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Vol. 71/No. 12      March 26, 2007

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
March 26, 1982
Sixty percent of Guatemala's voters responded to the call by the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union (URNG) to boycott the March 7 elections, even though not voting is illegal. (Guatemalans can lose their jobs for failure to vote.)

News of Gen. Aníbal Guevara's election as president of Guatemala came as a surprise to no one.

Mass murder, intimidation, and fraud were but a few of the means used by the government to ensure that Guevara's victory would come off without a hitch.

Some 200 men, women, and children in the town of Santa Cruz del Quiché were decapitated with machetes on election day, a fact that was covered up by the Guatemalan army for four days.  
 
March 25, 1957
Sparked by 200,000 shipyard workers, the British working class is preparing to resist attempts by the capitalist class and its Tory government to make the workers pay for maintaining the dying British empire. The shipyard workers, members of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, struck on March 16 after their bosses had flatly rejected a demand for a 10% wage increase. The increase is demanded to help offset a new rise in the cost of living resulting in part from the Tory adventure at Suez.

Strikes involving an additional three million workers are expected to begin soon over the same demand. It could be the "gravest industrial crisis since the general strike of 1926," says the March 18 Christian Science Monitor.  
 
March 26, 1932
Strikes are once again spreading through the coal fields. In the Pennsylvania anthracite region a large number of the black towering breakers are shut down as thousands of men have left the collieries. It is what is called an insurgent strike. The combination, of an insurgent movement and a powerful strike, has thrown both alarm and fear into the whole of the enemy camp. As it gained day by day during its first week it met the most terrific opposition from the united forces of the operators, the state cossacks and the United Mine Workers officials.

So far the opposition has not been able to stem the tide. While the state troopers are massed in the territory ruthlessly breaking up "insurgent" meetings and making wholesale arrests, more collieries join the movement.  
 
 
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