Release the Las Heras prisoners and all political prisoners!

See previous posting on the political prisoners of Las Heras

Statement of the relatives of the prisoners of Las Heras for the formation of a National Commission for the immediate freedom of all political prisoners

Las Heras, 02-05-2008

We, the relatives of the Las Heras prisoners, namely the families Catrihuala, Perez, González, Bilbao, Cortes and Rosales, call for the formation of an urgent National Commission for the immediate release of the political prisoners of Las Heras, Jose Villalba, and the dropping of all charges against all the worker militants, the return of Julio Lopez alive, and the formation of workers and peoples courts to judge the killers of Fuentealba and all those responsible for the imprisonment of members of our families, such as the Judge Ruata de Leone, servant of the government.

We call for the formation of this National Commision by all the militant workers' and students' organisations, as well as all Human Rights organisations and the parties of left that claim to represent the working class.

The families say we have had more than enough! We will no to longer tolérate the detention of those who fight for to living wage as if they were murderers!

They have been locked up for over two years still without charge and continue suffering this unjust treatment at the hands of the government and the employers. They are beaten and tortured every day in the jail to make them submit. They suffer terrible humiliations by the police whenever we visit them. None of us can sleep after our experience of the persecution and repression that the government has subjected us to, and we do not want any more humiliation!

Currently, our family members Darío Catrihuala, Hugo González and Jose Rosales are detained in jail in the locality of Pi­co Trun­ca­do, while Juan Pablo Bilbao is being detained in jail in the locality of Ca­le­ta Oli­via and Ramon Cortés and Alexis Perez are in the jail of Puer­to De­sea­do, province of Santa Cruz.

Ten times enough! Now is the time to confront this government that not only deprives us of food but squanders millions of dollars and leaves us to pay for our lawyers out of our wages. The hour has come to mobilise to free the political prisoners. For two years we have been fighting alone struggling to find the money to pay the lawyers. We do not want to fight alone! That is why we must urgently organise our forces to fight for this National Commission.

For all those that they want to contribute to a resistance fund of the relatives of Las Heras, we have set up a provisional account in the National Bank of Las Heras, Province of Santa Cruz, savings bank number 3280235498 or CBU 01103289-30032802354983 in the name of the account holder Franco Andrés Catrihuala.

Also we have this email address so you can communicated with us: familiaresenlucha@yahoo.com.ar

Violet Gomez, mother of Alexis Perez

Cynthia Perez, wife of Juan Pablo Bilbao

and sister of Alexis Perez

Franco Catrihuala, brother of Darío

Francisco Catrihuala, father of Darío

Dora San Martin, mother of Darío Catrihuala

Mariela Catrihuala, sister of Darío

Ingrid Saldivia, wife of Darío Catrihuala

Silvana Choiman, wife of Ramon Cortes

Ursula Llancao, sister of Jose Rosales

Jose Haro, brother-in-law of Jose Rosales

Raquel Valencia, partner of González

Estela Ampuero, mother of Juan Pablo Bilbao

Signatories to this declaration:

