At the beginning of this month they sent us a very disturbing alert that caught us all by surprise. Amadeu Casellas was in a coma in the ICU. Fifteen days earlier, Amadeu made a call to tell us that he had felt ill and that, from prison, he left to go to the hospital, being admitted until the weekend.
They had him medicated and when he felt better they prescribed him treatment and sent him “home” so that he had to return to prison.
Amadeu was on a regime of releases from prison to work returning on weekends. We do not know the medical report of the admission, but he did explain that he noticed that it was difficult for him to breathe and that he was running out of air. In that phone call we asked him if they had seen anything in the hospital, but he told us that they did not see anything in the lung plate they had done. It was not the first time he had had a respiratory crisis; previously, more than a year ago and being free, he had to go to the hospital for similar symptoms, without the cause being determined.
On this occasion it was not Amadeu who called us. And what they told us is that it seemed that he had suffered multi-organ failure and that to avoid his “collapse” they induced a coma to try to recover the functions of the organs.
As we write this, Amadeu has been in a coma for more than 10 days now. In the first week in the ICU they told us that his situation was stable, a medical euphemism that explains little or nothing. At the moment they tell us that it seems that little by little he is recovering organic functions and that, if he continues like this, they will try to get him out of the coma.
We apologize for our silence to all the people who have been fighting and waiting for Amadeu’s freedom. It was difficult for us to explain what we did not know.
As friends and comrades of Amadeu we do not have direct access to medical information. They do not give us explanations, or evolution of his condition, we only know what we see when we visit him in the ICU or what his family environment tells us.
This is not the time to speculate. We reaffirm our rage by being aware that prison not only makes you sick, but it is also one of the worst places to get sick. Today in several places on the peninsula, events were called to denounce the lack of medical care in prisons. Acts to which we unconditionally join, calling attention to the current health situation in which the criminal lack of medical care in prisons is spreading more and more. This miserable process of privatization makes it only accessible to those who can afford it.
The capitalist system not only sickens us in prison confinement and labor exploitation, but also alienates us without the capacity to react with its systematic aggression. The situation of medical neglect is aggravated in vulnerable groups and in people subject to multiple forms of exclusion; for reasons of social class, gender, color, ideas… While our lives are becoming more precarious, there are those who make use of their privileges to enrich themselves without any scruples, stripping us of all rights and transferring their responsibilities to the working classes, the impoverished and those who find it increasingly difficult to have a minimum life expectancy.
The conditions of prison confinement go beyond the walls and are imposed in the so-called “free society”; we are gradually deprived of all freedom and we are clinging to the exhausting system of productive exploitation while we are expelled from our neighborhoods, from our homes and kept as if it were an ICU, tied to all kinds of repressive technology with the promise of a better life… for them.
Amadeu was about to be released from prison again. But this system does not build freedom for us, and moves us from one form of deprivation of liberty to another. Amadeu is currently subject to tubes and machines that maintain his vital signs, in a coma and without conscious life. Amadeu is waiting for his strength to push him to continue once again.
Amadeu’s vitality is what will free him from this new prison. We wish and send him all our strength so that soon we will have him with us again in the streets. We hope that his voice does not stop denouncing this criminal system that if it doesn’t kill you, it kills you.
Amadeu, you can’t leave now. There are still many tasks that we have pending to clear the paths towards those longed-for ways of life in anarchy. Beyond them, there is nothing.
as of June 16, 2024
Statement from Amadeu’s Support Group