Argentina: not crazy or dead

Sergio Ferrari. My comrades and I lived under a brutal system of repression. The military treated Coronda as an experiment where they tried to psychologically destroy their political opponents. In pavilion 5, where we were kept, we spent 23 or 24 hours per day in solitary confinement. We were mostly alone in our cells, or we shared with one other person. We had no rights: we couldn’t read, sing, exercise or work. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other through the window. Everything was forbidden. We were allowed one hour outside, where we walked in a small yard, but we had to walk alone and weren’t allowed to talk to anyone. During this hour, we were relatively free, which lent itself to blackmail: any punishment could lead to losing this hour of “recreation”. We could be punished for whistling in our cells, for example. From the second year on, we were allowed visits. The authorities would also blackmail us over this.

The aim of these detention conditions was to accelerate our destruction because we were political prisoners.

One of the national police commanders who ran the prison told me and the other inmates that we would only get out “crazy or dead”, meaning that we would be unable to be political agents or opponents. The destruction of the human being was the regime’s way of ensuring that if the person ever got out of the high-security prison, they would be unable to rejoin the political or trade union struggle.

SF. Some “democracies” are based on dictatorial regimes. But in the case of Argentina under the dictatorship, the essential fact of the oppression of prisoners took place on two levels. Firstly, there was the day-to-day regime of detention: the more rigid it is, the more the prisoner is confronted with their own personal and psychological fragility. Secondly, there is the question of the rights of political prisoners. During the dictatorship, 80% of political prisoners were imprisoned without trial. We were imprisoned based on our degree of activism or our membership in particular organisations. This led to a horrible situation: when there is no trial or no sentence is pronounced, there is no right to defence and no clear punishment. We were at the mercy of the national executive branch. We didn’t know if our imprisonment would last one month, six months, one year or twenty-five years. We were imprisoned at a time when the dictatorship was still ongoing. The entire situation was unclear, and the political circumstances were unstable. We didn’t have a clear idea of the future.

A reader might ask themselves how a person can bear these conditions for one, two, three or four years. This is a key point, because it is what brought us together to produce this book.

Under these conditions, my comrades and I were very creative and established collective resistance to the regime. This everyday resistance enabled us to counteract its impact. When we were entirely isolated, we illegally built a little device that we called “the periscope”. It was a small piece of glass stuck to a piece of straw from a broom with burnt breadcrumbs to make a kind of little mirror. We would slide it under the door to observe the comings and goings of the guards. When they had gone, we could carry out acts of resistance: we spoke to each other through the window or emptied the toilets so that we could communicate through the pipes. We started to lead our own lives. We gave each other history lessons, told each other about films, shared all kinds of things. That was the extraordinary part of the whole experience. We were all young, between 20 and 25 years old, and had so much generosity. Our political outlook brought us together and allowed us to resist. This was the basis of our survival.

SF. Last year, seven of my comrades and I had the opportunity to visit Coronda prison. It is still in operation, but since 1979 it has housed common law detainees. During the visit, I saw that my pavilion was still standing and still in use. We were able to talk to the prisoners, who are held there under an “open house” regime. I had the feeling that it was very different. There is a huge difference between spending 23 or 24 hours per day in total isolation and being able to share your existence with your fellow human beings; or between being deprived of the right to read, learn and have contact with the outside world, and having the right to receive letters, packages and phone calls.

In my opinion, prison is still inherently an instrument of repression everywhere in the world. In that sense, every prison is a political prison. The rules of a political system underly the incarceration of a common law detainee.

There are some constants in the symbolic role of the prison, but there is nonetheless a big difference between a repressive dictatorial regime based on total isolation and the experience of incarceration in a prison that is overcrowded but where life is permitted. Overall, I think it’s a little easier to serve a sentence under these conditions than under the conditions I faced.