------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Sept. 30, 1999 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- WORKERS AROUND THE WORLD PERU: TRANSPORT WORKERS STRIKE Some 17,000 Peruvian transport workers staged a one-day strike on Sept. 14, leaving much of the south of the Andean country paralyzed. The workers were protesting fuel price hikes and increased tolls on major roads. Truck drivers, bus drivers and taxi drivers took part in the strike. Claudio Tanco Silva told the Peruvian daily La Republica that 35 affiliates of the Southern Transport Workers Federation took part in the protest strike. HEALTH CARE WORKERS VS. FUJIMORI Tens of thousands of hospital workers walked off the job across Peru on Sept. 14 to protest plans by dictator Alberto Fujimori to restructure the health care sector. In addition to rejecting Fujimori's plan to "municipalize," or decentralize, the Peruvian health care system, workers demanded that 20 percent of the national budget be allocated to health care, the pro-International Monetary Fund neoliberal economic policies be ended, and that Fujimori not stand for reelection. Forty-five thousand members of the Medical Federation of Peru ratified the strike on Sept. 7. The Unified National Federation of Health Sector Workers also joined the protest. Fujimori seized power on behalf of the military in a 1992 "self-coup." His government, backed by the United States, staged a two-pronged war against both armed revolutionary insurgencies and the country's labor movement. While unleashing a brutal wave of repression against the Peruvian Communist Party's "Shining Path" insurgency and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, Fujimori imposed a draconian economic program of austerity and privatization on the working class. That economic program has provoked a wave of labor opposition in recent months. Peru's labor movement has been at the core of a growing multi-class movement against Fujimori's dictatorship--centered around the demand that Fujimori not stand for reelection for a third term. Health care unions are threatening an indefinite, total strike in October if their demands are not met. http://members.spree.com/trotsky68/peru.htm ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com