Free These Jailed Socialists

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Twenty five leaders of sive secret police of the Geisel dictatorship.

Twenty-one of these were members of the Brazilian movement "Convergencia Socialista" (Socialist Convergence).

Two were members of the Argentinian organisation the PST, (Socialist Workers Party), a sympathising section of the 'United' Secretariat of the Fourth International.

One. of them was Hugo Bressano, better known as Nahuel Moreno, who is an internationally known leading member of the PST.

Also imprisoned was Antonio Sa Leal, the general secretary of the Portuguese PRT (Workers Revolutionary Party), also a section of the USFI.

In July six other members of the Socialist Convergence were arrested and tortured in Brasilia and are still being held.

Also on August 23 another Socialist Convergence member was kidnapped by the police along with a high-school student Ronaldo de Almeida, whose whereabouts the police refuse to divulge.

Although Sa Leal and some of the Brazilian detainees have now been released, nine members of the Socialist Convergence and the two PST leaders are still being held, and there is talk of possible charges against Moreno.

These detentions are part of a broader wave of arrests which coincide with a renewal of workers' struggles in the last few months in Brazil after a long period of successful reprossion by the dictatorship.

This dictatorship has been responsible since it seized power in 1964 for holding thousands of political prisoners without trial.

Many of these have been brutally tortured, in some cases until they have died.

And prisoners from other countries have sometimes been repatriated.

That is the threat which now hangs over the arrested members of the Argentinian PST, who could be handed over to the the United States and elsewhere protests have been made over this latest series of arrests.

Socialist Press demands the immediate release in good health of all those arrested and the dropping of all charges against them.

Labour MPs, union officials and labour movement bodies must be called upon to support the international campaign for. their release.

A picket of the Brazilian Embassy demanding the immediate release of these prisoners has been jointly called by the Workers Socialist League and the International Marxist Group.

We call on all labour movement bodies to support this picket.

Monday 18 September Brazilian Embassy 32, Green St., London

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workers' organisations were arrested in Brazil on August 22 by the DOPS, the repres

murderous Videla regime. " Already in Brazil, Portugal,