Summary:
—
The first steps
— The Cromo Operation
— A Penitentiary reform aimed at exterminating the prisoners
— Communes inside the prisons
— The penitentiary isolation
— Reinforced concrete drawers
— The battle of Herrera de la Mancha
— An arm wrestle between the government and the GRAPO
— The government starts the negotiation with the prisoners
— The movement of solidarity with the hunger strike
— Regrouping and new dispersion
— The battle against the dispersion
— The longest strike
— The military answer of the GRAPO
— The death of José Manuel Sevillano
— Political evaluation of the strike
The existence in Spain of a very high number of antifascist prisoners has been a constant for the last decades; it has generated important experiences of struggle as well as a traditional stream of solidarity, support and collaboration with them and their families on the part of the people that has never stopped.
The political prisoners entered the jails in three consecutive waves. The first of them were the republicans defeated in the civil war (1936-39); then the opponents to Franco’s dictatorship and, finally those who confronted the reform carried out by the regime to simulate its change. This evidence has imposed itself in spite of being constantly denied by the official instances And, of course, a problem that does not exist cannot be solved. That is why it is better to liquidate it, to suppress it. The struggle for amnesty in Spain has not been, therefore, anything but a struggle to impede the silent extermination of the political prisoners.
During the Transition, some of the political prisoners left the jails through a door being acclaimed as antifascists, whereas others entered through another door, vituperated as terrorists. Only among the militants of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO the police arrested around 3,000 people who, in their majority, spent long periods in jail. In summary, this is their history.
The government will very soon show its weakness. On November 26th, 1975, after Franco’s death, it was forced to enact a limited pardon: 235 prisoners, who represented less than 10% of the imprisoned antifascists, came out of prison. However, Fraga* declared that only 500 remained in prison and that they could not be released since they were implied in violent crimes. This principle, widely used during the transition, clearly revealed the essence of the political change: while the antifascists were accused of being criminals, the 350,000 men and women shot dead by the fascists after the war were not considered violent crimes and the responsibles for those crimes were not punished; and what is even worse, they were not even purged. The very president of the government -appointed by Franco before his death- was Arias Navarro, attorney in the court-martials in the 1940s whose nickname was Málaga little butcher. Not only did all the crimes of fascism remain unpunished, but also the criminals occupied the highest posts of the new State.
The government confirmed that there wouldn’t be more pardons since the really political prisoners had already been released. After the pardon, the newspaper ABC proclaims that satisfaction has been given to wide national sectors and also to the requests of charity and pardon made by the Catholic Church. With such a generous measure disappears a highly difficult question. The newspaper Ya defended its viewpoints as follows: We are against those who demand an amnesty for everyone [...] The nature of the crimes of terrorism requires a more rigorous treatment while those of a genuine political character deserve a greater benevolence.
With some of the prisoners that were freed -the old dinosaurs of the PCE (Communist Party of Spain) such as Marcelino Camacho, Simón Sánchez Montero, Luis Lucio Lobato or Francisco Romero Marín- the regime organises big propaganda setups which revealed the true significance of the fascist grace measures: The reformists were freed to preach reconciliation and to silence those who still remained in the fascist dungeons. The message of these conciliators was clear: from then on, in the jails there were good conditions for the prisoners and the police did not torture any more. The leader of the PCE(r) José Balmón met Carrillo (*) in the Penitentiary Hospital of Carabanchel in December 1976, but while Balmón was recovering from the important injuries inflicted to him by the police during the interrogations, Carrillo spent some brief holidays inside living like a king. While they were washing the face of the regime, the old opportunists denounced the resolute actions of the masses and, of course, those of the armed organizations. While they were released, the revolutionaries were still filling the cells of the prisons. They got their prisoners out and forgot about the rest: that was their example of solidarity.
But both Fraga’s and Camacho’s plans were spoiled. Their calls to calm down have no echo and each time greater sectors join the struggle, carry out assemblies, call demonstrations and confront the police in the streets resolutely. The people started to organise in an independent way for a long battle to achieve the amnesty; many anti-repressive groups, the Gestoras Pro-Amnistía in the Basque Country, The Socorro Rojo, the AFAPP, ACPG were created.
In this way a clear separation appears between the field of fascism and its loyal opposition, on the one hand, and the working class and the people on the other. The differences lay in the general conception of the amnesty, since the reformists considered the grace measures as an integrating part of their national reconciliation with the fascist regime; as and editorial of Gaceta Roja (number 36, January 1st, 1977) said Fascism showed clemency and in turn the people and its vanguard men and women renounced to the struggle, while the pacifists and legalists appeared as architects of the victory. In their communiques, the GRAPO demanded the liberation of the political prisoners and did not speak of grace nor clemency at all.
On the other hand, the divergencies also affected the methods of struggle, since while the conciliators advocated for the sit-ins in the churches, the signatures of petitions and pacifism, the people’s organisations developed the assemblies, the barricades, the demonstrations and the direct confrontation with the police with all means of defence that they had at hand. This was pointed out in this way in an article entitled The real insult published in the review Aurora (number 8, August 1976), voice of Madrid Local Committee of the PCE(r):
Like fascism, revisionism knows, especially after having gone through the school of the National Revolutionary War of 1936-39, that one of the sensitive points in the people’s conscience, is the liberation of the best sons of the people from the fascist dungeons; those who struggled to achieve the real liberty and democracy for the different peoples of the present Spanish State, as well as the recognition and homage to those who, as heroes, gave their lives to the sacred cause of the people in their struggle against fascism and the return of the political exiled.The pardon did not cheat anyone. The mobilizations for amnesty became sharpened by the end of 1975 with the campaign everyone at home for Christmas, that compel the government to reiterate its refusal to free all the antifascist prisoners. The president of the government, Arias Navarro, officially declared: A general amnesty will come as a culmination of our process of normalisation, when the democracy will be ready to work. We are not going to free people that will surely subvert what we are trying to build. It is clear that freedom was only intended for the collaborators and beautifiers of the fascist regime; the others were terrorists that had to be kept in a cage.It is from this well-known fact and through the design of the national reconciliation policy on the part of Carrillo’s revisionist party, that it starts at each given time to mount amnesty campaigns through peaceful demonstrations, the letters to different Church and political authorities, manifestos and press releases with the only objective (since the intention of achieving the real people’s liberties -amnesty among them- was far from them) of pretending to have the control of the antifascist people’s movement at the eyes of the monopolist capital and whitening in this way the facade of the State building, quite stained with blood, with the colours of the false bourgeois liberties.
[The reformists] have achieved in the end what had already been negotiated beforehand: the amnesty for the revisionists and the freedom of action for them and their allies, while the real fighters are still being tortured in the police stations and rot in the jails.
But the masses were not intimidated by the threats of the heads of the regime nor by the exhortations of the conciliators whose statements were widely spread by the new-bred fascist press that appears in those days (Diario 16, El País). In March 1976, besides the struggles that culminate with the assassination of four workers in Vitoria, a new pro-amnesty week is called in the Basque Country.
This new measure serves for the tamed opposition to intensify its criticisms against the resolute antifascist struggle and, especially, against the guerrilla armed struggle at the same time that they cover up the crimes and the tortures at the hands of the police. They had achieved to get their prisoners out so that they would endorse the wonderful change that was taking place in Spain and only the terrorists remained inside: around 180 antifascists to whom the government denied the release since they represented those organisations that did not surrender to their feet.
But they did not achieve to cheat the masses; before Suárez inaugurated his new government, on July 8th 1976 a new pro-amnesty week started, with demonstrations, conferences and mobilisation that culminated in an impressive meeting of 100,000 people in Bilbao, followed by the explosion of more than 40 bombs placed by the GRAPO on July 18th addressed against fascist monuments. During that summer, in the popular feasts, the vindication of the amnesty was present in all the acts through banners, posters, stickers and meetings demanding the release of the last 180 antifascists that still remained in jail.
As usual, the government tried to confound the masses and to launch misleading messages through the mass media. Only 48 hours after the beginning of the operation, a spokesman of the President’s Office assured that under no circumstances would they liberate the prisoners included in the list and that the government was not ready to give in to the armed guerrilla Organisation. Then the GRAPO decided to put pressure to the maximum announcing that they were ready to execute Oriol if their conditions were not fulfilled by December 17th. The Home Secretary, Martín Villa, was urgently taken to Prado del Rey* in a helicopter; prisoner of a nerve attack, he appeared on television three minutes before the ultimatum of the GRAPO expired and he spoke again of grace measures: It has been and it is still the will of the government to make a generous use of clemency that heals the old wounds. The government sees no problem in saying publicly what is true at the level of its inner labour; that is to say, that, in fact, it was preparing a series of regulations that are intended to spread the field of the implementation of measures through which the possibility of integration among the Spanish people can be augmented. After this declaration the GRAPO, on their part, announced: In view of the government’s vague promise of an amnesty, we think that the only security that we have that these promises may come true, is to retain our prisoner.
With Oriol in a safe place, several antifascist organisations, the PCE(r) and the GRAPO among them, called for a general strike on January 10th 1977, during which the young José Manuel Iglesias died in Sestao (Vizcaya). In Madrid, together with the guerrilla operations the pro-amnesty people’s mobilizations multiplied at the beginning of 1977; the police caused a blood orgy repressing the demonstrations with brutality and assassinated Mari Luz Nájera and Arturo Ruiz in the streets.
