COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS
MAY 31, 2008
RAZA STUDIES: A CEREMONIAL DISCOURSE
BY ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
Atop the hills of the Nahuatl-speaking village of Ocotepec, Morelos,
Mexico, while a colony of red ants is carrying maiz kernels on their
backs, an elder explains: "These are the ants of Quetzalcoatl."
The sensation is magical. In a metaphorical sense, the ants are acting
out a cosmic drama. It and similar stories – which can be considered a
ceremonial discourse – are recorded in many of the ancient
Mesoamerican amoxtlis or codices of how maiz or cintli came to the
people. They are also recorded in songs and dances and in the
collective memory of the maiz-based cultures of the Americas.
In the nearby village of Amatlan, the late elder, Don Felipe Alvarado
Peralta, relates from memory the following story:
At the dawn of the Fifth Sun, after humans were created, Quetzalcoatl
– bringer of civilization, writing, the calendar and the arts – is put
in charge of finding food for the people. Walking along, Quetzalcoatl
notices a red ant carrying a kernel of corn. Quetzalcoatl asks:
"What's that on your back?"
"Cintli," replies the ant. "Maiz. It is our sustenance."
"Where did you get it?"
Reluctantly, the ant points toward Tonalcatepetl – the mountain of
sustenance. "Follow me."
When they arrive, the only way into the mountain is through a small
opening. At that, Quetzalcoatl transforms into a small black ant. Once
inside the mountain, Quetzalcoatl sees the maiz and takes it,
proceeding to bring it to the "lords" in Tamuanchan. There, they
approve of it. Unable to bring Tonalcatepetl itself, Quetzalcoatl
instead brings the seeds to the people.
This ancient story of the Nahuatl peoples of Mexico was recorded in
the Chimolpopoca Codex of 1548. Don Felipe was reputedly the keeper of
the stories of the Quetzalcoatl priest, Ce Topitzin, who had been born
in the ancient city of Amatlan some 1200 years earlier. One such story
was about the association between Nahuatl-speaking Mexican
revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and Quetzalcoatl. He related that during
the 1910-1920 Revolution, Zapata had hid in the caves above Amatlan –
the same caves associated with Ce Topitzin. After Ce Topiltzin's
schooling in nearby Xochicalco, he also later left his impressionable
civilizational mark throughout Mesoamerica, including the ancient
cities of Cholula, Tula, Cacaxtla and Chichen Itza. Known as a wise
and peaceful elder, he took his name from the much older or mythic
Quetzalcoatl – the plumed or beautiful serpent – whose presence is
also recorded in the ancient city of Tollan-Teotihuacan. According to
Maya scholar, Domingo Martinez Paredez, in Un Continente y Una
Cultura, Quetzalcoatl is known by various names throughout the
continent, including Kulkulkan among the Maya of Yucatan, Gucumatz
among the Maya Quiche of Guatemala, Itzam among the Huastecas, Tohil
among the Zapotecas and Arara among the Andean Quechuas. This plumed
or water serpent reputedly also goes by several other names in what is
today the U.S. Northeast, Southwest and Northwest.
While it is not certain when and where maiz was specifically created,
most botanists place the age of maiz somewhere in the vicinity of
7,000 years in Southern Mexico and /or Central America. Oral
traditions generally agree with this framework and scenario.
While there are plenty of variations, Mesoamerican cultures appear to
have sprung forth from a common root – maiz. Thus, many share similar
stories of mythic or hero twins who battle lords of the underworld in
a cosmic ballgame; stories of a plumed or beautiful serpent; and the
attempts to create humans, first out of mud, then wood, and finally
maize, as recounted in the ancient Popul Vuh, the Maya creation book.
It includes maize-based calendars and similar cosmovisions, including
the belief in the sacredness of maiz. As Guillermo Bonfil Batalla
argued in Mexico Profundo, maiz itself is the civilizational impulse
or germinational seed that triggered Mesoamerica's development. Traces
of that impulse can still be seen today throughout Turtle Island or
the Americas, including wherever corn, beans and squash – wherever
tortillas and chile – are being eaten.
* * * *
This society tells people of Mexican/Central and South American
descent that they don't belong; witness the massive immigration raids
sweeping the nation and the clamor for a 2,000 mile wall. At best,
they are told that they are subservient. This maiz discourse, which
underpins Raza-Mexican American Studies nationwide, tells a different
story. The primary stories teach respect and that as humans, we are
all equal. It is such stories, contained in the codices, that were
destroyed by fanatical priests during the colonial era. Contrary to
the myths [about Raza Studies in Tucson and Semillas del Pueblo in Los
Angeles] that are being foisted upon by new would-be censors – rather
than subvert Western Civilization – these stories provide an
invaluable glimpse of the continent's history. And similar to
Greco-Roman, Chinese and Egyptian stories, they are part of our human
legacy and heritage.
