Vol. 81/No. 7      February 20, 2017

 

25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

 

February 21, 1992

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Public attention here remains focused on the current Puerto Rico Senate hearings that are investigating the 1978 police murder of two young pro-independence activists. The hearings have put a spotlight on the role of U.S. and Puerto Rican government officials in planning, carrying out, and covering up the murders.

The Puerto Rico Senate Judiciary Committee has questioned former police superintendent Roberto Torres González and former deputy police superintendent Desiderio Cartagena about their involvement in the case. The two have contradicted their own and each other’s testimony.

Carlos Soto Arriví, 18, and Arnaldo Darío Rosado, 24, were ambushed and killed after surrendering to as many as 20 cops at a remote mountaintop called Cerro Maravilla on July 25, 1978.

February 20, 1967

Feb. 13 — This afternoon, Lyndon B. Johnson ended the less-than-48-hour extension of the “Tet truce” with orders for resumption of U.S. bombing of north Vietnam.

Washington used the so-called truce period to build up forces for launching the biggest military operation of the war, the 15,000-man “Operation Gadsen,” which was launched at the minute the truce ended. At the same time, Washington prepared to launch a massive invasion of the Mekong Delta region with another 15,000 troops of the Ninth Infantry Division.

Further, giant U.S. B-52 bombers rained death on the south Vietnamese countryside up to the moment the truce began, and resumed as soon as it ended. And while doing this, Pentagon propagandists worked overtime to cook up Johnson’s excuse for breaking the truce period off.

February 21, 1942

An all-out employers’ offensive to block federal aid to millions of jobless victims of priorities and delayed war plant conversions, is receiving strong support in Congress.

A majority of the House Ways and Means Committee last week expressed their intentions of knifing an Administration proposal for a skimpy $300,000,000 appropriation to provide supplemental federal unemployment compensation to the war-made unemployed. Present state unemployment compensation allowances average $10 a week.

Behind this vicious campaign is the determination of the boss class to keep unemployment relief down to starvation levels, in the belief that this will make the workers willing to take jobs at any wage, and to forestall any measure that smacks even “in principle” of what is termed “federalization.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home