Comrade Alfredo M. Bonanno has passed away at the age of 86. He lived a whole life in the world of struggle and anarchy. He was one of the main representatives of the insurrectionary tendency of the Italian anarchist movement with a great theoretical contribution and editorial work. He was editor of the magazine Anarchismo and other anarchist publications. For his activities he was repeatedly persecuted and imprisoned by the Italian state together with other comrades in the 1990s, e.g. for the O.R.A.I. case (in 1996), the armed expropriation of the Serravalle Rural Savings Bank in the Trento area* in 1994 and other attacks.
He had come to Greece several times. The first time I met him was in January 1993 when he visited me in the military hospital 424 in Thessaloniki after 50 days of a hunger strike I had carried out. I had just been released from being a prisoner in the Thessaloniki military prison for refusing to serve my military service. In 1999 he had also come to Greece and had testified as a political witness for the defence in my trial for the bombing of the Ministry of Development in December 1997 as an act of solidarity with the then dynamic struggle of the villagers of the Strymonikos Gulf villages in North Greece – Halkidiki (Olympiada, Varvara, Stavros, Asprovalta) against the installation of the Canadian multinational gold company TVX GOLD, which has been succeeded today by Hellas Gold, a subsidiary of Eldorado Gold.
It was a historic political trial in the then annals of the Greek anarchist movement where for the first time in Greece after the fall of the junta there was a defence of armed-dynamic forms of action. In that trial, in addition to the Greek comrades/compañeros, in addition to Alfredo Bonanno, Costantino Cavalleri, a comrade of the insurrectionary tendency of the Italian anarchist movement, and the comrade Hellyette Bess, who was a member of the French guerrilla organization Action Directe and had been imprisoned for several years for her participation in the organization, had testified after an international call for solidarity. The 3 then imprisoned members of Action Directe, Jean-Marc Rouillan, Joëlle Aubron and Nathalie Ménigon, had also sent a written message of solidarity to the court.
The last time I saw Comrade Alfredo was in 2010-’11 in Korydallos prison when we were in custody for our participation in the Revolutionary Struggle. He was also in custody on the charge of expropriating a bank in Greece. With Comrade Alfredo, despite our different approaches to struggle and mode of action, we were connected by an invisible thread, as are so many other comrades around the world who dedicate their entire lives to the struggle to free humanity from the shackles of the state and capital.
THE COMRADE WILL LIVE ON IN MEMORY AND IN OUR STRUGGLES
Nikos Maziotis, convicted for the actions of Revolutionary Struggle.
source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1628067/
Via & translated for Abolition Media by Nae Midion
Act for free note * Actually Alfredo was arrested during a robbery in a jeweller’s shop in Bergamo, Italy in 1989 https://www.elephanteditions.net/uploads/elephant/bergamo.pdf then in Trikala, Greece he was sentenced to 4 years for bank robbery and was later released after one year as he was over 70 years old. The Serravalle robbery involved other anarchist comrades and was later to become the point of departure for the ‘Marini frame-up’.