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Summary
On September 17, political prisoners Edwin Espinal and Raúl Alvarez were acquitted! Host Karen Spring shares her experiences of working to free Edwin and Raúl while thanking each and every person who helped them along the way. This small victory shows the power of national and international solidarity.
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Transcript
Karen Spring:
After three days in court on September 17, political prisoners Edwin Espinal, my partner, and Raúl Álvarez were acquitted of all charges. After almost a four-year struggle, hundreds of solidarity letters and calls, several social media campaigns, almost a dozen trips to Ottawa and Washington, we finally did it. This is a huge victory for Edwin, Raúl, the Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners in Honduras, for myself, and for all the people that made calls, wrote letters, and campaigned to free Edwin and Raúl. Honestly, this acquittal is an example of the power of solidarity. So many of you contributed. Many of you either wrote me before or after the trial, wishing me luck, and making it known that you stood with us.
Welcome to the Honduras Now podcast. This podcast shares human rights stories from Honduras and connects them with global issues and North American policy. I’m your host, Karen Spring, a longtime human rights activist that has lived in Honduras for over a decade. Thanks so much for listening.
The day of the verdict I managed to actually get inside the courtroom. While it may seem like something that should happen naturally, seeing how I’m married to one of the defendants, COVID-19 and the arbitrary nature of the Honduran justice system meant that there was no guarantee that this would happen. As I sat waiting for the verdict in the court, I felt the weight of the past years on my shoulders. This would be the moment that would decide so much of my future, after defining so much of my recent past. The lack of preparation by the prosecution throughout the trial, had me feeling somewhat confident we would get the verdict we wanted. But again, in Honduras, justice is never guaranteed. Sitting in the courtroom, listening to the judges read the verdict, I began to cry. I bowed my head to hide my face, grateful that I could hide behind my face mask. I wouldn’t call my tears tears of joy. I think they were more tears of relief and also of mourning. It has been a long and hard road.
This journey started on a Friday evening, around 8:00 p.m. in 2018. I was sitting at my kitchen table working on my computer when I got a call to tell me that Edwin had been arrested. Getting the news, I jumped into my car and drove quickly to the police station. Edwin was in good spirits despite being in handcuffs and facing serious charges. Originally, the prosecutors just made up a list of charges against Edwin and Raúl: arson, property damage, terrorism, criminal association, and even attempted murder. The idea was to stack the list as much as possible and hope a few charges would stick.
Three of those ultimately did, and Edwin and Raul continued under investigation for the others. Within three days, Edwin and Raúl were sent to a maximum security prison. Despite there being other options or jails closer to the capital city, the corrupt judge wanted to send Edwin and Raúl to a place that would make them suffer. In a maximum security prison, organized criminal groups would keep them in line. The internal dynamics inside the prison would shut them up. Sending protesters to a maximum security prison would also send a strong message to other vocal opponents of the government.
From his isolation cell, lying on a cement slab, Edwin would hear and speak to Raúl Álvarez, his fellow political prisoner, for the first time. Within days of Edwin being sent to prison, I went to the gates of La Tolva. I foolishly took a plate of food, hoping that La Tolva was like most Honduran jails, and that I would be allowed to visit and sit and eat with Edwin. But La Tolva was no such jail. The front metal gates, framed by cement, would become a place I would hang out several days a week for over a year and a half. In the hot afternoon sun, or during complete downpours. I would stand outside the prison, getting to know the lawyers that would visit regularly, some of the wives and the partners of other prisoners, and the nice young man selling treats that would stop by the gates in the mid afternoon.
Looking into the prison complex from the holes in the wire fence, La Tolva is like a cement jungle. It has at least four tall guard outposts at the extremes of its property lines. Towards the back part of the complex is where the cell blocks are located. All around the complex are hills with pine trees. If you look carefully, you can sometimes see armed military patrolling the hills, watching over the prison from afar.
When Edwin first went into La Tolva, there were no phones. Approximately a month after his arrest, I received a call from an unknown number on my phone. When I answered a recording would start, “Do you accept a call from…” and Edwin’s voice would come on, “Hi, sweetie”…? If yes, press one.” Getting calls from the prison in the short three months that the telephones were activated became a highlight of my day. Since the prison had just opened in mid-2017, no phone system had been installed. By approximately February 2018, or one month after Edwin and Raul were imprisoned, the phone system was activated. But it didn’t last very long.
