December 11, 1970
A widespread movement has developed in Mexico for
presidential amnesty for 68 political prisoners just given
harsh sentences. The prisoners were jailed during the
period of the 1968 student movement, which culminated in a
bloody police massacre on the eve of the Olympic Games. The
demands for a pardon will be one of the first things
Mexico's incoming president Luis Echeverría will have to
deal with when he takes office Dec. 1.
The 68 political prisoners, including Mexican intellectuals and student leaders, were sentenced Nov. 12 to prison terms of from three to 17 years and fines totaling $160,000 on charges such as sedition and damaging federal property.
Among those sentenced Nov. 12 were the Mexican scholar Eli de Gotari, who was given 16 years in prison, and the internationally known novelist and revolutionary José Revueltas, also given 16 years. Only a small number of the prisoners received sentences under five years, which allow for parole.
December 8 1945
CHARLEROI, Belgium, Oct. 30 - An inspiring demonstration
of international working class solidarity is taking place
among Belgian mine workers and German slave laborers.
Despite the all-out anti-German and chauvinistic campaign
carried on by bourgeois, Socialist, and Stalinist parties,
Belgian workers are showing in action that they do not hold
the German workers responsible for Nazism.
The Belgian capitalist class and its Socialist and Stalinist lieutenants have left no stone unturned in their effort to justify the disgraceful use of German workers as slaves to swell the profits of the mine owners. "The unpaid wages of German prisoners" they lie, "will augment funds for rebuilding the ruined villages of Ardennes, etc."
But such arguments just don't take. Belgian workers understand perfectly what the Trotskyist paper La Lutte Ouvriere (Workers' Struggle) explains: that the German workers are not responsible for Nazism, which reduced both Germans and Belgians to slavery; that the coal bosses want to use the German prisoners as strikebreakers.
For instance, at the mining town of Anderlues, German prisoners have backed Belgian miners striking for holiday pay. The Germans put it this way - "We are forced into the pits," they said, "because we are under soldiers' guard. But we promise you we will NOT work."
In another town in Charleroi (Trieu-Kaisin) recently, Belgian, Polish, and Spanish miners went out on strike in support of the Germans. They walked out because the bosses failed to send an ambulance quickly enough to remove a German prisoner who had been seriously injured in a fall.