Here is a [slightly abbreviated] report on the attempt to re-occupy the CSOA [anarchist occupied social centre] il Molino in Lugano. There is much to be said and this text doesn’t claim to be exhaustive, but it gives the point of view of those who were present at the time and lived through it.
29th December
On Wednesday 29th December a group of comrades went into the area of the ex-slaughterhouse to attempt to re-occupy the buildings left intact after the demolition of the housing area of the social centre that took place during the night of 29th May 2021.
After a moment’s exploration, we rolled up our sleeves to start the work of putting the place back in order and cleaning up. The idea was to put life back into the place and make it accessible from outside, and a solidarity gathering of about fifty people in the square opposite gave us the right encouragement.
One of those inside climbed on to one of the roofs to speak to the gathering through a megaphone, from below came chants and speeches, fireworks broke the monotony of the routine of this grey city, a flag with an encircled A flapped against the background of the Ticino snow-clad mountains. After all that had happened over the last seven months, the enthusiasm after having succeeded in sneaking through these walls in full daylight without being seen was great, and behind face masks and balaclavas you could almost see the smiles of the comrades, finally returned to a place that had been their second home for years.
Soon after, a couple of Lugano antiriot police vans turned up and officers lined up in front of and behind the Molino. Meantime, as news of the occupation spread people continued to join the gathering, which was now about a hundred people. At this point the idea was to try to have a meeting in the ex-slaughterhouse in the evening, something later prevented by the antiriot police which blocked the entrance to the social centre.
The police seemed unprepared to manage the situation, and nervousness among them was palpable. Their aggressive manoeuvres, uncoordinated and clumsy, didn’t let anything good be prefigured for the hours that were to follow. At around 6pm, at the back of the ex-slaughterhouse, in one of the access roads to the schools of the Lambertenghi neighbourhood, a brawl broke out between police and people in solidarity, ending with the arrest of two comrades. One comrade was held by a cop who threw him to the ground where his head hit a stone. First he tried to handcuff him while putting pressure on his neck with his knee, followed by blows to his back, pressing his hands on his face, nose, and finally taking down his trousers, while two others held him still. The other comrade was bodily taken away by three male officers. The two were taken to Noranco until 2am, then to Via Bossi in Lugano and finally to the remand prison of Farera. They were released the following afternoon with charges of violence and threatening the authorities and police officers.
When night fell, the comrades in the place climbed back on to the roof to talk with the people outside in solidarity and set off another round of fireworks and firecrackers. Meantime tension grew in the square and the police charged injuring several people using pepper spray, teargas and rubber bullets. Some of the gathering people responded to the charges as best as they could by launching bottles and pieces of debris, not letting themselves be intimidated by the violence of the antiriot cops. Quite a chaotic situation ensued. Many people were intoxicated with gas and pepper spray, someone brought milk to rinse eyes and skin and appease the burning.
The gathering stayed until 1am with various moments of tension. A call was made for an anti-eviction gathering from 7am.
30th December
In the morning of 30th December, soon after 4:30am, the antiriot police forced entry into the place. The square and the road in front of the ex-slaughterhouse quickly filled up with police vehicles: four vans and several police cars and plain-clothes cars. At this point a dozen comrades were on the first floor of the cinema room of the social centre, while another two managed to climb on to the frozen slippery roof overlooking Viale Cassarate.
Several particularly agitated cops started smashing things with truncheons at random in the courtyard, while the people in the building were ordered out. After a quick discussion, those in the cinema room went out to the courtyard where they were stopped and taken outside, while two comrades remained on the roof which the cops couldn’t reach. Two “negotiator” cops arrived and after climbing on to the underlying roof, they tried for a few hours in a surprising blackmailing and “psychologically active” way to negotiate a descent from the roof, it being an uncomfortable unsafe situation and to prevent further problems to the city and the people. Just before 7am, they allowed vice-major Badaracco to go up with a crane along with a fireman to negotiate the descent and evaluate the situation.
The vice-major apologised for what had happened and for the eviction saying that he was extremely worried about the dangerous situation on the roof. At one point he even rang the major to inform him of the situation and update him on the requests made by the two comrades: immediate release of those arrested and the recovery of things from the ex-slaughterhouse for a few weeks with a go-ahead for all the planned initiatives. Badaracco descended after half an hour’s fruitless negotiations, while the two cops left, telling those on the roof that now “it will be us who take responsibility for the consequences and for what will happen in the next few hours”.
After the cops’ raid, in total 10 people were arrested and taken to police stations in Via Bossi in Lugano, Bellinzona and Locarno for interrogations some of which lasted until about 1pm. All were released and charged with trespassing and rioting. The two comrades who had been taken to Farera for the night were released in the afternoon at around 5pm. Some of the arrested comrades had DNA samples taken, were fingerprinted and photographed and forced to strip naked for searches. Phones were seized from all those who had them, various tools, scarves, pepper spray and any object which according to the investigators could be used as evidence for the charge of rioting.