To buy phone cards, I would have to go to the dirt parking lot in front of La Tolva prison, during a two-hour timeframe on the weekends. I would approach and stand awkwardly at the side of a dark black suburban, until an American man rolled down the window. The man and his Honduran wife worked with a US phone company to manage the phone system inside the prison. They sat in their suburban in the parking lot, across from the jail, selling phone cards. They were surprised to be dealing with me, a foreigner, wanting to buy phone cards to speak to her partner inside La Tolva. They were always friendly to me, probably because the man barely spoke Spanish and was not used to doing business with foreigners.
When I told him that Edwin was in prison for protesting, both the American man and the woman went silent. I quickly learned that they didn’t care, or they didn’t want to know, or get involved. After all, prisons were good for their business. Despite being friendly, I saw the couple as the foot soldiers of a global business to create markets for US companies in the prison industry. La Tolva was just another prison, and I was just another customer wanting desperately to hear from her loved one inside.
Getting phones inside the prison was like a luxury. Edwin and Raúl would take turns waiting in the long phone lines to call me two to three times a day. We were only allowed five minutes each call.
One day, about a month and a half after being in there, Edwin called me to tell me he was on hunger strike. “What?” I responded. “Why?” “Because there are a whole bunch of us here that are sick,” he said. “The prison authorities don’t care. The rest of the prisoners think I’m crazy. I pulled my mattress into the shared common area, and I’m surrounding it with the plates of food I’m not eating. Other prisoners are starving, so if I don’t pay attention, they’ll take the food from me. But it’s the only way I can show the guards watching on the cameras that I’m on hunger strike,” he said. After getting this news, I knew that Edwin’s success with the hunger strike depended on me getting the word out, telling the world that he was on strike, demanding medical attention.
Once I started sending out international and national human rights alerts, a compañera from Italy snapped into action and started making graphics to count the number of days that they managed to maintain the hunger strike. These graphics were circulated on social media. That’s how the first campaign of this whole process got started. This is how I learned the power of international solidarity. After about five days, and several five-minute phone calls, informing me how things were going, Edwin and a bunch of prisoners were taken to the doctor, finally.
It was this experience that made me realize that the success of putting together a campaign to free Edwin and Raúl was all about communication. I couldn’t support Edwin and Raúl without knowing every single detail of what was going on inside that prison. And I couldn’t campaign nationally or internationally without building actions around what was going on inside the prison and the reality that Edwin and Raúl faced.
The people that regularly visited the prison were almost like a small community. Some were actually groups of family members of prisoners that lived in the same city, let’s say, six hours away from the prison, and who would rent a small van to drive to the prison once every two weeks for weekend jail visits. They would all pitch in to pay for the van and the gas in order to cut the costs of the regular prison visits that quickly became a significant economic burden.
In a small community of prison visitors, I didn’t exactly fit in. In fact, there were days when I would fly to Honduras, coming directly from Washington DC, and would head directly to La Tolva. It was beyond a bizarre experience in a timeframe of two days, being in the belly of the beast, having meetings in the Senate building in Washington DC, to standing the following day at the gates of a US style prison in rural Honduras. The two worlds, the global imperialist north, and the global oppressed South, could not have been more defined and exaggerated in those moments.
So for that reason and others, I didn’t really fit in with the people visiting the prison. Many visitors were the girlfriends or wives of the prisoners. Some lived really hard and rough lives. Others had spent years going into prisons to visit their husbands. And some were heavily involved, one way or another, directly or indirectly, in gang activity. This never really bothered me. I made the line like the others, and would wait my turn to go in for the visits. Despite not fitting in very much, many of the Honduran women visiting the prison would encourage me to speak out about the prison conditions and the abuses by the prison guards and the military running the prison.
What I’ve learned about doing this work is that the suffering is always worse than you think. I talk about my experiences like they were bad, but I know there are experiences far worse than what I went through in La Tolva prison. Edwin was never gang-raped, like other political prisoners were in the time that they were incarcerated. Once I got my regular visitation pass, my visitation rights were never revoked, regardless of how much I spoke back to prison authorities, whereas other women visiting their partners in prison, for simply saying half of the things I said, were banned from visiting their family members for six months to one year.
