FIES is everywhere

In July 2005 the Spanish anarchist Roberto Catrino López was arrested in Amsterdam after he had escaped from the notorious FIES regime in Zaragoza, Spain a few months before.

From fear for being handed over to the Spanish state, Roberto has chosen to stay silent about his captivity in The Netherlands until today. However, the Department for Justice in Spain has tracked this comrade down and has requested for his extradition this week. Roberto that infect is with HIV want however under no circumstances to return to the hard reality of solitary confinement and abuse under the FIES regime. This prisoner is ill and must be treated accordingly as to experience a humane continuation of his remaining life.

Roberto is a social prisoner that was doing a 18 year sentence, of which the largest part in isolation. His initial sentence concerned only eight years but through his share in all sorts of mutinies, walk- and hunger strikes and flight attempts this accumulated meanwhile to 18 years. Only because he didn’t want to accept the reality of torture and resistance was the only option.

The FIES (Module of Internees under Special Supervision) regime is an answer to the many coordinated uprisings and mutinies that have taken place in the seventies and eighties. To break the resistance special prisons inside the existing prisons were created where the detainees became isolated from each other. This goes together with continuous solitary confinement, censorship, and abuse in modules that we generally consider as dungeons. The prisoners are completely left to the arbitrariness and hate of the guards. People are transferred continuously, are impeded contact with the outside world as much as possible and ill persons are not taken care decently. Each year people die in their cells through physical problems or the lack of hope to live on.

Roberto has had to live for years under this terror and doesn’t have the strength to return to this. Currently he’s staying in the Penitentiary Hospital in The Hague where he’s recovering from a double pneumonia after the prison of Lelystad, where he was being held, refused to treat his illness symptoms. Just when he was on the edge of dying, he got transfered to a hospital.

Roberto shouldn’t be subjected to what has happened to other ill prisoners that passed away in or due to their life in prison. The death of the anarchist Xose Tarrio in January 2005 stands engraved yet freshly in our collective memory. This young man, that has a similar history to Roberto Catrino Lopez, suffered from AIDS and passed away just after its release. In the heaviest of this devastating disease he was being kept far away from his family and didn’t get the freedom that was necessary to be sick. Unfortunately this is only a single example from a long series of deaths in prison.

We demand therefore that Roberto Catrino Lopez is not handed over but is given freedom and the care that he needs. We’ll not leave him alone and will fight for his freedom ! More info will follow this week.

Sick persons in the hospital, prisoners in the streets !

Anarchist Black Cross Amsterdam

April 15, 2005

Write letters of support (in English or Spanish) :

Roberto Catrino Lopez, P.I. Haaglanden, Lokatie Scheveningen-Oost, Penitentiair Ziekenhuis, Postbus 87810, 2508 DE The Hague (The Netherlands)