For the first time in this rotten country, a movement of practical solidarity with prisoners in revolt has appeared outside the prisons. This was a blow which none of the reformers or moaners ever expected - all those who allow the suffering of prisoners to justify their own cowardliness, their own interest in helping to maintain the status quo. Above all, it was a blow for the State.

On the outside, there are a multitude of cretins who indulge themselves in long speeches over what they prudishly call 'the problem of detention', even though they have no personal experience of being arrested and would be better shutting up. Their pretentious hot air contrasts with the silence that is imposed upon the prisoners in revolt, and the total censure that their communiques have received.

Inside a prison, information gets around by underground rumours. From one prison to another, though, information gets round differently. This gives a certain importance in prisons to the written press, on top of it being a way of killing time through reading. Boredom and isolation are the only two things which make prisoners a bit interested in the newspapers; and makes each of their lies that much more damaging.

The press has been unanimously hostile to the prisoners revolts, through slander or silence. All commentators shout out the same stupid questions that only intellectuals can pose, with the all too obvious aim of creating doubt and confusion. They only differ in the manner by which they ask the State to crush the revolt. At one extreme, Le Figaro calls for a tighter clamping down upon prisoners, and harps on ceaselessly about supposed government inaction. At the other extreme, Liberation joyfully supports a government which talks of reforms, & waxes eloquent over the cultural gadgets by which the government hopes to cool the jailbirds' anger.

All these liars are even more hostile when they have to report gestures of real solidarity with the inmates which counter their views.

We're not like those who specialise in writing or speaking about prison (we're not like those who try to set up gatherings at Beaubourg, or who shamelessly go and waffle for two hours with the head-screw of the Fleury-Merogis gaol either).

The risk of ending up in jail -and the fact that many of us have been there before- largely condi-tions our lives. Let's point out that those of us who have been convicted and detained in the past have always been criminals; we have no affinity with 'political prisoners' whatsoever.1

The prisoners struggle totally concerns us. We distributed a folder in June '85 which echoed and amplified the prison mutineers demands, in the spirit of the revolt itself. To our knowledge, this is the only document on the outside which clearly took the side of the revolt, without the embarassed excuses put forth by the militants of all types. The four demands stated were those of the mutineers, expressed in the rare tracts to filter out, and, above all, expressed in their actions. A certain number of people then created a scandal, particularly by disturbing rail traffic throughout the country. They thus gained publicity for the demands which had been denied up to that point, and have justice to the reality of the revolt.

The hostility of the media has been systematic from the beginning. All have spoken of 'outrages'. Calling a barricade on a railway track, or breaking a signal light an 'outrage' is not only an outrageous exaggeration, but also a means of encouraging repression by confusing all expressions of practical solidarity with the mutineers, with terrorism. A fortiori, to speak of 'rail terrorists' as some papers have done is very sordid. One paper even spoke of travellers taken hostage, after an action involving the Trans Europe Express. (Speaking of hostages, what about the 25,000 in Preventive detention?!) Organised vandalisme would be more precise.

We use the means of action of any proletarian: sabotage and vandalism. We don't carry out symbolic actions, we create disorder like workers in struggle are currently doing, blocking road and railway lines, stopping TV transmitters etc.

The principal characteristics of the actions from mid May to mid June was simplicity. The Brussels TEE was stopped by a very simple procedure which changed a signal light to red. 15 people were enough to stop this important train, spray-paint the demands of the May rioters, break the windows to throw the tracts inside. The customs officials and plain clothes policemen in the front car did nothing to oppose this. The system of signals of the high speed TGV was sabotaged by a mere hammer; on various rail lines, electrical boxes were burnt with a bit of petrol.

Straw burns well in summer as a Toulouse chair maker who used to make his profits from the sweat of prisoners found out: ‘Bandoleros' reduced his workshop & his business to ruins. At Nantes, the printing press which handles the national press for the western regions was sabotaged when sand, gravel and nails were shoved into the compressors that feed the printing cylinders. In Paris, two metro lines were shut down by the simplest of techniques: throwing worksite material on the tracks.

Each time every precaution was taken to see that the safety of the travellers was not threatened. This is why we did not stop the high speed train (TGV) in the same way that we stopped the TEE train. We thought it too dangerous to brutally stop a train as fast as this one, so we sabotaged material to make them very late.

Emboldened by the arrest of 4 people at Rouen at the beginning of July, the specialised liars went one step further in their hypocrisy they insinuated that these 4 could have been responsible for the derailment which took place 3 days after the action of the 'Hoboes of the Val-de-Seine' on the Paris-Le Havre line. The press announced that they had burned some signal boxes which upset the mechanism. But as the railway company itself had stated on numerous occasions, this could not have had dangerous consequences for the safety of passengers because the destruction of any signal boxes automatically causes all railway signals to go red so that all trains coming into the sector stop, and then proceed at greatly redrced speed (about 20 m.p.h.).

There is no way that the 'Hoboes of Val-de-Seine' could have been responsible for the accident yet they have been accused of the destruction of material which could endanger lives, a criminal offence. Channel 2 and France-Sok have gone out of their way to push these slanders to the limit, with the aim of frightening off those who might be tempted to carry out such actions in the future.