The kidnapping was prolonged for two months and, finally, the police succeeded in finding the commandoes that kept Oriol and Villaescusa in their hands, aborting the guerrilla operation. However, this operation was not a failure since within a month another pro-amnesty week was called for forcing the government to release more prisoners on March 14th. Portell, the Basque journalist, wrote: In view of the facts, it is a mistake to think that the lengthening of the amnesty process can be blamed on violence. In a certain way, the amnesty has been a triumph of the armed or the street violence since the government has not been able to release all the prisoners at the same time.
In fact, the struggle for amnesty proved that the guerrilla struggle did not paralyse (nor did it supplant) the mass struggle; on the contrary, the combination of both forms of struggle allowed to obtain the liberation of more antifascist prisoners. Just the day before the kidnapping of Oriol, the Justice Minister Landelino Lavilla had announced that there would not be any more amnesties: At this precise moment there is nothing. The limits within which the amnesty was granted are wide. It has been widely debated whether its application was right or wrong. I would say that in general terms it was well done. The final boundary of the violent crimes is substantial. In summary, I am not preparing any other decree-law about the amnesty. However, after the people’s mobilisation and the armed actions of the GRAPO, they had to retrace their steps and to enact two other amnesty laws.
But once more not all the prisoners were released: 27 remained in prison, among them the militants of the GRAPO who had been arrested in the Cromo Operation; the government still wanted to keep hostages in order to threaten and blackmail the people’s movement. Once more, they did not achieve their objectives; the mobilisation continued in the villages and neighbourhoods, especially in the Basque Country, culminating in April with a new pro-amnesty week, which was brutally repressed by the police killing five demonstrators and wounding other 300 in an unprecedented blood orgy. The harsh repression did not succeed in paralysing the people’s mobilizations: the assemblies, the meetings, the sabotages and the mass demonstrations continued throughout the summer, until in October 1977 the government was forced to grant the last pardon which freed all the antifascist prisoners, except the GRAPO militants. Therefore, in Spain there was never a true amnesty, there was not a single day without political prisoners throughout the Transition. Concerning this question, there was no change as regards Franco’s regime, that is why the GRAPO are not abided by the new Constitution nor by any other innovations introduced and they are fully legitimated to continue the guerrilla struggle.
In fact, this latter pardon of October 1977 was written by the government precisely with the intention of leaving the militants of the GRAPO in prison: they were not released and had to fully serve their sentences of more than 20 years. The High Court enacted three sentences on June 26th and November 8th 1978 and March 30th 1979 confirming that the amnesty did not include the GRAPO prisoners. In the first of them it justified the negation of the pardon because the GRAPO oppose the people’s violence carried out by special commandoes to the national reconciliation policy and because, besides, they did not struggle for the autonomy of the oppressed nationalities but for their self-determination. The last sentence added that in the GRAPO we do not find any motive for the re-establishment of the public liberties, which cannot be understood to be fulfilled legitimately by means of the armed struggle that de-stabilises the democracy.
This decision of the High Court was very significant since it referred to a GRAPO commando that had been surprised in the underground of Barcelona handing out leaflets. A policeman tried to impede it, and he was shot dead by the commando. This is an example of how the police defended the liberties and how the GRAPO had to protect themselves through arms in order to defend their political positions. It is important to highlight here that some of the magistrates of the High Court that dictated these resolutions, like Hijas Palacios, were the old executioners of the Public Order Court that the new regime had promoted in order to pay them back for their services. Even the President of the High Court, Adolfo de Miguel, was an utter fascist who ended up acting as a lawyer of the supporters of the 23rd February 1981 attempted coup. Among the judges, like among the rest of the repressive bodies of the State, there also stood out the fascists formed in the old school of the civil war.
On the other hand, in the same month of October 1977, when the pardon was snatched at the government, the whole Central Committee of the PCE(r) was arrested when they were holding a Plenum in Benidorm. This is another of the examples that illustrate the Transition and the change of facade of fascism. In a statement issued immediately after their entering prison, the leaders of the PCE(r) declared:
At the same time that we were taken to jail [...] the law about the amnesty was passed. This is the third or fourth law that they have cooked in a short time and, like the others, it carries the unmistakable stamp of fascism, of the so-called ‘factual powers’ and, besides, it has been negotiated in the shameful Moncloa pact in exchange for a new project of ‘anti-terrorist’ law that will be equal to those approved before by the Parliament; who are they trying to cheat?Not happy with this, by that time, the fascists and their reformist lackeys drew up a Constitution in whose article 62 was banned forever to enact any amnesty nor general pardon. That’s why the struggle for amnesty leads today to the direct confrontation with the fascist State.This law, that was apparently addressed only against the PCE(r) and other ‘violent’ organisations, is in fact a hard challenge launched by the government, the monopolies and all their servants against the working-class and people’s movement; a warning in the sense that in the future they would not tolerate the struggles of the masses and of their vanguard organisations for the defence of their bread and freedom; it is besides a carte blanche for the acting of their repressive corps and the parallel police hidden by the government under the denomination of ‘parallel groups’.
Of course, these groups are not and will not be arrested by the police, it does not make public their awful crimes, such as the one of the Correo street, that of Atocha street or the more recent one perpetrated in the magazine ‘El Papus’; they are not going to dismantle them; how could they do it if they are themselves and they count with the support and the complicity of the government?
At the same time as the Constitution was passed, a new anti-terrorist law was passed. This law prolonged the state of emergency indefinitely, sanctioned the deprivation of the most elemental rights, favoured the practice of torture to the detainees and allowed to judge them afterwards before the National Audience, a special tribunal of a political kind that assumed the competencies of the court-martials and the Public Order Court in order to imprison with long sentences the revolutionaries.
At the beginning, the government put together in the same jails the political and the social prisoners in order to pretend that they were alike, that there were no more political prisoners. However, influenced by the political prisoners and the mobilizations in favour of amnesty, the ordinary prisoners started to organise themselves and created the COPEL (Organising Committee of Prisoners in Struggle) in order to vindicate their rights, the abolition of the Social Dangerousness Law and the improvement of their living conditions in jail. The political prisoners, with their example and experience contributed to organise their prison-mates, to elaborate their vindications and to defend from the jailers, struggling side by side.
At the same time, the experience of the struggle for amnesty serves as an encouragement to demand a general pardon in favour of the social prisoners, stimulating their fighting spirit. According to the official figures of the General Attorney, during 1977 more than 50 mutinies of ordinary prisoners took place in the Spanish jails; 9 of them provoked great damages and fires. The PCE(r) always supported the struggle of the social prisoners and in relation to those mutinies it stated that year: Our position as regards this is very clear: the Party and mainly our comrades in prison support the many struggles and mutinies carried out by the social prisoners against the brutal conditions to which they are submitted; besides, the Party maintains that the true criminals, the Mafia and the gangsters are the government, the bankers, the police the army, the Carrillos, the Felipe González, etc. Now well, we will struggle to impede the placing at the same level of the political prisoners -all those who are imprisoned for having struggled for the freedom of the people- and the social prisoners, although our Minimum Programme includes the elaboration of a Penal Code upon a democratic basis and the revision of the proceedings of the social prisoners (Published in Gaceta Roja -Red Gazette-, number 57, November 15th 1977). In Gaceta Roja number 50, August 1st that same year was also said:
The social prisoners are victims of the capitalist society and they are submitted in the jails to a truly desperate situation, therefore, our Party considers that their struggle is just and it supports and stimulates it; this is what our comrades in prison are doing. The COPEL (Organising Committee of Prisoners in Struggle) is carrying out an antifascist struggle; there is no doubt that there are earnest people there; for this reason, we repeat, our Party supports them which is proved by the fact that comrades and sympathisers have participated actively in the demonstrations near Carabanchel jail when the police perpetrated so brutal massacres against the prisoners.The mutinies compel the regime to manoeuvre in its old style. The architect of the new penitentiary law, Carlos García Valdés, explained clearly his plans: there won’t be any more pardons, and therefore, the only thing to do was to accomplish the reform of the jails. It did not take long for the government to give evident proofs that this reform would be like the others that were being put into practice at that moment: a face washing of the old fascist regime, that under no circumstance would change its terrorist essence. García Valdés himself foresaw his failure in an interview and, facing such a possibility, he threatened with the building of barbed-wired concentration camps, since there was nothing else to do. And that’s what happened in the end.However, some anarchists and other individuals are trying to confound the people talking about social prisoners as if they were at the same level as the political ones, demanding ‘amnesty for the social prisoners’ and forgetting about the jailed antifascists. This suits fascism in order to spread confusion and to hide the repression against the antifascist fighters.
For this reason we must state clear here that between the COPEL and the organised movement of the working class there is a world of difference and that between the social prisoners (many of whom would not hesitate in stealing money from a worker) and the communists and antifascists fell in the struggle there is no possible comparison. We won’t give up the struggle in order to free these comrades.
Confronted to the mutinies of the social prisoners, the Prison General Management answered by isolating the COPEL most conscious members, isolating them and submitting them to permanent harassment at the hands of the jailers in the cells. They needed to drown the jails and that is what they did through 1978, period during which they settled the basis for the penitentiary reform which was approved in September 1979, leaning on the old fascists jailers who, during the transition, had been promoted to governors and personnel managers, thanks to their wide repressive experience. The riot squads are definitely deployed in the jail galleries and they drown any protest in blood and fire.
