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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/world/americas/25briefs-BOLIVIASENATE.html?ref=americas
Published: November 25, 2006
Bolivia: President Threatens Senate
By Simon Romero
President Evo Morales proposed disbanding the Senate, which has been resisting his calls for ambitious land reform legislation. The proposal would be considered by an assembly that is rewriting Bolivia’s Constitution. Tension has been increasing between the central government and provincial authorities after governors from six of Bolivia’s nine states said this month that they would break ties with the government. Protests against Mr. Morales also have been taking place this week in Santa Cruz.
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http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=139386
10:11pm Viernes 24 Noviembre 2006
APPO press conference from 2 p.m., November 24, 2006.
November 24, 2006
APPO PRESS BULLETIN
TO LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PRESS
TO THE PEOPLE OF OAXACA, MEXICO AND THE WORLD
The APPO maintains its principle demand, the departure of Ulises Ruíz Ortiz and his government supported armed groups from the state of Oaxaca, and when we refer to armed groups, we are referring to the paramilitaries and thugs commanded by Heliodoro Díaz Escarraga, Lino Celaya Luria, Jorge Franco, Bulmaro Rito Salinas and Manuel Martinez Feria, as well as Lizbeth Caña Cadeza, who has nothing but a guerilla mentality in her head.
The mere fact of being in power does not exonerate them from punishment for the deaths and other violations that have been committed against the inhabitants of Oaxaca, and for that reason the APPO will sustain its claim of genocide against Vicente Fox, Carlos Abascal Carranza, Ulises Ruíz Ortiz and the commanders of the PFP.
The APPO asks for the intervention of international organizations and the PGR clear up these assassinations because they are not just of state jurisdiction, given that high power firearms, for the exclusive use of the army, were used. Not a single death can remain unpunished, regardless of the victim’s origin, it is yet another live lost.
The APPO reminds URO that this is still not over, and it will not end until his departure, Oaxaca does not pardon the assassinations and the humiliation of its people, they are unforgivable.
The women of the COMO (Committee of Oaxacan Women) on hunger strike shows further heroics, but also the rejection of the impunity, and that their demands are just, the departure of URO and the police forces of occupation, it is urgent, and only for those who don’t want to see ingovernability will this demands continue.
It is and will be a success, the Grand Megamarch which will leave tomorrow, Saturday the 25th, at 10:00 a.m. from the Casa del Gobierno in Santa María Coyotepec, to cordon off the PFP in the main streets of this capital city. The PFP will only be left with the option to retreat and immediately depart from Oaxaca, the Oaxacans don’t need them, only cowards assassinate and then protect their own, but when they leave, they should bring with them Ulises Ruíz Ortiz and his armed guerillas.
The APPO maintains that there is no space in this great movement for traitors and corrupt bosses, and for them there is only space in history’s dumpster.
NOT ONE STEP BACK IN THIS STRUGGLE!
THE FALL OF THE TYRANT IS IMMANENT!
DISAPPEARANCE OF POWERS NOW!
ALL THE POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
APPO PRESS COMMITTEE
agrega tus comentarios / add your comments
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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/4358555.html
Nov. 24, 2006, 10:39PM
Two decades later, the fight is still on
In Oaxaca's struggle for political and economic stability, little has changed
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Email= dqalthaus@yahoo.com
OAXACA — Southern Mexico's underdogs are rebelling once more and Juan Sosa is right in the thick of it, again. Sosa, 40, has been waging rebellion in his native Oaxaca state for nearly two decades now. During much of that time he's been hounded and harried: threatened with death, kidnapped by police, imprisoned on murder charges. But Sosa's still at it. And he's got many years, perhaps a lifetime, of effort ahead of him, he says.
"We know that the political awakening of the masses is just beginning," Sosa said recently as hundreds of other dissidents gathered outside Oaxaca City's colonial era cathedral, plotting new protests. "This is a long struggle."
Since last June, Sosa and other dissidents have been trying to drive Gov. Ulises Ruiz from office. Their tactics — occupying the city center, shutting down government offices, clashing with police — have gutted Oaxaca's vital tourist trade, convulsed its politicians of every stripe, ensnared its public in a state of siege.
The trouble in Oaxaca has long echoed across Mexico, where the largely poor followers of leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador continue to challenge the legitimacy of President-elect Felipe Calderon, who takes office Friday.
Elite versus poor: Converging in Oaxaca, some analysts say, is the chaos of feuding political elites and the roiling anger of the poor and disregarded who comprise as much as half of Mexico's 107 million people.
"This is Untamed Mexico, the Mexico of the excluded, those who don't have enough to eat, enough medicine, enough housing," said Victor Raul Martinez, a sociologist at Oaxaca's Benito Juarez Autonomous University. "This is the enraged Mexico."
Though violence is frequent and government officials say guerrilla groups are bent on inciting armed rebellion in much of Mexico, the chance of outright warfare is considered remote. But Untamed Mexico's ferment — along with gangland bloodshed and fighting between political parties — presents perhaps the greatest challenge to Calderon's presidency, some analysts say.
"What is at play here is what direction do we want this country to take," said Heliodoro Diaz, the Oaxaca governor's top political operative. "Whether we are capable of building a country of laws, that's the great challenge."
"That a street movement can decide the direction of political and social policies of the country is unacceptable," Diaz argued. "If we don't have a show of force and close ranks now, we are placing the country in a situation of greater risk."
The governor, who has four years left on a six-year term, has refused to step down. Sosa and other activists say they're not stopping until Ruiz is out, if then.
"We are targeting personalities now," Sosa said, referring to the governor. "But the structure of the political system comes later."
Soft-spoken and sturdily built, Sosa says he first jumped into Oaxaca's fractious and often brutal politics in the late 1980s when he became involved in a savings-and-loan project for poor Zapotec villages near his home outside Oaxaca City. His involvement grew along with the rising indigenous activism fueled by the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage to the Americas. In August 1996, mostly Indian rebels attacked the Pacific Coast resort of Huatulco and other southern towns.
In the ensuing crackdown, federal police arrested the city council and scores of other people from Loxicha, a Zapotec community in the mountains not far from Huatulco. Claiming they were framed by Oaxaca's then-governor and local political bosses known as caciques, Sosa became a leading spokesman for the jailed villagers.
In July 1998, Sosa himself was arrested on a street in the state capital and held for 25 days before being charged with murder in relation to a guerrilla ambush of a police patrol. Sosa and several other accused men were jailed for three years without trial before being released in a general amnesty in 2000. But eight men from Loxicha, including the town's former mayor, remain in jail, some given 30-year sentences. Sosa denies that either he or those arrested in Loxicha were ever members of the guerrilla group or that he committed murder.
"They couldn't prove the charges throughout the whole process," said Sosa, a father of two whose trimmed gray-flecked hair and moustache give him a passing resemblance to Emiliano Zapata, the famed revolutionary leader of a century ago.
'These are just delinquents': Ruiz has insisted that Sosa and the other protesters — gathered under an umbrella group called APPO — are but a few thousand malcontents and "rent-a-radicals" that his political foes hired to stir things up.
"The governor shouldn't resign because of a group of guerrillas holding the state hostage," said Gerardo Diaz, a middle-aged accountant marching in support of Ruiz recently. "These are just delinquents."
But many among the dissidents — an unwieldy legion embracing both ditty-singing do-gooders and bomb-tossing youths who think Joseph Stalin got a bad rap — aim at a revolution that brings justice to Mexico's poor, equality to its Indians, real democracy to its people.
The protesters have held peaceful marches, sit-ins and other demonstrations during more than five months of conflict. But students and other more radical activists battled with federal riot police for more than six hours Nov. 2, injuring as many as 10 policemen with Molotov cocktails and clubs. Police in turn beat and arrested scores of activists.
"This is a process of the radicalization of society," Flavio Sosa, another movement leader who is no relation to Juan Sosa, says of the Molotov-throwers. "These are young men who think they are in a revolution. They don't like leadership of any kind."
Oaxaca's politics have always been viciously split along regional lines, with local caciques controlling communities and pledging loyalty to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
The PRI, to which Ruiz belongs, has ruled Oaxaca for 77 years and controlled Mexican national politics for seven decades, until outgoing President Vicente Fox's election in 2000. The PRI's system worked much like that feudal knights only tenuously tied to a distant king. Mexico's king died when the PRI lost the presidency. Oaxaca's still-powerful knights have been cast adrift, some joining other political parties.
"It's an internal struggle within the PRI and between the different regions of the state," said Salomon Nahmad, director of a federally funded Oaxaca research group. Still, he said, the roots of the conflict are in the "the abandonment of the people, the discrimination against people who are indigenous or of Indian extraction."
Lopez Obrador support: Though focused on local issues, the Oaxaca protest has taken center stage in the ongoing political crisis spawned by last July's contested presidential elections.
Oaxaca's dissidents tend to align with Lopez Obrador, who narrowly lost the presidency.
Lopez Obrador, who led a protest occupation of downtown Mexico City through the summer, declared himself Mexico's "legitimate president" on Nov. 20 at yet another mass rally. Claiming to represent the poor, he has called on followers to resist Calderon's legitimacy throughout the next six years. Many in Oaxaca seem ready to heed that call.
"The rich are richer and the poor every day are poorer. Is that right? Is that just?" asked Ufemia Perez, a 38-year-old mother of five in a hillside slum on the northern edge of Oaxaca City. "It's not right that a few live in mansions while the rest of us live like this."
"That's what this is about," said Perez, a lay leader in the local Roman Catholic parish. "No one can resolve this. Perhaps only God."
Thousands of federal riot police dislodged the dissidents from the central square of Oaxaca's state capital in late October, allowing the city to return to a semblance of normality. But the activists simply moved their headquarters to the steps of the Santo Domingo church, a few blocks north of the plaza. They also continue holding the state university campus and blockading streets and working class neighborhoods around the city.
Bombings in Mexico City on Nov. 6 were claimed by splinter groups tied to the same guerrilla organization to which Sosa was accused of belonging. Their actions were in support of the Oaxaca dissidents, the guerrillas said in a statement.
