Many Latin American countries have acquired a notoriety for their failure to properly maintain their prisons. As a result, prison riots have become all too common. Some 100 years ago, the great Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) highlighted this problem in Trilce; the following is one of the poems (poem XVIII) from this collection.

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XVIII

Cesar Vallejo

        Oh the four walls of the cell.

Ah the four bleaching walls

that inevitably face the same number.

        Breeding place for nerves, foul breach,

through its four corners how it snatches at

the daily shackled extremities.

        Loving keeper of innumerable keys,

if only you were here, if you could only see unto

what hour these walls remain four.

Against them we would be with you, the two of us,

more two than ever. And you wouldn’t even cry,

speak, liberator!

        Ah the walls of the cell.

Meanwhile of those that hurt me, most

the two long ones that tonight are

somehow like mothers now dead

leading a child through

bromowalled inclines by the hand.

        And only I hang on,

with my right, serving for both hands,

raised, in search of a tertiary arm

to pupilise, between my where and my when,

this invalid majority of a man.

Translated from the Spanish by Clayton Eshleman

*Third World Resurgence No. 350, 2022, p 48