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http://www.workers.org/2006/world/ecuador-1207/
Published Nov 30, 2006 12:24 AM
Ecuador elects Correa president
—John Catalinotto
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With over 85 percent of the votes counted by Nov. 28, Rafael Correa was leading in the second round of the election for president of Ecuador. His opponent, billionaire banana magnate and Washington’s favorite Alvaro Noboa, had less than 42 percent of the vote, compared to Correa’s 58 percent. While Noboa still refused to concede defeat, world leaders were already congratulating Correa on his victory.
The first calls came in from the anti-imperialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and from Brazilian President Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva. While the U.S. State Department did not contest the fairness of the elections, it did not congratulate Correa.
During the election campaign, Correa promised to cancel the agreement allowing the United States to use the military base at Manta, located 20 minutes from the borders of Colombia, where there is a revolutionary struggle—both armed and unarmed—against an ultra-right regime. Manta was to be “the main hub for U.S. surveillance flights over” Latin America. (Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2001)
Correa also promised to avoid restarting negotiations for a “Free Trade” Agreement with the United States and to develop friendly relations with Chávez and other progressive Latin American leaders. Correa also said Ecuador could rejoin the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
With a population of over 13 million people, Ecuador is the biggest producers of bananas on the continent and possesses the fourth-biggest supply of petroleum. In April 2005 a mass uprising deposed President Lucio Gutiérrez, who had betrayed his campaign promises by suddenly announcing he was “the best ally of Bush in Latin America.” A year later a mass uprising of peasants and Indigenous peoples threw out Gutiérrez’s successor, Alfredo Palacios.
Now the people of Ecuador have joined those of Venezuela, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina by electing a declared opponent of Washington’s neoliberal program as its head of government.
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http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2151
Tuesday, Nov 28, 2006
Venezuela Congratulates Correa’s Win to Ecuadorian Presidency
By: Steven Mather - Venezuelanalysis.com
Caracas, November 28, 2006 (venezuelanalysis.com)— Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro expressed his satisfaction yesterday and President Chavez congratulated, as Ecuador took a step to the left on Sunday when Rafael Correa became its new president. Correa is a friend of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and it is believed that Chávez was the first person to call and congratulate him.
Nicolas Maduro said that, “Correa means a step forward in the leftwing nationalist and progressive projects in the continent. The Ecuadorian people took a step forward and his victory is of the noblest coups against the anti-Chávez campaign conducted by the George W. Bush administration,” continued Maduro.
President Chavez also greeted Correa’s victory, saying, “I publicly congratulate, with solidarity and patriotic joy, the new president of the sister republic of Ecuador, Rafael Correa.” Referring to the other left victories in the past year, Chavez added, “Every time we are more accompanied.”
Maduro criticized those who try and use links with Chávez as a negative campaign tool. This has happened in several recent Latin American elections including in Mexico and Peru. “Sectors trying to turn ‘anti-Chavismo’ into a political emblem, into a cold war promoted in Washington to annihilate movements of change, have been seriously beaten in Nicaragua, Brazil and now in Ecuador,” he said.
Correa argued in his victory speech that, “The people have given us a clear mandate, with the second-largest margin in the last 30 years of democracy.” He went on to thank God for his triumph and said that it was a “clear message that the people want change.”
His victory follows those of President Lula Da Silva in Brazil and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, both left of center politicians who were not the preferred candidates of the US government.
Correa won with 57.9 percent of the vote, compared to the conservative banana tycoon Noboa's 42.1 per cent.
Correa ran on a platform that promised to rein in political elites, threatened to default on foreign debts and to renegotiate oil contracts. Ecuador is the second biggest oil exporter in South America after Venezuela.
He has also in the past criticized the presence of a US military base in his country and like Hugo Chávez is not afraid to stand up to the US government. The US military base contract ends in 2009. When asked whether he thought the contract should be renewed he said, “If they want we won't close the base in 2009, but the United States would have to allow us to have an Ecuadorian base in Miami in return.”
Also, asked to comment on Chávez’s description of President George W. Bush as the devil he said that, “Calling Bush the devil offends the devil. Bush is a tremendously dimwitted President who has done great damage to the World.”
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http://www.workers.org/2006/world/chavez-1207/
Published Nov 30, 2006 @12:20 AM
Chávez: ‘More power to the people!’
—Robert Dobrow
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One week before the Dec. 3 presidential election in Venezuela, hundreds of thousands of supporters of President Hugo Chávez, wearing red T-shirts and waving red banners, rallied in downtown Caracas.
It is time, Chávez told the crowd, to give more power to the people.
More power, he said, should be given to “communities, the poor, the people who cry, work and study.”
The Venezuelan leader spoke in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, noting that the election takes place on the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s arrival in Cuba with other armed rebels aboard the vessel Granma to launch the guerrilla war that eventually brought the revolution to power.
“Fidel,” said Chávez to the roars of his supporters, “applause from Venezuela! Long live revolutionary Cuba!”
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The pro-Chávez rally came one day after a large demonstration in support of the U.S.-backed, anti-communist opposition leader Manual Rosales.
Independent polls have given Chávez a 20-point lead over Rosales in the presidential election. But the opposition is already preparing to declare “election fraud” on Dec. 4, and mobilizing its supporters around the slogan “defend the vote.”
The U.S. government has funneled millions of dollars to opposition groups inside Venezuela through organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
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http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N29501344.htm
Nov 30 2006 @04:23:06 GMT
Calderon to take power in violent, unstable Mexico
By Alistair Bell
Mexico City, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Mexican conservative Felipe Calderon takes the helm of an increasingly violent country on Friday, facing street protests over his razor-thin election victory, a southern state in chaos and a worsening drug war.
Leftists who accuse Calderon of stealing July's election plan protests in the streets and in Congress when he receives the presidential sash from ally President Vicente Fox.
In what might foreshadow things to come, lawmakers from the ruling National Action Party brawled on Tuesday with leftist deputies who dispute Calderon's victory
A 44-year-old lawyer, Calderon inherited a separate political crisis in the southern state of Oaxaca and a war between drug cartels that torture and behead rivals.
More than 2,000 people, mostly drug traffickers and police, have died in two years in a feud that has spread south from the U.S. border area, including to Calderon's own Michoacan state.
"There are a lot of challenges to stability and they seem too much to handle," said Jorge Zepeda, a biographer of the main candidates in the July 2 election.
Although Mexico's top electoral court and foreign observers found no vote rigging, leftists claimed fraud in the election and they crippled central Mexico City for weeks with a mass sit-in. More protests are planned for the coming days.
"The bad news is that the country is worse than we thought, The good news is that we've underestimated Felipe throughout the campaign. He has managed to overcome a lot of obstacles," said Zepeda.
Calderon received a lift on Wednesday when the Oaxaca crisis eased. Protesters calling for the resignation of Gov. Ulises Ruiz withdrew from a radio station they had held for months and used as a base to store supplies.
Protesters failed in an attempt to take Oaxaca city's main square in a clash with police on Saturday, and about 150 of them were arrested.
The Harvard-educated Calderon showed mettle by unexpectedly winning his party's nomination and then coming from far behind to beat leftist presidential favorite Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by less than a percentage point.
Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, has vowed to prevent Calderon from swearing in at a ceremony in Congress on Friday.
Rival lawmakers occupied the platform in Congress on Wednesday, preventing a congressional session from taking place, after PRD deputies and pro-Calderon lawmakers got into a shoving match there on Tuesday.
A huge security operation both on the streets and in the legislature is planned for the inauguration.
POVERTY FIGHT
Mexico only implemented full democracy when Fox ended seven decades of one-party rule in the 2000 election.
A partner of the United States and Canada in the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has recently avoided the kind of financial upheaval that plagued it in the 1980s and 1990s but the gap between rich and poor is still gaping.
Calderon, a former energy minister under Fox, says fighting poverty and crime will be his main goals.
