Last week, there was an article on the news about how Charles Taylor wasn't happy with the dairy-based diet he was being fed at The Hague and was insisting in more African food. Somehow, this awoken memories on Ana, a friend and formal political prisoner in Uruguay. Her response talks about what it means to have been a political prisoner, even 30 years after.
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I am at least writing down a book about my time in jail, not for giving a
personal record but for living up to Giorgio Agamben's classification of the
different kind of people survived Auschwitz. I recognize myself on one of
the groups he suggest, the "witnesses", the ones who survived only with the
idea to give testimony. Not testimony about what happened me but to give
testimony to what happened to a whole country, to a whole generation, to a
society who became stripped bare to it's basements.
I have now 110 pages written and every page hurts, it hurts to try to
remember the 19 years old naive teenager I was, the interrogations, the
abuses, the feelings me and my comrades shared and wanted to transmit to
others, to friends, to relatives, to neighbors.
It's now 31 years ago I was released, but I can assure you, it feels as it
was yesterday. A friend who is a member of the Swedish Academy met the
Hungarian writer Imre Kertész when he come to Stockholm to receive the Nobel
prize in 2002. They spoke about memory, it took Kertész 30 years to
come out with his book about his experiences in the Holocaust, in Auschwitz.
It's time for me to come out with the memories of our own tribulations.
We were kept for months in cattlewagons without windows and without any
hygiene facilities. We were taken to the toilettes twice a day, with blind
folded eyes. The soldiers made us to form a line and each one gave other a
hand. We ate cold stews with small stripes of meat and fat and beans. Once
we lifted from the deep pan the cranium of a small dog.
They transfered us to the jail, an older priest seminary transformed into a
jail for female political prisoners. Punta Rieles became my home for two
years, later I was moved to a military casern.
We were 12 or 16 in each cell. The windows were permanent shut and they were
painted in gray, to hinder us to peek out into the countryside. (The jail
was surrounded by high towers where armed soldiers aimed K-pistols to us and
to the way who went to the town, Montevideo. They said we were hostages and
they were afraid someone could come and take us away.)
We slept with the lights on all the time, every hour, in the night, two or
three female armed soldiers come into the cells to inspect us.
We had no newspapers, no radio, no papers or books or pens. The books our
relatives sent were burned in the jail boiler. 8 hours a day we
were forced to work at the gardens picking stones, when the stones were
picked they were moved to another place, to be picked again.
Half an hour every day we were allowed to play some sport, mostly volleyball,
but many days the privilege was revoked.
Our families and lawyers were allowed a half hour visit every two weeks but
in case of turbulence or problems they were turned away at the gates, two
kilometers from the buildings.
I envy Taylor's jail conditions...
Ana Valdés, former political prisoner in Uruguay