http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080811/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/bolivia_referendum;_ylt=Aurt9Tvz_DVtHgnp1JU6kTlvaA8F Bolivians back Morales in recall voteBy FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 8 minutes ago LA PAZ, Bolivia - Voters vigorously endorsed President Evo Morales on Sunday in a recall referendum he devised to try to break a political stalemate and revive his leftist crusade, partial unofficial results showed. More than 62 percent of voters in this bitterly divided Andean nation ratified the mandate of Morales and his vice president, Alvaro Garcia, according to a private quick count of votes from 900 of the country's 22,700 polling stations. The 53.7 percent by which Bolivia's first indigenous president won election in December 2005 had been the previous best electoral showing for a Bolivian leader. Morales had proposed Sunday's recall in a bold gamble to topple governors who have frustrated his bid to redress historical inequities in favor of Bolivia's long-suppressed indigenous majority and extend his time in office. Eight of the country's nine governors were also subject to recall — and two Morales foes were among the three ousted, according to the quick count, which was conducted by the Ipsos-Apoyo firm for the ATB television network. First official results were not expected until late Sunday. Morales' leftist agenda has met with bitter opposition in the unabashedly capitalistic eastern half of the country, where protesters who accuse him of being a lackey of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez last week blockaded airports to keep Morales from touching down for campaign visits. All four governors there easily survived Sunday's plebiscite, as expected. But Morales did score gains with the defeat of opposition governors in the highland province of La Paz and in Cochabamba, seat of his coca-growers movement. The recently elected governor of central Chuquisaca province was exempt from the referendum. Cochabamba Gov. Manfred Reyes, a conservative three-time presidential candidate, promptly refused to recognize the results and called the referendum unconstitutional. Under the law that set the referendum's rules, politicians whose "no" votes exceed the percentage by which they were elected are ousted. It also lets Morales name temporary replacements pending provincial elections. More than 100 international observers, mostly from the Organization of American States, monitored the vote. A few irregularities were reported, including the pre-dawn theft of ballots in the small pro-Morales town of Yucumo in eastern Beni state. Replacement ballots were later flown in. Victor Hugo Cardenas — an Aymara native like Morales who was vice president from 1993-97 — predicted Sunday's vote would only make South America's poorest nation "even more difficult to govern." But on the wind-swept shores of Lake Titicaca, from where Cardenas hails, other Aymaras were steadfast in their support of the president. "For more than 500 years we've lived in slavery," said Rolando Choque, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher voting in Achacachi. "Change doesn't come overnight. It's a long road." Indeed, Sunday's outcome clearly defined Bolivia's growing divisions: In Chuquisaca and each of the four eastern provinces, majorities voted in favor of recalling Morales. Political analyst Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information Network said Sunday's results could be used by Morales "to try to go ahead with the fight against poverty ... or it could just entrench the situation further." Morales has been unable to get a date set for a nationwide vote on a new constitution that would give indigenous groups more power and allow him to be re-elected to a second five-year term. The opposition walked out of the constituent assembly that wrote the document. The battle for Bolivia hinges on land ownership and natural gas income. The four eastern lowland provinces — Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz and Tarija — have resisted Morales' insistence that the central government control energy profits and decide how to distribute them. The four declared themselves autonomous this year in largely symbolic votes. While vowing not to expropriate private property, Morales has made an exception for fallow land in the east that he wants impoverished Indians to farm. The plan has made little headway, but still infuriated wealthy landowners. Natural gas and precious metals revenues have boomed since Morales nationalized the gas fields in 2006 and renegotiated extraction contracts. Bolivia now keeps about 85 percent of these profits, and combined with rising global energy and mineral prices, exports have nearly doubled since 2005 to US$4.7 billion last year. Populist measures that have endeared Morales to the poor indigenous majority have included handouts to schoolchildren and the elderly. He also has proposed a nationwide pension plan that would extend protection broadly to include workers in the informal economy and stay-at-home mothers. ___ Associated Press writers Carlos Valdez and Paola Flores contributed to this report.  AP Photo: A coca farmer throws confetti over Bolivia's President Evo Morales, left, as he arrives to... News SearchRelated Searches: Che Guevara would be pleased today, maybe even astonished about the progress that has taken place in Bolivia. His ol' stomping grounds! Que Viva Evo! Come Together and Create! Peter S. Lopez ~ aka:Peta Sacramento, California, Aztlan Email: sacranative@yahoo.com C/S |
