October 9, 2000
NEW YORK — Demanding the arrest and prosecution of those who committed the savage beating of two Mexican workers on Long Island nine days earlier, hundreds of workers held two demonstrations in Manhattan Sept. 26.
The youths were picked up by two men pretending to hire them, taken to a deserted building, and then viciously assaulted with a shovel, knife and crowbar. Both escaped and were hospitalized with serious injuries.
Protests in Farmingville against the attempted murders drew more than 500 people, most of them esquineros, or corner men, as they are called. Many of the workers have not let themselves be intimidated. The demonstration at Union Square drew Mexican workers, young and old. They chanted, “We’re here and we’re not leaving! And if we’re thrown out, we’ll be back!” “No justice, no peace!” and “The workers’ struggle has no border.”
October 10, 1975
Five Spanish political prisoners were executed by firing squads at dawn Sept. 27. The sentences touched off an international storm of protest.
Demonstrations occurred in most major cities of Europe, as well as in Ankara, Mexico City and Bogota. Workers in the Basque region began a forty-eight-hour general strike Sept. 29. Thirty thousand workers in San Sebastian had downed tools two days before.
The new “antiterrorism” law not only made the death penalty mandatory in killings of police and government functionaries, it also placed Spain under a virtual state of siege for the next two years. The repression is aimed at maintaining the regime’s control in face of the worldwide economic crisis of capitalism and the expected demise of the aging [dictator Francisco] Franco.
Added to this is the influence of the revolutionary process in neighboring Portugal.
October 9, 1950
Gen. MacArthur on Sept. 29 made his triumphal entry into Seoul. He had “liberated” the South Korean capital in typical MacArthur-style. Seoul was bombed and burned to the ground.
Don Whitehead, AP correspondent, reported: “Not in two wars have I seen anything to equal the battle for Seoul. … It is a bonfire of all the bitterness of war concentrated on one city. … Seoul is being scarred and battered terribly.”
MacArthur did not spare the lives of his own soldiers. The U.P. reported that officers “contended that it (Seoul) could have been taken without the heavy loss in lives and property paid for its capture.” N.Y. Times reported that “Seoul was 65 per cent destroyed” and that “its large business and residential areas had been reduced to ashes.” Seoul is but a sample of what American imperial “liberation,” has meant to all South Korea.