01/09/2021
Sharing Eduardo Samaniego Amaya's article with an English translation for accessibility. This is Eduardo's first written article in two years and it's an incredibly powerful article about the importance of the election in Georgia and his experience being tortured. Please show it some love. Share the original article in Spanish click on it and like it as well.
In recent years, Georgia's demographics have changed the way this state conducts its politics. A growing coalition of dedicated, compassionate, and united people have repeatedly challenged Georgia's conservative government, revealing our more attractive side, a more welcoming, open-hearted, and less divided state. I feel incredibly blessed and grateful to have been a part of this march for progress, and part of Georgia's legacy for civil, political and human rights. An incessant and hard fought legacy that moves Georgians along our best values and our best traditions. Remembering the lessons learned to generate new social movements that achieve significant social change, in Georgia and throughout the United States.
After graduating as student body president from North Cobb High School in Kennesaw, I worked hard to build coalitions to fight for universal human and immigrant rights in Georgia.
In 2014, as a result of my entrepreneurship as a social fighter, I received a scholarship to study at the University of Hampshire. Even then, now president-elect of the student body at the University of Hampshire, I continued to support my immigrant communities in Georgia, and those across the US, in this fight that I was waging at my young age, marching, organizing for human rights. , where many reached out to me and many more supported my actions, it was where I lived and learned from the countless systemic problems that my brothers and sisters in Georgia experienced daily.
Eventually I built a social media base with over a million visitors a week to educate others on issues like the unjust and mass incarceration of good people, mass deportation, and access to health care and education for all. It was here that my passion and dedication for making Georgia a better state was born.
Georgia's departure from “conservative” government continues to exemplify a departure from Jim Crow legacies, but conservative political legacies continue to harass the most disadvantaged members of our communities, legally subjecting them to old forms of discrimination in employment, housing. , the right to vote, educational opportunities, public benefits, and jury duty. These practices are evident in all Georgia penal and prison systems today.
Over the past three decades, Georgia's conservative lawmakers galvanized the state's prison systems, increasing the number of beds available to Georgians caught in a cycle of unsolved systemic problems.
Although this increase began in public prisons, it has increased in private prisons such as immigration detention centers across the country. As a result, in the last decade alone, immigration offenders, along with those affected by state laws targeting undocumented individuals, have consistently equaled or surpassed drug offenders in the federal criminal systems of the United States.
Consequently, Georgia's elected officials and appointed, unvoted conservative judges converted small infractions that previously amounted to a written warning or a small fee that had to be paid, in months and even years in prison, where often many people they wait in jail for months and do not receive a sentence.
In October 2018, I experienced the full brunt of the Georgia prison system. The Cobb County police detained me for twenty-seven dollars. After ordering a taxi home, I realized, halfway to my destination, that I didn't have my wallet with me. I immediately notified the taxi driver of my mistake; however, instead of allowing me to pay for my fare once I reached my destination, he stopped, locked me in his vehicle, and proceeded to call the police.
After my arrest, I arrived at a detention station in Acworth, where I was detained for several hours. The next day, the authorities transferred me to the Cobb County Jail, or Little Guantanamo, as Latinos know it.
The cops took me to the Cobb County Jail. After years of advocating against incarcerating immigrants myself, I still could not understand to what extent the police could make this prison a burning hell for me. However, he had a clue, this was the same prison where many men and women have died after being admitted for petty infractions, where countless inmates have reported human rights violations and other abuses. This prison is now where ex-Sheriff Neil Warren who was fired and disgraced this past election, with his officers (still there) sparked a reign of terror in the cities of Cobb County, where cops violated the constitution on a daily basis. . This little Guantanamo is where my torture began.
What I experienced in body, mind and soul I cannot express as anything other than a growing physical and psychological torture, indescribable and complete. I still have a hard time putting the pieces together to help others understand the scope of the inhumanities I was subjected to every day and every waking hour I spent in the Georgia prison system. Policemen without ethical or moral values and of little humanity became my torturers, with a compulsive obsession to hurt my body and my soul.
While I was being held in the Cobb County Jail, “correctional” officers dehumanized me and denied me basic services like toilet paper and soap. Furthermore, the prison staff forbade me to go out for a simple breath of fresh air like the rest of the inmates. I was forced into freezing showers in the middle of December and then boiling showers that burned my skin and left blisters all over my body.
