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Since the turn of the century, as we saw in the history of Mexico's electrical power industry, monopolies like General Electric and Westing- house - which together control over half the U.S.
Almost seventeen years after the nationali- zation of the electrical industry, all of our forewarnings have been fulfilled. Techni- cally, the Federal Electrical Commission is in bankruptcy.
Victoria Bergesen
When the Chilean Junta released Orlando Letelier from the Dawson Island concentration camp in September 1974, they warned him that traitors to the "fatherland" would be killed. This threat did not stop Letelier, formerly Allende's foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, from organizing an effective campaign in exile against the military dictatorship.
Julia Preston
On September 14, Colombia's labor unions called a 24-hour national strike that drew massive public support, with an estimated 25 million people participating. Assaults by military and police patrols in working class areas turned the strike into the biggest social upheaval since the "Bogotazo" in 1948 when Colombia was thrown into a virtual civil war.
As of October 24th a new re- search library will officially be open to the public in Oakland, California. NACLA-West has turned over its research data base to the newly created DataCenter located in the same building as the NACLA offices in downtown Oakland.
Bob Barber
Efforts by human rights lobbyists to cut back U.S.
Few of President Carter's policy decisions have so clearly demonstrated the influence of domestic and transnational corporations and the administration's anti-labor bias as his recent proposals dealing with undocumented immigrants. On August 4, Carter announced and sent to Congress the long- delayed, highly controversial four-point package containing these main components: * a revised Rodino bill with civil penalties for employers who "knowingly hire illegal aliens"; * more military-type equipment and Border Patrol personnel to stop further immigration; * limited amnesty for undocumented immigrants already in the country; * multilateral aid aimed at creating jobs in Mexico and other immigrant-source countries.
Jane Rothenberg, a staff member of NACLA, died at the age of 27 on August 31. The impact she had on us has been profound.
When the world-wide recession of 1975 hit full force, hundreds of thousands of workers in the electrical equipment industry from Flint, Michigan, to Johannesburg, South Africa, to Mexico City were left jobless. General Electric, leading the electrical equipment industry inter- nationally with annual sales of $13 billion, laid off 11,000 workers domestically and another 18,000 in its eighty foreign plants.
The government repression of the electrical workers' strike in July 1976 fit with cold logic into the overall panorama of economic and political crisis in Mexico. In only ten years, the country's foreign debt had grown tenfold to a staggering $28 billion.
The Mexican State has aggressively stimulated capital accumulation with subsidies to private enterprise through the electrical, oil and rail industries, protective tariff barriers, generous concessions to exporters and one of the lowest tax rates in Latin America. However, it is the State's tight control over the labor movement which has allowed General Electric, Westing- house and other private companies to impose the levels of exploitation described above.
Of the tasks that faced the new President of Mexico in 1970, one of the most important and at the same time most potentially explosive was the reorganization of the state-owned electric power industry. Divided into two separate companies, inefficient and debt-ridden, this crucial energy utility was holding back industrial development as a whole.