LA ABCF member and former political prisoner Daniel McGowan will be presenting on Eric King’s case tomorow (12.28) at a Philly ABC letter writing event.
Happy solstice everyone! As 2020 draws to a close and we celebrate the days getting longer, join us next Monday at 6:30pm to show anarchist political prisoner Eric King some solidarity and send new year’s cards to comrades behind bars! We’ll be joined by someone from Eric’s support crew to provide the most updated info and answer questions. This event will be held on Jitsi – we’ll post the meet link on social media the day of. You can also message us to get the link beforehand.
Thankfully the mail ban against King has been lifted for the time being, so we’re taking this opportunity to send him some love. 2020 has been a rough year for many, particularly people whose lives are in danger inside prisons and folks like Eric who are facing additional repression such as communication restrictions and solitary confinement. Eric’s account of life in solitary confinement in the Bureau of Prisons (Flipping the Script) was featured in Solitary Watch earlier this year. Read his take on the Kafkaesque existence of over 10,000 people being housed in segregation for at least 23 hours a day.
If you can’t make the event, please drop him a line without mentioning his current case, Covid, or anything about the mail ban.
Eric King #27090-045 FCI Englewood 9595 West Quincy Avenue Littleton, CO 80123
A California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officer wears a protective mask as he stands guard at the front gate of San Quentin State Prison on June 29, 2020, in San Quentin, California. JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES
“Some of us wear masks even in our beds, but it feels futile,” said Sarah Jo Pender, incarcerated at the Rockville Correctional Facility, one of Indiana’s three women’s prisons. “There is little to do except watch the infection spread and wait my turn to suffer.” These measures did not prevent Pender and six of the 14 women in her cell from contracting COVID-19. They were not alone: As of December 18, the prison had tested 1,050 women; 302 (nearly 29 percent) tested positive.
WHAT: Noise Demo Against the PIC, for the Liberation of PPs + POWs WHEN: 9:00pm, Thursday, December 31st WHERE: Metropolitan Correction Center (MCC, the federal prison in downtown Manhattan); Pearl Street, between Cardinal Hayes Place and Park Row (J to Chambers Street or 4/5/6/ to City Hall; NOTE: we are not encouraging folks to take public transit or other risks. Please recognize your comfort level with attending this event) BRING: Noisemakers, air horns, drums, anything that is loud, but does not require mask removal!
On the noisiest night of the year in New York City, come help us remind folks locked up that they are not alone. NYC Anarchist Black Cross, in response to an international call for noise demonstrations outside of prisons, is asking folks to join us outside of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in lower Manhattan. Come, not to appeal to authority, speak truth to power, or any other contrivance, but rather to stand with comrades, at a safe distance, and show direct solidarity to those on the other side of the wall.
The state, writ large, is targeting anarchists all across theUnited States and abroad. This will be both protest and celebration.
We are launching a holiday campaign to booster the ABCF Warchest this holiday season. The funds donated goes right to political prisoners. We give monthly stipends of $50 to 20 political prisoners and donate generously to release funds for political prisoners. e.g. like Jay Chase , David Campbell, Zolo Azania and Red Fawn Fallis.
The Anarchist Black Cross Federation (ABCF) initiated the Warchest program in November 1994 to send monthly checks to Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War who have been receiving insufficient, little, or no financial support during their imprisonment. Its purpose is to collect funds from groups and individual supporters and send that money directly to commissary accounts of vetted Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War (PP/POW) via monthly checks. Since its inception, we have distributed over $130,000 in funds.
Other ways to donate:
The current batch of political prisoners who receive the ABCF Warchest:
Happy solstice everyone! As 2020 draws to a close and we celebrate the days getting longer, join us next Monday at 6:30pm to show anarchist political prisoner Eric King some solidarity and send new year’s cards to comrades behind bars! We’ll be joined by someone from Eric’s support crew to provide the most updated info and answer questions. This event will be held on Jitsi – we’ll post the meet link on social media the day of. You can also message us to get the link beforehand.
Thankfully the mail ban against King has been lifted for the time being, so we’re taking this opportunity to send him some love. 2020 has been a rough year for many, particularly people whose lives are in danger inside prisons and folks like Eric who are facing additional repression such as communication restrictions and solitary confinement. Eric’s account of life in solitary confinement in the Bureau of Prisons (Flipping the Script) was featured in Solitary Watch earlier this year. Read his take on the Kafkaesque existence of over 10,000 people being housed in segregation for at least 23 hours a day.