Repression against social prisoners was brutal: beatings, suicides, punishment units, night transfers and, finally, the massive entrance of drugs in the jails from that year onwards. Whereas the Constitution abolished the death penalty, the most conscious social prisoners were assassinated by dozens within the jails. One of Spain’s best kept secrets is the number of deaths in the jails. Never have official figures appeared, but it is known that they exceed 200 a year. This is the background for the assassination of the anarchist political prisoner Agustín Rueda Sierra on March 13th 1978; he was beaten to death by the governor, the personnel managers and other wardens in Carabanchel prison. As a reprisal, nine days afterwards, a GRAPO commando executed the General Manager of Penitentiary Institutions, Jesús Haddad Blanco. On April 10th 1979, GRAPO also tried to execute the maximum responsible of the penitentiary reform, Carlos García Valdés -General Manager of Prisons who had substituted the former- but he saved his life because in the last minute the weapon of the member of the commando that was going to shot him got jammed. García Valdés had threatened publicly the GRAPO prisoners saying to them that he also knew how to build jails for beasts.
The communes of the political prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO appear in the jails of Carabanchel and Yeserías after the first massive arrests in 1977 with the aim of transforming the jail into a school of political formation, into an atmosphere of work and discipline in order to allow the communist and antifascist prisoners to stop the jailers’ attempts at sinking them in the idleness, desperation and degradation inherent to any prison. In this sense, cleanness, seriousness and order have always played a special role since the struggle does not stop with the arrest, but it only changes its form when entering the jail and it is necessary to keep the maximum vigilance and not to relax because, in that case the prison devours the prisoner.
A leading committee and several cells or commandos are created, each of them has to carry out a specific task within a general plan designed by the leading committee. The communes of the political prisoners expressed the ideals of the society for which they were struggling: solidarity, equality and collective property. But it was not only a mere question of putting in common each one’s resources; it was not a mere question of collective consumption, through which the aid coming from outside was shared, but they were mainly production units. For this reason, the centre of activity of the communes was the productive labour, that consisted of the craftsman production in wool and other materials of bags, circlets, shawls, scarfs and other articles as well as the elaboration of cards and posters of political content. The objective was the full financing of the expenses of the whole commune in order to avoid the imprisonment to become an added expense to the families.
On the other hand, through that via, it is possible to spread new political slogans, to continue with the tasks of propaganda and to help to the labour of the Party in the streets.
Another of the fundamental objectives was the study and the political discussion on the part of all the militants; in order to achieve this, a very complete library was created with the help of friends, book distribution companies and bookshops. These books serve as a fundamental material for the study and the elaboration of the most diverse analyses, not only on political but also on economic, cultural and historical questions. A fundamental material for the work is the press brought by visitors from all the corners of the country and even from abroad. Dazibaos and murals are also made to summarize the discussions or to expose the criticisms in order to be known by everyone.
However, not everything is work; the weekends are used for resting and for fun, especially for those activities with a collective character. Here play a fundamental role the learning of revolutionary songs, the cultural acts, the poetry recitals, the theatre plays, the drawing contests, the board games, the sport competitions, etc.
However, isolation is the true innovation that will become widely used a method of annihilating the prisoners. In words of Andrés Marquéz, General Manager of Prisons with the PSOE government, maximum security is achieved through maximum isolation (newspaper Ya, April 16th, 1986). The reduction of the space available is the essence of isolation; the system of galleries was changed into the system of units, true prisons within the prisons. In a reduced space the possibilities of control are greater and the prisoner feels all the weight of the jail system in a much more individualised way.
The penitentiary isolation required the building of new maximum security prisons, of new architectural spaces designed for the most complete lack of communication of the prisoner: lack of communication with his comrades, his relatives and, finally, also with the outer world; this lack of communication materialises in the tapping of communications, in the censorship of their correspondence, and in the deprivation of press, radio and television. In order to reinforce the isolation, the new jails are built in isolated and uninhabited places, with a difficult access which makes the visits sporadic. The old prisons situated within the cities are progressively demolished and new ones are built with the benefits obtained through the speculation of the urban plots of land. The lack of communication is the guarantee of impunity, of the fact that the jailer can perpetrate any crime with the most absolute impunity.
The penitentiary isolation in Spain had a proper name: Herrera de la Mancha, a prison built in February 1979 and inaugurated with the arrival of the first prisoners on June 22nd. Herrera was the first new-type jail built in Spain. Isolated at 200 Kms. from Madrid, in the middle of the Castilian plateau, without any possibility of access through public transport, with a unit structure for the prisoners, surrounded by the detached houses of the jailers and a quarter of the Civil Guard at the entrance, it was the laboratory of the penitentiary reform, where the regime of extermination of the political prisoners was immediately tested. Herrera is not the penitentiary reform, but this has to go necessarily through Herrera, said García Valdés summarising his work. The GRAPO were on the point of blowing it up little after its building. By the middle of 1978 they managed to get the plans of the prison and they gathered enough information to blow it up with explosives, but the police arrested a commando in Barcelona in October that was loading the explosives in several cars in order to take them to Herrera and, regrettably, the action was not carried out.
So the government could inaugurate it in the summer of 1979 in the most absolute silence. Some of the most important leaders of the COPEL that were still alive and who had stood out in the calling of the protests and mutinies were confined there. When they arrived in the Civil Guard van, they were welcomed by the jailers armed with sticks and arranged in two rows; the prisoners had to go through these while they received all kinds of beats, kicks and punches. While this happened in the first jail of the democracy, the members of parliament approved the new penitentiary law unanimously and applauded García Valdés standing up who received in this way his corresponding portion of glory in the tribune.
Such was the inauguration of this prison, which was in accordance with the rest of the fascist reforms. In the interior a new regime based on the humiliation of the prisoner was experimented -this is an elementary principle for the warden to express his omnipotence: full-frontal nudity searches, night controls, row recounts, filling of applications to obtain the most elementary things, censorship of correspondence, tapping of communications, to walking next to the wall looking at the floor, permanent recounts, military music in order to create an atmosphere, video-cameras everywhere, etc.
Isolation was not a Spanish innovation but a scientific system of destruction of the imprisoned revolutionaries which was prepared in several Western countries at length. It was tested for the first time in the United States at the end of the 50s within the framework of the CIA plans known by the code-names of Artichoque, Blue Bird, M. K.- Ultra and M. K. - Delta which were made public by President Carter in 1977. One of the CIA foundations, the Research Society on Human Ecology was in charge of carrying out such psychiatrical experimentations of sensitive deprivation, studying the effects that human isolation could cause, as well as the possibilities of carrying out brain washes and lobotomy surgery operations.
Germany developed these projects in Europe in 1971 after the arrest of the first militants of the Red Army Faction. They were carried out in the Psychiatric and Neurologic Clinic of Hamburg-Eppendorf, under the responsibility of doctor Jan Gross. This Clinic was managed by the 115 Special Department of Researches, which was financed by the German Association of Researches with many millions of marks. The main means of the experiments was a silence chamber, a completely soundproofed room deprived of any optic or acoustical stimulation and equipped with machines ready to record human reactions to the most complete isolation.
After these first experiments, the plans of isolation and deprivation of communication were brought to the jails in order to subdue all those who refused to accept the norms imposed by the State. From the beginning these plans were denounced by everyone as a form of white torture, without visible traces. In this way, the Start Programme, which had been put into practice in the United States in 1973, was banned in February 1974; on July 4th 1978 a resolution of the European Commission of Human Rights said in reference to the Stammhein prison, in Germany: The international scientific, phonologic and psychological doctrine maintains that deprivation of communication, on its own, can seriously damage the psychologic and physical constitution: it causes chronical apathy, tiredness, emotional weakness, perturbations in concentration, reduction of the intellectual capabilities and perturbations in the neurovegetative system. In the same sense pronounced International Amnesty in a Memorandum presented to the German government about the isolation of the prisoners of the Red Army Faction in the maximum security jails.
Herrera de la Mancha prison was inaugurated just when the plans of penitentiary isolation started to be uncovered as a means of torture and psychological destruction; it was followed by the prison of Meco in 1982, and then all the rest: Nanclares de la Oca, Daroca, Topas, Villanubla, etc. In words of Enrique Galavís -who succeeded García Valdés as General Manager of Prisons-, the GRAPO prisoners had to be confined in reinforced concrete drawers (Interview on National Radio, February 11th, 1980). Taking advantage of the building of the new prisons, building societies such as Huarte became involved -together with the PSOE- in a scandal of corruption amounting to many million pesetas and they even exported the prison prototype, with the building of extermination centres in Peru and other Latin American countries.
In those days GRAPO publicly proposed for the first time a five-point programme -which included amnesty- in order to stop their armed actions; this programme made clear the most important political objectives of the struggle for the resitance movement and, at the same time, it served to negotiate a truce with the government. But, at that time, the government had not exhausted all the repressive possibilities yet and its plans were centred on mass arrests and selective assassinations. The number of political prisoners increased unstoppably and their situation worsened progressively. A constant feature in the penitentiary policy was always the consideration of the imprisoned revolutionaries as hostages through whom the government tried to frighten the people’s movement on the one hand, and to exert pressure on the revolutionary organisations on the other. Within the jails the political prisoners suffered, in their own flesh and blood, all the ups and downs of the political struggle: the weakness or the strength of the government and the weakness or the strength of the masses.
