Free Lelo & Abolish ICE
Some thoughts on the horrors of deportations, state violence, traveling in Central America/Mexico, and The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
It’s been over a month now that farmworker leader and organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juárez has sat in a Tacoma Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. A month since US federal agents broke into Lelo’s car and kidnapped him, while dropping off his girlfriend at a tulip farm in Mount Vernon, WA for work. The fact that Lelo was not charged with a crime is irrelevant when it comes to those born outside of the United States for the ever expanding state violence machine. One wielded by varying types of fascists, who see an easy to use tool for retribution on their political and racial enemies. Something the second Trump administration promised in the political slogan “Mass Deportations Now.” Besides literally partnering with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to illegally send deportees to his horrifying torture chamber CECOT, he’s also taking a page from his strategy of extrajudicially targeting political opposition in the form of student visa holders in the struggle for Palestine liberation and now some of our most effective labor activists.
Lelo was a founding member of Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), an independent farmworker labor union in the farms of northwest Washington state, where he started working and organizing before he was even a teenager. Now 25, Lelo remains a true force fighting for farmworkers through his union and the Bellingham based farmworker community organization Community to Community (C2C). He speaks four languages, including two indigenous languages spoken by other immigrant farmworkers in the greater Mayan diaspora within Mexico. A true leader in a bottom up labor movement that has won raises, a historic farmworker union contract, and improved outdoor heat protections across the state of Washington. All in a type of work often left out of the mainstream labor movement. An immigrant community used to state repression, fear, and loss, after years long collective struggle, was winning big. The bosses needed to reinstall the fear of the state, that anyone could be targeted at any time, even our most beloved and renowned.
As border scholar Oswaldo Zavala puts it in his polemical book Drug Cartels Do Not Exist the neoliberal state needs to create enemies to continue justifying its expansion. It’s been a decades-long project to foster the fascist imagination that any latino immigrant is a potential “narco-terrorist” bringing fentanyl into the country. And as the state gets more violent and cruel it only further foments more violence in response, endlessly justifying more arms in the hands of the state. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE are a bipartisan violence machine created by those who see value in an ever expanding security state. Republicans who see this as part of a coherent political project of oppression and punishment for non-citizens. And the Democrats as a permanent “oppositional,” non-profit, fundraising project pretending to be a political party. They need the violence machine to exist, to get bigger, scarier, and more violent, so they can keep fundraising on the promise that they won’t use the machine quite as much.
Yesterday I ran into a man at a park here in Mexico City who had just been deported from the states a few days earlier. He wore a US Marine Corps backpack which held a couple changes of clothes. This man had been in the states since moving there as a young child 45 years ago, he said he’d fought in Iraq and was living in East Los Angeles off disability and piecemeal work before they sent him off.
“I guess I’ll stay in Mexico for 5 years,” the man said. “If I go back and they catch me they say I’m banned for 10 years or put in federal prison. I don’t know if they mean a federal prison in the US or El Salvador. But now I guess I’ll see Mexico… I don’t remember it at all. Maybe I’ll stay a couple years in Mexico City and Veracruz, one in Jalisco, one in Mazatlan, and one in Baja.”
I found myself telling him about Lelo’s story.
“They got him in the detention center in Tacoma?” he said in shock. “Cabron, those places are privately run, way worse than any federal prison. Man, if you can talk to your friend tell him to hold strong. That shit’s the worst of the worst.”
Last month I was in Xela, Guatemala at the Proyecto Lingüístico Quetzaltenango, a Spanish school founded during the armed internal conflict in Guatemala after the US/United Fruit Company Coup, genocide of Mayan communities, and disappearances of suspected student activists. I feel very lucky to have had teachers and guides who were ex-guerillas, labor activists, and land defenders in the heart of the struggle against the violence done both by genocidal dictatorships in the 1980s and the corrupt neoliberal Guatemalan state since the peace accords in 1996. It is a place to learn Spanish, in the context of the real Guatemalan and American history. It was also very strange. Friends in the states were organizing direct actions, call-ins to state reps, and labor solidarity rallies in support of Lelo, yet I could really only talk about it with people I don’t know very well thousands of miles and two countries away. My teacher and classmates were sympathetic to the struggle, some told me that they called and donated to Lelo’s legal defense fund. The Guatemalan anarchist info shop Ch’o Tinimit hosted a discussion on radical unionism and let me chat with local activists in students about the situation. But when people asked for daily updates, I had nothing much to report.