Brukman workers: Celia Martinez, Juan Carlos Righini, Delicia, Amalia, Rose, Miguel Stems, Liliana Cárdenas, Liliana Torales, Hugo Ramos, Zenón Jiménez, Elisa Diaz - UOM: Alberto Piccinini (Assistant Secretary UOM of Villa Constitution); Juan Actis (Organising Secretary of UOMRA, Secc. V.Constitución); Ramon Godoy; Norbeto Lopez; Carlos Vásquez; C. Vargas; R. Lezcano; Héctor Martinez; Carlos Avila, various delegates andmore signatories of workers - Junta Interna ATE INTI - Comisión Interna de Paty: - [Internal Commission of Paty]: David Soria and Hugo Costilla - Hospital Francés [French hospital]: Workers Assembly on 15th May (Approved unanimously); David Garuti, general delgate of the Internal Commission; Victor Garay, delegate of the Internal Commission; Cóceres, delegate; Alejandra Galván; Hugo Verón; Juan C. Domínguez; Cristian Acevedo, Graciela Amber; Hugo Cabrera; Maria Bjerring; Nélida Banggio; Mónica Arena; Joaquin Ruiz; Viviana Gueren; Estela Silva; Victor Iñiguez; Matías Torren (Antidote Group) and other workers signatures - FUTRADEyO: Jose Villalba, detained in prison - United Front of Employed and Unemployed Workers – Casino of Buenos Aires: Hernán Lopatka, delegate (disappeared and defendants); Leonardo Bonani, Gastón Platkowski (delegates of disappeared); Rodrigo Fernandez, Ana Luque, Alexander Cohen, Viviana Larroble, Erika Penjerek, Cristina Valenzuela, René Manente, Federico Garcia (dissappeared) and more workers signatures - Estela Medina; Liliana Debellis; Ana Maria Renzo, Mothers of Workers of the Casino - Garrahan hospital: S. Pereyra, delegate - Workers of Maffisa: Hernán Garcia (internal commission), Victor Carrillo, Pablo Domínguez, Marcos Vargas, Miguel A. Benítez, Marianela Flores (Commission of Women of Maffisa) and more workers signatures - Judicial: Pichi Graciano, Legal Delegate (Villa Constitution) - AGD - GRAPE: Fabiola Ferro - Miguel Etchegoyen, teacher CBC- CUM (UBA) – Protected factories (GCBA): Humberto Herrera, Odón Firego (teacher and assistant psychiatric nurse), Lucas Centurión, Marcelo Piccinini, Hospital Embroiders: Adolph Méndez - Noemí Reyes health worker of Hospital San Martin (La Plata) - FUBA: Cristian Henkel, president - Philosophy and Letters (GRAPE): Federico Castaglet, president Center of Students of FFyL), Lucia Hellin (mst), Pelloni - Yann Crystal (Directive Advisor FFyL GRAPE), Gonzalo Martinez (militant prosecuted on the 4th of November 2005 - USG FFyL), Silvina Ponce, Claudia Sanchez, Flax Dew, Ezequiel Vila, Carolina Cobelo, Victory Garci'a, Maria Victoria Esperón; Leandro Palaces, Laura Genta, Maria Oak grove (workers advocates CEFYL) and dwells signatures of students - Gustavo Arce, Sebastián Bruno (Reason and Revolution) - Center of Students of Sociology (CECSO-UBA): Santiago González, president CECSO - Center of Students of Psychology (UBA): Alexander Go'mez, president - Center of Students of the Teaching staff Joaquin V. González: Darío Molinari, Gabriela - UNLP: Mateo Garcia Silva, Chair of Libre Pensar-Actuar-Latinoamérica (UNLP), Maria Tiscornia, Andrea Rodriguez (sociology students), Natalia Aguilar and dwells signatures of students of the UNLP - Marcelo Cruciani, Multiorganizations of San Cristóbal - Children of La Plata: Emiliano Hueravilo, of the disappeared, Pablo Balut, of the disappeared - Association of Detained and Disappeared: Nilda Eloy - Center of Human rights of Zaragoza – [La Plata): Patricio Vértiz, Francisco Vértiz - Luis Zamora, lawyer for Self-determination and Freedom; Gerald Romagnoli, Deputy of the City of Buenso Airies, of Self-determination and Freedom; CADHU: Marcelo Parrilli; Luis Orellana; Raquel Coronel; Enrique Pope - - Laboralistas de Izquierda (A.L.I): Leonardo Sinistri - Carlos “Perro” Santillán, TUPAJ KATARY - Néstor Gomez, Frente de Unidad Barrial de Desocupados y Ocupados,, FUBADEyO - Internal commission of EMFER: Rafael Artiguez - Liga Socialista Revolucionaria – Democracia Obrera - Jose Castillo, UBA Izquierda Socialista - Alexander Torres, Mst, Ariel Orbuch, MAS La Plata and further signatures…

Castro and World Social Forum

What has enabled the current bureaucracy of Castro to leap ahead in the process of restoring capitalism in Cuba? It is undoubtedly the suppression of the workers' and poor peasants’ revolution in Bolivia, and the containment of the pre-revolutionary situations in Chile and Mexico.

