There is an accusation that resurfaces every year, always accompanied by dramatic outrage and a media rush to condemn. The Avante! Festival becomes, for one reason or another, a problem that must be denounced. The argument, the target, and the pretext may change, but the pattern remains the same, finding a reason to put the Festival in the dock. This year, the pretext was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PCP invited an organization that appears on the European Union's list of entities subject to counterterrorism measures, and from there arose the accusation that it was whitewashing or supporting terrorism. Before this, there were others.
Why does the Festival need to face a new public trial every year? Perhaps it is worth asking what it means to be "designated as a terrorist." It is a designation with legal consequences, subject to review, and one that can be changed when political circumstances shift.
Nelson Mandela knew this better than anyone. The ANC had an armed wing and was treated as a terrorist organization for decades by various Western governments and authorities. Even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Mandela and other ANC leaders remained subject to legal restrictions in the United States associated with their former designation as terrorists. The very same people who today erect statues in his honor treated him as an enemy for decades.
Yasser Arafat is a case of dual identity. For decades, he was treated as an enemy by Israel and the United States. In 1974, he addressed the UN with an olive branch in his hand. In 1994, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo process. After 2000, he was once again treated as an enemy, confined by Israeli troops to his headquarters in Ramallah, by the very people who had eventually recognized him as a negotiating partner. He surely did not change his nature twice in a decade. What changed was the convenience of those who classified him.
If you like, there is a much more recent example. Ahmed al-Sharaa led the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda and was designated a terrorist by the United States in 2013. In November 2025, less than a year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and al-Sharaa's rise to power, the UN Security Council removed him from the sanctions list, the United States removed him from its list of global terrorists, and Donald Trump welcomed him to the White House. The same person who for years had been portrayed as a terrorist threat came to be treated as a political interlocutor within just a few months of coming to power. There was no historical exoneration of his past, rather, there was a shift in context, interests, and policy. The label fell away because it no longer served the purpose of those who had applied it.
These are not isolated cases. History is full of them. The "terrorist" label is not a definitive moral judgment, but a classification that can change with political circumstances. This is where the controversy ceases to be merely about terrorism and becomes about democracy. A democratic society does not reduce political judgment to lists drawn up by authorities with their own criteria. The Festival is neither an embassy nor a parliament. It is a political and cultural space belonging to a party that has the right to choose whom it stands in solidarity with and to give a voice to whomever it sees fit.
Nor should the controversy make us overlook another important nuance. The very same States that label those who resist them as terrorists engage in forms of violence that they teach us not to recognize as such and give them respectable names. Security, defense, order, stability. A blockade that kills through deprivation is not terrorism, it is foreign policy. A bombing that devastates a neighborhood is not terrorism, it is self-defense. The misery that kills through disease and hunger isn't even counted as violence, it's just the normal functioning of the economy. The violence of power always has a name that legitimizes it. The violence of those who resist, however, is labeled in a way that discredits it. Those who have the power to name violence are the ones who decide everything else. The accusation of violence leveled against those who resist often ignores the violence already embedded in the order that presents itself as peaceful. Colonialism, occupation, exploitation, war, and poverty are all part of this history.
Old Marx steps in here, as unsettling and relevant as ever. He reminds us that the world we live in is neither natural nor inevitable. It was built by economic and political relations and, for that very reason, can be transformed by our collective action. The PCP has made it clear that it does not govern international relations according to the criteria of entities that classify organizations as terrorist and points out that, if that were the case, it would never have expressed solidarity with Nelson Mandela. It is a political position, one that can be accepted or challenged, but there is a fundamental difference between challenging a political choice and asserting that it constitutes, in and of itself, support for terrorism.
This isn't the first time that a controversy surrounding the festival has turned out to be different from reality. In 2020, it was the pandemic. Avante! took place under health guidelines set by the DGS, with attendance capped at 16,563 people, and was at the center of a massive political controversy. At the time, SIC aired a fake front page of The New York Times on Nightly News announcing a "mass suicide party" with 33,000 attendees. The front page was a photomontage, of course. What's more, strangely enough, Polígrafo, the channel's own fact-checking segment, had already debunked it hours earlier. Even so, it was shown on the main newscast as if it were true. Once again, Avante! was placed at the center of public scrutiny, this time through the use of lies.
That is why it is worth looking beyond the controversy. Some people think of Avante! as a three-day spectacle. Think again. It is a collective endeavor that lasts the entire year. The 2026 Festival marks its fiftieth anniversary, born of the freedom won from the dictatorship and having weathered, since then, bomb attacks, neoliberal normalization, and the media siege of August. It takes place every summer and continues to be built by PCP activists and friends through volunteer work. It's not just what happens between Friday and Sunday at Quinta da Atalaia. It's everything that had to be done beforehand so that those three days could take place. Setting up, transporting, cooking, cleaning, organizing, welcoming, discussing, creating. Thousands of comrades and friends working together to build something that belongs to them. When it's over, it doesn't end. On the contrary, the spirit, the unity, and the solidarity that made it possible remain, more alive and more vibrant than ever. That's not nostalgia. It's practice.
Apparently, that's what bothers people. It is in this way of doing things that one of the most profound differences lies. For three days, at Quinta da Atalaia, the logic of profit does not organize the space. Culture is not merely a commodity, nor is politics merely a spectacle. An essential part of what happens there is based on volunteer work, carried out collectively by people who set up structures, serve the flatbreads, take turns serving lunch and dinner, organize the debates, and return home exhausted yet satisfied. Work does not disappear. It changes its meaning. It ceases to be merely what is sold to survive and becomes, instead, what is offered to build a community. This is deeply political. And that is precisely why the Festival is more than just a festival.
It is also here that Avante! touches on an issue that Marx, whom Atalaia insists on celebrating, placed at the center of his critique. What happens when what we do ceases to be merely a commodity and becomes also a way of collectively building something? It's an uncomfortable question, because it forces us to examine what the dominant discourse presents to us as natural. Who decides how we organize our work, who benefits from it, and why we accept as natural that almost everything must be measured by price, profit, and private property. The Festival does not answer these questions in theory. Over the course of three days, it shows that other ways of organizing collective life are possible. A possibility that capitalism teaches us to forget.
To the comrades who, year after year, bring all of this to life and return home tired but fulfilled, with a cleansed soul, there remains the certainty that what we build together is greater than any fleeting controversy. Those who want to reduce the Festival to a controversial invitation have missed the point entirely. Avante! is much more than a summer controversy. For fifty years, it has been a bastion of freedom, a place where collective organization ceases to be a mere slogan and becomes a practice. It is a gathering of people who come from different places, bring their struggles, their music, their ideas, and ultimately discover that, together, they can achieve anything that once seemed impossible. What is built there continues in the communities, in the neighborhood committees, in the concrete struggles of daily life that don't wait for the next Festival to begin. The Festival passes, but the seed remains. Avante! is the dress rehearsal proving that another world, organized differently, fits within this one.
You don't have to agree with the PCP to recognize the uniqueness of this. It is a political festival that embraces a worldview. It defends some causes and fights against others. That is why it cannot be reduced to the idea that it should be a neutral space, sterilized of conflict and political positions. Does the Festival make people uncomfortable? Let it continue. That is yet another of its virtues: the ability to unsettle, to provoke discussion, to bring people together, and to challenge what many would prefer to be accepted without question. Democracy is not built by silencing voices that unsettle. It is built by having the courage to listen to them. Avante! can be whatever you want it to be and whatever you say it is. But a neutered festival? No way!
