Querida Hermana Nora ~ Gracias for the invite. I am busy with work and a presentation here on October 1st but I would like to know more about the Latino Issues forum.
I live in Sacramento but make it to the Bay Area every now and then. How many gente from the Latino Mission District will be attending? Sometimes as activists we forget to work in our own backyards and often certain events are too expensive for the average poor and oppressed Latino/Chicano working class member. Nevertheless, keep up the good work and feel free to join up with the Network Aztlan and check out our Yahoo Groups.
Please click Links below.
We can and should utilize the power of the Internet to reach out to others, but sometimes the Internet itself can be a distraction from local community education work that needs to be done.
>>>>>>>>> Come Together and Create!Peter S. Lopez aka: PetaEmail: sacranative@yahoo.comSacramento, California, Aztlan
----- Original Message ----From: Nora Vargas <nvargas@lif.org>To: sacranative@yahoo.comSent: Monday, September 15, 2008 10:41:25 AMSubject: LIF invite
LATINO ISSUES FORUM A PUBLIC POLICY & ADVOCACY INSTITUTE Advancing California's Social, Economic, and Environmental Future
For Corporate Partnership and Community Partnership sponsorship opportunities please contact: Berenise Herrera bherrera@lif.org (415) 547-9122
For all other inquiries and further information log onto: www.lif.org
or call: (415) 284-7220
On behalf of the Board of Directors and Staff, I cordially invite you to join us in celebration of our 20th anniversary. Throughout our 20 year history, LIF has strived to create a better, more equitable society for all Californian's. In honor of our past and in celebration of our future we will be hosting two events, one in Northern California and another in Southern California.
San Francisco When: Wednesday, October 1, 2008 6:00pm-8:00pm Where: City Club of San Francisco 155 Sansome Street, Suite 950 San Francisco, CA 94104
Honoring LIF's 2008 Outstanding Leader, Ms. Ortensia Lopez, Executive Director of El Concilio.
Welcoming remarks by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom*
Los Angeles When: Thursday, October 7, 2008 6:30pm-8:30pm Where: City Club of Los Angeles 333 S Grand Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90071
Honoring LIF's 2008 Legislative Consumer Advocate, Honorable Hector De La Torre, Assemblymember*
Welcoming remarks by Honorable Jose Huizar, Los Angeles City Council Member and words by Honorable Karen Bass, Speaker of the Assembly*
Join us for horsd'oevres, open bar, awards and entertainment! Please RSVP by September 26th for the San Francisco event and by October 10thfor the Los Angeles event. To regiser, please visit www.lif.org or call (415) 284-7220. Don't forget to invite your friends!
We look forward to celebrating with you!
Sincerely, Nora Vargas Executive Director
*invited
160 Pine St., Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94111 * Phone (415) 284-7220 * Fax (415) 284-7222 634 S. Spring St., Suite 902, Los Angeles, CA 90014 * Phone (213) 488-0053 * Fax (213) 488-0208 550 E. Shaw Ave., Suite 255, Fresno, CA 93710 * Phone (559) 241-6572 * Fax (559)241-6563 107 9th Street, Ste. 620 , Sacramento ,CA 95814 * Phone (916) 213-3537 * Fax (916) 498-1547
CARACAS, Venezuela — The United States stepped up the diplomatic skirmish with its left-wing adversaries in Latin America on Friday, saying it would expel the Venezuelan ambassador and declaring that Venezuela's top two intelligence officials had supported the "narco-terrorist activities" of rebels in the region.
The moves heightened the political tensions that have been building between the United States, Venezuela and Bolivia in recent days. On Wednesday, Bolivia's embattled president, Evo Morales, expelled the American ambassador there, Philip S. Goldberg, accusing him of supporting rebellious groups in eastern Bolivia.
Then on Thursday, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela said he was expelling the American ambassador to his country, Patrick Duddy, contending that an American-supported coup plot had been discovered.
The State Department responded by declaring Bolivia's ambassador to Washington persona non grata. Then on Friday morning, it said it would expel Venezuela's ambassador, while the Treasury Department accused the Venezuelan intelligence officials of aiding Colombia's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, "even as it terrorized and kidnapped innocents."