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Bolivians back Morales in recall vote
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Read: All Mixed Up Over La Raza: By GUSTAVO ARELLANO
| Sabbath Night ~ Gracias for the Lead Hermano Roberto ~ You know what a news and information hound I can be in my 'free' time. I did a simple Google Search and the below article popped up. I kind of like Gustavo's irreverent spin on stuff. Politically correct folks can be such sterile perverts. Fascinating to me as I relate to the concept of La Raza Cosmica ~ The Cosmic Race ~ in an ultimately egalitarian way and if humankind survives long enough we will all merge together. But that can be a big IF! Take it For What It's Worth! FWIW P.S. After work today, Brother Clay and I moved most my stuff from the Chacon Casa to here at the Lopez Sanctuary. Called and Left 'mensaje' on your cell phone. Remember the CASA junta manana! Did you get the canton? Rapped with Langston, Yvette is getting off the hook but she is sticking to her sobriety! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Come Together and Create! Peter S. Lopez ~ aka:Peta Sacramento, California, Aztlan Email: sacranative@yahoo.com C/S http://www.laweekly.com/la-vida/ask-a-mexican/all-mixed-up-over-la-raza/19356/ All Mixed Up Over La Raza The "cosmic race" celebrates miscegenation, not segregation By GUSTAVO ARELLANO Wednesday, July 30, 2008 - 11:40 am Dear Mexican: What's with calling yourselves "La Raza"? Being Mexicans, Chicanos or whatever isn't enough — now you're THE race? Sounds pretty racist to me. —The Race is On Dear Gabacho: Few things annoy the Mexican more than the Know Nothing Nation's deliberate ignorance with this most nebulous of Mexican idioms. Despite the patient explanations of Chicano yaktivists who say the phrase doesn't exclusively mean "the race" in Mexican Spanish but is a synonym for "community," idiot commentators insist that "la raza" as used by Mexicans betrays their Reconquista tendencies and alludes to a Mexican sense of racial superiority akin to Nazism and white supremacy. No group gets the brunt of criticism more than the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), one of the largest civil-rights groups in the United States, and one in the news recently because both John McCain and Barack Obama addressed the organization during its recent national convention. Professional pendejos like Michelle Malkin hissed a fit, calling NCLR seditious and accusing the two presidential candidates of legitimizing hate by visiting them — all this over two Spanish words. Betcha they've never read the primary source from which "la raza" originated — José Vasconcelos' 1925 booklet, La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race). Vasconcelos — Mexico's first secretary of public education — wrote his piece as a reaction to the race thinking of the time, one dominated by adherents of Darwinism and Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" prism that placed the gabacho above all people. The Mexican intellectual also subscribed to racial stratifications, but whereas others saw unavoidable strife, Vasconcelos imagined something greater. La Raza Cósmica is a classic work of the prophetic tradition, one where Vasconcelos predicted humanity would evolve into a fifth race, one free of the negative attributes each racial group possessed to create a harmonious existence — the cosmic race, la raza cósmica. Crucially, Vasconcelos never stated Mexicans were that race but rather wrote that Latin America's legacy of mestizaje posited "Ibero-Americans" as prime acolytes to spread the gospel of fusion — not through violence, but "the triumph of fecund love." The raza cósmica theory is utopian and even goofy in execution — Vasconcelos cited the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Atlantis, alchemy texts and even the Pythagorean concept of the number eight as possessing divine qualities to bolster his position — but it's ultimately an anti-racist dream. Vasconcelos was by no means perfect — he didn't like ugly people, and was too fixated on the superiority of Spanish qualities — but his ideal is one not that removed from that American standby, the melting pot. He even understood the humanity of gabachos — "The exclusion of the Yankee [from la raza cósmica], like the exclusion of any other human type, would be equivalent to an anticipated mutilation, more deadly even than a later cut." I don't remember Hitler talking about including non-Aryans into his Thousand-Year Reich, or Americans including non-gabachos in Manifest Destiny, for that matter. Needless to say, Vasconcelos' theory gained fans across Latin America — imagine a sociologist stating miscegenation was okay! But it wasn't until the 1960s Chicano movement that the concept of la raza cósmica gained further followers. Like most things they took from Mexico (food, women, the language), Chicanos corrupted Vasconcelos' vision, interpreted "la raza" as referring exclusively to Mexicans and forgot the whole brotherhood bit. "It is true that mestizaje is one of the central concepts of the Vasconcelos essay," states the introduction to Didier T. Jaén's excellent translation of La Raza Cósmica, "but, of course, it is also clear that the racial mixture Vasconcelos refers to is much wider, much more encompassing, than what can be understood by the mestizaje of the Mexican or Chicano." Like Vasconcelos, however, the Chicano definition of "la raza" was rooted in