"What he needs to do is help peasants and indigenous people. If he does that, he'll be successful and be liked. If not, the people are going to be on his case," said Adolfo Posadas, 44, a building caretaker who voted for Lopez Obrador.
Calderon named Francisco Ramirez Acuna as interior minister on Tuesday, drawing new condemnation from leftist politicians who say he used excessive force in breaking up protests when he was governor of Jalisco state.
Despite the challenges, Calderon he has more support in Congress than Fox had and might win energy and fiscal reforms with support of the country's third force, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Lopez Obrador's PRD says it will take to the streets if Calderon tries to privatize the energy sector, tax food and medicines or bring in repressive labor reforms.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexcabinet29nov29,1,3944028.story?coll=la-headlines-world
November 29, 2006
Mexico's President-elect Calderon fills Cabinet with friends
By Sam Enriquez, Times Staff Writer
Email= sam.enriquez@latimes.com
Standoff
Mexico City— President-elect Felipe Calderon appointed close friends and party allies to key Cabinet positions Tuesday, a sign that he is closing ranks in the face of street-level opposition to his narrowly won presidency.
The appointees reflect the conservative social and fiscal views of Calderon and his National Action Party, or PAN, and contrast with his promise made during his bitter campaign against leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador that he would appoint a multi-party Cabinet.
Lopez Obrador, who last week declared himself the country's "legitimate" president, has ordered his party's congressional bloc to prevent Calderon from taking office. Lawmakers loyal to Lopez Obrador have threatened to take over the rostrum of the lower house where Calderon will be sworn in Friday. On Tuesday, a group of them scuffled with Calderon loyalists in a scrum of pushing and shoving that turned into an hours-long standoff.
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"They threw one of our deputies to the floor," said Valentina Batres, a lawmaker with Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party.
She said colleagues had only approached the dais to consult on a motion.
"The first ones to rush up were the PAN because they have this fantasy that we want to take over the dais," she said.
Faced with the prospect of strong-arm politics, as well as a leftist uprising in Oaxaca and spreading drug violence, Calderon appears poised to take a stronger hand than President Vicente Fox, who broke seven decades of single-party rule when he was elected in 2000 but had trouble navigating the emerging three-party system.
Calderon on Tuesday named a hard-liner and longtime family friend, outgoing Jalisco Gov. Francisco Ramirez Acuña, as interior secretary, a domestic security post considered the government's second-most powerful job.
Ramirez's first order of business will be to restore calm in Oaxaca, where thousands of protesters seeking the ouster of the state governor have controlled parts of the city since summer.
Fox's interior secretary, Carlos Abascal, negotiated an end to the teachers strike that triggered the protests but failed to negotiate a settlement with remaining dissidents. Street violence flared again over the weekend, and the state supreme court building was burned.
Signaling his frustration with the Fox government's failure in Oaxaca, Calderon said Ramirez, a former congressman who will leave his governor's post two months early, would not be afraid to use his authority.
"During his career as a governor and representative, Ramirez Acuña has confirmed the need and value of dialogue, and at the same time the inalienable responsibility of the ruler to uphold the law," Calderon said.
Ramirez was criticized by human rights groups for failing to investigate police-abuse claims lodged by dozens of protesters arrested during a May 2004 summit of European and Latin American leaders in Guadalajara.
That same week, Ramirez showed his loyalty to Calderon, whose father was a PAN founder and a longtime supporter of Ramirez.
The governor was the host of a dinner where Calderon, then Fox's energy secretary, was introduced to a cheering crowd as PAN's next presidential candidate. Fox was furious, and Calderon soon resigned to run against Fox's preferred candidate.
Calderon on Tuesday also announced the appointment of Juan Camilo Mourino, a close campaign advisor, as Cabinet secretary, a post similar to the White House chief of staff; Patricia Espinosa Castellano, a career diplomat with a doctorate from Oxford, will head the Foreign Ministry. Another key campaign advisor and diplomat, Arturo Sarukhan, will oversee U.S.-Mexico relations.
Calderon last week announced a formidable lineup of economic ministers, all of whom are free-market advocates with doctorates from prestigious U.S. universities.
Seeking to blunt criticism from advocates for Mexico's 50 million poor, Calderon said the market alone could not alleviate poverty. Government, he said, must help "correct the terrible inequities in Mexico."
His new treasury secretary, Agustin Carstens, who holds a degree from the University of Chicago, later said that lower oil prices in 2007 could hamper government spending.
On Friday, Calderon introduced his secretaries for health, agriculture, education and social services — all members of his party.
Calderon's health minister, Jose Cordova Villalobos, a conservative Catholic, has strongly opposed the government's dispensing of the "morning after" birth control pill.
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Times staff writers Héctor Tobar, Carlos Martínez and Cecilia Sánchez contributed to this report.
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http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2152
Wednesday, Nov 29, 2006
U.S. Embassy Warns of Political Disturbances in Venezuela
By: Steven Mather - Venezuelanalysis.com
U.S. Embassy in Venezuela
Caracas, November 29, 2006 (venezuelanalysis.com)— The US Embassy in Venezuela yesterday released a statement warning its citizens resident in the South American country to stockpile food in case of major political disturbances following the presidential elections on December 3. The embassy qualified the warning by saying there was no evidence that any disturbances had been planned.
The main bulk of the statement read as follows, “In light of recent history of street disturbances occasioned by political activity, and current levels of anti-U.S. Government sentiment on the part of the Venezuelan Government, American citizens in Venezuela should maintain a high level of personal security awareness, especially during the election period,” it goes on, “Common sense measures include, among other things, avoiding large gatherings and other public events where disturbances could occur, and monitoring local developments and media reports. The Embassy specifically recommends that American citizens resident in Venezuela defer local travel on election day and maintain a few days’ supply of food, water, and medications at home for election day and the immediate post-election period.”
There are often fears of trouble after the elections but they are usually unfounded. There were widespread fears that there would be serious civil unrest after the recall referendum of 2004 but these didn’t occur.
The last time there were major disturbances was in March 2004, when opposition groups organized week-long street blockades and clashes with the police, known as “Guarimba,” in order to pressure the government and the National Electoral Council into accepting a petition for a recall referendum. While the referendum was eventually announced several months later, it was widely recognized that the disturbances had nothing to do with the decision and that they alienated many opposition supporters from the opposition leadership.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/29/AR2006112900319.html
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 @6:22 AM
Brawl, Standoff in Mexican Congress
By Mark Stevenson / The Associated Press
Mexico City -- Lawmakers wrestled, slapped each other and tumbled across the floor of Mexico's Congress after opposition legislators threatened to block the inauguration of the incoming president, whom they accuse of stealing the election.
By late Tuesday, the brawl had turned into a tense standoff between congressmen of President-elect Felipe Calderon's conservative party _ who want him to take the oath of office in Congress _ and opposition leftists who have vowed to block the swearing-in ceremony.
The battle showed how hard it could be for Calderon to unite a nation divided since he narrowly defeated opposition candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the disputed July 2 election.
Congress has seen plenty of degrading behavior, but Tuesday's brawl came as Mexico faces central questions on the effectiveness of its government, with escalating turf wars between drug gangs and bloody street battles in the southern city of Oaxaca, which was seized for five months by leftist protesters.
Calderon has pledged to reach out to the millions of people who didn't vote for him by building a coalition government that will include several of his rival's proposals to help the poor. But so far, he has stacked his Cabinet with militants from his own party.
The congressional chaos began after conservative legislators of Calderon's National Action Party, or PAN, took over the speaker's podium early in the day amid rumors that leftist lawmakers planned to seize Congress, as they did before President Vicente Fox's Sept. 1 state-of-the-nation speech.
Leftists from Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, quickly followed, and scuffles broke out.
Tired and bedraggled, the lawmakers ate fast food and occasionally broke out into fresh bursts of shoving and shouting late into the night. Nearly everybody in Mexico's political scene found the spectacle depressing.
"I'm sorry this had to happen, but we were forced to do it," said PAN Rep. Juan Jose Rodriguez Pratts, whose colleagues occupied the upper steps of the broad, raised speaker's podium, while opposition legislators formed an angry knot on the bottom steps.