In each political moment the government answered with the most varied penitentiary measures: punishment cells, beatings, regrouping, dispersion, transfers, etc. In the night of 26th to 27th December 1978, suddenly, the 36 prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO who were imprisoned there, are thrown out of bed at gun point, handcuffed and transferred to the prison of Zamora. The prison Soria was occupied by the prisoners of ETA and the rest of the political prisoners were transferred to Segovia prison. At the beginning these three prisons become special centre of confinement of all the political prisoners whose number increases every year.
In the prison of Segovia, a common prisoner sent by the head of the prison tries to assassinate the militant of the GRAPO Fernando Silva Sande striking him several times with a knife. In Zamora the prisoners were forced to start three hunger strikes lasting for more than 20 days in January, November and December, claiming for an improvement in the conditions of living and a honourable treatment on the part of the jailers. In the hunger strike of 1980, the prisoners were banned to buy mineral water and the manager of the prison ordered them to drink water from the river. Olegario Sánchez Corrales suffered an infection due to the bad condition of the water. The case emerged to the mass media and the people demanded the building of a sewage treatment plant which they achieved.
The assaults of the political police to the prison are periodical: while they close the prisoners in the yards, they open their cells, they search them, they break everything and they carry away the most unforeseen thighs.
In the prison of Zamora starts the arrangement for the spectacular evasion of five leaders of the GRAPO, who succeed in their escape on December 17th 1979. As a reprisal, the government divides the commune of political prisoners in 3 groups: 22 are transferred to Herrera de la Mancha and Puerto de Santa María and the st remains in Zamora.
A harsh battle starts, a struggle in which the warden want to impose a regime of extermination in order to make the prisoners abandon and repent themselves, and the prisoners defend their dignity as human beings and as revolutionaries with the only arm they have at hand: the hunger strike. The strikes start to be intermittent (10 20 30 days) with short periods of recovering between them, that are hardly long enough to overcome the physical weakness. During 1980 the prisoners carry out three hunger strikes, with a total of 50 days of fast.
Little by little through the solidarity organizations, the prisoners achieved to widespread their true situation in the prison of Herrera and the regime of extermination that the wardens tried to establish there; the government was compelled to form a parliamentarian Commission i order to hide the scandal.
Finally the political prisoners considered that they could no longer continue with the physical debilitation, since the wardens had all the chances to win. The dilemma was between the silent annihilation or the death in the struggle. A firm and definitive position was needed. A new method of hunger strike, that consisted in starting the hunger strike one by one, with the aim of putting the maximum pressure and to prolong the situation in order to break down the wall of silence planned by the government. On January 14th two prisoners in Herrera start the hunger strike; to them, little by little and two by two, join the prisoners -men and women- of the other jails: Yeserías, Carabanchel, Zamora and Puerto de Santa María.
From Carabanchel the prisoner spread a statement on February 21st announcing that the objectives had been fulfilled, but it warned, at the same time, the possibility that everything was a trap: We except any kid of tricks from the wardens, but they will not fool us, they warned. And they were right. The improvements did not last very long. Two days afterwards the military coup took place and the government estimated that, in view of the military threat, the prisoners would not restart the strike.
During the night of the coup, the military column under the orders of general Pardo Zanacada, after having stormed the seat to the television, went to the prison of Carabanchel, with the aim of taking with him the political prisoners and shooting them. They could not enter the interior of the jail and, for some time, there was a great tension between the Civil Guard that was watching the prison until, finally, they gave up in their attempt.
The government counted with this implicit threat, as well as with the exhaustion of the prisoners who, according to their expectations, will not be able to answer a new aggression in that moment. The months of summer were coming and they expected to have the silent complicity of the media.
But the prisoners endured as they could the new provocations that followed the agreement: the humiliations, the arbitrary searches, the full-front nudity, etc. returned. The demands to fulfil the agreements become punishments in isolation cells and long periods of isolation, accompanied in some cases by brutal beatings. A new hunger strike was inevitable, in spite of not having favourable conditions, due to the permanent threat of the coup d’état.
On 14th May 1981 starts the hunger strike of the political prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO against the regime of extermination imposed in the jail of Herrera de la Mancha. Juan José Crespo Galende starts it and he was followed by the rest of the prisoners of Herrera and the other jails one at a time. The demands are quite simple: a humane and honourable treatment and the coming out from Herrera de la Mancha; these demand should be guaranteed by a solvent organism.
On April 28th Crespo Galende starts with blood vomits, suffers form great pains, dizziness and general unrest. Due to the vomits he can hardly drink mineral water since it causes him nausea. Notwithstanding his physical deterioration, he is transferred to Madrid to assist to a judgement and he enter Carabanchel prison from where, after 40 days of hunger strike, he is transferred to the Penitentiary Hospital where he is completely isolated not allowing him to be in company of his comrades. At the mercy of the warden, he is put under pressure and coerced by all means in order to make him abandon the strike. Little by little many prisoners in strike fill the Penitentiary Hospital, they are all submitted to the same pressure and even some of them are beaten by the wardens. The Justice Minister sends a group a psychologists to the hospital in order to made the prisoners abandon the strike.
In view of Crespo’s situation, on June 2nd, the Minister of Justice Fernández Ordoñez accepts to receive a commission of lawyers of the prisoners and he sends them to the General Manager Enrique Galavis, who had refused to receive them up to that moment. The accepts that the prisoners in hunger strike to be seen by an independent doctor, since the prisoners suspected that the water they were given contained vitamins. And, in fact, the doctor confirms the suspicions since he reaches to the conclusion that, within the seriousness, Crespo could continue 150 days more in hunger strike. For this reason the prisoners start also a thirst strike on June the 5th. Crespo repeats once and again that he won’t go back alive to Herrera only to pick up butts from the floor. He kept an extraordinary lucidity, even in the worst moments and he coined the sentence that would define this struggle: To die to survive; in order to be able to live in a honourable way in the jails it was necessary to struggle to death and prove Rosón, Minister of Interior, and all his pretorian guard that the political prisoners were not ready to let themselves be crushed nor drag as worms in the units of the prisons.
The intoxication press campaign does not stop a single day. In his press declarations, the Manager of the Penitentiary Hospital even says that Crespo Galende is in perfect conditions and that he even eats candies. However the Minister of Justice, Fernández Ordoñez, threatens publicly with the forced nourishment of the prisoners in view of the imminent danger of a fatal outcome.
The Tokyo Declaration of the World Medic Association, held in 1975, expressly stated concerning this: The prisoner will not be forced to take any artificial nourishment when he refuses to take food, and, according to the doctor, he is able to evaluate in a rational and realistic way the consequences of this voluntary decision. Such opinion of the doctor upon the capacity of the prisoner of assessing his discission will be corroborated, at least, by another independent doctor. The consequences of refusing to take food will be explained to the prisoner by the doctor. In the end, the discission was not different to any other case in which the patient does not want to follow the advises of the doctor, being the latter compelled to respect the discission of the former.
But the government tried to impose its political interests above everything and everyone, not hesitating at the moment of using the most brutal violence both against the prisoners in strike and against those who refused the forced feeding. The prisoners of the Penitentiary Hospital were tied to their beds and fed by force with saline solution through intravenous via. Crespo enter a semi-unconscious state, with moment of delirium; he loses consciousness several times in a short period of time. On June 8th he goes into a coma and he is transferred to La Paz Hospital. The doctors affirm that his state is very serious and that an imminent outcome should be feared in a short period of time. The government denies the news and speaks or recovery and improvement. In spite of his serious state and the protests of the doctors, Crespo is surrounded by a cloud of policemen that invade the floor of the Hospital, he is tied to his bed by the hands and the feet and inject him more serum to prolong his agony.
On June 19th, after 97 days in hunger strike, Crespo Galende dies. He had started to be politically active in the organization of the Basque Country of the PCE(r), and when he was arrested he belonged to the Central Propaganda of this Party. Like the rest of his comrades amnesty was not applied to him nor did the judges take into account the political character of the activity for which he was sentenced. He as arrested before the Constitution was passed and they assassinated him in the name of that same anti-democratic Constitution. It was the first time that in Spain a political prisoner dies in hunger strike: not even in the times of Franco had the barbarity reached such point.
But the struggle did not finish there: other prisoners join it and some of them are fighting for their lives. Since the death of Crespo all the prisoners that continue the struggle refuse to be visited by the doctors, to receive any form of medical treatment and to be transferred to hospitals in order to avoid the artificial prolongation of their agony. But the government starts to transfer the prisoners by force to the Intensive Care Units of the hospitals in order to get the problem out of the prison framework, as if it were only a purely sanitary matter, to inject them saline solutions and to prolong their agony indefinitely. In view of this situation, the political prisoners also start a thirst strike.
The workers of the hospitals refuse to cooperate with the government in the forced feeding; so they were forced to, they were banned to speak with the strikers and were threatened to be sued with cooperation with armed band. The medical school of Madrid and the Group of Basque Doctors against the torture declared in favour of the prisoners and against the forced feeding.
