Letter from Tamara about the anti-prison struggle

Translated by This Is Our Job

From Liberación Total (June 28, 2010):

It only takes a quick look around to see that we live and breathe prison. We are born in chains and condemned to endure a miserable, empty existence subject to the control of a System of domination that enslaves and feeds on our lives, and whose best weapons against dissent are the prisons charged with sowing fear among those who break the law and clash with order.

Prison is one of the System’s strongest pillars. It was made for those who don’t submit, for those who—consciously or not—exemplify the misery created by the System.

In addition, it’s now a very profitable business. Prison is one of power’s cruelest tools of vengeance: punishment. Inside prison, injustice and abuse abound, revealing the brutal aspiration to destroy people. There, everything is designed to annihilate; to create a meager subsistence; to make one feel the most intense loneliness; to distance; to erase dreams and memories, which are lost to time by those whose minds and voices are unable to scale the walls that use routine and habit to cage something more than bodies. Support and solidarity must then become visible, strike, and shatter the concrete and cold bars, preventing them from silencing the voices within.

When we talk about Repression, we sometimes adopt the attitude of victims, which obstructs our view of reality; namely, that we are immersed in an open war, in which repression is no more than the System’s response to any attack on its foundations. It’s an attempt to restrain us, and that’s why we should always assume a position of conflict, and keep fighting.

The struggle against prison concerns all of us who want to retake control of our lives, who refuse the dying of the light, who don’t want to take part in their lies, who resist further perpetuating the silence of a society that has become complicit in all that tries to steal our lives and oppress us.

Every day, with every gesture, at every moment, we have the opportunity to seize our freedom.

An embrace for all, filled with rebellion, liberty, and complicity.

Every strength, courage, support, and solidarity to Alfons, Nuria, Rodri, Gabriel, Marco, Juan Carlos, Diego, and so many other compas who are struggling and suffering the consequences of repression: May your cries never be silenced, nor your rebel hearts forgotten.

My deepest scorn and hatred for our executioners. It’s not going to be easy for them to defeat us.

DOWN WITH THE WALLS!

—Tamara; June 6, 2010