As soon as news of the eviction began to spread, several dozen people in solidarity formed a gathering on the bank of the Cassarate river opposite the social centre, given that the road in front of the place had been closed by police. Participants in the gathering talked with the two comrades resisting on the roof with a megaphone. Slogans, chants, music and speeches followed throughout the morning.
At a certain point, at around 8:30, they [the two comrades on the roof] tried to come down to fetch water, food and a blanket; in the area under the roof, a comrade was chased by cops previously hidden by the staircase of the amphitheatre as he was trying to climb up the ladder leading to the roof. As he almost reached the end of the ladder, one of the cops kicked him down violently, causing the comrade to precipitate from over two-metres high and land on one of the theatre benches previously smashed and thrown on the ground by the police; as a consequence he had a broken rib, breathing difficulties for a few hours and a badly shaken back. In spite of the injuries he was immediately surrounded and pushed down the ladder to the activity room, where he was searched and handcuffed. Then the comrade was pushed into a police car where one of the cops in charge tried to restrain him with a safety belt right on the broken rib and then they started off full speed and sirens blaring, carelessly tossing the comrade around all they way. Once in the police station, he was finally “taken care of” and taken to hospital and then taken back to the police station in Via Bossi for interrogation (see below).
Meantime, those arrested in the morning during the eviction were released and joined the gathering. A soon as the news spread that the two comrades held in Farera were to be interrogated in Lugano at around 3pm, we decided to split up and a small group of comrades made their way to Via Pretorio for solidarity greetings outside the windows of the Public Ministers’.
The last comrade present in the place resisted stubbornly on the roof until about 3pm. Until the news came of the release of all the people arrested the day before and in the morning. When she [the last comrade on the roof] decided to come down, she was taken to the police station in Via Bossi and released shortly afterwards. At this point the gathering in Viale Cassarate moved to the corner of Via Bossi and Via Pretorio with banners and megaphones. About sixty people carried on the mobilization there with speeches at the megaphone, chants and hugs to the released comrades, then all went back to the Molino area for a while before parting.
A few observations on the way the cops acted
On Wednesday evening, a cop took a run-up and pushed a woman who had approached the police line to try to calm them down, causing her to fall backwards hitting the nape of her neck. The comrade lost consciousness; not content with that, another cop dragged her to the other side of the road and tried to make her stand up, very dangerous when someone loses consciousness. That same evening a young man was struck in the face by a truncheon and was taken to hospital, as well as another person who had an asthma attack caused by pepper spray and teargas.
The much talked about police State continues undaunted to beat up and arrest, from the eviction of 29th May to the beatings of students in Mendrisio in the month of June, to the events of September in Villa Saroli in Lugano. The notion of isolated cases is not easy to maintain, the modus operandi of the Ticino police seems clear enough and full on: zero tolerance towards anyone who with their actions dares to challenge the status quo of a canton which is more and more to the right as concerns the repression, the political field, that of immigration and public order in the case of “illegal” parties and not only.
From 29th December the entire area adjacent to Molino was militarized for works aimed at strengthening the process of securing the sediment of the ex-slaughterhouse against possible attempts at re-occupation. The stretch of road from the entry to the parking area of the ex-slaughterhouse to USI (from the flyover of Via Balestra to that of Via Madonnina) was closed both to traffic and pedestrians, blocked with rows of police vans and watched day and night by surveillance officers and police armed with teargas guns. The road remained closed for a week and traffic circulation was reinstated only in the afternoon of 6th January. In the place there is a lot of coming and going of police and workers doing bricklaying. Trucks are carrying huge bricks to be piled up to erect a wall in the gaps opened at the first eviction. “Base camp”-style gazebos and antiriot police vans can also be seen in the parking area from the outside. It seems ridiculous that all these means are required to face a dozen people who tried to take back the buildings of the ex-occupied social centre. The symbolic significance of this wall, as of the demolition of the housing area on 29th May, will not easily be forgotten in this canton in the years to come.
Bulldozers, truncheons and bricks can temporarily stop attempts to open up cracks of freedom, but they can’t kill ideals which in the face of the arrogance of power can only become stronger. In a context where freedom of thought and movement is being increasingly restricted, where the security, patriarchal, neo-colonialist and techno-capitalist model is being erected as a solution for every kind of tension and social demand, it is inevitable that even in these latitudes repression strikes harder and harder and without exception those who threw themselves into the struggle heart and body.
It is up to those who refuse to give in to a normality where every aspect of our lives is determined by the law of the strongest, where our wellbeing is guaranteed by exploitation here and in other parts of the world, those who still feel the passion for freedom in their guts, to raise our heads, roll up our sleeves and continue to struggle.
