There was a building a few of us had squatted, and it was our base of operations. It may have been a social centre but it was not necessarily open for all. It was like an ancient convent, with its gallery around a patio with plants and a fountain. But it was all derelict and almost ready to be demolished. We used rooms that were quite dark, because the mechanisms that actioned the devices to let the light get in the rooms did not quite work.
Then we squatted another building, less spectacular and in another neighbourhood. Once in the other building, we celebrated the first anniversary of the first one. We were doing the preparations for that anniversary. The new squat was in a populated, residential neighbourhood; it may have been near the house where I lived. The streets were not asphalted, they were full of mud when it rained. I was walking towards the new building with things for the anniversary. We had to be secretive, we could not allow the police to know that we were involved in the building.
As I was approaching the building in the dusty streets a policeman approached me with a leaflet that consisted of a hand-made book, bound with cotton threads. It was a hard back. The first and the last pages were hard card board; the interior pages were not so hard but were harder than normal paper. I began reading. It was an appeal for information on the new building. I decided to go past the street of the building as if I didn’t know anything about it, as if I was going somewhere else. Then as I continued reading I understood I had to go back and face whatever issues the police had with the squat.
The leaflet was an appeal for more information for the police but it actually contained quite good and accurate information about our activities already.
The street was full of police, so if I entered or even knocked on that building it was quite obvious that I was part of it.
Before I could knock, one of my comrades was already on the street; it seemed he was there prepared to speak to the people on the street to counter act the outreach of the police.
I showed him the leaflet. He knew about it. ‘Yes, we may have a mole among us’. But he pointed out that all the information the police claimed to have, was not supported by a reference, or a source.
The leaflet/booklet had two parts. One was the vast amount of information they had on us; it occupied all the soft pages and one of the hard covers. The other one of the hard covers contained the appeal for more information and a vague, invalid explanation about how the police had obtained the information they already had.
My comrade was explaining to a policeman that the lack of a proper explanation or evidence that the information they had was accurate, invalidated the whole of the leaflet.
As I was leaving, a policeman approached me. I had divided the booklet, undoing the cotton threads and separating the hard cover that contained the appeal for more information. I had this cover in one hand and the rest of the booklet in the other. I showed the policeman what I had on my hands. I raised the hand with the one cover and said: the invalidity of this” then I raised the other hand “makes this invalid”.