SOCIO-POLITICAL RESOLUTION ON IMPRISONED PERUVIAN TEACHERS

WHEREAS, Arturo Sanchez Vincente, Victor Manzur Suarez, Nelson Huaman Contreras, Hernan Vela Espinoza and Manuel Jimenez Delgado have exercised their rights as established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and participated in a teachers' strike for an increase in wages, measures to halt the increase in the cost of living, the release of other teachers arrested from previous strikes, and recognition of the Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de Educacion de Peru (SUTEP) as a legal union, and have consequently been arrested, along with hundreds of other participants, for this non-violent activity; and

WHEREAS, the majority of the strikers have now been released after nearly seven months detention, during which they were neither charged nor tried, and the five aforementioned teachers still suffer imprisonment in very harsh conditions, not knowing whether they will be released within days or several years time; and

WHEREAS, we of the American Federation of Teachers, representing 400,000 members in the United States, honor and support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and thereby honor and support our colleagues in Peru who are held in custody for exercising their rights as established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

RESOLVED, that the American Federation of Teachers hereby respectfully endorses and supports the appeal initiated by Amnesty International for the immediate release of Arturo Sanchez Vincente, Victor Manzur Suarez, Nelson Huaman Contreras, Hernan Vela Espinoza and Manuel Jimenez Delgado and all others still imprisoned for their non-violent participation in the teachers' strike of 1973 in Peru.