Spain has extended into the prisons Political prisoners have launched hunger strikes to protest their living conditions. Some of them have managed to smuggle out declarations explaining the conditions they are subjected to and the demands they are fighting for. Three such statements have been collected and published as a brochure by the Front Communiste Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist Front), the French Trotskyist organization. We are publishing below the introduction to •REPRESSION Zaragoza, Martutene, Basauri, Pamplona, Carasanchel, Segovia ... The political prisoners in the main prisons of the Spanish state are in struggle. Any struggle under the brutal Francoist dictatorship equires determination and intense combativity. But under the tragic conditions imposed on the prisoners in Franco's jails, this determination and combativity ecomes heroism. These are the same comrades who pression, inside the prison gates. ut the success of their struggle depends on the exernal support we can extend to them in order to Throughout its whole existence the dictatorship has not ceased to offer proof of its tyrannical and reressive character. Confronted by the working class, he high-school students, the university students most recently after the passage of the law on selecion and education), the physicians and professors, he peasants and popular sectors, and the nationalfies oppressed by the centralism of the Spanish state, he dictatorship has found no response other than reression: prison, assassination, military tribunals, he Civil Guard, and the politicosocial brigade. + is an exploitative regime granting no political reedoms, dominated by a reactionary oligarchy
THE the brochure and two of the statements of the prisoners. Both come from the Segovia prison and were
Isigned by members of the following organizations:
ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna -- Basque Nation and
Freedom), PCE (Partido Comunista Español -- Spanish Communist party), FAC (Forces d'Aliberement de Catalunya -- Liberation Forces of Catalonia), and the LCR-ETA(VI) (Liga Comunista Revo lucionaria-ETA(VI) -- Revolutionary Communist League-
ETA, Sixth Congress, sympathizing organization of •the. Fourth International). - INPRECOR break the criminal isolation the dictatorship is trying to impose on them. All the comrades on hunger strikes have been placed in special "punishment cells, " where they are continuing their action under even more tragic conditions. Their demands are part of our struggle, the struggle of the working class and all the oppressed. In all of our battles, in the factory assemblies, on the campuses, and in • the neighborhoods, the demands of the political prisoners must be added to our specific demands. In this brochure we are reproducing three documents produced by the political prisoners themselves in which they explain their situation and the reasons for their fight. • that has imposed systematic terror to keep itself in power. In the repressive context of the past several years, the dictatorship has opened a new public-order tribunal to step up persecution of social-political "offenders. " Sessions of the war council are held on a daily basis, with sentences of twenty and forty years in prison being handed down. Two new prisons for political prisoners have been opened (Zaragoza and Pontevedra). Demonstrating workers have been assassinated (recently it was workers in Carmona, who were demanding water), and so have Basque revolu-
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SPAIN tionaries. Some are murdered "legally, " like Salvador Puig Antich. The repression is also manifested in the firing of workers in the factories and shipyards and the removal of professors and students from universities and other institutions. We must call special attention to the repression in Euzkadi (the Basque country, which is under military occupation, with hundreds of prisoners, torture, trials, and police controls, where the Civil Guard abandons itself to frenetic manhunts. The repressive character of the regime also extends to the prisons, where a completely primitive life is created for the inmates. The whole wave of struggles in the prisons since last summer (hunger strikes, revolts, and so on) has been marked by the struggle of the political prisoners against the inquisitional regime imposed by the DGP (Dirección General de Prisiones -- General Prison Administration). Examples of this are the struggles led by the comrades of Zaragoza, who went on a hunger strike, by those of Martutene (in San Sebastian), who were taken on a night transfer without being guaranteed any security or given any information about where they were going, by those of the Bausuri prison, some of whom were released only in order to be seized by the police again, tortured for five days, and returned to prison. We give here a brief account of the living conditions of the political prisoners: * A fundamental point is the dispersion of the political prisoners throughout various penitentiaries on the peninsula. In addition to the provincial preventive-detention prisons, there are'a dozen prisons through which the political prisoners are scattered. The comrades convicted in the Burgos trials are held in Caceres, Cartagena, and Córdoba, isolated from the other comrades and subjected to especially miserable conditions. Cartagena is a prison for "hopeless cases" and Córdoba for offenses during which blood was shed. The other political prisoners are divided among nine prisons: Soria, Segovia, Jaen, Lerida, Palencia, Zaragoza, Pontevedra; the Zamora prison is reserved for the clergy, and that of Alcala de Henares for women comrades. The sole aim of this dispersion is to avoid concentrations and thus to prevent general responses to the injustices committed in the prisons. *The other, more important, aspect is censorship and denial of communication. Periodicals, reviews, and books that are freely circulated in the country are censored in the prisons. In many prisons the daily press is selected or forbidden completely. Further, there is an "inquisitional index" of banned publications. These are, notably, the reviews Cuadernos para el Dialogo, Trionfo, and Mundo Social.
