  We consider the ground state and the elementary excitations of an array of
spin-Peierls chains coupled by elastic and magnetic interactions. It is
expected that the effect of the magnetic interchain coupling will be to reduce
the dimerization amplitude and that of the elastic coupling will be to confine
the spin one-half solitons corresponding to each isolated chain. We show that
this is the case when these interactions are not frustrated. On the other hand,
in the frustrated case we show that the amplitude of dimerization in the ground
state is independent of the strength of the interchain magnetic interaction in
a broad range of values of this parameter. We also show that free solitons
could be the elementary excitations when only nearest neighbor interactions are
considered. The case of an elastic interchain coupling is analyzed on a general
energetic consideration. To study the effect of the magnetic interchain
interaction the problem is simplified to a two-leg ladder which is solved using
DMRG calculations. We show that the deconfinement mechanism is effective even
with a significantly strong antiferromagnetic interchain coupling.
