Calero is currently an associate editor of the Spanish-language monthly Perspectiva Mundial and a staff writer for the Militant, both published in New York. He was involved in a six-month fight against the U.S. government’s efforts to deport him. Last December, immigration agents arrested him at the Houston Intercontinental Airport while he was on his way home from reporting trips to Cuba and Mexico. Washington said it intended to send him back to his native Nicaragua because of a plea-bargain conviction 15 years ago for selling one ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop. Calero was then in high school.

Under the mounting pressure of his defense campaign, the U.S. government dropped its effort to deport him on May 1 and a judge formally declared Calero “non deportable” three weeks later.  
 
Meeting with Labatt strikers
A highlight of his visit here was meeting and exchanging experiences with more than two dozen strikers at the Labatt picket line and strike offices. Calero was invited to visit the Labatt strikers by Normand Faubert, a union vice president, only days after the union officer had received the material on the tour. Calero met and spoke with two groups of strikers during his two-hour morning visit.

The 950 members of the Labatt Brewery Workers Union, affiliated to the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN), have been on strike since June 16, demanding more permanent jobs, better pensions, and an end to subcontracting. Some 20 percent of the workers in the plant are temporary, with no benefits and lower wages.

“As part of my defense campaign,” said Calero in his opening remarks, “I learned that the bosses and their governments are doing the same things everywhere in order to maximize their profits and smash us as a class. Working people lose too many fights, not because we do not want to fight, but because we don’t know how to fight in order to win when the objective conditions don’t present insurmountable obstacles.”

This opened up a serious discussion between Calero and the overwhelmingly native-born Quebecois strikers. “This guy is not a terrorist, he is a revolutionary,” said one worker. “After 10 weeks on strike, should we begin to be more aggressive?” asked another.

“Looking for and extending solidarity is key,” replied Calero. Some strikers explained with pride how 400 of them went to support 10 municipal workers on strike in a very small village, doubling the local population at once.

“What stance should our unions take on globalization?” asked another worker. Calero said that this is a term used widely to obfuscate the reality of the world capitalist system, which is in the era of imperialism. The only effective way to oppose globalization is to seek international solidarity of the oppressed and exploited classes and fight imperialism. A feature of this system, which has now entered a period of economic depression, is intensified competition between the employing classes of different countries. Under the “progressive” banner of opposing globalization, bosses try to tie workers behind their bandwagon by drawing them to nationalist demands of defending “American jobs” or “Canadian jobs,” which underlie anti-immigrant and chauvinist campaigns. “There is no such thing as ‘American’ jobs,” Calero said. “These are bosses’ jobs. The bosses decide who and when they will hire and who and when they will lay off.”

Another striker asked: “What will it take in order to begin winning more struggles?” A fourth added: “What should we do so the unions act less like ‘businesses’?”

Calero said that after nearly two decades of retreat by the labor movement in the United States, there has been a sea change in the mass psychology of working people over the last six years. “There is more willingness to resist and to look for and extend solidarity.”

“There is no blueprint. As individuals, each of us should take more responsibility for the struggles we are engaged in and find ways with others to strengthen our unions.” Calero gave the example of a group of coal miners he met two days before in western United States.

“Many of these,” he said, “are undocumented, nonunion workers from Mexico. They are paid $5.25 an hour, while unionized workers at a mine a mile from there are paid $20 an hour. These unionists have to work with these immigrant workers to help them get a union. Otherwise the bosses will impose on the unionized miners the same intolerable wages and working conditions that the Mexican miners face.”  
 
Bringing fighters together
The same night, some 25 people attended a meeting at the St-Pierre Centre sponsored by local backers of the Róger Calero Defense Committee. The panel brought together several fights for immigrants and workers rights. These included five Algerian activists, a group of five people involved in the struggle to free Mohamed Harkat in Ottawa, three participants in the recently concluded Quebec-Cuba Brigade, and other working people and youth.

