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Marco Camenisch is a political prisoner in Switzerland. He was convicted of murdering a prison guard during an escape attempt. He was born in 1952 in Schiers, Switzerland and raised in a middle-class home in Canton Graubünden. He dropped out of high school, where he felt only elitist thinking prevailed. During his apprenticeship as a farmer at the Plantahof school, he opposed the policy that fertilizing must be done with chemicals. Marco moved to an alp but soon realized, that conditions wouldn't change as long as he wasn't actively resisting.
In the late 1970s Marco was involved in local struggles against the nuclear power industry. In switzerland, as in other countries too, the movement against nuclear power plants resorted to means of direct action: cutting down pylons, sabotage against power stations, and actions against leaders of the nuclear industry.
In January 1980, together with others, Marco was arrested, and after a year being on remand, the court of Canton in Chur and Graubünden sentenced Camenisch to 10 years in prison, for direct action against a pylon and against a power station of NOK (Nordostschweizer Kraftwerke = "Northeast Swiss Power Stations") at Bad Ragaz. Another co-defendant got 7.5 years. Marco refused to cooperate with the judicial authority, because he didn't acknowledge their legitimacy. In court he read a statement in which he connected direct actions as a protest against the supposed ecocide of the energy industry with the prospect of struggling against the capitalist social order.
In December 1981, together with 5 other prisoners, he succeded in escaping from Regensdorff Prison near Zürich. During the meleé a prison guard was shot and killed, another was seriously injured. Marco wasn't part of the group which comitted the shootings. After the escape ten years of clandestine living followed. In 1989, Swiss federal police and media claimed him responsible for the killing of a Swiss border police officer at Brusio. After a shootout with the Carabinieri, he was arrested in November 1992 in Tuscany, Italy. The Italian Courts convcted him to 12 years. He served 9 of those years while in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison.
In April 2002 Marco was extradited to Switzerland. He was held in a prison in Pfäffikon near Zürich. In January 2003, after a hunger strike against the bad conditions of imprisonment he was suffering, and several direct actions of an international solidarity movement, they transferred him to a prison in Chur with better conditions. Recently the Swiss government re-transferred him back to Pfäffikon and cancelled the improvements.
After all the years in prison, Marco, an anarchist, didn't let the Swiss state change his mind about his political convictions. Instead of this, behind bars, he has remained a political activist. By writing letters, he organized a far-reaching network of political and personal relations. Marco's address is:
Marco Camenisch,
Hörnlistrasse 55,
CH-8330 Pfäffikon/ZH,
Switzerland
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