We are Liberté, a 100% self-managed enterprise by prisoners in the maximum security prison of Batán and since 2021 formally a cooperative.
We started activities in 2014, in order to cover basic needs such as work, study and training, recreation, food and other treatment activities.
We have been achieving each of the objectives that we set for ourselves, and growing progressively in the number of members, increasing from two members at the beginning, to about a hundred people today.
All these small achievements are thanks to self-management, which we consider to be the way, or at least the way we have found, to improve the quality of life and recover dignity.
All this is not only the work of the members of Liberté but also of a large network of people and institutions trusting and believing in us.
We have also been able to advance in the face of serious impediments, through dialogue and this led us to become a founding and active part of the Committee for the Prevention and Resolution of Conflicts of the Batán prison.
Our activities are concentrated in leather goods, carpentry, blacksmithing, a general store, handicrafts, beekeeping, an organic garden, a library, a training room and a restoration service for those registered (committee).
We have the patronage of the Judge, now deceased, Mario Juliano (Asociación Pensamiento Penal) and Josefina Ignacio, we were also declared of National Interest by the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture. We have the accompaniment of the National Penitentiary Prosecutor (PPN). We are sponsored in our cooperative path by the Argentine Federation of Credit Cooperatives (FACC). The National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) promotes us with the proHuerta program. The National University of Mar del Plata provides us with the much-needed educational mechanisms. And many other people and organizations that on a day-to-day basis allow Liberté to grow.
The emotional incentive that every morning fills us with energy to continue dreaming is our families and our friends.
And from what many say "the opposite pole", we get the love that we need so much to restore our hearts, the victims who share the same dream and work with us in each project we start, they are the Victims for Peace group. .
We have not yet been able to develop commercial and industrial activity on a larger scale, among other reasons due to the lack of a formal structure that has prevented us from obtaining economic resources from the state or other public and private organizations and NGOs.
In summary, our mission is to work for the recovery of rights and dignity in prisons, with the ultimate goal of creating a future in which prisoners can fully integrate into society and be considered as one more neighbor.
