Some 225,000 Brazilian metalworkers walked off their jobs April 1. Hundreds of factories in the industrial suburbs of São Paulo have been shut down tight, among them auto plants belonging to Ford, Volkswagen, General Motors, Saab-Scania, and Mercedes Benz.
Although some of the workers voted to accept a court-ordered settlement that gave them wage increases of up to 47 percent, about 160,000 are holding out for additional demands. These include a one-year employment guarantee, a reduction in the workweek from forty-eight to forty hours, and the right to elect shop stewards.
As the strike entered its third week, a regional labor court declared it illegal. The military regime's minister of labor, Murillo Macedo, threatened to arrest leaders of the metal workers union and to occupy its headquarters. Referring to Luís Inácio da Silva (Lula), the president of the São Bernardo metalworkers union and a nationally known workers leader, Macedo drew his finger across his throat and said: "I'm going to cut off his head."
Despite such threats, the April 18 Latin American Weekly Report indicated that "the strike has been so solidly supported
Brazilian police use rifle butts to dislodge striking metalworkers from union headquarters.
that there has been no need for pickets."
At stake for the Brazilian government is a newly developed wage policy that the regime proposed after experiencing 140 major strikes in 1979. The policy is supposed to offer automatic wage increases to compensate for inflation, plus other increases tied to productivity. However, the government's inflation index has regularly proved to be below the actual cost of living in the country's ten leading cities.
The strike of the ABC metalworkers (socalled because of the names of the major suburbs-Santo André, São Bernardo, and São Caetano), comes on the heels of a strike by more than 12,000 dockers in Santos, Latin America's largest port.
Santos is designated a "national security" area in which strikes are illegal, but the workers walked out anyway when they were offered a 3 percent productivity raise. They demanded 15 percent and, after carrying out a solid strike despite military occupation of the port, voted to accept 10 percent.
Assessing the prospects in the ABC strike, the April 4 Latin America Weekly Report concluded: "Given the workers' aggressive mood ... the government can hold out little hope of an easy settlement and peaceful industrial relations in the near future."
Eight Taiwan Dissidents Sentenced
A Taiwan military court handed down guilty verdicts against eight opposition leaders April 18. Shih Ming-teh, the manager of Formosa magazine, was sentenced to life in prison on frame-up charges of plotting the overthrow of the government and of harboring the "seditious intent" of promoting Taiwan's permanent separation from China.
Huang Hsin-chieh, the founder and publisher of the opposition magazine, and a member of the Taiwanese parliament, was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. The six other defendants received twelve year sentences.
In addition to the jail terms, the court ordered the confiscation of all property of the defendants aside from that judged essential to the support of their dependents.
Fraudulent Election in Honduras
The first national elections in nine years were held in Honduras April 21, amid praise from the Carter administration and the mass media in the United States. The elections are being hailed by Washington and the Honduran rulers as the first step in a gradual transition to democratic rule. The reality, however, is different.
So determined was the regime to prevent the emergence of any real opposition in the electoral arena that even the Christian Democrats were barred from taking part! Also banned from participation was the Honduran Patriotic Front, a bloc of work-
', and teachers' organizaers'
', students' tions.
On April 16, according to the Mexico City daily Uno más Uno, secret police agents arrested at least twenty-five members of the Christian Democratic Party in various cities. Party leader Hernán Corrales Padilla, a former rector of the Autonomous University and a former minister of education, declared that the election was "corrupted," and that the regime was preparing "the vilest fraud in the history of the country."
Not even Liberal Party leader José Azcona Hoyos was safe. Although his party eventually won out over the equally venal National Party, Azcona Hoyos was attacked in broad daylight April 15 by a gang of National Party thugs while he was attending a meeting of the Board of Elections.
Meanwhile, Washington has promised
$4 million in military aid to protect this new-found Honduran democracy.
13 Tunisian Dissidents Hanged
Brushing aside international appeals for clemency, the Tunisian regime of President Habib Bourguiba hanged thirteen dissidents at dawn on April 17.
The thirteen were among fifty-nine persons accused of having taken part in a guerrilla attack on an army barracks and police station in the town of Gafsa in January. That attack was put down only after French military transports and helicopters airlifted Tunisian troops into the area.
Of the other accused who were found guilty by a state security court, five were sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor and fourteen drew lesser prison terms. In addition, seven defendants who had escaped the country were sentenced in absentia.
100,000 Black Students Protest Racist Education in South Africa
Ending a two-year lull in Black student protests in South Africa, tens of thousands of high school students in Cape Town and other cities across the country walked out of their classes in mid-April to demand an end to the apartheid regime's racist system of segregated education.
The call for the nationwide student strike was issued on April 19 by a meeting of student representatives from more than sixty Black schools in the Cape Town area.