Rodriguez Pratts said PAN lawmakers felt they had to take action to ensure that the inauguration would not be blocked by leftists.
"There were clear indications, latent threats to do that, and so what we did was head that off to guarantee Friday's ceremony," said Rodriguez Pratts.
The former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party called the spectacle "shameful," and one of its leading members, Sen. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, suggested it would be "natural and logical" to simply hold the inauguration ceremony elsewhere if the congressmen refuse to leave before Friday.
"Our colleagues are going to stay there on the podium for the next 72 hours," vowed PRD national leader Leonel Cota.
Disputes over the July 2 elections are unlikely to go away. Lopez Obrador says he was cheated of the presidency by vote fraud, has declared himself the "legitimate president of Mexico," endorsed and led street protests and has refused to recognize or accept Calderon, whom he calls "the lackey" and "the spurious president."
On Tuesday, Calderon named Francisco Ramirez Acuna as his interior secretary, the government's No. 2 post in charge of domestic security and political affairs. The former Jalisco governor has been criticized for turning a blind eye as police detained dozens of protesters during an international summit in his state in 2004. In a report last week, the U.N. Committee Against Torture expressed concern about the arrests.
The U.S. Embassy said Tuesday that former President Bush will attend the inauguration of Calderon, who has promised to crackdown on drug trafficking and maintain close ties with the U.S.
___
Associated Press Writer Kathleen Miller contributed to this report.
___
On the Net:
President-elect Felipe Calderon's English-language Web site:
http://www.felipe-calderon.org/fc/html/eng/index.htm
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http://www.vidaenelvalle.com/news/english/story/13063469p-13717613c.html
Published Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 @01:05PM)
Latino is closer to making dream of traveling into space a reality
By Ivan Mejia / Agencia EFE
Los Angeles -- When he was a child, José Moreno Hernández helped his parents pick fruits and vegetables in California, but dreamed of becoming a space shuttle crew member.
"I remember seeing the images of Apollo astronauts jumping and playing on the moon," said Hernández who has been wanting to become one of them since that time.
But his primary motivation came when he was a high school student and heard that Franklin Chang-Díaz from Costa Rica had been chosen to be an astronaut and become the first Latino in space.
Today, 44-year-old Hernández works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and was chosen to start training as a mission specialist as part of the 2004 class of astronaut candidates.
"Between the ages of 12 and 16 I worked picking strawberries, cucumbers, green tomatoes, cherries, grapes and beets," recalled Hernández, one of four children of migrant farmworkers from México.
Born in French Camp, a few miles south of Stockton, the aspiring astronaut studied at various schools and didn't learn to speak English until he was 12 due to the temporary nature of his parents' work.
"I studied in public schools and when we went back to Mexico it was during the holidays so school was not in session," he explained.
"My parents made sure we took two to three months worth of homework so we could do it over there," he recalled.
Hernández went to high school in Stockton and in 1984 graduated as an electrical engineer from University of the Pacific. He then got his master's degree in Computational Science and Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1986.
"After working for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for six years I began filling out applications to become an astronaut," explained the engineer, who pointed out that to be accepted by NASA you need to be persistent aside from having good grades.
Hernández started working at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, in 2001 and that year completed extensive training in shuttle and International Space Station systems operations.
Currently he forms part of a team that get the shuttles ready to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
For Salvador and Julia Hernández, José's parents, the fact that their son graduated from college was enough for them.
"But it makes us so proud that he was chosen for this (training)," stated Salvador Hernández.
The fruits of his parents' labor can be seen not only in José but also in a brother who works as an engineer for the U.S. Department of Energy, in another brother who is a mechanic for the city of Stockton and in his sister, who is a CPA at the University of the Pacific.
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http://www.narconews.com/Issue43/article2398.html
November 29, 2006
The Coup d’Etat in Mexico
As a New Regime Prepares to Seize Control December 1, Promising a New Wave of Repression, the Antidote Is Being Born from Below
By Al Giordano = Special to The Narco News Bulletin
Of the 159 Mexican citizens rounded up last weekend in the southern state of Oaxaca, accused of various charges related to anti-government protests, 141 have been moved, by helicopter, a twenty-hour drive from their families and homes, to the penitentiary in San José del Rincón, Nayarit. Although this first wave of detentions was random – anyone unlucky enough to be on public streets and sidewalks where the riot cops stormed – the government classified these prisoners as “dangerous,” justifying their transfer to a prison far away. Not one of those arrested last weekend has seen nor spoken with a lawyer, a human rights worker, a family member or an independent doctor. When, on Monday, reporters and Nayarit state legislators drove toward the prison to investigate, agents of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP, in its Spanish initials) intercepted them, threatened them with arrest, and stole the film from the camera of a photojournalist that had documented their presence.
In Oaxaca, federal police, coordinating their operation with the paramilitary squads and pirate radio station of disgraced governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, continue to conduct house-to-house raids searching for the alleged “leaders” of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO, in its Spanish initials). Attorneys, doctors, clergy, journalists, family and human rights officials have likewise been blocked from speaking with the imprisoned or observing their condition in the wake of what eyewitnesses tell Narco News were the violent beatings police inflicted on many during their arrest.
The events in recent days in Oaxaca mark the largest mass arrest in Mexico since May 3 and 4, when 217 citizens were detained in Atenco and nearby Texcoco, outside of Mexico City. Within days of the Atenco police raid, the first witnesses to the beatings, rapes and tortures of the detained appeared: five foreigners – journalists and human rights observers – that had been swept up by police as they documented the events in Atenco, who were kept incommunicado for various days then deported back to Barcelona, Berlin and Santiago de Chile. From them the world learned of the gang rapes and other savagery inflicted on bound and blindfolded women and men as they were taken to prison. Federal police bosses have openly scoffed at the stern recommendations by the National Human Rights Commission, a government agency, that the police brutality be investigated and punished. In that context, the secretive stance of the State regarding the Oaxaca prisoners is worrisome.
The government of lame duck president Vicente Fox did not learn, from the atrocities of Atenco, to correct its own illegal and authoritarian abuses. It is evident that it considers its only mistakes of last May to have been the failure to hide its own crimes from public view. And so, last Saturday, when it went on the attack in downtown Oaxaca, it was careful to avoid scooping up any of the foreign journalists or human rights observers who might blow the whistle upon their subsequent deportation as witnesses of what occurred to the Mexicans arrested. (International observers, however, would be mistaken to presume that the jackboots won’t be coming for them next; there are already reports in the national media that a separate operation is planned to rid the crime scene of global eyes and ears.) By immediately moving the bulk of the detainees far from Oaxaca or any other media center, the Fox government reveals its intent to hide from public view what it has done to the arrested. The last and final legacy of Vicente Fox, a man who often claimed he had “democratized” Mexico, turns out to be a domestic Guantanamo-on-the-Pacific, where none will be able to hear the cries of the tortured.
It is in this context that the coup d’etat will be completed on Friday, installing Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderón, upon the throne of the Mexican democracy that never was.
The Civil War Up Above
As the treatment of the imprisoned remained behind the curtain yesterday, cameras were able to document the scene in the accompanying photo.
Photos: DR 2006, La Jornada
It is not, contrary to what it might appear to be, a photograph from a scene from a Marx Brothers film. It is, rather, the true history of yesterday’s session of the Mexican National Congress, the distinguished hall in Mexico City where, on Friday, according to the Constitution of the Republic, Felipe Calderón must take the oath of office and put on the presidential sash in order to legalize his status as the nation’s top executive.
