![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/5.jpg\")
The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”
\nFive years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.
\n\nThis is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.
\n\nOctober 2019 in Santiago, Chile. The president has called in the armed forces against the people for the first time since the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.
\n\n“Wait, I don’t get it. The advertisements are untouched. There’s not even graffiti. Not a single window is broken.”
\n\n“Yes. And?”
\n\n“I mean, the shelves are all empty. Did they just evacuate all the merchandise, or was it actually looted?”
\n\n“Haha what? Of course it was looted, the whole neighborhood looted it. Well, women and children first.”
\n\n“And no one destroyed anything?”
\n\n“Look, the idea isn’t to give them a bigger insurance check. Besides, if things keep going the way they are, that building may soon be ours.”
\n\n“That would be a serious step. I can’t imagine things ever reaching this point where I come from. Good luck with your struggle.”
\n\n“No! No, no, no, brother—our struggle. You’re here. You’re in this. Tell people.”
\n\n“I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone back home.”
\n\n“Explain it like this: neoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die.”
\n\n The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”
\nOn October 17, 2019, Chile’s student movement was on its heels, facing new legislation that put police in schools for the very first time. With the students’ normal organizing environment swept out of their control, the movement launched a campaign against a routine increase in public transit fare. With a right-wing billionaire in the presidency, the prospects for resistance looked dim.
\n\nEverything changed in a single day. On October 18, a small rush-hour protest at a metro transfer station triggered a stoppage of Santiago’s entire public transit system. As commuters were stuck in hot traffic, images of police beating students began to circulate on their phones.
\n\nSantiago exploded. In one weekend, over a hundred metro stations were attacked, with ten completely destroyed. A quarter of the Wal-Marts (the largest grocery chain) in Chile were looted or burned. The government declared martial law in response to civil disturbance for the first time since the 1973-1990 Pinochet military dictatorship—but the people would not back down.
\n\nChile graffiti reel, 2019-2020.
\nWe decided to take a break from our country after I finally beat criminal charges resulting from participating in combative political activity. We had just crossed the border out of Ecuador when we heard reports about an uprising there. Peasants were marching on the capitol, choking off the highways to force the president to reverse proposed austerity measures.
\n\nYou said, “We should go back.”
\n\nI said, “If it were Chile…”
\n\nJust two weeks later, it was.
\n\nI’m not from Chile, but I lived there for years.
\n\nWe arrived in Santiago a week before everything exploded, and almost immediately encountered an evasión [a collective fare-dodging action] that students were staging. It was your first time in Chile, and I was excited for you to get a small taste of student rebellion. And, hey, getting where we were going quicker without having to pay the second highest transit fare in Latin America?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/9.jpg\")
Evasion, 2019.
\nOK. But the best part was how fun it was. It was so fun that the following day, when we heard the shriek of students rushing down the escalators towards the turnstiles, that we ditched our free bus ride and rushed into the station. As if we had just scored the winning goal, the teenage rebels thrilled, chanting “If you don’t jump, you’re a cop!” as we hopped through the turnstiles they had liberated. We kept evading whenever we encountered fare-dodging actions that week, even if we didn’t really need a metro ride.
\n\nOn October 18, I was supposed to give a talk at some friends’ anarchist ateneo [social center]. You were out on the town while I was back at my old apartment preparing. You WhatsApp’d me some videos of kids wilding out in the metro station. Was it really Los Heroes [a metro station]?1 You were at the center of history? God damn. I just YeahYeahYeah’d you because I had seen Chilean riots before. “Oh I’m glad you got to see that. We have to get ready to leave though.”
\n\nYou—somehow—got back to my old apartment where we were staying. Knowing what I know now, I don’t even understand how you got there in time. But you were always good at finding me in the streets over the coming months, even when things got chaotic. What should have been a 45-minute commute to the ateneo took two and a half hours. Time can be elastic in Chile, sure, but it really shouldn’t take that long.
\n\nSomehow, we got there. No one else did, though. Over the months that followed, the coolest people I met flattered me with, “Oh, I was going to come to your talk that day! But then, well…”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/8.jpg\")
The CrimethInc. presentation in Villa Francia on October 18, 2019.
\nAs we waited for an audience, I saw two ten-year-olds walking down the middle of the street with a children’s couch the size of a playpen.
\n\n“There’s no way they’re gonna do what I think they’re gonna do to that couch, right?”
