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The Tar HeelThursday, July 13, 19789
Exiled Socialist claims persecution
Dave McKinnon
News Editor
Hector Marroquin Manriquez is a 24-year-old
socialist who faces deportation to
his native Mexico and he claims
certain imprisonment, torture, and
probably death unless he can mobilize
public sentiment in the United States
behind his request for political asylum
here.
Speaking at the Carolina Union
Thursday night near the end of a 65-city
tour, Marroquin termed the charges
awaiting him in Mexico "absolutely false,"
and a "complete frame-up to justify the
Mexican government's political
persecution."
Marroquin said that he is now accused
of conspiracy to overthrow the Mexican
government, subversion and guerilla
activity in connection with two gun
battles between Monterrey police and
Mexican guerillas in 1974.
But, said Marroquin, he was in fact in
the United States in April of 1974, when it
was claimed by Mexican police that he had
been wounded in the first shoot-out.
Marroquin also said that he was actually
lying in a hospital bed in Galveston,
Texas, recovering from a serious
automobile accident in August, 1974,
when according to police he was taking
part in a gun battle at a bakery in
Monterrey.
In an interview, Marroquin offered the
circumstances of his own flight from
Mexico as an example of its policy of
ruthless repression of political dissenters.
Marroquin originally fled Mexico in
April, 1974, as a result of another charge
of politically-motivated violence
stemming from the assassination of a
librarian who, said Marroquin, was also a
police informer at the University of
Nuevo Leon, where Marroquin was then
a student.
Marroquin emphatically denied the,
charge, which was eventually dropped,
but pointed to the fates of three fellow
students and political organizers who
were also accused of the murder as
examples of his own probable end if he is
returned to Mexico. According to
Marroquin, two were killed during alleged
shoot-outs, and the third was arrested
and has disappeared.
Marroquin termed the Mexican
government "thoroughly illegal. They
violate the constitutional rights of the
Mexican people all the time, constantly."
He added that Amnesty International's
estimate that some 200 to 300 political
prisoners are being held in Mexican
prisons does not include an equal number
of dissidents who have simply
"disappeared."
And, said Marroquin, the political
situation in Mexico has if anything grown
more repressive in recent years. He cited
cutbacks in government spending, the
country's worsening economic situation,
and an increase in student, labor, and
. peasant unrest as contributing factors.
But, said Marroquin, his struggle to
remain in this country is being waged not
only for himself, but for thousands of
victims of repressive regimes all over the
world. Marroquin pointed out that the
U.S. almost invariable denies political
asylum to political enemies of regimes
like those of Chile, Argentina, Haiti, and
Iran which it considers friendly, but
which practice brutal repression of
dissidents. Marroquin said that his own
case for political asylum, if successful,
could set an important precedent for the
U.S. campaign for human rights all over
the world.
With the McCarron Act Congress made
it possible for avowed socialists to become
naturalized citizens, so that Marroquin,
who has lived and been employed in
Houston since 1974, has been forced to
seek the alternative of political asylum.
Yet it is the U.S.'s discriminatory policy of
granting asylum which has caused him
fhe most trouble. Marroquin pointed to
the ease with which socialists such as
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn received asylum
as clear evidence of this discrimination. -
Marroquin was arrested as an illegal
alien at Eagle Pass, Texas, in September,
1977, as he was returning from a brief trip
to Mexico to confer with a lawyer, under
circumstances which, according to
Marroquin, gave every evidence of
collusion in his case between Mexican and
American law enforcement agents. He
remained in jail for three months before
being released on a $10,000 bond, and
now faces a deportation hearing which
could be called at any moment. His case
has been taken over from the Immigration
and Naturalization Service by the State
Department for reasons of national
security.
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Staff photo by Allen Jernigan
Hector Marroquin: will he simply "disappear" like hundreds of his fellow
activists in Mexico?
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