"We understand that this is a process to re-establish order," said Heliodoro Diaz, the Oaxaca state official. "This has to be a government that listens to people more, that has more dealings with civil society. This has to be a government that reforms itself."
Such reforms could happen. Or they might not. The leftist political parties and groups loyal to Lopez Obrador may well persist in protests. Or maybe they won't. But the agitation in Oaxaca and across southern Mexico will continue, Juan Sosa and other activists vow. Until what they consider justice is achieved. Someday.
"The movement can't be controlled, co-opted or corrupted," Sosa said. "The political groups can reach agreements among themselves, but they can't stop the movement. They won't reach agreement with us."
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http://ww4report.com/node/2825
Fri, 11/24/2006 - 20:31.
Oaxaca: Zapotecs build popular power in mountains
Submitted by Bill Weinberg
Traditional indigenous authorities from several communities in Oaxaca's northern mountains met at Guelatao de Juarez Nov. 21 to formally inaugurate the Assembly of Zapotec, Mixe and Chinanteco Pueblos of the Sierra de Juarez, to support the popular struggle in the conflicted Mexican state. Announcing its affiliation with APPO, leaders said the organization would "seize" government offices throughout the region, and would continue the occupation of the federally-owned radio station based in Guelatao de Juarez, XEGLO, "La Voz de la Sierra," which was taken over by protesters several days earlier.
The statement said this was "the first step in the organizational consolidation organizativa of the indigenous peoples of the Oaxacan mountains" and would "contribute to the strengthening of our respective processes of autonomy, reconstitution and development as peoples."
Noticias de Oaxaca, Nov. 21=
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~archive/chiapas95/2006.11/msg00555.html
Source archived at Chiapas95
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/chiapas95.html
See our last post on Mexico and the Oaxaca crisis.
http://ww4report.com/node/2824
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http://ww4report.com/node/2826
November 24, 2006
Chiapas: Zapatistas again block roads for Oaxaca
Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Fri, 11/24/2006 - 20:52.
Supporters of the Zapatista Naitonal Liberation Army (EZLN) blocked roads at 18 points in Chiapas Nov. 21 in support of the struggle in Oaxaca and to press demands for the resignation of the embattled state's Gov. Ulises Ruiz. The Chiapas state government secretary Roger Grajales Gonzalez said the blockades involved hundreds of indigenous Zapatista supporters, and were carried out in a peaceful manner.
Blockades were held on the San Cristobal de las Casas-Palenque route through the Highlands, the Ocosingo-Yajalon-Tila route through the Zona Norte, and at various points in the Selva. Federal Preventative Police (PFP) were on hand to back up the state police forces mobilized to the scenes, but no violence was reported. (El Universal, Nov. 20)
See our last posts on Mexico and the Oaxaca crisis, the Zapatistas and the struggle in Chiapas and Chiapas solidarity with Oaxaca.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/24/america/LA_GEN_Mexico_Oaxaca_Unrest.php
Published: November 24, 2006
Authorities in Oaxaca, Mexico deny reporting that U.S. journalist was shot at point-blank range
The Associated Press
Oaxaca, Mexico: Authorities in the southern state of Oaxaca insisted that an American journalist-activist killed during violent protests last month was not shot at point-blank range as they had indicated earlier.
The assertion made Thursday further muddies a case already dogged by conflicting statements and accusations by protesters that authorities are trying to protect their own in the death of Bradley Roland Will.
Will, 36, who wrote dispatches for the Web site Indymedia.com, was filming a group of leftist protesters when they clashed with a group of armed men in Santa Lucia, a working-class town on the outskirts of Oaxaca City. Both sides fired, but it is not clear who shot first. Will was shot in the abdomen and died on the way to hospital.
Police later arrested Santa Lucia town officials Abel Santiago Zarate and Orlando Aguilar in the killing. The men were allegedly part of group of officials and off-duty police officers confronting the protesters.
At a news conference last week, however, Attorney General Lizbeth Cana Cabeza said state investigators had found that both of the bullets that killed Will were fired from the same gun and one of them was fired at point-blank range — evidence signaling that the leftist protesters whom he was with, and not the town officials, may have shot him.
A spokesman for the protesters said at the time that authorities were fabricating evidence to win the officials' release.
Yet in a news release issued Thursday, the state Attorney General's office said that "neither the state attorney general nor any official from the department has told the news media that the shots fired against Bradley Will were fired at close range."
There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy.
Further confusing the case, a man who was identified as having driven Will in his pickup truck to an awaiting ambulance told the Televisa television network late Thursday that Will had only one gunshot wound, not two.
Oaxaca City, formerly popular with tourists for its nearby ruins, mouth-watering Mexican cuisine, colonial architecture, and handicrafts, has been under seige for the past six months by protesters demanding the resignation of Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz, who they claim rigged the 2004 election and has used violence against his opponents.
At least nine people have died in the clashes, including Will.
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http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061124/LOCAL17/611240379/-1/ZONES04
November 24, 2006
Hispanic family wins suit against activist
Associated Press
SIERRA VISTA, Ariz. -- An anti-illegal immigration activist accused of threatening to shoot a Mexican-American family of hunters with an assault rifle and using racial slurs against them was ordered to pay them $98,000.
A civil jury held rancher Roger Barnett only partly responsible, saying some of the blame lay with the man who sued and the man's father.
Ronald Morales and his father, Arturo, were with Ronald's two young daughters and their friend when Barnett confronted them near his ranch and accused them of trespassing on Oct. 30, 2004.
Ronald Morales' lawsuit claims they were legally crossing land Barnett leases from the state. The Moraleses are U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.
Barnett, who claims to have detained more than 10,000 migrants in the past 10 years, denied threatening the hunting party. He testified that he took out his AR-15 rifle only because the adults in the group were carrying rifles.
Morales, a Navy veteran, said he felt justice had been served by the verdict.
"We came to court and spoke the truth," Morales said. "Hopefully this sends a message that you can't point a gun at little kids -- or anybody, for that matter -- and then threaten to shoot them."
Barnett declined to comment, saying his lawyer advised him against it. His brother, Donald Barnett, expressed disappointment.
"In the Morales family, the father taught the son to trespass, and now the father's teaching the daughters how to trespass in blatant disregard for the law," said Donald Barnett, who was initially named in the suit but later was dropped. "I guess in this country, private property and a person's rights don't mean much anymore."
The suit was sponsored by the Border Action Network and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061124/ZNYT02/611240438
Published Friday, November 24, 2006
A Border Watcher Finds Himself Under Scrutiny
By Randal C. Archibold
For years, Roger Barnett has holstered a pistol to his hip, tucked an assault rifle in his truck and set out over the scrub brush on his thousands of acres of ranchland near the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona to hunt.
Hunt illegal immigrants, that is, often chronicled in the news.
“They’re flooding across, invading the place,” Mr. Barnett told the ABC program “Nightline” this spring. “They’re going to bring their families, their wives, and they’re going to bring their kids. We don’t need them.”
But now, after boasting of having captured 12,000 illegal crossers on land he owns or leases from the state and emerging as one of the earliest and most prominent of the self-appointed border watchers, Mr. Barnett finds himself the prey.
Immigrant rights groups have filed lawsuits, accusing him of harassing and unlawfully imprisoning people he has confronted on his ranch near Douglas. One suit pending in federal court accuses him, his wife and his brother of pointing guns at 16 illegal immigrants they intercepted, threatening them with dogs and kicking one woman in the group.
Another suit, accusing Mr. Barnett of threatening two Mexican-American hunters and three young children with an assault rifle and insulting them with racial epithets, ended Wednesday night in Bisbee with a jury awarding the hunters $98,750 in damages.
The court actions are the latest example of attempts by immigrant rights groups to curb armed border-monitoring groups by going after their money, if not their guns. They have won civil judgments in Texas, and this year two illegal Salvadoran immigrants who had been held against their will took possession of a 70-acre ranch in southern Arizona after winning a case last year.
The Salvadorans had accused the property owner, Casey Nethercott, a former leader of the Ranch Rescue group, of menacing them with a gun in 2003. Mr. Nethercott was convicted of illegal gun possession; the Salvadorans plan to sell the property, their lawyer has said.
But Mr. Barnett, known for dressing in military garb and caps with insignia resembling the United States Border Patrol’s, represents a special prize to the immigrant rights groups. He is ubiquitous on Web sites, mailings and brochures put out by groups monitoring the Mexican border and, with family members, was an inspiration for efforts like the Minutemen civilian border patrols.
“The Barnetts, probably more than any people in this country, are responsible for the vigilante movement as it now exists,” said Mark Potok, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the groups. “They were the recipients of so much press coverage and they kept boasting, and it was out of those boasts that the modern vigilante movement sprang up.”
Jesus Romo Vejar, the lawyer for the hunting party, said their court victory Wednesday would serve notice that mistreating immigrants would not pass unpunished. Although the hunters were not in the United States illegally, they contended that Mr. Barnett’s treatment of them reflected his attitude and practices toward Latinos crossing his land, no matter what their legal status.
“We have really, truly breached their defense,” Mr. Vejar said, “and this opens up the Barnetts to other attorneys to come in and sue him whenever he does some wrong with people.”
Mr. Vejar said he would ask the state attorney general and the county attorney, who had cited a lack of evidence in declining to prosecute Mr. Barnett, to take another look at the case. He also said he would ask the state to revoke Mr. Barnett’s leases on its land.
Mr. Barnett had denied threatening anyone. He left the courtroom after the verdict without commenting, and his lawyer, John Kelliher, would not comment either.
In a brief interview during a court break last week, Mr. Barnett denied harming anyone and said that the legal action would not deter his efforts. He said that the number of illegal immigrants crossing his land had declined recently but that he thought it was only a temporary trend.
“For your children, for our future, that’s why we need to stop them,” Mr. Barnett said. “If we don’t step in for your children, I don’t know who is expected to step in.”