The department said that the head of Venezuela's military intelligence agency, Hugo Carvajal Barrios, protected drug shipments from seizure by Venezuelan anti-drug authorities and helped provide weapons to the FARC, which the United States considers a terrorist organization. The department also said that Henry Rangel Silva, the director of the DISIP intelligence agency, "materially assisted" the FARC's drug trafficking activities and pushed for greater cooperation between the Venezuelan government and the rebels.
In addition, the Treasury Department said a third official, Ramon Rodriguez Chacin, who resigned as interior minister this week, was the Venezuelan government's main weapons contact for the FARC. It said the rebel group uses proceeds from narcotics sales to buy weapons from the Venezuelan government.
The United States and Venezuela have been sparring over a variety of issues, including claims that Venezuela is growing as a transshipment point for cocaine, Mr. Chávez's plans for military exercises with Russia's Navy in the Caribbean and the safety of Venezuela's airports for American airlines.
But there are significant internal issues that could be playing into these disputes as well. Bolivia is grappling with violent, spreading protests in its increasingly ungovernable east. Venezuela, and particularly the Chavez government, is facing uncomfortable revelations about a spy scandal unfolding in a Miami courtroom, as well as rising inflation and potential losses in regional elections later this year.
As for the Bush administration, it has been unable to effectively engage either of those governments, and anti-American sentiment has been mounting in the countries for years, a phenomenon aptly stoked by both Mr. Morales and Mr. Chavez. In Venezuela, that sentiment was fueled in 2002, when the Bush administration tacitly approved of a coup that briefly toppled Mr. Chavez.
On Thursday, Mr. Chávez gave Ambassador Duddy 72 hours to leave the country, asserting a new plot, and recalled his ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Álvarez.
"When there is a new government in the United States, we'll send an ambassador," Mr. Chávez said, using an expletive to refer to Americans.
The latest moves represent a low point in Venezuela's political relations with the United States, which imported more than $40 billion in oil from Venezuela last year. Trade between the countries has remained resilient, topping $50 billion in 2007, despite repeated threats by Mr. Chávez to halt oil exports to the United States, a warning he reiterated on Thursday.
For all the warnings, refusing to sell oil would probably hurt Venezuela more than the United States. America is the country's main customer for oil, and therefore a significant part of its revenues. By contrast, American refiners could buy oil elsewhere.
The Chávez government also said Thursday that it would reduce the number of flights by airlines from the United States to Venezuela, which now number about 70 a week, after the Bush administration complained that American inspectors were not allowed to review the security of Venezuelan airports.
The airline issue offers a window into tension over claims of drug trafficking, with news reports here saying that government officials are hesitant to allow inspectors into facilities thought to be used to smuggle cocaine to the United States and Europe.
Mr. Chávez said that a plot to overthrow and assassinate him had been uncovered and that the Bush administration was behind it. State television here played what it described as intercepts of phone discussions between active-duty and retired military officers that referred to a plot to take Miraflores, the presidential palace.
The State Department responded Friday that the "charges leveled against our fine ambassadors by the leaders of Bolivia and Venezuela are false — and the leaders of those countries know it."
Mr. Chávez has claimed at least 26 times in the last six years that there were plots to kill him, according to counts in the local media.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
c/s
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Come Together and Create! Peter S. Lopez aka: PetaE
mail: sacranative@yahoo.com Sacramento, California, Aztlan
For years, Gerardo Salazar played the Romeo in dusty Mexican villages, trolling town squares and schoolyards for women and girls he could seduce with declarations of love and, ultimately, sell in seedy Houston cantinas.
Salazar, who called himself El Gallo — the Rooster — could have been arrested three years ago after a federal indictment named him leader of an international human trafficking ring. Instead, he escaped to Mexico, where his hometown is a notorious center for kidnapping.
But the cantina sex trade Salazar helped build in Houston continues to flourish.
Despite enforcement efforts, human traffickers and prostitution operators have constructed resilient and lucrative networks of organized crime that have a franchise-like ability to persist and prosper, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.
Two associates of Salazar's, bar owners who escaped prosecution in 2005, were arrested only recently after police rescued a teenager allegedly held captive and sold as their sex slave.
Houston's sex-for-hire scenario has played out for years in dimly lit bars, some specifically constructed to conceal sexual slavery with secret doors, hidden gates and camouflaged brothels, records show.
