Revisiting two Mexican political prisoners. Balance of dreams and rebellious deeds, 1968 – 2014

Abstract

Within the temporal arc of the cold war, of the east-west confrontation, with the doctrinal repercussion of National Security and the delimitation of an internal enemy in part of the Latin American region, the Mexican State is observed as the one that resorted to the practice repressive to dismantle all kinds of opposition.
Different were the repressive mechanisms that were put into practice. One of them led to the arrest and permanence in a legal prison and even in a circumstantial prison housed in a hospital space.
Some of those victims, survivors of the repressive power of the State, experienced resistance in different ways and manifested it in their subjectivities. Among those who passed through these prisons were women belonging to different movements and political or armed groups. Being a woman connoted some moments before, during and after being released.
This article is based on the observation of how that experience affected the subjectivities of the two former prisoners who became so from actions of protest and struggle against the regime. They are Roberta Avendaño, “La Tita”, a law student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Rosa Albina Garavito, professor of Economics at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León (UANL). Tita was an activist in the 1968 student movement, arrested a few months after the “Tlateloco massacre” and Rosa Albina, a guerrillera, belonging to the group Los Procesos, whose apprehension occurred after being wounded in 1972.
Interviews with both and an autobiographical book serve as sources for this article. These pages capture in their stories the ability to observe what has been lived and to give it an interpretation to convey the experience. Thus, two different reflections are apprehended that distinguish one from the other, but both coincide in their duty of memory.