Fundraising by Jacopo Simonetti

In my field experience as a volunteer for Operation Dove alongside some of the Mapuche communities in the territory, I had the opportunity to attend hearings involving Mapuche defendants, observe the discrimination they faced at trial, and visit presos (inmates) inside prisons. On one of these visits, to Lebu Prison, I understood how Mapuche inmates, albeit within gray and complicated environments such as prisons, manage to create and build, together with their families and children, alternative spaces of resistance, places of hope, perspective and resilience.

These created and imagined spaces, in the aforementioned experience, take the form, simply, of two perpendicular walls covered with writings in support of other presos, drawings of Mapuche flags, and colorful doodles of their children; an unlikely and incoherent place in relation to the context in which it is placed, and for that very reason powerful. The peace with which the different inmates face their sentences made me realize the magnitude of this struggle and the impossibility of it coming to a halt; freedom or nothing .

Ihad the opportunity, therefore, to understand and experience the art of their resistance, a resistance implemented with respect for all human and non-human living beings, I understood and experienced their "I do not accept" and felt the pain of wounds, unfortunately and not yet, healed. In these few months of work I have understood how valuable the Mapuche struggle is, and able to help experiences of resistance of all oppressed people in the world.

The distances to be traveled, in order for us volunteers to be present during the different hearings, in the prisons, in the courts and alongside the communities in the territory, are very large and the project, for this, needs financial resources. Therefore, I ask you for a small contribution to support Operation Dove, in support of the Mapuche people and their battles; battles that they will surely, albeit with effort, win. Thank you.

"It truly takes courage, bravery and infinite hope, to look to the distant horizons of a new future in a time when all the forces of the past have been unleashed and unspeakable misery, combined with depression of the souls, weighs like a nightmare on the peoples."(Rudolf Rocker)