Mr. Barnett prevailed in a suit in the summer when a jury ruled against a fellow rancher who had sued, accusing him of trespassing on his property as he pursued immigrants. Another suit last year was dropped when the plaintiff, who had returned to Mexico, decided not to return to press the case.
Still, the threat of liability has discouraged ranchers from allowing the more militant civilian patrol groups on their land, and accusations of abuse seem to be on the wane, said Jennifer Allen of the Border Action Network, an immigrant rights group.
But David H. Urias, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund who is representing the 16 immigrants suing Mr. Barnett, said fewer complaints did not necessarily mean less activity. Immigrants from Mexico are returned to their country often within hours and often under the impression that their deportation — and chance to try to return again — will go quicker without their complaints.
“It took us months to find these 16 people,” Mr. Urias said.
People who tend ranches on the border said that even if they did not agree with Mr. Barnett’s tactics they sympathized with his rationale, and that putting him out of business would not resolve the problems they believe the crossers cause.
“The illegals think they have carte blanche on his ranch,” said Al Garza, the executive director of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps in Arizona, a civilian patrol group that, Mr. Garza says, does not detain illegal immigrants but calls in their movements to the Border Patrol. “The man has had it.”
Mr. Barnett, a retired Cochise County sheriff’s deputy and the owner of a towing business, acquired his ranch in the mid-1990s, buying or leasing from the state more than 22,000 acres.
Almost from the start he took up a campaign against the people crossing the border from Mexico, sometimes detaining large groups and radioing for the Border Patrol to pick them up.
Chuy Rodriguez, a spokesman for the agency’s Tucson office, said the Border Patrol maintained no formal relationship with Mr. Barnett or other civilian groups. Agency commanders, concerned about potential altercations, have warned the groups not to take the law into their hands.
“If they see something, we ask them to call us, like we would ask of any citizen,” Mr. Rodriguez said.
Mr. Barnett’s lawyers have suggested he has acted out of a right to protect his property.
“A lease holder doesn’t have the right to protect his cattle?” Mr. Kelliher asked one of the men in the hunting party, Arturo Morales, at the trial.
“I guess so, maybe,” Mr. Morales replied.
Mr. Barnett has had several encounters with local law enforcement officials over detaining illegal immigrants, some of whom complained that he pointed guns at them. The local authorities have declined to prosecute him, citing a lack of evidence or ambiguity about whether he had violated any laws.
A few years ago, however, the Border Action Network and its allied groups began collecting testimony from illegal immigrants and others who had had confrontations with Mr. Barnett.
They included the hunters, who sued Mr. Barnett for unlawful detention, emotional distress and other claims, and sought at least $200,000. Ronald Morales; his father, Arturo; Ronald Morales’s two daughters, ages 9 and 11; and an 11-year-old friend said Mr. Barnett, his brother Donald and his wife, Barbara, confronted them Oct. 30, 2004.
Ronald Morales testified that Mr. Barnett used expletives and ethnically derogatory remarks as he sought to kick them off state-owned property he leases. Then, Mr. Morales said, Mr. Barnett pulled an AR-15 assault rifle from his truck and pointed it at them as they drove off, traumatizing the girls.
Mr. Kelliher conceded that there was a heated confrontation. But he denied that Mr. Barnett used slurs and said Ronald Morales was as much an instigator. He said Morales family members had previously trespassed on Mr. Barnett’s land and knew that Mr. Barnett required written permission to hunt there.
Even as the trial proceeded, the Border Patrol reported a 45 percent drop in arrests in the Douglas area in the last year. The agency credits scores of new agents, the National Guard deployment there this summer and improved technology in detecting crossers.
But Ms. Allen of the Border Action Network and other immigrant rights supporters suspect that people are simply crossing elsewhere.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/world/americas/23mexico.html
Published: November 23, 2006
Mexican Report Cites Leaders for ‘Dirty War’
By James C. McKinley Jr.
Mexico City, Nov. 22 — Just before leaving office, the administration of President Vicente Fox has quietly put out a voluminous report that for the first time states unequivocally that past governments carried out a covert campaign of murder and torture against dissidents and guerrillas from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
The 800-page report is the first acceptance of responsibility by the government for what is known here as the “dirty war,” in which the police and the army are believed to have executed more than 700 people without trial, in many cases after torture. It also represents the fulfillment of Mr. Fox’s vow when elected in 2000 to expose the truth about an ugly chapter in Mexico’s history.
“The Mexican government has never officially accepted responsibility for these crimes,” said Kate Doyle, the director of the Mexico project of the National Security Archive, a private research group at George Washington University.
Ms. Doyle and other human rights experts said, though, that the special prosecutor who issued the report, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, had not succeeded in prosecuting the officials responsible for the crimes it describes in such detail, notably former President Luis Echeverría.
Instead of being announced at a public event, as is often the case, the report was posted on the Internet late Friday night. Some human rights experts say that the way the report was released suggests that Mr. Fox’s enthusiasm for ferreting out the sins of past governments has waned since he took office.
The report relies on secret military and government documents that Mr. Fox ordered declassified. It contains lengthy chapters on the killings of student protesters in Mexico City in 1968 and 1971, as well as a brutal counterinsurgency operation in the state of Guerrero, where military officers destroyed entire villages suspected of helping the rebel leader Lucio Cabañas and tortured their inhabitants.
The report offers considerable detail, including the names of military officers responsible for various atrocities, from the razing of villages to the killing of student protesters.
It does not include orders signed by three presidents authorizing the crimes. Still, the document trail makes clear that the abuses were not the work of renegade officers, but an official government policy.
The events occurred during the administrations of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, José López Portillo and Mr. Echeverría. The federal security department kept the presidents informed about many aspects of the covert operations. Genocide charges against Mr. Echeverría, the only one still living, were thrown out in July by a judge who ruled that a statute of limitations had run out.
“At the end of this investigation,” the report says, “it has been proved that the authoritarian regime, at the highest levels of command, impeded, criminalized and fought various parts of the population that organized itself to demand greater democratic participation.”
The authors of the report, which was assembled by 27 researchers, go on to state that “the battle the regime waged against these groups — organized among student movements and popular insurgencies — was outside the law” and employed “massacres, forced disappearances, systematic torture and genocide, in an attempt to destroy the part of society it considered its ideological enemy.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/world/americas/23brazil.html?ex=1165035600&amp;en=470b0c0358f57c33&ei=5070&emc=eta1
November 23, 2006
Of Rubber and Blood in Brazilian Amazon
By LARRY ROHTER
Rio Branco, Brazil — Alcidino dos Santos was on his way to the market to buy vegetables for his mother one morning in 1942 when an army officer stopped him and told him he was being drafted as a “rubber soldier.” Men were needed in the Amazon, 3,000 miles away, to harvest rubber for the Allied war effort, he was told, and it was his patriotic duty to serve.
Mr. dos Santos, then a 19-year-old mason’s assistant, protested that his mother was a widow who depended on him for support, but to no avail. He would be paid a wage of 50 cents a day, he recalls being told, and receive free transportation home once the conflict was over, but he had to go, that day.
More than 60 years after the end of World War II, Mr. dos Santos and hundreds of other poor Brazilians who were dragooned into service as rubber soldiers are still in the Amazon, waiting for those promises to be fulfilled. Elderly and frail, they are fighting against time and indifference to gain the recognition and compensation they believe should be theirs.
“We were duped, and then abandoned and forgotten,” Mr. dos Santos, who never saw his mother again, said in an interview at his simple wood house here in Acre, a state in the far west of the Brazilian Amazon that has the largest concentration of former rubber soldiers.
“We were brought here against our will,” he said, “and thrown into the jungle, where we suffered terribly. I’m near the end of my life, but my country should do right by me.”
The program originated in an agreement between the United States and Brazil. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had cut the United States off from its main source of rubber, in Malaya, and President Roosevelt persuaded Brazil’s dictator, Getúlio Vargas, to fill that strategic gap in return for millions of dollars in loans, credits and equipment.
According to Brazilian government records, more than 55,000 people, almost all of them from the drought-ridden and poverty-stricken northeast, were sent to the Amazon to harvest rubber for the war effort. There are no official figures on how many of them succumbed to disease or animal attacks, but historians estimate that nearly half perished before Japan surrendered in September 1945.
“Some of the guys died of malaria, yellow fever, beriberi and hepatitis, but others were killed by snakes, stingrays or even panthers,” recalled Lupércio Freire Maia, 86. “They didn’t have the proper medicines for diseases or snakebites there in the camps, so when someone died you buried him right there next to the hut and kept right on working.”
The work was exhausting, dangerous and unhealthy: rubber soldiers rose just after midnight, tramped through the jungle in the dark to cut grooves in the trees and returned later in the day to collect the latex that dripped into cups.
They would then toast the white liquid into solid balls weighing up to 130 pounds, a process that generated so much smoke that many were left blind or sight-impaired.
Though many of the rubber soldiers were forced into service, a few enlisted, hoping for adventure and riches. José Araújo Braga, 82, described himself as “a rebellious kid who wanted to see the world” and thus was easily swayed by government propaganda that spoke of the Amazon as an El Dorado where the “Rubber for Victory” effort could earn a hard worker a fortune.
“I could have joined the army and gone to Europe,” where Brazilian troops fought alongside American forces in Italy and are now honored as heroes, he said. “But I chose the Amazon because, foolish me, I thought that I could make a lot of money.”
Once the men reached the Amazon, though, their wages ceased and they were herded into cantonments, with no visitors allowed.
When the war and American interest ended, the people profiting from the arrangement were not about to let their free labor go. The rubber camp bosses “feared an exodus if the news got out, and so many rubber soldiers were still there in the jungle years later, unawares,” said Marcos Vinícius Neves, a historian who is director of a government historical preservation foundation here.
Mr. Maia said: “It wasn’t until 1946 that I learned that the war was over. We didn’t have any radios, and we were completely cut off from the outside world.”
But those who heard the news right away also encountered problems in leaving and collecting their wages. Many were told that they owed money to the rubber camp bosses for food, clothing or equipment, and would have to remain until their debts were paid off.
