Page 4-Saturday, April 15, 1978-The Michigan Daily
hec 4gan, aIaiI
Eighty-Eight Years of Editorial Freedom
420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 156
News Phone: 764-0552
Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan
Deciding what should exist
The fox wants
Comparing the Mexican government to the
Chilean or Argentine may be, to borrow a
phrase from Malcolm X, like comparing a fox
to a wolf: they're both in the canine family,
and though the fox may be trickier, it is not
necessarily any less vicious.
Hector Marroquin knows the brutality of
the Mexican state.
HE ENTERED the University of Neuvo
Leon in Monterrey at the age of 16 in 1969, a
year after hundreds of peaceful demon-
strators had been killed by army troops in
Tlaltelolco Square in Mexico City. In 1971,
student demonstrators from Monterrey took.
their campaign for student-faculty control of
I F YOU HAVE an animal living in
your backyard that you think could
be considered an endangered species,
don't tell your congressman about it.
The government is currently taking
steps which would allow it to
deliberately finish off the poor
creature.
The U.S. Senate is now discussing an
amendment to the Endangered Species
Act which would, for the first time,
empower officials to extinguish a
species of life.
The proposal would permit the
government to waive sections of the
Act - which passed Congress in 1973
by a near consensus vote - in order to
further progress on some construction
projects. In other words, certain
projects, like dams, would be construc-
ted even if an animal or plant species
would be destroyed in its wake. The
benefits of such projects must "clearly
outweigh" the value of the species,
however.
Under the proposed amendment, a
special review of representatives of
seven federal agencies would become
responsible for deciding which species
should be saved, and which should not.
If not for such a safeguard, your
representatives in Washington might
have a heyday. Take, for example,
Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah), who says "I
frankly don't give a damn if a 14-
legged bug or the woundfin bug live or
die." Garn has proposed a second,
even stronger amendment to the En-
dangered Species Act, leaving state
goyernors with the option of waiving
its provisions, should they not prove
' ractical" in the construction projec-
t9.
A good number of environmental
organizations have, understandably,
been active in preventing the adoption
df any amendments which would
remove many of the teeth from the
Endangered Species Act.
:The initial amendment came as a
result of protests from business and in-
dustry, and from scientists working for
the Smithsonian Institution,
who have argued the current
Act is "too inflexible." Wit-
nesses at hearings on the amendment
have pointed to an ongoing suit - to be
heard in the U.S. Supeme Court next
week - which asks that the Tellico
Dam on the Little Tennessee River not
be completed because it would destroy
the "critical habitat" of the snail dar-
ter, a tiny fish which can only survive
in flowing water. Backers of the
amendment say that too many vital
projects are being delayed or
eliminated because of the fate of some
insignificant species.
Many of these witnesses seem to be
overlooking the original intent of the
Endangered Species Act - to provide
some safeguard to the right of such
"insignificant species" to exist.-
If the government must allow itself
to waive the provisions of the Act, it
must at the same time make sure there
are responsible people to review such a
waiving. Just because it's hard to "give
a damn" about some strange en-
dangered species doesn't mean it must
be condemned to extinction.
By Howard B
The 1977 Amnesty Internatio
the prevalence in Mexico ofI
modes of repression. The
"numerous cases of people d
ter being arrested" and deno
of torture by federal and stat
extract confessions, the appa
violence employed by militar
arrests, and the unacknowledg
political prisoners in secret pr
EVEN AFTER Marroquin c
U.S. in the spring of 1974,
authorities continued to cha
terrorist acts. Mexican newsp
to feature him under hyster
"These are the Subversives
Monterrey!" and "Once Aga
Mad Dogs Cause Panic and F
Monterreyans." He has be
wounding two policemen in
April 23, 1974, and of taking pa
robbery in August of th
Marroquin was working fora
struction firm in April and was
Galveston in August after suff
juries in a car accident. Pay sl
April 23 to May 21, filledo
Zamora, the alias Marroquinv
have been submitted to the Im
Naturalization Service (
Marroquin
is closely allied to the entire problem of un-
rick documented Mexican immigrant workers in
the Southwest United States.
3nal report cites Most of these people have been forced to
precisely these leave Mexico - where the economic crisis is
report noted so severe that nearly forty percent of the
isappearing af- labor force is either unemployed or underem-
unced "the use ployed - merely to survive. The U.S.
e authorities to economy welcomes these immigrant
arent excessive workers because they will work for low wages
y and police in - at the legal minimum or below - and
ged detention of because their "illegal" status makes them
isons." docile. In fear of being arrested by INS police,
jailed, and deported, these workers cannot
crossed into the stand up against employer abuses. Last Oc-
the Mexican tober, when 200 workers at an Arizona citrus
arge him with ranch struck against starvation wages and
apers continue animal-like living conditions, the INS was on
ical headlines: the scene within two.weeks, deporting 90 of
That Torment the strikers. Attacks like this warn the
ain the Violent "illegals" to accept their degradation quietly,
ear Among the to the advantage of American business. That
en accused of these workers are in turn treated like
a shootout on criminals is a classic example of how, under a
art in an armed repressive social system, the victims of
at year. But crime are punished in place of those who vic-
a Houston con- timize them.
s hospitalized in
ering severe in- PERHAPS PART of Hector Marroquin's
ips dating from problem is that he refused to be docile. His
out to Roberto conviction of the need for socialist change,
was then using, nurtured in Mexico by the fight against
nmigration and government repression, was not altered by
INS) officer his experiences in the United states.
