[English below]
En 1985, el jurista conservador Günther Jakobs se congratuló ante el mundo de la aparición y desarrollo de una legislación restrictiva en clara contradicción con el Derecho Penal tradicional, dentro del cual constituía una parcela extraña a la que denominó Derecho Penal del Enemigo. Dichas leyes sancionaban conductas a las que la “autoridad competente” atribuía el papel de llevar a la comisión de actos delictivos aunque dichos actos no se hubieran cometido. El supuesto infractor sufría castigo no por hechos realizados, sino por hechos posibles. La ley ya no le contempla como un ciudadano del Estado con plenos derechos, sino como un peligro, un enemigo del Estado con derechos recortados, o mejor, sin derechos. Pues bien, dada la inestabilidad de unos sistemas políticos donde la progresión de la injusticia social evidencia su fracaso histórico, la legislación contra el “enemigo” ha pasado de ser la excepción a la norma, quebrando la relación lógica entre la falta y la sanción, o el delito y la pena. En el actual ordenamiento jurídico las detenciones y registros arbitrarios sin órdenes expresas, la violencia gratuita de los agentes del orden, las deficientes garantías procesales y el castigo desproporcionado por delitos inexistentes, empiezan a ser normales. Lo hemos visto recientemente, por ejemplo, en el juicio del 4F <https://argelaga.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/4f-algo-huele-a-podrido-en-barcelona/>, en los procesos a piqueteros, en la Operación Pandora <https://argelaga.wordpress.com/2014/09/17/que-hay-detras-de-la-operacion-pandora/> y en la revisión de la sentencia a quienes “bloquearon” el acceso al Parlament de Catalunya <https://argelaga.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/castcat-el-regreso-del-top/>, cosas que confirman una situación que ya no corresponde a un estado de Derecho, sino a un estado de Excepción, o sea, a un estado de No Derecho. Políticos, policías, jueces, fiscales y magistrados gustosamente contribuyen a ello.
La idea de “enemigo” constituye la base de un estado de Derecho Suprimido, es decir, de una Democracia de la No Libertad (de una Dictadura). Por enemigo se considera no al corrupto, al prevaricador o al delincuente privado, sino al adversario del ordenamiento jurídico y político vigente, a quien combate a éste, sea con ideas o con hechos. El enemigo es el enemigo público, el del sistema político, aquél que no acepta su legitimidad y considera su existencia como la garantía de una desigualdad y una opresión perpetuas. Y el sistema, para protegerse, se separa de su enemigo, lo pone fuera de la ley y lo trasforma en criminal, puesto que la disidencia es un crimen, el mayor. El sistema se considera en guerra contra ese “enemigo” y por lo tanto le aplica leyes de guerra. Cuando el Jefe Superior de Policía de Valencia, Antonio Moreno, nombrado por Rubalcaba, justificó en una rueda de prensa (20 de febrero de 2012) la contundencia de las cargas policiales en las manifestaciones contra los recortes en la Enseñanza refiriéndose a los estudiantes como “el enemigo”, proclamaba con la naturalidad del verdugo un secreto de Estado a voces. El funcionario fue ascendido dos años más tarde. Todavía hay quien se rasga las vestiduras hablando de rasgos “típicos del franquismo”, cuando en realidad son típicos de la democracia de castas parlamentarias. No, el Derecho Penal del Enemigo no es un legado de la Dictadura de Franco; es una invención del sistema democrático bipartidista.
Un sistema autoritario, se llame democrático o no, se define respecto a su enemigo, ese ser vil e infame que pretende su abolición, y en la actualidad la etiqueta de “terrorista” cuadra a la perfección. Pero calificar a todo enemigo de terrorista requiere una gran flexibilización del concepto. Así pues, en el campo gaseoso del terrorismo cabe de todo, desde la quema de contenedores y el lanzamiento de bengalas a los actos propios de la lucha armada, desde la difusión de ideas y la okupación a los atentados suicidas. En ese todo queda atrapado cualquiera que discrepe de la forma estatal como la ideal de una sociedad libre organizada y dude del desarrollo económico capitalista como esencia de la democracia, puesto que a poco que practicase sus ideas, en el lenguaje del orden equivaldría a “subvertir el orden constitucional, o suprimir, o desestabilizar gravemente el funcionamiento de las instituciones políticas”. El delito de opinión, es decir, el tener una opinión contraria a la dominante, al parecer lleva lejos. Igual que los delitos de usurpación y resistencia a la fuerza pública, es decir, la creación de centros sociales en edificios abandonados y la protesta ante la brutalidad policial. Las imaginarias tramas de “terrorismo anarquista” descubiertas por la policía y perseguidas por los jueces son una clara muestra de lo que estamos diciendo.
