Statement from Juanra from the prison in Vught

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Extra High-Security Pentitentiary, Vught

Reality deals us yet another blow and a new repressive machinery is put into place. The nightmare from the past of a `great and free Spain' [an expression used by Spanish fascists dating from the Franco era, for the `great fatherland'], nowadays named Europe, is based on different organisms. Not long ago I had the more than slightly dubious honour of being the first to fall victim to a new juridical entity that has come into effect in the [European] Community: Eurojust.

The old promise of a Europe of peoples and cultures without borders, where we as individuals would be free to choose our place of residence, is slowly changing into a new nightmare with Orwellian characteristics. It would seem logical that those countries that are most advanced in the area of civil rights should impose a hint of progressiveness on the rest, but it turns out to be quite the other way round. It is those states that have already stood before the European Court in Strasbourg for systematic violation of the most elementary civil rights that are determining the chilling direction: policies of repression and surveillance are being imposed on the remaining states. Discrepancy, doubt, and alternative thinking are and will remain proof of insurgency in the new Europe of Capital. In these times of obligatory uniformity, the world has never before been so unequal in terms of the available opportunities, and never so equal in terms of the militaristic manner of punishment.

Nevertheless, the most horrible is yet to come. If the Spanish government is successful in demanding my extradition, it is clear that I will be placed in detention without any right to the presumption of innocence [until I am proven guilty] and without any right to a fair trial - as if that expression still means anything nowadays - and all this without there ever having been a shred of convincing evidence against me. I am a political activist who is active in a broad spectrum of social movements in Barcelona. And I will be judged as such. I am a dissident to conformist thought processes and to the new social order, and I have behaved shamelessly and committed the high crime of speaking my mind during academic conferences, press conferences, and in concerts before thousands of listeners. I have defied the powers that be and that has a price. A price which I am now paying in full, without discounts or special offers. And that is not even the worst of it, because there is an unbelievable number of people finding themselves in the same situation in this orderly, eager-to-please, and oh-so-bourgeois democratic Europe for those who are bourgeois democrats. The worst of all this is that my extradition, under the aegis of this new agreement named Eurojust, will not only create a precedent, but will also set an example, will pave the way for a new worldwide model of silencing critical voices of those who struggle to stand out and who are fighting for a world in which many worlds can coexist. The prime minister Aznar already said it himself recently: everyone belongs to the same network; i.e., everyone who does
not agree with the doctrines of social democracy (be it now the
Blair/Jospin version or the Berlusconi/Aznar version) will be assumed to be terrorists and our only rights will those of the presumption of guilt and the right to rot away in extra high-security prisons in solitary confinement. Together with my extradition, the rights of millions of people who live in the new `Community' will be extradited and buried.

It may be clear that the last word has not yet been uttered, neither about the hostage-taking to which I have been subjected, nor about the individual and collecive freedoms under which we still live in the here and now. The last word, paradoxically enough, is to be had by those of us without a voice, whether or not the ruling class now ponders it. The last word about this embryonic state of martial law under which campaigns of criminalisation are launched and under which the television monopolies are the handmaidens of certain rulers, will be that we will go to the street day after day to announce that our lives are not for sale. The last word is to be had by us who will continue indicting the ruling class that has bunkered itself in the trenches of its own autism and that ignores the voices of those who struggle against this globalised nothing.

For now and forever.

Solely from the mobilisations will we be able to determine the uncertain future when the fascist police, who recall times past when defenceless demonstrators were shot at, and the torturers with falsified evidence will point the finger of accusation, and the mass media and the judges will sentence people (to death), and when in fact all will be free to think what we always wanted to think, while in reality we will not think and will not even express it, let alone bring it into practice. That is the Europe of prosperity.

And now it is up to us, both individually and communally, to decide
whether we are going to accept that our lives will be mastered by the
model of a police state that tortures and slanders each and every one who stands in its way, or whether we are unwilling to co-operate with this disgrace?

AND MAY THE FORCE BE WITH US

Juanra