Datelines
al., Mark G. Judge et.
Hunger Strike for Peace WASHINGTON They have risked their lives for their country in Germany, France, and Vietnam. Now they are making the sacrifice again on the steps of the Capitol here in...
...These lucha ("fight") dolls have come to embody the seamstresses' cause...
...They imposed a curfew on the village and forced the people indoors...
...The crowd was almost exclusively Israeli and numbered about fifty...
...The demonstration on June 26 consisted of an inspection tour of the damage done, followed by speeches from the villagers and visitors...
...A mature olive tree is said to produce a crop worth about $300, so the annual loss is on the order of $ 1 million and the economic base of the village has obviously been destroyed...
...As Brian Willson says, "I'm ready to die, but I'm ready to live, too...
...He left the priesthood in 1974 and made his first trip to Central America...
...We needed money and attention, but people had had enough of the earthquake and misery...
...On weekends, they return to make collective decisions and take sewing classes...
...But, she continued, "Our legal system is rooted in the principle of private restraint for public good...
...that day, no one was permitted to leave...
...The mood at these times is friendly and relaxed...
...Even the Meese commission conceded that there is no empirical evidence that pornography is, in the county council's words, "the genesis of bondage, rape, murder, child sexual abuse, venereal diseases, and other physical and mental health problems...
...Soon, several hundred members left the group to form garment-work cooperatives...
...During the week, sixty-nine workers, including some husbands and children, finish precut fabrics and assemble dolls...
...Villagers visited the offices of the Israeli military government and of the absentee-property agent in Ramallah and were assured that no plans were in the works for Midya...
...As for the government, labor secretary Antonio Farrell officially recognizes the union and calls the factory owners' conduct "monstrous...
...It's not pornography that's being attacked but, very subtly, the widespread popularity of the sexual revolution since World War II...
...The destruction of crops and orchards in advance of court determination as to land ownership is an old story in Israel and the occupied territories...
...We lost a lot of practice in the weeks after the earthquake...
...The road up to the village was lined by small boys carrying black flags, some mounted on olive branches...
...factory which can use our work, but so far we've had no luck," says Monide...
...He kept saying, "Let the people die...
...Who is setting the standards now...
...Now they are making the sacrifice again on the steps of the Capitol here in Washington, but the enemy is more elusive in this war: the Reagan Administration and its attitude toward Nicaragua...
...Victoria Monide, now president of a garment workers' cooperative, has been employed in the industry for eighteen years...
...Regardless of its fate, the seamstresses' union has presented Mexico with a new image: a politically viable women's interest group...
...Even a nonfarmer could see that the trees were much older...
...I took part in the marches, the encampment, and the fight for the union," says Monide...
...Within a month, what began as an emergency rescue effort mushroomed into a full-scale labor movement and, eventually, the formation of the Nineteenth of September Garment Workers' Union...
...we're no longer in the papers," Hernandez says...
...Lawyers for the people have won a temporary restraining order from the High Court halting further destruction of trees at Midya, thus saving the trees that remain untouched...
...The villagers first tried to stop the bulldozers with their bodies...
...I know we'll always be fighting...
...Ignoring the buried women's cries, the owners concentrated on saving their machinery...
...Gathering in the streets of San Antonio Abad—the city's garment district—family, friends, and coworkers of the trapped seamstresses met, many for the first time...
...Twelve-hour workdays, minimal light and ventilation, and inadequate safety precautions were typical...
...We are in some sense speaking to the feelings of the culture to say this is a war, and we have to stop it...
...Factory owners hurried to the sites with digging equipment, but eighteen days passed before they searched for victims...
...September Nineteenth publicity reflects this attitude...
...Though these conditions violated labor codes, Mexican officials routinely looked the other way...
...They helped us put food on the table, but they're not our main project," says Mon-ide...
...The ballot question is an outgrowth of the recent report of Attorney General Edwin Meese's pornography commission and is backed by a group named CADRE (Citizens Advocating Decency and a Revival of Ethics), whose directors include James Hold-erman, president of the University of South Carolina...
...The villagers were somber...
...We live in a sexist society, whose values are defined by machismo...