Not all the members of that esteemed lawmaking body are in agreement that Calderón was elected to the presidency last July 2. The facts strongly suggest otherwise. (See “Mexico’s Presidential Swindle,” New Left Review, September-October 2006.) About 150 legislators allied with the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD, in its Spanish initials) insist that the PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador received the most votes and have vowed not to permit Calderón, of Fox’s National Action Party (PAN, in its Spanish initials) to be sworn in as president. Last September 1, on live national TV, the PRD legislators (amounting to almost one-third of the entire Congress) took the podium and prevented Fox from delivering his State of the Union address, in protest of the electoral fraud on behalf of Calderón. Thus, their vow to do it again on Friday is not an empty one, and it has the defenders of the election fraud on tenterhooks.
The PAN government has thus applied the same “solution” in Mexico City as it has in Oaxaca: On November 20, it sent in the federal police to surround the Congressional building and declare a kind of martial law in the surrounding neighborhoods. That was the day that López Obrador supporters converged on the city’s central square, known as the Zócalo, and presented him with the tri-color presidential sash. Fearing that the mass of people would then take the Congressional building various miles away (a fear that did not materialize), Fox sent in the riot cops to protect the building. But as the photo reveals, the solution had no impact. The Congress itself is at Civil War.
Photo: The Hon. Violeta Lagunes of Mexico’s House of Representatives, hard at work.
The PAN again jumped the gun on Tuesday. Misinterpreting the appearance on the Congressional Hall podium of a sole PRD legislator as a “signal” that the dissident legislators were about to take the stage en masse, the PAN legislators launched a preemptive strike. This provoked the PRD legislators to follow them up there. Pushing and shoving, and more than a few fisticuffs ensued for control of the three-tiered podium. One PAN legislator pulled out a spray-can of mace, and tear-gassed a PRD legislator in the face, leading to his hospitalization. Another PAN legislator, 35-year-old Violeta Lagunes, of Puebla, was captured on film dumping soda and other liquids onto rival legislators. The melee continued throughout the day and night, with both sides vowing to hold the stage until Friday: one side to guarantee Calderón’s ascent, the other to prevent it.
The Fox-Calderón transition teams have worked hard to recruit heads of state from other nations to attend Friday’s ascension in their efforts to place a sheen of legitimacy on the regime shift. Among those expected: George Herbert Walker Bush, former US president and father of the current occupant of the White House, to represent the neighboring regime to the North. History repeats itself: It was Bush, Sr., who, as Vice President of the US in 1988, officially congratulated Carlos Salinas de Gortari as the new president of Mexico after what serious historians now agree was a monumental electoral fraud.
But today, Mexico’s Secretary of State Luis Ernesto Derbez worried aloud that the ongoing brawl for control of the Congressional podium might scare some away. “It is going to be very shameful and disgraceful for our country,” he said, “if we have chiefs of state of the quality of former president George Bush, Sr., observing below, on the podium, a spectacle worthy of a second-rate country.”
As the legislators in suits and ties continue fighting over the podium, Calderón vows that hell or high water he will go to that hall and collect his trophy – six years at the helm of Mexico – on Friday. Meanwhile, his rival López Obrador has called his supporters to the Zócalo at 7 a.m. Friday morning and Fox is reduced again to his legacy as the “Dial 911 President,” calling in the cops. It is not clear what, if anything, López Obrador and his allies plan to do on Friday. In the months since July’s fraudulent election, he has talked big but pulled back from marching his troops into confrontation, even when he counted with millions, indignant and by his side. Either he will surprise on Friday or December 1 could mark the collapse of the electoral path to change in Mexico.
The First-Rate Country from Below
Today marks the final stretch in the eleven-month marathon that has been the Zapatista Other Campaign’s listening tour of all of Mexico. Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos, who has visited every corner of the country since January 1, taking notes of the testimony of “the simple and humble people who fight,” will make one more stop in the rural Huasteca region of the state of San Luis Potosí and soon head back to Chiapas to inform his indigenous comandantes of his findings. December will be dedicated to meetings between Other Campaign adherents to determine the next steps of what is now a truly nationwide effort to topple not just an illegitimate government but also “the capitalist system” that it serves. At the end of the year, December 30, the Zapatistas will receive delegates from throughout the world for an international gathering in the autonomous municipal seat of Oventik, Chiapas.
The Other Campaign tour of Mexico revealed, at every stop, that Mexico neither enjoys democracy nor any of the basic freedoms required for it. At this moment when the State’s effort to hide its authoritarian repression in Oaxaca makes the atrocity in fact visible, the truth is that the terror seen this week in Oaxaca has been occurring all along in decentralized form against all Mexicans that have dared to speak up or organize for their rights. The Other Campaign found hundreds of political prisoners stashed already in the country’s jails and penitentiaries. Until their family members and organizations brought their existence to the attention of the Zapatista spokesman, many had been taken away so quietly as to have never caused a single news report about their detention. The Other Campaign tour also met literally thousands of Mexicans, in every single state, that have arrest warrants over their heads or face ongoing charges related to their political organizing work. These, too, had been repressed alone, in silence. Likewise, it found mothers and family members of political dissidents that had simply been “disappeared,” or who were later found only as corpses. It is impossible to presume, now that so much evidence has been documented, that Mexico is the liberalized democracy that the national and international Commercial Media portrays it to be.
Much of the work of this international newspaper over the past year has been documenting and reporting these stories, and translating them into other languages, to break that information blockade. The logic of the Other Campaign is that if so many are having their basic rights denied, suffering the blows of a dictatorial regime alone, each in their forgotten corner, then the time has come for Mutual Aid so that, if good people must be beaten, imprisoned and assassinated, then it makes infinitely more sense to confront the regime together.
Thus, for example, when on Monday it was learned that the Oaxaca 141 had been flown clandestinely to an isolated prison in Nayarit, Other Campaign adherents in Oaxaca, among them from the Other Journalism, now knew their counterparts in Nayarit and in the nearby metropolis of Guadalajara, Jalisco, on a first name basis. Between compañeros, phone calls, text messages and emails went out. And the adherents in that region have begun organizing support and noise-making actions so that these 141 political prisoners do not disappear into Fox’s Guantanamo, forgotten and invisible. It also means that the efforts they undertake there will be reported back to Oaxaca, to the nation and to the world in many of its languages. In sum, although not one of the Oaxaca 141 in Nayarit has been heard from, they are already speaking and defying the government and media blackout on their existence and the repression against them. As a result of the Zapatista Other Campaign, the distance between Oaxaca and a prison in Nayarit has grown much shorter than Fox, Calderón, or their security apparatus capos presumed.
The Coup d’Etat Will Not Stand
This, down below, is not the second-rate country of clowns in suits punching each other out in the halls of Congress or of elections authorities that preside over falsifying the results. It is the first-rate country of the dignified Mexico that the outgoing viceroy, Fox, and the new viceroy, Calderón, attempt to snuff out in Oaxaca and elsewhere: a nation of people who work hard, raise their families, and endure police batons, teargas, bullets, prison, torture and death each time they express a desire for a better life.
Calderón sent a very clear signal that, in terms of state violence and repression, Mexico probably hasn’t seen anything yet, not even during the dirty war of the 60s and 70s, compared to what is to come, when he named, this week, Jalisco Governor Francisco Ramírez Acuña to the powerful post of Interior Minister to essentially run the government. Ramírez Acuña is widely perceived as an authoritarian hardliner who imprisons dissidents – as he did time and time again in Jalisco – for sport. That’s one philosophy of statecraft when a governor has a reputation for allowing narco-traffickers and other violent criminals safe haven in his state: create a distraction by rounding up protesters, while gloating with slogans about how “the law will be enforced.”
Ramírez Acuña has told reporters that the matter of Oaxaca will be first on his agenda when he takes the steering wheel of the federal government. It is also an open question as to what changes in policy are in store regarding the Zapatista autonomous communities in Chiapas and the amnesty law for the leadership of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish initials) that Fox respected, more or less, during his six years in office. The disgrace of Fox’s final year as president, including but not limited to the violent police actions in Atenco and Oaxaca, means that a man that began his presidency pardoning indigenous political prisoners leaves having put many more times that number – hundreds of Mexican dissidents, a disproportionate number of them indigenous – in prison, usually on trumped up charges, as punishment for their exercise of free speech. It is entirely possible that, regarding Oaxaca, he already ceded control of federal policy and techniques of repression to Calderón and Ramírez Acuña.
