Undoing the “Cemetery of the Living”: Performing Change, Embodying Resistance through Prison Theater in Nicaragua

Abstract

Reverter o "cemitério dos vivos": concretizar a mudança, corporizar a resistência através do teatro de prisão na Nicarágua Inverser le "cimetière des vivants": concrétiser le changement, donner corps à la résistance grâce au théâtre de prison au Nicaragua

From prison to pit: trajectories of a dispensable population in Latin America

“…Ayala Ugarte, 2017;De León, 2015;Longazel & Hallet, 2021;O'Neill, 2012;Silverman, 2002;Vignolo, 2013). The study builds on our separate but complementary research exploring the long-standing neglect of prisoners and their experiences of social death on the one hand (Weegels, 2014(Weegels, , 2019(Weegels, , 2021, and the marginalisation and invisibilisation of the dead from lower socioeconomic layers of society on the other (Klaufus, 2014(Klaufus, , 2016a(Klaufus, , 2016b(Klaufus, , 2018(Klaufus, , 2021. Drawing from case studies on these three countries, we analyse what happens with prisoners in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, tracking the imagined and real trajectories between the prison and the grave (or urn) in terms of public policies and the experiences of next-of-kin, to uncover the everyday necropolitics of prison worlds and the practices and structures of 'necroviolence' that gird the treatment and disposal of marginalised people's dead bodies.…”

“…4. See Weegels (2014Weegels ( , 2019Weegels ( , 2020aWeegels ( , 2021 for detailed examples of this double tension for Nicaraguan prisoners. For examples beyond Nicaragua see for example (Darke, 2018;Solinger et al, 2010).…”

Debunking the Myth of Nicaraguan Exceptionalism: Crime, Drugs and the Political Economy of Violence in a ‘Narco-state’

“…Her interlocutors repeatedly noted how police officers requested bribes in exchange for dropping charges or, when that was not possible, how district attorneys or local judges accepted (or demanded) bribes in exchange for release or lesser sentences. 63 In some cases, this included collusion between state officials from the police, the judiciary and the detainee to under-report the amount of money or drugs seized from the latter. One of Weegels' research participants was for example arrested with 3 ounces (100 g) of cocaine and US$1,000 cash, but ended up serving time for possessing less than 1 ounce; the cash did not feature in his sentence.…”

“…64 Others claimed to have been 'thrown under the bus' by their supplier and arrested with only a 'puchito' (a small quantity of drugs) so that a larger shipment could pass through unimpeded to the Honduran border. 65 This way, they held, the police could show they were 'combatting drugs' internally, while colluding with larger players over international drug transportation, especially along the Pan-American highway.…”