This Week in History: November 4-10. – Carswellfamilyfoundation

25 years ago: Clinton prepares repression in Puerto Rico

This week in 1999, the Clinton administration was preparing to send 300 federal marshals to Puerto Rico to quell protests against military live-fire exercises on the 20-mile-long island of Vieques, located about 8 miles from the island colony. east coast.

US government agents were concerned about the possibility of mass organized protests. Last April, a stray bomb exploded during a live-fire training exercise, killing one Puerto Rican civilian, David Saines, who worked for the Navy, and wounding four others. Popular anger forced Governor Pedro Roselló to form a commission of inquiry, which recommended an immediate and permanent end to military exercises on the island.

US Navy vehicles on the beach at Camp Garcia, Vieques

The Pentagon formed its own commission and recommended that the Clinton administration curtail military exercises over the next five years, but any immediate respite in training would jeopardize “national security.” A meeting between Governor Rosselló’s chief of staff and Secretary of Defense William Cohen yielded nothing. USS Eisenhower The combat group prepared to fire live ammunition. While negotiations continued, the protesters refused to leave the training ground they occupied.

Popular sentiment against the militarism of the US government resonated deeply among the working class on the island of Vieques and more broadly throughout Puerto Rico. The US Navy had used Vieques and the neighboring island municipality of Culebra as military zones for the previous six decades to prepare for invasions of countries throughout Latin America.

During military exercises, the Navy used radioactive shells containing depleted uranium. A Navy spokesman confirmed that a month before the fatal “disaster” on Vieques, a fighter jet mistakenly fired 236 shells, of which only 57 were subsequently recovered. The shells, which take years to decompose, threaten the island’s water, atmosphere, soil and people. Cancer rates in Vieques were twice the average on mainland Puerto Rico, and the infant mortality rate was higher.

According to a report released by Puerto Rico’s governor’s commission, U.S. military exercises on the island “confined civilian residential areas and commercial activities to an approximately three-mile strip in the center of the island.” He also imposed restrictions on fishing, the main livelihood of the island’s inhabitants.

50 years ago: a state of siege was declared in Argentina and Bolivia

On November 7, 1974, the governments of Argentina and Bolivia declared themselves in a “state of siege” to combat the uprisings and threatened military coups against the US-backed dictatorships that ruled both countries. In the coming weeks, the suppression of left-wing political organizations through state-sponsored fascist violence will be intensified.

In Bolivia, the impetus for declaring a siege was an attempted coup d’état by some military personnel against President Hugo Banzer. Soldiers of the 12th Infantry Regiment and US-trained counterinsurgency Rangers briefly took control of the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra before being driven out by forces loyal to Bancer.

The coup was politically led by dissidents from the National Revolutionary Movement and the Bolivian Socialist Phalanx Party. Both parties were far-right organizations that were part of Banzer’s ruling coalition and supported him during the 1971 coup that brought Banzer to power as dictator for the first time.

The leaders of the coup attempt included former Interior Minister Carlos Valverde and General Julio Prado. This faction broke away from the main party organizations that still supported Banzer. The break came shortly after Banzer rescinded his promise to allow elections by the end of 1974.

According to a radio broadcast broadcast from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the plotters were supporters of former President Victor Paz Estenssoro, who had also once supported Banzer but was now living in exile in Peru.

Shortly after the coup began, Banzer traveled from the capital La Paz to Cochabamba to gather loyal forces for his defense. Still in control of most military resources, including the air force, he was able to crush the rebellion and regain control of the city.

Two days later, on November 9, Banzer announced the expulsion of all civilian elements from the government and that the military would rule the country entirely until at least 1980. All political parties and organizations, including trade unions, were ordered to disband. Although the coup was carried out by a faction of his own right-wing supporters, the ensuing repression was directed primarily at left-wing and socialist workers and youth.