The Maria Bonita
One of Salazar's favorite haunts was the Maria Bonita.
Since 2004, the lavender-colored bar with its backyard concealed behind a high fence in the 7900 block of industrial Clinton Drive has repeatedly been targeted for prostitution, underage drinking and human trafficking.
Even today, the bar is open for business.
Though investigators tried to shut it down in 2005, women refused to testify against its owner, David Salazar, a U.S. citizen, or his mother, Gregoria Salgado Vazquez, an illegal immigrant and convicted prostitute known as "Doña Blanca."
Both operated the bar, liquor license records show, which was used for human trafficking by fugitive Gerardo Salazar.
The pair was arrested earlier this year after a teenage girl called 911 on a borrowed cell phone.
The girl told police she had been held captive in a house but never knew the address.
The story she told — of being romanced in Mexico, betrayed and then sold in a Houston bar — was strikingly similar to the statements of Gerardo Salazar's victims three years earlier.
Seduced then betrayed
Shown in a snapshot as a striking man of about 40 with intense dark eyes, Gerardo Salazar branded the girls he liked most with a special tattoo: A rooster, after his own nickname.
He and his accomplices often hit rural Mexican pueblos with full wallets and tricked-out-trucks aiming for town plazas, municipal fiestas, schoolyards or anywhere they might find vulnerable women or girls, investigators said.
He offered them his love and hints of marriage. Once in Houston, he introduced them to a life of abuse and forced prostitution.
By day, Gerardo Salazar and his cohorts warehoused women in an apartment complex near the Gulfgate shopping center.
The victims, according to records, were alternately sweet-talked, dressed up, threatened, raped and beaten.
For years, his cocktail of romance and brutality paid off.
Night after night, Gerardo Salazar and others ferried victims to cantinas and sold them to customers many times in the same night — pocketing about $50 for each transaction.
His business model was forged in his home state of Tlaxcala. There, family-run organized crime operations known as lenones have long honed the art of human trafficking.
Considered specialists in kidnapping, coercing and prostituting primarily poor and uneducated girls, lenones are known for exporting their victims to countries hungry for cheap, no-questions-asked sex, like the United States and Japan, according to Mexican authorities.
Other criminals from Gerardo Salazar's hometown of San Miguel Tenancingo have been connected to major sex trafficking rings in New York and New Jersey, according to federal court records and an interview with a U.S. Department of Justice official.
In Houston, Gerardo Salazar operated undetected in cantinas on forgotten corners of Clinton Drive.
Secret doors and meetings
In late 2004, state alcohol inspectors first noticed something odd at the Maria Bonita Cantina: Women went to the restroom and never came out.
An undercover police operation in February 2005 revealed that the women's bathroom mirror doubled as a door that led to a fenced backyard.
Meanwhile, clients left the bar and went to the backyard through a guarded gate, then entered an outer building for a paid rendezvous arranged by the bartender, according to records, crime scene photos and interviews with Sgt. Michael Barnett, who leads the enforcement team of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission's office in Houston.
One photo captured the sordid atmosphere inside: a discarded condom atop a striped mattress in a closet-like room.
At the time, David Salazar held the liquor license for the Maria Bonita, owned the property and controlled its business name, public records show.
The TABC's lead agent on the case, Ben Giese, suspected David Salazar also was involved in trafficking or prostituting women.
But Giese, who now works for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in Brazil, told the Chronicle that victims he and others attempted to question in 2005 were "scared to death."
"We even arrested one out of there — but she wouldn't talk to us, even though she was getting deported," Giese said.
Reluctance to testify
The victim lived at the Willow Creek Apartments, a village-sized complex with many newly arrived immigrants, where Gerardo Salazar's ring kept its captives in 2005, records show.
In June 2005 one woman called a domestic violence hot line. A 16-year-old girl branded with a rooster tattoo was picked up at the apartments by a rescue worker who took her to a woman's shelter. But when told police would want to question her, she returned to Gerardo Salazar.
His welcome was savage. He hit her with a belt, slapped her in the face, kicked her in the stomach and legs and forced her to return to prostitution, court documents show.
Investigators spent the next weeks trying to find her again.
