Solidarity with Palestine: Camilo Torres Restrepo Political Prisoners Movement (Part II)
Translation
“The prison regime undermines the dignity of political prisoners”
The penalties for the crimes of rebellion and related offenses have been progressively increasing with each reform. Each criminal type is tried separately, in a desperate effort to deny the political character of our struggle. The judges invented the thesis that conspiracy to commit a crime is compatible with rebellion and the Supreme Court of Justice has accepted and backed it. The prison regime attacks the dignity of political prisoners; we are dispersed throughout all the country’s prisons, preventing our collective dynamics and the reaffirmation of our revolutionary values. We are prevented from communicating and denied the right to information. We, like the more than 110,000 prisoners in the country, suffer indignified conditions and at times conditions that threaten life, since the minimum conditions of welfare that a human being needs to live are not guaranteed, and on the contrary we are subjected to overcrowding and lack of medical attention that has led comrades to death for these causes. The entry of human rights defenders, humanitarian organizations and verification commissions is prohibited, restricted and made difficult.
In previous writing, we wrote:
From our condition as political prisoners and social fighters we reaffirm our commitment to humanity, to history, and we will continue to fulfill it. We have done so from clandestinity, from the neighborhood, from the village, from the plains, from the mountain, from prison. We hope that we can continue doing so, free, discussing, arguing, obtaining and conceding reason, and that all citizens can do so without the fear of prison or of the cemetery for daring to dream. What is wrong with dreaming? What harm do utopias do?
From the prisons today we continue fighting, for our recognition, for our dignity as social and political fighters, for the respect of human rights, for peace, for social justice, for freedom, for a new Colombia, free, democratic and at peace.
Our work over all these years since we formed as the Political Prisoners Movement has been to develop a program of peace pedagogy, in which encounter and respectful listening take place among all social sectors, political parties, churches and ethnic peoples with the most elementary purpose of articulating and carrying out political exchange with a multiplicity of expressions of Colombian society, as well as of the international [community] that supports both the struggle of peoples for their rights, their autonomy, their independence and their freedom, but also so that those processes can take place in a non-violent and not so bloody way as war, which is one of the alternatives left to us when the oligarchies in power do not want to recognize popular sovereignty; on that point Camilo Torres was clear in saying that:
“I am convinced that all peaceful avenues must be exhausted and that the final word on the path to be chosen does not belong to the popular class, since the people, who constitute the majority, have the right to power. It is necessary to ask the oligarchy how it will deliver it; if it does so peacefully, we will take it equally in a peaceful way, but if it does not intend to deliver it or intends to do so violently, we will take it violently.” (Umaña Luna; E. 2003. p. 91)
Thus, the ones we should most demand to stop the war are not the guerrilla organizations but the oligarchies that have always implemented it to impose their policies and defend their economic interests disguised as democracies, in whose name a people is invaded, trampled, murdered and annihilated.
In that pedagogical and political exchange work, we had the immense joy of receiving the visit of Sahar Francis, defender of political prisoners in Palestine, who came to learn about our experience and to share hers in that very difficult work of being in solidarity with apparently lost causes due to the prolongation of conflicts. The images shown through mass media are nothing compared to what political prisoners in Palestine—and the whole of that people—have to live daily, destined for extermination by the supposed will of a God who chose a single people to make them enjoy the delights of a fertile land amid the aridity of the deserts, and which today has become a terrain of dispute for the great world powers without caring about the fate of its ancestral inhabitants.
“Those of us who resist by different methods and means that imperialist avalanche suffer the consequences”
In the exchange with our comrade Sahar, we reaffirmed once again that the struggle of oppressed peoples is the same, but also that the interests of capitalism are the same everywhere and therefore its methods for the subjugation of peoples. The supposed democracy, paradigm of Western civilization, is being attempted to expand throughout the world, in a re-edition of the crusades that sought to subject all humanity to Christianity. Thus, as was already said before, those of us who resist that imperialist avalanche by different methods and means suffer the consequences, which among others include imprisonment as a warning for the rest of the fighters for freedom and dignity.
In our case, the Colombian State has been copying in an accelerated way the North American model of prisons, so that by being in one of the maximum security prisons built relatively a few years ago, one feels as if one had been extradited to the United States. The symbol that stands out from this “new penitentiary culture,” as the establishment has euphemistically called it, is the maximum security prison located in the city of Valledupar, capital of the department of Cesar, and which the prisoners have called “la tramacúa.” This term (which by the way has the largest population of Arab and Jewish origin due to the migrations that occurred throughout the 19th and 20th centuries) signifies big, heavy, hard, difficult. And it was designed and built with that purpose: to break the human spirit to the maximum point of leading it to see suicide as the only alternative to escape so much ignominy. “Welcome to hell,” is the greeting with which the prisoners already there receive those who are transferred from other prisons, in some cases for being sentenced to penalties that exceed 30 years and can reach 60. In the case of political prisoners, we are taken there for our organizational work in other prisons and in defense of human rights.
The conditions of this prison, which are already being replicated in others in the country, are worsened by the lack of water that makes the smell of urine and excrement permanent. The heat becomes unbearable, especially during the hours in which one must remain locked in cells without any kind of ventilation. The fights over the little water are constant, since each prisoner must collect and store it in 5-liter jugs during the 5 or 10 minutes of supply to be used for the rest of the day. It is not allowed to have radio receivers, much less televisions, and even dental floss is prohibited. This situation is already occurring in prisons located in hot climates such as La Dorada, in the department of Caldas, Jamundí in Valle, and Yopal in the department of Casanare.
On more than a few occasions excrement serves some prisoners as an element of pressure to get their health situation attended to or to insist on a transfer that very rarely is achieved. In this case, the desperate prisoner takes his own excrement and smears it on his body or threatens to throw it at the guards if his demands are not met. The rebel is then taken to the doctor, diagnosed as mentally ill and therefore prescribed anxiolytics to “lower his levels of aggressiveness.” In addition to this, most prisoners find escape in the consumption of hallucinogens; but in the case of the “tramacúa” the number of people who consume sleeping pills every night is alarming, since in prison time passes more slowly during the nights.
In sum, prisons are the instrument that the elites who hold power in the States have designed for social control, but above all to punish those who act in accordance with what the capitalist system has taught them: to get money, fame and power at any cost; only that this too is reserved for that powerful elite, which does not tolerate that anyone different from their caste dares to be equal to them. And in the end that rich and powerful class is nothing more than the result of inheritances obtained through centuries of hatred, plunder and extermination.