EDITORIAL STAFF
Editors-in-chief
DAVID GOODMAN GREGG KRUPA
Managing Editors
EILEEN DALEY
KEN PARSIGIAN
BARB ZAHS
Editorial Page Director
BOB ROSENBAUM
Sunday Magazine Editors
PATTY MONTEMURRI TOM O'CONNELL
the university to Mexico City, where they
were attacked by right-wing gangs. Over a
hundred were killed, but none of the attackers
were indicted. It was later revealed that the
killer gangs had ties to the ruling
Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).
Finally, in January 1972, Marroquin's room-
mate Jesus Rivera was accused of taking part
in a terrorist bank robbery and was shot to
death in a police raid. Rivera had emerged
from a friend's apartment, his hands up, of-
fering no resistance, and he was shot fourteen
times. The other suspects in the bank robbery
left police interrogations with burns, bruises,
and missing teeth.
It can be no wonder, then, that Marroquin
chose to flee Mexico when he was accused of
terrorist activity in January 1974. Nor should
we doubt the validity of his claim that if the
U.S. government denies his pending appeal
for political asylumrand deports him now, his
life will be endangered.
MARROQUIN WAS active in the student
protests at the University of Nuevo Leon, and
after Rivera's murder in 1972, he joined a
socialist discussion group that became known
as the Student Revolutionary committee. He
left the group in August 1973 as its leaders.
began to advocate guerrilla activities, which
Marroquin saw as an impediment to
developing broad popular support for radical
change and an invitation for widespread
government repression. This judgment was
based on his knowledge and understanding of
Rivera's fate: each terrorist action only gave
the police an excuse to conduct a general
sweep of radicals uninvolved in criminal ac-
tivities. And that is precisely what happened
to Marroquin after a university librarian was
killed on January 17, 1974. He heard of the
assassination, feared another witchhunt, and
in fact found himself listed two days later s
one of the accused. He hoped to prove his in-
nocence of the charges, but after an attorney
advised him against turning himself over to
the Monterrey police, known for their
brutality, Marroquin fled to Baja California
and later to Texas. Since that time, two of the
other students accused in the crime have beek
killedsby police in "shoot-outs" and a third
has disappeared.
'His case is simple: The Mexican
government would like to see him
dead, or at least in jail, and the
U.S. government is willing to help
by deporting Hector Marroquin.'
Arts Editors
OWEN GLEIBERMAN
MIKE TAYLOR
reviewing his asylum request. And medical
reports from the University of Texas Medical
Branch indicated that the hospital indeed
treated a man named Roberto Zamora in the
month of August for a broken leg and pelvis,
injuries that incapacitated him for over a
month.
But this evidence of the falsity of the
Mexican charges against Marroquin has not
been ;taken seriously by Joe Staley, district
direcdor of the INS in San SAntonio. In a letter
to the State Department seeking advice on
Marroquin's appeal for asylum, Staley wrote:
"The three hospitals in that locale
(Galveston) have been able to establish that
the SUBJECT, under his true name, was not
treated . . . One of the hospitals did
acknowledge that an individual named
Robert Zamora was admitted . . . The alien
claims to have used that alias at the time, but
establishment as to the alien and Robert
Zamora being one and the same has not been
substantiated."
MARROQUIN'S treatment at the hands of
INS - his arrest in September 1977 for
carrying false identity papers and his sub-
sequent three-month imprisonmenthas an
"illegal alien," the bias and suspicion the
agency bears toward his defense, and the
threatened deportation - shows that his case
Though he lived in fear of "la migra'' - the
immigration police - he took part in a union
organizing drive at a Coca-Cola bottling plant
where he worked. He joined the Socialist
Workers Party in 1976 and became active in
the fight against deportations of undocumen-
ted workers.
But the U.S. government is reluctant to
grant asylum to an exiled radical, who
charges a government friendly to Washington
with political repression. If we are not fooled
about the intentions of the Mexican foxes -
about their > commitment to democracy or
due process-certainly the U.S. government, which
we assume is well-informed, is not either. Perhaps
we must also beware of the intentions of our own
government in this case. We will have to fight
to save the life of Hector Marroquin.
t
Howard Brick is a member of the Ann
Arbor Committee for Human Rights in
Latin America. Hector Marroquin will
speak at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 18, in
the Pendleton Room of the Michigan
Union.
