The Deepest Spot in the Caves

There are beings who are kept apart from other people for one reason or other, like the nymph Echo who was confined to the depths of the caves and ravines, where no one could see her, no one could hear her, except when she was interrogated, thus concealing the world of her existence.

This is mythology, it’s true, but some men and women of flesh and blood are also kept apart from people and excluded from the world, and to this end, the deepest parts of the caves are fashioned out of iron and concrete, parts so deep that very few people can even see what’s down there, so deep that the Sun can’t reach that far, so deep that many don’t even know these parts exist or where they are located.

These places are the maximum security prisons, where, right next to hardened criminals unable to lead a more or less normal life or develop relatively healthy relationships, other people are confined who are not only able to do all this, but who fight for the betterment of society and relations between human beings, for justice to be real, for ethics to no longer be relegated to speeches and books, and for freedom and human rights to be the true heritage of everyone.

The former are condemned for victimizing society, and the latter for being its conscience.


That’s what a maximum security prison is: the deepest spot in the caves. But what are these places like?

I don’t know about the rest of them. Very few people on the outside do, and it’s even harder for somebody on the inside to find out anything about them. Just as sunlight can’t get in, one’s gaze can’t get out, not even to rest on the areas where other people walk and live. What I can tell you is what this one is like, the one where I am right now. I, like Martí, can say: “I know the monster well, for I’ve lived in its entrails.”

Five hundred pages would be little space to say what this prison is like, not only because there’s a lot to say about it, but also because I’m now a victim of the Maximum Security Syndrome, and one of its symptoms is that instead of listening to others, you want to talk and talk interminably, even if only to a sheet of paper or to oneself in a long, drawn-out soliloquy. Why? Because for years it’s been impossible to talk to more than a few people with whom you have anything in common, which isn’t really talking. Maybe you have an unconscious desire to recover words lost, as in the case of that lady in Eduardo Galeano’s book, El Libro de los Abrazos (The Book of Hugs), who has silently endured tremendous abuse her whole life long, but just before she dies bursts out with an unstoppable string of reproaches and insults that she’s had to hush for so long. Or maybe it’s because you fear that if an organ isn’t used you may lose the gift of speech, and you want to use it so as not to become tongue-tied or immobile, full of shame, inhibited, knowing that maybe someday your services will be needed when you finally leave this place of lost words.

What I can do is try to contain my increasingly restless (which doesn’t necessarily mean more skillful) pen, and say what’s most important in a few words. I hope I can do this without feeling frustrated by this limitation, which wouldn’t be at all unusual in this place of continual frustrations.

And what’s strange about feeling frustrated when you can never be sure of getting what you expect? Everything here can change from one minute to the next and what was your right yesterday may not exist today or may be considered a crime, which really means you have no rights at all. The postcard that is allowed one day may be cause for punishment the next, and the same is true of a drawing or a letter received. Having the words of a song written out can cause you to be written up, not to mention having an unauthorized garment. Many prisoners wait for visitors in vain because they can be denied entry for any pretext whatsoever. Other inmates expect to be granted a transfer to a minimum security prison because it’s their right, but this is arbitrarily denied. How can one not feel permanently frustrated in these conditions where there’s no room for certainty.

And I can vouch for all that I’m saying, not because someone else told me about it but because I myself have lived through it, and I’ve looked at it closely because it’s the only thing I can directly observe.

I learn about what’s happening on the outside through the people who visit me. Here, we must learn to see through the eyes of others, and we see what’s going on in the outside world through what they tell us,

Likewise, we hear through the ears of these visitors, and they are intermediaries that allow the voices of yet other people to reach us. It’s as if they were voicing the laments repeated by the nymph Echo so that we can hear the voices of those who wish to speak to us, because this is the place where one hears through the ears of others.

And speaking of speech, how can my voice reach you except in a pitch that is not my own? That’s because this is the place where you learn to speak through mouths that aren’t your own. Our voices couldn’t be heard so far away if someone else weren’t willing to lend us their own.

