Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America

2. Literary Afterlives of the Punta Carretas Prison: Tunneling Histories of Freedom

56 | Literary Afterlives of the Punta Carretas Prison Tunneling Histories of Freedom 2 How do the textual works that thematize the past of Punta Carretas Prison contribute to an understanding of the afterlife of confinement? Moreover, how do they differ from the architectural and critical work on the mall that was analyzed in the previous chapter? It should be noted that the majority of writings on Punta Carretas tend to focus on the site’s past as a prison, and on recreating the political prisoners’ massive prison break in September 1971, when 111 prisoners (106 of them political prisoners from the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional–Tupamaros [MLN-T]) fled Punta Carretas through a tunnel excavated from inside the prison’s walls. Setting a Guinness World Record as one of the largest prison breaks in history, the 1971 escape was one of MLN-T’s most disturbing collective actions for the military authorities, since the prisoners showed considerable audacity in building their exit tunnel within the prison walls. The escape was in part a response to the authorities ’ refusal to negotiate over MLN-T’s request for political prisoners to be freed and for an end to the torture and mistreatment of inmates. Within this context the form of their escape embodied a kind of response in which prisoners found a different means of freedom. The first escape plan LITERARy AFTERLIVES OF THE PUNTA CARRETAS PRISON | 57 from Punta Carretas consisted of a tunnel built from outside, using the city’s drainpipe infrastructure. But this attempt failed when a storm flooded the route, dragging the prisoners’ tools and plans above ground, where navy officials policing the river discovered them. Even though the discovery was made in the midst of an already forceful wave of military repression, it triggered an even stronger crackdown on civilians, resulting in massive detentions and home arrests throughout the country. There were repercussions in the Punta Carretas prison as well. Political prisoners there were punished for a month, and they responded with a hunger strike that, according to Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, a former political prisoner and one of the MLN-T’s founding members, fueled their ever-growing obsession with escape. They came up with a new plan: to dig holes between the prison cells, creating an interconnected passageway toward the tunnel. Then a final plan was devised in which prisoners themselves excavated a tunnel from within the walls, threatened by a looming deadline for the transfer of detainees to other new detention centers under construction, Isla de Flores and the grim Libertad Penitentiary, which opened in 1972 after a second, albeit minor, escape of MLN-T prisoners from Punta Carretas. After news of the escape became public, the authorities prohibited journalists from taking pictures of the underground tunnel, thus leaving the prisoners’ work forever invisible. This decision can be read as part of a wider process of concealing and silencing the massive escape, a process that would persist until the first narratives of the event began to surface more than a decade later in the mid-1980s. The only existing images of the tunneling are those found in the literature written by the survivors—that is, in a textual afterlife that figures confinement as a tension between the perception of the escape and the possibilities of literary imagination. How does the narrative figuration of this erased episode in the history of political resistance within the prison relate to the possibilities of escaping from a present whose most important utopia is a prison-mall of prisoners-consumers—a present in which free consumers are confined in the mall? Moving away from the original architecture of confinement, the texts that thematize the collective escape point to the possibility of figuring other temporal images that open the place up to other signifying processes. By doing so, they spatially situate the dominant dreams of cleanliness and social regeneration embodied in the prison and the mall, building other histories of freedom that relate to subalternized histories that had been systematically erased throughout the century. The prison-mall’s architectural objective of becoming a symbol of plenitude that might embody the promise of democratic freedom through and for consumption becomes interrupted and 58 | LITERARy AFTERLIVES OF THE PUNTA CARRETAS PRISON critically supplemented by a literary-testimonial field that situates Punta Carretas’s new architectural form in textual space. When former prison architecture enters the textual realm from the...