Datelines
al., Zolt?n Grossman et.
Marcos and the Atom Besieged MANILA It is night on the highway north of Mariveles, an industrial and fishing town at the tip of the Bataan Peninsula, west of Manila. More than 5,000 residents,...
...Nicholas founded Students United Against Apartheid, which drew only about fifty activists out of 55,000 students at OSU...
...Complaints from Natividad and other inspectors forced a special USDA team to review more than 200 slaughtering and processing plants in the Los Angeles area earlier this year...
...Union organizers trained students in civil disobedience and offered to pay legal fees if students were arrested...
...He has high blood pressure and recently suffered a mild stroke—the results, he says, of "years of harassment by plant owners and agency managements...
...One family member, however, was absent: About an hour before the picketing was to begin, Carlos's eighty-eight-year-old grandmother collapsed of a heart attack and died...
...The general strike was considered 95 per cent successful, as barricades paralyzed transportation and business...
...Justice, American Style SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO Every Friday, Carlos J. Noya, his family, and his friends picket from noon to one in front of the Federal courthouse in Old San Juan...
...Some didn't think the university should take a political stand by divesting or were worried their tuition would go up if South African holdings were withdrawn...
...The report is written in as positive a way as we could have written it," says Lou Gast, associate administrator of the US-DA's Food Safety and Inspection Service...
...The reason is that his son, Carlos Noya Murati, now thirty, is serving his second prison term for refusing to testify before a Federal grand jury...
...He served in the U.S...
...Carlos was put in a maximum-security section of the Rio Piedras prison and, two weeks later, was whisked to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where he spent seventeen months...
...Judge Eugene Nickerson sentenced Carlos and Cintron Fiallo to two years each in prison...
...The union's helpful role was not lost on Nicholas...
...Based on my experience in Los Angeles," he testified, "my advice to the public is not to eat meat...
...Those nitty-gritty details "can poison us," warns Tom Devine, legal counsel for the Washington-based Government Accountability Project...
...Fishermen set off firecrackers, while church bells ring in greeting...
...He's been called a "Mexican son of a bitch...
...Several local union leaders have also asked that criminal indictments be brought against violators...
...The struggle of Filipinos should be led by workers," says Ed Capuyoc of the Bataan Labor Alliance, the first regional workers' organization in the country...
...Devine calls the USDA's report "fundamentally dishonest...
...military bases at Subic Bay and Clark Air Field, with power lines running directly to them...
...He was a founder of Puerto Rico's pro-statehood New Progressive Party and, before that, of the United Statehooders...
...The reason: The university had $10.8 million invested in companies that do business in South Africa...
...Albert L. Huebner (Albert L. Huebner is a freelance writer in Canoga Park, California...
...The Los Angeles Times gave the meat inspection issue extensive coverage, and a liberal member of the Los Angeles County Board has demanded a deeper probe into compliance with meat regulatory laws...
...One week later, the university signed a new wage agreement that met most of the union's requests...
...In case of an accident, the prevailing winds would blow radioactive contaminants toward the sprawling capital of Manila...
...Army during the Korean War, coming out a captain, and his wife is a pharmacist...
...Welga, welga, wel-gang bayan...
...It sits near an active volcano and astride an earthquake fault...
...he wants Puerto Rico to become an independent nation...
...Marcos says he'll build the plant by all means possible...
...Grade-A Whitewash LOS ANGELES Gregorio Natividad has paid a high price for his work...
...This is the kick-off for a three-day general strike in June against the nearby Morong nuclear power plant...
...And at the regents' next meeting in June, the university decided to divest $3.3 million within a year and the remaining $7.5 million over the next five years...
...The university also pledged to establish a scholarship fund to provide financial aid to non-white undergraduates from South Africa...
...Carlos is an independen-tista...
...We say we will stop it by all means possible...
...The grand jury's term expired and he came home and got married...
...During the march, local villagers applaud, hand out water, and join the ranks (which swell to 25,000...
...But the divestiture group took off when it received help from another quarter—the 2,500 university employees who belong to the Communication Workers of America...
...People saw the union taking up social issues, which they haven't done in a while," says Stephen Lerner of the union's national organizing staff...
...Alongside the usual graffiti condemning the U.S.Marcos Dictatorship, walls now carry such slogans as lakas ng bayan hindi lakas nukleyar (people's power not nuclear power...