By the time the call was issued, some 25,000 students were already boycotting classes. By April 22, the number had reached more than 100,000, and the strike had spread from Cape Town to Johannesburg, Durban, Pretoria, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, and other cities. Most of the students were between thirteen and eighteen years old, but some universities and teacher training colleges were also affected by the boycotts.
The bulk of the protesters were Coloureds (of mixed ancestry), who are concentrated for the most part in Cape Province. The protests, however, also involved students from the African and Indian populations, the other two components of South Africa's Black majority.
In an effort to build stronger unity among the three sectors of the Black population, Coloured student leaders have appealed for greater African involvement in the boycott. At a rally of 5,000 students in a Coloured township outside Johannesburg, one student leader said, "We should stand together and we therefore call upon you [Africans] to support our liberation cause."
Another student declared, "We must tell the Government that we want to determine our own destiny. The Government has done everything to humiliate us by giving us inferior education."
Fearing that a sharp crackdown on the student protest might simply aggravate the ferment-possibly leading to a repetition of the mass youth revolts of 1976 and 1977—the regime has ordered police to maintain a low profile.
However, police have on several occasions attacked student marches. On April 22, they fired tear gas into a crowd of 8,000 demonstrators in Cape Town and the following day used tear gas and clubs to break up similar marches in Johannesburg and Durban.
Rights Group Accuses Argentine Regime
The Inter-American Human Rights Commission, which had been invited to Argentina by the country's military regime, released its report on conditions there April 18. Instead of the whitewash that the Argentine rulers had apparently expected, the report gave a damning account of the regime's savage record.
Since the military came to power in a March 1976 coup, the commission found that at least 7,000 people (Amnesty International estimates at least 10,000) have disappeared after being detained by government forces. These missing persons, the report said, "can be presumed to be dead."
In addition to its finding that government agents "have killed numerous men and women after detaining them," the report accused the regime of "systematic torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading practices."
These practices, moreover, "were not unknown to persons occupying the highest positions in the Government and armed forces."
Such a report from an official body of the Organization of American States can only help put the Argentine regime on the defensive and aid in the defense of its victims.
The fruits of this pressure have already been seen with the release of two tradeunion leaders, Diego Ibáñez and Lorenzo Miguel. Ibáñez, the former secretary general of the Federation of State Petroleum Workers, and Miguel, who headed the Metallurgical Workers, had been held without charges for more than four years.
Soviet Rulers Rearrest Chornovil
Amnesty International reported April 16 that Ukrainian political prisoner Vyacheslav Chornovil was rearrested by the Kremlin rulers three months before his eightyear term was to have ended. He had been sentenced in February 1973 to a term of five years imprisonment and three years internal exile for "anti-Soviet activity."
As a journalist in Ukraine in the fall of 1965, Chornovil was assigned to cover the trials of Ukrainian intellectuals. Outraged at the illegalities of the trials, he protested the sentences and refuted the charges. In his writings, published abroad as The Chornovil Papers, he showed that the defendants were not "anti-Soviet criminals," as the prosecution claimed.
Because of his writings, Chornovil was arrested and in November 1967 sent to serve a one-and-a-half-year term.
Following his release, he, like hundreds of other young Ukrainians in the late 1960s, opposed the Stalinist policy of Russification in Ukraine. He denied the Kremlin's charge that they were "bourgeois nationalists" and considered that, on the contrary, in defending Ukraine from Russification he was following Lenin's policy on nationalities. The Kremlin, he stated, in imposing Russian on Ukrainians was reviving the Great Russian chauvinist policies of the Tsarist period that Lenin fought against.
The 1972 KGB crackdown was aimed at smashing this Ukrainian Marxist current. Chornovil, like many of the others arrested and sentenced with him, has retained his militant commitment to his ideas. In the summer of 1979, he announced his intention to join the Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group.
Amnesty International has issued an "Urgent Action" call for telegrams and letters to be sent to Soviet authorities demanding Chornovil be freed.
Corrections
The English text of the "Draft Resolution on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan," supported by a minority of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International at its January 26-29 meeting, did not include an amendment appearing in the final French text. (See IP/I, March 3, 1980, page 214) The first two sentences in the last paragraph of the statement should have read:
"Revolutionary Marxists must take part in and promote actions by the anti-imperialist and workers movement to politically press the Soviet Union to immediately withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. In doing this, they must fight all forms of boycott against the Soviet Union and oppose all characterization of the Soviet Union as imperialist."
In the special supplement to IP/1 on the 1979 World Congress of the Fourth International, the list on page 4 of comrades who had died since the previous congress omitted the name of American socialist Bill Kitt, who died in 1975.
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