By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson
International League of People’s Struggle
30 January 2012

We, the International League of People’s Struggle, wholeheartedly express our highest respect and admiration for the late union leader Comrade Amancio Samuel Villatoro,  martyr and hero of the proletariat and people of Guatemala.

We join his beloved family, the labor and other movements and the broad masses of the people in Guatemala in honoring his memory and in resolving to create  The Martyr Museum of Social, Student and Union Movements of Guatemala.

We appreciate and support the project to build a museum in order to  preserve his remains and those of other martyrs, all the  records  of their lives and struggles in the patriotic and revolutionary service to the Guatemalan proletariat and people.  Thus,  their legacy will be perpetuated and will continue to inspire the current and succeeding generations.

We admire the outstanding role  of Comrade Villatoro as a dedicated  union leader and his courage in fighting for the national and democratic rights of the proletariat and the people.  It was the most despicable act of inhumanity that he was kidnapped on 30 January 1984 and then murdered on the 29 of March of the same year. We are grateful that the Guatemalan Forensic Foundation succeeded in locating and exhuming  his remains 28 years after his brutal murder.

We are proud that his son Nestor Villatoro, who is a member of the International Coordinating Committee of the ILPS, is continuing the work of his late father as a union leader and is determined to build and strengthen the Amancio Samuel Villatoro Foundation.  

The foundation  deserves our solidarity and all  possible support  so that it can realize its noble purpose of creating  a  Museum/Cemetery of the Martyrs from the labor movement of Guatemala,  a library of the labor movement  as a depository of the biographies of the martyrs, the “Escuela Sindical CNT” and “Union School CNT.”

We wish the foundation the utmost success in its work  to  preserve the  history of the people’s struggle,  encourage the people further to fight for national and social liberation,  reactivate the Guatemalan labor movement, uphold human rights and  resist the recurrence of reactionary violence and atrocities.

May the Guatemalan proletariat and people win victory in their  ceaseless struggle  for national independence, democracy, social justice,  all-round development and peace. ###