\n\nThey did. Right onto the fire at the end of the block. We started to piece it together: what you had seen, no one at the event, the heavy traffic, this flaming barricade. Santiago was going off.
\n\nWe crossed downtown to our friend’s apartment, closer to the action, but it turned out the action was everywhere. The husk of a bus. Smoldering buildings. At one point, our cab driver wasn’t sure what to do because the intersection had cops on one side and fighting encapuchados [masked heroes] on the other.
\n\nI was still YeahYeahYeah-ing your wide eyes when I left the following day, despite all my friends’ insistence that this was something special. When I got to the anarchist book fair in Buenos Aires—to give my talk again—the whole book fair was cancelled. They managed to get through a couple of the time slots, but everyone was talking about Chile. Looking at their phones. Cheering for our team whenever we struck a blow and expressing outrage every time there was news about repression. It didn’t take long for the organizers to pack it all in and just open up the social center so the whole book fair could simply watch the news from Chile.
\n\nMy friend, one of the organizers, walked over to me while I was wide-eyeing the events on the television. He whispered to me, “Dude, why the fuck did you leave?”
\n\nThe third time I tried to give my ill-fated talk, it was in the middle of the revolt, both temporally and territorially. Some anarchists had opened up a squat in one of the looted and abandoned businesses right by the main protest plaza. Enough people said they still wanted to see my talk—even though I didn’t understand why they would be interested in anything other than what was going on around us—that I decided to organize a presentation at the squat. Plus, I loved the space and wanted to keep it active. During talks there, one would regularly hear the uproar of revolt just outside the door, although we occasionally had to tuck our heads into our knees and wait out the wafting clouds of teargas.
\n\nNobody came. The host had been optimistic, but after waiting a couple of hours, he informed me that the legendary 1970s Basque punk band, La Polla Records, was playing in a stadium that day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/10.jpg\")
Fifty years of punk rock in the middle of an insurrection: “No rest, no peace!”
\n“I don’t really like punk rock, so I didn’t mind opening up the space for you. But I guess everyone’s there.”
\n\nBut I do like punk rock. So I grabbed my loosies and hopped on my bike.
\n\nAlmost ten years ago now, five punks died in Santiago when bouncers violently beat back a rush of poor punks who were trying to get into a show where the British crust band Doom was playing. Wanting to avoid a similar situation—or simply intimidated by the uncontrollable, pay for nothing, fight for everything spirit that was consuming Chile—the security at the stadium would simply allow you to walk in without a ticket. I even took my bicycle in.
\n\nInside the stadium, 15,000 punks were letting their hair down. Out in the plaza, every sector of the oppressed was present, and while we gave the cops our worst, we tried to be on our best behavior with each other because survival depended on our collective bonds. For example, a fragile truce existed during those months between the different soccer hooligan barras bravas so that they could fight the police together. On the rare occasions that fights did break out between demonstrators, everyone would chant “If you fight, you’re a cop! If you fight, you’re a cop!” Wild anarchist idealists went to the plaza with their most polished pitches to promote the values we believed would deepen the revolt.
\n\nInside that stadium, however, the pressure was off. The plaza always had an element of carnival, but the La Polla Records show felt much more like a celebration of how far the anarchy had gone. If you know, you know, and everyone there got it—all punks—and we could just be bad because being bad together was so good. We didn’t need justifications or explanations, we could just enjoy the environment of collective, chaotic rebellion. While we had to mind our interactions on the frontline (“If you recognize me behind my mask, no you didn’t”), lest buchón sapo [Argentine, then Chilean, for “snitch”] plainclothes track our social connections, here in the stadium, those of us who had maintained a professional candor with each other in the streets could embrace and see the whole of each other’s faces erupting in radiant laughter.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/7.jpg\")
Demonstrators snap a photo of the declaration of intra-hooligan, anti-police unity. It reads, “We lost too much time fighting among ourselves,” with each word atop the colors of a different team.
\nEveryone was sharing alcohol and weed and whatever else they had. A skinhead hooligan had hacked the stadium’s sprinkler system and was spraying mist over his section of the crowd under the hot summer sun. People climbed onto the sound tower and the roof of the stadium to hang banners in solidarity with the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche struggle or to dance silhouetted against the setting sun.
\n\nHere, the audience was in control—except the audience was totally out of control. Just a few songs into La Polla Records’ set, they had to stop in the middle of a song because too many enthusiastic hooligans had gotten on the stage and one had fallen into the drumset. They weren’t trying to stop the show, really. They were just excited.