For that reason, and out of pure frustration and indignation, I had several outbursts at the gates of the prison. During one of my outbursts, that started over a hot and sweaty three-hour wait, at the front gate of the prison, I started arguing with the guards. I had permission to go into the prison. But they often made me wait for hours before actually allowing me in. They did this to punish Edwin, Raúl, me, and their other family members. The punishment was always subtle, it was never direct. They never said why. They never explained why I had to wait three hours. It all seemed arbitrary. And it was always different. It involved keeping me waiting out in the sun for three hours before arbitrarily opening the gate and giving me the sign that I could enter. Or it was telling me to change my shirt, sometimes two or three times before being allowed in. Because I was showing too much of my arm, which was during some prison visits not allowed. The rules always changed. They always found ways so that once I finally got into the prison, I would be so upset, and so ready to give up.
It got to the point where I started bringing a picnic blanket, and two fold-up chairs that I would later call my war chairs. I’d unload them from my car and get them set up in front of the front gates of the prison. It was the way I subtly communicated back to the guards that I wasn’t going anywhere and that I was ready to wait and fight it out.
When I stood up to the guards or spoke back to the military director in front of others at the gate of the prison, Honduran women would pull me aside and tell me to keep going. They would ask me to fight, because if they did or said what I said, their visits would be suspended for months. Now to some this sounds like heroism. It really wasn’t. The women were encouraging me to use my privilege, my foreigner status, my role as a human rights defender, to demand that the director fulfill the law. I believe that this is the role of international observers and human rights defenders in Honduras.
After almost a year of Edwin’s imprisonment, and shortly after Edwin and I got married in La Tolva, I was finally able to apply for a regular visitation permit, which allowed me to go in every two weeks for conjugal visits. Prior to getting this regular visitation permit, I had to request special permission, and go through a whole bunch of loopholes, and get the signature of the director of prisons to be able to go into visit Edwin. Prior to getting this regular permit, I was only able to get in to see Edwin maybe about four times over one week, and then I’d have to wait two or three months again for the next visits.
Conjugal visits are only granted, at least legally, at least when I was going into La Tolva, to the wives or partners of each prisoner. But these 40-minute visits in a room the size of a closet was about the only time I could actually be alone with Edwin. I saw those visits as a way to make him feel human while he was subject to the horrific and torturous conditions inside the prison. These visits were the only time that Edwin was totally unseen by prison cameras, prison authorities, and other prisoners themselves. We would cry together, or get into intense discussions about strategy, and talk about the frustrations of the whole process.
During normal prison visits, we were put into large common areas packed with other prisoners and their family members. There was no time alone, and we were never out of the sight of prison authorities or the extremely dangerous members of organized crime that were in prison with Edwin and Raúl.
At one point the prison director made Edwin and his family visit with the rest of the prisoners from the most dangerous cellblock in the prison. It was the first time I saw gang leaders with full-blown facial tattoos in person, or prisoners that walked with at least 10 other prisoners following behind them, like their body guards. Sometimes Edwin would whisper to me during these communal visits. “Hey, you see that guy over there with a tattoo, talking to the woman in the red shirt? Don’t look, don’t look directly, go slow, and don’t make it obvious.” I would quietly turn around and look. “Yeah, I see him,” I said. “He’s killed like 50 people. He talks all the time about how he cut up some of the bodies of the people he killed,” Edwin told me, whispering.
After the visits every other weekend, I would walk out of the prison feeling peaceful and happy. Edwin and I often agreed that seeing each other was like recharging our batteries. At some points during his imprisonment, we went four months without seeing one another. The hardest moments were when we couldn’t speak to each other. But we would always find ways to communicate through contraband letters, or sending verbal messages through people that were able to visit the prison. But we both came to understand that Edwin couldn’t fight to stay alive in prison, and I couldn’t keep campaigning to get him out, without being able to see one another to recharge our batteries.
In the last months before Edwin and Raúl were released, Honduran prison authorities, especially the military director and subdirector, became extremely hostile. We knew we were treading dangerous waters. Edwin and Raúl were constantly being told to shut up and to stop drawing attention to the prison. We didn’t know that the first and hardest part of this journey was about to come to an end. But the closer to the release that we got, the more dangerous the situation became.
