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Summary

ACT UP’s Spanish-language guidelines on nonviolent direct action — minimum safety levels for protesters at direct actions, originally developed in the HIV/AIDS direct-action tradition and translated for the broader ES-language NV movement.

Body

ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the direct-action network founded in 1987 in response to the US HIV/AIDS crisis — produced Acción Directa No Violenta as a Spanish-language operational guide to minimum safety levels at direct actions [source: accion-directa-noviolenta-actup]. The original ACT UP context is specific: the HIV/AIDS movement operated under time pressure, against a hostile state and indifferent medical establishment, and with members whose health was already compromised (medication schedules, opportunistic infections, immune-system fragility) [source: accion-directa-noviolenta-actup]. The minimum-safety protocols that emerged from that context have been adopted across the ES-language NV movement.

Coverage: minimum safety levels for protesters — what the action must provide (water, food, access to medication, access to a quiet space, a clear de-escalation route, an obvious medical point); affinity group discipline — the small-group rule (you do not leave the action alone, you do not take a separate photo of a fellow arrestee, you do not give police any more information than the law requires); non-cooperation with police framing — the explicit refusal of any role that puts an activist in a police-like position; support of arrestees — the jail-support phone tree and the legal-observer handoff [source: accion-directa-noviolenta-actup].

The document is a translation of the US ACT UP “Nonviolent Direct Action” handbook; license is not explicit (treat as link-only). Reproduce by paraphrase.

Use it for

Designing minimum safety protocols for an ES-language direct action; training new affinity groups in the basic nonviolence discipline; integrating arrestee-support into a small-team action.

Open Questions

  • Confirm current ACT UP NY URL; the ACT UP chapters have folded and reformed across decades.
  • The lists flag license unverified; confirm on the document.

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