Political
prisoners in
El Salvador
POLITICAL PRISONERS in El Salvador are held in two prisons, Mariona for men and llopango for women. Mercedes Sanz, from the Socialist Workers Party (PSO), Swiss section of the Fourth International, was able to visit Mariona prison. She describes conditions there in the following interview given to Arnold Berthu on March 20, 1987.
Question. You managed to get into Mariona prison. Can you tell us what its main features are?
Answer. The prison has several sections. There is section C, the psychiatric wing. That is where they keep the prisoners who are considered "mentally ill." There are about 50 of them, and they cannot move around freely. Section 2 is where the political prisoners are held. There are 800 to 1,000 of them. There is a section for common-law prisoners, where about 2,000 people are being
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prison building.
into the prison
On visiting
From there, door separating change between are
The mittee, which clinic, hygiene and
The which
18 road leading to the gate, the search the in the common-law
1980, a com-
For
Assistance Commaintenance
Committee, arise among prisoners. as the detainees are taken to make a
There is also a legal aid bureau deposition before their captors instead organized entirely by the politicals. of before a judge. It gives legal advice. Finally, there is If, through torture, they get a conan internal bureau that maintains an fession, it is considered sufficient to up-to-date list of prisoners, with a preventive detention, which series of vital statistics (date of entry, can last up to 121 days. This period of preventive detention is served in prisoners have organized series of actions, including strikes. The longest one lasted 57 days before a military investigating judge.
At that time, they can confirm or deny the statements that they made
Q. Can you give an example of to the repressive forces. They can say such actions and tell us what it pro- that it was obtained through torture.
In August 1986, after the prison. They won the right to get ers formed the Legal Aid Bureau, conjugal visits from their compan- the military authorities changed their for up to 12 hours, once a After two weeks detention, the detainees are immediately brought
At first, the prison authorities before a military investigating judge demanded payment. The prisoners without going through Mariona. The rejected this system, went on hunger them is thus greater, strike and refused to go back to their inasmuch as they may be tortured cells at the fixed hour, 6pm. That way, "disappear" if they refuse to the guards couldn't call the roll. Their contirm their confessions. action paid off. It should be added that defence of the prisoners by lawyers is made October 9, 1986, on the eve of the difficult, as the latter are threatened earthquake, seems to me to be especi- with death by the paramilitary groups ally important. On that day, the or accused of the same sort of offence political prisoners decided to ban charged against their clients. armed guards from coming into the Some lawyers who get their clients section of the prison reserved for off through their ties with the milipoliticals. They barricaded themselves tary judges exact high fees. A member in their section. The Discipline Comof the Human Rights Committee mittee took charge of the roll call was released on October 1, after his and handed over a report to the family paid 6,600 colons. The average guards. monthly wage of a worker in the
After that action, they got the cpaital is 450 colons; an agricultural guards to agree to come in unarmed worker gets 240. and accompanied by a member of the Discipline Committee, who called Q. On January 13, the rightthe roll. wing parliamentary opposition refused
Now, the prisoners go back to their to vote for renewing the state of siege cells at 9pm, and the doors and bars that has been in force for several have been removed. The rest of the years. Duarte has not been able to time, they move about freely in their get the two-thirds vote necessary, section. at least for the time being. What is the situation of the political prisoners The political prisoners seem to have managed to impose a sort of A. Any individual arrested and "dual power" the prison. charged with a political crime can Can you explain what happens before be held for 72 hours by the security imprisonment? bodies. But, recently this limit has
A. Some 75 per cent of the not been respected. political prisoners are from peasant The situation is complex, because backgrounds. Many of them have not taken part in FMLN activities, but whether they are in Mariona or Ilopanthey are considered to be part of its go, have been jailed under Decree social base and therefore are accused No. 50 of the state of siege. Not of collaborating with, or membership long ago, one of Duarte's stooges, of, the FMLN. Acevedo Perola, announced
According to Decree No. 50, in that a bill is going to be submitted force under the state of siege, the to the legislative assembly to replace army or the police can detain a citizen No. 50. Its context is not they suspect of belonging to the FMLN for two weeks. Personally, I think that they are
During that period, the detainee going to introduce reforms reflecting has no right of defence. This time is the international pressures used by the security forces to force to bear in the United Nations. They confessions through torture. Such are going to alter the facade without confessions are extrajudicial inasmuch changing the content.