\n\nA few more songs of the same, and one fateful fight between a bouncer who tried to suggest to a fan that he shouldn’t grab the singer’s neck in order to sing along, and the whole thing fell apart. Altogether, La Polla Records played something like five songs before abandoning the stage. As dusk came on, the atmosphere shifted from enthusiasm to anger.
\n\n15,000 punks rule! La Polla Records in Chile, February 2020.
\n15,000 grumbling punks and anarchists and hooligans and skinheads filed out of the stadium. Honestly, the amount of inward-facing frustration was so high that the most strategic choice the police could have made that evening would have been to allow the infighting to take its natural course. However, when there are thousands of punks occupying the road outside the stadium drinking and destroying traffic infrastructure, the pigs just can’t help themselves.
\n\nAnd neither could we. The most beautiful, glorious street battle of those six months unfolded before my eyes. We could see the police descending from up in the hills, so their arrival was anticipated. There was an air of “Here we go…”
\n\nBrightly colored mohawks bounced in and out of visibility amid clouds of tear gas. The most wildly dressed peacock punks engaged in feral smashing of beer bottles against police, while boom boxes provided a fast-paced tupa-tupa-tupa soundtrack to the riot. We didn’t see the best practices of gas masks, goggles, and gloves that the frontline used in the plaza. This was pure fuck you energy.
\n\nI had made a friend earlier that night while standing around selling cigarettes—but our befriending quickly accelerated when we realized we needed to rely on each other to get out of there safely. Even though they had, let’s say, much more reason to avoid capture by the police, on our first attempt to extract ourselves, they grabbed my arm and said, “Can we just watch it though?”
\n\nYeah… except no! They were shooting shit at us! Dozens of punks rushed past us and, behind them, mechanical faceless stormtroopers advanced out of the gas clouds, arms drawn. We turned and ran.
\n\nIn those six months, I mastered a whole audio taxonomy of booms—deep ones for the spent spray paint cans thrown into street fires, three different mid-level frequencies for different police projectiles, and the most piercing booms, fireworks. With the cops at our heels, we heard—BOOM—and instinctively I told my friend, “Jump!” No shit, a smoking canister hurtled under our feet. BOOM BOOM! Instinctively, again, “Duck!” This time, they went right over our heads.
\n\n“We absolutely have to get out of here.” We turned down a side street and wandered to the home of a friendly but ribbing communist who was excited to share his plan to subvert either the anarchist circle-A, or the constitutional process—I couldn’t tell which—by making a circle-A logo for the “Apruebo” (Approve) campaign for the constitution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/12.jpg\")
“Stop prohibiting so many things, I can’t keep up with disobeying them all.”
\nOver the last five years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing the material from this documentary in live presentations. In the days that this film depicts, every time I organized a talk, it was interrupted by the fiercest street confrontations in decades, or a people’s insurrection just across the border, or an uncontrollable wave of rioting punks. I wish that was still happening today. It’s better to do than to watch.
\n\nSince those days, I’ve presented the live version of Fell In Love With Fire within autonomous territory held in defiance of state power—in Weelaunee Forest, at a Los Panchos community in Mexico City, in People’s Park, where the audience sat on a trashed excavator left from the last riots to retake the park in 2022. It is my hope that this videozine, this documentalgo, can serve as tool to bring those kinds of spaces onto the map of other projects of rebellious self-determination across the globe and across time.
\n\nPlease, don’t limit your use of this video to isolated viewing, nor to sterile, polite, seated events to raise funds. Use it to raise hell.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/3.jpg\")
Their side.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/10/21/4.jpg\")
Our side.
\nYou can download the English .srt subtitles file here to translate the subtitles into another language for us.
\n\nLos Héroes is not far from La Moneda, the metro stetion where kids dropped a televisión onto the tracks—shutting down the metro and setting off the chain reaction of revolt. ↩
\nOn the night of June 12, 2020, Atlanta police officers murdered Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, at a Wendy’s in south Atlanta, Georgia. This took place immediately following the high point of the countrywide uprising in which people responded to the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and countless other Black people around the United States. In response, a new wave of protest and revolt broke out across Atlanta, in which the Wendy’s burned to the ground. Armed Black demonstrators occupied the site of the Wendy’s, mourning for Rayshard Brooks and seeking to create spaces of Black empowerment.
