“We Burned What We Could”: Anti-Police Revolt in Mexico City

Cover photo from Ediciones Ineditas

A week ago, a riotous demonstrations broke out in Mexico City after it was discovered that four police officers had abducted a 17 year-old woman and raped her in a police car. This is not an isolated incident, and soon feminist, anarchist, and community organizations marched on the Attorney General’s office smashing windows, destroying office materials, and writing graffiti on the side of the building. As Jezebel wrote:

The march was in response to two separate cases that have made headlines recently. In the first, four police officers are accused of raping a 17-year-old girl in their patrol car in Azcapotzalco on August 3. The second involves another policeman accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in a museum days after the first case was reported.

Then Friday, August 16th, the demonstrations led by women’s collectives continued with people marching in the city against the police, attacking a metro bus depot as well as setting fire to a police station. According to ABC News:

They chanted “Rapist police!” and “My friends protect me, you don’t!” and some trashed a bus station, breaking windows and gates. The crowd moved on to a police station, where they smashed windows and set a fire on the second floor. Many then went to the nearby Independence Monument, the symbolic center of the city, and spray painted the base of the stone monument with slogans like “damned pigs!” The demonstrations have become known as the “glitter protests” after marchers earlier this week doused the city’s police chief in pink glitter.

Anarchists and other autonomous antagonists have put out several statements. The first statement, sent to It’s Going Down, reads as follows:

“Provocation” and “illegality” means any action that is not enforced by the State and exceeds its laws and standards; that is why the authorities insist on presenting the anarchic war against the system of domination as a “provocation” that seeks to unleash repression. But reality teaches us that repression is here and now and is practiced by power on a daily basis either in a veiled or brutal manner.

The State continues to maintain a monopoly on violence and is only willing to share it with so-called “organized crime” groups and others who also share the same DNA, demonstrating that there is nothing new in its Fourth Transformation. As we have always stated: they are the same misogynist dogs, but now with a cherry colored collar.

Finally, the anti-systemic rage managed to spread fury to wide sections of the so-called “feminist movement,” sadly asleep until yesterday afternoon. At least now they understand that pacifism is the most active accomplice of patriarchal power and domination.

We have always expressed that we are not feminists. WE ARE ANARCHISTS and that is why we fight the patriarchy, not feminism. We know the feminist ideology and we see it in “action” daily, occupying seats and public positions, attaching themselves to our bodies and our lives to spread “the feminist homeland” as stated by a senator of MORENA (National Regeneration Movement, a social-democratic political party), forgetting (consistently) that the homeland is the territory of the Patriarch.

Neither Martha Lucia Michel nor Marta Lama nor Marilú Razo nor any of the systemic feminists (political, academic and dialogueras) represent us. Their reaction to the purple and black violence, their relationship with Sheimbaum (mayor of Mexico City), only reinforces their status as opportunists in search of a bone, so they lick her boots and they suck the balls of the president.

The best example of their complicity is the hashtag #ellasnonosrepresentan (they do not represent us), stating that with anti-systemic violence we tarnish “the defense of women’s rights”, promoting complicit passivity and imposing the politically correct conduct of the “good people”.

We are not people. To be “people” is to delegate our reality as women, our freedom and our autonomy to another, is to deny our individuality and our essence. WE ARE ANARCHIC WARRIORS IN STRUGGLE AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY.

We are conscious of the fact that we are at war and we know who our enemies are. We know what we are facing, and we also know who are allies of the system and who our accomplices are. We recognize what others keep silent: the presence in the national palace of a misogynistic and sexist, pro-life, ultra-conservative and evangelical fascist that the left has allied itself to in their constant opportunism to “seize power” at all costs.

That’s why we don’t ask our executioners for justice or for the dismissal and punishment of their brigade of rapist pigs. That would be distinguishing between good cops and bad cops. For us, the only good cop is the one who’s dead.

We don’t want dialogue, so we don’t set limits on the revolt. Our desires for destruction and our longing for freedom will not remain stuck in a dream catcher: we will be your worst nightmare!

If one day we don’t return home: Don’t light candles, light barricades!
No God, no State, no master, no husband!
State-Capital, with AMLO (president of Mexico) OR WITHOUT AMLO, patriarchy is what it weaves!
Let’s destroy everything that dominates and conditions us!
Anarchic solidarity with all imprisoned comrades around the world!
Against the patriarchal civilization!
For the control of our lives!
For the destruction of gender!
For the insurrectionary anarchic tension!
For Anarchy!
Fire to the existent!

Féminas Brujas e Insurreccionalistas (F.B.I)
Mexico City, Saturday August 17, 2019.

Another write-up from Antagonismo was recently translated and published by Edicione Ineditas stated:

As the sun began to set everything can be tallied up as beacons of good behavior, good citizenship, well-behaved, shouting slogans, making pleas, almost begging to be heard…that we do not enjoy surviving in a daily life filled with the fear of being kidnapped, tortured to death, murdered; or that our mothers would see our bodies lying decomposed, or that they would never find us again at all…¹

Later, the walls were painted, performances with fire, movement, ever-louder shouts, the first glass is shattered, shouts of empathy overflow, improvised tools and more glass falls. We shout with fury, with joy, with sadness…Yes, it was us, and yes we’d do it again a thousand times over, yes we ran off the men of our contingents, from our space of action. They had nothing to do there, they were not invited. They were not welcome as friends or allies.

Night covered us and we didn’t even fear the police, nor the dark streets, we were a tide of the unknown, together, strong, rabidly disorganized, sick with rage and frustration. We painted everything along our way, we smashed every symbol of the authorities responsible for our daily vexations. We burned what we could.

They ask us, why we are we mad?

While others call us: bitches, deranged, hysterics, whores, shameless. They make fun of us, they scoff at us, they call upon others to kill us, to sexually assault us, to lock us up; they say we don’t know how to protest; they tell us to spare the walls, the windows, the monuments; they ask who is going to clean up the city, that we’re a bunch of annoying chicks, that we are leading the movement astray, that we’re infiltrators, provocateurs, fascists, agents of the Yankees, porras ² of the Left.

I was born with this body which marks me across history and across lands as something which they call woman, and they have created me to be submissive, stepped-upon, assaulted, to be a mother, to be a caretaker, to wait on others, to put up with anything, to be quiet, to serve the servant of the boss and the boss as well and that’s why it was all of us there, that’s why we don’t leave behind a single one and we celebrate the actions of us all.

No one called for a peaceful march, none of us came out in the name of another, we don’t want to represent anyone nor be represented by anyone, we don’t beg for justice from the executioner, we don’t beg for scraps from the traitor Sheinbaum ³, nor from the presidential seat; what happened yesterday [Aug. 16th] was an explosion of rage; we know that [the authorities] will not lift a finger to guarantee our safety or to punish those who assault us. There will be more murders of women for simply being women in this world; they will keep on blaming us; they will keep on calling us liars; scammers of family-orientated ideologies will come to tell us that we are not true feminists or anarchists; that we do not know how to do politics; and the mothers of those killed and disappeared will continue with their pain; they will keep on looking for their daughters in mass graves; new search organizations will be born; the children of murdered mothers will still be here; they will grow up only to see that humanity does not give a damn about what happened to their mothers…

– Antidemocratic proletarians

Read the full text here.