The Women's Student Activist Collective at the University of Minnesota in Solidarity with Carlos Montes

The Women’s Student Activist Collective at the University of Minnesota strongly condemns the FBI and Los Angeles County Sheriff department’s violent raid of Chicano activist Carlos Montes. We stand in solidarity with Montes and all activists targeted in the ongoing investigation of anti-war and international solidarity activists.

The Women’s Student Activist Collective acknowledges that the 5 am raid of 17 May 2011 is part of an ongoing attack on anti-war and international solidarity activists across the United States in an attempt to silence all dissent. FBI involvement has been affirmed documents and statements released by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department making the link clear between the attacks on Montes and the attacks on activists in the Midwest dating back to 24 September 2010. Documents obtained in court in June 2012 revealed the FBI initiation of the raid, illustrating that it has nothing to do with the charges being pursued. Like the raids in the Midwest, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department and the FBI pillaged from the Montes residence cell phones, a computer and hundreds of personal documents that have nothing to do with the firearms code violations that have been brought forth against him. 

Montes has been an activist and leader in the community since his involvement in the 1968 East Los Angeles education reform movement, the Chicano Moratorium against the war in Vietnam, and more recently he has been a leader in the immigrants’ rights movement and an organizer of the 2008 RNC protest in St. Paul, Minnesota. Montes is a co-founder of the Chicano youth movement, the Brown Berets, who developed a 13-point program for equity, justice, peace and self-determination. 

The Women’s Student Activist Collective at the University of Minnesota stands in solidarity with Montes and supports his struggle with the oppressive and contemptuous legal system. We say stop the frame up! We demand that all charges be dropped against Montes and that all of his possessions be returned immediately. We pledge to continue to support Carlos and resist FBI repression until he and all other anti-war and international solidarity activists are cleared of all investigations and charges.