...Ending up in jail was "your fault," Carlos told his father, "because you brought me up to go by my conscience and principles...
...Strike, strike, people's strike...
...The FBI found that my son was working at the time of the incident," Noya says...
...Department of Agriculture (USDA...
...One daughter, also a dentist, practices with her father...
...To clear the site in the 1970s, the government forcibly evicted residents from their land...
...With all the defects done by the Filipinos, the plant will be able to operate for two months at most...
...In Morong, nuclear power and military repression go hand in hand...
...For the last twenty-three years, seventeen of them in Southern California, he has been blowing the whistle on the meat industry and the USDA...
...The union leadership decided to link the two issues...
...After fifteen years of controversy and delay, the reactor is being prepared to go on line...
...William Steif (William Steif writes frequently for The Progressive from abroad...
...Carlos attended the same parochial school as his father and then went on to Boston College, where he studied for two years before enrolling at the University of Puerto Rico...
...I think that report is a cover-up for supervisors," Natividad says...
...This went out with the Spanish Inquisition...
...At about the same time the anti-apartheid group surfaced, the union was asking for a 4 to 5 per cent pay increase...
...When the university regents met in May, some 400 students and workers disrupted proceedings by banging against the room divider, chanting loudly, and pursuing regents as they were escorted out under heavy police protection...
...Carlos reported to the grand jury but refused to take the oath, saying he didn't recognize the jurisdiction of the U.S...
...More than 5,000 residents, mostly women employed at the nearby Export Processing Zone, are carrying torches in a march...
...Carlos was placed in the Federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, on July 16, 1984...
...Yet in Bataan, women who earn the equivalent of thirty cents an hour making clothes for Barbie dolls, and fishermen who cannot compete with corporate trawlers, have joined the campaign against the Morong plant...
...And he shows no signs of slowing down...
...Gast says the "nitty-gritty" details were omitted...
...To Filipinos, the Morong plant has come to symbolize the dangers of nuclear power...
...Workers have carried out massive sabotage within the plant, rerouting wiring, cutting cables, wrecking vehicles, and destroying a turbine by blasting sand into its lubricant...
...Most were totally ignorant about apartheid and conditions in South Africa...
...We want to not impede progress by having a totally negative report...
...But the version of the USDA report that was officially released did not reflect these disturbing findings...
...Union printing presses churned out anti-apartheid fliers and posters...
...Carlos and another inde-pendentista, Frederico Cin-tron Fiallo, now forty-one, reported to Brooklyn but refused to take the oath...
...Soon, leaflets compared the university's treatment of its service workers, a large portion of whom are black, to the repression of blacks and unionists in South Africa...
...On Friday, July 12, 1985, about 100 middle-class friends and neighbors from Miramar marched with Carlos's father to mark the first year of Carlos's prison term...
...Natividad is a meat inspector for the U.S...
...It got people thinking and wondering," Nicholas recalls...
...It kind of dampened the spirits of the people in Morong...
...It failed to come up with any evidence to charge him with wrongdoing...
...This is how we show the people where we stand," grins a truck driver at the site...
...In the midst of near-famine and civil war in some provinces, President Ferdinand Marcos is shelling out up to $2.6 billion for the nuclear power plant...
...Several scuffles ensued, and one union member was arrested...
...Since the protest, more than twenty-five towers carrying power lines from the plant have been dynamited...
...such evictions continue to this day...
...Carlos was ordered to testify before a Brooklyn grand jury investigating the 1982 Wall Street bombings by the FALN, the Spanish acronym for the Armed Forces for National Liberation...
...Carlos already has spent more than two-and-a-half years in Federal prisons, and if he's lucky, he'll get out by next Christmas...
...It includes in its ranks a network of women's groups called GABRIELA, which organized a 40,000-strong march from Manila to Morong last October...
...If we don't open the fight against the nuclear plant, the people won't move...
...One day in early 1980, Carlos was subpoenaed to appear here before a Federal grand jury investigating the December 1979 Sabana Seca incident, in which terrorists attacked a bus taking sailors to the Navy base, killing two and wounding ten others...
...Without the union, I don't think it would have happened," says Stephanie Gus-sler, a sophomore communications major...
...In fact, it impressed him so much that he decided to join up...