“Oh, I was so happy the day the war ended, because I thought, ‘Now I can finally go home,’ ” Mr. dos Santos recalled. “But when I went to talk to the boss about leaving, he said, ‘Who are you kidding?’ and told me to get back to work.”
With no money and no transportation, most of the rubber soldiers resigned themselves to remaining in the Amazon. They married, had families and continued to work in the rubber camps or became rural homesteaders, ignored and anonymous.
“How do you suppose Brasília was built?” said José Paulino da Costa, director of the Retirees’ and Rubber Soldiers’ Union of Acre. “The United States paid money to Brazil, but it went to other projects instead of the rubber soldiers, which was a terrible injustice.”
In 1988, though, Brazil ratified a new Constitution with an article that called for the rubber soldiers to receive a pension valued at twice the minimum wage, or $350 a month currently. But many who served here found themselves ineligible because they could not supply the required documents. Their original contracts had been lost, destroyed by rain or handed over to rubber plantation bosses and never returned.
Those who have qualified receive a pension that is barely one-tenth of the amount paid to Brazilian soldiers who fought in Europe during World War II. In 2002 a member of Congress from the state of Amazonas introduced a bill to pay rubber soldiers “who are living in misery” the same amount, but the bill remains stalled in committee.
“When I watch the Independence Day ceremonies on television and see the soldiers who fought in Europe parading in their uniforms I feel sadness and dismay,” Mr. Maia said. “We were combatants too. Everyone owes us a big favor, including the Americans, because that war couldn’t have been won without rubber and us rubber soldiers.”
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http://www.workers.org/2006/world/mexico-1123/
Published Nov 22, 2006 1:05 PM
On anniversary of Mexican revolution
Peoples movement inaugurates its own president
By LeiLani Dowell
On Nov. 20, the 96th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Mexican President Vicente Fox decided to cancel the traditional parade held that day. However, the people of Mexico, infused with the spirit of resistance that the anniversary commemorates, continued their struggle against oppression.
In Mexico City, a people’s inauguration was held to swear in Andrés Manuel López Obrador as Mexico’s legitimate president. This was a mass rejection of right-wing, pro-U.S. Felipe Calderón, who is to be sworn in on Dec. 1 despite massive protest of a corrupt and fraudulent election last July 2. The Associated Press reports that thousands were gathering on the morning of Nov. 20 to participate in the inauguration.
The AP quoted López Obrador as saying, “Nobody wants violence in our country, but there are people who give grounds for violence. There are a lot of people who say that, after July 2 the path of electoral politics is no longer viable.” (Nov. 20)
The Narco News Bulletin reports that in Chiapas, thousands of Indigenous residents successfully blocked all major roads and highways in the state on Nov. 20, standing in silent formation across the roads or highways in solidarity with the struggle of the people of the state of Oaxaca. The blockades and other business closures in honor of the strike left the streets “uncharacteristically quiet” on a national holiday that usually involves much traffic to the tourist sites in the area. (Nov. 20)
Protests have continued in Oaxaca, demanding the resignation of Ulises Ruiz and the withdrawal of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), which have been occupying the central plaza of the city of Oaxaca and brutalizing protestors.
At least 30 “disappearances” of protestors have occurred since the arrival of the federal police. El Universal reports on the case of René Trujillo Martínez, a program announcer for Radio Universal—the radio station of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), which is the organization that has been leading the fight against repression in Oaxaca since May.
On Nov. 7, Trujillo and two of his friends were abducted from Trujillo’s home, held in a warehouse, questioned and tortured with electric shocks, needles under their fingernails, strangulation and beatings for three days. They were then forced to take pictures with guns, taken to the federal Attorney General’s Office in Oaxaca, and charged with possession of illegal firearms. (Nov. 20)
The most recent protests have focused on the documented sexual assaults and harassment against the women of Oaxaca by members of the PFP. Nancy Davies reports that on Nov. 19 more than two hundred people encircled the PFP, holding up mirrors “so they could see themselves as they really are.” (narconews.com, Nov. 20) On Nov. 20 a demonstration of the Oaxaca’s Coordination of Women was suppressed by police forces who threw piquín chili dissolved in water in the faces of the protestors. (Prensa Latina, Nov. 20.)
A Constitutive Congress of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca has been formed, and met on the weekend of Nov. 10-12 to define its own constitution, and elect a State Council. The Congress announced, “In spite of the climate of repression that flourishes around the movement of the peoples of Oaxaca, it’s necessary not to stop, but to move ahead in the attainment of our objectives and toward solution to the demands of the Oaxaca peoples.” The State Council announced their upcoming events, including a State Forum of the Indigenous People on Nov. 28-29 and participation in the national movement against the presidential inauguration of Felipe Calderón on Dec. 1. (narconews.com)
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http://www.workers.org/2006/us/soa-1130/
Published Nov 22, 2006 10:00 AM
22,000 protest at gates of U.S. torture school
By Dianne Mathiowetz
Ft. Benning, Ga.
The annual protest at the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga., demanding the closing of the School of the Americas (SOA—now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Cooperation) drew record numbers and displayed the growing participation of young people from all across the country.
Among the many memorable and emotional elements of the multi-day event: survivors of torture at the hands of SOA graduates speaking of their brutal treatment; the sight of 1,000 grandmothers wearing white kerchiefs in the tradition of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina, who stood with pictures of their “disappeared” children demanding accountability from their government; 117 U.S. veterans marching towards the gates of Fort Benning on the early morning of Nov. 19; the impact of thousand of voices intoning “presente” after the calling out of names of victims murdered by SOA-trained soldiers; and the magical appeal of giant puppets, dozens of drummers, and stilt walkers combined with contagious music and song from dozens of musicians.
As of Nov. 20, some 16 people, including three of the grandmothers, had entered onto base property and were arrested. They face up to six months in federal prison.
As evidence that the struggle to shut down the SOA is expanding, similar protests were held this weekend in Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, El Salvador, Colombia, Canada, Ireland and in the U.S. For additional information, go to www.soaw.org
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http://www.workers.org/2006/us/boston-1130/
Published Nov 22, 2006 12:51 AM
BOSTON MEETING The struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and immigrant rights
By Peter Cook / Boston
A multinational crowd packed the Boston Workers World office on Nov. 18 for a meeting on the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and human rights. This important meeting was held at a crucial time, less than a week before the 37th National Day of Mourning in Plymouth and only two weeks before the Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day rally and march on Dec. 1.
The featured speaker was Mahtowin Munro, co-leader of United American Indians of New England (UAINE). Denouncing the racist vigilante Minutemen as well as the proposed wall of death along the border with Mexico, Mahtowin gave a detailed overview of the history of immigration in North America, starting with the first and only truly illegal immigrants—the Europeans who started their invasion in 1492.
Robert Traynham of USWA 8751, Boston School Bus Drivers, chaired the meeting. Traynham recalled the system of segregation and Ku Klux Klan attacks that he experienced growing up as an African-American in West Virginia.
Clemencia Lee, a leader of the Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee and a member of the Boston Teachers Union, provided an update on the organizing for the Dec. 1 action. She focused on the successful street outreach that had taken place earlier in the day, where young people they met on the street were excited about taking part in a day honoring Rosa Parks.
Lee also announced that two of Rosa Park’s nieces have accepted an invitation to come to Boston to speak at Dec.1 and to tour local schools, churches and visit community organizations.
Four Salvadorans working at Harvard University, who are members of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, told of their determination to fight against the unjust and racist plans to lay them off. The workers, animal technicians at Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MVB), discussed the long history of racism at Harvard University.
Latin@ workers make up approximately 70 percent of the animal technician staff and are routinely denied opportunities for advancement and training. Management told these workers that even though they have seniority, they will lose their jobs because of automation and insufficient proficiency in English.
Latin@ workers have been subjected to the most vile forms of racism, ranging from a prohibition on the use of Spanish at the workplace to segregated meetings and functions. Recently, a white manager sprayed household cleaner on the food of some of the Latin@ workers claiming she did not like the smell.
Sara Mokuria, representing the Committee for Justice for Hector Rivas, gave an update on this important struggle for safe working conditions. She announced that, as a result of the hard work of the committee, some members of the Boston City Council have called for a public hearing on Dec. 4 to look into the death of Héctor Rivas as well as the overall safety of the Boston School Bus fleet.
Agustín Herrera of Voices of Liberation, a radical youth organization, spoke about the struggle for immigrant rights. Herrera mentioned that 3,600 immigrants have died in the desert near San Diego since the start of “Operation Gatekeeper” in 1994. Herrera pointed out that youth are dying in the streets of Boston as a result of the same system that oppresses and exploits undocumented immigrants.
An educator, Herrera spoke of the way that the education system is used to facilitate oppression by not teaching the true history of the U.S. Herrera called for everyone to do everything possible to support the struggle in Oaxaca, Mexico. He closed by stating, “No Justice, no peace; there is no justice on stolen land.”
Moonanum James, co-leader of United American Indians of New England (UAINE), gave a spirited and well-received overview of the history of the National Day of Mourning (NDOM).
National Day of Mourning
James spoke of how in 1970 his father, Wamsutta Frank James, was asked to give a speech at a state-sponsored banquet commemorating the 350th anniversary of the landing of the pilgrims. When the organizers read his speech, which gave the true history of the pilgrims, they immediately disinvited him. Instead, Wamsutta Frank James spoke in front of several hundred Native Americans and their supporters in Plymouth, Mass., at the first NDOM (the full text of the speech can be found at www.uaine.org).
Moonanum James related various NDOM stories, ranging from the burying of “Plymouth rock” to the 1997 police attack on the march in which 25 people were arrested. James stated that once again this year’s NDOM will be dedicated to Leonard Peltier, the Native-American leader who has been unjustly imprisoned since 1976.
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http://www.workers.org/2006/us/smithfield-1130/
Published Nov 22, 2006 1:10 AM
At world’s largest hog factory
Immigrant workers lead wildcat strike
Solidarity is key to reinstating fired workers
By the Raleigh, N.C., FIST (Fight Imperialism Stand Together) branch
Tar Heel, N.C.
