Toro to be in court on Jan. 18

Víctor Toro Ramírez fought the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Now he is fighting deportation from the U.S., and is linking his own struggle to that of all undocumented workers.

Toro arrived in the U.S. in 1984 and settled in the South Bronx, N.Y. In 1987 he co-founded La Peña del Bronx, a community grassroots organization serving the poor and the needs of the community, with his life partner and partner in struggle for social justice, Nieves Ayress.

On July 6, 2007, while on an Amtrak passenger train, Víctor Toro was arrested and detained by the Border Patrol (ICE) in Rochester, N.Y. Toro, who is out on bail and continuing to organize, will be in court again on Jan. 18. His defense committee asks everyone to come out and show support at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan in New York.

Toro wrote recently that at his hearing he hopes to discuss with the movement his proposals, which he has developed in a statement that we publish a part of below.

The year 2008 will provide great opportunities for immigrant workers to carry out their tasks and struggles for the poor and marginalized people of the United States and the world, and with the understanding this is a development involving great projects carried out on a universal scale, we will have to change things.

In spite of contradictions weighing on the class struggle in this country, I would like to present some optimistic proposals for how I see that we can meet the challenges of 2008.

We count upon the existence of a social, union and political rearmament far greater than that which existed ten years ago. We rearmed at a high level in 2006 to carry out protests, mobilizations and strikes throughout the entire country involving thousands of people, and on May 1, 2006, our struggle for unconditional amnesty reached its highest level, with a protest movement of a million people in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Washington and many other cities. It was a movement that made the country’s Democratic-Republican bureaucracy tremble with fear.

Until 2005 we were invisible. In 2006 we became visible in the press media of those in power. And in 2007 we again became invisible. We have to change history. We advanced in one year more than we could in the half century before it. The victories won at local and regional levels will not change.

The main demands and those that mobilized the most people were the struggle for a general amnesty and the struggles against the war in Iraq and the Middle East. Parallel to this situation and its social and popular skirmishes, there were developing crises, that of the monstrous costs of the imperialist war, the one of the war deaths of the U.S. Armed Forces members and the reactions of their relatives, the case of those tortured in Iraq and Guantánamo, the continual scandals involving the Bush gang and its allies, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the rapid increase in repressive violence and racism, whose greatest expression came with the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, the anti-terrorism and anti-immigration campaigns, the instability of Wall St., also the threat of an economic recession, global warming and the overweening responsibility of the Bush administration for it, the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. ...

Toro goes on to call for going forward to organize from the bottom up a national protest to stop all work on May 1, 2008, to fight for an unconditional amnesty now!