Adventures and Misadventures in 2025

A look back at the activities, plans, talks and other operations in which the Ni cautivos ni desarmados (Neither Captive nor Disarmed) project has been involved over 2025

Greetings gang and readers.

So now we come to the end of the month and the end of the year. As ever, plagued by doubts I was wondering: Should I do a normal article or do an end-of-year review and summing up? In the end I have plumped for the latter. Not without its dangers though, because, as my friend Javi ‘Sarmiento’ says, sometimes when I get to the summing up, further details come to light.

Down to brass tacks. This has been a quiet enough year, if ever there can be one. Not so many talks and launches as previous years, but even so, on we go. […] 

As for our blog Ni cautivos ni desarmados, the year opened with some items on the libertarian underground in France, fed out through the blog over several months. In late 2024 I began with the counterfeiting apparatus and through 2025 the lid was lifted on the procurement, storage and distribution of arms, the legal apparatus and money-laundering, with two articles on the expropriator apparatus, rounding off with that big robbery of the Belgian royal family and a miscellany of updates and fresh information. 

Things started to move where the blog was concerned in May. On 22 May I gave a talk in Ejea on the anti-Franco libertarian guerrilla war and that went well as we recorded a program with the comrades from Pikaraza Radio. On the 25th, I was off to Arnedillo in La Rioja, for another presentation of the Blindspot book (El Angulo muerto) and on 31 May, just to round off the month nicely, the folks from La Iglesuela del Tietar invited me to take part in a splendid commemorative event alongside the great team from Historia viva Madrid sur. Of course, if you have to head south and given that anything beyond the province of Soria is the South and if headed for the capital, stopping off pay one’s respects and dropping in to see the Canina gang, in accordance with tradition, we recorded a show for Barrio Canino …  At the end of June I had an appointment that I could not miss. The ‘A las trinxeres’ festival –  not just any old festival but the 20th in a row, with the group itself turning 25 years of age. We ran into stacks of people there again and those three days just flew by. Walks, concerts, talks, presentations, a mural and, above all, having the whole gang together. Where did it take place? In Ridolaina near Bellver de Cerdanya, meaning that we were playing on home ground. In fact, in order to place on record all of the events mounted over those 20 years, a collective book was produced – 20 años de ofensiva contra el olvido/ 20 Years of the Attack on Forgetting. There was a joint presentation made to a pretty good turn-out, and that was a delight.

In between heatwaves, in Logroño we had Roc Blackblock, which left us with a city that a lot more pleasing to the eye. First there was a mural at the CSOA La Puerta Gotika, covering the female cigarette-makers’ dispute, which opportunity was used in order to deliver a talk alongside Teo (what a delight for us to be together), followed by another at the entrance to Semilla Negra, the Logroño city centre base of the Pepitas de Calabaza publishing-house. Those murals invoked the womenfolk from La Barranca and the people executed in La Rioja under Francoist rule. We seized the chance to put together a good team from various places, and meals out, the odd trip into the mountains, solving this world’s problems and maybe those of other worlds – all the sorts of things that people get up to when they want to get together.

Now let us jump a little forward in time and get back to the mountains of Catalonia. This time the event was the Berga festival paying tribute to the maquis, another veteran event in its 28th year now. The talk given there was Stolen Memories and I enjoyed the people and the landscape. This year too, there was substantial representation from the North, with colleagues coming from Euskadi, Aragon and La Rioja, as if we needed any encouragement.

Something else I am very happy about is the collaborative effort between Ni cautivos ni desarmadas and Silencio Tóxico. I had a text published in the No 3 edition of that great anarcho-punk fanzine. This time it was the turn of the grannies rather than the grandads and we dealt with the adventures and misadventures of Elisa Garrido. There is every sign that out collaboration is to carry on into a few more issues.

In early October, my colleagues from Duranguesado staged a book launch for me in Laudio. I had not been in that town for a long time. The fact is that it is a place I have passed through lots of times. From the concerts by Los lokales a thousand years ago, when we had the pleasure of seeing lots of groups, right up to Orbeko Etxea, their great successor. It was an unforgettable day, stating that morning as we travelled out to the positions once defended by the Bakunin Battalion in the Uzkiano area, with the historian Sergio Balchada as our guide. After that, we ate in the txoko [dining club] of some local comrades and that afternoon we headed down to Orbeko.  There was a good crowd throughout the day and out of the book launch came our collaboration with the folks from the Dortoka printers, out of which a text dealing with anarchist counterfeiters may well come. We shall keep you up to date with developments there. Another turn-up for the books was that I was able finally to meet and spend some time with Arkaitz, the power behind ‘La linterna de Diógenes’. He had invited me in two occasions to meet up, but we did not know one another. As was the case with Roc, the mural-artist, it seems to me that Arkaitz is doing sterling work and they both struck me as real pros in their fields and very good publicists. I was really pleased to have spent some time and swapped experiences with them.

From Laudio it was then on to the little village of Santorens to build a few walls. I mention this because, even as we were stacking stone, I had a phone call making me a very tempting offer. My pal Manu had gone to Naples for a few months and he suggested that I pay him a visit there, and, once there, we might stage a talk. I didn’t have to think it over too long as I was (and still am) keen to familiarize myself with the city. It was just what I needed to complete my Mediterranean triangle.  Barcelona and Marseilles I knew and for some time I had had my eye on Naples. It is the last of the “pirate” coastal cities and the least tame of the three. And lo and behold my beloved Buruburu and I will be heading there in late January. And to cap it all we shall meet up with the gang from Bari who are also staging a talk for me in a squat in the city.