The government is in such a position of weakness -due to the pressure of the solidarity mobilizations, that it cannot admit a new death. It tries new vias of approximation. On June 25th it call the lawyers of the prisoners to a meeting in the General Headquarters of Prisons, where they recognize that the strike has to end by any means and that they are ready to give concessions. The main point is the demand of the prisoners of getting out of the prison of Herrera de la Mancha, their regrouping in other jail with honourable conditions of living and with public guarantees that the agreements would be fulfilled this time. The General Manager, Enrique Galvís, signs the document and announces publicly through the media his compromise to implement the agreements and to regroup the prisoners outside Herrera within 6 months. The victory of the prisoners in the strike would have been indispensable without the wide movement of solidarity and support displayed during the three months that lasted. The government did not count with such widespread and resolute sympathy tokens. They thought that the intoxication campaign unleashed by the media during the previous years, would pay them well and, till the end, they played that card. They even treated to take advantage of the hunger strike in order to continue their campaign of tergiversations and lies. They wanted to transmit the false image that the strike was a desperate action of the prisoners who were absolutely alone.
In its editorial, the newspaper Ya was surprised by the proofs of support received by the prisoners from everywhere in the world and most different social spheres. What’s going on? wondered the editorial, alarmed at the condemnation of the extermination policy of the government and the wave of protests unchained in many cities and towns. The newspaper could not explain this to itself, neither could the government. The isolation of the prisoners failed and the wall of silence broke down. The struggles triggered showed that the one that was isolated and lacked prestige was the government. They were the first to be surprised by those proofs of encouragement coming from so different and distant social sectors. They had leaked to the magazine Interview that they would not give up even if each and every of the prisoners died, but their intransigent attitude came down quickly in view of the impossibility of achieving the social isolation of the prisoners.
The popular mobilizations of any kind were the ones to break the net of complicity with the extermination policy of the government, increasing the prestige and the influence of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO among wide people’s organizations, specially among the workers. To this impressive display also contributed the coincidence to the hunger strike of the prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO with that of the prisoners of the IRA in Northern Ireland.
All this contributed to break the accomplice silence between the government and the press. The teletypes ended up melting. Numerous were the statements and the articles of the progressive intellectuals and personalities in support of the vindications of the prisoners. The qualitative value of all those solidarity proofs towards the political prisoners is enormous. Today the political prisoners in Spain are, mainly, militant of armed organizations, which demands a higher consciousness and a higher compromise, since all the movements of solidarity have been subject to persecution, arrests and tortures in a desperate attempt at isolating the prisoners from the working class population.
On April the 28th there was a demonstration in front of the British consulate in Bilbao and slogans in favour of the IRA and the GRAPO were shouted. Some days after, relatives of the prisoners and members of the Gestoras pro- Amnistía and the AFAPP chained themselves to the Ministry of Justice in Madrid, as a result, some of them were arrested. On May 23rd a huge demonstration went through the streets of San Sebastian, interrupting the traffic in several streets until the riot police squads dismantled it violently. On June 1st the ACPG organises a sit-in in the consulate of France in Vigo. On June 6th the AFAPP organizes another sit-in in San Isidro cathedral in Madrid; the police vacated it three days later, due to this, the sit-in continued in the seat of the Red cross.
The proofs of solidarity increased after the death of Crespo Galende. On June 19th just after the breaking out of the news of Crespo’s death, there were spontaneous demonstrations in Portugalete and Mondragón and, the next day, the nationalist left call demonstrations everywhere in the Basque Country. In Hernani there an assembly in which around 1.000 people participated and similar ones took place in Ondárroa and Rentería, that ended in as many demonstrations. Bilbao and San Sebastian were occupied by riot squads in order to avoid the meetings. Almería, Albacete, Lugo, Alcalá de Henares and other localities appear envolved in banners demanding the government to accept the vindications of the political prisoners. In Cádiz the police vacates a sit-in in an neighbourhood association in support of the strike.
Many groups called the people to attend the funeral of Kepa Crespo Galende that took place on June 27th in Las Carreras (Vizcaya) where there was an impressive demonstration of mourning that occupied the whole national road that goes through the village. There were also demonstrations in Pamplona, Bilbao, Eibar and Rentería and the proofs of solidarity spread. The workers of Lemoniz and the mechanical repairs of the Blast Furnaces of Vizcaya spread statements in support of the political prisoners. In Cádiz there was a demonstration on June 14th and the police aborted another one on June 23rd provoking jumps and barricades in several streets of the city centre. On July 5th the death of Crespo Galende was also remembered in the anti-NATO concentration held in the Casa de Campo in Madrid. Another meeting was called in Vigo, after the strike, in which intervened lawyers of the political prisoners and members of the ACPG. The support continued during the demonstration of the Day of the Galician Motherland on July 25th in Santiago de Compostela which was described by the press as a demonstration in favour of the amnesty.
The year after Crespo’s death there were still many commemorations. In Las Carreras there was an homage with the intervention of Eva Forest and other former prisoners that congregated around 800 people who went to the cemetery to inaugurate a plaque in his memory. In Madrid on June 20th a meeting was held in the old Olympia cinema in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés which was called by the MC (Communist Movement), LCR (Revolutionary Communist League) and AFAPP; in it, were read many proofs of adherence to the act coming from many groups.
A very high price was paid: the death of Crespo Galende and the indelible sequels in the health of many others. Angel Collazo lost the reason as a consequence of the strike, Luis Rodriguez started then a crisis that took him to suicide three years later. But Rosón’s plans of extermination failed with a loud crash; under the most difficult conditions one can imagine, a group of prisoners, isolated and gaged obtained their demands. And not less important was their moral victory, getting the admiration and the support of millions of people in Spain and in the whole world. Just when it was put into practice, the penitentiary reform was put to evidence just like the rest of the other reforms that were carried out since 1975. On the contrary the prestige and the influence of the political prisoners reached levels not known to that moment. They proved that even in the most precarious conditions it was possible to confront successfully the terrorist policy of the government and make it go backwards.
The organisations of solidarity up to that moment struggled to denounce, mainly, that there still were political prisoners in Spain; from that moment the problem of their liberation was clearly posed.
From 1983 to 1987 the prisoners could live together in a commune and carry out a collective life in acceptable living conditions, without having great problems with the wardens. After the strike the political prisoners became a reality that was accepted unwillingly in the official spheres; a reality with which they had to negotiate if they could not end with it. In the summer of 1983 delegates of the government come to an interview with the prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO for the first time; and four years later start the Algiers talks with the militants of ETA. In all these talks, the existence of the political prisoners becomes an essential point.
But the antisubversive strategy of the PSOE government will give a turn in 1987, intensifying all the repressive measures and including the political prisoners as hostages to be able to break the revolutionary organisations. In 1987 slows down the rise of the assassinations at the hands of the GAL (*) against the Basque refugees; that France will start to expel massively towards Spain; the Constitutional Tribunal, headed by Tomás y Valiente legitimates the anti-terrorist law that is finally incorporated to the common Penal Code and, finally all the parliamentarian parties agree and from their consensus come the Pacts of Madrid and Ajuria Enea. Within this offensive, the political prisoners played a first order role and the government started their dispersion in order to make them abandon and repent, introducing a wedge that divides the movement of resistance.
Up to that moment the regime rehearsed the extermination, the pure and simple claudication of the prisoners and, through them, of the revolutionary organisations; from that moment, the strategy is a more modest one since it only requires to manage the problem that for it represents the existence of around 800 political prisoners of very different organisations: antifascist, libertarian, communists and independentist. It recognises the existence of an important group of political prisoners but it tries to achieve their repentance, their split and foment permanent quarrels at the same time. In an interview to the magazine Epoca in 1990, Múgica (*) recognised that the dispersion had as main object to impede the prisoners to organize themselves or to receive continuous visits of their lawyers and families. Dispersion and repentance were the two sides of the same coin. The dispersion which was inaugurated that year tried to force the claudication.
There are two clue characters in this strategy. On the one hand The General Manager of Prisons, Antoni Asunción, later promoted to Minister of the Interior of the PSOE? On the other hand, a sinister character that was not know by then since he occupied an anonymous post as maximum responsible for the security within the general Management of the Prisons: the commandant of the Civil Guard Rafael Masa González, who came to lead the parapolice commandoes of the GAL in the most criminal stage of the dirty war, he was directly involved in the killing of Brouard (*) and in the tortures to Linaza. It was clear, then, that dispersion was nothing else but the continuation of the same dirty war led by the State against the revolutionary and independentist organisations.
At the same that they applied the dispersion, the repentants were used by the media just like they did at the beginning of the transition with the conciliators and the reformists. Under the leadership of the political police a campaign of psychological war starts in which the repentants cooperate in order to try to cheat, distort and confuse the workers and the people in general. They are freed in order to give interviews, diffuses statements in vast propaganda campaigns which are widespread by the press, the radio and the television, where they are treated as experts who know very well the organisation which they have betrayed.
The repentant’s manoeuvre was an absolute failure. They only achieved to make an insignificant handful of political prisoners to surrender. In November 1984, 14 of the member of the GRAPO who were imprisoned abandoned the Organisation in bloc, only one of them lend himself to write an injurious book.
The prisoners of ETA were the first to be dispersed, in January 1987; and on July 27th was the turn of the prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO. The communes that they had is the prisons of Soria, for the men, and Carabanchel, for the women, were utterly destroyed. Without previous notice, the men are transferred to the jails of Almería, Ocaña and Daroca and the women to those of Cordoba, Castellón and Basauri. When they arrived to their new destinations, the prisoners had to start a new hunger strike in view of the deplorable living conditions that they were imposed. Taking advantage of the dispersion, the warden treated brutally the political prisoners in order to make them give up. On 18th April 1989 Aurora Cayetano, Alicia Artímez and Eva Alonso Arce, who were imprisoned in the jail of Castellón were brutally beaten and introduced in punishment cells after having protested for an arbitrary shortening of the time of communication during the visits. A group of wardens entered the cells and started to beat and kick them in the stomach. As a consequence of the beatings, Alicia lost the sensibility in her right arm and has also lost mobility from the finger of her hand to her breast since she has a lesion in her arm nerves.