If you can’t make the event, please drop him a line without mentioning his current case, Covid, or anything about the mail ban.
Eric King #27090-045 FCI Englewood 9595 West Quincy Avenue Littleton, CO 80123
Mary Fish turned sixty-eight in September. She did not celebrate with her sons or grandchildren. No one sang her happy birthday; nobody baked her a cake. Instead, she spent that day as she has her previous seventeen birthdays—behind bars.
Mary Fish after participating in The Messages Project, which allows incarcerated people to record themselves reading books to their children or, in Fish’s case, grandchildren.
In 2002, Fish received two prison sentences totaling forty-eight years for assault and burglary. After entering prison, she stopped using drugs and alcohol. She’s participated in self-help groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and various prison programs.
At age fifty-three, Fish began working in the prison’s laundry room for $11 a month. For twelve hours a day, she pushed carts crammed with clothes and sheets, loading them in and out of the institutional washing machines and dryers. “I now have two herniated discs in my back,” she tells me in a letter from prison. She also enrolled in college courses, earning two associates degrees, which helped her shave some time off her sentence for good behavior.
[W]e consider it absurd that a few people should possess the Earth, and the many not have a place to lay down their heads for rest. We want land to be accessible to all…
Ricardo Flores Magon, Regeneracion, Theoretical Journal RICARDO FLORES MAGON WILL LIVE FOREVER IN OUR PRESENCE AND IN OUR HEARTS
Ricardo Flores Magon was born in San Antonio Eloxochitlan, Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1873, to Nahuatl parents. In 1900, he founded the revolutionary theoretical journal Regeneracion, that protested the policies of Mexican President Porfirio Diaz and the military dictatorship that oppressed the Mexican masses. His organizing and literary writings and denunciations of government and society resulted in his political imprisonment in Mexico for a number of years. Ricardo and his brother Enrique went into exile in the US to flee extreme government repression of Mexico’s working-class movements. In 1906, Ricardo founded the “Partido Liberal Mexicano” in St. Louis, Missouri.
In January 1911, the Magon brothers inspired the insurrection in Baja, California, that took over Mexicali and Tijuana into the hands of workers’ councils, with the support of the workers’ movement, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Ricardo and Librado Rivera produced a manifesto entitled “To the Workers of the World” in 1918 in Los Angeles, widely circulated and distributed around the world. Addressed to “Anarchists of the World,” they called on working class unity, and control of the means of production and distribution in the hands of the workers themselves, and for the elimination of all patriarchal, oligarchical forms of ruling class domination of the poor and for the freedom of working class labor power from the shackles of wage-theft slavery, which they considered as an immoral, criminal system of exploitation and illegal expropriation.
For their political activism, Ricardo, Enrique and the other “Magonistas” were arrested, tried, convicted for “seditious conspiracy” and imprisoned at McNeil federal prison in Washington State, and later at the Leavenworth federal prison, then being used by the U.S. government to house revolutionaries, anarchists, socialists, communists and anti-fascists, at the height of the “Red Scare” fascist right-wing frenzy in the U.S., designed to suppress, destroy, and imprison resistance fighters and their social liberation movements, criminalizing all militancy and dissent.
Ricardo, inspired by the manifesto “The Conquest of Bread,” written by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, produced many revolutionary theatre skits, and wrote many profound essays, poems, commentaries, and other revolutionary satirical writings denouncing Mexico’s ruling class. Ricardo also denounced the robbery of Northern Mexico through white settler colonial wars of plunder and annexation, that today comprise the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Colorado, and parts of Utah and Nevada, and forcing Mexico into illegal treaties, such as the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, at the point of a gun, and threats of further war to steal all of Mexico, while the U.S. Marines sat in the port of Vera Cruz, awaiting orders from the U.S. ruling class government to invade all of Mexico or retreat with its territorial land-grabs.
Repression against the Regeneracion editors grew more intense after the journal published essays related to the 1915 Revolutionary Plan of San Diego, Texas, that called for an uprising in the occupied territories stolen from Mexico, and called on all African Americans to join the armed struggle for their own liberation from the plantation slavery of the South, and for the creation of their own African Republic in the South.
A U.S. anarchist political prisoners support movement to free Ricardo, Enrique, and the other imprisoned “Magonistas” was born, led by Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, the IWW and other working-class and labor movements, in spite of repression against the movement by the governments of Mexico and the U.S., who joined forces to destroy the working class movements in both countries. Ricardo was assassinated on November 21, 1922, in Leavenworth prison.
