(The following statement was issued in January by political prisoners in Spain's Carabanchel prison. We have taken the text from the January 30 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper supported by the French Trotskyists of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist League). The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Shortly after the announcement of the decree-law on the prevention of terrorism [August 27, 1975], a special section for political prisoners was set up in the "sixth wing" of Carabanchel prison. The number of prisoners placed there recently has varied between sixty and seventy.
The special regimen is marked in particular by a more rigid repression, in effect, the suppression of all rights enjoyed by the other prisoners.
The living conditions imposed on us are aimed at making any communication impossible-the regimen is halfway between being solitary confinement and normal imprisonment.
We are now kept in individual cells eighteen hours a day, under constant harassment and gibes with no other aim but to humiliate us.
The cells offer similar sanitary conditions-the walls drip with water along their entire length and one can always hear the rustling of the swarms of rats who live in the space between the floors.
Most of the toilets are stopped up. Water does not reach more than 50 percent of the cells. It has to be brought into the cells in buckets from the fountain in the courtyard, and then only when authorized by the guards.
The cold and the humidity make the situation intolerable.
We are forced to eat our meals alone, in our cells. Our meals arrive cold, whereas the other prisoners are allowed to eat in a dining hall, where the meals are kept hot.
During an entire day we are allowed to spend no more than six hours outside our cells. We are taken to a small courtyard near the building we oceupy and locked up there. We are forbidden to form in groups of more than five persons.