Vol. 76/No. 26 July 16, 2012
July 17, 1987
EL PASO, Texas—Nineteen undocumented workers hopped an eastbound Missouri Pacific freight train here on the evening of July 1. Within 12 hours, 18 of them died from dehydration and suffocation after being locked in an air-tight boxcar.The deteriorating Mexican economy is forcing a growing number of Mexicans to try to get across the border to find work. But it is becoming increasingly dangerous.
The U.S. Border Patrol (la migra) routinely makes more than 20,000 arrests a month here. Recently la migra agents have been involved in the shooting and drowning of Mexicans.
The problem of insufficient oxygen was compounded by the fact that the train was held up for two hours in El Paso while la migra supposedly inspected it. By the time the work began on the escape hole, it was too late.
July 16, 1962
Unemployment, as expected, has risen sharply again with the end of the school year. A report of the Labor Department on July 5 stated that the number of jobless rose 744,000 in June to a total of 4,463,000, or 5.5 percent of the total labor force. It was up one-tenth of 1 percent from May.The Labor Department also noted that more than 2,000,000 teen-agers entered the labor force in June but only a little more than two-thirds found jobs.
One of the most curious, if not to say suspicious, aspects of the employment report is that the labor force, i.e., those employed and those available for work, has declined from a year ago.
The decline in the labor force while the population increases has been a “puzzling” point to economic analysts ever since the Kennedy administration has been reporting a downturn in unemployment.
May 1, 1937
Military developments have a close and significant relation to the political realities of Loyalist Spain. To the degree that the workers’ militia has taken actual control and direction into their own hands, and to the degree that workers’ power is the political and military reality, while the dual power of the People’s Front capitalist-coalition is reduced to impotence or, at least, secondary importance—to that degree the Fascist ranks are flooded with appeals for worker-solidarity, there are wholesale desertions to the workers’ side, and the Fascists are hurled back.Despite significant gains for the Spanish workers on the main battlefronts, the united front blockade of Spain by England, Italy, France, and Germany, with the blessing of the Stalinist bureaucracy, is the most serious threat yet raised against the Spanish revolution.