We are heartbroken to report the untimely passing of Luciano Pitronello, known as Tortuga, an anarchist from the territory dominated by the Chilean state.
In 2011, at age twenty-two, Tortuga was severely injured during an attempt to carry out an attack on a Santander bank in downtown Santiago. The explosion resulted in Tortuga losing one hand and suffering severe damage to his other hand as well as his eyes, skin, and lungs. At first, it was unclear to what extent Tortuga would recover. Many anarchists around the world followed news about his condition with great concern as he remained in the hospital under police guard.
Despite these debilitating injuries and the prospect of decades in prison, Tortuga remained unapologetically committed to revolutionary struggle. He refused to share information about another participant in the action. Demonstrating admirable determination, he survived the ordeal and exceeded expectations in the speed and extent of his recovery.
In 2012, Tortuga was acquitted of terrorism charges, sentenced to six years of probation, and released from prison. After his release, he helped to establish and maintain the self-managed social center and autonomous library Sante Geronimo Caserio, named for an Italian anarchist who was guillotined at the age of twenty.
Two days ago, while Tortuga was working in Santiago, he came into contact with electrical cables and was killed by an electrical shock. This tragedy illustrates that the most dangerous thing is not resistance—it is not taking intentional risks in hopes of paving the way to a better world. Rather, the most dangerous thing, the thing that kills the most people, is ordinary life at the mercy of capitalism.1 We honor all of the ways that Tortuga contributed to the struggle for a better world, not least the example that he set in confronting hardship.
We urge people to read Tortuga’s letters from prison, which are collected here. In these letters, Tortuga describes his experience treading the challenging path to medical recovery in the midst of incarceration. You can also hear an interview with him here.
Below, we offer a few words from Tortuga, followed by some recollections from a comrade who knew him.
Luciano Pitronello, also Known as Tortuga.
Some Words from Tortuga
“So, you want to know about me? Well, I will fight in order to live, and live in order to fight until I am free and wild. I do not trick myself in thinking that I am less wild if I breathe artificially, because I believe that it is in situations like that when the wildest human instinct blossoms—the instinct of survival.”
“A rebel becomes a warrior when one is able to get back up stronger than one fell, who is able to see reality even though one has everything to lose; a warrior does not necessarily have to know how to make a bomb or handle one, nor to have techniques of camouflage, those are things one learns by addition. Warriors are dangerous for their ideas and principles because they see all the way to the final consequences, always firm, steadfast, because they do not betray themselves nor their comrades, because they are always aware, because they don’t let themselves be carried away by fuck-ups or rumors, because if they have problems they confront them, if they feel pain they cry, and if they are happy they laugh; because they know to live out a full life, though it will not therefore be peaceful—those are the true warriors; now in this war, there are many joyful occasions, but there are also moments of bitterness, because it is a war, not a passing phase, and to confront the system of domination utilizing these conclusions can carry disastrous consequences and we should know that beforehand, because an error, a small carelessness changes everything… Regarding my wounds, they have all healed; unfortunately, the marks will always remain, but I carry them with the same pride as my tattoos, because they are the best evidence that I am convinced in my ideals—how could I not be? I carried that bomb with dreams and hopes and those remain intact.”
“The important thing is to never lose the fighting spirit, never, no matter how terrible things look, but as long as your mind and your heart do not betray you, the rest becomes almost a detail. Our bodies can weaken, it is true. But what makes us great has nothing to do with flesh and bones, what makes us great is our convictions, our spirit, knowing that we are doing the right thing. The abyss does not stop us.”
Graffiti calling for Tortuga’s freedom while he was held in prison.
Some Words about Tortuga
I first met Tortuga when he was tabling at a D’linkir2 show at a squat in Santiago. His was the only literature distro at the show—it was more of a drunk punk show than an underground anarchist occasion, but Tortuga loved neon, spikey, pinned up punk rockers. Seemingly contradictorily, he was also a die-hard teetotaler—though this totally made sense once you got to know the guy. That night, the most charming part of his literature table were the well-done, hand-drawn sharpied stickers for sale reading “Drug free: against all authority!” and “Self-determination begins with a drug free mind.” The stickers were all the more impressive once I saw Tortuga’s arms and hands.
In 2011, a bomb that Tortuga intended to place at a downtown bank exploded in his hands, resulting in his being hospitalized for a considerable period of time as well as losing one of his arms and much of his other hand. When I met him, Tortuga was using a prosthetic claw to produce those beautiful stickers.
I already knew who Tortuga was, but I didn’t know that the man at the literature table was the one whose letters I had read. Our anarchist podcast had reviewed a North American release of his collected prison letters from the time he did for the 2011 bomb case. Leaving the show, I commented to my friends “Damn, I had a great conversation with that dude at the literature table. We somehow went from 1920s propaganda by the deed to 1980s street punk.”
When they responded, “Oh yeah, Tortuga is great for that kind of thing,” my jaw dropped.
“Oh shit. That was Tortuga?”