\n\nAhead of the anniversary of the George Floyd uprising, we present We Are Now, a film centering the voices of participants in the occupation of the Wendy’s. We hope that this will help to pass on the memories of some of the forms of courageous resistance to white supremacy and policing that took place in 2020, along with the lessons that people derived from their experiences. None of the struggles depicted in this documentary are concluded. Let’s learn from the past and prepare for the next chapter.
\n\nContent warning: this film shows lethal police violence and resistance to it.
\n\nWe Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta.
\nTo show solidarity to those still fighting in Atlanta today, you can support the following projects:
\n\nHere is a version of the film without subtitles. We invite translators to prepare the subtitles in other languages; contact us for the SRT file.
\n\nA version of the film without subtitles.
\nWe didn’t know the Wendy’s occupation was still happening. It was a few hundred miles away and it felt like every stretch of highway we had previously ignored suddenly led to something strange and promising—a mystery of not whether, but how people’s misery would be expressed. The map was bigger now. Every town wanted to represent and there was a shit ton of news coming at us. On all devices. At all hours. From all kinds of people you kind of think you remember from that band that played that party… A whirlwind of memory and doubt about the veracity of any information. Objectivity defenestrated.
\n\nNevertheless, some things were real. Rayshard Brooks was a Black father of four, shot dead in Atlanta by two police officers—by every police officer—on June 12. It was caught on camera and word spread fast. On June 13, demonstrators—mournful, angry, and hyped—burned down the Wendy’s. On June 14, people began occupying the Wendy’s as a “cop-free zone.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/19/1.jpg\")
\nWe didn’t know any of this. We were in Atlanta for a rave and figured the Wendy’s was over or heavily co-opted. We didn’t know shit. We had heard about a protest plaza in DC, the CHOP in Seattle, a tent city in Philadelphia, a Confederate monument transformed into an open-air revolutionary social center in Richmond, but we didn’t know if any of these were ongoing on any given day.
\n\nTo know for sure, you had to go.
\nAnd we had to know.
Into Atlanta a few hours before the party.
\nShould we go check it out?
\nThat’s it. It’s still happening.
\nThe signs look weird with their lights out.
\nCan we get closer?
\nOther people are going in.
\nOk let’s try but if they tell us to fuck off…
“Welcome to the Wendy’s of not Georgia. Some ID please. Hold on a second.” Not like a cop… more like that time I went to a Caracol in Chiapas and had to surrender my passport to enter. Guns too. I can’t wait for a world without guns or identification. There’s already no cops here, and you can just sense that they aren’t coming anytime soon. He looks so tired. It’s been more than a second… more than a minute. Finally, “Ok, just don’t park over there.” He gestures to the flowerful corner where Rayshard Brooks was killed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/19/3.jpg\")
\nWe gather in the back with the multi-racial, but mostly white, crew of multi-tendency—but mostly anarchist—carpenters while the multi-racial, but mostly black, security team watches the entrance in multi-quality, but mostly cool, cars with good speakers and bass music. A man walks over. “I just want to thank y’all for what you’re doing.” Oh shit, that is a lot of weed. And it’s gushy. The carpenters exchange straight-edge inside glances, and people have COVID-19 nerves, too, but I see the love in that man’s eyes and I will smoke his weed. It is one thing to be permitted—it is another to be welcomed.
\n\nWe need a guide. We find a guide. Old friend guide. This old feeling. No one’s in control. Cars come in fast and their tires sing screeching hysteria to us. They’re gone. We’re gone too. Winding around the city. “Don’t stand there, that’s where people get shot.” A few weeks later someone is shot there. We find the rave. Bass. It’s happening. I’m in love with everyone. Or free. I’m keeping the faith. With everyone. Or both because same. Same and both.
\n\nSame?
\nYes.
\nMore?
\nYES! MORE!
“Dude, we’ve only ever hung out in official states of emergency. This is like number four.”
\n\n“MORE!”
\n\n“You’re out!”
\n\n“You’re back!?”
\n\nThe sun is rising. Everyone is arms all over each other. There’s a kitten when we get to our car. It’s time to find darkness.
\n\nWe release this film in memory of everyone who has lost their lives to state violence—across the United States, but also worldwide, from Colombia to Myanmar and Palestine—in hopes that together, we might one day bring about the end of every institution that treats human beings as disposable.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/05/19/2.jpg\")
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