“Death to the regime, that leaves in the bones
To justice that has us imprisoned
Their inquisition takes me to the stake
The flames awaits them igniting the workers’ anger
I will never be in the prison of fear
We are capable of stopping what they are doing, believe it…”
By Alternativa Anticapitalista
The recent arrest and imprisonment of the Catalonian anti-fascist rapper Pablo Hasél, last February 16, has triggered all the possible alarms for the defense of freedom of speech and critical art. This has once again shown the unsustainable anti-democratic mask of the Spanish monarchy, who accused the artist of “glorification of terrorism” and “slandering the Crown”, (while Juan Carlos I is currently in the Arab Emirates fleeing from justice for money laundering). This event highlights the post-Franco influence of the 1978 regime in Spain, its repressive and authoritarian regime, specially the urgency of Unity of action to dismantle it.
The massive support that Hasél has received from other artists, internationally, but mainly by the people and the youth, has been displayed in massive marches in different regions of the Spanish State where tensions accumulate due to social inequality, growing poverty and cuts on democratic rights, added to repression, censorship and prison for voices who discern and criticize the regime.
If you are reading this and cannot help but draw comparisons to Nicaragua, you have more than sufficient motives. We continuously see how different States, defending the privileges of the political and economic elites, activate repressive forces like the police, laws, armies and violent groups to disarticulate any kind of popular uprising, when the strength of the social and cultural manifestations take to the streets to fight for their rights and freedoms. In authoritarian regimes, the entire State structure and its institutions are designed to justify the repression of the population and to silence any demand. Both the police and the justice apparatus are directly responsible for the impunity they allow in cases of police/justice brutality, which have left severe consequences like political imprisonment, extra-judicial executions, massacres, tortures, sexual abuse, eye mutilation and other crimes against humanity committed by the State.
If you are reading this and cannot help but draw comparisons to Nicaragua, you have more than sufficient motives. We continuously see how different States, defending the privileges of the political and economic elites, activate repressive forces like the police, laws, armies and violent groups to disarticulate any kind of popular uprising, when the strength of the social and cultural manifestations take to the streets to fight for their rights and freedoms.
In authoritarian regimes, the entire State structure and its institutions are designed to justify the repression of the population and to silence any demand. Both the police and the justice apparatus are directly responsible for the impunity they allow in cases of police/justice brutality, which have left severe consequences like political imprisonment, extra-judicial executions, massacres, tortures, sexual abuse, eye mutilation and other crimes against humanity committed by the State.
In Nicaragua we have hundreds of cases of abuse of authority and extreme violence by the dictatorship of Ortega-Murillo. We do not forget that it was the regime who murdered the 24 year-old rapper Franco Valdivia Machado, a.k.a. RENFÁN. He was a rapper from Estelí, a law student, father of a girl and a migrant construction worker in Costa Rica. After shooting him from a public building, the paramilitaries dragged him through the streets of Estelí, clearly instilled by the hatred of the political elite that intends to remain in power forever.
Other equally concerning cases are Gerald Vasquez, a 20 year-old student and popular dancer that was murdered during the paramilitary attack on Divina Misericordia on July 13, 2018, and a Marcelo Mayorga, who performed the Torovenado dance and was murdered on June 19, 2018, during the “Operation Cleaning” coordinated by the National Police and the paramilitaries and lead by the government. All these cases were extensively documented on video in real time. However, to this day, there is not a single open investigation to find and try the culprits.
There are other daily examples of police violence in our region. For example, in Chile where the last fatal victim of the Pacos/Carabineros was the street artists and juggler Francisco Martínez, who was well known in his commune. Decades earlier, it was the turn of Victor Jara, a popular singer that was tortured and murdered by the dictatorship of Pinochet in 1973. Going back to Spain in the midst of the civil war, the poet Federico García Lorca was murdered for being “communist and gay” in 1936.
In our countries, State terrorism always aims its bullet to the same class: workers, poor people, students and artists have been victims the moment we raised our voice to demand for our rights. Artists with class consciousness must set our eyes on the repressive actions and keep condemning them, rebelling and resisting; but also being open to base organization, because only with the unity of the oppressed classes and unity of action we are going to be able to overthrow this system that oppresses, exploits and kills us.
A Russian poet used to say that art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it, thus we must fight for a Nicaragua where no artist is persecuted, harassed, repressed or exiled for expressing freely. We want a country where art is truly independent and critical of any institution. Down with the monopolies and industries that crystalize the expressions of the culture and the artistic creation in all its forms. Let’s organize from the bottom to promote freedom of speech, creation and identity of everyone. Let’s fight for a revolutionary art at the service of questioning tyranny and defending the social and individual emancipation in our country and the whole world. Join us.
#LibertadAPabloHasél
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