Without our visitors we would be blind, deaf, and dumb, as is the case with many people who have been abandoned simply for being locked up here and who have practically ceased to exist for the outside world.

Yes, those of us inside are dependent on others for almost everything we know about the world. And not only that. If you don’t use your memory it gets weak. Just as it gets harder to memorize new things, it gets harder and harder to remember what was once engraved in your mind, and you need help that invariably begins with “Do you remember that time when...?” Because without that invaluable aid, that piece of past life would be irreparably lost. So this is also the place where you learn to remember through the memory of others.

How many things I would have forgotten without someone to remind me! How many things I might forget if I didn’t rely on the soliloquy of my other self, who asks me about what he’s interested in remembering! That doesn’t seem so terrible, and it wouldn’t be, except that with each memory lost, we stop living a little. Do you want to know something? Let me tell you before I forget: Like many others who are here in this place, and I think like many others in similar places, it doesn’t bother me that other people forget about me because even if they don’t remember me, I’ll keep on existing. What bothers me is that I could forget them. Because what would I be if I forgot what I’ve experienced, what I’ve been, and the people I’ve known? I’d no longer be a father if I forgot I had a daughter. I wouldn’t be a husband if I forgot I’ve had a wife and loved her. I wouldn’t be a rebel if I forgot each and every injustice that I’ve witnessed and fought against.

What meaning would life have in this place if I forgot that there were a thousand reasons for being what brought me here? I wouldn’t want to forget a single one of those reasons, nor forget any of the people I’ve known. As long as I remember them, it doesn’t matter whether or not they remember me. And I ask the people who read this or hear of this to forgive me for being so egotistical and saying that it doesn’t matter whether they pay me any mind or not. For me, it’s important to remember them because I want to keep on being what I’ve been. I want to keep on existing. I want my life to have meaning, and I think that’s what every political prisoner in a maximum security prison wants.

I don’t know if everyone will understand me, and I suppose some might condemn me for what I’m saying, but if that’s the case, I hope I’ll be allowed to adequately defend myself because I want to experience what it feels like to do that in accord with the rules of justice. Since I’ve been here I’ve lost that right because I’m one more person who was condemned as soon as the decision was made to lock me up here. Even before the judge gave his verdict and before I ever crossed the threshold of a court, the decision had already been made that I was guilty, no matter what national or international laws were violated. Maximum security prison is a sentence dictated before trial.

And I can assure you that this is true. Who could defend himself before judges and magistrates who are willing to find you guilty at all costs just because they’ve been given the high sign? With notable honorable exceptions, those who judge here, make their decisions over and above the law, in reality functioning as a Special Tribunal that makes its decisions according to special laws, all of which is expressly prohibited by law for all citizens, but is a prohibition that doesn’t count for those of us here.

Is it possible to adequately defend yourself if you don’t have a copy of the Constitution, or the Penal Code, or any law, or any treatise of law? That’s been the case with me and with many others for the last four years, in which we’re not even allowed to receive a single volume of case law. All such things are “prohibited items.”

Defending oneself in a trial or waging a legal struggle against the abuses suffered here or trying to get a transfer to another kind of prison is doomed to defeat because a maximum security prisoner is also extra-legally condemned to not being able to defend himself.

In other kinds of jails, a prisoner can keep up with what’s going on in the world because this is not prohibited by law and disinformation is not necessarily part of the sentence imposed. But here it’s different; from the time you get here you’re condemned to being disinformed because receiving any newspaper or any magazine is prohibited. The only news you can get is what’s said on the commercial television news reports, whose mission is disinformation.

So I have no way of knowing what, if any, effect these lines will have. Neither can I feel the satisfaction of seeing them in print, which is one way thoughts can come alive even when you can’t convert them into action. For me they’re just a message in a bottle like the one a shipwrecked person throws into the sea, hoping that someone will find it and read what it says and know that some of us exist here whose ship capsized one day, and from that moment on we’ve been condemned to stop participating in journeys around the world, to be uninformed of them, and to fall behind in any advances made.

