No. 452, May 6, 1988
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
25~ WfJ/iIlE/iS"II'tJ'"No. 452 6 May 1988 Workers Strike, Contras Splinter, Sandinistas Backpedal Icara• ualn• urmol• Workers Need Bolshevik L~adership With truce talks in Managua be tween the radical-nationalist Sandi Outside U.S. nista regime and Washington's contra embassy in mercenaries once again interrupted, Managua, Nicaragua is seething internally. As Sandinista , government negotiators offered increas demonstrators ingly dangerous concessions to the denounce counterrevolutionary chiefs, who keep CIA-backed assassins, c~1I demanding more, thousands of Sandi for permanent nista supporters demonstrated with cease-fire to signs demanding "death to the con end contra war. tras." Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan masses stagger under anti-working-class austerity which has slashed their miser able wages. Pushed to the wall, con ,J'.ii\" struction workers and mechanics have been on strike for the last two months. And as.the Sandinista police crack "peace" pact engineered by the Dem all SandinistaII.'military and civilian per AID has already resumed air drops to down, the internal right wing and contra ocratic Party and Costa Rican pres sonnel to abandon the seven"cease-fire" the mercenary camps along the Hondu leadership-in collusion with opposi ident Arias, is an effort to undermine the zones! They are also demanding the ran border with Nicaragua. Even so, the tion union leaders-are cynically pos- limited gains of the Nicaraguan Revolu right to receive "replacement" weapons military attempts at overthrowing the ing as friends of the strikers. tion through negotiations, since Rea and ammunition, and that Soviet mili Sandinistas may have reached a dead In the all-sided turmoil engulfing gan's contras have lost on the battle tary aid to the government be cut off. ' end. "The bottom line is that theContra Nicaragua, a Bolshevik party is ever field. Contra official and former La The Reaganites in Washington are war is over," said U.S. Assistant Secre more urgently needed to crystallize the Prensa editor Pedro Chamorro said as doing their best to sink the truce talks. tary of State Elliott Abrams in an off situation along class lines, fighting to much on returning to Managua: "We Under the Sapoa accord, "humanitar the-record interview. "And perhaps the complete the revolution by- expro came here to achieve at the conference ian" aid to the contras is supposed to be last service I will perform for the Con priating the bourgeoisie, and to extend table what we have not been able to delivered by a "neutral" party, so the tras will be to band out green (US immi it throughout Central America and achieve in the mountains" (New York White House picked AID (Agency for gration) cards" (Independent [Lon beyond. Times, 17 April). Backed up by the International Development), synony don], 9 April). The March 23 Sapoa cease-fire agree $48 million voted by the Democrat mous with CIA counterinsurgency pro Meanwhile, the contra leadership is ment, implementing the Esquipulas II controlled Congress, the contras want grams from Vietnam to EI Salvador. continued on page 10 Behind French Elections: Fascist Threat Mounts As the results came in from the first bled the Communists' total, finishing Le Pen's racist electorate, Mitterrand round of the French presidential second only to "socialist" Francois is trying to undercut the National elections on April 24, millions in Mitterrand. ' Front by promising public spending to France and throughout Europe react The second round, on May B, pits improve housing conditions in areas ed in shock. Jean-Marie Le Pen-can President Mitterrand against Prime with high unemployment and immi didate of the fascist National Front, Minister Jacques Chirac, former dis grant population. Mitterrand will paratrooper-torturer from the dirty ciple of de Gaulle. Although he came likely remain in the Elysee pres colonial war in Algeria, the man who in ahead of Raymond Barre, the other idential palace, perhaps with a coali reaped international infamy with his major bourgeois candidate, the Gaull tion of his Socialist Party(PS) and sec Gavin Smith declaration that Hitler's gas chambers ist Chirac received less than 20 per tions of Barre's UDF. French fascist Le Pen. were only a historical "detail," the sin cent. The score of the Communist On May 1, Le Pen held a sinister ister inciter of' anti-immigrant ter Party (PC F), historically the party of anti-working-class provocation in for attacks on immigrants. This fas ror-had won over 14 percent of the the militant French proletariat, was Paris. Mixing May Day and Joan of cist demonstration wasn't the massive vote. From Amiens in the north to catastrophic: 6.8 percent, its lowest Arc, the fascist leader wanted to review outpouring that the National Front Marseille in the south, in many cities., since the 1920s, down by two-thirds