On September 14th the AFAPP from Madrid organises the first solidarity act with the prisoners in strike, and two days after, the police charged brutally against several relatives that were demonstrating with banners in from of the Ministry of Justice. On the 19th other relatives sit in the seat of the Red Cross in Bilbao.
In view of the new complexion of the situation and also of the nearness of the calling of the elections by the PSOE for the month of October, the General Management of Prisons starts to make manoeuvres in order to win time, divide the prisoners and demoralise the movement of solidarity. The deputy inspector of Penitentiary Health, María Angeles Granados, formally compromises herself, in front of the director of the Penitentiary Hospital Jaime Vinuesa and the Penitentiary Vigilance judge, Manuela Carmena, to transfer is short term the seven prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO from the prison of Almería to another jail in normal conditions and with the possibility of been able to develop a life in common among them. The prisoners, who were then imprisoned in the Penitentiary Hospital, accept the offer and announce the end of the strike.
But once the elections had been held, the PSOE does not fulfil its promises and on November 10th disperses the seven prisoners that were in the Penitentiary Hospital. Besides, other nine prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO are also dispersed. In one of those transfers, the 12th that same month, Carmen Cayetano, political prisoner of the GRAPO, is the object of ill-treatment when she arrives to the prison of Seville-II where she is tied to her bed and the warden undressed her by force.
On November 30th the political prisoners answer to a new manoeuvre of dispersion with another hunger strike, demanding their regrouping in the same prison. In the statement that they produce in order to make their vindications known, they denounce the isolation, that started with the dispersion and the prohibition of having contacts among them as well as their lack of communication with respect to the outside; all these measures are addressed to exterminate the prisoners silently in order to hide the tortures, the suicides provoked or the innovation of the funds reserved to the jails behind which hides the Jail GAL, a plan to liquidate the political prisoners taking advantage of the provocations or the social prisoners who were accomplices to their plans.
One month later 60 prisoners are on hunger strike fro their regrouping, among whom we can highlight the anarchist prisoner Pablo Serrano who had joined the commune of the political prisoner in Soria.
As happened in the previous strike the new State General Attorney, Javier Moscoso, threatened with the forced feeding and ordered the public attorneys to oppose the judges that were contrary to force the will of the strikers. The same posture was taken by his successor in the post, Leopoldo Torres. The Minister of Justice, Enrique Múgica calcifies the positions contrary to feed the prisoners forcedly as collaboration with suicide. Finally, against all the deontological norms of Medicine, the Constitutional Court in full session, presided once again by Tomás y Valiente, approved the measure of the government in favour of the forced feeding in their sentences of June 27th and July 19th 1990. Instead of defending the rights of the prisoners, as it was its duty, the Constitutional Court eliminated them and it even impeded the prisoners to struggle to get them trying to break the will in a complete and definitive way. As a prisoner in a letter said They won’t let us die, nor live.
Once he counted with this indispensable support, the General Manager of Prisons, Antoni Asunción, orders the warden to watch the prisoner in strike night and day since they already in the hospital to make sure that they receive the feeding through a venous via, and introducing plastic tubes in their noses or syringes in their veins. The prisoner were tied hands and feet to their beds, either with bandages or with handcuffs (like in Meco) and even with leather straps like in Yeserías or in Logroño. Then, the catheters were introduced by force, either to feed them with saline solution by venous via, injecting them in the arms, or introducing a catheter in their nose. This was the most painful method since there is a great relaxation and in some cases, the prisoners had tearings in the breathing vias. In spite of all this, in an official note spread on June 1st, the Ministry of Justice denied the evidence refuting the fact that they were feeding the prisoners forcedly.
Josefina García Aramburu, imprisoned in the jail of Basauri (Vizcaya), described the forced feeding in a letter dated January 1990: 45 days after having started the strike they decided to feed us by force. At that moment, I was only given a maximum 48 hours of life, Carmen a little more. We have been under forced feeding for nine days although be have done our best to boycott it. Carmen did not drink a single drop of water during all this time; besides she tried a series of techniques to avoid the feeding to enter. As regard myself, during the five days when I was in the Intensive Care Unit I was raped repeatedly and in all jugular vein, catheters through the nose, through everywhere [...] You are applied a catheter the guarantees a food with all kinds of vitamins, iron, potassium, calcium, etc.; it is known as Pecitene. If you are taken to the ICU, they start using saline solution in the veins and then the Pecitene. The your jugular is opened and they introduce another saline solution. A little bit latter they take out the saline solution from the jugular and you are given parenteral feeding (a white bag with a white paste containing all the ingredients of a meal), three kilos in 24 hours. The saline solution that they take out of the jugular is injected together with the another one in the veins. 48 hours after they take out the feeding from the jugular and they put saline solution instead. An afterwards, apart from the medicines that they consider necessary, they force you to take albumin through the jugular and iron through the mouth. I was completely covered with catheters and cables, since I also had electrolytes or whatever their name is, connected to the screen that controls your heart. On top of that, the catheters and the saline solutions were connected to bombs that whistled each time there is an anomaly or the food ran out. And what is worst, in the ICU, tided or not, you don’t have any chance of takings all the cables out since once you have tried, all the personal of the hospital is on you.
The transfer to the hospitals and the forced feeding had also other secondary objectives: pretending it was a health not a politic problem, deviate the attention and confront the prisoners to the doctors and not to the government. The same tried to do the penitentiary surveillance judges always with the aim of putting the government in a second level, out of the polemic. To this contributed many of the discussions, artificially inflated from the press, that presented the problem from a pseudohumanist perspective as a suicide, as a personal liberty exercise and not as the means of struggling against the extermination in the jails. Once all the dikes of silence were broken, the intoxication passed to a first level, with the cooperation of all kinds of university intellectuals and columnists.
The judge Manuela Carmena, however, recognized publicly that the government was the responsible for the hunger strike for not having fulfilled its promises that had transmitted to the prisoners in her presence.
The people’s mobilizations succeeded one another from the very beginning without rest. Called by the AFAPP, a group of people concentrated in front of the Ministry of Justice in order to protest for the dispersion of the prisoners and their living conditions in jail. The next day, another hundred people repeat the same meeting in front of Soria prison. On January 11th demonstrations in support of the prisoners in strike take place in Bilbao, San Sebastian and Pamplona; these demonstrations were called by AFAPP, Salhaketa, LKI, EMK, CNT, ESK-CUIS and CGT. In Vigo takes place a concert in solidarity with the prisoners in a Neighbourhood Association Val do Fagoso. In Eibar, a sabotage in solidarity with the prisoners is made which cuts the broadcasting of the television in the area. In Madrid on January 19th a demonstrations called by the AFAPP, LCR and MC takes place and hundreds of people assist in support of the prisoners. On December 31st several organization (LCR, MC, PCOE, PCV and Libertarians) call a concentration in Valencia demanding the regrouping of the prisoners. ON February 2nd around 500 people demonstrate in Madrid in support of the vindications of the prisoners and in Bilbao another demonstration of 300 people is dismantled by the police. In a public statement, both the Group of Young Lawyers and the Association against the Torture support the demands of the prisoners, criticize the measures of the government and make Múgica and Asunción responsible for the life of the strikers. In another public statement, Herri Batasuna maintains the same position, as well as the Mothers United against Drugs. In Bilbao and San Sebastian meetings are called by the AFAPP, LKI, EMK. CNT, IT, and Kemen. The Gestoras pro-Amnistía make the PSOE, and particularly Enrique Múgica minister of Justice, responsible for the life and the health state of the prisoners.
In Vigo is created a Platform in Solidarity with the Political Prisoners, integrated by different political parties and movement of solidarity, who called a demonstration in Santiago on March 18th to which 500 people assisted.
The newspaper El Heraldo de Aragón informed on February 2nd that the formation Pro-Reunification Committee that thrown stones to the seat of the PSOE in Saragossa, action which was vindicated, warning that they will continue to make sabotages if the government did not yield to the demands of the prisoners. They also informed about a document written by 65 intellectuals and writers from Aragón demanding the government to negotiate with the prisoners and demanding an honourable treatment in the prisons.
In Catalonia, six organizations: Crida a la Solidaritat, Lliga Comunista de Catalunya, Moviment de Defensa de la Terra, Partit dels Communistes de Catalunya and Confederació General del Treball, pronounce together in favour of the prisoners in a statement sent to the delegate of the central government in Barcelona, where they criticised the attitude of the government.
