[NYTr] Chilean Who Fought Pinochet Dictatorship Faced with US Deportation

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Workers World - Jan 10, 2008 issue
http://www.workers.org/2008/us/toro_0110


Toro to be in court on Jan. 18

Víctor Toro Ramírez fought the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Now he
is fighting deportation from the U.S., and is linking his own struggle
to that of all undocumented workers.

Toro arrived in the U.S. in 1984 and settled in the South Bronx, N.Y.
In 1987 he co-founded La Peña del Bronx, a community grassroots
organization serving the poor and the needs of the community, with his
life partner and partner in struggle for social justice, Nieves Ayress.

On July 6, 2007, while on an Amtrak passenger train, Víctor Toro was
arrested and detained by the Border Patrol (ICE) in Rochester, N.Y.
Toro, who is out on bail and continuing to organize, will be in court
again on Jan. 18. His defense committee asks everyone to come out and
show support at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan in New York.

Toro wrote recently that at his hearing he hopes to discuss with the
movement his proposals, which he has developed in a statement that we
publish a part of below:

"Struggle of immigrants in 2008

"The year 2008 will provide great opportunities for immigrant workers to
carry out their tasks and struggles for the poor and marginalized
people of the United States and the world, and with the understanding
this is a development involving great projects carried out on a
universal scale, we will have to change things.

"In spite of contradictions weighing on the class struggle in this
country, I would like to present some optimistic proposals for how I
see that we can meet the challenges of 2008.

"We count upon the existence of a social, union and political rearmament
far greater than that which existed ten years ago. We rearmed at a high
level in 2006 to carry out protests, mobilizations and strikes
throughout the entire country involving thousands of people, and on May
1, 2006, our struggle for unconditional amnesty reached its highest
level, with a protest movement of a million people in cities like Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Washington and many other
cities. It was a movement that made the country’s Democratic-Republican
bureaucracy tremble with fear.

"Until 2005 we were invisible. In 2006 we became visible in the press
media of those in power. And in 2007 we again became invisible. We have
to change history. We advanced in one year more than we could in the
half century before it. The victories won at local and regional levels
will not change.

"The main demands and those that mobilized the most people were the
struggle for a general amnesty and the struggles against the war in
Iraq and the Middle East. Parallel to this situation and its social and
popular skirmishes, there were developing crises, that of the monstrous
costs of the imperialist war, the one of the war deaths of the U.S.
Armed Forces members and the reactions of their relatives, the case of
those tortured in Iraq and Guantánamo, the continual scandals involving
the Bush gang and its allies, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the rapid
increase in repressive violence and racism, whose greatest expression
came with the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, the anti-terrorism and
anti-immigration campaigns, the instability of Wall St., also the
threat of an economic recession, global warming and the overweening
responsibility of the Bush administration for it, the construction of a
wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. ..."


Toro goes on to call for going forward to organize from the bottom up a
national protest to stop all work on May 1, 2008, to fight for an
unconditional amnesty now! 


Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and
distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without
royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww at workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe at workersworld.net