In another prison I could study and I might have even gotten a university degree, but not in this one, not now, because it’s prohibited. We’re not allowed to do this, which is a violation of the constitution. Yes, we can read, but not what we want to read, only what the authorities decide on. Every week (well, not really), we can choose a book from a list pared down to twenty or thirty by the time it gets to us, but it’s rare that any of those available are of any interest. There’s nothing in the law that says that a prisoner can’t get a book from his family or friends, but nobody here has been able to get a single one. For several months we couldn’t even read one approved by the institution just because the authorities said we couldn’t. A maximum security prison sentence means that you can’t study.

And how about health? Being here also means you can’t exercise your right to be healthy because even though medical services do exist that could possibly be adequate for treating the prisoners, they don’t fulfill their function or their function is ill-defined. Each inmate is periodically visited to compile documentary evidence of treatment, but you don’t get this treatment when you need it, in other words, when you’re sick, as if illnesses could be programmed to coincide with medical visits. And not only that. Medication is not dispensed with the regularity that is necessary for it to be effective; instead, interruptions are routine. So instead of combating infections or viruses, such practices only allow them to grow stronger. Does this matter to the authorities? Not in the least. It’s as if they wanted a prisoner to develop incapacitating illnesses, perhaps with the hope of making him less dangerous, whether that danger is imagined or real. Could this be true? Possibly. And if not, suffice it to say that there’ve been times when even exercises like push-ups, sit-ups, or yoga have been prohibited, thus converting them into activities that must be performed in secret at risk of sanctions.

For four years, we’ve had to sleep with the lights on in the cells despite the harm this does. We’ve also been deprived of a mirror although this affects one’s self-image. And there’ve been three-week periods when we’ve been forbidden to have a watch or a clock and we’ve had to stay awake from three or four o’clock in the morning until the count at six a.m., so has not to be caught unawares because this could mean isolation and the loss of our rights to family visits, phone calls, and yard. Sick people confined to the medical area are chained to their beds, thereby compounding their suffering with discomfort, complications, and humiliation.

I can’t stop here because I still have to tell about the beatings given to prisoners. In some cases the victims have informed me of them, and in others I’ve partially witnessed or at least heard them. Once I was listening when a man lost his life during a beating, and I’ve been told of other cases, one here and one in a similar prison, where people died under torture––the initiation ceremony and passageway to your cell.

Human rights? Their existence is not recognized here because once you put on that uniform, you can say good-bye to the status of human being you had before you were locked up here. This is what maximum security prison means: ceasing to be human and, instead, becoming a thing, an object, state property, as one of the functionaries here once told the prisoners in an outburst of honesty. State property? Yes, that’s what a maximum security prisoner is. That’s the way prison administrators think, or maybe I should say, the rulers. And they do rule supreme. The phrase of that famous French monarch fits them to a tee: “I am the State.” They don’t have to answer to anybody for torturing or murdering prisoners—not to the law, not to society.

It’s true, none of this is permitted by law. It happens here because this is a maximum security prison, a space not bound by laws that prevail in the national territory, an extra-territorial area resembling the embassy of another country, where national laws don’t prevail, but rather the laws of the country represented.

And what is the law that rules here? The law of those who are a law unto themselves. The law of absolute arbitrary action. The desires of those who wield power behind the power.

Do you worry about what might happen in the future in the society we live in? Were you moved or shaken by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Skinner’s Walden Two or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? I don’t know, but I was. It matters to me because I’m already living in a world like the one in those books, and I don’t like it a bit. Like Montag, I hate not being able to read what I want to. I don’t feel comfortable being under 24-hour-a-day surveillance by Big Brother, even in my cell. I don’t like it when all of us are punished for something one person did or when they condition us to renounce our rights or to fear to exercise them or to believe that we don’t have them.

