After a recent attack by an inmate – who ended up dead – against two prison guards, the prison inmates’ visitation right during the weekends was suspended by the penitentiary authorities of Comcar prisons (near Montevideo). This measure triggered a mutiny: inmates burned mattresses, smashed windows and trashed large parts of the detention facilities.
On the other hand, inmates’ relatives clashed with the police forces, who blocked them on the driveway to Comcar prison block.
Saying that the suspension of the visitation right is an abuse of Power, would mean that we enter in the very same logic of domination, the logic of the prison system and the laws created to protect and take care of the exploiters and the dominant class, so as to maintain their lives of privileges in tranquility.
We cannot speak of ‘police abuse’, ‘abuse of authority’, or anything alike, as it is a given that this is the function of cops. The existence of police and prisons is by itself an abuse.
This is why any attempt to break out from anything obstructing the path of freedom is completely justified whenever one is locked up in these hellholes, which the State has built in order to punish those that do not serve its world of exploitation and misery.
In the morning of April 25th riots broke out in the 4th and 5th wings of Comcar, the most overcrowded units of the largest prisons in the country. This footage is from the clashes at noon between the metropolitan police and the assembled relatives, who also burned blankets as a way of protest. Cops arrested at least two relatives of prisoners. As detention facilities were set on fire, it is likely that inmates have been transferred in other wings.