Five hundred workers walked off the job here at Smithfield Packing Nov. 16 in response to the recent firing of 75 immigrant workers, many of whom support efforts to unionize the plant. The next day, the plant was shut down again when over 1,000 workers, including many African Americans, walked out.
After the two-day walkout, Smithfield Packing bosses agreed to workers’ demands to halt the wholesale firings, and to reconsider their implementation of immigration policies in the plant. For the first time, the company also agreed to meet with a group of workers elected by the workers themselves to further negotiate about plant issues and employee concerns. That meeting will take place Nov. 21.
Workers have been struggling for 12 years to bring a union to the world’s biggest hog processing plant, located in a poor, rural region of eastern North Carolina.
North Carolina is a “right to work”—that is, officially anti-union—state. The work force is the second least unionized in the country. There is a fast growing new Latin@ population.
Against this background, Smithfield Packing has spent millions of dollars in a campaign to intimidate the workers and keep the union out.
When the United Food and Commercial Workers initiated an organizing campaign at Smithfield in 1994, the work force was mostly African American. Now, it is at least 65 percent Latin@, about 30 percent African American, with the rest white and Native workers.
The company has used racism, fear and other intimidation tactics to keep the union out. In the 1997 election, Smithfield was found guilty of violating over 40 federal labor laws. But the bosses tied up the court decision in appeals for eight years.
As detailed in a 2005 Human Rights Watch report titled “Blood, Sweat, and Tears,” Smithfield workers have been maimed, injured and killed as a result of the working conditions in the plant. Union supporters and organizers have been wrongfully imprisoned and beaten by Smithfield’s private police force.
Over the past several months, support for the union has grown. This, coupled with the company’s loss of its last appeal of the National Labor Relations Board decision, has encouraged the workers who say they feel they are close to winning a historic victory and a contract.
In the weeks leading up to the walkout the company fired 75 Latin@ workers claiming their Social Security paperwork could not be verified. Some of these workers had been at the plant for two to three years. In an interview at Smithfield, one worker said the workers believed the company was using the paperwork claim as an excuse to fire union supporters.
New immigrant workers are realizing their power. On May Day 2006 thousands of Smithfield workers and their families united behind the immigrant-rights struggle. The May Day demonstrations around the country showed that this community has power and that unity behind the immigrant-rights struggle and the struggle for worker justice can move the overall working-class struggle forward.
The campaign for Justice at Smithfield continues. It will not end until the workers win a contract and union recognition.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/world/22aids.html
Published: November 22, 2006
AIDS Is on the Rise Worldwide, U.N. Finds
By Lawrence K. Altman
The AIDS pandemic is growing in all areas of the world, with worrisome signs of resurgence in some countries that were trumpeted as successes in combating the disease, the United Nations said yesterday.
At the same time, the prevalence of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, among young people has declined in eight countries in Africa, showing that prevention efforts can work, United Nations officials said.
“Even limited resources can give high returns when investments are focused on reaching people most at risk and adapted to changing national epidemics,” said Dr. Paul De Lay of the United Nations AIDS program, known as Unaids.
But over all, prevention efforts have reached far too few people at risk, like gay men, prostitutes, injecting drug users and members of minority groups, Dr. De Lay said in a telephone news conference from Geneva. He was commenting on a report issued yesterday by his agency and the World Health Organization, also a United Nations unit. Both have headquarters in Geneva.
An estimated 39.5 million people are now living with H.I.V., the report said. Of that total, 4.3 million became infected this year. There have been 2.9 million AIDS deaths in 2006, the highest number reported in any year.
The comparable figures in 2004 were 36.9 million living with H.I.V., 3.9 million new infections and 2.7 million deaths.
In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, infection rates have risen by more than 50 percent since 2004.
The AIDS pandemic is a series of epidemics involving different groups at high risk like prostitutes, drug users and gay men. Because different groups may become infected at different rates and stages of the epidemic, each country needs to know its situation.
But precise statistics are not available, because many countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa lack adequate disease surveillance systems, the officials said. Those countries’ health systems lack sufficient trained workers, laboratories, supply systems and money to keep H.I.V.-infected people alive.
Nevertheless, “these estimates are amongst the most robust for any disease of global public health importance,” said Dr. Kevin De Cock, the World Health Organization’s chief AIDS official.
The global death total would be even higher without the efforts undertaken in recent years to provide antiretroviral therapy to hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients in poor countries, Dr. De Cock said. Still, he said, such drug therapy has not reached enough poor people to match the degree of decline in death rates seen in wealthy countries.
Dr. Peter Piot, the executive director of Unaids, said that “countries are not moving at the same speed as their epidemics.”
Without rapid improvements, the pandemic will only worsen, the officials said. The United Nations cited Uganda as a country where the infection rate has shown resurgence after being on the decline.
Surveys conducted in 2000 and 2005 show that the rise there appears to have resulted from increasingly erratic condom use and an increased number of men who had sex with more than one partner in the previous year. Also, there are signs of an increased H.I.V. prevalence in some of Uganda’s rural areas.
Cause for concern was also found in Thailand. Despite a falling overall H.I.V. infection rate there, a large percentage of new infections are among people previously considered at low risk, Dr. De Lay said. “A third of all new infections are among married women,” he said.
Infection rates in the United States and Western European countries, including England, seem to show a decline in the intensity of prevention efforts, the officials said. The number of new infections in the United States has remained stable at 40,000 for about a decade.
That rate “is not good news,” said Karen Stanecki, a senior epidemiologist at Unaids. She said the United Nations had “highlighted” those wealthy countries “because we feel they are places where prevention programs should be more focused to stop all the new infections that are occurring.”
But the officials said they were encouraged by new data showing declines in H.I.V. prevalence among young people from 2000 to 2005 in eight African countries: Botswana, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
The trends were not sufficiently strong nor widespread to lower the overall impact of AIDS in Africa.
The report also said that in China some programs that focused on sex workers had led to marked increases in condom use and decreases in rates of sexually transmitted infections. Also, programs for injecting drug users have shown progress in some areas.
In Portugal, new H.I.V. infections among injecting drug users declined after the introduction of special prevention programs focused on H.I.V. and drug use.
Many babies have not benefited from efforts to scale up distribution of antiretroviral drugs in Africa. Dr. De Cock said studies were needed to directly measure the effectiveness of such therapy on child survival and the death rates of children in poor areas.
Strong efforts are needed to improve the detection and treatment of tuberculosis as part of efforts to treat AIDS in poor countries, Dr. De Cock said.
Although countries, private foundations and individuals have contributed billions of dollars to improve H.I.V. treatment in poor countries, health workers cannot assume that such donations will always continue, Dr. De Cock said. “We face a great responsibility to show further impact in coming years,” he said.
The report is available on the organizations’ Web sites: www.unaids.org and www.who.int
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http://www.workers.org/2006/us/native-immigration-1130/
Published Nov 22, 2006 12:34 AM
A Native view of immigration
The following talk was given by Mahtowin Munro, a member of the Lakota Nation and co-leader of United American Indians of New England (UAINE), at a Nov. 18 Boston Workers World Party forum entitled “The Struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and immigrant rights.”
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I am going to be talking about immigration tonight from a North American Native viewpoint. Many of us who are Native to this country have been outraged as our sisters and brothers from Mexico, Central America and South America have come under increasing attack by the right wing. We are deeply alarmed by the existence of white vigilante groups such as the Minutemen, and by the stated intention of the U.S. government to build a wall separating the U.S. from Mexico.
As Indigenous peoples, we have no borders. We know that our sisters and brothers from Mexico, Central America and South America have always been here and always will be.
The immigrant nation that is the U.S. has a short memory and is in denial of its historical facts. This government is descended from immigrants who came here and took our lands and resources, either by force, coercion or dishonesty, and banned the religions, languages and cultures of the original Indigenous peoples of this continent.
In the various discussions of so-called “illegal immigrants,” one historical fact is always overlooked: America’s own holocaust directed against African and Native people, carried out by uninvited foreigners who came to these shores and took everything they could. Surely the deaths of tens of millions of Native and African people at the hands of marauding, manipulative European immigrants during a 400-year span should be worth bearing in mind.
U.S. history brims over with brutal, bloody instances of inhuman European immigrant actions that are far removed from the basic aspirations so often associated with today’s immigrants. The undocumented workers today in this country dream of a better life and seek to escape the poverty and repression engendered by U.S. imperialism. Unlike the earlier immigrants and the perpetual forces they set into motion, I highly doubt that today’s immigrants are plotting to seize others’ property, kill babies and earn bounties based on body parts brought back from raids.
Consider that, in the late 1630s, the British wiped out nearly every man, woman and child of the powerful Pequot tribe of southern New England in retaliation for conflicts arising out of fur-trade struggles. A few years later, Dutch authorities in charge of the settlement of “New Netherland” on the island of Manhattan carried out nighttime raids against the local Indigenous people, where infants were torn from their mothers’ breasts and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents. Legislation approved in Massachusetts and elsewhere in New England in the 1700s authorized bounty payments for scalps or heads of Indians, young and old.
As it turns out, the immigrant authorities were just beginning their efforts to obliterate “the savages,” as American history chronicles.
Some of the best-known names in American history are dripping with prejudice and arrogance aimed at Native people. Not only did Thomas Jefferson—a holder of hundreds of Black men, women, and children—live a life of ease on his great plantation as a result of that slave labor. He also was convinced that the best solution in dealing with Native peoples was to drive all of us west of the Mississippi.
The war-hero president, Andrew Jackson, was one of the most despicable Indian-haters on record. He made no bones about his racism and championed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced the Cherokee and other southeastern Native peoples from their homes and caused thousands of them to die on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.
The 19th century in particular is rife with accounts of the foreign intruders’ invasions of Indian country, especially in the Southeast and West, and the carnage that resulted. The December 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee of over 300 unarmed Lakota children, women and men by the U.S. Army is perhaps the best-known of what were countless massacres carried out by the immigrants and their army.