...While in Boston, he decided "through his own reading and analysis" to support Puerto Rican independence, his father says...
...The warnings of Natividad and others have led to some positive action...
...Instead of getting people to react in a much more militant manner, it caused fear in them...
...They see the latest whitewash as a way of protecting Government regulators...
...We do not want nuclear waste for a quarter-million years...
...The Coalition is a largely urban-based, middle-class organization...
...I've got to respect that...
...He is a gentle man, ach-ingly in favor of Puerto Rico becoming the fifty-first state of the Union...
...Antinuclear activists in the developed countries often assume that workers are too concerned with their own immediate economic survival to rally against atomic power...
...He has been arrested on trumped-up charges and acquitted, threatened and assaulted, fired and reinstated...
...Noya was first vice-president of the American Dental Association in 1981-82 and now serves on the group's judicial council...
...Shoddy USDA meat inspections threaten public health, he swore in a recent affidavit...
...Collusion between USDA supervisors and meat firms may allow the filthy conditions to persist at the plants, some critics contend...
...The image of the 1960s, with students confronting blue-collar workers, is hopefully being revised...
...Solidarity with a Twist COLUMBUS, OHIO Last year, George F. Nicholas was an Ail-American track star at Ohio State University (OSU), where he surpassed Jessie Owens's OSU record by running the 100-meter dash in 10.3 seconds...
...The reactor, one of four the Westinghouse Corporation has slated for the Philippines, is close to the U.S...
...It is a grave disservice to democracy and justice," says Carlos's father...
...As the torchbearers wind their way up the coastal highway, the women begin chanting: "Anong sagot sa planta nukleyar...
...In February 1983, another subpoena arrived...
...hygiene facilities lacking soap, towels, and water, and dirty sinks used for washing both meat and workers' hands...
...Heavily armed military personnel accompanied by a tank plow through the demonstration, and officers conduct body searches of thousands of marchers...
...According to details of the review obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the special team found scores of violations, including the presence of flies, fresh rodent droppings, and live cockroaches...
...After trying a centralized form of organization, the Coalition opted for self-reliant autonomous groups of workers, peasants, professionals, and fishermen in Bataan...
...Extensive amounts of hair, fecal matter, and ingesta were observed on boned meat, boning tables in operation, and inside Cryovac-bagged veal cuts," one reviewer found...
...the other daughter is an architect in New York...
...We are desperate," says one Bataan organizer...
...At a collegiate track meet in February, Nicholas knelt during the playing of the national anthem and declined to represent OSU in competition...
...zoltan grossman (Zoltdn Grossman, an anti-nuclear activist and free-lance journalist in Chicago, recently returnedfrom the Philippines...
...They had the financial resources, the numbers, the negotiating and legal expertise...
...Almost 500 managers, owners, and members of the inspection staff were interviewed...
...The four persons were killed directly from their association with work against the plant," says Elmo Menapat of the Nuclear-Free Philippines Coalition...
...Bataan has seen many marches, particularly during strikes against the low wages and poor working conditions in the multinational industries of the Zone, but this one is different...
...district court or grand jury...
...What is the answer to the nuclear plant...
...One, a construction worker at the site, was found dead in a septic tank...
...They are now into their second year...
...The core is to be loaded and the fuel tested within two months, and full-scale operations could begin as early as December...
...meat contaminated by flakes of paint and rust...
...The group carried on its protest in front of the Federal courthouse...
...So why has he been picketing every Friday since July 1984...
...And union members turned out by the hundreds to augment the anti-apartheid group's rallies and protests...
...The judge sent him to jail on civil contempt charges "until such time as you comply" or the grand jury term expires, but no longer than eighteen months...
...Noya is a fifty-nine-year-old dentist, trained at the University of Maryland, who practices on the street where he was born in San Juan's Miramar sector...
...They were given a month "to think it over" and still refused, so they were charged with criminal contempt, a crime with no maximum sentence...
...He's now an organizer of clerical employees for the Communication Workers...
...He also was, and presumably still is, a member of the Puerto Rican Socialist League, which his father describes as "a highly vocal organization that openly defends independence and socialism for Puerto Rico...
...Helen Cordes (Helen Cordes is assistant editor of the Utne Reader in Minneapolis...
...Between 1979 and 1981, the military assassinated four activists...
Vol. 49 • September 1985 • No. 9