Almost simultaneously, a similar process was underway in neighboring Argentina. On November 1, Montoneros militants assassinated Alberto Villar, head of the Argentine secret police and leader of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA). The AAA was a fascist terrorist organization whose goal was to destroy socialist organizations through mass murder.

Immediately following Villar’s death, there was a wave of fighting and assassinations between the AAA and various anti-government guerrilla organizations. On November 7, Argentine President Isabel Peron, who came to power in July 1974 after her husband Juan Peron died in office, declared a state of siege in her country.

To an even more brutal extent than in Bolivia, the state of siege was used to authorize and justify unlimited fascist violence against socialist parties and trade unions. The AAA, already composed mainly of police, was allowed to begin unrestricted terror.

In particular, the AAA persecuted the Argentine Socialist Workers’ Party (PST) and the Argentine Communist Party. In the first week of November alone, three members of the PST were shot and killed by the AAA.

75 years ago: The United Mine Workers sent more than 300,000 striking US miners back to work.

On November 9, 1949, some 320,000 striking miners were sent back to work following a resolution passed by the United Mine Workers’ (UMW) Policy Committee.

The nationwide strike began on September 19, its immediate cause was the suspension of benefits payments to anthracite and bituminous coal miners. It expanded to include demands for improved wages, hours and working conditions. At the peak of the strike, approximately 400,000 miners participated.

Harry Fain, miner from Wheelwright, Kentucky, 1946.

The UMW previously ordered about 80,000 striking workers west of the Mississippi to return to work on October 3. The November 9 resolution ordered the remaining 320,000 workers to return under a three-week “truce” with the mining companies. The strike was due to resume on November 30 if a contract agreement had not been reached by then.

The strike initially resumed on this day. But the next day, the UMW political committee again ordered the miners to resume work three days a week, starting on December 5th. Ultimately, almost the entire US mining industry abandoned the striking workers’ demands. At the end of the year, the miners were sent back to regular work.

The UMW’s November 9 resolution came amid attempts by the Truman administration to end the strike. The White House openly floated the idea of using the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 to crush the strike.

The resolution followed a two-day decision by the Supreme Court, which upheld a fine for contempt against the union of more than $1 million. Militantthen a Trotskyist newspaper in the USA, the next day, commented on this decision, writing: “The Supreme Court is not concerned with protecting the interests of the masses, least of all the interests of the working people. He defends the sanctity of profit and the preservation of the capitalist order.”

100 years ago: Pogrom of Muslims in Yugoslavia

On November 9, 1924, more than 2,000 Orthodox Christians killed about 1,000 Muslims in the village of Šahovići (today Tomasevo) in the Cetinje region (today Montenegro) in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

The pogrom occurred in retaliation for the November 7 assassination of the regional leader, Montenegrin Christian official Boško Bošković. Authorities blamed the murder on the leader of the Kačaks, an Albanian nationalist movement based in Kosovo, although he was in Albania at the time. Speakers at Bošković’s funeral incited hostility towards the local Muslim population for the murder.

It later emerged that Bošković was killed by members of another Christian clan.

The authorities issued an order to disarm the population of Shakhovichi and took 50 of its leading citizens under “protection”. The next day, mobs were organized in nearby villages and 50 Muslim leaders were captured and executed. The gang was partially armed with weapons taken from the Shakhovichs.

Scene from the pogrom in Shakhovichi

Stalinist leader Milovan Djilas, one of the founders of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1945, whose father participated in the pogrom, wrote in his book A land without justice (1958) about what followed:

After the prisoners in Sakhovichi were mowed down, one of our residents, Sekula, walked from corpse to corpse and cut the ligaments on their heels. This is what they do in the village with oxen after they have been struck down by an ax, so that they do not get up again if they come to life… Babies were taken from the hands of mothers and sisters and beaten in front of their eyes… The beards of Muslim religious figures were torn out and crosses carved on the forehead…

The survivors appealed to King Alexander I for justice, and the facts of the massacre were raised in Parliament, but to no avail. The remaining Muslims emigrated to Bosnia and Herzegovina or Turkey.