International Viewpoint 4 May 1987
WESTERN EUROPF this gave rise to certain internationalist concerns about solidarity and even internationalist identification, especially with the French movement of December 1986.
However, these struggles were not confined to fightbacks against governa radicalization that has been underway for several years among youth. People have begun to talk about a "new generation." This term should be used with circumspection so as to
A NEW RISE of youth mobilizations has occurred over a wide spectrum of countries over the past couple of years. At the end of 1986, a number of major movements coincided. Two major European governments, the French and the Spanish, were thrown on the defensive. young people.
After a decade of pronouncements by the bourgeois press and. pundits that the youth revolt was a thing of the past, a new rebel generation has clearly come on the scene.
CLAUDE GABRIEL
Very broad mobilizations of youth have occurred in the recent period
Western Europe. This happened first of all in France, where struggles by highschool and university students reached a level unprecedented since
May 1968; and then in Spain, where the youth are dealing a serious blow to the social democratic government's
The mobilizations
Greece and Belgium should also be noted. This "agitation"
on the part of youth in school was preceded in
1985 by a powerful movement of highschool students against
Outside Europe, in Quebec, student movement reacted in October against thes government's free-enterprise project and obstructed its implepolicies have been advanced in the dominated countries, provoking the same sort of student mobilization. The best example is the Mexican student movement. (See International Viewpoint, April 6, 1987.) But many others taken place over the last year against the university austerity plans prompted by the IMF, for instance, in Senegal, Madagascar and Brazil.
All of this is no coincidence but rather represents a systematic attack by the governments against certain educational gains. The objective is to cut state spending and apply an austerity policy to the educational system as a whole. As always in such cases, the very prosaic aim of cutting social spending is being dissimulated by hypocritical talk about improving education, adjusting it to the "modern the need for admission
In some countries, youth, highschool students and university stu-
International Viewpoint 4 May 1987 fought back massively these often similar attacks. However, the political circumstances from being identical every1985 came after several grave defeats for the working class, in particular the failure of the factory councils movement in 1984.
The mobilization in France marked a notable initial change in the social situation, and was not without an on the railway strike that followed it. The Spanish movement also started up in a difficult period for workers' struggles. Relationship to workers' movements therefore, developed in very different tionship with the struggles of the working class is the more contradictory for that. While in Belgium, the of workers' strikes in recent years could serve as a school for the mobilizations, elsewhere relationship has not been so automatic. On the other hand, in France and Spain at least, the youth mobilizarevival of workers' struggles.
Despite this diversity, all these mobilizations were massive and were occasions for important debates or experiences regarding united demo. cratic organization of the struggle.
The idea that young people in general were fighting back against the attacks started to develop among the youth. And avoid improper interpretations. But it does reflect a certain number of special features of the social and political experience shared by these austerity started to be imposed in most European countries in the mid-1970s (with the excep. tion of Italy), there were no great youth mobilizations. The first wave of bourgeois attacks had only a very marginal impact on the school
And youth unemployment was barely beginning, except again for Italy. Finally, the first sections oi the working class to be hit by the capitalist crisis suffered major defeats, and this created a great uncertainty among wage workers in general and youth about how to respond to
"generation" of the late 1970s was, in its way, of the doubt and confusion of a large part of labor in the same period
If today's youth seem to be taking quite a different attitude, that is not the result of an abrupt change in behavior. First of all, the governments have decided now more serious attacks against education as a whole. Secondly, a lot of these youth see nothing ahead of them but the economic crisis.
Up until now, the youth did understand that it was possible to fight together and to confront the successfully. But or four years, there have been signs of a radicalization of the new generation. For example, there was the massive involvement of young people in the anti-war, environmental and anti-racist movements. In Spain, the anti-NATO movement opened up the way for a blossoming of structures for mobilizing In France, the marches against racism mobilized essentially young people from the highschools on November 1, 1985, there was a strike of 150,000 highschool students
However, with the Italian highschool movement of 1985 and then the big French and Spanish mobilizations in 1986 and 1987 something new appeared. The youth went into the streets in a completely indepen-
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