I was out buying fish at the market when I was picked up. I was locked up with 3,000 tribals, most of them innocent. I spent seven months in jail. I told them, “You can hang me, you can kill me, I don’t have a problem, but you can never change my mind.” That period was very dark. My torture was not physical, it was mental.
I was forced to live in a dirty toilet. It was filled with faeces and people would walk in and urinate over me. (Rumour has it he had to clean a drunken constable’s vomit with his hands). We weren’t allowed to bathe. We weren’t given clothes. If we asked for a blanket, they would wipe the dirt off their feet on the blanket before handing it to us. Our jailers would cover their hands with cloth and twist the prisoner’s scrotum. I could hear my boys screaming with pain. They wanted stories, so I told them ‘stories’ from the jungle. I told them that we would send messages by a special system we had created. Our boys would sit on top of trees and then by using flashlights we would send messages from one tree top to another. They also wanted to know how we burnt houses, so I told them that we would use the inedible part of the maize plant because it was soft and when it is dry it is inflammable. We would dry them, light them, tie them to arrows and shoot them into houses. None of this actually happened but I had to tell them something. more at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main48.asp?filename=Ne181210A_TRIBE.asp Comment: Those lousy, corrupt and cruel Agentes de Salazar! jc