On several occasions, all my clothes were stripped and left with nothing but underwear in the middle of a fiercely freezing winter. When I protested the inhumane treatment I was receiving, the prison officers took me to the coldest and darkest room my mind and soul have ever experienced; I still shudder to think of that today, it was "the black hole", solitary confinement. The "correctional" officers were my torturers in solitary confinement. Throughout my days in the Cobb County Jail, things were done to me that I dare not share today and may never be ready to share.
It was in solitary confinement where I screamed for my freedom, where I asked deaf ears for food and water, where I was hungry for weeks, I was thirsty for days, inside they stripped me of my humanity. Too often my food was thrown on the ground and offered me nothing but a cup of ice after days of thirst. He often prayed to God, asking him to tear down these walls and deliver a beating heart to the police officers whose hatred and disdain for Latinos he already knew but now experienced in the flesh.
Later I was sent to the Irwin Detention Center, one of Georgia's most infamous prisons with a broader record of human rights violations. There, I was kept in solitary confinement for weeks, punished and stripped of all clothing for an extended period after loudly protesting when I saw Central American children in cages next to our "isolation chambers." The sight of the incarcerated children was unbearable, and I remember hurting my legs and knees from banging on doors demanding that the children be released.
The work of the community, my friends and allies for my release was rejected by immigration officials, who made the decision to transfer me between different detention centers in Georgia as a tactic to prevent the rise of a movement in my favor. In the end, immigration officials placed me in five different prisons in Georgia. Even after several prominent United States Senators and congressional men and women from across the country signed letters demanding my release, I decided to sign my voluntary departure to escape the torture I could no longer bear. As I was signing my voluntary departure from the country to escape torture, the words of former candidate for President Mitt Romney echoed in my ears: “We are going to make life so difficult for immigrants.
It doesn't escape me for a second that what the Cobb County officers did to me was fully intended to silence me, to strip me of my voice and my power, and to make me suffer so horribly that I would forget who I was then and what I was. they had made me. Despite your efforts, I have not forgotten anything. I still remember the officers and officers of the Cobb County Jail, their names, their insignia, their faces, even their words and gestures, including all the immigration collaborators, who were part of this tortuous vigil remained indelible in my memory.
But today it is a fact, after the torture and inhumane events that I endured in the prisons of Georgia, I am still here, I still have a voice and I want to continue using my voice to continue fighting for human rights. With my work, my voice and all my will, I want to make Georgia and every place I call home a more dignified place for all people.
Today, I want to continue to use this voice to inform you that Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock is a serious leader in the fight against mass incarceration. Against this tortuous and dystopian reality that occurs inside Georgia's jails. Reverend Warnock believes that in the Land of the Free "it is a scandal and a scar on the soul of America to imprison more people at a greater rate than in any other country in the world."
With our country containing only 5 percent of the world's population and housing nearly 25 percent of the world's prisoners this is our original sin. Reverend Raphael Warnock knows that real and immediate change is needed because he has walked our streets, worked to feed the poor in our communities, and not only preached, but lived and encouraged others to live the gospel every day.
If elected Senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock has pledged to increase accountability and vigilance against police officers who have so far dripped ice for our communities with impunity, ensuring that our cities can support critical services without having to go to the justice system. penal.
Reverend Raphael Warnock has a plan to reform the bail system so that no one is in jail simply for not being able to pay a few dollars. Most importantly, he has worked to end mass incarceration for decades and is committed to ending the use of privatized immigrant prisons and ensuring that released citizens can re-enter society with access to adequate resources and support. .
Reverend Warnock is the champion we need in Georgia if we want to bring justice to the wrongfully incarcerated, to those in jail without conviction, to those who cannot post bail. Together, the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will pursue specific policies to free the good people in Georgia and give them back once again the opportunity to continue living in dignity.
I am not a Republican or a Democrat, I am not casting my voice vote based on party loyalty, but on issues at the moment. Right now, the choice is clear, with the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff we can help deliver the Georgia we deserve, a more united state, with an active economy with more jobs and a more prosperous and secure future where immigrants not be persecuted simply for wanting a better life and where the daughters and sons of all who call the good and magnificent state of Georgia home can be set free.
If you hear my words and feel my story and have the power to vote, elect Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff as our next Senators from Georgia by voting this January 5.
Eduardo Samaniego Amaya is a strategist and political organizer who fights for universal human rights. He is currently awaiting a response to his deportation appeal. You can find him on his social networks as
Sobreviví a la tortura dentro del sistema penitenciario de Georgia January 2, 2021 By Editor En esta foto en Atlanta, Eduardo estaba hablando de la necesidad de expandir medicaid para los georgianos y la urgencia de una Reforma Inmigratoria con paso a ciudadania para los 11 millones de indocumentad...
