JUSTICE FOR BRENDAN LILLIS !

I just emailed , the Secretariat, at the European Council for the Prevention  of Torture, Diane Penaueau, asking for them to help in bringing justice and  compassion to the Irish Political Prisoners in Maghaberry Prison, at behest of  Caroline Kelly, please , if you even have 5 minutes , take the time to send a  similiar message to Diane, at :

cpt.doc@coe.int and bbernath@apt.ch

and let her know about this grevious injustice in Maghaberry Prison !

Dear Diane Penaueau,

I felt the need to highlight the injustice taking place in HMP  Maghaberry Prison in Maghaberry, Lisburn, Northern Ireland, whereby it has come  to my attention, that despite all the peaceful and nonviolent efforts of the  Irish Political Prisoners there, they were consistently, forcibly strip  searched, unmercifully beaten, and several of their number, thrown into solitary  confinement, and continue to live in inhumane conditions that are a clear  violation of their rights, a clear violation of human rights and the European  Convention on Human Rights, and , speaking specifically, regards, Political  Prisoner, Brendan Lillis, his continued detention, while the Prison Authorities  refuse to give Brendan proper medical care, and insist, instead to drug him, as  he continually suffers from the incurable medical condition, known as ankylosing  spondylitis , is in clear violation of Article 5, the Right to Liberty and  Security, and Article 6, the Right to a Fair Trial. As a colleague recently  stated, , Brendan Lillis, also has a protected right under the EU HR Convention  to the Provision of Medical Services under Article 2 the Right to  Life.

Brendan Lillis and his fellow Political Prisoners are being held in  inhumane conditions due to their political convictions and I urge you and your  colleagues to investigate this injustice and let the world know that while  Brendan Lillis and his fellow Political Prisoners are held in these unjust  conditions, we will not rest until justice is done.

Sincerely,

Rory Dubhdara,

New Brunswick, NJ, USA

JUSTICE & FREEDOM FOR THE MAPUCHE HUNGER STRIKERS

From Void Mirror From Athens Greece, from Mexico city to London, from New York to Bilbao, from Hamburg to Sofia and from Katmandhou to San Francisco, from all the active cells of Void Network we are expressing our solidarity to the struggle of Mapuche for Mother Earth, for the Dignity and Freedom of their communities, for the Freedom and Dignity of all of us. The Struggle of Mapuche people is our own struggle, their dreams are our own dreams! Freedom for all political prisoners, Freedom for all Mapuche prisoners NOW! Dear Friends, this is a message from Mexico City, 23rd March 2011.

Last September we contacted you during the more than eighty day hunger strike staged by Mapuche political prisoners in Chile. At that time we also made a call for international support, numerous individuals and organizations signed up to this cause and responded to the call for support. This included various meetings in the Chilean Embassy in Mexico City in Europe and in other countries around the world which formed part of the international events to provide solidarity and support to these political prisoners in Chile. The hunger strike was ended with an agreement on the part of the Chilean government to not try the detained under terrorist law (which also permits repeated prosecution for the same crime). The hunger strike and the mass support in Chile and beyond made a huge impact, pressurising the Chilean government to respect the basic individual guarantees for the prisoners. Last March all of the seventeen Mapuche political prisoners, persecuted for supposed terrorist crimes, were cleared of those supposed crimes and the majority of them were freed.

However, four prisoners who are members of the Arauco Malleco Organisation (Coordinadora Arauco Malleco) have been condemned to prison sentences of between twenty and twenty five years. These are Ramón Llanquileo Pilquiman, José Huenuche, Jonathan Huillical and Héctor Llaitul. It is important to note that the Arauco Malleco Organisation is one of the Mapuche organisations which is most active in the defence of communal land against forestry companies and which vindicates indigenous autonomy most rigorously. It is clear that the sentences are not only severely disproportionate however there are also political reasons behind their invention. The prisoners have now begun another hunger strike which started on the fifteenth March. At the time of writing this hunger strike continues. The prisoners defence will appeal against the sentences, presenting a call to declare the charges void to the Chilean Supreme Court of Justice. The principal arguments are that in these cases “faceless witnesses” were permitted. These secret witnesses are anonymous and the defence is not permitted to have any form of contact with them. Furthermore, during their detention and time in prison there have been violations of constitutional guarantees, confessions under torture, declarations outside of the allowed time limit and without the presence of defending lawyers. There has also been repeated trial for the same alleged crime.