STAFF WRITERS: Michael Arkush, Rene Becker, Richard
Berke, Lenny Bernstein, Brian Blanchard, Bruce Brumberg,
Mitch Cantor, Donna Debrodt, Eleonora diLiscia, Marianne
Egri, Josh Gamson, Steve Gold, Sue Hollman, Elisa Isaacson,
Margaret Johnson, Carol Koletsky, Paula Lashinsky, Marty
Levine, Mitch Margo, Sheila Middlebrook, Dan Oberdorfer,
Mark Parrent, Judy Rakowsky, Martha Retallick, Keith Rich-
burg, Julie Rovner, Beth Rosenberg, Dennis Sabo, Amy Saltz-
man, Steve Shaer, John Sinkevics, Liz Slowik, R.J. Smith,
Pauline Toole, Sue Warner, Jeffrey Wolff, Shelley Woison
PHOTOGRAPHY STAFF.
ALAN BILINSKY....................... Co-Chief Photographer
ANDY FREEBERG ................Co-Chief Photographer
BRAD BENJAMIN ...................... Staff Photographer
WAYNE CABLE.......................Staff Photographer
JOHN KNOX. . Staff Photographer
PETER SERLING.............. Staff Photographer
i
LETTERS
S'',
11'o The Daily;
The correspondents who
ijastised The Daily (April 11) for
0inting Greg Lynne's article on
ttudent health insurance and
fibortion,'demonstrate both their
4ntolerance of differing opinion
4iid the moral bankruptcy of the
.Oitreme feminist ideology which,
'tey say, demands "access to
lbortion."
!'hey deny that abortion kills
$uaman beings, which is at the
Oiert of the abortion issue,
ling the unborn child merely
b'agroup of cells." Since there is
ono serious scientific or medical
:study suggesting that the product
Of human conception, from the
"mment the new DNA chain is
formed, is anything other than a
;ew and unique human being, the
,"rden of proof that this new
sitman life does not deserve
equal protection lies with the pro-
,bortionists.
s: It is not moral myopia, as they
contend, to believe that the
;aking of human life even at its
erliest stage of development is
barbaric and immoral. But it is
"morally myopic to place
tIative value on human life,
placing a greater importance on
a woman's - or a man's - con-
venience than on nascent human
lfe; And don't kid yourselves, a
,aige proportion of abortions are
committed only because a
boyfriend doesn't want to be
bothered by responsibility.)
Furthermore, it is the feminists
themselves, and not Greg Lynne
,r any other pro-lifer we know of,
*hr nntar at nracm... ,ad
TO THE DAILY
Abortion letter employs 'desperate feminism'
To The Daily:
This is in response to the letter
of Deidre Feeney, Deborah
Filler, and Joan Gibson ap-
pearing in your April 11th issue.
In that letter they chastize the
Daily for publishing an anti-
abortionist article containing
thoughts which in their roles as
censors of what is fit to print they
determine to be "sensationalist
rhetoric and tasteless and in-
flammatory cartoons".
At the risk of being sentenced
along with Mr. Lynne as an
emotional sensationalist I would
like to point out the following fac-
ts relative to fetal life which these
ladies refer to as "something that
is not yet human". Three to four
weeks into a pregnancy the fetal
heart is pumpimg. At six weeks
all organs are present. At eight
weeks there is readible electric
brain activity. At ten weeks into
the pregnancy there is spon-
taneous movement of the baby's
body independent of a mere
stimulus response. And at twelve
weeks, the end of the first
trimester, electrocardiograph
readings can be obtained.
Now it seems to me that anti-
abortionists have a right to have
a public hearing and to advocate
that this sort of human life ought
to be protected. What appalls me
is that the ladies in question
would snuff out Mr. Lynne's wor-
ds from the pages of the Daily
with such blithe indifference,
especially in the light of the fact
that they put words into Mr. Lyn-
ne's mnth which he never utter-
reality. Human life is human life,
regardless of whether or not it
has yet arrived at what society
determines to be the status of
human personhood in the legal
sense.
If the ladies in question think
that a fetus in the twelfth week of
development, moving indepen-
dently, with all of its organs in
place, and with electronic brain
activity is not a human person, so
be it. But please, ladies, in your
plea for rationality and fairness,
don't tell Mr. Lynne or the
Catholic Church that they have
no right to make a public counter-
argument, or that by engaging in
public debate they are "imposing
their morality on the rest of
society", or that they are thereby
being emotional and sen-
sationlist.
