Tag Archives: communique

Chile: Statement by Marcelo Villarroel on Political Prison in Chile

via AMW English

From the high security jail of Santiago de Chile I send these words of greeting to all who meet today in Villa Francia to share visions and experiences around the political prison.

The jail that I live in today is the same one that has taken more than 20 years of my life.

I arrived here at the age of 21, transferred from the former penitentiary at its inauguration on February 20, 1994, leading me in 2004 with the anti-jail fight started with Kamina Libre in 1996.

The KAS was then used to imprison and annihilate the military political subversion of the left. Rodríguistas, Miristas and Mapucistas lautarinos [members of MAPU-Lautaro, an armed left-wing group] were recipients of the perverse dirty war of the government of Aylwin and Frei that managed to defeat the armed projects embodied in the FPMR, the different MIR and the Mapu-Lautaro.

There were many factors that caused this defeat and the prisoners of that generation began to leave after a decade of confinement, one of the toughest in Chilean carceral history.

The composition of social reality was severely transformed by the State and the Capital in the process of bourgeois remaking, thus transforming paradigms, ideas, practices and tensions.

It was in the second half of the ‘90s that the subversive reality began to change definitely as well as the ideas of forces that serve as references and guides for action. Continue reading


Chile: Communiqué of the prisoners of the Carcel of Alta Seguridad

via actforfree

Communique of the end of the hunger strike and the continuation of the mobilization of the prisoners of Carcel de Alta Seguridad [High Security Prison] against the reform of law 321

Publicacion Refractario / Saturday, June 1st, 2019

Today Thursday, May 30, we are ending the hunger strike after 14 days. We started it in 23 prisoners locked up in section 3H north of this unit, and in the days that followed the hunger strike saw the participation of different sections, reaching a total of 32 prisoners, as a concrete manifestation of the refusal of the application of the amendment to Legislative Decree No 321, concerning parole.

We believe that this struggle requires the attention, resolution and the dedication of all the imprisoned concerned, as well as their families, their organizations and their people who see prison as an instrument of discipline primarily aimed at criminalizing poverty and supported by an ever more repressive legal framework, the aim of which is to keep social order in the service of the powerful of this country.

As part of the national mobilization of prisoners and those accompanying and supporting us against this perverse modification, we declare a state of permanent mobilization, since it is with the silence and the complicity of the politicians of all colours sitting in Congress, judges and lawyers who justify and the State as a whole, under the Piñera government [Sebastián Piñera, the Chilean President; NdAtt.] who, behind the backs of the small people, have used legality in violation of the treaties as well as principles of their own law, which they claim to defend. Continue reading