My friend Mark Medina, an organizer with Jobs with Justice Portland and the Coalition of Independent Unions (CIU), went on the podcast “It Could Happen Here” to speak about the CIU’s action at city hall calling on the labor movement to put more pressure on elected officials to call for Lelo’s immediate release. Thankfully the Washington State AFL-CIO turned out and organized for the initial rallies outside of the detention center where they are imprisoning Lelo. But a labor movement that often likes to say, “An Injury to One is an Injury to All,” is also in a moment where certain mainstream labor leaders like Teamster president Sean O’Brien have tacitly endorsed the far-right’s targeting of immigrant workers. Maybe they think this betrayal of the working class is worth it if the violence machine is built by White union members’ hands, distributed by union trucks, and the new prisons operated by union guards. Medina talked about the United Farm Worker murals and resounding influence on life for Mexicans in his neighborhood in East Los Angeles despite it being hundreds of miles away from the UFW organized farmworker towns.
“If we don’t act now to defend a union leader like Lelo, the labor movement risks losing its influence as a moral movement,” Medina said.
This really struck me. Now that I’m out of my job in the mainstream labor world, I’ve thought a lot about what it means or should mean. Obviously this is a moment where we, the working-class and labor movement are losing, membership is declining, and some want to run away from the struggle that is needed to even stand a chance to save a workers’ movement. But avoiding the fight in exchange for some temporary boss’ promises for some workers is not just a death note to our morality, it’s gladly accepting the job of bartending on the Titanic after the original got on a lifeboat.
My last day at PLQ in Guatemala, all the graduating students gave a short speech in Spanish. I’ll post it here eventually (it’s handwritten in my notebook at the moment). Thinking about the horrors facing Lelo and others wrongfully targeted and detained by a right-wing state, I was reminded by the interconnectedness of these struggles from Guatemala to Mount Vernon; Columbia to Gaza. For now I translated the end of it below.
I recently watched the 1973 Spanish film El Espíritu de la Colmena (Spirit of the Beehive). In it, Ana is living in a small village in fascist Spain immediately after the civil war. Ana and her sister watch the film Frankenstein, and Ana is scared when the monster appears to kill a little girl, inspiring the town to turn and kill him. However, Ana’s sister explains to her that the monster had only been trying to help the girl. And while the townspeople wanted to kill him, they could not because he is not in fact a monster but a spirit, one without a body. Later Ana comes across an injured Spanish revolutionary guerrilla hiding in a barn outside of town. The two of them become friends as Ana helps him by bringing some medicine and food from her parents’ house. That is until Ana’s fascist father, and the townspeople find him and shoot him dead. Ana thinks about Frankenstein, her new friend, and the idea of the spirit that her sister told her:
“Los espíritus no tienen cuerpos. Por eso no les puede matar. Si un espíritu es tu amigo, solo necesitas decir tu nombre y va a venir. Soy Ana. / Spirits don’t have bodies. It’s for this that you cannot kill them. If a spirit is your friend, you only need to say your name and it will come. It’s me Ana.”
Right now we’re fighting with an enemy that seems really, really big. Sometimes, it seems too big to defeat, and yet we continue fighting. From Guatemala, to the deportation centers in Washington, from restaurants in the city, to the farms in the countryside. The struggle doesn’t have a body, and for this you cannot kill it.
ACTIONS TO TAKE IN SOLIDARITY WITH LELO:
Keep calling to demand Lelo’s immediate release! (from C2C)
WA Representative Rick Larson https://larsen.house.gov/contact/contactform.htm?zip5=98281&zip4= | (425) 252-3188
Senator Patty Murray: https://www.murray.senate.gov/write-to-patty/ | (253) 572-3636
Senator Maria Cantwell: https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/contact/email/form | (253) 572-2281
Food Chain Workers Alliance has put together a petition that sends multiple state elected officials your demand that Lelo be released immediately, as well as connects you with their phone lines: bit.ly/FreeLelo
Donate to support Lelo’s legal defense fund:
Donate online here
Checks can be mailed to: Community to Community Development PO Box 1646 Bellingham, WA 98227
Updates:
Washington: Stay connected with Community to Community and Familias Unidas por la Justicia for asks and future solidarity actions
Portland: Stay connected with the Coalition of Independent Unions for upcoming actions
National: keep up with the Food Chain Workers Alliance a group of unions and workers centers that support struggles in the industry of food production and services across the United States.
You are an amazing part our world. Keep standing up. I love you. Namaste!