This represents the temporary defeat of the most advanced anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggles of the proletariat and exploited in Latin America.

The Castro bureaucracy could not move towards capitalist restoration without the World Social Forum’s treacherous ‘Bolivarian Revolution’. In the years since the turn of the century the WSF has put all its efforts into preventing revolutions in Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia. It has stopped workers and peasants struggles in Chile and Mexico during 2006/2007 from embarking on the revolutionary road.

The Zapatistas and the Stalinists allowed the heroic Oaxaca commune to be crushed. In Chile, the Castroist FPMR [Popular Front of Manuel Rodriquez] prevented a general strike and allowed the "red pacos" [red pólice] of the Communist Party and the unión bureaucracy of the CUT to save Bachelet’s pro-NAFTA civil-military regime. In the United States the WSF subordinated the emerging opposition to the Iraq war and the struggles of migrant workers to the Democratic Party

Meanwhile, along with Chavez, the Castro bureaucracy is pushing a Contadora and Esquipulas style of agreement to stabilize Colombia by disarming the FARC. This agreement is designed to bring about a situation where the FARC and the Colombian bourgeoisie end the war and the FARC become a legalised ‘Bolivarian’-type party contesting elections.

Just as the betrayal of the Salvadoran and Nicaraguan revolutions in the 1980s allowed the Castro bureaucracy to move towards capitalist restoration, the suppression of the Bolivian revolution, the containment of the struggles in Mexico and Chile, and now the betrayal of the FARC today, has created the opportunity for the Castro bureaucracy to complete the restoration process and turn themselves into a new bourgeoisie.

This process will not be peaceful because to succeed, it has to crush the resistance of the Latin American workers and poor peasants.

So far the Castroists and the WSF have suppressed and contained the Latin American revolution, and the struggles of the US working class at the feet of the Democratic Party, but the continential proletariat has not been crushed by an historic defeat.

Cuba is undergoing the terminal decline of the foundations of the degenerate workers state. It is facing a crisis of insufficient production and shortages similar to that of the USSR in the late 1980s under Gorbachev and his policy of "perestroika”.

All foreign exchange and profits generated in the sector of the economy open to imperialist investment – tourism, nickel, petroleum, etc. – go offshore as royalties, patents and profit remittances to foreign monopolies, and as the income of the bureaucracy that goes into "off shore" accounts in the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands. The convertible peso –the "chavito" – that exchanges 1 to 1 for the US$ shows how profitable this sector is for foreign investors and the corrupt expropriation of foreign exchange by the bureaucracy.

Of those billions of dollars of profits extracted from the island, little or nothing is reinvested in Cuba. This is the cause of the insufficient production and shortages faced by the workers and peasants earning miserable wages (US$ 13 per month) in devalued pesos (34 pesos equal 1 US$!).

The devalued peso reflects the declining labour productivity of the obsolete and defective state sector of the economy. Many people are homeless and most autos are 50s US or Eastern European 60s and 70s models. Most people have ration books for food and the once high standards of education and health are deteriorating dramatically. Thus, as was the case in the 80s in the Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe, Cuban workers are left with very few past gains to defend that have not been liquidated or weakened by the restorationist bureaucracy.

This crisis of insufficient production and shortages results from the failure to develop the productive forces within the limits of the traversty of "socialism in one island."

Since the bureaucracy cannot enrich itself on the backs of the declining state economy, the only way out for the bureaucracy is to finish the restoration of capitalism. The alternative of revaluing the peso doesnt work because there is not the production to back the currency, and hyperinflation would result causing increasing social inequality and growing hatred among the masses.

The only alternative for the bureaucracy is to raise labour productivity. But this would need an acceleration of the process of foreign investment in joint ventures with the bureaucracy. This intensifies the exploitation of Cuban workers and drives down its miserable living standards. In other words, another explosive cocktail that could blow up in the faces of the bureaucracy.