In Paris, the underground was interrupted in two different places simultaneously on the mor-ning of Friday the 12th July. That night Le Monde and France-Soir announced that the saboteurs had left tracts signed 'Black Order': this is untrue. This can only be a police provocation, as they were the first on the scene. 'Black Order' is the name used by the Italian secret service when they set off murderous bombs in the station at Bologna a couple of years ago. One can see the sort of analogy that there they were trying to set up.... Despite the formal denial, that evening France-Sok took up this blatant fabrication in its edition of the following day.

After they first asked if we were terrorists or jokers with poor taste, the specialists of lies went from insinuation to denunciation. This is not surprising in a social system whose survival depends upon the police and the lie. They speak of a 'mysterious group' behind all this. A pretentious ignoramus in France-Soir declared that 'these groups recruit members of left-wing anarchism, the fringe between delinquency and terrorism'.

Let's stress once and for all that we, Cangaceiros, don't come from leftism, anarchist or otherwise there isn't a single ex-militant amongst us. And none of us has ever been mixed up with any kind of political racket in any way. We have only one form of relation with political groups and organisations: war. They're all our enemies, there's no exception. We aren't 'on the fringes of delinquency': we are delinquents. Which doesn't mean that our 'delinquent situation is a professional one'. But on the other hand we have nothing to do with terrorism at all. The poor sods who let themselves be drummed into that are but puppets, executors of a stinking ideology serving an apparatus based on a cop-mentality and hierarchical structures as we said before, we treat militants with contempt.

Other liars insinuate we have large amonts of money, suggesting we are 'supported by more important organisations'. What then? The Mafia? The K.G.B.? The Red Brigades? And the Opus Dei? And to say we are well organised they say we are 'strongly structured' (HORROR !). They find our texts are too well printed: anyone knows you don't need to be covered with gold to get a few thousand mags correctly printed. Yet they insinuate...They use calumny and amalgam techniques hoping some of it will end up on a judge's desk...

Among the most derisory of these calumnies, the press and T.V. have said that one of our friends arrested in Rouen is a professor of philosophy! The Ministry of National Education itself had to correct this a few days later: the insulted person had, in fact, only been a simple assistant in a school ten years ago. This is a typical police reflex - to point out one thinker and, for these cretins, this person has to be a graduate. Intellectuals are only graduate cretins. Proletarians know how to think by themselves - they don't need to be taught. As for philosophers, they can't think because they don't know a thing about life. T

To finish with these dubious allegations let's say that a group who publishes a magazine and often makes its position known through leaflets, tracts and posters can hardly be described as obscure and mysterious. A widely diffused tract explains the sufficient reasons for these actions: no paper, no radio or T.V. news has dared say precisely what was in it. They prefered to make suppositions, to make up a mystery out of simple things: it's like all the cackling about the prisoner's revolt, on `the problem of prison'. Although it's an extremely simple thing, they keep confusing the issues so no one knows what it's all about in the end. The question is to know whether we accept the prisons or whether we refuse them. Unequivocal.

We wanted to make widely known the demands logically following the May '85 revolts and start to break down the inmates' isolation, as every care was taken to suffocate them into silence after the fever of the mutinies was gone.

Outside, we are usually submerged by a feeling of impotence as to what is going on inside. For the first time this impression of powerlessness has been overcome. Though not numerous, by simple and effective means, we have given the May revolts a beautiful publicity. And if these actions have remained limited, it's down to our own isolation in this society.

The coming of the Left to power has allowed French capitalism to overcome a difficult moment and, notably, to discipline the workers with the help of the trade-unions. It has intensified the modernisation of social isolation through the extension of policing and control this is built on a policy of isolation by imprisoning those who still escape this control. The social peace appearing to reign in this country depends, in great part, on the overpopulation in the prisons. That's all.

One could, of course, hope that because of the revolt there will be a breath of fresh air on the 14th July. We have seen to what point the socialists take everyone for idiots. But what can one hope from a State, apart from blows and lies? And what can one hope from a shit like Mitterand, who, as Home Secretary, gave the orders to shoot down striking workers in 1955 in Nantes?

"Everything that crawls on this earth is governed by blows"

OUR FRIENDSHIP TO THE HOBOES OF VAL-DE-SEINE!!!

OUR FRIENDSHIP TO THE MUTINEERS OF CHAUMONT, OF LYON, DOUAI, EVREUX, AND TO ALL THE OTHERS.

Beginning of August '85

OS CANGACEIROS

Translation: March 86
A censored version of this text has been previously published by Black Flag (with whom we have no contact and have obviously asked nothing from) in November '85. As always, the censors define themselves by the content of what they censor.

• 1Of course, we're not talking here about workers whom the State send to gaol in order to break a strike (like the miners). In practice, in France it doesn't occur to a proletarian to proclaim himself as a "political prisoner". Only members of political sects and other militants aren't ashamed of defining themselves like this. (Note, March '86)