Whether by commission or omission, Vicente Fox Queseda, who wanted so much to be known as a statesman that ended 70 years of single party dictatorship, leaves with a legacy as having been just one more bumbling repressor and looter in a long list of them. Calderón and his team, on the other hand, begin with no such transcendent illusions. They are the proud architects and heirs of the 21st Century Coup d’Etat, and payday comes on Friday.
First they will promote fear and terror, to try to silence the clamor and protest from below. That’s not going to have the desired effect. The level of indignant desire to do away with the long line of repressive regimes, as witnessed in every state and region along the 2006 Other Campaign trail, has only been inflamed by the ongoing events in Oaxaca and elsewhere. It is also an open secret that the 2006 election was stolen. Not even those that claim it was fair really believe it. There are certainly enough prisons and graveyards in Mexico to fill with thousands more for the crime of speaking and organizing for a better life. And there are police and soldiers galore, plus paramilitaries, to do the dirty work. But there are still not enough to hold back the critical mass of millions that do not recognize their legitimacy. History marches in the direction of a confrontation between those who impose from above and those below who, now recognizing that everyone else like them is in the same horrible situation, have constructed the “other” organization of horizontal communication and Mutual Aid.
The new regime is going to come in, most likely, with nightsticks and guns blazing. Not all of us are going to survive it. But the day is coming when millions will stand up, all at once, and overpower the powerful who have created two opponents for every one they have jailed, three for each they have killed. And from this small corner, that of an observer with a laptop, come what may, it has been the greatest privilege of this life to listen, learn, document and report over so many years from the first-rate country that is the Mexico from below. It has shown all of us, in every corner of the earth, a new way to fight. You won’t read it in the Commercial Media and there will likely be moments to come when they succeed in peddling the myth that all hope is lost, but the following conclusion is evident to anyone that has really been listening to the sound from below: The coup d’etat is here, but it will not stand.
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http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_4737379
Whittier, CA, 11/29/2006
Latinos less likely to seek HIV test
Groups say culture, language hinder efforts
By Susan Abram Staff Writer
Email= susan.abram@dailynews.com or (818) 713-3664
Latinos are more likely than others to avoid HIV testing until they are hospitalized or have full blown AIDS, compounding efforts to contain the spread of the deadly disease, a Los Angeles-based organization announced Tuesday.
As World AIDS Day approaches Friday, local organizations remain challenged with encouraging Latinos to get tested for HIV, saying cultural misconceptions about how the disease is spread remains a stubborn problem.
The study surveyed Latinos residing both legally and illegally in the Los Angeles area.
Conducted by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the study found that
72 percent of those Latinos living with AIDS had been diagnosed less than a year after getting their first HIV test. By comparison, 35 percent of whites and 53 percent of African Americans living with AIDS neglected to get tested less than a year before being diagnosed with the disease.
"We need to look at the reasons for this more fully, to understand whether it's based on immigration status or on language barriers," said Amy Rock Wohl, epidemiologist for Los Angeles County.
But a similar, smaller study conducted in San Mateo County traced the aversion to testing among Latinos to widely shared community beliefs that marriage and having children somehow lowered the risk for HIV. It also found that bisexual Latino men felt they were not at an increased risk of contracting the HIV virus because they did not identify themselves as gay, said San Mateo County epidemiologist Gladys Balmas.
Indeed, among Latinas in Los Angeles who are HIV positive, 44 percent did not know how they contracted the disease. Many had no more than three sexual partners.
"Messages on prevention are not reaching the Latino community," Balmas said. "There also are cultural factors. When we talk to immigrants, they believe they do not fit into high-risk groups so the message is not reaching them."
Miguel Bujanda of the Whittier Rio Hondo AIDS Project, said a slew of factors have traditionally worked against Latinos when it comes to seeking out health care and medical treatment.
"Latinos have a hard time going to the doctor," he said. "They would ask for medical attention if it is life-threatening. But doctors are not a priority. Putting food on the table is."
Add in the stigma of HIV and testing for the disease often goes ignored within the Latino community, he added. "People are testing, but they are not coming back for the results," Bujanda said.
Bujanda also noted that, while his organization and other nonprofit groups provide free HIV testing, many immigrants not legally in this country do not come in for testing out of fear of deportation.
Local experts agree that prevention messages, such as using condoms, need to reach beyond the gay community and among intravenous drug users.
"It is obvious that Spanish-speaking Latinos do not benefit from prevention and treatment messages available in the mainstream media and health service industries," said Luis Lopez, coordinator of the Latino Coalition Against AIDS. "We need more investment and better focused HIV outreach and education efforts directed to Spanish-speaking communities to reduce hidden risk behavior and increase access to health services."
But some health experts say the apathy toward HIV and AIDS is not unique to Latinos, immigrants or a specific race, ethnicity or religion.
"What we're seeing now is more and more individuals who are not educated," said Dr. Jeffrey Galpin, an infectious disease expert based in Tarzana who has worked in the AIDS field for the past 20 years.
"That same fear that existed 20 years ago needs to continue," he said. "You look at Magic Johnson, and Magic looks like he couldn't be healthier. Yet we're still dealing with a disease that has no cure."
A widely reported study released this week concludes that AIDS will be the third-leading cause of death worldwide within the next 25 years.
The U.S. government should be the first to extend medical care to the world, Galpin said, because AIDS and HIV is a universal epidemic.
"We can't be as myopic as we have been," he said. "We can't live and hold our own and say let the rest of the world die. We will pay one way or another, be it economically or some other way. The same winds that blow in Africa will come to our shores."
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Staff Writer Araceli Esparza contributed to this story.
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http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/933/
Wednesday, 29 November 2006
Interview with Peter Camejo: Unions and California Politics
Written by Javier Armas
Javier Armas: Everyone can see that the politics of California has changed with the growth of a huge immigrant rights movement that exploded on May 1. This being the case, how does this change your role, and the Green party’s role, in California politics?
Peter Camejo: The new development of the new civil rights struggle of immigrant workers is an expression of a process that is tied to globalization. There is now a radicalization taking place in the third world that extends into the United States because of this. The conditions in Mexico has worsened, as they have in many places in the third world. And so now we see, inside the United States, the impact of these processes. I think that the immigrant workers are becoming the real leaders of trying to defend the rights of all workers in the United States. I think it completely changes how the Green party has to focus. Amazingly the people who vote green, are not the same sociological group that attends meetings in the Green Party, who are primarily of European descent. And many are environmentalist. The people who mostly vote for the Green party in California are poor people, and who are primarily Black and Latino. This is a very interesting dichotomy between who founded the party and who is its apparatus with who votes for it. That is a sign that there is a need for a third party in America that will really represent Latinos, Afro-Americans, and working people.
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JA: Talking about class and unions in California, it appears all the unions have put all their energy in supporting Phil Angelides. And I just had a discussion with an organizer from AFSMCE local 3299, the largest AFSMCE local in California, and he said that Angelides is very incompetent and not very charismatic, but they are going to support him anyways against Schwarzenegger. So I asked why wouldn’t his union endorse Peter Camejo, and his response was that its absolutely unrealistic that Camejo would win. What is your response to trade unionist and workers who are part of unions to that line of thinking?
