A few simple words. Statement from comrade Ignacio Avaca
There are many things I’d like to say to you and in my opinion words will always fall short to express the intensity and particularity of what I feel. I would like to thank each and every one of you without having to repeat “thank you”, but rather with a hand when you need it, with deeds, not letters. However, at this moment, perhaps the only action I have left is to continue resisting as I have done till now, together with my blood brother, and with the subversive brothers and sisters here in Rancagua, Santiago or any prison in the world.
Not a day goes by that I don’t long for a taste of the freedom “of the street” which, although often illusory and now an open-air prison, materially-speaking at times and immaterially at many others, is undoubtedly preferable to being in this barren prison yard. Not a day passes that I do not look at the poplars moving in the wind, high and far away from barbed wire, concrete and the glares of the gendarmes, and wish I were caressing the foliage of some tree, for the warmth of a complicit embrace, or the intensity of my eyes meeting those of someone I haven’t seen for a long time. But I also know that all this is part of what I have chosen, that although it hurts me and I do not wish prison on anyone, this destiny has never been anything new; it has never been anything new to resist it and try to erode its structures (physical and mental) as much as we can, break its rigidity and confinement. And, although there are things at which I know I have failed or which could have gone better in terms of my experience here, I am sure there is nothing I cannot learn from it, for my present constant self-criticism has always been not a necessity but a life decision which, although painful at times, brings with it the one thing that I like to think is a “universal law”: constant change.
For the rest of this life (and perhaps others), I will be grateful to friends, kindred spirits, siblings and loves, and even when I am flooded with rage, grief and powerlessness, I know that sooner or later, in one way or another, I will see them again.
“(…)with a loving heart that bares itself to the comrade, with one hand tender and the other armed (…)