This shows that as Trotsky said in The Revolution Betrayed, restoration will not be peaceful. The bureaucracy in its attempts to restore capitalism and become a new bourgeoisie must overcome the resistance of the masses by means of civil war.

Therefore, the only course is the political revolution linked to the Latin American socialist revolution. This is the only way to stop the bureaucracy from becoming the direct agents of US imperialism, crushing the masses, finishing capitalist restoration and inserting Cuba into the global division of labour as a new “brothel” of America."

· For the Trotskyist program of political revolution to overthrow the parasitic bureaucracy, and to create a workers state, a true workers democracy with a government of armed workers, peasants and soldiers councils!

· For a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat that ends all the "privileges, ranks and medals" of bureaucracy, class inequality and wage labour, where the first task is to renationalize under workers’ control and all sectors of the economy that are open to foreign capital and "joint ventures", and to reimpose the monopoly of foreign trade and stop the flight of foreign currency which bleeds the of wealth of the Cuban economy.

This is the only way to end the perverse system of "two currencies", and return to a single Cuban peso, a healthy currency that represents the real value created by the economy of the island once the workers and peasants have regained control from the monopolies and corrupt bureaucracy all branches of the production and all the wealth they have been stealing.

It is also the only way to expel the parasitic bureaucracy and its foreign partners, and create a healthy workers state as a bastion of revolution in Latin America, North America and the world.

"Uranium Dirty Bomb" fabrication against the FARC

This is a slightly edited post from MARXMAIL that attacks the US attempt
to implicate Chavez in providing 'uranium' to the FARC for a "dirty bomb"
on the basis of 'files' found on the computer of Raul Reyes.

....................................................

There is NO forensic examination that can determine that files were not
added after a certain date. Both the BIOS and OS clocks are user-settable.
Add ALL the files you want, setting the date for when you want them to
have appeared, erase recently used file lists and so on, defrag the drive
to change the physical layout and voila, there's nothing to show any files
were added.

If the CIA agents who organized the attack on Ecuador and have
orchestrated the release of the alleged FARC computer material are in
the tiniest bit competent, there would have been nothing for Interpol
to find.

Even worse, much of the alleged material wasn't even supposedly found
on the computer, but on alleged "thumb drives." You can put a file on a
thumb drive claiming to have been put there ten years ago, before the
damn things even existed.

The whole story about computers in a jungle camp is hokey as shit. Had
such computers REALLY been found, the FIRST thing the Colombian
authorities would have done is establish a completely transparent and
verifiable chain of evidence in the handling of the machines. The failure
to do this makes the computers worthless as evidence in any REAL
court of law on the planet.

So blatant was the disregard that even the imperialist agent at the head
of Interpol was forced to confess that this made Interpol's avowal
worthless.

"Mr. Noble told reporters in Bogotá that Interpol could not vouch for the
accuracy of the files. He added that a Colombian antiterrorism unit
accessed the seized files in the days after the March 1 raid, in a
violation of internationally recognized rules on handling electronic
evidence, but that Interpol?s experts verified that the action had
not altered the content of the archives."

But the REASON for the "internationally recognized rules on handling
of electronic evidence" is PRECISELY that tampering can be done
without detection.

That is WHY the Uranium hoax is so telling.

First, the idea that the FARC would have any interest in or use for a
"dirty bomb" is ridiculous.

Second, even the IDEA that such a bomb COULD BE BUILT using
artisan methods and improvised tools is absurd. To build it you need
to combine a good quantity of highly radioactive isotopes with
conventional explosives.
The POINT of a dirty bomb is that it will kill or seriously sicken people
closely exposed to even a small part of the radioactive isotopes that
are scattered by the conventional explosive. But ... what happens to
the person or people who assembled the thing, and thereby exposed
themselves not to a tiny fraction of the radioactive payload, but the
entire mass of it?

