Hector Marroquin fights for his life

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Ted Brown reviews Dispatches by Michael Herr, Picador Books, £1.25.

A long-running struggle to save the life of Mexican ' socialist Hector Marroquin is reaching a crucial stage in the United States.

The Immigration s and Naturalisation Service decided in December to refuse him the right to political asylum in the USA.

This opens up the danger that Marroquin be deported to Mexico, where he faces torture and almost certain death in jail on trumped-up charges of terrorism raised against him when he was a student leader in early 1974.

The government of President Jose Lopez Portillo has a notorious reputation for the repression of trade unionism; and the torture and murder of political opponents.

But Carter's INS, in dismissing Marroquin's appeal for asylum blandly asserts that he has failed to establish:

"that there is likelihood of your being persecuted for your political opinion, race, religion, or membership in a particular social group".

Despite this setback at John Carter the hands of the administration so supposedly concerned with "human rights" Marroquin, a member of the US Socialist Workers Party, has been supported by an extremely broad based campaign demanding his right to asylum.

Indeed so broadly is the campaign that support appears to been forthcoming bourgeois and petty geois politicians, pi groups and civil based more have from bour'essure rights bodies than from the ised labour movement.

Celebrities Marroquin's Defence Committee circular for example boasts as sponsors an impressive list of celebrities, politicians and even the worthies of Detroit City Council-but not one single trade union local or identifiable union leader.

Indeed the whole direction of the SWP's campaign has been to present the issue as one divorced from class questions, and largely outside of the labour movement.

The SWP paper The Militant, for example, reports on 26 January on Marroquin supporters who happen to be in the Electrical and Steelworkers unions collecting workers' signatures on a petitionbut gives no hint of a fight inside their locals to mobilise for resolutions or even industrial action in his support or pressurise union officials to back the campaign. • A separate short piece adds a token call to "urge co-workers, union locals and other organisations to send Marroquin telegrams"-but this bears little relation to the main thrust of the campaign.

Instead, the bulk of the article devoted accounts of an intervention in the Holy Family Catholic Church in Detroit.

And while the previous week's Militant carried excerpts from Marroquin's speech to the conference of the Young Socialists Alliance in which he stresses the class nature of the INS decision, none of this is included in the general propaganda for the campaign.

We are not opposed to a campaign seeking the broadest support for Marroquin it is vital that his fight against deportation is successful.

But to place any faith in well-meaning bourgeois liberals to sustain any serious fight on this issue, and turn away from the primary task of mobilising the labour movement in Marroquin's defence both ducks the main issues and creates: added danger of defeat.

The assistance of liberals and radicals should not be brushed aside: but support from the labour movement must be tenaciously fought for at all costs.

The Defence Campaign is asking for financial contributors and messages of support to be sent to:

Hector -Marroquin Defence Committee, PO Box 843, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10003.