It is therefore that support groups from various parts of the world will impulse diverse actions of solidarity for the prisoners and pressure on the Chilean government. The objectives are to support the demand to declare the charges and trial void that have been declared against these four prisoners. In these actions we also send a message of solidarity to those prisoners on hunger strike.

As part of these actions we also send another letter to you with the hope that we can once again count on your signature. We send you warm regards.

Support Organisation for the Mapuche political prisoners in Chile [ Mexican Section.]

We, artists, academics, indigenous, civil and popular organisations of various nationalites wish to make public our concern for the sentences against the Mapuch political prisoners in Chile, Ramón Llanquileo Pilquiman, José Huenuche, Jonathan Huillical y Héctor Llaitul. We find the enormous sentences against them alarming as well as the fact that they have not had the legal guarantees that protect the most basic of human rights. It must be considered that the State can not respond to indigenous demands of land, territory and autonomy by criminalising social protest. We call upon the Chilean State to guarantee the due and proper trial of the detained, a trial without the use of secret witnesses, with tribunal impartiality, dignified conditions of detainment and an end to repeated trial for the same alleged crimes. We call upon the Chilean State to the rights and basic guarantees of the Mapuche people, to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples consecrated in the 169th declaration of the WLO and to respond urgently to the demands of the hunger strikers. We send a message of solidarity from all over the world to the prisoners and their families.

autonomía! autogestión! horizontalidad! libertad!

Jovenes en Resistencia Alternativa
www.espora.org/jra
ciudad de méxico: 36266692
Void Network
[Theory, Utopia, Empathy, Ephemeral Arts]
http://voidnetwork.blogspot.com
please send your messages of solidarity:
the signs will be received in
libertadpresosmapuche@gmail.com
for more info about the Mapuche Nation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapuche

1954 : Coup d'etat and Civil War in Guatemala

When Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman attempted to nationalize the United Fruit Company, a US-based corporation that controlled much of Guatemala’s agricultural land, a CIA-sponsored coup d’etat replaced him with a brutal military dictatorship.

Mural depicting Guatemalan President Arbenz and symbolizing the reign of military terror following the CIA backed coup in 1954, Collaborative art by HIJOS, Zone 1, Guatemala City, Guatemala. Copyright © Donna De Cesare.

Arbenz had tried to follow international law, offering the US company compensation. Arbenz had based his offer on the estimated value the United Fruit Company itself used in its tax declarations. The company had deliberately underestimated the value of its land holdings to avoid paying Guatemalan or US taxes.

After refusing the $600,000 buyout Arbenz offered as too low, the United Fruit Company, its banking supporters and the CIA argued that he was either a communist , or a socialist who would make Guatemala prey to Communist takeover. At the height of cold war tensions, these assertions persuaded US President Eisenhower to support a CIA coup plot. Arbenz was forced into exile and died in Mexico in 1971. The US continued to support the succession of military regimes that followed waging war for the next 40 years on anyone they decided was “communist” including their own Mayan population.

From :

http://www.destinyschildren.org/en/timeline/coup-d-etat-and-civil-war-in-guatemala/

Guatemala to Restore Legacy of a President the U.S. Helped Depose

By ELISABETH MALKIN, New York Times

Published: May 23, 2011

MEXICO CITY — After President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a C.I.A.-backed coup in 1954, the Guatemalan government reversed his policies and branded him a Communist, all but erasing his brief presidency from history.

Nearly six decades later, a democratic Guatemala has promised to restore his legacy and treat him as a statesman.

In an agreement signed with Mr. Arbenz’s descendants last week, the government promised to revise the school curriculum and grant Mr. Arbenz the treatment afforded to historical heroes. It will name a main highway and a museum wing after the ousted president, prepare a biography of him, publish his widow’s memoir and mount an exhibition about him and his legacy in the National History Museum.

The post office will even issue a series of stamps in his honor.

“When you say his name, my generation and older generations automatically pick sides,” said Dr. Erick Arbenz, Mr. Arbenz’s grandson, an anesthesiologist in Boston. “The younger generation don’t know who he was or how he shaped history. Part of that is the culture of silence created by the C.I.A. and the perpetrators.”

