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A Letter from GRAPO Prisoner - Marcos Martín Ponce

Marcos Martín Ponce – Political Prisoner Of GRAPO,
From Fleury Merogis Prison, France

On the 8th Of August they (the Police) took me out to the Palais (something similar to the National Audience Chamber in France) for another extradition trail, I have now lost count of how many I’ve been through already, anyhow both to and from it the Gendarmes escort in charge of searches wanted me bend down naked.

As I refused to comply, four of them got in to the small and dirty cage (Police Cell) where they do the searches and while two of them jumped on top of me to immobilize me, the other two started to kick me on the legs and punch me in the stomach until I fell on the ground. The then proceeded to further kick me in the ribs.

It is this way as nobody knows (or nobody wants to know!) that behind this façade that the ‘Democratic France’ presents in front of public option that these dungeons exist. A place were they can do anything they want to us.

The impunity that these people have is such that when you are to go in front of the tribunal, and you object to what has happened to you they then mockingly accuse you of obstruction and lying while they look at each other, smiling sarcastically.

And even they have the audacity to leave you like a liar, arguing, “that in France they respect t the Rights of Man, as since a long time ago it existed as a democratic state and blah blah…” It is incredible the arrogance they have. You just feel like spitting in their face and telling them, although they want to ignore you, they are fascists which not only protects the torturers but they are encouraging them to feel they can act with impunity.

I can assure you that this I the law of the jungle. Yes, I know that in Spain, especially in prisons and in detention points the Civil Guard and the National Police take acts of torture much further (I learned recently of brutal tortures on the PCE(r) David Garaboa by the National Police several months ago), but not because these characters haven’t reached such a sinister level I’m not going to stop denouncing them. Moreover, I want the world to know that although they humiliate us, we are still here and standing firm, resisting. My revolutionary dignity is still intact, even stronger.

The people should never forget that the political prisoners that are now being tortured, dispersed, isolated etc, once that decided to give the step forward towards a consequent struggle in the benefit of all the people without asking any benefit in exchange.

Anybody who is conscious of what is happening and fails to act within their possibilities, it is in some ways, looking the other way and so facilitating the fascist oppressors. And those who are not looking the other way should remind them so.

Each one should look inside themselves and tell themselves, once being conscious of what is happening, can carry on only preoccupying themselves with themselves, and never taking part with the issues involved, because if it is this way, all their so-called titles of anti-fascist, of communist, of anarchist or of progressives should be thrown to the rubbish bin.

This is time to react and that these actions are not left without a response for each tortured prisoner, there should be the most consequent denunciations to let them see that the political prisoners are not alone. That we are not an exchange coin with which they can blackmail or intimidate the Resistance Movement, that we are revolutionaries, and therefore we are part of this struggle of the people, and that the fascists are not going to get away with it every time they want to!

TO RESIST IS TO WIN! WE ARE STILL WINNING!



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What follows is the translated text of a political prisoner now incarcerated in a Madrid Gulag. Here David Garaboa recounts for the world the brutal torture he received, a practiced common by the Spanish State in the year 2005. This text maybe freely and widely distributed in a gesture of international solidarity.

Tortured: But In A “Good Mood”!

I was arrested around 20:30 hours between the border of Port Bou (Girona) and France. After I was asked to produce my documentation, several national policemen took me to the police station were after refusing to identify myself with my real name I got hit several times in my face and kicked in my legs and one side. AS I started to bleed severely through my nose and mouth, they gave me toilet paper to clean myself and because I refused to do so, they started to rub it violently around my face. Later on, appeared another police man in civilian clothes, who will later be the one who would lead the interrogation in Barcelona, in order for me identify myself started to hit me in the stomach and in the head. During one of those hits, his watch broke which was used as an excuse to give me another beating.
After they changed the plastic tape which they used to hold my hands on my back for a pair of hand cuffs that they tightened brutally. They threw me on the ground facing upwards to step on my chest and stomach, a thing that provoked great pain on my wrists.

