January 24, 1975

The FBI maintains 160 agents in Puerto Rico whose sole function is to persecute the proindependence movement on that island of 2.8 million people. This was among the facts revealed by a former FBI employee at a news conference in San Juan at the end of December.

One of the methods employed by the FBI is to send agents into proindependence organizations. Other FBI techniques included illegal mail tampering. Sometimes the FBI would return the letters to the postal system for delivery, but in other cases the intercepted communications would be put in FBI files and never reached their destination.

The FBI also obtained copies of bank records of proindependence groups. The FBI would gather this material through a contact at the main office of Banco Popular.

Among the organizations targeted by the FBI were, in addition to the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, the Puerto Rican Independence Party, the Nationalist Party, the Socialist League, the Puerto Rican Communist Party, and other left-wing groups.

The latest information about the FBI's activities comes in the wake of a stepped-up campaignof harassment of proinde-pendence militants related to the recently concluded strike at the Aqueducts and Sewers Authority.  
 

January 23, 1950

Truman has given the green light to Robert N. Denham, NLRB General Counsel, to invoke a Taft-Hartley injunction against the embattled coal miners, some 90,000 of whom last week decided not to accept John L. Lewis's "suggestion" that they discontinue their "rolling" strike begun January 9.

Although the United Mine Workers has not had a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board, Denham on Jan. 18 petitioned the Federal District Court to issue a temporary injunction to prevent the miners from engaging in any action in support of their contract demands which he claims are "unfair labor practices" under the Taft-Hartley Act. Judge Richmond Keech promptly set Jan. 26 as the date for a hearing.

This move brings out into the open the conspiracy of the coal operators and the government to put legal shackles on the miners and deal them a crushing defeat. The "Hate Lewis" mob think the moment is ripe to beat down the miners who have been the spearhead of American labor militancy in the last decade. Then the way will be cleared, Big Business thinks, to "deal with" the other unions, particularly the CIO.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home