During one prison visit, the military director asked to speak with me privately while I was visiting Edwin one day. He took me into a cement hallway and took me aside to speak to me, as he unconvincingly told me that he was doing everything possible to help Edwin and Raúl, but how he betrayed his true motive. As he talked to me, he slowly started to back me into a corner. Standing directly behind him were two military police, with their faces covered in black balaclavas. By the end of the conversation, I was half sitting on a high ledge against a cement wall, while the director stood less than 10 inches from my face. Despite knowing it was an act of intimidation, and a physical way of threatening me, I didn’t feel scared in that moment. Maybe I was being naive. But through this whole experience, the almost four years of this battle, I felt strong because of the support I received from Honduran people, the social movement, and from all of you.
Now I use the word “solidarity” a lot, like many people do that do this work. But the word itself, in the way I experienced it, just doesn’t capture the way I felt about the support that I received. In the 19 months of Edwin and Raúl’s imprisonment, and the two years from the time of their release up into their acquittal about two weeks ago, I always felt strong.
And despite the verdict, we are still waiting for it in writing. After that, the prosecutor’s office has 20 days to appeal. And until the verdict is absolutely final, Edwin and Raúl will have to continue signing before a judge once every two weeks. As a prison director backed me into a wall inside La Tolva, I felt encouraged and empowered by the support that so many people have given me. I felt love. I felt the strength of others standing with me. Maybe not physically in all moments, but emotionally and morally. It was almost a feeling that transcended the prison director and me in that very moment. I knew that cameras inside the prison were watching the interaction. I knew that if something happened to me inside the walls of that prison, where there was no outside communication, phone signal, and extremely limited access to outsiders, I knew that other people would take up the fight if something were to happen.
I was driven by the strength of others. The people that would take time out of their day to write an email to their Members of Parliament or to their Congressional offices. I felt the support from the Congressional Representatives and their aides that truly tried to help, and that would call the Honduran Embassy in DC to ask about the case of the political prisoners in Honduras. I felt inspired by the strength and determination of the people in Europe, who at one point organized a bake sale in a community event to raise money to help cover the legal costs for all the Honduran political prisoners. I felt the strength of OFRANEH and COPINH, who would come to the protest gatherings in Tegucigalpa and do spiritual ceremonies to give me and other family members of the political prisoners strength to carry on.
For so many years, I’ve stood in solidarity with the Honduran social movement. This experience allowed me to truly feel the reciprocal nature of solidarity, and to feel it on such a personal level. But also in the context of a hard struggle under a narco dictatorship.
Waiting four years to be acquitted has been hard. Edwin and I and also Raúl have found it hard to make life plans. Envisioning your future becomes extremely restricted. Thinking about making life plans are quickly dampened by questions like, what if I’m sent back to prison? What if this doesn’t work out well for us? Because of our victory, Edwin and I can at least start to ask these questions about our future, and not feel like a gloomy black cloud is hanging over our heads. Yet even though the hardest parts are over, we are still waiting on that final written verdict. If the government appeals, then Edwin and Raúl will have to continue signing before a judge for the often several years it takes. Despite being absolved, this persecution continues to affect mine and Edwin’s life in countless ways. Indeed, that was always the point.
Finally, I want to say that I recognize the privilege rooted in my story. There are lots of Honduran women and families fighting for the release of their loved ones from prison. There are lots of cases that aren’t getting the attention they need and they deserve. As I’ve said before, Edwin and Raúl’s case is just one of many. They are representative of a much broader struggle, the struggle to improve prison conditions for all prisoners, the struggle to stop the harassment of women and families when they visit their loved ones in prison, and the struggle to stop the criminalization of vocal opponents of the government.
Thank you to each and every one of you for supporting us along this journey. Thank you for carrying us through this experience.
That is the episode for today. I promise, after today, I will move on to another topic in the coming episodes. There are so many stories in Honduras to tell. We have lots of interesting episodes coming up in the next few months. As always, check out HondurasNow.org for show notes, or to make a donation to this really important work. Thank you so much for listening. This is your host, Karen Spring, signing off for this week. Hasta pronto.