Jan. 10, 2011 From Hommodolars Contrainformación - by Marcelo Villarroel
via Anarchist News
My mind is once again overwhelmed by a sad mixture of shock, rage, and
pain. This time, a new dose of harsh reality is exposed to the world, as
solid evidence of society’s sickness wakes me from my dreams to daybreak
in a punishment cell.
It was 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday the 8th, and in the distance, among bars and
cold hallways, I heard the murmur of a conversation in a wing adjacent to
the disciplinary unit of the Maximum Security Section (SMS), where I had
been staying for the past nine days as a penalty for “contravening the
internal regime of High-Security Prison.” I initially thought I had
misheard, that I was still sleeping and it was all a horrible nightmare,
but regrettably the murmur was clear and precise, and I was totally awake
and alert: “81 dead and 14 injured in tower 5 at San Miguel prison.” In a
matter of minutes, information began to flow from the tiny screened
windows on the various floors and from the different voices of prisoners
with television and radio access, unable to hide their shared despair.
A new routine begins in the SMS. It’s a routine marked by hatred for the
jailer, combined with a generalized commotion inside this heavily shrouded
unit, also known as the High-Security Block (MAS).
As the day goes by, the avalanche of information becomes more and more
irrefutable, while the conviction grows in my mind that I am bearing
witness to indolent butchery on the part of gendarmes who, as
executioner-slaves, bear the responsibility for this blatant new State
crime. How can I think otherwise when I have lived and felt the
Nazi-Fascist treatment of these “Penitentiary Officials” thousands of
times. It’s they who give orders, administrate, and govern the prisons
that are coldly designed to feed off of the daily deaths of dozens of
prisoners across the entire country.
How many prisoners commit suicide, tormented by prison experiences they
can’t endure? How many prisoners are brutally beaten, tortured, or
isolated for their dignified refusal to support the abuses that are part
of the “rehabilitation process”? How many prisoners are murdered in fights
manufactured and encouraged by gendarmes applying their internal policy of
divide and rule? How many prisoners are transferred, their roots
arbitrarily pulled up out of their home soil, destroying their families
and depriving them of the little they’ve managed to build in the way of
real human relationships? How many of those who talk about, propose,
decide on, and live off the criminalization of poverty, the prison
business, and the construction of a substitute reality have intimate
knowledge of what it is to experience the stress of imprisonment and the
strain of punishment, solitary confinement, white torture, and utter
helplessness?
In this sick Prison-Capital-State society, the indiscriminate death of
prisoners has become something “normal.” At the beginning of the decade,
under the Lagos government, around 26 prisoners burned to death in the old
Iquique prison. Also 10 years ago, seven prisoners burned to death in San
Miguel, and another 10 people in Colina II. They may officially say those
deaths were the result of massive brawls or riots, but that in no way
absolves all who sustain Capital and the State of their responsibility.
Capital and the State are not empty words or subjective, abstract
structures. They are concrete things comprising people who take part in a
project that integrally serves domination, which looks to perpetuate
itself in the form of a prison society we must necessarily destroy in
order to put an end—once and for all!—to this exasperating state of
things.
The rich are happy, and they secretly enjoy the indiscriminate death of
imprisoned proletarians. It would be “politically incorrect” to say so
openly, but one can clearly perceive their indifference in the face of
such a massacre. Politicians on the left and the right reach consensus,
seek “solutions,” and attempt to be “creative.” The fourth estate,
capital’s propaganda apparatus known as the press, once again delights in
being able to sell all this backstage drama. But the Social War is
relentless, ferocious, and bloody. It will not be distracted, and it will
certainly not forget.
In the country’s prisons, there is a sense of indignation and a feeling of
fury toward authority, and I hope it won’t be fleeting. There is also an
instinctive will to organize, mobilize, and break away from the
debilitating functional passivity shown in the face of the jailer.
As an Autonomous, Anarchist subversive, I can’t ignore the pain of the
families. I can’t—nor do I want to—think that anticapitalist consciousness
has been seized by indifference and that these events will remain shelved
in the “red archives” of our unyielding, rebellious, and insurgent
proletarian memory. Above all, it’s our humanity that makes us decide to
struggle for revolutionary transformation and the destruction of the
capitalist order. Experiences like these keep our senses sharp and
validate our chosen path.
UNTIL PRISON SOCIETY IS OBLITERATED !!
PROLETARIANS AT WAR, SUBVERSION IS OUR MOTTO!!
WHILE THERE IS MISERY, THERE WILL BE REBELLION!!
—Marcelo Villarroel S.; Anarchist Prisoner; December 14, 2010;
High-Security Prison; Santiago, Chile
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