Chilean revolutionary demands political asylum

By Teresa Gutierrez

The struggle to demand political asylum for Chilean revolutionary Victor Toro continues. Toro, who is undocumented, was racially profiled in July 2007 by immigration agents on an Amtrak train in upstate New York.

Victor Toro Photo: May 1st Coalition For Worker And Immigrant Rights

Toro’s next court date is Dec. 6. Everyone in the New York area is urged to pack the courtroom at the hearing scheduled for 1 p.m. and the protest outside the court at 26 Federal Plaza at noon.

In Chile, Toro was a leader and founder of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left). The MIR is well-known and revered by revolutionaries worldwide as it led an extraordinary revolutionary struggle in Chile, in particular in the early 1970s.

In that period, a U.S.-orchestrated fascist coup massacred tens of thousands of Chileans when U.S.-backed right-wing military generals overturned the pro-socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Within a few days after Allende’s overthrow, a U.S. puppet regime headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet took over. On Sept. 11, 1973, Allende was assassinated.

This bloody time will be forever remembered not just by Chileans but also by anti-imperialists and revolutionaries worldwide. Tens of thousands were beaten, tortured, maimed and killed during the Pinochet regime.

It was also a time of heroic struggle as Chilean workers, peasants, women and all working-class sectors carried out militant and fearless resistance, a resistance that has not been vanquished to this day.

A case against imperialism

The continued resistance in Chile is why Toro is not being tried solely on his immigration status.

The Justice Department decided months ago to turn this case into a case against the Chilean movement and, by extension, the Latin American movement. The U.S. government ominously brought up Toro’s political affiliation with the MIR, deciding to put the MIR on trial as well as Toro.

Toro, however, took this not as a setback but as an opportunity to put U.S. imperialism and its role in the bloody coup of 1973 on trial.

The U.S. government submitted documents to the court that repeatedly named Toro as a principal leader of the MIR and defamed him as a “dangerous extremist.” By asserting that MIR is a terrorist organization, it takes Toro’s case out of the realm of immigration law and into the so-called “war on terror.”

Carlos Moreno, Toro’s lawyer, argues that much of the Pinochet regime still lingers in Chile and deportation could lead to his client’s assassination. He says it will be difficult for an immigration judge to counter the “terrorism” charge and grant Toro political asylum.

Toro continues to emphatically stress that his case is not about him individually, but is a case to document the U.S. role in Chile as well as the 14 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

At Toro’s October hearing, Toro’s family, his spouse Nieves Ayres and daughter Rosita, testified. Ayres is also a leader and organizer, a co-founder of La Peña del Bronx, a longtime community activist and a key representative of the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights. She herself was a victim of fascist torture during the Pinochet coup.

Toro told Workers World on Nov. 23 that at the Dec. 6 hearing his defense will continue to raise political developments such as Operation Condor. This was a U.S.-sponsored network of terrifying secret police agents that operated in the Southern Latin American Cone in the 1970s and coordinated horrific attacks against left and working-class forces.

The hearing will also include testimony from prominent academics such as professor Peter Winn, a professor of history at Tufts University specializing in Latin America and Chile in particular. According to Toro’s attorney, Winn’s testimony is significant because he has traveled extensively in Chile and is the author of several books on that country. He is expected to testify about how allegations that MIR is a terrorist organization are far from the truth.

Chile today

Toro’s case is as relevant to developments in Chile today as it is to those of the 1970s.

The movement and conditions in Chile have erupted and made international news this year. The earthquake in February; the case of the 33 trapped copper miners; the struggle of the Indigenous tribe, the Mapuches; and current hunger, women’s and miners’ strikes are all examples of a growing revolutionary fervor in Chile.

“All the various class forces are in motion: students, women, workers, campesinos, the Indigenous people are all organized and mobilized,” Toro says.

Recently 33 women occupied the Chiftón del Diablo mine to demand the reinstatement of an emergency jobs program that had been launched after the February earthquake. More than 8,000 workers were left jobless, which followed the elimination of another 9,500 temporary positions.

Another struggle is raging in another mine in Chile, the Collahuasi mine, in yet another example of the threat Chilean workers are to capitalist interests.

WW asked Toro about the MIR today. He said that sadly the MIR currently has many different factions but that he supports all of them. Toro remains confident that the MIR will evolve into the main organization that will help to lead the working class to final victory in Chile.

A statement on the 45th anniversary of the founding of the MIR in August of this year, entitled, “With experience, with the youth, with strength and with unity,” states in part: “To the workers and people of Chile ... to the Mapuche political prisoners on hunger strike ... our history is no more than the history of a people that struggles for its liberation. ... We have passed through great periods of struggle and resistance, we have been dealt a tremendous blow. Our MIR has had the streets filled with young and courageous blood of our people in the struggle for emancipation, the construction of people’s power and the struggle for socialism, a struggle that we have not given up and that today fills our hearts with dreams the same as in the past.”

Toro and Ayres are correct to make Toro’s trial about U.S. imperialism. It is another courageous act of resistance by Chilean revolutionaries who have faced the repressive arm of imperialism head-on and have not blinked or turned away.

The progressive movement in the U.S. must continue to demand political asylum for Victor Toro and imperialist hands off the MIR. Long live the struggle in Chile!

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