...The fact is that the Meese commission doesn't have the facts," says Maxwell Lillien-stein, the ABA's New York lawyer...
...I'm doing this because it's the most significant thing I can say to my culture," says Will-son...
...All except Mizo have spent time in Central America...
...Frank Collins (Frank Collins works with the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in Jerusalem...
...Hudson added that CADRE's "targets" are not publications with "literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" but those published "for the sole purpose of arousing morbid lust or...
...But the government claim that the trees were young is a fiction...
...Hope Springs from the Rubble MEXICO CITY September 19, 1985, is not a day the people of Mexico City remember with fondness...
...The September Nineteenth Cooperative Society, which Monide heads, operates from a small rented building on the city's outskirts...
...It is difficult to assign a monetary value to the loss suffered by the villagers of Midya...
...Bluenoses Battle Books COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA This state capital, population 100,000, is the latest scene of the censorship wars...
...Ann Riley, wife of Governor Richard Riley, and Harry Dent, formerly White House counsel to Richard Nixon...
...We drove into the wadi below the village and walked up the zigzag road recently gouged out by the bulldozers...
...Alon Gilili, head of the Green Patrol, announced, "We will deal with the problem in the toughest manner...
...As in the case of libel, treason, and other issues, obscenity has been determined a 'clear and present danger.'" Jackson and the ABA disagree...
...Massacre of the Olive Grove MIDYA, OCCUPIED WEST BANK This is the story of a massacre, the victims being 3,000 or more olive trees on 275 acres of this village near the "green line" that separates Israel from the Occupied West Bank...
...From 3 a.m...
...The soldiers hacked off the branches and then uprooted the denuded trees and carted them away...
...And they have filed a suit in the Jerusalem civil court seeking damages for the trees already destroyed...
...Cooperatives only benefit the individual...
...Within days of the quake, she and a group of her colleagues petitioned the Mexican Congress for aid...
...And when I see those names, I remember that I came to the Senate with a social responsibility...
...But every week, production increases...
...We are looking for a U.S...
...The council voted ten-to-one to put a referendum on the ballot that would proscribe "any writing, magazine, picture, newspaper, tabloid, periodical, film, tape, videotape, or other method of communication which depicts, portrays, visualizes, simulates, or otherwise reflects sexual arousal of the male sex organ, masturbation, sexual intercourse, whether heterosexual, homosexual, or bestiality, anal intercourse, oral sex, whether heterosexual or homosexual and including regardless of whether the oral contact is with the male sex organ, the female sex organ or anus, sexually violent materials, sexual activity without violence but with degradation, submission, domination, or humiliation...
...Many trees, in the general haste, were uprooted and left lying on the ground, or were stripped of their branches and left standing...
...There were still hundreds, of women without jobs, and I needed to feed my family...
...As word of this neglect spread, fellow citizens sent food, supplies, and counsel to the surviving seamstresses...
...At least one observer thinks the gravest danger to the movement is cooptation by men...
...There's no future in that kind of system...
...Both the union and the cooperatives are wary of involvement with organized political parties and feminist groups, as well as the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the nation's powerful government-aligned labor union...
...But there is a climate developing across the United States equating pornography with such evils as cocaine and treason...
...But government inspectors permitted the owners' abuses, and the army presided at factory sites to protect the equipment...
...The villagers say more than a thousand Israelis participated in the destruction, including the wardens of the Israeli Lands Administration, members of the Green Patrol, and staff of the Nature Reserves Authority, as well as soldiers...
...It is the pimps, the prostitutes, and the booksellers...
...But the mute evidence may have been enough...
...he asks...
...This referendum would set standards that our law enforcement officers and judges could depend on...
...They say the "clear and present danger" is, instead, self-appointed moralists like CADRE's directors who seek to censor books, magazines, and films...
...This is another Vietnam as far as I'm concerned," he explains...
...But they are politically passive, with no sense of the larger fight...
...policy...
...Fluctuating fabric prices and low payment for their services are among the coopera-tivistas' other woes...
...The government asserts that the trees removed or destroyed were all less than five years old and were part of a creeping encroachment on Israeli state land...