On July 16, 2005, she was discovered among other women at a cantina near the Maria Bonita called La Costeñita.
This time, a Latina FBI special agent named Maritza Conde-Vasquez persuaded her to cooperate.
Two months later, authorities raided Willow Creek apartments.
They first arrested Gerardo Salazar's two nephews and another accomplice. Weeks later, they captured his two sons.
But Gerardo Salazar got away.
In the aftermath, investigators with the sex trafficking task force were overwhelmed by another case. Several agents with connections and experience later left the state, and leads about bars like the Maria Bonita went unexplored.
Bar owners who operate businesses as fronts for organized crime can be shut down, or even lose their property, under various state and federal laws, though the process can be complex.. Lawless cantina owners often use legal tricks to keep operating by changing ownership on deed records or renewing liquor licenses under names borrowed from family or friends.
Despite evidence that his bar was a center for trafficking used by Gerardo Salazar's gang, David Salazar continued to own it until last year.
He and his mother also ran another Houston cantina, El Club Guerrero, on Wallisville Road, police said.
A prisoner at 16
It was there that David Salazar is accused of selling a 16-year-old sex slave himself, court documents show.
In March 2008, a teenage girl called 911, saying she had been held prisoner inside a house in Jacinto City, six miles east of the Maria Bonita.
Her alleged captors were cantina operators David Salazar and his mother.
The girl stands 5 feet tall and and weighs about 90 pounds. She likes stuffed animals, dolls and coloring books, according to JacintoCity Detective B..J. Silva, who extensively interviewed her.
A promise of love
The girl told the detective she met David Salazar in 2007 when he bumped into her as she was walking home from school, scattering her books.
David Salazar had the cachet of a rich man. He owned a late-model SUV and homes in Mexico and the United States, records show.
The teenager, abandoned by both parents, said she fell for his promise of love and an escape from extreme poverty.
David Salazar paid a coyote to bring her across the border in January 2008.
He admitted he picked her up from the smuggler on Telephone Road in Houston, JacintoCity police said.
Once she got to JacintoCity, the girl said, she was locked up in his mother's house and forced to sell herself five to six nights a week in his Wallisvillle Road cantina.
"When she refused, they would lock her up in a room and wouldn't feed her for days," Silva said.
The yard was fenced and guarded by pit bulls and a chow. House windows were barred, and the storage room where the girl slept was padlocked.
She only managed to call for help after a cantina customer slipped her a cell phone and showed her how to dial 911, Silva said.
When she called, the girl didn't know her captors' address. JacintoCity police finally found her on March 7 after two house-to-house searches.
"It was very disturbing," Silva said."At first, we didn't know what we had."
David Salazar and his mother face felony charges of kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault of a child in HarrisCounty.
Their lawyers did not return phone calls.
Suspected family ties and other possible links between David Salazar, his mother, fugitive Gerardo Salazar and organized crime groups in Mexico remain under investigation.
JacintoCity Police Chief Joe Ayala has filed papers to seize and sell the suspects' home in JacintoCity.
Their old place, the Maria Bonita, remains open — under new ownership.
How the rendezvous were concealed
1.Women and teenaged girls, obeying orders to sell themselves from their captors, left the bar's bathroom via a door hidden behind a mirror. (Photo: See the hidden door.)
2. Customers left eh bar but re-entered its grounds via a guarded gate in a high privacy fence.
Comment: The oppressed are often architects of their own oppression or willing accomplices in the perpetuation of oppression and there are many forms of prostitution.
Bolivian President Evo Morales is in Tehran this week, ushering in a new chapter in his country's economic and strategic cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has promised a hefty investment in Bolivia's energy sector and other joint ventures, some involving other Latin and Central American countries, such as Venezuela and Nicaragua, not to overlook Cuba.
In a joint communique, Morales and President Mahmud Ahmadinejad have signed off on the need for "concrete political steps against every type of imperialism", while also condemning the intervention of the United Nations Security Council in Iran's nuclear program as "lacking any legal or technical justification".
Bolivia may be a poor country, but it is strategically located and represents an important ally for Iran that can act as a catalyst in enhancing Iran's growing cooperation with other Latin nations, especially those considered leftist or populist.