On behalf of the Action Committee of Those Without Papers (CASS), Mohamed Cherfi told of the more than year-long fight led by hundreds of Algerian refugees against the Canadian government’s effort to deport them back to their native Algeria, a country with an ongoing civil war.

For months, he said, Algerian refugees and their supporters organized marches, weekly vigils, and press conferences, circulated a petition, and built support for their case wherever they could get a hearing. Their fight received national coverage in October when a family took refuge in a church to avoid being deported.

At that point, the Quebec government stepped in and offered to process the Algerian refugees as would-be immigrants without them having to leave the country, which is the usual procedure in such cases. Since then, hundreds of Algerian refugees and their families have been accepted as immigrants by the Quebec government —a victory unprecedented in its scope for any group of immigrants in Canada.

“However,” said Cherfi, “there are still several dozen, if not more, Algerian refugees who either have been excluded from this procedure for technical or so-called legal reasons, or are still awaiting an answer from the Quebec government.”

Sophie Harkat and Christian Legeais described the struggle they and others in Ottawa are leading to free Sophie’s husband, Mohamed Harkat, who was arrested in December under a so-called security certificate issued by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), Ottawa’s secret police. He has been jailed since then without access to the evidence against him and was tried without the right to appeal the judge’s decision, which is pending. CSIS is demanding Harkat be deported to Algeria, accusing him of being a “sleeper agent” for Al Qaeda and a threat to Canada’s security.

On August 25 about 50 relatives and friends of five men held in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal under a federal security certificate marched in Ottawa and presented a petition signed by 4,500 people to the office of Canada’s prime minister Jean Chrétien. In addition to Harkat, the other detainees are Mahmoud Jaballah, Muhammad Mahjoub, Hassan Almrei, and Adil Charkaoui.

Speaking on behalf of the Communist League, Michel Prairie thanked all those who had made possible Calero’s victory by sending protest messages, signing petitions, and donating badly needed funds for the case. The Communist League, a sister organization in Canada of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States , Calero’s party, played a key role in his defense campaign in this country.

Prairie stressed that there was nothing specifically “American” in what happened to Calero. “As working people living in this country, our responsibility is to aim our fire at the Canadian government.”

Over CAN $1,000 was raised or pledged toward Calero’s tour and defense expenses.

Calero spoke at an August 20 meeting of the CASS where he discussed in more detail the lessons from his fight together with five Algerian activists and supporters of their struggle.

He was also able to meet several workers leaving work at Jack Victor, a large UNITE-organized garment plant in Montreal, some of whom had signed a petition in support of his fight and followed his case in the pages of Perspectiva Mundial.

Calero was also interviewed for a Spanish-language program on Radio Centre-Ville, a widely known multilingual community radio station.

Sylvie Charbin and Grant Hargrave contributed to this article.
 

Other speakers included Mathew Behrens from the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, Morteza Gorgzadeh of the Free the Five Committee in Toronto, which is organizing a cross-country tour with a relative of one of the five Cuban revolutionaries jailed in the United States on frame-up conspiracy charges, and Michel Dugré, a leader of the Communist League.

Meeting participants also expressed opposition to the August 14 arrest and indefinite detention without charges of 19 men of Pakistani and Indian origin here on the pretext of links to terrorist groups.

The 27 people present contributed nearly CAN $800 toward the costs of the tour and to put aside some funds for the next defense case the Political Rights Defense Fund (PRDF) may have to take up. New York-based PRDF helped initiate the Róger Calero Defense Committee.

Calero was also able to discuss his victory with workers at two hog processing plants organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers and visit a picket line in Port Colbourne of Steelworkers who have been on strike against the Inco refinery for the past three months.

At the Maple Leaf meatpacking plant, he met members of a Hungarian family who have worked for several years at the factory and now face deportation. “There is an opportunity for their co-workers and their union to extend solidarity,” Calero said. He described how support from the labor movement was instrumental in winning his case.
 
 
Related article:
Antideportation struggle gets hearing in Boston  
 
 
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