PC: What this person has not thought through is why he has no choice. If he is basically saying that I’m not happy with the candidate that I’m voting for and maybe this is the candidate that I don’t prefer, but I’m going to vote for him anyways, then he has no immediate understanding of why that is. Its Phil Angelides and the Democratic party that does not allow free elections in America; so that labor will vote for pro-corporate candidates. And our candidacy is not because were about to win, in that sense he is right, but that we want free elections, so that he would be free to vote for who he really supports. And why do you continue to vote for the people who oppress you, in continuing to support the parties that deny you free elections. For example, the Democratic Party has lowered the minimum wage from over 10 dollars an hour to 8 dollars an hour when the economy doubled, they have allowed the unions to collapse, they have allowed the richest one percent to take all the profits when the overwhelmingly majority of working people have received no pay increases. And yet labor leaders will tell you that there voting for those policies that are totally anti-labor because that same party these leaders are voting for does not allow free elections. What that shows is a total lack of understanding by that labor leader of the reality of America. And its not this person’s fault, it’s the whole leadership of the labor movement who is committing suicide by continuing to support the Democratic Party. The labor movement used to be 37% of the American workforce, now its 12%. It is dying because of its support to the Democratic Party. By voting for Phil Angelides, he is destroying the unions and destroying the workers ability to defend its self.
JA: So what is the strategy of the Green Party in making in roads in the unions and the labor movement?
PC: It doesn’t have one. The Green Party is trying to present its view the best it can. Right now, the fact that, people who are telling the truth are weak is not a condemnation of those who are telling the truth any more than it was for the early abolitionist movement, who in their first presidential race received 7,000 votes. They got much lower percentages than what the greens did. And yet looking back, we now recognize that the abolitionist were 100 percent correct, 100 percent right for refusing to vote for the parties that supported slavery. It’s the same thing today on many political levels.
For example, the sympathy that is growing for the Green Party, one population sector where it has become massive is the Arab-American Muslim community. About 30% of this community considers itself Green. Also among the very young in California, polls in Marin show 25% of people under the age of 25 consider themselves Green. And in my last election, the highest percentage of those voting for me where the poorest people in California and the youngest people in California. Of both of those categories, I received 15% of the vote. You see the Green Party occasionally receive high votes. A beautiful example was the race for superintendent of school where our candidate came in 2nd.And this candidate only had 3,000 dollars but was able to win that much support because of our politics. So it’s a mixed picture but at this point the Green Party has no overall strategy, specific strategy, except trying to build caucuses in the unions that begin to understand this. But were very weak. We have a caucus in the teachers union and we are trying to build others. But were still very, very weak.
JA: My Last question is what is your response to political activist who see change taking place outside of electoral politics and see electoral politics as a dead end?
PC: Well I think the people who act in the social movements who do not see change taking place through elections are in general correct. It’s the other way around. Its when massive movements develop in the streets that electoral alternatives might appear that can actually triumph. But they are not in contradiction with one another anymore than the direct actions of the movement against slavery was in conflict with the fact that candidates were running apposing slavery. So I do think we have to have a balanced view of this.
I’ll give you the example of Venezuela where there was the two party system that had complete control for a long period of time. Roughly a 25 year period, 30 year period, and one day an independent candidate suddenly swept the elections and the two major parties collapsed to 5% of the vote between them. And that will be the way change will come. It will be sudden and drastic but it takes some time, a long time, and if there aren’t pioneers that pave the way that begin the process like what happened in Venezuela- it went on for 25 years before that explosion took place of people organizing and fighting against the two major parties. So we see the Green party as an early indication, an early step into that direction, and it may not even be in the electoral form that will come at the end when the break happens and the two corporate money controlled parties collapse.
There are signs all over the world that the two party systems are starting to collapse and people want alternatives. There signs of it in Europe, all over Latin America, and we think that eventually that will come into the center of the United States, which is really an empire and at the center of the empire.
JA: Thank you Peter for the interview
PC: Thank You
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http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/november29/immigrate-112906.html
Stanford Report, November 29, 2006
Fear, repression not solving immigration issues, scholars say
Panelists agree that militarization of the U.S. border with Mexico is not working as a deterrent to unauthorized immigration
By Barbara Palmer
In the current U.S. immigration debate, there is a disconnect between the native-born population's fears of losing control of political and economic power to newcomers and the structural needs of the American economy, which has come to depend on immigrant labor, said Alejandro Portes, professor of sociology at Princeton University, who spoke here during a Nov. 13 class on immigration issues.
Public response to immigration follows in two basic paths: the desire to exclude newcomers altogether or to "Americanize" them as fast as possible, said Portes, the director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton. But since neither response is rooted in an understanding of the economic forces that drive immigration, policies based on them often lead to consequences that are the opposite of what they intended, he said.
Portes was one of four scholars who appeared on a panel, "Immigration: Is There a Problem? Is There a Solution?" as part of an autumn quarter course, Immigration Rights and Wrongs. The course, taught by Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) faculty and visiting scholars, examined aspects of immigration, including its economic, political, cultural and ethical dimensions. The class was open to the general public as well as to undergraduate and graduate students as part of an annual CCSRE course that addresses pressing social issues.
Other panelists at the Nov. 13 presentation included Jayashri Srikantiah, associate professor of law and director of Stanford Law School's Immigrants' Rights Clinic; Jennifer Lee, associate professor of sociology at the University of California-Irvine; and Aristide Zolberg, professor of political science at New York City's New School University. Michele Landis Dauber, associate professor at the Law School, was moderator.
The militarization of the U.S. border with Mexico isn't working as a deterrent to unauthorized immigration, the scholars agreed. "There has been more than a tenfold increase in border enforcement expenditures in the last decade or so, at the same time as there has been a drastic increase in the amount of undocumented migration," Srikantiah said. "The more complicated the U.S government makes it to cross the border, the more profitable it is for smugglers or traffickers to take people across," she said. The net result has been more deaths at the border; in 2005, there were 450, she said.
The fit between the needs of thousands of U.S. firms for manual workers and the needs of Mexican and Central American workers is so strong as to defy any attempt at repression, Portes said. "You can build fences at places in the Mexican-American border and the flow will just move elsewhere, as migrants brave the desert and death as necessary."
Border enforcement hasn't served to keep undocumented migrant workers out of the United States but to keep them in, he said. Despite the fact that the Border Patrol is now second only to the Army as an arms-bearing force, the probability of capture for those trying to cross the border illegally has declined due to the increasing sophistication of smugglers, he said.
Once in, it is too costly for migrants to leave and return again, stopping what formerly were cyclical migration patterns in their tracks, Portes said. Heightened repression, "so dear to the self-important guardians of national integrity," has had exactly the opposite consequence, he said. "It has transformed what was a regional phenomenon to a permanent unauthorized population."
A global economic web
Jennifer Lee challenged the perception that the persistent inflow of immigrants—and in particular Hispanic immigrants—threatens to divide the United States into two cultures. Her work has shown that the newest groups of immigrants follow classic lines of assimilation, she said. By the third generation the majority of Hispanic immigrants achieve rates of social mobility consistent with immigrant groups in the past, as demonstrated by measures including using English exclusively and rates of intermarriage, she said.
But monolingualism created by an emphasis on assimilation is not necessarily a good thing, Portes said. The United States has become part of a single global web, in which it plays a core role, he said. "In the new world order, in which economic, political and cultural ties bind nations ever closer, it is not clear the rapid extinction of foreign languages in America is in the interests of individual citizens or the country as a whole."
As an alternative, Portes recommended immigration legislation that would bring the currently unauthorized flow of immigrants "above ground" as a managed labor pool.
Under his proposal, every Mexican with a certified job could cross the border legally by paying $2,000, half of which could be refunded upon his or her return. Migrants who wished to stay in the United States after six years, and who had no criminal convictions and the endorsement of employers, would be given preferred status, he said. His proposal also would tap the proactive capacity of the Mexican government, which would create social programs that would provide incentives for the families of migrant workers to remain in Mexico, he said.
Most immigrant rights groups oppose a temporary worker program, because it creates no incentives for migrants to become valued workers in the United States, Srikantiah said. It also creates the potential for the abuse of power by employers who control workers' visas, she said. Migrants call such programs "report to deport," because "in our world of technology, if you enter a database as a temporary worker, you'll be tracked." A worker could be deported for even a mild violation of the law, she said.
In a critique of current proposed legislation, Srikantiah noted the Senate bill ultimately was not supported by a majority of grassroots and legal advocacy groups partly because it expanded conceptions of "so-called criminal aliens" and further limited their rights, she said. Both Senate and House bills expanded ideas of who could be detained without a bond hearing and the categories of crimes that make an immigrant deportable.