his troops under the watchwords . hoped for after its spectacular electoral including the Paris region, Le Pen beat from the last presidential elections. of "fatherland" and "labor," Nearly breakthrough. Aside from a hard core the candidates of the "respectable" Mitterrand himself received only 34 25,000 people marched, shouting of some 2,000 fascist thugs sporting bourgeois parties and more than dou- percent. So while Chirac is bidding for "France for the French"-code words continued on page 8 week and one family visit per month. According to Susan Rosenberg, who Parti8au Defeu8e describes herself as an anti-imperialist political prisoner, Lexington officials £o......ittee told her, "The only way you can get out is if you change your associations and CLASS-STRUGGLE DEFENSE NOTES affiliations." The government hellhound is still on Geronimo Pratt's case. For 18 years Pratt has foughtfor his freedom and to Geronimo/Pratt expose the bloody crimes of COINTEL PRO which murdered 38 of his Panther comrades and keeps him behind bars. The PDC learned from prison officials Back Safe that Pratt's legal papers, seized more than one month earlier, had not been forwarded under federal seal as prom Free Him Now! ised. Instead they were sent through the On April 29, Geronimo Pratt finally prison in El Reno, Oklahoma on the mails, and "lost"-just like the FBI arrived safely in San Quentin prison, way back for nearly two weeks and sub "lost" the wiretap logs which prove that more than two weeks after leaving the jected to a grueling 36-hour non-stop Pratt was 400 miles away from the site of Metropolitan Correctional Center in final leg from there. At El Reno, he was the murder for which he was framed. New York. Pratt had come to New York allowed into the general prison popula Pratt's papers, the product of years of research on COINTELPRO, are vital to to testify as a defense witness in the trial tion for the 'first time in over a month, WV Photo of Mutulu Shakur and Marilyn Buck and then again placed in solitary con Geronimo Pratt, America's foremost his exposure of the FBI vendetta against (see "Geronimo Pratt Put in Chains," , finement for the last five days ofhis stay. class-war prisoner. him. And this sleight of hand occurred WV No. 451, 22 April). Pratt was kept Upon learning that Pratt was back in as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals chained and manacled all the way to "the hole," the PDC called news report tions, Inc. (IE), which turns a neat profit threatens to throw out his appeal on a New York, his very life endangered by ers and civil rights organizations urging transporting prisoners and suspects not legal technicality. being falsely branded a "prisonescapee" them to call the prison to protest this lat- convicted of any crimes in a manner Congressman Ronald Dellums has as he was dragged through several pris . est abuse. similar to {he brutal way Pratt was introduced a resolution calling for a ons in' the Deep South. In a lawsuit Until El Reno officials threw P~att brought to New York. IE packs prison Congressional investigation of COIN brought by the Partisan Defense'Com into solitary they treated him no better, ers wearing leg irons and handcuffs TELPRO and the frame-up of Geron mittee in New York, the government and no worse, than other inmates-e-i.e., attached to a "belly chain" into a imo Pratt. The Dellums resolution also was forced to admit in courtthat Pratt is hideously! And that customarily abu "stretch van" which drives cross calls on the California governor and not a "prison escapee," and thereby he sive treatment' of prisoners is getting country. The van meanders to drop off parole board to "take actions within won a measure of protection on his worse. Reaganite privatization has giv and pick up new "passengers."Thereare their power to bring about the immedi return trip. en birth to private prisoner transport no stops for sleep and prisoners are let ate release from prison of Elmer'Geron Even so, Pratt was kept in the federal companies such as Interstate Extradi- out only for brief bathroom stops every imo' Pratt." The 1976 Senate Church three or four hours. Food is brought in Committee hearings exposed some of three times a day and the tightly packed the crimes of COINTELPRO-but left prisoners are denied access to showers its gangsters unpunished and its vic tims, like Pratt, behind bars. Geronimo Return to Lenin's International! or change of clothes. American prisons are filthy, over needs your help now! Send your letters Ignace Reiss (Poretsky) was a veteran crowded, degrading and deadly dan to Congressman Peter W. Rodino, Jr., Polish-Jewish Communist who served in gerous. The largely black and Hispanic Chairman, Committee on the Judi Soviet intelligencefor 15 years,first in the prison inmates constantly face the ciary, 2137 Rayburn House Office Fourth Department ofthe RedArmy, then sadistic caprices of their racist jailers.