The government has indicted on felony charges three employees of the Manzo Area Council and a nun who works with them. They are Margo Cowan, director of the agency, Catalina Montaño, Marguerita Jauregui Ramírez, and Sister Ann Gabriel Marcaicq.

Partially funded by the federal government, the Manzo agency provides a variety of services to the poor in Tucson's west side barrio. One important and independently funded service has been counseling undocumented immigrants who have the possibility of legalizing their status here on the basis of having a child, spouse, or other relative who is a citizen or permanent resident.

Such counseling is provided by countless social service agencies, attorneys, and licensed immigration counselors throughout the country. If the Manzo workers are successfully prosecuted, it would jeopardize all immigration counseling.

Successful prosecution would threaten more than immigration counseling, Margo Cowan added. Public health nurses, county hospitals, and schools that in any way relate to undocumented people would also be open to victimization.

The indictment is sweeping. The twenty-five counts include "aiding and abetting" aliens to elude detection, "transporting" them, and knowingly aiding "felons," that is people here "illegally."

Cowan, indicted on all twenty-five charges, faces a maximum of seventy-seven years in prison and a $98,500 fine.  
 
December 24, 1951
BOSTON--"I have probably been the most outspoken professor with full tenure in the Greater Boston area, and if I am convicted of this false charge it will be a great threat and intimidation to the university world," Prof. Dirk J. Struik told the Militant in an interview.

Struik has become a central figure in the witch-hunt following his indictment last September under the Massachusetts "Anti-Anarchy" law for conspiring to overthrow the government. In addition to this charge he is also being prosecuted under the same law along with a Malden, Mass., business man, Harry E. Winner, and Mrs. Margaret Gilbert for "conspiring to teach...the overthrow of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States of America."

The "Anti-Anarchy" law was passed in 1919 as an "emergency" measure to cope with the situation which the legislators, looking through the spectacles of the Palmer Red Raid hysteria, professed to see. However the political stooges of Big Business in Massachusetts never used the law. They found it more to their liking to deal with anarchists by frame-up and legalized murder as in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The present indictments under the "Anti-Anarchist" law are the first in the 33 years this legislation has been on the books.

Struik, an internationally famous mathematician and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has frequently stated that though he is a Marxist he has never been a member of the Communist Party. He also told this interviewer that he agrees with many of the policies of the Communist Party and at one time even considered joining but decided against it.  
 
 
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