Today, Ricardo Flores Magon lives through his ideas and his writings, such as Tierra Y Liberta, and other of his writings published in Regeneracion that remain valid today, as adopted by Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution, the anarchist indigenous resistance movements in Mexico, and the social tremors initiated by Sub-Commandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, and the Chicano Mexicano Movement for independence, for self-determination, and for national liberation revolution, from within the belly of the beast’s occupied territories and its concentration camps for the poor, neo-colonial plantation prisons of mass incarceration in Texas.
This November 21, 2020, we pay homage to our Comrade, our mentor, our hero, our martyr, and our Brother and Teacher, and remind the rest of the world that the Chicano Mexicano movement for National Liberation has never died, for a people, a nation, a movement will never die as long as our indigenous homeland remains in the hands of racist, war-criminal, foreign invaders, who will never lay permanent claim to the stolen lands in the U.S. Southwest, for those who occupy these lands can never be truly free, nor enjoy human happiness, and freedom of conscience and dignity, until these lands are returned to their legitimate owners, and victims of these colonial war crimes are awarded reparations for their human suffering and loss, to make them whole again, that must begin at a convened International Truth Commission and Reparations Tribunal, as our healing of these historical traumas begins…
By Xinachtli, Chicano POW, political prisoner, now going on 19 years in consecutive solitary confinement at the James V. Allred Unit Control Unit Prison in Iowa Park, Texas, November 21 2020
*** “Intellectual property rights” are an imperialist concept we do not believe in, nor honor; this piece may be reproduced, circulated and disseminated in all social media and other sites, without the permission of Xinachtli or the Central Texas ABC group.
Note:
Having been wrongfully imprisoned since 1997 for defending himself against an armed Texas sheriff, Xinachtli is eligible for parole in 2021. More information about how to support his parole effort should be released soon, but the Xinachtli Defense Committee would encourage everyone to send letters to his lawyers in support of his parole, using his registered name, ALVARO LUNA HERNANDEZ, and prison number, TDCJ-CID#00255735. Parole letters should be addressed to:
Texas Department of Criminal Justice – Parole Division P.O. Box 13401, Austin, Texas – 78711-3401
But the letters themselves need to be sent to Xinachtli’s lawyers at: ALLEN PLACE LAW, 109 South 7th Street, Gatesville, Texas 76528
Sending them to Allen Place instead of directly to the parole board will help his lawyers to use them effectively.
Key points to mention are that he has a solid support system waiting, with available opportunities of employment, residence, and transportation, and that he is in his late 60s with several health conditions which would put him at high risk if infected with COVID-19.
To contact Xinachtli directly, write to
Alvaro Hernández #255735 James V Allred Unit 2101 FM 369 North Iowa Park, TX 76367
Join a collective of advocates and directly impacted leaders for a #ClemencyNow rally outside of Governor Cuomo’s NYC office. We will continue to pressure Cuomo and demand that he release people through clemency. RSVP for the in-person rally here. Register for the virtual event here.
This is a call for a night of strong solidarity with those imprisoned by the state. Historically, New Year’s Eve is one of the noisiest nights of the year. This year, most of which has been consumed by a global pandemic, we encourage folks to take whatever measures are necessary to insure individual and community well-being, in response to both the virus and the state, understanding the balance each of us must strike for ourselves. Given our current reality, on New Year’s Eve gather your crew, collective, community, organization, or just yourself to raise a racket and remind those on the inside that they are not alone.
Internationally, noise demonstrations outside of prisons are a way to remember those who are held captive by the state and a way to show solidarity with imprisoned comrades and loved ones. We come together to break the loneliness and isolation.
We know that prison is beyond reform and must be completely abolished. It is a mechanism of repression used by the state to maintain a social order rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. To come together outside of the sites of repression is to also stand in defiance of what they represent.
The logic of the state and capital—of punishment and imprisonment, must be replaced by a rejection of oppression and exploitation. This call is one step in that direction.
Wherever you are, meet on New Year’s Eve at the prisons, jails, and detention centers, be loud in solidarity with those imprisoned and to push forward the idea of a world free from domination.
We send this call in solidarity with those defying state repression of large scale dissent: from the George Floyd uprisings to ongoing defiance in Greece by those facing repression as anarchists, and all of those in the spaces between.
We want a world without walls and borders. We will fight together until everyone is free!