The wholesale abuse of Native peoples continues to this day, and it springs from the same destructive capitalist practices that were brought here by foreigners long ago.
As I listen to some people call other people “illegal” immigrants, I often wonder: How could it possibly be that their ancestors were considered to be “legal” while so many immigrants now are considered “illegal”?
These comparisons between past and present miss a crucial point. So few restrictions existed on immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries that there was no such thing as “illegal immigration.”
For instance, the government excluded less than 1 percent of the 25 million European immigrants who landed at Ellis Island before World War I, and those mostly for health reasons.
We begin with a simple fact: We Native peoples had no immigration policies. When the Europeans began arriving and stealing our land from us and massacring our people, we did not have them take a citizenship test. We did not have them pass through Ellis Island. We did not have quotas for how many could come into the country. So, when did the U.S. begin to have immigration policies, and what were those policies?
For many years, whiteness was the prerequisite for citizenship. The first naturalization law in the United States, the 1790 Naturalization Act, restricted naturalization to “free white persons” of “good moral character” once they had resided in the country for a specified period of time.
The next significant change in the scope of naturalization law came following the Civil War in 1870 when the law was broadened to allow African Americans, whose ancestors had been forced to immigrate here in slave ships, to become naturalized citizens.
During the 1800s, male Chinese immigrants were excluded from citizenship but not from living in the United States, because their labor was needed by the big railroads. Female Chinese immigration was severely curtailed. Congress in 1882 passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was a virtual ban on further Chinese immigration. The Chinese immigration ban was not repealed until the 1940s. In the early 1900s, Japanese immigration was limited as well, but the Japanese government continued to give passports to the Territory of Hawaii, where many Japanese resided. (At that time, Hawaii was not yet a U.S. state.) Once in Hawaii, it was easy for Japanese to continue on to settlements on the West Coast, if they so desired.
An 1882 law banned the entry of “lunatics” and infectious disease carriers. After President William McKinley was assassinated by a second-generation immigrant anarchist, Congress enacted in 1901 the Anarchist Exclusion Act to exclude known anarchist agitators. A literacy requirement was added in the Immigration Act of 1917.
During the 1920s, the U.S. Congress established national quotas on immigration. The quotas were based on the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality who were already living in the United States.
In 1924, the Johnson-Reid Immigration Act limited the numbers of southern European immigrants. Italians were considered not “white” enough and an anarchist menace. The numbers of Eastern Europeans were also limited because Jews, who made up a large part of those leaving that area, were not “white” enough and were considered to be a Bolshevik menace.
I should mention that we Native people were “naturalized” and “granted” citizenship by the U.S. government in 1924.
In 1932 President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the State Department essentially shut down immigration during the Great Depression.
In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act revised the quota system again. This act removed overt racial barriers to citizenship but solidified inequalities. Most of the quota allocation went to immigrants from Ireland, the United Kingdom and Germany who already had relatives in the United States.
This law was also particularly aimed at preventing socialist, communist or other progressive immigrants from entering the country. The anti-”subversive” features of this law are still in force.
During all these years, the entire Western Hemisphere, including Mexico, was exempted from immigration regulations. That changed in 1965 with the Hart-Cellar Act, which abolished the system of national-origin quotas.
A last-minute political compromise introduced, for the very first time, quotas for Mexico and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. This law racialized “illegal aliens.” A hierarchy of those deemed worthy and those deemed unworthy of becoming an “American” became increasingly deeply rooted.
Several pieces of legislation signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996 marked a turn towards harsher policies for both legal and “illegal” immigrants. These acts vastly increased the categories for which immigrants, including green card holders, can be deported. As a result, well over 1 million individuals have been deported since 1996.
In short, the notion of “illegal aliens” is a construct, an invention of the racist U.S. ruling class. The dominant powers for centuries codified Indigenous, African, Chinese and other people as essentially not “American.” The revolting use of the word “illegal” as a noun is a linguistic way of dehumanizing people and reducing individuals to their alleged infractions against the law.
I do not have time tonight to discuss the details of the economic and social conditions created by U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism that have forced our sisters and brothers from Mexico and many other countries to come to the U.S.
The United States is the true culprit in this situation through the robbery of the Mexican people, which began with the theft of their land and has continued with economic policies like NAFTA, which have destroyed the economy that sustained thousands of families, forcing them into exile and particularly into emigrating to the U.S.
As an aside, I want to explain what I mean when I say that the U.S. government stole land from the Mexican people, because this is rarely discussed in school or anywhere else. First of all, the land of course belongs rightfully to Indigenous peoples. Later, the various colonial governments claimed territory.
The “Mexican Cession” is a historical name for the region of the present-day southwestern United States that was ceded to the U.S. by Mexico in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the Mexican-American War. The cession of this territory from Mexico was a condition for the end of the war, as U.S. troops occupied Mexico City and Mexico risked being completely annexed by the U.S.
The United States also paid the paltry sum of $15 million for the land, which was the same amount it had offered for the land prior to the war. Under great duress, Mexico was forced to accept the offer.
The region of the 1848 “Mexican Cession” includes all of the present-day states of California, Nevada and Utah, as well as portions of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. Note that the United States had already claimed the huge area of Texas in its Texas Annexation of 1845.
So we see that the U.S. literally stole millions of acres of land from the Mexican people, then established arbitrary borders such as the Rio Grande, and now hunts down those who dare to cross those borders.
The U.S. government has now escalated its war against the Mexican people, whether they are in Mexico or in its Diaspora, by approving $2.2 billion to begin construction of what is to be a $6 billion apartheid wall between the two countries.
At the same time, massive raids are being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security. In cities across the country, ICE is trying to push immigrant workers further underground and scare them away from organizing and fighting for their rights.
Local and state governments, most notably in Pennsylvania and Arizona, have been passing vicious anti-immigrant legislation. I just read on the Internet the other night that the Bush administration and the Justice Department now claim the right to hold any non-U.S. citizen indefinitely, without the right to a trial in a civilian court.
In recent years, we have also seen how attacks against even documented immigrants, particularly Muslims, have been carried out under the guise of “homeland security.”
So all in all, there is a calculated attempt to create a thoroughly intimidating and threatening climate for immigrant workers, especially the undocumented.
Further, racists continue to push their “English-only” campaigns and to oppose bilingual education. I feel outraged by these “English-only” campaigns. Is English the Native language of this country? Generations of Native people were beaten for speaking their Indigenous languages and forced to learn English. Instead of English-only, maybe we should be insisting that people speak Mayan or Cherokee or Wampanoag.
Well, things were looking pretty bleak for a while. It had appeared that the capitalist ruling class and its representatives in the U.S. government had the upper hand completely, and that the mass struggle was dormant.
But then came the magnificent immigrant rights demonstrations of last spring. These were led by workers from Mexico and Central America and South America, but they were joined by Caribbean, Asian, African and other allies. This development shook the ruling class. It frightened and deeply worried them. It gave a glimpse, even in the midst of periods of reaction, of the crucial struggles that are on the horizon.
Step by step, day by day, this movement will grow. The government can pass anti-immigrant laws but those laws will be repealed in the streets. It was the earlier heroic struggles of immigrants in the U.S. that led to the historic International Women’s Day as well as May Day. Without a doubt, immigrants will make that kind of history again.
Let’s ask some basic questions here: Why does the U.S. need immigrant workers? This country depends on immigrants being the most exploited workers, the ones who work in sweatshops and keep the luxury hotels running.
Without immigrant labor, the economy would collapse. So why the witch hunt? To drive immigrants further underground and to manipulate this reserve army of labor. The corporations want to super-exploit immigrant workers. They just don’t want to be responsible for paying them the value of their labor or for providing benefits, services and basic democratic rights.
The corporations and the government are using the anti-immigrant legislation to mask the truth about the crisis looming for U.S. workers and the huge financial debt of the government.
This criminalization is also aimed at the rising tide of change developing throughout Latin and South America, from Venezuela to Oaxaca and Chiapas, a tide of resistance like that of the people of Cuba to U.S. global policies.
Capitalism thrives on the scapegoating of certain groups of people, which they use to try and divide us as workers. They want to keep us divided amongst each other because they want to prevent us from uniting to fight back against their bloody-handed system.
This is not the first time that immigrants have been scapegoated. Irish immigrants of the mid-1800s were vilified. During the 1800s, Chinese workers in the western part of the U.S. were subject to the most virulent racism, including lynching, and endured the most brutal working conditions.
From World War I until the 1920s, the government conducted anti-Jewish and anti-Italian reactionary attacks, including the Palmer Raids. Former President Theodore Roosevelt and many other prominent citizens of his era proclaimed their fears that the Anglo-Saxon was an endangered species due to immigration and to higher birth rates among the immigrants.
On the West Coast, Japanese immigrants were interned in concentration camps during World War II, and there were widespread police attacks on Chican@ youth in California during the same era.
The current attacks against immigrants must be seen as attacks on all workers. This current assault on immigrants is just another tactic—like racism, homophobia and sexism—that the ruling class uses to pit workers against each other. The only winners when this happens are the bosses.
Native people have dealt for centuries with the terrorism of the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and other colonizing governments. I urge all of you here tonight to consider the knowledge that we have gained during that time. If we had unified early on, worked together rather than as separate nations, we may have prevailed and pushed the Europeans right back into the Atlantic Ocean.
When we unite struggles, when we build a movement, we must have sensitivity for each other’s struggles. We must respect the right to self-determination of all oppressed nations. That means, for example, that only Indigenous peoples can decide what our goals are in the struggle and how we should best fight to achieve those goals. But others can help and support us while having respect for our leadership, and this is what happens at National Day of Mourning. And we cannot subordinate the fight against racism to any other struggle. That is at least in part why today’s antiwar summit in Harlem is so important.
At the same time, while we are involved in the struggle, we learn about each other, and learn to trust each other, and become internationalist in our outlook.