One of the really hard questions that Congress will grapple with is not so much about quotas or legalization, but a nuts-and-bolts one, she said: "If the current enforcement doesn't work, if it is not humane, what kind of enforcement can we live with?"
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http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=N29417577
Wed 29 Nov 2006 @9:12 PM ET
Protesters withdraw from base in Mexico's Oaxaca
Oaxaca, Mexico, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Anti-governor protesters in a troubled southern Mexican city withdrew on Wednesday from a radio station they had held for months, easing a crisis that is weighing on President-elect Felipe Calderon.
Protesters from the Oaxacan Peoples' Popular Assembly group handed over a university radio station to education authorities after they lost ground in clashes with police on the weekend.
The demonstrators, who want Gov. Ulises Ruiz to resign, had used the radio station to coordinate street protests and store supplies.
A top aide to Calderon, who takes office on Friday, has described the six-month-long Oaxaca conflict as Mexico's most pressing problem. About 15 people have died, most of them shot by what protesters say were off-duty policemen.
Protesters failed in an attempt to take the city's main square in a clash with police on Saturday, and about 150 of them were arrested.
Some protest leaders have been sent to jails in distant parts of Mexico and others have taken refuge in churches. Police have cleared away barricades set up around the city, which had long been a tourist magnet famed for its indigenous markets and colonial architecture.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/30/america/LA_GEN_Mexico_Oaxaca_Unrest.php
Published: November 29, 2006
Mexican police clear final barricade in Oaxaca, protesters turn over radio station
The Associated Press
Oaxaca, Mexico: Authorities removed the last significant barricade erected by leftist protesters as part of their six-month takeover of Oaxaca City on Wednesday, and activists — some of them weeping — returned a seized radio station to university officials.
The loss of Radio University — which had served as the movement's nerve center, alerting protesters to police movements — and the removal of a barricade made of hijacked, burned-out vehicles just outside the campus' walls, appeared to be a huge setback for the once-powerful protest movement.
For the first time in months, police appeared to control this entire colonial city in southern Mexico, popular among tourists for its picturesque, arch-ringed main square.
A group of about 20 protesters, some of whom wept while others shouted slogans, met with officials of the state's public university to turn the equipment and offices of Radio University back over to academic personnel.
Earlier in the day, about 200 government employees used bulldozers and dump trucks to cart off the burned-out husks of 22 buses and cars from an intersection where supporters of the leftist Oaxaca People's Assembly had piled them up to block traffic.
The barricade had been the scene of confrontations between demonstrators and police in the weeks after federal officers entered the city on Oct. 29 to retake the city's center.
Police control over other areas of the city was tenuous or spotty for much of November, but authorities clamped down after violent demonstrations last weekend that resulted in more than 150 arrests, 43 injuries and the burning of vehicles and buildings.
Protest leaders — including some of the amateur announcers who had used Radio University to issue calls for protests, identify the movement's enemies and broadcast political diatribes — were reportedly holed up at a church to avoid arrest.
The protests began in late May as a strike by teachers seeking higher pay, and quickly exploded into a broad movement. The teachers later accepted pay raises and returned to work, but their leftist allies continued to demand the resignation of Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz, whom they accuse of violence and corruption.
The protests paralyzed the city for six months and scared away tourism, the city's economic lifeblood. Following an attempt by Ruiz's government to dislodge them in June, strikers and protesters seized several private radio and television stations, but later abandoned all but Radio University.
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http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/powerplays/archives/003129.php
Violence Erupts Again in Oaxaca
By Sarah Ferguson | November 29, 2006
After the riots that rocked Oaxaca over the weekend, justice for slain Indymedia journalist Brad Will may be the last thing on Mexican authorities' minds.
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The crisis peaked Saturday when federal police battled with masked youths hurling Molotovs, fireworks, and rocks. The violence followed a peaceful march by thousands seeking the removal of federal forces occupying the city. More than 150 people were arrested and dozens injured during the clashes, including a journalist who got nailed in the head with a tear gas canister, and at least 10 people were hit by live ammunition, according to a local human rights group. Government offices, hotels, and cars were set ablaze.
It was the worst violence in Oaxaca in the six months since members of the protest coalition APPO (Oaxaca People's Popular Assembly) began demanding the removal of the state's governor Ulises Ruiz, whom they claim was fraudulently elected.
Indymedia reports that both federal police and bands of armed gunmen fired on the demonstrators, and at one point APPO sympathizers returned fire.
Now APPO is claiming six demonstrators were killed and their bodies taken by police. State officials insist no one died. But independent journalist John Gibler reports that bands of armed men entered hospitals in the city and allegedly removed wounded protesters at gunpoint.
Meanwhile, leaders of APPO have gone into hiding as both federal and state authorities pledged to hold them criminally accountable for what's been estimated as $27 million worth of damage to this historic city—including the State Superior Court (Tribunal Superior de Justicia), whose offices were gutted by flames, a prominent theater, and a 19th century building listed as a world heritage site.
Arrest warrants have been issued for 200 activists, and contingents of elite riot police in ski masks are reportedly raiding people's homes. "People are being grabbed off the street and put into trucks and disappeared," one American in Oaxaca, who asked not to be named, told the Voice. "All the internationals are leaving town."
The fear and confusion over the missing and as yet unverified dead protesters does not bode well for those hoping to get to the bottom of Brad Will's murder.
The violence erupted Saturday after thousands of APPO demonstrators attempted to peacefully surround the battalions of federal police occupying the city's central square. (Pictures here.)
But clearly some in the crowd were ready for a showdown.
Free Speech Radio News had this particularly descriptive account:
‘The protesters donned wooden shields, construction helmets, and vinegar-laden maxi-pads to resist tear gas, used homemade bazookas, Molotov cocktails, rocks, and slingshots to fend off the ensuing barrage of concussion grenades, tear gas, and marbles from behind police lines. ‘
Yes, that's right, maxi-pads, and the police in Mexico apparently use marbles and slingshots, too.
Things got much uglier as the police unleashed water cannon, pepper spray, and heavy doses of tear gas, rounding up and reportedly beating many marchers. Driven back from the square, bands of masked youth rampaged through the streets, hurling rocks and firebombing banks, hotels, restaurants, shops, and government buildings, and torching numerous cars and buses.
Hundreds of buildings were damaged.
APPO leaders conceded they lost control of the protest and have since blamed the fires on "provocateurs" and "hitmen in the service of Ruiz" seeking to discredit the protest movement.
Governor Ruiz, in turn, blamed the destruction on the leadership of APPO and "radicals from Mexico City" as well as other "outside" agitators. Ruiz has refused to step down from office despite pressure from Mexico's Congress. (He's said only God can make him go). He called on outgoing president president Vicente Fox to rout the "delinquents" who are "terrorizing" his city.
Human rights groups, however, have accused the governor of backing paramilitary-style assaults on APPO demonstrators by plain-clothes gunmen tied to Ruiz's party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
Prior to last weekend, at least a dozen people had been killed, including Will, whose shooting helped trigger the federal occupation.
On Sunday, two more APPO activists were seized by gunmen in plain clothes during a press conference called to denounce the disappearance of a student.
Now rights groups are calling for U.N. and Red Cross officials to intervene to prevent further human rights abuses.
Federal police have pledged to put an end to the uprising by December 1, when the new Mexican president Felipe Calderon takes office. "Our tolerance has been exhausted," the commander declared. Already, some 140 of those arrested have been shipped out of state to a federal prison in the northern state of Nayarit.
But others say they don't foresee things getting back to normal in Oaxaca any time soon. "There are deep, deep wounds, and generalized terror that is going to be hard to recover from," says Emilie Smith, an Anglican priest who works with the indigenous rights group CIPO in Oaxaca. "The sense in the city is one of sullen, terrifying occupation."