...we have our advisers down there, we have our logistical systems built up, we've got permanent installations, we've got six to ten airfields, a large field hospital, and all the handwriting is on the wall for another Vietnam...
...The union must be composed by and for women exclusively," says Professor Moises Guzman, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico...
...We got nothing," she says...
...It would be very difficult for men to represent the seamstresses' interests...
...Production is not very high," Monide admits...
...But it just came down to survival...
...Mark G. Judge (Mark G. Judge is a writer in Potomac, Maryland...
...But the co-op is still plagued by worries...
...Kerry, who was an organizer of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, said, "The names of many of my friends leap out at me from that wall...
...CADRE maintains it is only interested in banning trash...
...The dolls were an affirmation of life, an emblem of the women's desire to make their own way...
...One of the village youths said he was "outside of his mind...
...Bulldozers made paths to the various levels of the olive orchard, and the work of destruction began...
...During the weeks at their encampment, the women's complaints crystallized...
...it brought an earthquake that killed more than 20,000 and left 100,000 homeless...
...Lillienstein says "vigilante groups, often encouraged by local politicians," are going after materials "clearly not obscene...
...For some, though, "Nineteenth of September" also means hope, for it is the name taken by a new seamstresses' union born in the aftermath of the disaster...
...Their goals: to retrieve their coworkers' bodies, to be paid for their last week of work, to regain their jobs, and to create a national seamstresses' union...
...Midya is small—570 people— and depends on its olive crop for economic survival...
...They have sued the military government in Ramallah's civil court on the question of who owns the land, and some Israeli settlers have taken the land question to an Israeli court...
...The Richland County Council has asked its constituents to vote in November to "establish standards of decency and propriety" under which "pornographic, obscene, and/or patently offensive" materials may be outlawed...
...On June 19, long before dawn, almost 300 Israeli soldiers surrounded the village while the people slept...
...I just didn't want to use words any more—words become cheap...
...The bottom line is that we want to stop the killing," Will-son says...
...We met at a highway intersection...
...The public was psychically overloaded," says Ramirez...
...policy in Central America, subsisting on water alone...
...That means publications like Playboy, video shops' films, or Playboy's cable-television channel...
...Unfortunately, most of the speeches were in Arabic and most of the people to be reached were Israeli, so there was little verbal communication...
...While largely ignored by the major media, the four veterans are nonetheless attracting attention, drawing sympathetic crowds of 150 to 200 people and between 200 and 300 letters a day...
...to 9 p.m...
...So was formed the national union of garment workers," reads the caption, "after many attempts, discouraged and impeded by the state and CTM, which defend the interests of the rich and not of the working classes...
...The union, she says, focuses on broader themes: "Our goal is to help the workers of Mexico...
...Later, a story circulated that he was siting a new power line...
...in 1966, he volunteered as a chaplain in the Army and spent two-and-a-half years in Vietnam, earning the Medal of Honor...
...In the long run, the union still has to work with factory owners...
...On June 26, I went to a demonstration arranged by Nuri al-Uqbi of the Committee to Defend Bedouin Rights...
...William Steif (William Steif, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, is a free-lance writer who lives in the Virgin Islands...
...It appears that the land in question was annexed to Israel in 1975...
...Last July, he returned his Medal of Honor in protest against U.S...
...The orchard looked like a battlefield littered with corpses...
...Sale of the lucha dolls has raised almost $ 12,000...
...Most of the houses were flying black flags...
...Union members, however, claim they will be more effective in the long run...
...And now he sits in front of the Capitol bearing a sign that says Veterans Fast for Life on one side and For God's Sake Stop the Killing on the other...
...Women from eight factories united, forming Seamstresses in Battle...
...The seamstresses have caught the attention of Mexico's artists and intellectuals...
...Rarely educated past a junior-high level, the women knew little about their legal rights, and many supported entire families on wages of$19to$25aweek...
...The union, too, operates with a sense of urgency: "The public is forgetting us...
...The first sign of trouble came with the arrival of a surveyor, who told the local people he did not know why he was there...
...And experts say some of the trees were planted well before World War II...
...Claudia Kolker (Claudia Kolker is a senior at Harvard University who researched this story last summer in Mexico City...