That is the kind of unity perspective we will bring to the streets on December 1. That is the kind of unity perspective that we bring to the antiwar movement—and I want everyone now to mark the date of March 17 in your brain, because that will be an international day of action for the fourth anniversary of the U.S. war against the people of Iraq.
The things we seek, such as self-determination and sovereignty for the oppressed, an end to killer cops and racism and war and the oppression of LGBTQ people, full rights for disabled people, jobs and education, can never be fully realized under capitalism, a system that is centered on exploiting people and resources and making a profit.
Reforms help a little, but we need a whole lot more than reforms. We don’t need a little less police brutality; we must put an end to it! We don’t need a little more money in our minimum wage paychecks; we need a living wage, and free healthcare, and affordable housing for all! Youth and students shouldn’t have to join the Army to be all that they can be; they need a real future! Rather than reforms, what we need is to commit ourselves to making a revolution together!
We cannot allow ourselves to be fooled by the elections. We have been told for decades that we must put our faith in the bourgeois elections and in the Democratic Party, which supposedly will show us the kinder, gentler face of capitalism.
Didn’t the Democrats vote for this war, and all the other wars? Wasn’t it Bill Clinton and the other Democrats who happily gutted programs such as welfare, food stamps, college education grants and so many others?
Have the Democrats freed Mumia Abu-Jamal or Leonard Peltier? The Democrats represent the same class interests of the big bosses and corporations as the Republicans do. Regardless of who has won an election, millions around the world will continue to live in misery because of U.S. imperialism.
And if we really want a revolution, the history of Chile and other countries has taught us clearly that the ruling class will never just quietly give up power based on elections; at some point, there’s going to be a fight.
The Democrats and Republicans alike have both feet squarely planted in the luxury liner of the big corporations and the filthy rich. I can picture them, out on their fancy cruise ship, living the high life, drinking champagne and eating oysters.
Meanwhile, all us poor and working and oppressed people are in a simple birch-bark canoe together. We look over, and we can see that their ship is named the Titanic. We know it is going to sink, baby. When they get little leaky holes in their ship, the rich get afraid and desperate, and throw more and more stones to try and sink our canoe.
Now, our bark canoe may not be as fancy as the Titanic, but it is sturdy, we have really made it well, and there is room for all of us on it. Every now and then, somebody tries to have one foot in the Titanic, and one foot in the canoe. The boats go their separate ways, and that person falls into the water and drowns. We all have to choose one boat or the other, the Titanic or the canoe. Which one will you choose?
Sisters and brothers, the map of the world is colored with the patterns of our ancestors’ spilled blood. I believe that someday we can make a new map of the world together, a map that does not have borders among workers. Ultimately we will take back everything that is rightfully ours, everything that was stolen from us and built by the blood and sweat of our ancestors.
But in order to do that, we must be highly organized and have a plan of action, because the ruling class knows perfectly well how to join ranks against us. What is required is a new movement of unity, solidarity and resistance in all parts of the world. Workers World Party is and will continue to be in the forefront of that new movement and we invite you to join us.
Our future, and the very future of our Mother Earth, requires us to struggle toward a socialist future. The threats to life in this country and around the globe demand from all of us a new way of thinking, acting and being. We must come together in unity to fight against this vicious government and the corporations that control it. Together, we can build a new movement, the likes of which this country has never seen before!
Sisters and brothers, this is OUR world. Let’s work together to take it back!
Free Leonard! Free Mumia! Ho!
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http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/80610.html
Last Updated 6:49 am PST Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Schwarzenegger gains among Latinos
His election strategy pays off in best GOP showing since 1990.
By Aurelio Rojas - Bee Capitol Bureau
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A3
One day last summer, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to step into a meeting with the editorial board of a Spanish-language newspaper, he received a briefing from a campaign aide.
They discussed issues that could come up, potential land mines in the governor's efforts to woo Latino voters, such as the Minutemen and Proposition 187.
After conferring with other aides, the governor went into the meeting and for the first time disavowed his previous support for the civilian border patrol brigade President Bush has branded as "vigilantes" -- and reaffirmed that he was wrong to vote for the 1994 measure to ban public services to illegal immigrants.
More vocal opponents of illegal immigration criticized Schwarzenegger for his statements to the editorial board of La Opinion. But the governor's change in tone marked the beginning of his turnaround with Latino voters.
At the time, a Field Poll showed only 22 percent of them supported Schwarzenegger. In cruising to a 17-point re-election victory this month over Democrat Phil Angelides, the governor received 39 percent of their vote, according to exit polling done for The Bee. That threshold has not been reached by a GOP gubernatorial candidate in California since 1990. And it was reached as Republicans with more strident views on illegal immigration were being punished by voters around the country.
Arnoldo Torres, the Schwarzenegger campaign's Latino outreach director who briefed him before the July 24 meeting, praised the governor for acknowledging he was wrong about the Minutemen and Proposition 187.
"The governor had the (guts) to say, 'You know what? I said things that I shouldn't say (and) I don't support racism,' " said Torres, a former political analyst for Univision and past executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Latinos accounted for only 12 percent of the voters, according to the Los Angeles Times exit poll. Perhaps troubling for the future of the GOP in California was how poorly two conservative Republicans running for constitutional offices fared with the fastest-growing share of the state's electorate.
State Sens. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, and Chuck Poochigian, R-Fresno, tallied only 23 percent and 20 percent of the Latino vote, respectively, in their losing bids for lieutenant governor and attorney general.
The lone bright spot for the Republican Party in down-ballot races was Steve Poizner, the Silicon Valley billionaire who easily beat Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to become the state's insurance commissioner. Running against the state's high-ranking Latino officeholder, Poizner -- a social moderate who spent more than $13 million of his fortune on his campaign -- received 35 percent of the Latino vote, according to GOP pollster Steve Kinney.
For the GOP to hold on to the Governor's Office in 2010, after the centrist Schwarzenegger moves on, Republicans may have to turn to a candidate who is more like Poizner and less like McClintock and Poochigian.
No GOP candidate for governor since the 1970s has won in California without getting at least one-third of the Latino vote.
Hector Barajas, a spokesman for the California Republican Party, said future GOP candidates will have do as Schwarzenegger did and talk to Latinos about common concerns such as education and job creation.
"We need to continue to try talk about areas where we have agreements -- and at the same time continue to have a dialogue with respect in areas where we may have disagreements," Barajas said.
By playing up common interests with Latino voters -- and playing down areas of possible disagreement -- Schwarzenegger repaired his strained relationship with Latino voters.
Last year, Latino voters resoundingly rejected four ballot initiatives supported by Schwarzenegger and opposed by unions by an average of 72 percent, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. During the 2003 recall election that swept him into the office, Schwarzenegger did surprisingly well with Latinos, receiving 31 percent of their vote. But after the recall, "he didn't do much with Hispanics," said Torres, a Democrat.
"There wasn't a strong outreach to the Hispanic-language media," Torres said. "There wasn't a lot of things that (we did) in this campaign."
This year, Matthew Dowd, the governor's new chief campaign strategist, promised to spend "more time, more money and resources" to court Latino voters than any Republican ever in California.
Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, who ran the ground operation in support of Angelides for the Legislature's Latino Caucus, said the Schwarzenegger outreach effort was the best he's seen by a GOP gubernatorial candidate.
"They were good," Cedillo said. "(Dowd) understands the increasing importance of the Latino vote because he's worked in Texas for so many years."
Torres said the governor made more appearances than any previous GOP candidate in California before Latino audiences. He also did more interviews with Spanish-language media.
With a 2-to-1 fundraising advantage over Angelides, the Schwarzenegger campaign also was able to run television and radio ads earlier and for a longer period than any previous GOP candidates
Besides Torres, the campaign hired four Latino deputy campaign directors to work with Latino media and reach out to coalitions of Latino supporters, including influential business groups.
That was a marked change for an administration that currently has only three high-ranking Latinos, including the chief spokeswoman, Margita Thompson, who has announced her resignation. Torres said the future GOP candidates would be wise to build on the architecture that the Schwarzenegger campaign used to attract Latino voters.
"(They) should use the experience of what just happened and reach out, not in a patronizing way, but in respectful, substantive way and say, 'Come join me,' " he said.
About the writer:
The Bee's Aurelio Rojas can be reached at (916) 326-5545 or arojas@sacbee.com
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http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Local/newWEST02112106.htm
November 21, 2006
Speaker: Immigration policy goes against Latinos
By Brittney Booth / Staff Writer
Email= brittney.booth@news-jrnl.com
DELAND -- As Latinos gain prominence in the United State's government and military, the nation needs to rethink its immigration policy regarding them, a former congressional aid told Stetson University students Monday.
Working under New York congressmen, Dr. Willie Rivera spent two decades helping political asylum refugees obtain U.S. citizenship. The ordained minister is now a volunteer chaplain for the Volusia County Sheriff's Office. He spoke about his experience at a lecture sponsored by Stetson's Hispanic Organization for Latin Awareness.
Rivera said during the 1980s, he helped many Eastern European immigrants obtain green cards quickly, even if they had ties to the Communist party. In one year, he said he assisted more than 3,000 European immigrants who were given preference. But the government did not treat Latin American immigrants the same way.
"The country wanted certain people to come to the United States," he said. "We have always let certain immigrants into this country.''
If the U.S. does not want the onslaught of illegal immigrants coming from Latin America to continue, the nation's leaders should focus on developing Latin America's economy instead of building a wall to keep people out, he said. If we want to keep them out, we should make them want to stay (in their country of origin)," he said.
The nations' immigrations laws are flawed and overly strict, and the country does not have the manpower to deport the estimated 12 million illegal Hispanic immigrants living here, he said.
At the same time the U.S. is embroiled in an immigration debate, Latinos are making strides in the nation's government and military branches. Armed forces recruitment among Hispanics continues to grow as Latinos seek educational opportunities and adventure, Rivera said.