its turbulent time. It was during this era that the organization that preceded NCLR incorporated that term to its name in 1972. But over the decades, the cósmica part of la raza was largely dropped, as was the ethnocentrism, and what remained was a benign synonym for Mexicans. People can disagree with NCLR's policies — amnesty for illegals, better education for Latinos (not just the Mexis), funding other nonprofits — but to classify them as the Tan Klan because of their name is like a prude getting offended over the name of the titmouse. By the way, coming haters: Don't paint me as an NCLR apologist. I think the organization's president, Janet Murguia, is stupid for trying to get right-wing pundits off the air, mostly because they're so easy to prove wrong. Besides, the only raza that truly matters is mine: the Nerd race. Por mis Nerds todo; fuera de mis Nerds, nada. Click here for the Mexican on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiPFUDB4l7U --- On Sat, 8/2/08, Robert Lopez <robertslopez14@yahoo.com> wrote: From: Robert Lopez <robertslopez14@yahoo.com> Subject: To: "sacranative@yahoo.com" <sacranative@yahoo.com> Date: Saturday, August 2, 2008, 9:19 AMjose vasconcelos 1925 booklet la raza comica look up |
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Report Credits Drop in Illegal Immigrants to Enforcement: Wash Post
| Study Was Based on Census Data That Indicate Number of Less-Educated Hispanics Has Declined By N.C. Aizenman Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 31, 2008; A16 A report released yesterday by a Washington think tank that advocates stricter limits on immigration says the number of illegal immigrants in the country appears to have declined significantly over the past year, at least partly because of the chilling effect of stepped-up enforcement. The study by the Center for Immigration Studies based its findings on census data that indicate that the number of less-educated, working-age Hispanic immigrants, defined as 18-to-40-year-olds with a high school diploma or less, has dropped by more than 10 percent, or about 830,000 people, since last August. Previous research suggests that a large share of less-educated foreigners is in the country illegally and that it makes up the bulk of the illegal immigrant population. Furthermore, although earlier declines in the number of these Hispanic immigrants have been linked to a rise in their unemployment rate, the current drop-off began last year almost immediately after Congress abandoned legislation to legalize undocumented immigrants and six months before any significant rise in their unemployment rate had occurred. During the same period, the number of foreigners who were more educated or non-Hispanic, and therefore far less likely to be illegal immigrants, continued to rise or hold steady. "The evidence is consistent with the idea that at least initially, more robust enforcement caused the number of illegal immigrants to decline significantly," said Steven A. Camarota, one of the study's authors. "Some people seem to think illegals are so permanently anchored in the United States that there is no possibility of them leaving. . . . This suggests they're not correct. Some significant share might respond to changing incentives and leave." Several demographers who specialize in estimating the illegal immigrant population expressed concern about the limits of the study's methodology but said they found the possibility that the illegal immigrant population is decreasing plausible. Determining the actual amount of that decline, however, is far more controversial. The census does not ask about immigration status. Instead, government and independent researchers use a variety of techniques to estimate the number of immigrants in the country illegally. One way is to subtract the number of visas, permanent residency permits and naturalizations granted each year from the total number of foreigners counted by the census. The difference between the number of foreigners who can be accounted for through such records and the total number tallied by the census is considered to be the size of the illegal immigrant population. Camarota and co-author Karen Jensenius took a different approach, calculating the previous ratio between the number of less-educated Hispanic immigrants counted by the census and the total illegal immigrant population estimated by government researchers, and then applying that ratio to the new, lower number of less-educated, working-age Hispanic immigrants to come up with a new estimate for the total illegal immigrant population. According to their calculations, from August of last year to May, the illegal immigrant population declined by about 11 percent, to about 11.17 million from a high of 12.49 million. One drawback of Camarota's and Jensenius's method, noted the Pew Hispanic Center's Jeffrey S. Passel, a widely regarded expert on estimating the illegal immigrant population, is that "it tracks something that correlates with the number of illegal immigrants rather than the actual number of illegal immigrants, and it assumes the correlation remains the same." "If the ratio [between the number of less-educated Hispanic adults and the total number of illegal immigrants] has changed, then the trend could be very different," Passel said. Even more contentious is the question of what, if anything, the study's findings indicate about the impact that recent national and local immigration policies might have had on the size of the illegal immigrant population. Since December, the