Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Murder last Friday - Filiberto Ojeda Rios


For those of you that didn't hear what happened... because is not in the mainstream news...
They shot him and waited enough time to let him bleed to death before going in.
Read on.

RU

(modified from Democracy now)
FBI Shoots Dead Puerto Rican Nationalist Leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios

For the past four decades Filiberto Ojeda Rios had been a leading figure in the fight for Puerto Rican independence and against U.S. colonial rule.
He was wanted by the FBI for his role in a 1983 bank heist.

Longtime Puerto Rican nationalist leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios has been killed by the FBI.
The shooting occurred Friday after FBI agents surrounded a house where he was staying. According to an autopsy, Rios bleed to death after being hit with a single bullet. Officials didn’t enter his home until Saturday, many hours after he was shot.

The FBI claimed the 72-year-old Ojeda Rios fired first but independence activists accused the FBI of assassinating him.
For the past four decades Ojeda Rios had been a leading figure in the fight for Puerto Rican independence and against U.S. colonial rule.

In 1967 he founded and led the Armed Revolutionary Independence Movement. He was later a key organizer with the FALN, the Armed Forces of National Liberation and then the Boricua Popular Army, also known as the Los Macheteros.
The FBI considered Ojeda Rios a wanted fugitive because of his ties to a $7 million bank robbery in 1983 in Connecticut. He had been living underground for 15 years.

On Friday night, 500 supporters of independence protested the shooting by blocking one of the main roads in San Juan.

In New York, a protest took place yesterday at 26 Federal Plaza.

Dance fundraiser for Katrina victims

Hello!!
An amazing group of women have put this event together here in beantowne.
Details on flyer below.
RU

Monday, September 26, 2005

US out of Iraq NOW

From Democracy Now

Between 100,000 and 300,0000 people took to the streets of Washington D.C. on Saturday (September 23rd 2005) to protest the ongoing war and occupation of Iraq. It was the largest anti-war protest in the nation's capital since the invasion and the first in a decade that federal officials allowed to go past the White House.


Suheir Hammad read her poem “Of Refuge and Language” at the pre-march rally:

SUHEIR HAMMAD: I wrote this poem after Hurricane Katrina and the victims of the rescue effort. The rescue effort victims of Hurricane Katrina were viewed on television for all of us, and they were called "refugees." This is a poem for all of the refugees in the world.


"Of Refuge and Language"

I do not wishTo place words in living mouthsOr bury the dead dishonorably
I am not deaf to cries escaping shelters
That citizens are not refugees
Refugees are not Americans
I will not use languageOne way or anotherTo accommodate my comfort
I will not look away
All I know is this
No peoples ever choose to claim status of dispossessed
No peoples want pity above compassion
No enslaved peoples ever called themselves slaves
What do we pledge allegiance to?
A government that leaves its old
To die of thirst surrounded by water
Is a foreign government
People who are streaming
Illiterate into paperwork
Have long ago been abandoned
I think of coded language
And all that words carry on their backs
I think of how it is always the poor
Who are tagged and boxed with labels
Not of their own choosing
I think of my grandparents
And how some called them refugees
Others called them non-existent
They called themselves landless
Which means homeless
Before the hurricane
No tents were prepared for the fleeing
Because Americans do not live in tents
Tents are for Haiti for Bosnia for Rwanda
Refugees are the rest of the world
Those left to defend their human decency
Against conditions the rich keep their animals from
Those who have too many children
Those who always have open hands and empty bellies
Those whose numbers are massive
Those who seek refuge
From nature’s currents and man’s resources
Those who are forgotten in the mean times
Those who remember
Ahmad from Guinea makes my falafel sandwich and says
So this is your country
Yes Amadou this my country
And these my people
Evacuated as if criminal ,br> Rescued by neighbors
Shot by soldiers
Adamant they belong
The rest of the world can now see
What I have seen
Do not look away
The rest of the world lives here too

In America

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