Many proofs of solidarity come from abroad, among them were those from the Communist Party of Hungary (marxist-leninist) and the Communist Party of Turkey (Marxist-Leninist). In Hamburg groups of demonstrators occupy the bureaus of the European Parliament and the Spanish consulate, while in Frankfurt they assault the seat of the Social-democrat party and the Red Army Fraction carried out an armed action that was vindicated by the commando José Manuel Sevillano. In Zurich meetings and sabotages take place in front of the Spanish Consulate in protest against the living conditions and the dispersion of the political prisoners and the bureaus of the air company Iberia are frequently attacked. In Brussels groups to saboteurs destroy several delegations of Spanish banks and on February the 5th members of the Committee in support of the political Prisoners in Spain chain themselves in front of the Consulate, spreading a statement against the Spanish government. Some days after they occupy the Consulate in Liege and four people are arrested in the dismantlement that followed. The Group of Marxist-Leninist Women of Zurich manifests its solidarity with the prisoners and produces a statement that affirms that: Your struggle in the jails is ours, you count with all our support and solidarity, since with your example you will transform the dark dungeons of the bourgeoisie in the combat trenches. The Belgian political prisoners of the Combatant Communist Cells and the French ones of Action Directe started a hunger strike in solidarity with their Spanish comrades. Also all the German political prisoners of the Red Army Fraction made a rotatory strike in solidarity with their Spanish comrades on January 2nd: With our solidarity action we want to express that we make a common front against the same enemy. The victory or the defeat in Spain will be the victory or the defeat in the whole Western Europe, they affirm in their statement. The German group of lawyers of the political prisoners send a letter to Múgica demanding him to fulfil the vindications of the prisoners. An International Commission in favour of the political prisoners in hunger strike is also formed; it is constituted by around 100 lawyers and doctors from Holland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy and Spain; they spread a statement in which they make a call to defend the political prisoners in their struggle against the physical and psychological torture and in favour of their regrouping. A similar International Commission was formed in Mexico.
The lawyers of the prisoners Angel Elías, José Esteban, Francisca Villalba, Juan Manuel Ruiz and Fernando Burillo send a document to the European Parliament in order to make intercede before the Spanish government. One of these lawyers, José Esteban Armentia, had an interview with the labourist Member of Parliament, Ken Coates, responsible for the Human Rights Subcommittee. As it could be expected, this was not useful at all, only to reveal -if someone doubted it- that human rights are only for them and not for the workers and the working people.
After 70 days in hunger strike, on February 7th, F.J.Ros Díaz, who was at the Guadalajara hospital and declares himself in thirst strike. At the same time, the measures of intervention of communications and censorship of correspondence are reinforced in order to isolate several prisoners. Some of them are transferred in ambulances from a prison to another. In January there are already 24 prisoners in hospital. In view of the refusal of the prisoners, the management of the Penitentiary Hospital asks the Penitentiary Surveillance Judge an authorization to examine the prisoners and make medical tests to them. The General Management spreads a circular in which it says that in the transfers of the prisoners to he hospitals they have an authorization of the Penitentiary Surveillance Judge in order to be immediately fed against their will. The AFAPP informed International Amnesty and the Medical Association of Madrid, asking them to impede the forced feeding considering that it is a form of torture and to prolong the agony unnecessarily. The Medical Association ratified the criterion of the World Medical Association against the forced feeding. On their part, the Federation of Associations in Defence of the Public Health spreads a press release agreeing with the prisoners and opposing to their forced feeding. But a supposedly humanitarian organization such as International Amnesty revealed, throughout this strike, its deceptive and despicable nature, when it opposed to the forced feeding in Morocco and supporting it in Spain. The showed in this way their imperialist nature pretending that there are only violations of the human rights in the third world countries but not within Europe itself.
On January 30th the Minister of Justice, Múgica Herzog, manifests publicly that the government will not negotiate with the prisoners in hunger strike since it considers is a blackmail. The Home Secretary, Corcuera, manifests his full support to the Minister of Justice and to the dispersion policy. On his part, Antoni Asunción affirms that the relatives are coercing the prisoners in order to make them continue with the hunger strike. The height of the frivolousness and the audacity was to compare the hunger strike with the anorexia nervosa that some teenagers suffer in their obsession with diets and getting slim (published in El Mundo, October 2nd, 1990).
On January 27th Jesús Cela Seoane -who had just been released and had been on strike- was kidnapped by a special group of the Civil Guard in order to interrogate him. The bosses of this disguised group were the Home Minister, Corcuera, The Secretary for the Security, Rafael Vera and the Director-General of the Civil Guard, Luis Roldán. He was threatened, put under pressure and finally given an anaesthesia in order to take him to Burgos in a car where he is abandoned.
In the statement vindicating this action, the GRAPO described the hunger strike of their prisoners and the longest torture session ever known in History in order to disqualify those who hypocritically spoke of respect for the life as an excuse to tie the prisoners to their beds and to put them catheters in their noses prolonging in an indefinite way this macabre agony that makes the experimentations of the Nazi turn white. The statement says that the Organization has never ‘made politics’ out of the suffering of the prisoners and the other victims of the State repression. In all cases we have limited ourselves to denounce and to confront the attacks that the Government has addressed against us and the other people’s organizations how it was possible according to the circumstances. This is specially true as regards the conditions that all the political prisoners undergo. As it is well-known, never have we promoted nothing else but to preserve a minimally acceptable way of life in the prisons; the prisoners of the PCE(r) and the GRAPO have never created situations that could be used as argument to those who are in government nor to the wardens that could justify the dispersion nor any other kind of reprisals against them. The GRAPO affirm that there is no other alternative to this situation than to continue this strike to the end, to the achievement the regrouping: either this or we have to resign ourselves to seeing them die in slowly, isolated in a filthy whole, being silently killed. We don’t think that this alternative can be accepted by any honest and sensible person. They admit that the Government had achieved to make the prisoners themselves carry the heaviest weight of the hunger strike, so that, given the general existent conditions, the organized people’s movement has not been able to replace them in the place they occupy in this harsh comba. In this consists, fundamentally the socialfascist, criminal policy of felipism: in the use that they make of the political prisoners as real hostages in the hands of the State in order to weaken the people’s movement and to try to blackmail it.
The statement also says that one of the clues of the terrible prolongation of the hunger strike is to try to make the GRAPO come to the field of the immediate answers in order to deviate our forces, corner and destroy them easily. The GRAPO did not enter in the blow by blow provocation, nor in the increase of desperate actions in support of their imprisoned comrades although during the strike they executed two member of the Civil Guard, a policeman and severely wounded two high members of the army and finally on September 7th two militants armed with guns entered the consultation of another doctor, José Luis Casado Martínez, also in Saragossa and also responsible for the forced feeding. But he has already left his consultation and saved his life in this way. On June 7th that same year, the GRAPO blew up the house of Galavis (former General Manager of Prisons) while he was inside, but although his house and car were destroyed, he saved his life. With this action the GRAPO succeeded to reach three of the most important leaders of the extermination of the prisoners from the General Management of Prisons, finishing with the life of one of them and proving that these so outstanding criminals will never be immune.
On March 1st the prisoners achieved to take the catheter out and as a reprisal they are all transferred again to the Penitentiary Hospital. The order comes from the police when they were informed of it since the doctors were compelled to inform them of any incident. In the Gregorio Marañón Hospital their privacy was not respected since they had to be in their rooms with the doors open in order to let the police watch them constantly, in some occasions the policemen entered the rooms in spite of the doctors’ opposition.
The police took an each time greater control of the hospitals and they focused their attention mainly on José Manuel Sevillano almost from the beginning given his steadiness in following the strike to its last consequences: instead of transferring it in an ambulance he was moved in a Civil Guard ban in the worst imaginable conditions.
In the Penitentiary Hospital the prisoners are again given the forced feeding by mid March although they negotiate with the warden the way they are given it. To avoid being tied to the beds with the plastic catheter in their nose, the agree in taking the food by oral via: a penitentiary nurse took them the liquid saline solution known as Pentaset; in the presence of a warden José Manuel Sevillano pretended to swallow it and then when they left, he spit it is the sink.
In Saragossa the feeding was also given through the nose and the stomach which produced Olegario Sánchez Corrales a strong gastritis. For this reason, he and other two comrades (José Balmón and Francisco Cela) took it out on March 13th in the Hospital; as a reprisal they were transferred to the prisons of Daroca and Torrero. The coming back to the prisons provoked many infections since to the extreme weakness of the prisoners joined the dirtiness proper of the prisons. An however, the propaganda intoxication did not stop a single minute tying to minimize the seriousness of the situation and to discredit the prisoners on strike. For instance, the newspaper Diario 16 from Aragón said on March 23rd the facts as if the prisoners had went again on strike after a parenthesis eating stewed meat the day of their farewell from the Miguel Servet Hospital.
The outcome accelerates when in a medical analysis the warden found that José Manuel Sevillano has extremely weak and they introduced a catheter by force though the nose in order to feed him and to improve his general state. On April 18th, together with the rest of the prisoners, José Manuel Sevillano refuses again the forced feeding and achieves to taer the catheter. The Management of the Penitentiary Hospital instead of transferring him to Gregorio Marañón Hospital, takes him to the jail of Meco where he enters the infirmary. This was a measure of force destined to put pressure and to exhaust all the repressive possibilities: notwithstanding the seriousness of the situation, those who refuse the forced feeding were not transferred to hospitals but to jails. Buenaventura García was transferred to Segovia, Juan Manuel Perez Hernández to Ocaña, Josefa Alarcón rest of the women prisoners to Ávila.
On may 12th Sevillano has his second heart attack and the doctors consider that he is dead and in spite of it he is urgently transferred to Gregorio Marañón Hospital to revive him. He falls into coma and he is artificially kept in life at hospital in order to make the government win time and get ready for his death that would only take place when they considered appropriate. At the same time they spread the news of his death in order to demobilize and disorient the movement outside.