unemployment rate of less-educated, working-age Hispanics has risen to 7.06 percent from 4.93 percent, making it that much more difficult to determine whether the continued decline in their population during this period was the result of anything beyond basic economics. But Camarota and Jensenius suggest that the six-month decline that occurred after the failure of the legalization legislation and before the rise of these workers' unemployment rate is one of several examples of a link between immigration policy and immigrant choices. They note, for instance, that starting in May of last year, when Congress's consideration of the legalization plan began receiving widespread media attention, the number of less-educated, working-age Hispanics began to rise. "I call it the amnesty hump," Camarota said. He noted that the population increase during this period might not have been statistically significant, but "it seems that what was happening was that fewer illegal immigrants left than might otherwise have done so because they were hoping to qualify for legalization." Also up for interpretation is the degree to which the drop in the number of less-educated Hispanic adults (and, by inference, illegal immigrants) was the result of fewer foreigners entering the country or more of them leaving. The U.S. Border Patrol reported a 20 percent decline in apprehensions along the southern border over fiscal 2007, a possible indication that fewer illegal immigrants attempted to enter the country. Camarota and Jensenius note that census data do not answer the question. But the authors suggest that if less-educated Hispanic adults were not leaving in greater numbers than before, their total population would merely grow more slowly, not decline steeply. Among those who are leaving, the vast majority are probably doing so on their own. Despite a surge in work site raids and other enforcement measures, as well as decisions by various state and local governments to train their police to identify illegal immigrants, only 285,000 immigrants were removed from the United States last year, and many of those were formerly legal immigrants who lost their status after committing a crime. Camarota and Jensenius said they take this as possible evidence that tougher enforcement can have a multiplier effect, scaring many more illegal immigrants into leaving of their own accord than authorities can pick up. And the authors suggest that if the trends they identify are sustained, "it would cut the illegal population in half within just five years." However, Randolph Capps, a researcher with the Urban Institute who has studied the number of U.S. children born to illegal immigrants, cautioned against such reasoning. Even if all the findings in the study by Camarota and Jensenius prove correct, he said, it is probable that the first million illegal immigrants to leave were those who had arrived more recently and had the weakest ties to the United States. The remainder, including the more than half of illegal immigrant adults who have children in the United States, Capps said, are less likely to leave unless they are removed by the government. "Having a kid in school provides a really strong incentive to stay," he said. In addition, "People who are more settled in the United States have more options. They can move to another [state or county] where enforcement is not as strict. If they lose a job, they can find another. If one member of the family is arrested and deported, they can find other relatives to stay with." >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Peter S. Lopez ~ aka:Peta Sacramento, California, Aztlan Email: sacranative@yahoo.com C/S |
Cervical cancer toll high in Latin America: Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-cervical-cancer-wn-0730jul30,0,1911135.story Cervical cancer toll high in Latin America By Donald G. McNeil Jr. | New York Times News Service July 30, 2008
Cervical cancer, which can be prevented by a vaccine or detected early by Pap smears, kills 33,000 women in Latin America and the Caribbean a year, according to a recent study. Better screening and an affordable vaccine for girls could reduce the deaths, which could increase to 70,000 a year by 2030 if nothing is done, the authors said. The study, sponsored by the Sabin Vaccine Institute, the Pan American Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others, compiled 15 years of research. It is the first major assessment of the effects of the human papillomavirus in the region. The virus, which is sexually transmitted and causes most cases of cervical cancer, infects 20 percent to 30 percent of young women in the region. Because too few cases are detected early, it is a common cause of cancer death. In the United States, where Pap smears are a routine part of medical care paid for by health insurance, just 2.5 percent of all cancer deaths among women are cervical cancer. In Haiti, 49 percent are. The countries with the highest rates included Haiti, Bolivia, Paraguay, Belize, Peru, Guyana, Nicaragua and Venezuela. A vaccine that prevents infection by the most dangerous strains of the virus costs $360 in the United States, far more than the health systems of most Latin American countries can afford. The study's goal was to estimate the disease's burden on the region and calculate how many years of life could be saved in each country with Pap smears or affordable vaccines. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Related Link: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> |