Martín Espada
Artists incarcerated in prisons have frequently told me that making art was like encountering an unlocked door art provided a momentary way out from the confines of state control. During long days, where tedious rules organize life and boredom is punishing, artists were able to scratch out a line or mix a color that could breathe a little air into the small cells that lock up so many people across this nation at shameful rates. Making art doesn’t necessarily change the material conditions of prison, but it can change psychic ones. Art gives the artist another language, another tool to fight for freedom. For the first time in fifteen years of working with artists in Illinois prisons, I have started to hear a different story, one of despair and fatigue. With COVID-19 raging in congregate living spaces, of which prisons are prime hot spots, artists, poets, and, indeed, all people locked behind fences and walls are on the edge. In many prisons, people have been on cons
Since demobilising in 2017, former rebel fighter Manuel Antonio Gonzalez has faced numerous death threats and lost his son in a bloody murder.
Part of the now-defunct Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group, who signed a peace deal with the government of Juan Manuel Santos in 2016, Gonzalez, 54, lives in worry, not only for his own life but for the thousands of other former fighters who signed up to the agreement alongside him.
The FARC, who have been accused of serious war crimes, handed more than 7,000 weapons to a UN peace mission in 2017, ending a five-decade-long conflict that left 260,000 dead.