Vol. 73/No. 41      October 26, 2009

Torres is serving a 70-year sentence and has been eligible for a parole hearing only once every 15 years.

His “crime” is fighting for independence of Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony and one of the world’s last. It is in the interest of workers in the United States to end Washington’s subjugation of that Caribbean island. A successful struggle for the freedom of Puerto Rico will deal powerful blows to our common exploiters and oppressors—the tiny class of billionaire families that rules the United States.

Puerto Rico’s colonial domination also reinforces systematic discrimination, racist prejudice, and cop brutality against the 4.1 million Puerto Ricans living in the United States, along with Blacks and other oppressed nationalities.

Torres was charged with “seditious conspiracy” and armed robbery, among other charges. Seditious conspiracy was also the charge back in 1886 against the workers known as the Chicago Haymarket martyrs, four of whom were executed because of their role in the fight for an eight-hour day.

In 1941, 18 Minneapolis Teamster leaders and members of the Socialist Workers Party were convicted on seditious conspiracy charges and jailed for their opposition to the imperialist aims of the U.S. government in World War II.

Seditious conspiracy laws—which make it illegal to advocate certain political points of view—are also known in the labor movement as “thought-control” laws. In Torres’s parole hearing the examiner insistently asked him about his view of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States and whether his views have changed.

In the abusive treatment of Torres and other Puerto Rican political prisoners, as well as of the Cuban Five prisoners, we can see the methods that will be increasingly used against union militants in the future as our class resists the layoffs, wage cuts, and worsening job conditions imposed by the employers. That’s why labor should demand today: Free Carlos Alberto Torres and all Puerto Rican political prisoners!
 
 
Related articles:
Reduced sentence for Cuban 5 defendant Antonio Guerrero
Puerto Rican political prisoner fights for release
New York picket demands: Free the Cuban 5!  
 
 
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