Vol. 77/No. 34 September 30, 2013
Life of working-class organizer
The Militant and the Socialist Workers Party lost a good friend June 29 when Cecilio Santillana of San Jose, Calif., died at age 85.Cecilio worked for 14 years as an agricultural laborer, starting in the 1940s as a bracero, a program under which the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated to supply agribusiness with a temporary, highly exploited workforce. He was active in the fight to win money owed to the many thousands of braceros whose meager pay was cut by 10 percent and placed in “savings accounts” for the workers’ use when they retired.
Concepción Santillana, Cecilio’s wife, told us July 8 that he did not succeed in getting all that was due him. She said he remembered with satisfaction the braceros’ fight and the immigrant rights marches he had helped to organize and participated in, including the massive outpouring in San Jose of more than 100,000 working people on May Day 2006. Cecilio spoke at Militant Labor Forums in San Francisco on the fight for immigrant rights on several occasions.
Gerardo Sanchez and Joel Britton
San Francisco, Calif.
Disagree on ‘whistle-blowers’
This letter is in regards to the article “Whistle-Blowers: Neither Heroes nor Traitors for Working Class” in the July 8 issue.Can the exposure of the U.S. government’s widespread spying programs be used to show the contradictions within this capitalist and so-called free democratic system? I think so. Why would a truly free and “democratic” government need such a vast and widespread capacity to spy, collect and store such massive amounts of data on its own citizens?
Also, I disagree with the statement that spying is not currently directed against political activists or Militant Labor. A recent case shows U.S. government accessing all twitter activity during Occupy Wall Street protests.
I agree that we must not lose sight of the true struggle and let the symptoms distract us from the disease itself. However, I firmly believe that as revolutionaries, as socialists, as communists, we need to be vigilant in spotting these contradictions, these symptoms of the disease that is capitalism. And expose them in the correct context and light.
A prisoner
Arkansas