| Domingo ~ Gracias Sunshine! ~ I hope it all goes well! You first sent this without a Subject, but I am glad I took the time to open the Email and check it out. We need to learn better how to utilize the power of the Internet
Please, por favor, feel free to join up with the Network Aztlan website and check out its various groups. There are times of great tensions and we need to all come together in order to help release those tensions with progressive community action! We should definately have Voter Registration and Voter Participation on Voting Day as one of our main priorities right now, along with other community education programs, including basic literacy! Enjoy!!! http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/9/prweb158561.htm
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NetworkAztlan_News/ Come Together and Create! Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta Email: sacranative@yahoo.com Sacramento, California, Aztlan --- On Sat, 9/20/08, Sunshine <soltocani@yahoo.com> wrote: From: Sunshine | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sunshine: Boyle Heights by Josefine Lopez and More
Monday, September 15, 2008
Read: Latino Issues Forum Invitation
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.
Website:
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.
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NetworkAztlan_News/
Come Together and Create! Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta Email: sacranative@yahoo.com Sacramento, California, Aztlan
----- Original Message ---- From: Nora Vargas <nvargas@lif.org> To: sacranative@yahoo.com Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 10:41:25 AM Subject: LIF invite
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Latino Issues Forum | 160 Pine Street | Suite 700 | San Francisco | CA | 94111 |
Friday, September 12, 2008
U.S. Calls Venezuelan Officials Rebel Supporters
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/world/americas/13venez.html?ref=americas
U.S. Calls Venezuelan Officials Rebel Supporters
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: September 12, 2008
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.
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Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
c/s
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Come Together and Create!
Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta E
mail: sacranative@yahoo.com
Sacramento, California, Aztlan
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Bars that were bases for sex ring still open for business: Houston Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5987854.html
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.
Education is Liberation! Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com Key Link: http://www.NetworkAztlan.com
Bars that were bases for sex ring still open for business
By LISE OLSEN
Email: lise.olsen@chron.com
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
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
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
But the cantina sex trade Salazar helped build in
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
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.
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
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
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
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
Other criminals from Gerardo Salazar's hometown of San Miguel Tenancingo have been connected to major sex trafficking rings in
In
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
"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
This time, a
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
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
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
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
Once she got to
"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.
"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
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
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.
3. Both reunited inside a small outbuilding inside the fence perimeter. (Photo: See the building's entrance.)
4. Another outbuilding doubled as living quarters and overflow meeting spot for six to eight women. (Video: See undercover video of the kitchen of the women's living quarters.)
5. When police arrived, the bartender pushed a button causing lights to blink in the outbuildings as a warning. (Video: See undercover video from inside the cantina.)
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.
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