Solidarity to Portugal from Rotterdam
CPH - 25.04.2009 13:41
In the morning of wednesday the 22nd at the hour called for a concentration in Portugal, a group of Portuguese Immigrants went to the Portugues Consulate of Rotterdam in order to fax a protest text to the Court of Oeiras, where at that time would be starting the 3rd session of the trial against the "25 of Caxias", accused of being the leaders of a Mutiny that occurred in a Portuguese prison in the year of 1996.
In the morning of wednesday the 22nd at the hour called for a concentration in Portugal, a group of Portuguese Immigrants went to the Portugues Consulate of Rotterdam in order to fax a protest text to the Court of Oeiras, where at that time would be starting the 3rd session of the trial against the "25 of Caxias", accused of being the leaders of a Mutiny that occurred in a Portuguese prison in the year of 1996.
On previous sessions, solidarity demonstrations where held at the door of the court, and some international solidarity was shown from Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela, where also the Portuguese Consulate was place for a solidair meeting, and in the latter a Portuguese Stete office was trashed.
The text sent follows:
"Today, April the 22nd of 2009, in the court of Oeiras, it follows the third session of the so called "25 de caxias" trial.
Today, thirteen years after the events, the Portuguese state is trying to invert history through its juridical system, denying the "trial" which it was submitted to during the years of 1994 until 1996, and trying to convict 25 people, using them as scapegoats of the situation created by society in general and the state in particular.
During those years, intense agitations were lived inside Portuguese prisons, product of legitimate and wide movement of protest against the miserable and undignifying conditions of the prisons, the humiliating and inhuman treatment given by the prison guards, and the general corruption of the penitentiary institution.
In those times, all this was acknowledged by the numerous denouncements, hunger strikes and other protests inside the prisons; amplified by the media repercussion that was visible from the outside on a daily basis, the decadent and unsustainable situation of the jails, and by the social critics, that furthermore openly questioned the existence of the prison system; some of them in those specific conditions; some of them in its totality.
Then it would have been impossible and unthinkable to submit 25 people in trial for a mutiny that was predictable and in which the prisoners could "only" lose all that they already didn't have; while the people truly responsible the situation had always everything to gain.
Today, apparently everything is possible in a Portugal with a big mouth of thirty five years of democracy, and with the belly full of miseries, even one prison in Monsanto which by unthinkable and intolerable reasons, gets the nickname of "Portuguese Guantanamo".
Let it also be today then, the day that it is registered in the papers of the national bureaucracy, that a group of old and young Portuguese emigrants in the Netherlands, don't accept this trial; due to all explanations previously given and for all of those not exposed. We don't accept the forgery of history, and we wish to end with the role of silent observers, of this and other events in our homeland.
This trial should have never begun, and more than its end we wish that these 25 people will never be called by the name of that or any other prison.
The group of people gathered in the
Portuguese Consulate of Rotterdam in the 22nd of April 2009,
and all the others who went to work. "
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