BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
SAO PAULO, Brazil - "Wait a minute, I know this man. It's
Mark Curtis," said Carlos Medina, an Uruguayan journalist
who works for Radio Havana in Montevideo, Uruguay. Medina
had just seen a picture of Curtis on the cover of the
pamphlet Why Is Mark Curtis Still In Prison? The booklet was
on display at a literature table during the meeting of the
Sao Paulo Forum, a gathering of political parties in Latin
America and the Caribbean, which took place in Montevideo
May 25-28.
"He is still in jail? It's unbelievable," he said. Medina first found out about the Curtis case when he lived in Stockholm, Sweden. "I met people from the Mark Curtis Defense Committee in the United States who were on tour in Sweden in early 1989," Medina said. "I remember I was shocked to see the picture of Curtis after he was beaten bloody by the police while in their custody. It made a big impression on me that the cops called him a `Mexican lover' when they pummeled him. Back then I wrote an article on Curtis's frame-up to show the real face of the U.S. `justice system' and to win support for his freedom."
Curtis is a unionist and political activist who was framed up by the police in Des Moines, Iowa, on trumped-up charges of rape and burglary and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. When he was arrested, he was involved in a fight along with other union members in the meatpacking plant where he worked to defend 17 immigrant co-workers from El Salvador and Mexico who had been detained during a raid by immigration agents in the factory.
"After my article was published, I sent a copy to Mark at the penitentiary where he was held in Iowa. But prison authorities returned it to me, saying they would not accept printed material from abroad," Medina said. "A few months later I came back to Montevideo and I haven't heard anything about Mark since."
The next day, Medina brought a copy of this article to Curtis's supporters from the United States he had met at the Forum. It had been published in Liberación, a Spanish- language weekly published in Stockholm. "I kept this article in my files all these years. Could you make sure to get it to Mark?" he said. "I always wanted him to know what I did in his defense."
Getting new supporters signed on
Medina, already an endorser of the Mark Curtis Defense
Committee, talked to other participants at the gathering in
Montevideo about the case.
Twenty-two people among the 160 participants at the Sao Paulo Forum signed up as endorsers of the Mark Curtis Defense Committee and contributed $25 towards Curtis's fight for parole. The new supporters came from Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay.
Susana Pereyra, a member of the Broad Front in Montevideo, was one of the endorsers. "I can understand this case because of my own experience with the police," she said. Pereyra is an activist in what has become known as the CX44 case, which refers to a radio station the government of Uruguay shut down last year. The station was broadcasting news and talk shows favorable to three Basque political activists who were arrested by the police in Montevideo and extradited to Spain after Madrid accused them of "terrorism." A series of rallies demanding asylum for the three refugees, including a union-led march, took place last August, which Pereyra helped to build. During one of these actions, the police shot and killed Fernando Morroni, among the demonstrators.
"The police then accused a number of protesters with assault, the cops who murdered Morroni weren't brought to justice, and the government shut down Radio 44," she said.
Pereyra and many other defenders of democratic rights in Uruguay have organized a campaign demanding the government drop the charges against the demonstrators and bring to justice the police who fatally shot Morroni.
Support in Brazil
Curtis's fight for justice also received support from
striking oil workers and others here in Brazil.
Neuri Rosetto, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), said in an interview in Sao Paulo on May 30 that his organization plans to include Curtis's fight for justice in the proceedings of the MST's national convention, which will take place in Brasília, the country's capital, July 24-27.
"We are planning a demonstration at the U.S. embassy during our convention to denounce Washington's imperial land grabs throughout Latin America," Rosetto said. "We will make the case of Mark and of other fighters framed up by the police or the U.S. government one of the main points of the rally." Rosetto said he expects about 5,000 delegates at the convention.
The MST endorsed the Mark Curtis Defense Committee in 1992. Since then, the organization has translated materials by the defense committee and articles from Perspectiva Mundial, a Spanish-language monthly published in New York, into Portuguese and has used them to publicize the Curtis case in Brazil and at two international forums in Europe. "Many of our members identify with Mark because they've had similar experiences," Rosetto said.
The MST organizes rural workers and peasants who are landless to occupy fallow lands or areas owned by big landowners and then begin to cultivate the fields while fighting for legal title. MST members often face attacks and frame-up charges by the army and the police, Rosetto explained.
After the nightly plant-gate rally on May 30 in solidarity with the striking oil workers who were occupying the Petrobra's refinery in Cubatao, the Curtis case became a topic of discussion at a tent that served as the canteen. One of the oil workers who spoke Spanish began explaining the case in Portuguese to other unionists after reading parts of the Spanish-language edition of the pamphlet Why Is Mark Curtis Still in Prison? and talking with Perspectiva Mundial editor Martín Koppel, who was on the scene covering the strike.
Uriel Villas Boas, president of STIMMES, the metal workers union at the huge Cosipa steel fabricating complex in the adjacent city of Santos, was also on the picket line at Cubatao that evening. He contributed $10 towards Curtis's fight for parole.
"Here the bosses, their goons, and the police often kill activists for doing precisely what Mark Curtis did," said Antonio Carrara, a member of SINDIPETRO, the oil workers union on strike at the Petrobra's refinery in Paulínia, in an interview at the union hall. Carrara and Silvio José Marques, the union president, said they will bring the Curtis case before the union local for discussion.