Organization and education among Salvadoran political prisoners

Crime, Law and Social Change

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 17-41

  Hammond, John L ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21344449080     PISSN: 09254994     EISSN: 15730751     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF00227365     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. India: Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990);
2. Perú: José María Arguedas, El Sexto (Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1974),
3. a fictional account; Deborah Poole and Gerardo Renique, Peru: Time of Fear (London: Latin American Bureau, 1992);
4. José Luís Rénique, "The Revolution behind Bars," NACLA Report on the Americas, 24, No. 4) (December 1990/January 1991), 17-19;
5. conscientious objectors: Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 80;
6. Northern Ireland: Bobby Sands, One Day in my Life (Chicago: Banner Press, 1985);
7. Chile: David Truscello, "Prison under Pinochet," The Radical Teacher 16 (December, 1979), 13-14;
8. Palestine: Samir Abed-Rabbo, and Doris Safie, eds., The Palestine Uprising: FACTS Information Committee (Jerusalem: Assoc of Arab-American University Graduates Press, 1990);
9. Don Peretz, The Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990);
10. South Africa: Fikile Bam, "Life as a Political Prisoner," Monitor (1989), 49-53;
11. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994);
12. US blacks: Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
13. This paper is part of a larger study of popular education and guerrilla war in El Salvador. Between 1989 and 1994 I interviewed one prisoner and eight former prisoners (identified in this paper by pseudonyms). In addition, working as a volunteer at the nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of El Salvador (CDHES) in 1989, I talked with or read the testimonies of many former prisoners and visited three prisons. With one exception, it was not possible to interview prisoners formally, but I was able to meet them and observe the physical conditions of the prisons. Finally, while working with the CDHES, I was myself captured and detained, first by the army and then in a Treasury Police jail. This experience, though brief, contributed dramatically to my sense of what it is like to be a political prisoner.
14. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in El Salvador (Washington: Organization of American States, 1979), 65-122;
15. Salvador Cayetano Carpio, Secuestro y capucha en un país del "mundo libre" (Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1979);
16. Ana Guadalupe Martínez, Las Cárceles Clandestinas de El Salvador: Libertad por el Secuestro de un Oligarca (No publisher listed, 1978).
17. Amnesty International Report 1982 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1982), 137.
18. Prisoners who were released, whether in an amnesty or individually, feared being targeted by death squads. Many of them left the country for exile as soon as possible, including at least 383 of those released in the 1983 amnesty and three of the informants interviewed in this research. Their fears were warranted: one day after the 1983 amnesty, eleven beheaded corpses were dumped outside Mariona prison, and released political prisoners were reported murdered or disappeared on other occasions. Claribel Alegría and D.J. Flakoll, Para romper el silencio: Resistencia y lucha en las cárceles salvadoreñas (México: Ediciones Era, 1984), 244;
19. Instituto de Derechos Humanos, Universidad Centroamericana "Jose Simeón Cañas," Los Derechos Humanos en 1987 (San Salvador: IDHUCA, 1988), 60-62.