*Communication, both oral and written, is restricted to immediate relatives. Communication is interfered with by functionaries, a situation that becomes intolerable. When they are asked to alleviate these conditions, some prison directors shamelessly assert that when we were condemned, "logically" so were our wives, children, relatives, and friends. The use of the Catalan, Galician, and Basque languages is strictly forbidden. It is recommended to the prisons and to the officials in charge of censorship to add extreme religious criteria set down by reactionary priests to the political basis for the censorship. *As for the sanitary, hygienic, and food conditions, we can say that they conform to the general characteristics of the prisons. Health care amounts to being given vaccinations against typhoid and smallpox in order to avoid the outbreak of epidemics in the prisons. Medical assistance is deficient, with only one doctor per prison who must treat dozens of patients in one hour. Hardly any prisons have a dentist or optometrist, with the result that cases requiring special attention become extremely grave. The general prison hospital, the only one inmates can go to, in every case is small and is short of beds and postoperative facilities; medical care varies according to the financial situation of the prisoners. Thirty-five pesetas a day are allotted to each prisoner, and when the general costs of lighting and cleaning and the effects of inflation are deducted, the result is poor nourishment deficient in proteins and vitamins, with no green vegetables or fruits. The diet is based on water and starch. This often produces illness after some time. *The system of classifying the prisoners according to how "dangerous" they are, the shortening of sentences on the basis of work done, and the possibility of conditional release are applied as means of blackmail and repression. Reduction of sentences is supposed to operate on the basis of two days' labor counting as three days' imprisonment, so that a three-year sentence can be worked off in two years. Conditional release requires serving the last quarter of the sentence under administrative control. All these forms of sentence reduction are conditional on the "good behavior" of the prisoner and on whether he "offers guarantees of leading an honest life outside. " Since the political prisoner cannot remain passive before the injustices of the prison system and will not abandon his struggle against the dictatorship, he is deprived of these measures, which could ever so slightly ease the monstrous sen*Prison life is especially miserable. The cells are not taken care of. You suffer from the heat in the summer and freezing temperatures in the winter. The toilets are inside the cells, which results in
ON HUNGER STRIKE bad odors that are often made worse by deprivation of water. The cell blocks, which are very small, accommodate about fifty political prisoners each. The right of personal and family privacy is ceaselessly violated by censorship, intervention, and surveillance. Punishments in special cells are frequent and inflicted for minor reasons. This situation gets even worse when the prison administrations violate their own rules of repression, creating subhuman conditions of punishment. Most of the time they forbid prisoners to leave their cells, take away the beds and mattresses, and forbid smoking and reading. *The prisons also have workshops which are supposed to rehabilitate people through labor and contribute to reductions of sentences through the system just mentioned. In reality, the workshops are transformed into real factories of exploitation and forced labor, in which salaries are beneath the minimum and discipline is draconian; the slightest infraction or mistake sends a prisoner to the punishment cell or to the hole. The work goes on with no security measures; accidents are frequent, as is shown by the workshop fire that killed a dozen people in the Alcala prison. It is against this situation that we are struggling. Against dispersion, censorship, discrimination, banning of original languages, the hole, the terrible treatment. In a word, against repression in the prisons. We ask for active solidarity in this struggle. We ask OWHY WE ARE Last month the political prisoners of the prisons of Zaragoza, Bilbao (Basauri), San Sebastian (Martutene), Pamplona, and now Madrid (Carabanchel) went on hunger strikes against the repression imposed by the dictatorship in the prisons:
ZARAGOZA: inhuman living conditions, with an especially severe military regime and internal regime.
BASAURI: where three comrades were sent by the prison director, with the complicity of the judge, to the Social Brigade, where they were tortured for five days in a police station before being returned to prison.
MARTUTENE: with totally repressive living conditions, where at 3:00 a.m. twenty comrades were dragged from their cells naked and threatened with machine guns without knowing where they were going or why.
that all people committed to democratic rights, to socialism, to the development of Catalonia, Galicia, and Euzkadi contribute however they can to the common fight against the misdeeds of the Francoist regime in the prisons. We are fighting repression where we find it. No provocation by the dictatorship (sentences, firings, assassinations, murders in the prisons) must go without a response. Finally, the general characteristics of the repression, along with the specific features of the prisons, only demonstrate the weakness of a dictatorial regime with no social base, a regime that has transformed the country into a concentration camp in which any demand or idea of progress is persecuted and banned. This regime is passing through difficult moments. Not only is it facing a spectacular rise of class struggle, it is also awaiting the death of Franco, the dictator for thirty-five years, and is hastily preparing for perpetuating the existing sitvation by means of the Juan Carlos monarchy. It is trying in vain to maintain a system based on denial of democratic rights, on national oppression, capitalist exploitation, and prisons and exile, with a king taking over Franco's job. Today more than ever it is necessary to redouble our efforts to win an amnesty, the release of political prisoners, and the return of the exiles, in order that we may be rid of the dictatorship once and for all. October 1974. Signed by political prisoners of the Segovia prison belonging to the ETA, the PCE, the LCR-ETA(VI), the FAC, and three independents. PAMPLONA: under conditions analogous to those in the other prisons and in solidarity with Zaragoza. MADRID: against the division of the political prisoners into different cell blocks and the isolation of some prisoners, like Antonio Durán. We, political prisoners of the Segovia prison, members of the ETA, FAC, LCR-ETA(VI), PCE, and independents, want to add our own hunger strike to this list of struggles. We are fighting for our general demands and in solidarity with the other political prisoners for: a) Reassembling of all political prisoners. Against the brutal dispersion that the comrades of the Burgos trials were subjected to. b) Automatic application of conditional liberty from the tribunal. No increase in penalties by administrative means!
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miguel enriauez c) Elimination of censorship of oral and written communications! No intervention by prison officials! Respect for personal and family privacy! d) Free entry of books, reviews, and daily newspapers circulated in the country legally. e) No retributions! f) Establishment of a status for political prisoners! Our action is in solidarity with all the comrades in the hole, for their demands and against repression in general; against the murders committed by the Civil Guard and the special brigades; against Francoist tyranny and its attempt to prolong itself through the Juan Carlos monarchy. We feel the deepest solidarity with the striking workers of General Electric, Hispano-Olivetti, FASA-Renault . . . who through their just demands are acting against the capitalists and the dictatorship, for a future of freedom and progress for the peoples of the Spanish state. We appeal to all workers, high-school students,