Framing a free spirit
Jailed by Chile for highlighting persecution of the Mapuche, a Basque anarchist now seeks justice. Review: The Good Don’t Use Umbrellas, Asel Luzarraga, by Jay Kerr
The Good Don’t Use Umbrellas, Asel Luzarraga, 2023, Active Distribution
The story of Asel Luzarraga’s time in Chile, his arrest, imprisonment and trial, is like something from a film. The raid by police brandishing sub-machine guns on his quiet suburban home; the planting of evidence to link him with bombings; the corruption at the highest levels of the state. There is even a friendly priest, speaking out in defence of a man the press labelled a foreign terrorist.
But this wasn’t a Hollywood movie, this was Asel’s life, and the consequences he still lives with to this day.
Asel’s arrest was huge news in Chile. His Basque nationality and the charge that he had planted bombs across the capital made him a prime target for conspiracy and intrigue. Each description of Asel in the press was analysed with suspicion… A Basque man has been arrested, what was he doing in Chile? A punk has been arrested, no doubt a low-life criminal guilty of the crime. The Basque punk they arrested in Temuco was an anarchist, here to corrupt our youth with foreign extremist ideas. Is he a member of ETA?
In reality, Asel Luzarraga was a victim of state oppression. He was, indeed, a punk and an anarchist. But, prior to his arrest, he had been stopped by police with a group of other punks while taking part in the painting of a mural as part of a festival, which featured its characteristic vegetarian food and heavy music. Not quite the terrorist mastermind he had been painted as.
He was also a writer. A noted one back in the Basque Country who had published many novels. He was a Basque representative of PEN International, the world’s foremost association for writers, and prior to arriving in Chile he had attended their international congress as part of the Writers’ Commission for Peace.
The reality was, the man the Chilean state had arrested as public enemy number one was a pacifist.
His arrest and trial sounds like a political thriller, a story filled with police corruption, media manipulation, and the struggle for truth and justice. Now, for the first time, that story is being told to the English-speaking world in his book The Good Don’t Use Umbrellas. It is part prison diary, part courtroom drama, combined with meditations on punk life and anarchist politics. All set against a backdrop of post-dictatorship Chile amid the ongoing repression of the indigenous people, the Mapuche, and presented with a Dadaist foreword by the legendary punk rocker, Penny Rimbaud of iconic band Crass.
Since his arrest and trial, Asel has been struggling to clear his name and highlight the plight of political prisoners in Chile, particularly members of the Mapuche community. It is strongly suspected that it was Asel’s blog posts in support of their struggle for freedom and justice that made him a target of the Chilean state.
However, remnants of Pinochet’s dictatorship that were clearly still active in the security forces at the time had not reckoned on the wave of international solidarity that would follow his arrest. The campaign “Asel terrorista? Mesedez!” (“Asel Terrorist? Please!”) launched in the Basque Country brought together some of the region’s foremost writers and artists, including Itziar Ituño Martínez, a Basque actor famous for her role as Inspector Raquel Murillo in the Netflix hit series Money Heist (La Casa de Papel in Spanish).
The Good Don’t Use Umbrellas is a gripping yet terrifying tale that should be a must-read for anyone who challenges the power of the state. As the anarchist thinker Ruth Kinna puts it: “Asel’s story is a powerful reminder of the vindictive, arbitrary power of the state and the vulnerabilities of anarchists and others to persecution and oppression.”
Asel’s story is just one of hundreds of unwarranted arrests, legal miscarriages, and false imprisonments in Chile and other countries around the world, but it also marks an attempt at justice. His story is made all the more important by the ongoing campaign to clear his name. As it unfolds, every page can be read with incredulity. It is no wonder that it was the reaction to the news of his arrest by his friends back home that gave rise to the name that the campaign to clear his name took on, when they said “Asel terrorist? Please!”
Jay Kerr is a member of Punk Ethics, a UK collective supporting the “Asel Terrorist? Please!” campaign. The Good Don’t Use Umbrellas by Asel Luzarraga, with a foreword by Penny Rimbaud, is available from Active Distribution