Marcello Villarroel: Words of Rage and War, Words of Solidarity. To Combat the Prison-Capital-State

From Hommodolars Contrainformación (December 15, 2010):

y mind is once again overwhelmed by a sad mixture of shock, rage, and pain. This time, a new dose of harsh reality is exposed to the world, as solid evidence of society’s sickness wakes me from my dreams to daybreak in a punishment cell.

It was 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday the 8th, and in the distance, among bars and cold hallways, I heard the murmur of a conversation in a wing adjacent to the disciplinary unit of the Maximum Security Section (SMS), where I had been staying for the past nine days as a penalty for “contravening the internal regime of High-Security Prison.” I initially thought I had misheard, that I was still sleeping and it was all a horrible nightmare, but regrettably the murmur was clear and precise, and I was totally awake and alert: “81 dead and 14 injured in tower 5 at San Miguel prison.” In a matter of minutes, information began to flow from the tiny screened windows on the various floors and from the different voices of prisoners with television and radio access, unable to hide their shared despair.

A new routine begins in the SMS. It’s a routine marked by hatred for the jailer, combined with a generalized commotion inside this heavily shrouded unit, also known as the High-Security Block (MAS).

As the day goes by, the avalanche of information becomes more and more irrefutable, while the conviction grows in my mind that I am bearing witness to indolent butchery on the part of gendarmes who, as executioner-slaves, bear the responsibility for this blatant new State crime. How can I think otherwise when I have lived and felt the Nazi-Fascist treatment of these “Penitentiary Officials” thousands of times. It’s they who give orders, administrate, and govern the prisons that are coldly designed to feed off of the daily deaths of dozens of prisoners across the entire country.

How many prisoners commit suicide, tormented by prison experiences they can’t endure? How many prisoners are brutally beaten, tortured, or isolated for their dignified refusal to support the abuses that are part of the “rehabilitation process”? How many prisoners are murdered in fights manufactured and encouraged by gendarmes applying their internal policy of divide and rule? How many prisoners are transferred, their roots arbitrarily pulled up out of their home soil, destroying their families and depriving them of the little they’ve managed to build in the way of real human relationships? How many of those who talk about, propose, decide on, and live off the criminalization of poverty, the prison business, and the construction of a substitute reality have intimate knowledge of what it is to experience the stress of imprisonment and the strain of punishment, solitary confinement, white torture, and utter helplessness?

In this sick Prison-Capital-State society, the indiscriminate death of prisoners has become something “normal.” At the beginning of the decade, under the Lagos government, around 26 prisoners burned to death in the old Iquique prison. Also 10 years ago, seven prisoners burned to death in San Miguel, and another 10 people in Colina II. They may officially say those deaths were the result of massive brawls or riots, but that in no way absolves all who sustain Capital and the State of their responsibility. Capital and the State are not empty words or subjective, abstract structures. They are concrete things comprising people who take part in a project that integrally serves domination, which looks to perpetuate itself in the form of a prison society we must necessarily destroy in order to put an end—once and for all!—to this exasperating state of things.

The rich are happy, and they secretly enjoy the indiscriminate death of imprisoned proletarians. It would be “politically incorrect” to say so openly, but one can clearly perceive their indifference in the face of such a massacre. Politicians on the left and the right reach consensus, seek “solutions,” and attempt to be “creative.” The fourth estate, capital’s propaganda apparatus known as the press, once again delights in being able to sell all this backstage drama. But the Social War is relentless, ferocious, and bloody. It will not be distracted, and it will certainly not forget.

In the country’s prisons, there is a sense of indignation and a feeling of fury toward authority, and I hope it won’t be fleeting. There is also an instinctive will to organize, mobilize, and break away from the debilitating functional passivity shown in the face of the jailer.

As an Autonomous, Anarchist subversive, I can’t ignore the pain of the families. I can’t—nor do I want to—think that anticapitalist consciousness has been seized by indifference and that these events will remain shelved in the “red archives” of our unyielding, rebellious, and insurgent proletarian memory. Above all, it’s our humanity that makes us decide to struggle for revolutionary transformation and the destruction of the capitalist order. Experiences like these keep our senses sharp and validate our chosen path.

UNTIL PRISON SOCIETY IS OBLITERATED !!

PROLETARIANS AT WAR, SUBVERSION IS OUR MOTTO!!

WHILE THERE IS MISERY, THERE WILL BE REBELLION!!



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