At the end of last year one of Europe’s most infamous insurrectionist anarchist groups, Conspiracy Cells of Fire, announced it would be shifting tactics in its near-decade long campaign against the Greek State in a campaign it dubbed Project Nemesis. The group, which has claimed upwards of 300 attacks against “targets of domination” since it emerged in 2007-8, said it would be shifting away from symbolic targets of authority towards hitting “the personal environment of the enemy, their homes, offices, hangouts and vehicles.”

It opened the campaign with a non-lethal bombing against the house of Athens district attorney Georgia Tsatani, who it accused of running legal interference for the city’s “business and politics mafia,” while a second action saw a firework-based parcel bomb being sent to German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. A third attack, which saw a mailbomb sent to IMF Europe director Jeffrey Franks in March, has been trailed as being linked to Greek insurrectionists but not claimed. The third bombing injured a secretary who opened the parcel before it reached Franks.

Linked to the Informal Anarchist Federation (not to be confused with the International of Anarchist Federations) and in recent years styling itself CCF-IAF, Conspiracy Cells of Fire formally considers itself a “third pole” of anarchist activity rooted in individualism and rejecting class struggle.

CCF has struggled in recent years after a series of arrests and jailings in the 2009-11 period and following its designation as an international “errorist” organisation by the US government, but it remains influential among insurrectionist groups worldwide and the callout has since been backed by Chilean group Banda Ácrata for a Winter of Fire.

Banda Ácrata announced what it called the “Fifth Act” of the campaign yesterday — the third on Chilean soil — by setting an incendiary device off at the doors of the National Confederation of Truck Owners of Chile HQ in Santiago. In a statement, translated by nostate.365, the group said:

The National Confederation of Truck Owners of Chile is a structural link in the chain of domination and exploitation, taking an active part in freight transport and environmental looting in Chilean territory and Wallmapu. They are one of the main beneficiaries of the IIRSA project, which has as one of its objectives the ‘improvement’ of road infrastructure for the transport of goods in the countries of South/Latin America.

They are also the first line of entrepreneurs working side-by-side with the Chilean State seeking to intensify the repression and police intelligence gathering in Mapuche territory, trying to stop without success the burning of trucks that is part of the autonomous Mapuche subversion in defence of its ancestral territory.

The two other Acts carried out included a fake-out bomb threat inside military facility Villa Militar Oeste in Santiago last December, and a delayed-timer explosive laid outside the National Association of the Judiciary, also in Santigo.

Unlike CCF, the Chilean group has thus far made a point of being non-lethal in its strikes, noting “although this in place live despicable beings who deserve to die, at day and night pass workers who are not our goals.”

Comment: Collateral damage

Regardless of any personal views on CCF, their tactics and any other groups backing Project Nemesis, there are potential causes for concern here which may need flagging for the broader anarchist movements of Europe and Latin America.

Coming in the wake of a number of arrests at the G20 protests and riots in Hamburg, the possibility of a more personally threatening wave of attacks could serve to concentrate bosses’ minds in Europe and Latin America, particularly in Greece, Chile and Mexico which have very active insurrectionist movements. Europe’s elites are already on a war footing against “extremism” and have repeatedly shown themselves willing to flout or rewrite all sorts of laws to eliminate even the perception of a threat from militant left or libertarian movements.

In the last major wave of CCF activity there was a lot of collateral damage, including the ASI-MUR case, which saw six entirely unconnected people arrested and put through eight years of legal hell essentially because they were public anarchists and thus easily pinched by authorities looking for a “win” to present to the public. Already this year, in a direct parallel, there have been riots in Athens in support of Irianna, a PhD student jailed on the strength of a partial fingerprint and circumstantial DNA evidence which police said showed she was a CCF member.

The threat of a new specific crackdown on anarchism is not yet a full reality, but if Project Nemesis is successful in causing elites the sleepless nights it hopes for it may well become so. And then it’s sleepless nights all round.