La Operación Piñata del 30 y 31 de marzo último, segunda parte de la Operación Pandora, han tenido por objeto la detención de personas acusadas de pertenecer a una “organización criminal con fines terroristas”. Entiéndase bien eso de “fines”, puesto que ni hay prueba alguna de que los detenidos estuvieran organizados, ni tampoco de que se les puedan atribuir acciones que hasta utilizando los criterios más amplios sean calificables de terroristas. La organización en sí, con la que muchos no han tenido nada que ver, los Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados, no ha sido más que un foro de relaciones entre individuos y colectivos de ideología afín a efectos de propaganda perfectamente trasparente, con su dirección de correo electrónico incluida. Sin embargo, en el Derecho Penal del Enemigo, la organización del contrario es delictiva por naturaleza, y por lo tanto, criminal y terrorista /per se/; un “punto de encuentro de grupos violentos” dispuestos a cometer improbables “sabotajes y colocación de artefactos explosivos” con el objeto de “sembrar el terror en la población”. Aquí se juzga solamente por la intención, que se da por sentada. El enemigo no tiene derecho a la intimidad, ni tampoco a la libertad de expresión o de reunión, por lo que tanto el uso del servidor Riseup, como la publicación de un libro y la coordinación de personas, son consideradas pruebas suficientes de delitos potenciales y aun de otros ya cometidos por desconocidos, como los petardos de feria colocados en cajeros automáticos o los artefactos sin carga explosiva de la Almudena y del Pilar, que servirán para calificar de “terroristas” a las víctimas de la operación.
El Director general de la Policía Nacional Ignacio Cusidó no tiene empacho en afirmar públicamente que “el terrorismo anarquista se ha implantado en España” y por eso la lucha contra él es “una prioridad para la policía”. Si los hechos desmienten tales despropósitos, tanto peor para los hechos. Los agentes del orden arreglarán pruebas y los jueces desecharán testimonios favorables. El Derecho Penal del Enemigo nos sumerge en un universo kafkiano que en cierto modo tiene su lógica y esa es la del miedo. La aberración yihadista y la crisis prolongada amenazan con despertar una histeria securitaria en las masas ciudadanas que no augura nada bueno. Malos tiempos para la libertad, un valor a la baja, y buenos para los halcones de la política. El miedo es la coartada del Poder, y un sector de éste es partidario de jugar esa carta a fondo. Las algaradas callejeras han ridiculizado montones de veces la eficacia de unas fuerzas del orden mentalmente muy identificadas con su función represora, pero incapaces de neutralizar una lucha urbana ruidosa que cuenta con efectivos no excesivamente numerosos. El ridículo es a veces mucho más subversivo que la propaganda radical o la pedrada, si bien no es el acto de sabotaje del sistema más contundente, sí es el que más lo deslegitima. La Operación Piñata no se ha desencadenado pues contra un etéreo terrorismo anarquista, sino que forma parte de un plan de guerra que apunta al entorno segregado del sistema, a la base de la disidencia social y de la resistencia callejera. A los ateneos, centros okupas, asambleas vecinales, colectivos obreros autónomos, grupos anticarcelarios, agrupaciones en defensa del territorio… Es una operación de limpieza que intenta evitar que unos minúsculos puntos de apoyo, al calor de la crisis económica y política, se conviertan en palanca de una crisis social difícilmente manejable. Como dijo Cusidó, se trata de una “labor preventiva”, dos palabras que conviene interpretar en sentido militar, puesto que este servidor del Estado es consciente de estar en guerra contra el bando radical de la justicia social, la igualdad y la libertad.
¡ABAJO EL ESTADO!
¡LIBERTAD INMEDIATA PARA LOS DETENIDOS!