Later they told me that they were going to take me to the Province Information Brigade police station in Barcelona and that if I was going to keep silent they were going to stop in the woodland of Girona and shoot me. While in the car they kept assaulting me and when we reached a poorly illuminated section of the leisure area of the motorway they made me step out of the car to “take a walk around the woods
were nobody would know what would happen”. As I kept quite they pushed me violently back in the car and told me that once we get to Barcelona, their superiors will be asking them for “quick results”.
Once in Barcelona, they put me in a cell and the ones who later will participate in the interrogations paraded before me. Amongst them, of course, “the good police man” offered to help me if I was going to talk. However the first three days on in communication were characterised for the physical torture: they hit and twisted my
penis and testicles, they pulled my pubic hair and beard with latex cloves and so on.
This time though, different from Port Bou, they were very careful of not leaving any marks on me. The threatening was also constant and assorted. They insisted that I would end up talking and added up that: “if we need to use the bag, the vaulting horse or the electric trods then we will, and if we have to hang you by your balls from the ceiling we will also do it. You must be certain that you are not going to come out alive from here without telling us what you know, we have impunity. For the judges in the National Audience Chamber you are nothing but a fucking terrorist, and if a trip-up and end-up killing yourself in these premises nobody’s going to claim nothing for it.” And all this combined with the lack of sleep and rest, the
obligation to keep standing up, the humiliations, the insults etc.

In the same way they used the emotional blackmailing and the use of drugs. And although I refused to accept their food and their drink, except for the tap water, they opted to spray the floor underneath the door with a liquid that provoked me hallucinations: I could see my skin tearing apart, snakes and lizards around the floor, and the walls seemed to adopt different shapes and relieves, a thing that provoked me a certain paranoia when I tried to lean on them. I guess that in order to increase the paranoia they put in the cell a kind of blanket that they inflated from the outside and that for me had the shape of a cage in which there were several rats and snakes. I know they were not real because I stamped a chair on them.
Another of the effects that the drugs provoked was disorientation, dazed condition, slow reflexes and a great dryness in my mouth. Moreover, they were controlling all my movements and reactions through a camera placed inside the cell.

Regarding the emotional blackmailing, they pretended to have arrested my former partner in A Coruna for which they disguised a police woman with a look-alike hairstyle and clothing. They also tried to make me believe they had arrested my actual partner, and they threatened me to jail different friends who didn’t know about my communist militancy under ‘collaboration with an armed band’ if I didn’t answer each of their questions. Another trick they used to persuade me was to
interrogate me in a room full of ‘trophies’ of my dead comrades assassinated and fallen in struggle.

In the last 48 hours of the five day they had me held, they soften things down: They stopped hitting me and they aloud me to change my blooded clothes into
clean ones. Maybe it had something to do with it that they provoked me a sever bleeding in my nose and had to call the emergency services to take me to hospital on two occasions. What I am convinced of is that they had orders to take me to the
National Audience Chamber without visible torture marks on me. Although it seemed that the judge Maria Teresa Palacios didn’t care that they brought me in front of her with obvious signs of torture and violence on my face as she didn’t enquire about them. And in the same way that I did in the police station, I refused to give a declaration.

And it is because in spite of the promises of change and democratic regeneration of the G.A.L (State sponsored Terrorist Group) I have verified in my own flesh that torture isn’t disagreeable with ‘the law’. The catch word seems to be: Torture yes,
but not much noticeable. Even though when I was put in prison I still had the effects of the beatings I received: serious injuries in my nose, mouth, and left eye swollen, a twisted and broken tooth, several wounds on my scalp and on my right leg, circulation problems in my thumb and right hand, and scares on both wrists. Besides
that, I feel well in a good mood and ready to carry on fighting, now in this front, which are the extermination centres of the fascist Spanish state.

David Garaboa Bonillo
Militant of the Communist Party Of Spain (reconstituted)
Prisión de Soto del Real. Julio
2005.