Dear comrades
It is widely known that on 02-06-00 the Preventive Federal Police (PFP)
sacked Mexican students and their General Council of Strike (CGH) from the
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). They had been occupying the
University for 295 days facing the increase of university and high school
tariffs and in defence of the public education.
More than 1000 the Mexican students and workers were detained at the
beginning. About 250 of them have been accused by the General Attorney's
office of the Republic of making the crimes of “terrorism, sabotage,
delinquent association, mutiny, damage in other people's property, injure
deceitful and specific robbery”. They are still imprisoned, just because
they were defending their democratic rights to a worthy education for the
people.
Among the detainees and subject to this accusation, there are Argentineans:
students Leandro Rodríguez Lupo, Cecilia Brenda Rossi and María Cecilia
Feijoó and comrade Christian Castillo, who is a professor in the Buenos
Aires University and a Trotskyist leader, member of the Party of Workers for
the Socialism (PTS). He has already being candidate for this organisation in
the last elections in our country. And he is co-ordinator of the Marxist
classes in the Buenos Aires and La Plata Universities. Last year, he had
participated in the “Interfacultades”, an embryo of students`
self-organisación body built up in Argentina during the last struggle
against the budgetary cutting of the government of Menem and the gorillas of
the Alliance. Besides comrade Castillo, three more Mexican Trotskyist
comrades are imprisoned.
The Mexican repressor regime, next to the North American imperialism, wants
to give a punishment to all the workers and combative students of Latin
America, to erase of theirheads any idea of international solidarity, of
uniting its fights overcoming national frontiers. This is the reason for the
anger over the Argentinean fighters.
We are developing an international campaign for the freedom of the students
prisoners in Mexico, hostages of Clinton, the IMF and the cipayo and
repressor regimens of Latin America and for the freedom of Christian
Castillo, a Trotskyist leader and a political prisoner in the claws of the
PRI regime. Within this campaign the Internationalist Workers` League
(Fourth International), LOI (CI), is taking part of the activities that are
developed in our country. With our comrades of the Workers` Trotskyist
League and the Group of Trotskyist Studies of Chile, we are actively
impelling this campaign in Brazil, Chile and Mexico. Then, we are calling
for a Continental Movement of Workers, Peasants and Students Organisations,
to liberate the prisoners. We call every organisation that claim itself as
Trotskyist to became the vanguard in this combat to liberate the Mexican and
Argentinean students, who really are political prisoners of the PI regime.
We consider that the Trotskyist movement, which has a real weight within the
international labour vanguard and that leads many unions and students`
organisations indifferent countries, should lead this struggle and put its
whole weight to serve this struggle, recapturing the tradition of the
campaign that united the whole Trotskyist movement for the freedom of Hugo
Blanco, the Trotskyist leader imprisoned in the 70sby the Peruvian bourgeois
regime.
We attach to the present letter the petition we are impelling and that it
has already being supported by many leaders and personalities of the labour,
students and of human rights movement in our continent. We URGENTLY request
you for your pronouncement on the questions faced in this campaign.
We also attach to the present, the declaration that we are distributing for
thousands in our country, in Chile and in Mexico.
Long life for the fight of the Mexican students and their General Council of
Strike!
Immediate freedom to the Mexican and Argentinean students prisoners and to
all the political prisoners of the continent!
With revolutionary greetings.
Silvia Novak
Internationalist Workers` League (Fourth International) LOI (CI)