In fact, Latinos represented 9 percent of the active military in 2003, up from 5 percent in 1993, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. At the U.S. Army's recruiting office in DeLand, three out of the five recruiters are Latinos. Staff Sgt. Leticia Martinez recruits at DeLand High School, Deltona High School and Pierson Taylor Middle High and said she has seen an increase in Hispanic and female enlistment in the past six months.
Sgt. 1st Class Leonardo Torres joined the army 15 years ago to further his education. "It became a part of me," he said. Today, Torres, who grew up in Puerto Rico, recruits at Pine Ridge High School in Deltona.
"Some join because of the adventure. Some join because of their income. It's a job security," he said.
====================
Hispanics in the military:
In 2003, Latinos represented 9 percent of the active military, up from 5 percent in 1993, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Hispanics make up 11 percent of the country's civilian workforce.
In 2006, Hispanics comprised 13.9 percent of active duty Marines, 12.7 percent of the Navy and 8.8 percent of the Air Force. Hispanics made up 11.7 percent of the Army in 2005, the latest information available. Source: U.S. Military branches
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/world/americas/21mexico.html
Published: November 21, 2006
Yes, He Lost Mexico’s Vote, So He’s Swearing Himself In
By James C. McKinley Jr.
Mexico City, Nov. 20 — Don Quixote, move over. The losing leftist candidate for president swore himself in on Monday as “the legitimate president of Mexico” before a huge crowd of his avid fans, ignoring rulings by federal electoral authorities and the courts that he narrowly lost the election last July.
Claudio Cruz/Associated Press
About 100,000 people crowded into Constitution Plaza in Mexico City on Monday to watch Andrés Manuel López Obrador swear himself in.
The candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who took on Mexico’s entrenched oligarchy, chose the anniversary of the Mexican revolution for the event. He has continued to assert that his opponents used fraud to deny him victory.
Appearing on a stage in the historic Constitution Plaza, with Mexican flags and an enormous eagle banner behind him, Mr. López Obrador promised to goad the government of the president-elect, Felipe Calderón, a conservative from the National Action Party of President Vicente Fox, into adopting his proposals.
About 100,000 people crowded into the square and roared with approval when a copy of the traditional green, white and red presidential banner was placed across his chest.
“We are assembled here to confront a fraudulent election,” he said, “and to take on a regime of corruption and privileges, to start the construction of a new republic.”
Mr. López Obrador maintains that powerful business leaders colluded with Mr. Fox’s party to mount a smear campaign depicting him as a dangerous leftist totalitarian. He also says Mr. Fox’s party made a pact with the centrist former governing party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, to defeat him in northern states.
Both accusations are true to a degree, but the nation’s highest electoral court ruled that those actions were not enough to skew the election results. Mr. Calderón, 44, a former energy minister, won by 240,000 votes.
Mr. López Obrador, who is 53, said he intended to have members of his Democratic Revolution Party introduce legislation in Congress, then use public pressure to force the laws through. Among his proposals are measures to break up near monopolies, improve health care, raise the minimum wage and cut government salaries.
He said he intended to continue touring to promote his ideas.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Fox took a veiled swipe at Mr. López Obrador at an event marking the anniversary of the 1910 revolution, saying society should never permit strongmen and populists to trample civil liberties. “Elections are the path that Mexicans have to preserve a political and public life that is plural, peaceful, orderly and civilized,” he said.
It remained to be seen if Monday’s political theater was a graceful exit for a candidate who could never acknowledge defeat, or truly the start of a unified left-wing movement to challenge the oligarchy of politicians and business executives who have controlled the country for a century.
The crowd was smaller than at Mr. López Obrador’s previous rallies, and divisions have appeared in his party. Some supporters have threatened to storm the dais to try to prevent Mr. Calderón from taking the oath of office on Dec. 1, while others are negotiating with his party, hoping to get the new president to adopt part of their agenda in return for political peace.
Forming a shadow government is astute politically, some analysts said, because it could keep Mr. López Obrador in the public eye during Mr. Calderón’s six-year term and set up a possible run in 2012.
Most of the people who turned out to support him, however, have high hopes that he will somehow deliver on his campaign promises despite losing. “He is our last hope,” said Consuelo Sánchez Quiroz, a 64-year-old retired hotel worker. “Fox and Calderón are both for the businessmen.”
But others saw the ceremony on Monday as a grand romantic gesture, something Don Quixote could relate to. “It’s something that goes beyond material things, it’s something more spiritual,” said Beatriz Ramírez, a 54-year-old psychologist, “to believe in the future, in a more equal society, to believe that some day it will become reality.”
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http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_4696866
Article Last Updated:11/20/2006 09:03:00 PM MST
Help for Latinos honored
Mexican consul general presents three awards
By Elizabeth Aguilera / Denver Post Staff Writer
Jared Polis, Alicia Cuaron and the city of Steamboat Springs were honored Monday by the consul general of Mexico for their work on behalf of the Latino community.
Juan Marcos Gutierrez presented the "Ohtli" award to Jared Polis, philanthropist and education advocate. The award is the highest Mexican government award outside of Mexico. The Ohtli - Nahuatl for "path" - award is given to someone who has contributed to the betterment of the Mexican community and has helped Mexicans abroad.
"This was a tough year for us because of the race issues and immigration issues, so we look for a person who advocates for the Mexican community and who had done it for a long time," Gutierrez said. Polis "is smart, successful, and he has been one of the most effective advocates on education and the Dream Act."
Polis credits the students at his New American School with landing him the Ohtli honor.
The school targets immigrant students who work, making it possible for them to still graduate from high school and learn English.
Polis is also known for his work advocating for the Dream Act, which would allow some undocumented high school graduates to attend college, pay in-state rates and eventually gain legal status.
"Educating our young people should not be viewed through the lens of politics," Polis said. "It should be viewed through the lens of human potential and basic human decency and collaboration between our two great countries."
Polis' fellow award winners were selected by the consul general. The "Amistad" award was given to the city of Steamboat Springs for its work in reaching out to its growing Latino community. Sister Alicia Cuaron was given the "Merito Communitario" award for her lifelong dedication to the Latino community.
"I am very proud of my parents and my heritage," she said. "My father always said value your heritage, culture and language. Everything I am I owe to my parents."
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http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_4697418
Article Launched:11/20/2006 10:57:02 PM PST
Latinos flexing muscles: Groups mull strategy on immigration
By Peter Prengaman / Associated Press
RIVERSIDE - At a recent strategy session, Latino political activists debated ways to characterize the 700-mile fence along the Mexican border approved last month by Congress.
"Berlin Wall" was the language used in the meeting agenda.
"Better to call it the `Apartheid Wall' because of the racial implications," one man said.
"We should call it what it is - an extension of the `Tortilla Wall,"' another activist suggested, referring to the derogatory name Mexican immigrants gave fences built around Tijuana in the 1970s.
With the Democrats set to take control of Congress next year, pro-immigrant groups are meeting around the nation to devise a new strategy to win amnesty for illegal immigrants, repeal of the Secure Fence Act and more visas for foreigners.
Activists say they have a better chance of gaining reforms under the Democrats than under the Republicans, but believe it will still require intense political pressure and efforts to mold public opinion.
"We are not taking it like the Democrats are a panacea for immigration reform," said Armando Navarro, coordinator of the National Alliance for Human Rights, an umbrella organization for Latino groups in Southern California. "But if they hope to capture the White House in 2008, they better listen to us."
Anti-illegal immigration groups counter that a number of Democrats will be loath to embrace legalization for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.
"Many newly elected members ran on a ticket of enforcement, so it's going to be difficult for them to turn around and vote for amnesty," said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-illegal immigrant group.
Last spring, Latino organizations, churches, unions and Spanish-language disc jockeys mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to protest a House bill passed last December to crack down on illegal immigrants and those who helped them. However, cracks appeared in that united front after the Senate passed a bill in May that would create a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants and a guest-worker program to bring mostly low-wage agricultural workers into this country. Some Hispanic groups hailed the legislation as a first-step compromise, while others rejected it. Unions worried that the guest-worker clause would erode organizing efforts.
Now, activists are trying to repair those rifts and show a united front when they push the Democrats for reform.
"I've been making reconciliation calls," said Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican-American Political Association. "It's extremely important that we come back together."
Some groups said activists should focus on a single issue this year: amnesty for all illegal immigrants. But not everyone agrees. Kevin Appleby, director of migration and refugee policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the public expects comprehensive solutions, and so activists should also focus on the need for a new visa system and the root causes of immigration from Latin America.
Latino organizations have held numerous regional meetings and plan national gatherings beginning in January. They plan to send illegal immigrants to lobby in Washington. Also, immigrants will send pictures of their families to lawmakers to gain their sympathy.
Exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and other media during last week's election showed 69 percent of Hispanics voted for Democrats, and 30 percent for Republicans. In 2004, President Bush got about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.
As proof of growing Latino clout, activists pointed to Bush's decision last week to choose Florida Sen. Mel Martinez as Republican National Committee chairman. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill did not mention immigration reform while talking about their immediate priorities after last week's election.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6095946.stm
Last Updated: Monday, 30 October 2006, 08:35 GMT
In pictures: Oaxaca clashes
Mexico's President Vicente Fox ordered federal forces into the southern city of Oaxaca after further violence in a long-running dispute involving thousands of striking teachers.
Tear gas was fired at the crowds of activists who have been occupying the colonial city of 600,000 inhabitants.
Hundreds of officers then began forcing their way into the city, pushing the crowd back.
The trouble began in May, with a strike by teachers for higher pay. But they went on to demand the resignation of state governor Ulises Ruiz, accusing him of corruption.
The police were backed by armoured vehicles and water cannon as they pushed into the city.
Even burning barricades were not enough to halt the police advance.
The protesters - mainly striking teachers - were forced out of the city centre, ending a five month occupation.
The five month standoff had descended into frequent violence. In the latest outbreak, three people were killed including US journalist Brad Will.
With few police around, people sometimes took the law into their own hands and meted out their own punishments for alleged offences.
The strike has left more than a million children across the state deprived of their education.
Some parents have managed to make alternative arrangements - like this improvised classroom at a car wash centre.
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