It is perfectly evident to me,
that women should have an
equitable role in society, that
their rights should not be denied,
that they are not simply baby fac-
tories, and that there is more to
women than their wombs. But it
is also perfectly evident to me
that fetal life is human and that
there are certain rights which at
tach to being human. Hitler's
genocidal mania and the
holocaust stand in the wings of
the argument precisely because
of human rights, fetal, male,
female, ages, or of any color,
race, or creed.
-Rev. Fr. Charles E.Irvin
St. Mary's Student Chapel
To The Daily:
book review problems
To The Daily:
I was embarrassed to see a
review of Philip Jose Farmer's
The Dark Design that appeared
under my name in the Sunday Ar-
ts section of the Daily (4/9/78).
I) bore limited resemblance to
what I actually wrote, although
90 percent of the words are
probably the same.
I have written a couple of books
and several articles, along with
much other less easily
classifiable prose. Although my
writing is not scintillating, it is
usually at least minimally
literate and almost always, I
hope, comprehensible. The
published review had neither of
those two qualities.
A point-by-point analysis would
be tedious, but a few examples
will establish the point. In
describing the planet River-
world, I said: "Any given area
along the shore is populated ap-
proximately 70 percent by people
from one time and place, and
somewhat less than 30 percent by
people from another time and
place .. ." Not, admittedly, the
gainliest sentence possible, but it
communicates the basic idea.
For reasons unclear, your editor
chose to omit any reference to the
fact that the sentence concerned
limited area, and suggest by con-
text that it described the whole
planet: "Seventy percent of the
inhabitants come from a par-
ticular time and place, the other
even have to know what my sen-
tence meant to know that
something was wrong with your
editor's sentence.
Your editor also chose to insert
the world "immortal" before the
word "resurrectees" early in a
short paragraph that ends with
the statement that "(Resurrec-
tees) who die by violence wake up
downRiver with a new, healthy
body." One can ignore whether
such people are in fact immortal,'
but only an editor who edited
before reading the entire
paragraph would think that the
word "immortal" was necessary
with the concept fleshed out so
close at hand. And why did my
reference to the "action" scenes
get changed to a reference to the
"exciting" scenes, with a total
change of meaning? Why was
2,000,000 B.C. (count the zeroes),
changed to 2,000 B.C.? Why did
my reference to the author's "af-
fection" get transmuted into a
reference to the author's "affec-
tion"? Why did the printed ver-
sion say that Farmer's
knowledge of history "enriches
the narrative of the other minor
characters" when I wrote that it
"enriched the narrative with
minor characters"? Why was the
second to last paragraph chopped
to make its last sentence a non-
sequitur?
The complaints would or-
dinarily be the type one should
make to one's editor. But when
the editor chooses to rewrite my
copy in a way that casts doubt on
publication-or skip the idea
altogether.
-Jim Martin
Proffessor of Law
EDITOR 'S NOTE: It is stan-
dard Daily practice to notify
writers of any major changes
being made in their sub-
missions by an editor prior to
publication. For some reason,
the author was not notified
and the copy not cleared in
this instance. The Daily regrets
the error.
unsuper review
To The Daily:
For four years now I have been
reading your arts reviews, and
for four years now I have been
dismayed by the gratuitous hat-
chet-jobs that your reviewers
pass off as serious criticism.
Almost without exception, The
Daily reviews which I have read
have been condescendingly
negative - despite their usual
obligatory and supremely banal
summation that a good time was
had by all. I'm seriously begin-
ning to wonder whether there is a
performer alive who can satisfy
your artistic standards - stan-
dards, I might add, that seem as
arcane as they do fluid.
The latest case in point is Susan
Barry's brutalization of the
recent performance by the U-M
Dance Company. Under the
hnadline. "Dancers Green but
frenetic coherency. The "imper-
fect execution" and the osten-
sible lack of technique, which Ms.
Barry takes as proof of amateur-
ness (pronounced OM-
mateurness, with the appropriate
disdainful nasality), seems to me
to be the obvious aim of the work.
One cannot, however, criticize
Ms. Barry for obtuseness above
and beyond the call of duty. Her
comment that the second piece
was smoother than the first
illustrates that she has, if nothing
else, a firm and solid grasp on the
obvious.
Finally, Ms. Barry, searching
for something positive to say,
places herself well within The
Daily tradition of concluding a
review with immemorable in-
sipidity. Noting that the cheerful
expressions of the lead dancers of
"Yake" made that dance a joyful
celebration, Ms. Barry provides
valuable advice on how to get a
good review. Undoubtedly,
choreographers will henceforth
instruct their dancers to smile in
the direction of The. Daily
reviewer.
Yet, even if Ms. Barry knew
something about dance, I don't
think the review would have been
a good one. It seems an unwritten
rule at The Daily (although there
are a few reviewers independent
enough to give perceptive
reviews) that a review should
focus on why a performance did
not meet some unrealistic and ill-
defined standard. This is unfor-
tunate for it encourages the
easiest and worst type of
criticism and discourages the