prisoners are militants who had escaped from Segovia prison and were recaptured and then transferred to Puerto de Santa Maria as punishment.
SPAIN ALETTER FROM .. The only newspaper allowed in the prison is the regional journal Diario de Códiz, usually with the reports of political events cuf out (things like the Vitoria general strike and the demonstrations around the death of Ulrike Meinhof). • .. The General Administration of Penal Institutions (DGIP) issued a memorandum prohibiting certain reviews from entering the prisons (such as Triunfo, Cuadernes, and Mundo), and the entry of all similar magazines (like Posible and Cambio-16) was also banned by decision of the DGIP, although without any accompanying memorandum... - . Our only source of information is the news broadcast that goes on at 9:00 every night, which means that we are virtually deprived of news. . . There is a list of banned books which includes such titles as "Cien años de soledod" and "Y creo en la esperanza, "but the warden in charge of censorship has an even stricter list. • • Puerto de Santa Maria is one of the toughest prisons in the whole Spanish state. We cannot leave the cellblock area. There is one courtyard about 40 meters by 20. We are not allowed to go to other parts of the prison like the library and the exercise yard... - We live in deplorable cells from the standpoint of hygiene. They are 2 meters by 3 and the water doesn't work. The humidity is so bad that most of us have begun to suffer From lumbago, rheumatic ailments, etc. There are cockroaches everywhere and rats in the toilets. There is only one shower for the twenty-two political prisoners. They force us into an exercise schedule which we have to perform like robots. ... The food is generally inedible and insufficient and we can barely keep it down, so we try to live on the food our families send us. ... The medical care is deficient. It is horrible to think what would happen if one of us ever got sick enough to have to be immediately transfered to a hospital for emergency surgery, because it is doubtful that there would be enough time to get out of the prison and get to the hospital in time to be treated. ... Besides all this, we are subject to constant political persecution and continual provocations from the guards.
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SPAIN ... All of us, with the exception of the two most recently arrived prisoners, have spent the last several months in punishment cells, serving terms of 300, 121, or 105 days. The punishment cell is completely bare. They take out everything, including the mattress, so there is no place to sit down all day long, except on the floor or iron slabs that serve as beds. This causes strong back pains by the second or third day. It is forbidden to lie on the floor or lean against the wall during the day. It is very difficult to eat, because you have to rest the plate on the floor or else hold it with one hand and eat with the other. All you get to eat with is a spoon. It is forbidden to talk to anyone or look out the window, and when they open the cell door you have to stand against the opposite wall. You can't take any more than three steps in any one direction in these cells. The mattresses are taken away when they wake us up and have to be brought back at night... They take away all watches, so we lose any notion of time, and all other personal effects as well, even eyeglasses. Absolutely everything is designed to be physical and psychological torture. Physical because a few days after being put in the cell you lose your appetite, they give us very little to eat and what they do give us is miserable. You get weak from lack of exercise, because you can't do anything because there's no room to move around. You can hardly walk because you get dizzy Fast. Your whole body gets cramped and painful. We all have insomnia and cannot sleep more than a few hours at a time, waking up constantly. Psychologically because the persecution is constant and the situation of total isolation leads to all sorts of ailments and a feeling of constant tension, anxiety, and anguish.. We are not able to denounce these conditions to the court, because they don't let us have paper and pens. • Besides our conditions in the cells, the police persecute our families, registering the houses where they live and threatening people who help them. • We have the "right" to write two letter a week, only to immediate families, in big letters, on one sheet of notepaper, covering only one side. We are allowed to write only about "family matters." ... We are allowed six visits of twenty minutes each month (suspended when we are in punishment cells). We have to speak through a glass without any holes at all, which means that we have to practically shout to be heard. We can talk only about family matters or the visit is cut off. The Basques are not allowed to speak in their own language. . . . We are never even allowed to briefly embrace our wives. . .. "I already know how to solve the Basque problem. Kill them all. " "I'm all worked up and | feel like knocking some of them off." "I don't see why they let them have visits. " These are the sort of things you hear when the guards talk among themselves. They treat us like animals to be persecuted and exterminated, ... We are surrounded by informers who are set against us and get commendations for contributing to the repression... They don't let us talk to the common prisoners. If we do, we are punished. D 18
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