In his visit to Bolivia last year, Ahmadinejad promised that Iran would make a US$1 billion investment in Bolivia's underdeveloped oil and gas sector and the two sides are now much closer in turning this into reality. Certainly, Morales' decision to set aside any hesitation and fully support Iran's position in the current nuclear standoff goes a long way in cementing Iran-Bolivia friendship.
From Tehran's vantage point, an indirect benefit of Morales' visit is that it impresses on Moscow the services that Tehran can render in strengthening Moscow's anti-unipolarism credo, which was spelled out by President Dmitry Medvedev in his major foreign policy speech last week. Tapping into Cold War lexicon, Medvedev openly mentioned Russia's intention to pursue a "sphere of influence" in politics and made a point of mentioning "not only with neighbors".
As various Russian experts, including at the Russian Center for Strategic Studies, have pointed out, Russia in the aftermath of the Georgia crisis is now inclined to strengthen its ties with countries such as Iran and Venezuela. In light of the Georgia visit this week by US Vice President Dick Cheney, reviled by Premier Vladimir Putin as directly responsible for triggering the Georgia crisis for election purposes, the growing rift between the US and Russia simultaneously represents an opportunity for Tehran both to neutralize UN Security Council efforts to impose tighter sanctions on Iran over the nuclear program and explore further, and more meaningful, strategic cooperation with Russia and the Latin left vis-a-vis the common threat of US unipolarism.
On balance, the post-Cold War record of US unipolarism has been less than desirable. There are many examples of blatant interventionism, bullying and war-mongering that have risked world peace. And now with both the US presidential candidates, Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, sold on the notion of maintaining the US's pre-eminence in global politics, we must expect continuity with the pattern of post-Cold War policies having the upper hand, albeit with new nuances if Obama wins.
Foreign policy advisors of Ahmadinejad are openly counting on Iran's new relations with Latin America as one of the net gains of his presidency. In fact, the new level of cooperation between Iran and Bolivia and other Latin and Central American countries is a timely, further confirmation of the strategic vision and outlook that they have brought to the government, compared with the Mohammad Khatami government that pushed the arch of detente with the West almost to the exclusion of all else.
Ahmadinejad's foreign policy team is now busy contemplating the next moves now that the Russians are putting to the backburner their hesitations for closer relations with countries labeled "rogue" by the West.
"As far as Iran is concerned the recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO] in Dushanbe was a success because China and Russia agreed to expand the role and input of observer nations at the SCO, and that includes Iran," a Tehran political analyst told Asia Times Online. As a result, Iran is today one small leap shy of fully joining the SCO, and membership is only a matter of time as far as Tehran is concerned.
Clearly, the windfalls from the Georgia crisis for Iran are multiplying and Iran's deft Latin diplomacy is meant to add to the new dynamism for geopolitical and geostrategic cooperation with Russia (and China). As a middle power (and not a "tiny one" as derided by Obama recently), Iran as a result of its active global diplomacy in the Non-Aligned Movement has a rather disproportionate global influence that far outweighs its paltry contribution to global economy (less than 1%), and is well-positioned and predisposed to bandwagoning with a new global anti-hegemonic front.
Using its petrodollars to solidify its networks, Iran has already entered into several economic agreements with Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba; should Ahmadinejad win re-election next year, his second term will likely deepen these ties even further.
At the same time, the prospect of closer Iran-Russia relations directly impacts Washington's thinking about Iran, given White House's reluctance to consent to a new round of US-Iran dialogue on Iraq's security and or to take Iran's serious misgivings about a US-Iraq security agreement into consideration.
Put simply, ignoring Iran is not an option for Washington any longer as Iran can effectively act as Moscow's junior partner sowing the threads of organic connection to the Latin (and indeed world's) leftist or populist governments. The more organic, or multi-faceted, such ties, the more value and importance attached to Iran by the key SCO nations, Russia and China, which can be seen in the visit of Bolivia's president - Iran's diplomacy performs both regionally and globally.
At this stage it is unclear if China actually favors such a new development, or if Russia is resolved toward this line, since Moscow appears intent on a measure of damage control with the West in the midst of these upheavals, and certainly cooperation with the West on Iran's nuclear program can have the protean value of healing some wounds.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction. For his Wikipedia entry, click here.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
