|The following interview with a political prisoner recently released by the Argentine junta appeared in the March 23 issue of the French Trotskyist daily Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Question. How did the deterioration in the conditions under which political prisoners are held come about?
Answer. After December 1975, the military took direct control of the prison system nationwide. In face of the disintegration of bourgeois institutions and the very marked upturn of the mass movement after the large mobilizations of June 1975, the military was already getting ready to take over on the political level. Direct military control of the prisons brought on an immediate worsening of the situation faced by political prisoners, since the officers took away some of the "privileges" we had won.
The military tried to impose a uniform set of regulations in the prisons, modeled after the "maximum security" system, where the prisoners are kept under strict surveillance.
Q. Dia this happen overnight?
A. No, because the regulations they tried to impose showed, for instance, that they had been devised by persons who were not familiar with the way prisons work. So, in La Plata, they began by trying to cut back on recreation. They wanted to lower it from five hours a day with sports to three half-hour periods a week with no sports, and to force the prisoners to go out one at a time. This was materially impossible, given the personnel shortage and the number of prisoners. The prison officials were forced to go around the rule, allowing the prisoners to go out for recreation in groups of ten for an hour each day.
Q. The military coup took place on March 24. Did this have an immediate effect on the prisoners' lives?
A. For the first three weeks after the coup, we remained completely isolated from the outside world, from our lawyers and families. The change was marked at first by a series of small incidents, reflecting the authorities' desire to "normalize" the situation in La Plata, while at the same time avoiding a direct confrontation with us.
La Plata had been designated as a regroupment center for political prisoners from all over the country. The political prisoner population was to be multiplied five or six times.
At the time of the coup, there were 200 of us. According to the latest figures I know about, there are 1,200 prisoners. Once La made into a strategic had been Plata center for regrouping political prisoners, it became important for the administration to break down the tradition of organization and resistance that existed among the original core of 200. They had to keep this original group from "contaminating" the others. This need was all the more pressing because the initial core of prisoners included a high percentage of members of political organizations, while the majority of political prisoners who came in after March 24 were militant workers.
So the administration followed a tactic of deliberate provocations. A button left undone, or a poorly made bed, meant no recreation. Sending people to solitary confinement became a standard practice.
At the same time, they did everything they could to deny us any regular mental exercise. They took away our radios and cut down on the number of daily newspapers allowed into the prison. They "impounded" the small libraries we had put together with books that had already gone through censorship. Anything having to do with economies, history, or sociologyeven academic sociology-was removed. For example, according to the new criteria, Malraux's Anti-Memoirs were considered subversive, and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, pornographic.
Along with this, they cut down on the frequency and length of visits, as well as the number of people allowed to visit us.
These provocations continued to escalate until August 13, 1976. On that day, one of the "delegates," who acted as an intermediary between the administration and the prisoners in the cell block was put in solitary confinement. This provoked a spontaneous collective reaction that took
"uproar." We were all the form of an locked up in our individual cells, so it was hardly a rebellion. Half the prisoners in the cell block, about thirty of them, were put in solitary confinement.
Q. Is that when they sent you on the transfer trip from which you thought you would never return?
A. Yes. Five days later, at midnight, soldiers came and took me out, together with four other comrades who were also in solitary confinement. They loaded us abruptly into a truck, with no explanations. In that truck was everyone whom the administration considered "agitators,"
as well as Martin Guevara, Che's brother, who is a member of the PRT [Partido de los Trabajadores-
Revolucionario Revolutionary Workers party], and who has been singled out for attack because of his name. He had been placed in solitary confinement for having shared his meal with a fellow prisoner. During the entire six hours that the ride lasted, we feared the worst: namely, that we would be slaughtered, pure and simple, in one of those
"attempted escapes"-especially classic since this was already standard procedure in other areas, like Cordoba.
Finally we arrived at Sierra Chica, a prison that is completely isolated, in the middle of Buenos Aires province, 400 kilometers from the capital. Our punishment lasted almost five months-two months in solitary confinement, and three months in isolated cells.
Q. But weren't your families notified about this transfer?
A. Our families had a very bad time of it for more than a month. The authorities refused to give them any information about what had happened to us. The anxiety of our families and comrades was heightened by the date of the transfer. It had, in fact, oceurred just before August 22, which in Argentina is the anniversary of the massacre of sixteen revolutionists in Trelew in 1972. And, as a matter of fact, on August 22, 1976, around thirty bodies were discovered in a village in Buenos Aires province, in unrecognizable condition. The rumor immediately began circulating that these were political prisoners executed by the authorities in "commemoration" of the anniversary of Trelew. You can just imagine how frightened our comrades and relatives were.
Q. Was the regime harsher at Sierra Chica?
A. Yes, much harsher than at La Plata. At Sierra Chica, for instance, they actually followed the system of three half-hour recreation periods per week; and visits were limited to one-half hour per week. At Sierra Chica, it was the "common law" prisoners who got the "political" prisoners' treatment: five hours of recreation per day, and three hours of visits per week.
other parts of
Then prisoners from Argentina began to flow into Sierra Chica, which was also one of the regroupment centers in the country. One day, while we were in solitary confinement, we heard screams and cries of pain. It was a group of prisoners being transferred in from
Córdoba. They were forced to run the gauntlet between two rows of guards who were clubbing them very hard. The incident that provoked the guards to such reprisals is symptomatic. The guards had beaten the prisoners with rifle butts, just as they were coming off the trucks. A shot went off accidentally and killed a guard on the spot. This is what brought on the reprisals.
Each time a new transfer took place, the same scenes of humiliation and sadism were repeated. The guards ordered the prisoners first to run, then to stop, undress, and do exercises in the halls. They shaved the prisoners' heads. These were comrades who had come from the Córdoba area, and they were in pretty bad shape. They looked like the photographs of concentration camp survivors in Nacht und Nebel or the Polish films or [Alain] Resnais's films about the Nazi camps that I saw a few years ago. The Córdoba comrades' heads had the same look.
Q. So you were able to gather firsthand information about the bloody repression enforced in the Córdoba area, and the hostage policy followed by the military authorities?
A. Córdoba in particular was a living hell. The prisoners there were cut off from the outside world for ten months after the coup. Every day they were subjected to physical punishment. During these ten months, about thirty political prisoners were taken out and shot in retaliation for guerrilla operations carried out on the outside.
The most tragic case is that of the left Peronist attorney, Vaca Narvajo. One day, after a guerrilla operation, he was taken out of the prison to be shot as a hostage. When he arrived at the military district headquarters, they told him that some suspects in preventive detention had been shot in the meantime, making the hostage quota, but that he was at the top of the list of the next batch.
So they took him back to the prison. In the midst of all this, his birthday came around. According to what some eyewitnesses have told me, this was a particularly moving event. All the prisoners who "celebrated" his birthday were in fact saying goodbye to him, knowing that he would be part of the next batch. And, in fact, a few days later, he was shot.
The military openly posted the going "exchange rates" in the most cynical way. For every civilian killed, three political prisoners were shot; for every officer killed, it was five political prisoners. This is the measure of the Cordoba military's respect for human life.
And now this policy is tending to become generalized, because I have heard that the situation has gotten considerably worse, even in La Plata. Corporal punishment occurs daily. Now they are torturing people right inside the prison, and there have been several prisoners who have died as a result, like Comrade Rafael Lasalla. [See Intercontinental Press, December 13, 1976, p. 1796.]