Posted in In the Streets
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http://www.narconews.com/Issue43/article2397.html
November 28, 2006
Oaxaca: The End of Tolerance
Why is this Repression Carried out Against the Popular Movement? And why Now?
By Luis Hernández Navarro / La Jornada
Oaxaca in 2006 is like Sonora in 1902. At the beginning of the 20th Century the government of Portifirio Diaz confronted the rebellion of the yaqui indigenous people and deported the first indigenous prisoners to the Yucatan, Jalisco, Tlaxcala and Veracruz. In the beginning of the 21st century, the administration of Vincente Fox is responding to the uprising in Oaxaca by sending the 141 detained persons to the prison of San Jose del Rincon in Nayarit.
Vincente Fox will end his six years in power with his hands full of blood. “The tolerance has run out” in Oaxaca, says General Ardelio Vargas, chief of the large force of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), and one of the “heroes”, along with Admiral Wilfrido Robledo, of the repression in Atenco. It is their dogs that are in the street. They throw tear gas, violently beat people, arrest without warrants, invade houses without authorization, destroy property, occupy hospitals and clinics, interfere with the free movement of citizens and sexually violate women.
In the streets the youth are indiscriminately arrested for the sole crime of being young. The prisoners are mistreated, tortured and jailed alongside common criminals. Judicial defense lawyers and family members are not allowed to visit. And, just as with Porfirio Diaz, they are deported.
But the abuses that are carried out against the civilian population by the PFP are not limited to those which are directly committed. Members of the PFP also act as the protectors of the hit men who work in the service of Ulises Ruiz. These gunmen and police, dressed as civilians, travel the streets of Oaxaca City in vehicles with which they kidnap and disappear members of the APPO. These are the caravans of death. These men have been responsible for most of the 20 homicides perpetrated against APPO.
Why is this repression carried out against the popular movement of Oaxaca? And why now? What happened that exhausted the “tolerance” of the federal authorities? Basically there is one reason: in less than a week the Chief Executive will take power in the middle of a huge crisis of legitimacy. Felipe Calderon demanded that Vincent Fox, since he had not resolved the conflict of Oaxaca, at least leave the social movement weakened enough to guarantee a future for negotiation under conditions favorable to the government. With prisoners and persecuted persons, one would imagine that reaching an agreement with the demonstrators would be easier and cheaper. Calderon demanded that it be the outgoing administration and not the incoming one that pays the price of disrepute for the repression of Oaxaca. In summary: that the way would be cleared. In this way, Calderon was able to discourage the massive presence of Oaxacans who would have contested his assumption of power during the coming first days of December.
The overwhelming presence of the PFP in Oaxaca since October 29 did not stop the protests against Ulises Ruiz from keeping up a vibrant presence. It did not break up the popular organization nor stop the revolt. On the contrary, the APPO excitedly continued with the formation of its congress and reaffirmed its internal unity.
Nevertheless, apart from the confrontations like those that occurred on November 2, the conflict at hand was relatively contained. Governability had not been reestablished, nor had the normality of daily life in the city, but points of informal communication existed between the federal government and the directors of the APPO: It was, at that time, a conflict that was relatively administered. This status, however, was inconvenient for the government and so it decided to enter the city and break the situation.
Did the popular movement do something that broke this balance? No, definitely not. The demonstrations of this past Saturday were absolutely peaceful. It was, obviously, a demonstration with much power, but it did not constitute an act of violence. The decision to use violence came from, as has been amply documented, the PFP. It was the members of this institution that threw projectiles and later tear gas at the demonstrators. It was they who began the aggression. And they did it brutality and with rancor. They were there to crush the demonstrators, and to make them pay with a vengeance. The repression was savage: three deaths, more than 100 injured, 221 detained.
And the PFP did all of this alongside the gunmen and the police, dressed as civilians who are in the service of Ulises Ruiz, while protecting them. They fired against and they kidnapped defenseless civilians, attacked those who were in the bus station of ADO (a bus company) waiting for transportation out of the city and did what they had done during the last few months: seed terror.
Simultaneously, Radio Ciudadana, popularly known as “Radio Patito,” the pirate station of state government loyalists, called upon those in Oaxaca to set fire to the homes of well-known members of the popular movement. This was not a joke. On Sunday, November 26, the offices of Flavio Sosa, one of the most well-known voices of the APPO, were burned. Of course, neither the PFP nor the state police prevented it.
“[The situation] is becoming normalized,” Ulises Ruiz said in one more of his involuntary jokes. “There will not be forgiveness,” he warned. As candidate for governor of the state, Ulises introduced himself as “a man of unity (unidad).” Today we know that at that time he was missing three letters from the word: Ruiz is the politician of impunity (impunidad).
The repressive violence in Oaxaca is the gold clasp in which Vicente Fox closes his six years in office, but it is also the card that presents Felipe Calderon. Without recognizing it, they have decreed a state of siege. The rights of the individual have disappeared entirely.
Nonetheless, the measure is not going to solve anything. Those who executed the state of siege have forgotten two small details. First, the enormous capacity for resistance that exists among the people of Oaxaca, and second, that what they have really done in suppressing the people is to further spread the recognition of the state’s crimes, indignation and the desire for revenge on the part of the citizens in many parts of the nation. The tolerance, understand this well, has also run out on the other side.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/28/AR2006112801511.html
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 @9:22 PM
U.S. Diplomat Meets Nicaragua's Ortega
By Filadelfo Aleman / The Associated Press
Managua, Nicaragua -- A U.S. diplomat met Nicaraguan President-elect Daniel Ortega on Tuesday, opening a new chapter in relations with a leader Washington once tried to help overthrow.
The United States opposed Ortega's Sandinista government in the 1980s, and backed the Contra rebel insurgency aimed at toppling the Marxist revolutionary.
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U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon said he was optimistic after the more than hourlong meeting in which he and Ortega talked about democracy and the need to fight poverty in Nicaragua.
"I think we are developing an important dialogue for relations between the two countries," Shannon said. The United States will continue to work with Nicaragua and the Nicaraguan people to do "everything we can for a better future."
Ortega did not comment on the meeting.
After meeting Ortega, Shannon had lunch with current President Enrique Bolanos. The U.S. official's trip to Nicaragua was part of a Central American tour that also includes stops in El Salvador and Panama.
Before Nicaragua's Nov. 5 presidential election, U.S. officials had suggested U.S. aid to the Central American country could be cut off if Ortega won. But in the weeks since the leader of the leftist Sandinista party won the vote, the U.S. has adopted a wait-and-see approach to the incoming government.
The United States has expressed concern at Ortega's win, saying relations will depend on his support for democracy.
Ortega was part of the junta that took power in Nicaragua in 1979, when the Sandinistas overthrew the hated dictator Anastasio Somoza. He was president from 1985-1990. Under his rule, Nicaragua descended into economic chaos under radical economic policies that included property seizures.
But he claims he is not the same man who bankrupted the nation and he assures business leaders he will respect the private sector.
Ortega, who takes office on Jan. 10, has said he wants to maintain relations with the United States, as well as with U.S. foes Cuba and Venezuela.
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http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/10403673/detail.html
Updated: 7:56 am PST November 27, 2006
Trial To Begin In Alleged Scam That Targeted Latinos
San Diego -- Four people indicted on conspiracy charges in connection to a homebuying scam at now-defunct First Latino Group in San Diego are set to go to trial next week.
Jury selection is scheduled to start Tuesday in San Diego Superior Court in the case against the four defendants, including Rolando Montez, founder of First Latino.
Prosecutors said First Latino systematically bilked more than 90 investors of more than $1 million in 2004. Many of the investors were Spanish-speaking members of Latino churches, and First Latino opened many of its pitch meetings with a prayer and a recitation from the bible.
Montez and the other defendants going before a jury have each pleaded not guilty to the charges. Each faces up to 12 years and eight months in prison if convicted.
Terry Samples, First Latino's former chief operating officer, was sentenced earlier this year to serve more than three years in prison for his part in the alleged scam.
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