*Revista Argelaga <https://argelaga.wordpress.com/>**, 1 de abril de 2015.
In 1985, the conservative jurist Günther Jakobs told everyone how pleased he was with the rise and development of a restrictive body of laws that clearly contradicts the traditional corpus of Criminal Law, a new legal system within which he posited a strange domain that he called the Criminal Law of the Enemy.1* Laws framed according to this new legal concept outlaw behavior to which the “responsible authority” attributes the role of the commission of criminal acts even if these acts have not actually been committed. The alleged perpetrator suffers punishment not for actions he actually performed, but for actions he might possibly have performed. The law no longer contemplates the citizen of the State as a person endowed with full civil rights, but as a threat, an enemy of the State with truncated rights, or even better, with no rights at all. However, due to the instability of certain political systems in which the progress of social injustice reveals their historical bankruptcy, legislation against the “enemy” is no longer the exception but rather the rule, shattering the logical relation between offense and penalty, or between crime and punishment. In our current legal system, arrests and arbitrary searches without due cause, gratuitous violence on the part of the agents of order, the non-observance of legally guaranteed rights of due process, and disproportionate punishments for imaginary crimes, are now beginning to take place on a regular basis. We have seen these factors in play recently, for example, in the trials of the piqueteros, the verdict against the 4F, Operation Pandora, and the Supreme Court’s overruling of the National Court’s failure to sentence those who blocked access to the Catalonian Parliament to harsh prison terms, all of which testify to a situation that no longer corresponds to a system based on rights, but to a state of siege, that is, a condition without rights. Politicians, police, judges, prosecutors and high court appointees happily contribute to consolidating this state of affairs.
The concept of the “enemy” constitutes the basis of a condition of Abolished Rights, that is, a Democracy of Unfreedom (of Dictatorship). The enemy in this conception is not the corrupt official, the perjurer, or the common criminal, but the adversary of the prevailing legal and political order, who fights against the latter, whether with ideas or with deeds. The enemy is the public enemy, the enemy of the political system, who does not accept its legitimacy and considers its existence as the guarantee of endless inequality and oppression. And the system, to protect itself, isolates its enemy, outlaws him and transforms him into a criminal, since dissent is a crime, indeed, it is the worst crime of all. The system considers that it is at war with this “enemy” and therefore it applies the laws of war. When the Police Chief of Valencia, Antonio Moreno, appointed by Rubalcaba, at a Press Conference held on February 20, 2012, justified the extreme force used in the police attacks against the demonstrations protesting budget cuts in education and referred to the students as “the enemy”, he expressed out loud, and with the simplicity of a thug, a State secret. This official was promoted two years later. There are still people who get all worked up about features “typical of Francoism”, when they are in fact typical of the democracy of parliamentary castes. No, the Criminal Law of the Enemy is not a legacy of Franco’s dictatorship; it is an invention of the two-party democratic system.
An authoritarian system, whether or not it calls itself democratic, defines itself with reference to its enemy, that evil and wretched being who seeks to abolish it; at the present time, the label of “terrorist” is the perfect description of this enemy. To define every enemy as a terrorist, however, requires a great deal of conceptual flexibility. Thus, in the extremely variegated field of terrorism everything has a place, from the burning of garbage bins and throwing emergency flares to actions of armed struggle properly speaking; from the dissemination of ideas and squatting to suicide bombings. Anyone who disagrees with the state form as the ideal form of an organized free society, and anyone who expresses doubts about capitalist economic development as the very essence of democracy, falls within this category; in the language of order such dissent would be equivalent to the “subversion of the constitutional order, or the abolition, or the serious destabilization of the functioning of the political institutions”. Opinion crime, that is, having an opinion that is opposed to the dominant view, seems to cover a wide range of phenomena. The same goes for the crimes of usurpation and resistance to the forces of public order, that is, the establishment of social centers in abandoned buildings and protests against police brutality. The imaginary plots of “anarchist terrorism” uncovered by the police and tried in court by the judges constitute clear evidence of this trend.
