[Dear com 1 reaa Socialist A campaign is…]
Socialist Press1979 1979-03-14Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 5 →
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Dear com 1 reaa Socialist A campaign is underway in protest at the deportation of Chilean socialist Nelson Gutierrez, and the levelling of frame-up charges against Chilean refugee Perfecto Benavides.
The two men arrived at Heathrow airport on February-only to be stopped, strip-searched a nd brow-beaten by immigrati on officials.
Accosted
Benavides was allowed to leave first, but half an hour later, while waiting for Gutierrez to be released, he was again accosted by immigration officers, who accused him of stealing a watch-and "found" one in his bag. • He was due to appear court as this article goes press.
Meanwhile Gutierrez, a Political Commission member of the Chilean MIR Pinochet London N.19 210/2/79 rades, ine articie in Press of the (Revolutionary, Left) was detained for the whole day at the airport, before being denied the right to enter Britain even for long enough to see his nine year old daughter he had arranged to meet.
Deportee
Instead, despite his eventual agreement to sign a document stating that he had left of his own accord, Gutierrez was sent back to Italy as a deportee-raising the danger that he be forcibly returned to Chile.
In Italy he was met off the plane by police, who held him until an energetic campaign on his behalf secured his release.
This incident follows on the revelations of the racist "virginity tests" carried out on Asian women by Heathrow immigration officers.
Yet these acts of harassment and degradation take place not under a Tory but a supposedly Labour government-one that has publicly declared itself opposed to the bloody Chilean dictatorship.
Hypocrisy
This, and other examples that reveal the hypocrisy of the Labour government's stance on Chile and the refusal of the trade union leadership to implement a policy of blacking or take any serious steps in solidarity with the Chilean masses, should be among the topics raised at the Trade Union Conference on Chile called by the Chile Solidarity Campaign at NUR Unity House on Saturday March 24