In, José Manuel Sevillano’s town, Marchena -a village of journeymen and country workers- special troops of the Civil Guard took positions and entered the houses of the most combative people in order to frighten them in view of the coming outcome and to present a silence mourning with the only presence of his closest relatives.
Sevillano died and the government could not impede many people to meet in Marchena’s cemetery to pay him tribute; there were many demonstrations and other forms of protest in many cities and towns in Spain.
Considering the extremely serious situation of the of all the prisoners, on February 8th the leadership of the PCE(r) orders them to leave the hunger strike that they were carrying out for 14 months. The final resolution of leaving the strike had to come from the outside the jails. Due to their health state and to the dispersion the political prisoners could not take this decision on their own. On this decision also influenced the exhaustion of the movement of solidarity that had to recover the initiative again under other conditions that the continuation of the strike could not provide. The government was only ready to yield to the death of several of the prisoners which is too high a price that we are not ready to pay, said this Party. But besides, the forced feeding would keep in life real corpses, confined forever and with very serious physical suffering: There was a limit -manifested the PCE(r)- from which we could not go beyond: the sacrifice could not become something sterile and even contrary to the objectives that were followed from the beginning of the strike which could not lead to a certain death.
In March The Central Committee publishes a statement in relation to the hunger strike. The initial evaluation carried out by the Party at that moment was the following:
We have not been able to snatch anything at the government; we have lost Sevi and the health of the rest of the comrades is ruined. But the States and the reactionary forces that support it have not been able to destroy us nor take to imprisoned comrades to the field of demoralization, claudication and repentance as they wanted to. Its political and moral defeat is more than evident. However, the prisoners maintain their moral and combat spirit intact. Besides, throughout this struggle they have won the recognition and the support of a great part of the workers.On its part, in its evaluation the PCE(r) starts explaining that the moment of the beginning of the strike was not deliberately chosen by them but imposed by the provocation of the government that was the one to take the initiative. In this way they wanted to deviate the plans of reorganization and accumulation of forces. Once more, the political prisoners were nothing more than hostages that they tries to use in order to enter in a hand-to-hand combat in which the Party was forced to use all its energies and in this way they had the opportunity of liquidating them in an unequal battle.However, we have to admit that this support is not enough, since it does not become a conscious and organized political struggle in order to impose the State the vindications of the prisoners, the amnesty and many other vindications and rights. This is the sense of our struggle, we walk in this way and we will continue struggling in it without surrendering. The hunger strike has meant an important step in that direction, and although momentarily, the class enemy has imposed by means of force, we have not been defeated in any field. On the contrary, it has lost the battle of the public opinion, it has been unmasked in its true socialfascist character in the eyes of the whole world, it has been forced to show its absolute lack of moral and its helplessness in front of those who dare to struggle.
Afterwards, a public debate was open in the press of the PCE(r) in order to analyse the experiences and make and evaluation. In October 1991, number 16 of its voice RESISTENCIA publishes an article entitled A necessary debate which summarizes the debates among the prisoners, the militants in the underground, those who had solidarised and even friends and organizations from abroad. For instance, the Editorial Committee of Il Boletino spread a statement that concluded: The Spanish political prisoners have succeeded to conclude this battle maintaining intact their political identity as class and their revolutionary commitment, contributing in this way to unmask the real nature of the Spanish State.
But even if the Party could not fall in the tramp, neither could it leave the prisoners abandoned to their luck since this means to let the government free to take its anger on the prisoners. But at the same time the hardest part of the struggle had to fall on the shoulders of the prisoners. The plans of the government were out of the narrow limit of the prisons: it was a strategic project in which all the anti-insurgent policy of re-insertion and massive extermination was being played. In order to include the scale in favour of the prisoners it was necessary to count with a movement of solidarity of the working class and other people’s sectors with a open political character and with the perspective of taking the prisoners out of the jails.
Due to the very character of the struggle, the government could not step backwards since this would have had important political repercussions for all the system. First of all, it would have force them to be in the defensive; the example of strength and resistance on the part of the prisoners and the confirmation that it is possible to make them go backwards could be an example and a stimulus for the working class and other people’s sectors oppressed by the repressive and exploiting policy of the State. This would have meant to throw over the overboard all that they had achieved to get back for more than ten years, it would have taken them back to 1977. This revealed that the intransigence of the government was not a position of strength but of weakness and crisis. But at the same time they would not go out of the crisis going backwards as a last resort; before they would exhaust all the repressive means at their reach. Hence what happened: the most complete close ranks of the parliamentary groups around the most simple vindications. They were ready to pay all the political prices necessary before yielding in front of the prisoners. The determination of the prisoners was not enough, nor the guerrilla actions: only a powerful mass movement of a political character would have compelled them to do it.
The government tried to repent and divide the prisoners but all these attempts turned against themselves. The failure of their repressive plans ended up with the agreement and with all the anti-terrorist plans, and in this way the PP and the PSOE confronted between them and these against the nationalist parties. The dirty war also turned against its promoters, who were involved in several trials for assassination, belonging to a terrorist band and malversation of public funds. The PSOE ended up sunk and tarnished in a sea of scandals and corruption.
On March 31st 1992, after several failed attempts in the prisons of Meco and Cartagena, Fernando Silva Sande, militant of the GRAPO, escapes from the prison of Granada.
One of the last socialfascist deeds was the reorganization of the prison bureaucracy. They transferred the jails from the Ministry of Justice to the Home Ministry rounding in this way the task started in 1987 with the dispersion. The police took positions in the prisons in order to prosecute the imprisoned revolutionaries even within the dungeons. In this way the predictions of García Valdés were fulfilled: with the failure of the penitentiary reform, a military, a civil guard or a colonel had to be put at the head of the General Management of Prisons. The General Management of Prisons was also risen of rank and was transformed into State Secretary which made it a department depending directly from the government and submitted to a clear political orientation, which was indispensable to work with the role of hostages that the political prisoners had in front of the revolutionary organizations they belonged. Within the new prison organization, a political cell for the repression was constituted made up by civil guards and secret agents of the CESID specialized in the antisubversive struggle. This political cell is in permanent contact with the security deputy director of each jail, that is a real political commissary in the prisons.
Immediately after the hunger strike, Antoni Asunción created the FIES (Special Surveillance Inmate Archives) in which are carefully registered each and every of the prisoners inscribed in it: letters, visits, family situation, sentences, personal evolution, etc. All the prisoners are submitted to this regime are in the most complete isolation, are transferred from jail and from cell periodically, their belonging are frequently searched, etc. In one of the circulars that was sent during the hunger strike, colonel Masa ordered the following: In relation to the oral communications of the prisoners of the GRAPO that are subject to intervention we are observing that, when transcribing the tapes the visitors let them written messages, hindering in this way the task of technical control of the communication. In consequence, it would be advisable that it would be forbidden to introduce papers, pens or pens or anything that could serve to this in the visiting rooms (Cambio 16, number 958, April 2nd 1990). Then these precise instructions were complemented with the other official Circulars of May 28th and September 13th 1991, February 28th 1995 and 21/96, which organize and regulates all the FIES special regime that included the entrance in special departments of the prison, isolated and speared from the rest of the prisoners, continuous changes of cells, with only two hours of access to the yard per day, always alone, eating within the cell, without having clothes, clothes given by the warden, handcuffed each time they come out of the jail, searched systematic and humiliatingly even under X-rays and with full-frontal nudity, etc.
The Hunger strike also helped the PSOE to elaborate a plan of building of 18 huge prisons, with a budget of 160.000 pesetas, capable of containing 20.000 new prisoners. In order to fill these new jails, the socialfascists elaborate a new Penal Code in 1995 the risen the sentences considerably and establishes new crimes specially addressed against the people’s resistance movement: insoumisos, squatters, night saboteurs, etc. The so-called Corcuera Law is also passed by means of which a full control of the population is established, spreading the rules that had been experimented from some years with the anti-terrorist law. The PP did only complete this task with other two measures: the video surveillance law and the Police 2000 plan for the repressive invasion of the streets and the neighbourhoods. At the same time, in a European scale, the Europol and Schengen Pacts have been implemented. With all these measures, the total number of prisoners in the jails has reached almost 50.000, while in the 60s -in Franco’s times- there were less than 10.000. The number of warden has also multiplied by four from 1979 when the penitentiary reform was promoted.
Before sinking, the PSOE had to confront another hunger strike in January 1996, that lasted for 15 days. The government was forced to negotiate, although two weeks later the strike started again lasting 38 days more. With it the partial regrouping of the prisoners was achieved, there was some improvement in the living conditions within the jails and two of the prisoners that were seriously ill during the previous hunger strike: Milagros Caballero and Juan Manuel Perez were released.
The crisis of the PSOE favoured the victory in the elections of the PP in March 1996. In their programme they had to fundamental clues in their strategy: the refusal of any kind of negotiation and the complete serving of the sentences. The day after the taking of power it was already changing its mind.
In the meantime the prisoners of the GRAPO started to be released after having served more than 20 year-sentences, and with many struggles and hunger strikes on their shoulders. All the enormous weight of the jails repressive machinery was not able to finish with them and they are the best example that it is possible to resist and win. This is being recognized in the numerous people’s tributes that they are given from their neighbours and working friends, in which thousands of people from different localities have express them their sympathy and recognition. And, undoubtedly, they have deserved it.
(*) Carrillo: head of the revisionist PCE (Translator’s note)