The purpose of Operation Piñata, which was implemented in March of 2014 as the second stage of Operation Pandora, was to arrest people who were accused of belonging to a “criminal organization with terrorist aims”. Note in particular this mention of “aims”, for there is no proof at all that those who were arrested were organized for the purpose of carrying out, much less that they could be held responsible for actually carrying out, actions that, even using the broadest criteria, could be defined as terrorist. The organization in question, with which many of those arrested had no connections at all, the Coordinated Anarchist Groups, was never anything more than a forum for contacts among individuals with shared ideological tendencies for the purpose of an entirely public and open propaganda, with its web page and its email address. In the Criminal Law of the Enemy, however, the organization of opposition is criminal by its very nature and therefore criminal and terrorist per se; a “point of encounter for violent groups” planning to commit implausible acts of “sabotage and random bomb attacks” for the purpose of “sowing terror among the populace”. Here, a judgment is made solely on the basis of an intention, which is itself taken for granted. The enemy has no right to the private enjoyment of social intercourse, nor does he have any right to freedom of expression or assembly, which is why both the use of the server “Riseup”, as well as the publication of a book and coordinated actions, are considered to be sufficient evidence of potential crimes and even of other crimes, already committed by unknown persons, such as the fireworks detonated at ATM machines or the dud explosives of Almudena and Pilar, which would serve to qualify the victims of the operation for inclusion under the rubric of “terrorists”.
The Director General of the National Police, Ignacio Cusidó, has no qualms about publicly stating that “anarchist terrorism has set down roots in Spain”, and that is why the fight against it is “a priority for the police”. If the facts belie these absurdities, so much the worse for the facts. The agents of order will plant the evidence and the judges will not allow testimony exculpating the defendants. The Criminal Law of the Enemy plunges us into a Kafkaesque universe which actually has its own particular logic and this logic is the logic of fear. The Jihadist aberration and the prolonged crisis threaten to awaken a totalitarian surveillance and control hysteria among the masses of the citizenry which augurs no good. Bad times for freedom, a value whose price on the stock exchange is in free fall, and good times for the gung-ho advocates of political solutions. Fear is the blackmail of Power, and one sector of Power is in favor of a thorough application of this strategy. Riots and protests in the streets have on numerous occasions cast ridicule on the efficacy of the forces of order, whose members are psychologically bound to their repressive function, but incapable of neutralizing a clamorous urban struggle that does not even have very numerous participants. This ridicule is sometimes much more subversive than extremist propaganda or stone-throwing, and even if it is not the most forceful act of sabotage against the system, it is the one that most effectively deprives it of its legitimacy. Thus, Operation Piñata has not been unleashed against an intangible anarchist terrorism, but is instead part of a strategy of a war that is directed against the social milieu of those people who have been excluded from the system, and against the rank and file of social dissidence and street-based unrest. Against the cultural centers [ateneos], occupied social centers [centros okupas], neighborhood assemblies, autonomous workers collectives, anti-prison groups, groups formed for the defense of territory…. It is a cleansing operation that seeks to prevent the formation of a handful of tiny footholds, in the midst of economic and political crisis, from becoming the springboard for the emergence of a social crisis that might spiral out of control. As Cusidó said, it is a “preventive action”, two words that should be interpreted in the military sense, because this servant of the State is aware of the fact that he is at war with a radical enemy fighting for social justice, equality and freedom.
Down with the State! Release the prisoners!
Revista Argelaga, April 1, 2015.
Translated in April 2015 from the Spanish text available online at: https://argelaga.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/operacion-pinata-todos-somos-el-enemigo/
* 1.
The principal features of the “Criminal Law of the Enemy” have been
enumerated as follows: “Tends to punish prospectively in a bid to
prevent future harms; Secondly, it imposes disproportionate
sanctions in the name of security; And thirdly, it departs from
conventional procedural protections.” Crucial historical examples
are the US “RICO”—Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act—legislation (1970) and the “USA Patriot Act” (2003) (Héctor
Zayas Gutiérrez, “The Expansion of the Criminal Law of the Enemy in
the US Legal System”, January 2010, from The Selected Works of
Héctor Zayas Gutiérrez, obtained in April 2015 online at:
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=hector_zayas).
[Translator’s note]
Fuente:
https://libcom.org/library/operation-pi%C3%B1ata-we-are-enemy-%E2%80%93-revista-argelaga
#Pandora 