After winning the presidency in a landslide election in 1950, Mr. Arbenz began an effort to modernize the economy, including a land-redistribution program that angered American corporations and the United States government. President Eisenhower, convinced that Mr. Arbenz was giving the Communists a foothold in the Americas, authorized a coup that ousted the Guatemalan president in nine days.

The deposed president died in 1971 at the age of 57, a broken man in Mexico, leaving his widow, children and, later, grandchildren to fight unsuccessfully in the Guatemalan courts for his reputation and their confiscated property.

In 1999, the family went to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington. It accepted the complaint in 2006, leading to five years of stop-and-start negotiations.

The agreement, signed last Thursday, includes monetary reparations, which were not disclosed. The Guatemalan government will also hold a public ceremony to admit the state’s past role in the coup and send a letter apologizing to the family.

The government has “acknowledged its responsibility for wrongdoing and its desire to make it right and restore this man to his place in Guatemalan history,” said Richard J. Wilson, a law professor at American University and the director of the law school’s human rights clinic, which argued the Arbenz family’s case.

President Álvaro Colom, Guatemala’s first left-leaning president since Mr. Arbenz held office, has given human rights organizations a freer hand in demanding an accounting of the crimes committed during the brutal 36-year civil war that began a few years after the coup.

“We’re working for the historical memory of our country,” Ruth del Valle, president of Guatemala’s presidential human rights commission, wrote in an e-mail. Ms. del Valle acted as her government’s negotiator. “It’s important to guarantee that events such as these are never repeated,” she said.

As part of the agreement, the family insisted on measures it believes can promote change in Guatemala, where, Dr. Arbenz said, the social chasm that lay behind the coup and its aftermath still persists. The government agreed to set up a degree program in human rights for public officials and indigenous leaders.

Dr. Arbenz said the agreement finally corrects the historical record, even if neither the president nor his wife, María Cristina Vilanova, who died at 93 in 2009, lived to see it.

“Justice does take time, even if it skips a generation,” Dr. Arbenz said. “My grandmother taught us to be tenacious, to be courageous, to be brave, and eventually there will be a solution.”

MACHUCA : A Film By Andres Wood

I wanted to recommend this brilliant Chilean film that I saw the other night, MACHUCA, it is basically the only movie I have ever seen that shows the truth of Class War from the point of view of grade school students, a story of a school kid growing up in Santiago when Salvador Allenda was in power and shortly after removed by the CIA backed military junta of Augosto Pinochet,  and the repercussions on the poor after Pinochet took power .

This film shows the massive chasm that lies between the haves and the have nots of Santiago in the early 1970's, which could really be any place or town or city or nation, in Europe, North, Central or South America, today, showing, El Barrio of New Brunswick with its poverty and desolation and less than two miles away, the sparkling estates and condominiums of South Brunswick, or North Brunswick, or perhaps taking you from the yuppie splender of Park Slope to the bleak ghettoes of Bedford Stuyvesant, and the fight for social and economic equality by those who opposed such a inequality and the radical changes brought about by  socialists like Salvador Allende, whose legacy has, I believe, sparked the massive move towards socialism and socialist governments in modern Latin America, with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, former Roman Catholic Bishop and political prisoner, Fernando Lugo, in Paraguay, a student of "liberation theology" (which is often termed  "Christian Marxism" by its detractors due to its emphasis on the fight for the poor and social justice), and Evo Morales in Bolivia, the first indigenous leader to become a president of Bolivia, when he was elected in a massive landslide of 53.7 % of the popular vote (the largest electoral victory in Bolivian history) on December 18, 2005, only to substantially increase this majority in a recall referendum on August 14, 2008, where he won more than two thirds of the votes, and again won the presidential elections in December 2009 with a 63% majority in tbe national vote.

This movie teaches the timeless lesson of Class War and even focuses on proponents of "liberation theology", in this movie, in the form of a rebel priest, who is shown as being either socialist or very sympathetic to socialist ideas, Father McEnroe, who is allegedly based on the historical rebel priest, Father Gerardo Whelan, who was the priest who taught at the school that this film's director, Andres Wood attended, Saint George's College, a rebel priest who stands up against the wealthy "elite" and their fascist backers. Great film and a recommended film for any socialist or anyone who understands the importance of Class War in *any revolutionary struggle*

-- Rory Dubhdara, The New Brunswick Bolshevik