feel we die, little by little, for a life that now finds us, and compels us, onto the streets.

All of our demands can be immediately realized, but only if we realize them ourselves!

The following was sent to us a few hours ago today (11/11) by Evade Chile 2019. What follow is a translation of their message, followed by a translation of their communiqué.

Comrades,

The State is attacking with all its political, military and media weapons to make us submit and forcefully remind us of its only message: that we have no right to more than its crumbs.

We see comrades falling everywhere, but there are millions of us rising up and carrying in our hearts a new world.

Up with those who struggle!

[FRONT TRANSLATION]
THE
STATE
IS THE
REAL
TERRORIST

#criapacosA play on the Spanish proverb that says, “Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos” or “raise crows and they will take out your eyes. Here the comrades replace crows (cuervos) with the derogatory term “paco” used to refer to cops. A reference to police that have been taking out the eyes of rebels in the streets.

[REAR TRANSLATION]

The “forces of order” enter into high schools & hospitals shooting, as others protect monuments and shopping centers. Everywhere our brothers, our sisters, our children and our parents are beaten, gassed with chemical weapons, sexually assaulted, disappeared, killed, imprisoned and even have their eyes ripped out.

Every one of our dead calls us out in outrage and revolt.

Now that power’s mask has fallen and we fearlessly observe the bureaucratic-miltary nature of democracy, the grotesque face of political patronage, the cynicism of the manager of social organization and the terrorism of the mafia state: we realize that we only have one option. To free our ourselves from voluntary servitude and self-organize production of all aspects of our social life.

This spontaneous organization is already manifesting itself among us. Every day we see this collective intelligence that does not need either the advice or direction of any kind of authority to move with precision and determination.

We see it appear in the different expressions of combat and resistance against repression: first-aid groups; psychological aid groups; those who offer us food & water; those who offer us shelter in their homes; those who dedicate themselves to political parody and bring down monuments and rename squares and streets, etc.

It is new way of life based on solidarity, gratuity and creativity that destroys the misery of wage-labor and the distances that kept us apart.

This fight is stubborn and without compromise because what is at stake is life itself. Our dreams do not fit in their polling urns.

For a long time we have endured the dehumanizing oppression of the dictatorship of money. We were systematically impoverished and made to believe that we were nothing. But by shedding all the garbage of the commodity-production system we have regained dignity and the desire to fight. This uprising has shown what true wealth and abundance is. Today we aspire for everything.

RESISTANCE IS LIFE!!!

The following was sent to us earlier today (11/13) by Evade Chile 2019. What follow is a translation of their message, followed by a translation of their communiqué.

Comrades,

Faced with these adversarial moments, only solidarity & mutual aid could give us encouragement.

[FRONT IMAGE]
IT WASN’T A DROUGHT
IT WAS A LOOTING1

IT WASN’T PEACE
IT WAS SILENCE
#ElPuevlo2

[BACK IMAGE]

“Divide and conquer” was the advice a police officer gave to the rich some 500 years ago and they’ve never forgotten it. The satraps3 in turn find themselves everywhere overwhelmed. Today they can only resort to terrorism, staging of false scenes and manipulation by way of their usual conduits: their armed forces, their means of (in)communication and their political theater.

They want to lecture us about violence! They say that “violence breeds violence” and they are not wrong. 5 minutes of life can feel eternal when you live in misery. But we have woken up. And in response to our outbreak of life, power then sets up another spectacle: whether by evicting encampments [of the houseless]; building ghettos where they keep us prisoners; seizing control of territories of those who stand up to fight against self-destructive inertia. It is those who cling to this barbaric civilization whom, systematically & an in organized fashion, set fire & destroy to defend their poisoned piece of the pie.

They want to lecture us about citizenship! They affirm: “Today’s easy choice is to use force and that the difficult one is to bet on Peace and dialogue. But of what peace do they speak of? We lived drunk with the frustrating rage of a war of all against all: fighting for a job or trying to make ends meet; struggling to breathe amid clouds of dust & acid in the cities; struggling to get a bit of water in the fields. It was not peace, it was silence: the good citizen eats and remains quiet. We would die the way we were living. And now that we deign raise our heads and wake up they aim for our eyes!

They want to divide us! They are scandalized because their monuments to violence are falling down: busts of genocidal soldiers; torture enclosures; cathedrals to a Macho God and the God of Money; palaces that the rich build to numb us with an endless supply of commodities. They exploit us and then sell the products of our labor. But despite all the their influence, street lights and bread & circuses with which they want to adorn it all, the world has not ceased to be a great salt mine of which most of us are servants.

They plundered the forests, the rivers, the lakes and the ocean with their logging, salmon farms and agribusiness. They polluted the desert and converted into a dump for the mining industry. They transformed cities into gas chambers and cancer factories. They exterminated ancestral cultures. They disappeared, killed and terrorized any villager who dared to question them and accuse them of abuses. But we are not afraid of them or their destruction. We have built everything that belongs to them and we will rebuild it in our own way, according to our needs, desires and in harmony with Mother Earth, which sustains us. After the fire we will sprout like a native forest.

It does not matter how much lead they fire upon us. Detached from the pain of everyday misery, our stagnant energy is poured into pure creativity and celebration. Although there is no guarantee of a final victory over the dictatorship of money, this rupture has already been pleasure. There is no return to the “peaceful existence” of the reigning lies.

• 1This phrase renders better in Spanish with the closeness of the pronunciation of “sequía” (drought) & of “saqueo” (looting)
• 2Here the comrades switch the b in pueblo with a v, continuing the allusion above of a drought with the closeness of the word puevlo (people)with the Spanish word for dust, polvo.
• 3A satrap; a governor of a province, a viceroy among the Persians.