Third, even granting the absurdities that the FARC had some possible
use for a dirty bomb, and that such a thing could even be built outside
a nuclear weapons laboratory, URANIUM isn't by ANY stretch of the
imagination a suitable radioactive substance. AND EVERYONE who
takes the slightest interest in the matter KNOWS THIS, because it is the
first thing you hit when you google "dirty bomb uranium," thanks to the
benighted imbeciles at the department of justice whose torturers
extracted from Jose Padilla a confession that he was going to make
such a bomb, leading to John Ashcroft immediately calling a press
conference --from Moscow, if I remember right!-- to assure the
American people that he had saved them from the equivalent of an
invasion by flying monkeys.

And that is why Padilla was never brought to court charged with the
terrorist plot he confessed to. They fucked him up so bad that he'd have
confessed to being in league with little green men from Mars who every
night deflowered and disemboweled white Christian virgins in al Qaida
orgies presided in person by Satan himself. In even the mockery that
passes for a court of justice in the United States, Padilla's confession
was incontrovertible evidence of crimes against humanity ... by the
government. So instead they tried him for having bad thoughts while
making phone calls. I think that was the substance of the "conspiracy."

WHY is "Uranium" said to be the radioactive component of dirty bomb
projects? Because in the public mind it is linked with the dangers of
radioactivity, nuclear bombs and the rest of it. Ask people what Cobalt is
and chances are they'll tell you it's a Chevy. Since "dirty bombs" are
weapons of mass psychological terror wielded by imperialism and its
stooges, and not real devices at all, it matters little that Uranium wouldn't
work in an actual device and something like Cobalt 60, which is produced
in large quantities for industrial and medical purposes, might. This is
strictly, solely, purely, exclusively, 100% lying bullshit propaganda.

Finally, the Colombian government's charade of "finding" 100 pounds of
Uranium buried in plastic garbage bags was the straw that broke the
camel's back on the FARC's "dirty bomb" scam, because it was DEPLETED
Uranium that was found. THAT stuff is used for things like building
shielding AGAINST radiation. And something that hitherto was unsuspected
was discovered thereby: there actually is a limit to how much government
bullshit the Colombian media will regurgitate. Caracol TV called a professor
of physics from a local university and put him on the air to explain, albeit
it in not too accessible scientific terms, that this threat was on a par with
saying the FARC was collecting broomsticks to build an air force of witches.

BUT FOR US, the GREAT convenience of the FARC's dirty bomb police
fabrication is that we don't have to take Hugo Chavez's word for it that
the Colombian government is lying, we don't have to take Ecuadorean
President Rafael Correa's word for it, we don't need to believe the FARC
if it says these things are fabrications: the Colombian cops THEMSELVES,
with this preposterous tall tale of dirty bombs made from depleted uranium,
have given us the equivalent of an affidavit signed in blood swearing upon
their children's heads that THEY MADE THIS STUFF UP, it isn't true, it's all
bullshit.

Now comes the Noble head of Interpol, and tell us a) there's no way they
can vouch for the material because b) the Colombian authorities decided
to violate international norms for handling this kind of evidence but c)
NEVERTHELESS we tell you no files have been altered.

THAT is a POLITICAL attack by an agent of American imperialism whose
experts and binding rules TOLD HIM the Columbian "evidence" was
garbage, compromised and contaminated beyond any hope of redemption,
but nevertheless insisted on going to bat for the neocon cabal that is so
desperate that it's even considering pulling the trigger on classifying
Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism, using the Colombian
fabrications as "evidence," without bothering to note that in this particular
case, the economic sanctions that would be invoked would mean that
Venezuela would have to get along without Coca Cola and the U.S.
without 10-15% of its crude oil.

And it is much, much easier to smuggle a truckload of coke syrup than
it is a supertanker full of oil.

The TIMING of the attack was transparent: it was meant to disrupt the
summit between the European Union, Latin American and the Caribbean
held the next day in Lima. And thus the real provenance of the attack
ALSO becomes clearer: this was a U.S.-inspired stink bomb aiming at
preventing Latin American countries from taking advantage of the
inter-imperialist contradictions between Europe and the United States.

Joaquin