For several weeks, the police offensive has intensified across the metropolitan area. Positions long held by Viv Ansanm have been retaken, university faculties were recently liberated, and strikes are multiplying. The clashes have not ceased, gunfire can still be heard in the distance, no area has fully returned to normal, but the progress is real. During the same period, however, the metropolitan components of the coalition have fallen silent. Jimmy Chérizier’s conferences have become rare, propaganda videos have almost disappeared, and the spectacular attacks against sovereign institutions have stopped. This silence, settling in at the very moment pressure is increasing, is the real novelty. It calls for interpretation, and that interpretation is not reassuring. Viv Ansanm is entering its second age, the stage where a criminal organization ceases accumulating through spectacular violence and begins embedding itself within the economic circuits of the society it parasitizes. This is the most dangerous moment, because it is the moment when the battle appears to be shifting even though it is merely changing terrain.

Naming the phenomenon