Guzņay spoke during a demonstration of 2,000 people in Barcelona protesting the racist murder of her husband Wilson Pacheco. She led the march down a main street in Barcelona to the entertainment complex where he was slain.
Pacheco and several other Ecuadorans were denied entrance to a nightclub in Barcelona January 27 and a heated confrontation ensued. When the Ecuadoran men began fleeing the area they were chased by the doorman, the bouncer from the bar, and two security guards from a nearby club. The racists caught Pacheco, beat him, and shoved him into the harbor.
"If he had been Spanish they might have beaten him, but they would not have thrown him into the water. They would only do that to an immigrant, thinking that he would have no papers. That is why it is racist," said Javier Pedreņo, a native Spaniard who is director of the Association of Ecuadorans and a spokesman for Pacheco's family.
The death of Pacheco and the subsequent rally condemning the racist murder highlights the growing social polarization in Europe, where immigration has become a central political issue. In Spain, Germany, and other imperialist countries the capitalist rulers have encouraged an explosion of immigrants who are forced to come to major cities to eke out an existence.
"We are in an international competition for the best workers," said Rita Suessmuth, who heads a commission appointed by the German government to propose legislation increasing immigration levels. Facing a declining population because of low birthrates, some industry officials say that the country needs to bring in as many as 200,000 workers to sustain its workforce.
There are already 7.3 million immigrants in Germany, many of whom came as "temporary guest workers" or refugees. With a slumping economy, however, rightist groups and parties are attempting to scapegoat immigrants for rising unemployment and worsening social conditions. In 2000 there was a 59 percent increase in "reported far-right, anti-Semitic and racist crime," according to the International Herald Tribune.
The capitalist rulers in Europe have driven down living standards for immigrants whom they treat as second-class citizens with few or no rights. Over the last six years the number of immigrants in Spain has doubled to more than 1 million, many of them workers from Middle Eastern, North African, and Latin American countries.
Immigrants have formed organizations like the Association of Ecuadorans in Catalonia. An estimated 30,000 Ecuadorans live in Catalonia's capital of Barcelona.
Meanwhile, the government in Madrid has launched a broader assault on workers' rights, targeting immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa under the banner of fighting "Islamic terrorists." The number of Arab immigrants in Spain has ballooned from some 30,000 in the mid-1980s to an estimated 500,000 today.
An article in the New York Times aided this campaign by asserting that "Islamic militants have sunk roots into an Arab immigrant population growing so fast that it is now 15 times as large as it was a dozen years ago." The paper quoted Fernando Reinares, cited as a "counterterrorism expert," who said that "Islamic militants" are "hiding in the Arab immigrant communities. We're seeing the globalization of Islamic groups in Spain, which before were only concerned with events in their home countries. Now they cooperate with terrorists across the world."
Last September cops in Spain conducted raids in workers districts where thousands of Arab immigrants live and work. This included places such as Almeria where there are coastal truck farms; Murcia, where farm workers harvest lettuce and others work in canning factories; Valencia, where Arab workers pick oranges; and Huelva, where workers from Algeria and other North African countries pick strawberries. Six men from Algeria were arrested and charged with participating in plans to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris.
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