EXPERIENCES OF MILITANTS OF THE ARMED LEFT IN PRISONS IN CEARÁ (1971-79)

Abstract

After the failure of the guerrilla, imprisonment and condemnation by the Military Justice, the militants of the armed left in Ceará had to fulfill their sentences in the Criminal Institute Paulo Sarasate (IPPS). There, during the 1970s, revolutionaries, seen as "terrorists", kept apart from the rest of the prisoners and targets of the military dictatorship's attention, faced new challenges. They searched for gaps, fissures, created spaces, used strategies and tactics within the prevailing authoritarian structure, in order to guarantee better conditions of survival. We seek to understand how and why the daily experiences and relations between leftist militants contributed to the reconstruction of the political projects and identities of those revolutionaries after the defeat of the armed struggle. Solidarity and mutual support marked the relationship between political prisoners, expressed in the organization of the so-called collective, the traditional practice of the left in prison. Notwithstanding mutual support, there were also frictions between political prisoners, as was the case at the 1974 hunger strike, the first at the IPPS.