...many had trunks two or more feet in diameter...
...It had the tone of an open-air funeral and was deeply moving...
...World War II veteran Duncan Murphy and Vietnam veterans Brian Willson, Charlie Liteky, and George Mizo have stopped eating in protest against U.S...
...Councilman John Monroe's efforts to set aside a "sin area" of the city for prostitutes and shops selling pornography led to the vote...
...Even the union offices—a series of tents on a former factory site—suggest defiance...
...As they waited for help that did not come, the women began to discuss their predicament...
...When Congress voted $100 million for the contras, they decided on a hunger strike...
...How the cooperatives will fare on the open marketpartially controlled by their former employers—remains to be seen...
...According to the Jerusalem Post, stones were thrown and two Israelis were injured...
...Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has also stated his support, citing the Vietnam Memorial down the street as a grim reminder of what escalation can do...
...Now the money goes toward machinery—we want to start our own line of clothing...
...Let there be no shooting or killing...
...visitors linger, chatting in the courtyard, and children play beneath the fold-out reception desk...
...Artists here have a strong tradition of political involvement," says co-op adviser Beatrice Ramirez, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico...
...She found, she wrote, "no magazines, books, or periodicals that would fall under our South Carolina statutes...
...The settlers refer to it as "creating facts...
...Keeping vigil at the factory sites, the women realized that the owners would leave as soon as they dug out their equipment, so they formed a human blockade to halt the recoveries...
...We had our CIA down there early, back in 1980...
...The soldiers responded by firing their submachine guns into the air and attacking with tear gas...
...An old villager wailed and threw himself against the tree stumps that still stood...
...Not I," wrote Hudson, "nor CADRE, nor any religious group, nor any liberal humanist organization can 'dictate' what is read or seen by individuals...
...Even family pomegranate trees were cut to the ground...
...The government doesn't like independent unions," says publicity director Hernandez...
...patently offensive' to ordinary decent people in the community...
...We support the cooperatives," says Maria Hernandez, the union's director of publicity and propaganda...
...Although it took the earthquake to bring it to light, the seamstresses' history of mistreatment is a long one...
...We all did...
...At union headquarters in San Antonio Abad, the struggle is more political than economic...
...This definition shall apply to all such materials as are prepared for commercial distribution or distribution to the general public whether for a fee or at no costs...
...It's hard to get attention...
...A road was gouged up the steep hillside leading to the village from the wadi below...
...The olive grove extended into the village, and trees were destroyed between the houses a few yards away...
...From the standpoint of the Mexican labor movement, the Nineteenth of September union is remarkably long-lived—and may already have left its mark in the political awakening of a whole new segment of Mexican workers...
...In one pamphlet, a brawny woman is shown snapping a chain labeled "CTM" over her head...
...Nancy Thurmond, wife of Senator Strom Thurmond...
...Only we can stop it...
...The union was recognized in October 1985, but that in itself didn't get the women back their jobs...
...Liteky and Mizo have been at it since September 1, Murphy and Willson since September 15...
...The villagers heard the sounds of bulldozers, excavators, and chain saws...
...In this case, they have lent their skills and reputations, donating original designs for dolls to be manufactured at the cooperatives...
...It's a throwback to the puritanical era of colonial times," says Lillienstein...
...All of our laws impose a certain morality on society...
...Brian Willson and Duncan Murphy are old friends from upstate New York, and Will-son met George Mizo at a veterans' meeting in Chicago...
...Liteky was ordained a priest in 1960...
...As the days drag on and they get physically weaker, the veterans hope their act and the sympathy it has aroused will affect White House policy for the better...
...On the morning of the earthquake, thousands of seamstresses arrived at work to find their factories in ruins, their livelihoods gone, and at least sixty of their coworkers trapped under the rubble...
...Rhett Jackson, who owns a Columbia bookstore and is president of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), was recently reassured in writing by the group's executive director, Laura Hudson, that she had visited his shop and given it a clean bill of health...
...The Meese commission did make a connection, of course—with two members dissenting—but it relied on what it called "intuition...
Vol. 50 • November 1986 • No. 11
