In an attempt to head off the strike, the military regime declared a state of emergency May 20 and arrested hundreds of labor leaders. Constitutional guarantees were formally suspended, the army was ordered to suppress strikes and demonstrations, and opposition newspapers and magazines were closed.

But such measures failed to intimidate the masses. Strike activity was reported in twenty-eight cities and towns. Armored personnel carriers were stationed in the streets of Lima, the capital, and the military regime admitted that at least twenty persons have been killed since the price increases were announced May 15. Five of the deaths occurred on May 22.

When the strike was called May 18 by the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP), the country’s main labor federation, the action was declared illegal by President Francisco Morales Bermúdez.

These price increases come on top of an inflation rate currently running at 80 percent a year, and at a time of widespread unemployment. In Peru, as elsewhere in the world, the real “subversive” is the capitalist system itself!

Morales Bermúdez decreed the price increases only under heavy pressure from the International Monetary Fund.  
 
June 1, 1953
Forty-eight union coal miners in the company town of Widen, West Virginia, face murder charges as the outgrowth of an armed clash between strikers and company thugs. The arrested men were released on the huge bond of $118,000 after a preliminary hearing on May 7.

The company and its armed agents have been trying to drive the pickets from their station on top of Winden Hill. On April 21 the Clay Messenger, a paper run by company stooges, published a letter addressed to Clay County Judge Charles A. Duffield demanding that he issue an order to clear out the pickets or “the Clay Citizen’s League for Law and Order fears that within the near future the citizens will take action to clear out such mobs by force.”

Two weeks later, the “Clay Citizens League”—the company’s vigilantes—made good their threat. First, on May 5 they used a bulldozer to clear off the picketing area on Winden Hill. Then, the next night, about nine p.m., a big gang of strikebreakers and company guards gathered in force against a handful of pickets and drove them from their station with rocks, rotten eggs, and clubs.

The following night a number of the pickets met near Dille, in Clay County, in a cook-shack headquarters. At four a.m. carloads of armed company men drove up in the dark. Firing broke out from the company men, according to accounts given Labor’s Daily. The strikers defended themselves. When the shooting ended one company man lay dead; three were wounded. One striker was shot in the arm.  
 
 
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