Well, let us move on. Midway between the phone calls and the stones, on Friday 17 October, we set the stone walls aside and headed down to Almacelles. To get to know the home-town of the Silencio Tóxico gang. And visit their brand-new Ateneu, known as La Boira (Catalan for Mist), out in the Lérida direction and you can imagine what lay behind that trip. Another talk about Stolen Memory and, after that, a concert by Parabellum and other local bands.

Then it was back to Santorens on Tuesday 21 October, to the social centre there for a talk about counterfeiters. Great atmosphere, with half the village in attendance. The fact is that anything staged in a country district is always a success. We will be back there this April, building walls and we shall see if that provides us with a good excuse for another article on libertarian history.

What with one thing and another, I finally buckled down to write something about the libertarian role in the Resistance in France. It looks like there is enough there to keep me going for a couple of years because, as my father puts it, “plenty there to chew on”.  I will not hurry things but I am not resting on my laurels. It is a subject about which I have been collecting information for quite some time and actually the list I have compiled naming resisters now holds upwards of a thousand names. I am thinking about issuing it as a free-to-download PDF, since paper is now so expensive. I realize that there is no comparison between an on-screen read and handling hard copy, but that is what we will go for. I will give it a try at any rate and then we shall see.

The end of the year was approaching and this time the call came in from Zaragoza. Another day of remembrance, organized this time by the folks from the CSOA Kike Mur on 16 November. That morning there was a libertarian walking tour of Torrero, with Kike as our guide, he being one of the authors of La bala y la palabra (a biography of Francisco Ascaso); the tour and he were both very interesting.  In the days ahead we shall surely have a lot of information to trade with each other. We had lunch on the street as there was a coupon day and after that there was the year’s final talk on Stolen Memory. I do not go to Zaragoza often, but I always have a good time when I go there …. I’ll be back!

The Kate Sharpley Library and its translator Paul Sharkey deserve a separate mention. If there is anyone looking for Ni cautivos ni desarmadas in English, you can find a while stack of them – plus the book Blindspot -  at this location: https://www.katesarpleylibrary.net/wwq8c 

Which is where things stand, although I need to hark back in time a little. On 25 October, while yours truly was in Zarautz enjoying the concert by Disaffect, Psilocybe and Agobio, surrounded by a good crowd, up in France our beloved Rolf passed away.

Rolf Dupuy had, in partnership with Antonio Téllez, established and, over the years, built up the great website on guerrilla activity in Spain and in France alike – I refer to Los de la sierra. This huge undertaking was carried on by Rolf following Téllez’s death, until he built up a massive digital archive on activist anarchism in the anti-Franco and antifascist struggles. But there was more to Rolf than just https://losdelasierra.info. He was key figure also in https://militants-anarchistes.info and a regular contributor to https://maitron.fr.  Those who follow this blog or dip into it, will already know the enormous effort we are talking about. My connection with Rolf dates back 15-20 years. At the outset I was just asking questions of him and later on, I started forwarding some information to him. Names, photos, newspaper clippings, anything that might help flesh out his archives. I would write him in Spanish and he would reply in French or in Spanish and we got along pretty well. From time to time we were out of contact due his health issues. Since 2016 we were back in regular touch again, as I was on the look out for information about Manuel Huet for my book Blindspot (El Angulo muerto). And again in more recent years. It just so happened that we never met, face to face and never spent any time in each other’s company. Ultimately, I can only be eternally grateful to him for the masses of information that he has left us and bid him a fond farewell, wherever he may have gone.

And – just as Raimon sings – ‘just when you think it is all over, it starts all over again’. Ru wrote to me to see what was going to become of Los de la sierra and I wrote to M. from Les Giménologues with the same query. We soon realized that the websites were not about to evaporate.  Teams are being assembled in France to take overall of Rolf’s projects, which is a relief to us all. 

Shortly after that I was taken aback to learn that Les Giménologues were proposing to add me to the new Los de la sierra crew, their own group having already joined it. That was the first shock, followed by huge delight, because of the confidence placed in me as well as the road ahead of us. But I was also quaking at the thought of how much effort will be required of me, but, damn it, it is not as if you were some neighbourhood kid, playing for a local football team only to be “spotted” by some major headline team. You cannot say no. Fortunately, these projects are much more interesting and a lot less shitty than the teams just mentioned. So the coming year will find us exploring, uncovering, cataloguing and scanning whatever Rolf’s archives may hold and gradually compiling fresh entries. Nothing to be scared of, right?

Well, that is it for today. Thanks go out to all who staged some of the events I have been talking about and invited me to take part in others, put me up in your homes, shared information, trips and experiences, translated my writings into other languages, put up with my tardiness and those of you who spare a little of your precious time to read these lines. And, above all, for egging me on.

Best wishes, remember and a Happy New Year.

El Salto, 26 December 2025 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ni-cautivos-ni-desarmados/aventuras-desventuras-humilde-proyecto-lo-largo-del-ultimo-ano  

Image: Mural about the cigarette makers made by Roc at the CSOA La Puerta Gótika. Source: Imanol

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.