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Vol. 73/No. 40      October 19, 2009

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
October 19, 1984
SALINAS, California—Under a sea of red and black United Farm Workers (UFW) flags, thousands of farm workers from the Salinas, San Joaquin, and Napa valleys marched defiantly through Salinas October 7. They marched to protest the growing, deep-going onslaught of attacks against the union by the agricultural employers.

Supporters lined the streets, and cars drove by with flags emblazoned with the United Farm Worker Aztec eagle, as the 6,500 unionists—in their overwhelming majority Mexican workers—marched six miles through the heart of the barrios.

This action took place as the growers are on a fierce offensive against the UFW. The stakes are high. Recently 14 United Farm Workers contracts have expired, and the growers have organized a frontal assault to break the union.  
 
October 19, 1959
The Eisenhower administration has promised to give earnest study to the Soviet disarmament proposal, and it can be counted on to do so without fail. Meantime, it goes right ahead preparing for war.

Thus negotiations have just been completed with Turkey for the construction of a U.S. intermediate-range ballistic missile base to be equipped with nuclear warheads.

According to a report by Jack Raymond from Washington in the October 11 New York Times, rockets with a range of 1,500 miles will threaten all European parts of the Soviet Union and Soviet Central Asia.

The Soviet government has proposed that an early step in disarming should be U.S. dismantling of its 950 bases abroad that ring the Soviet-zone countries.  
 
October 20, 1934
The general strike and the armed insurrection that swept over Spain during the past two weeks as a mass protest movement against the entrance of three Fascist ministries of the Popular Action party, and which in some sections took on the character of an armed struggle for power on the part of the workers, is now virtually over.

In a few localities, however, especially in the mountainous regions of Asturias where the miners have fortified a number of villages and mining camps, the workers are still holding their own valiantly against the armed forces of the reaction. The death list in the province of Asturias now runs into many hundreds while the casualties nationally range in the thousands.

Many of the leaders of the revolt have undergone military trials and a number of death sentences have been decreed.  
 
 
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