Of course, it was unjust that I was there at all, but the regime was almost like a monastery. It was good to be insulated from all the turbulence of political praxis—which deputy voted how, getting leaflets out, and so on. I had time to read a lot of literature, and read all of Capital again. As an experiment, I read the eleven or twelve volumes of the Marx–Engels correspondence chronologically, from cover to cover, in order to follow the course of the two men’s thought as they were writing to each other. I read Hegel, and reread Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. In a sense, prison also saved my life: one of the Mexican police agents who beat me once or twice told me I should be thankful, since the Guatemalans were ‘real sons of bitches’; and it’s true that all my comrades there were killed by the Guatemalan security services.