Valentin Joins the Hunger Strike

Valentin Arregui Paz’s participation in a prison hunger strike was both a protest against Juan Vicente Aparicio’s death during police interrogation and a turning point in the prison authorities’ official account of Arregui as a rebellious organizer. The record links the protest to his later isolation and transfer, while also showing how the authorities classified collective dissent as misconduct.

Background and Context

Arregui had been arrested on October 16, 1972, along Route 5 outside Barrancas. National Guard troops surrounded a group of activists involved in promoting disturbances with strikers at two automotive assembly plants along the highway. He was held under the Federal Government’s Executive Power and was awaiting judgment, rather than serving a sentence described in the record.

By November 4, 1974, Arregui was lodged in Pavilion A, cell 10, with political prisoner Bernardo Giacinti. The record places his hunger-strike participation within this longer period of political detention, but does not give the strike’s date or duration.

The Hunger Strike

Arregui joined a hunger strike protesting the death of political prisoner Juan Vicente Aparicio while Aparicio was undergoing police interrogation. The stated purpose makes the protest a response to a death in custody; the record does not establish further circumstances surrounding Aparicio’s death. It does, however, connect Arregui personally to the protest and identify him as a reputed instigator.

The prison report’s language shifts between recording the protest and judging it. It describes Arregui as rebellious and calls him a reputed instigator of the hunger strike, framing political dissent as a disciplinary problem. That characterization is the authorities’ assessment, not an independently established account of Arregui’s role in organizing the action.

Isolation and Transfer

As of March 25, 1975, Arregui had been moved to solitary confinement for ten days. The report does not explicitly say that the hunger strike caused this punishment, but it records the isolation alongside its account of the strike and other incidents attributed to him. Those incidents supposedly protested inadequate hygienic conditions in the pavilion and violations of personal correspondence, placing the hunger strike within a broader pattern of prison protest.

On April 4, 1975, Arregui was transferred to Pavilion D, cell 7, where he was housed with Luis Alberto Molina. The sequence—from political detention and protest, through solitary confinement, to a new shared cell—marks the institutional aftermath recorded for Arregui, without establishing that the transfer itself was a direct consequence of the strike.

Significance in the Record

The hunger strike appears through a prison dossier rather than a dramatized scene. Its central fact is spare but consequential: Arregui joined a protest over a prisoner’s death during police interrogation, and the same record presents him as an instigator of unrest. By placing that protest beside complaints about hygiene and correspondence, the dossier also preserves a wider range of grievances while filtering them through the authorities’ language of rebellion and misconduct.