“Yeah man, you didn’t see his claw?”
Some stickers made by Tortuga.
A few weeks later, I arranged to conduct an interview with Tortuga at the house he shared with his partner. We met up downtown and took a bus there. It was on the outskirts of the city, very much in the hood. Looking out the front window of the bus, we could see a visible cloud of tear gas wafting into the road just outside the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. As the bus passed in front of the University, police tanks moved into the road, halting traffic and stopping us directly within the tear gas cloud. We covered our mouths and noses while tearing up, looking at each other as conflicts erupted outside between rebellious students and the mercenaries of the state. He leaned over to me and said “Quite a way to start an interview, eh?”
Once at their house, I realized that they had turned all of the common areas into an anarchist social center with regular open hours: Biblioteca Sante Caserio. They even maintained a library with a system for checking out books. The two of them walked me through the house, showing me the infrastructure for events: the kitchen, the stolen university lunch trays, the stackable chairs, their prized projector.
I explained our podcast to him and showed him the script for the episode that included a review of his book.
“My book?”
“Yeah… you know… your book of prison letters?”
“Someone turned my prison letters into a book? Wait, people translated my prison letters into English?!”
He had no idea, but he was thrilled. I couldn’t start the interview for another forty-five minutes while Tortuga painstakingly google-translated our podcast’s book review into Spanish and read the whole thing.
On my next trip back to Chile, I brought him a copy of his book (generously gifted by someone who could not believe the story about him not knowing about the book’s existence) and started attending events at Biblioteca Sante Caserio. The crowd at the Sante Caserio events was young and extremely punk—think mohawks and animal print and spikes and colorful vegan leather. They were into insurrectionary anarchism, veganism, and being drug free. It was heartwarming to see these wild-looking youngsters earnestly debating the merits of different approaches to revolutionary struggle.
An announcement of an event at Biblioteca Sante Caserio.
Later, when I was living in Chile more permanently, I had more encounters with Tortuga. A vegan straightedge friend of mine had recently been released from prison after doing time for alleged thoughtcrime concerning animal liberation. His case had been controversial in anarchist circles. Whereas most anarchists in Chile assert a line of “neither innocent nor guilty—simply an enemy of the state” in response to cases of repression, this prisoner had defended his innocence from the state’s charges; some anarchists saw this as a small betrayal of those who proudly claim the actions for which they are sentenced. Upon this guy’s release, Tortuga asked me to pass on an offer to talk if he ever wanted to communicate with someone else who had done time for political charges. My friend was upset that I would even offer such a thing: their cases were different, their politics were different, their experiences of incarceration were different, and he didn’t need to be associating with known bomb-makers now that he was free.
A few months later, the two caught up with each other at a show. Afterwards, my friend reflected back to me, “Damn, I should have accepted that invitation sooner. We had a really good talk about drug-free vs. straightedge and what it’s like in prison. He was cool.”
Tortuga was great to talk to. He had a real enthusiasm, a vigor for life that was contagious. It was always enjoyable to be in his presence. He loved punk rock, loved chaos, and lived anarchy. I thought about him earlier this year when Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in protest of the genocide in Palestine. While honoring that the choice to use his life in that way was Aaron Bushnell’s alone, I couldn’t help but think of the wisdom Tortuga shared with me one afternoon in his home-turned-social center:
“We are far too valuable to be needlessly putting ourselves at risk. I think my most focused advice today would be, more than anything, that this comrade value herself, that she not feel like her life is just a material contribution to the struggle… that the struggle is for your whole life, it won’t change by waiting one more night.”
Now that Tortuga is dead, as the consequence of a work-related accident that could happen to anyone at any time, I’m almost tempted to draw the opposite conclusion: use your life as a weapon now before it is extinguished by the ever-present banal dangers of industrial capitalism and work.
In Chile, when an anarchist passes away in an attempt to attack capitalism, people try to throw down on the date of their death every year. The ways that people keep the memory of Mauricio Morales alive are just one example of this. I hope that people bring their best work to actions remembering Tortuga, considering that he survived his own bomb, continued to struggle with everything he had, and was killed by routine employment in our industrialized society.
I’m heartbroken that I won’t be able to see Tortuga’s bright smile once more when I return to Santiago. You will be missed, dear comrade.
Tortuga expressing his scorn of corporate media.
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Reportedly, Tortuga was electrocuted in the neighborhood La Reina (state) clearing debris from a park named after one Padre Hurtado (church) while working for a company (capital). The holy trinity: they rule you, they fool you, they electrocute you. ↩
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D’linkir was the punk band formed, in part, by Marcelo Villarroel—an urban guerrilla in the late 1980s and the Pinochet dictatorship’s youngest political prisoner, not to mention an alleged bank robber and a dedicated punk rocker. During Villarroel’s first bid in prison, he founded the Kamina Libre political prisoner collective, whose organizing behind bars exercised so much leverage against their jailers that the prison was forced to allow D’linkir to host shows with outside punk bands inside the prison. ↩