No, I don’t like it a bit. And I like it even less when I think that what’s put into practice and experimented with here is exactly what some would like to see and are planning for the society as a whole. A maximum security prison is a world of total impotence for an individual. It’s the perfect society of tyrants that prefigures what could happen in the outside world.

I wish all of you who live out there where you can’t see the deepest spot in the caves would turn your head this way and look into what’s already a shining mirror of the future so that one day you won’t have to repeat that last line of the poem: "...then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up.”

I could stop here, and maybe I should, but I wouldn’t feel satisfied because with what I’ve said, I haven’t even recovered a small part of the words I’ve lost here. I still have an insatiable hunger for them like Tantalus had for food, a side-effect of the sentence imposed on us, one that lasts a whole life long. At least in the case of the political prisoners, our offense was akin to that of stealing nectar and ambrosia from Zeus to give it to men.

It’s not the only side-effect that I know will stay with me the day I leave here. Like Tantalus, I have a burning thirst. Maybe his was for water, but mine is for new knowledge, facts, information, or whatever, because after such a long drought, I’ll be like a sponge wanting to soak up everything.

Or maybe I’ll end up getting used to the lack of water and turn into a thorny cactus that doesn’t need much moisture because the greed of its thorns and the impermeability of its skin stores the small amount that reaches its roots. If that’s the case, maybe I’ll end up being functionally mute and won’t want to utter a single word even when there are many ears that could hear them.

And what will be the consequence of these years of isolation? Maybe the nearness of other people will feel uncomfortable, so much so that I’ll prefer solitude, a distance between myself and others, confinement in a small space considered as a kind of security area that I won’t want anybody else to violate; an isolated, restricted, ordered area where nothing falls outside the routine that protects against those fearful, unforeseen events. Maybe I’ll become moderately autistic and that will become part of the sentence implied in a prison like this one, a sentence that varies in length according to one’s personal characteristics.

Long-term impotence in a common criminal, especially one with psychopathic tendencies, can produce a desire to cruelly and arbitrarily exert the power of life and death in his own small sphere, compounded by a desire for vengeance generated in him by so much abuse. In a political prisoner, it can leave a considerable residue of fear of experiencing the same thing again and a deep desire for this not to happen to other people and a fear that it might. For some time, the effects of the sentence will be felt; it won’t automatically end upon release.

I’ve already mentioned a weaker memory as a side-effect of this prison and others like them, and I know it’s unavoidable that I won’t have the same ability to remember things that I had before I came here. I know it’ll be relatively easy to forget many things because the memory is selective and tends to forget the things that hurt the most. So I could end up forgetting a lot of what I’ve experienced here, but I don’t want that to happen. I want to remember everything I’ve seen, lived, and felt. I don’t want to forget anything because if I do, it won’t matter to me when the same things happen to other people. If I forget, I’ll close my eyes, my ears, and my mouth when I hear about something similar; If I do that, I’ll be as guilty as the victimizer, and I don’t want that to happen.

So I hope and desire that if one day I begin to forget, you’ll remind me and reproach me, because sometimes that’s the best way to remember.

Jacobo Silva Nogales, December 6, 2008

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To Mumia, who I respect and admire,
and who I know is still resisting
after all these years of prison
in a place that could in no way be better than this one.


Greetings, brother.

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Jacobo Silva Nogales and his wife Gloria Arenas Agis were in the leadership of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo Insurgente (ERPI), captured in an operation in 1999 and tortured for several days. From their cells, they participate in the Zapatista Other Campaign and continue to fight their illegal incarceration. In effect, the State is trying them twice for the same offense in violation of the Constitution and illegally increasing their sentences for charges of rebellion and property damage.

Jacobo is an artist and several of his 300 paintings can be seen at http://www.geocities.com/cartas_para/ART3.html .

For more information: http://comiteverdadjusticiaylibertad.blogspot.com
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