* Positive Representation in Education has been formed to Save Raza
Studies. They have a listserv at: notosb1108@lists.riseup.net. Also, a
petition to Save Raza Studies can be found at:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-raza-studies
Rodriguez can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com or 520-743-0376. Column
of the Americas PO BOX 85476 -- Tucson, AZ 85754. The column is
archived at: http://web.mac.com/columnoftheamericas/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html
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6/6/08
La JBG El Camino del Futuro denuncia la incursión militar de 200 soldados
Jun 5, 2008
La JBG El Camino del Futuro denuncia la incursión militar de 200 soldados, así como policías y judiciales, en los pueblos zapatistas de Hermenegildo Galeana y San Alejandro, del Caracol de La Garrucha.
CARACOL DE RESISTECIA
HACIA UN NUEVO AMANECER
JUNTA DE BUEN GOBIERNO
EL CAMINO DEL FUTURO
CHIAPAS, MÉXICO
4 DE JUNIO DEL 2008
DENUNCIA.
ACTO DE PROVOCACIÓN
El que suscribe, la Junta de Buen Gobierno El Camino del Futuro.
Al pueblo de México y al mundo, a los compañeros y compañeras de la otra campaña de México y del mundo, a los medios de comunicación nacional e internacional, a los defensores de los derechos humanos, a los organismos no gubernametal honestos:
Por medio de la presente, la Junta de Buen Gobierno El Camino del Futuro, Chiapas, México, denuncia:
1. Columna de convoy militar y seguridad pública y policía municipal y PGR, a las 9 de la mañana, hora sur oriental, 2 carros grandes de soldado y 3 carros chicos de soldado y 2 carros de seguridad pública, 2 carros de policía municipal y una tanqueta y un carro de PGR.
2. Un total de alrededor de 200 provocadores.
3. Antes de entrar en el pueblo de Garrucha, sede del Caracol, a 30 metros de la orilla del pueblo, se paran 3 convoy y bajan del carro 4 soldados, como queriendo flanquear al pueblo de Garrucha, aprovechando de nuestro camino del trabajadero colectivo de milpa, reacciona el pueblo para rechazarlo y empiezan a organizarse, al instante los soldados suben de su carro y siguen su camino, mientras los otros que están adelante está intimidando a la población tomando películas y fotografiando, y así mientras están esperando los que están provocando.
4. Llegando en la otra posición de los soldados de Patiwitz, se incorpora otro convoy militar con rumbo a donde fueron a provocar nuevamente.
5. Llegan a la ranchería de Rancho Alegre, conocido como Chapuyil.
6. Se bajan todos en sus carros y agarran rumbo al pueblo de Hermenegildo Galeana, donde todos y todas son bases de apoyo zapatistas, acusando que en ese pueblo tienen sembradillos de mariguanas.
7. Toda la zona zapatista de Garrucha y sus autoridades autónomos somos testigos que no existe plantíos, sólo hay zapatistas y hay trabajadero de milpa y platanar, y están dispuestas y dispuestos a luchar por libertad, justicia y democracia. Rechazar cualquier provocación.
8. Como 100 soldado y 10 seguridad pública y 4 judicial se disponen a ir a enfrentar al pueblo de Galeana, todos los represores se pintan la cara para confundirse y no sean reconocidos dentro del monte, caminan unos tramos del camino y se meten al monte y así van avanzando rumbo al pueblo.
9. Es guiado por una persona llamado Feliciano Román Ruiz y es conocido que es policía municipal de Ocosingo el quien lleva a la columna de federales.
10. El pueblo de Galeana, hombres, mujeres, niñas y niños, se organizan para rechazarlos dispuestos y dispuestas a lo que salga.
11. En el medio del camino se encuentran y comienza el alboroto, llenos de coraje, las zapatistas mujeres y hombres, niños, niñas, diciéndoles a los soldados que regresen, y diciéndoles que no los necesitan aquí, queremos libertad, justicia y democracia, no soldados.
12. Los soldados responden: venimos aquí porque sabemos que hay marihuana y vamos a pasar a huevos, y es ahí donde el pueblo sacan sus machetes, palos, piedras, resorteras, hondas y todo lo que haya en el alcance de la mano y empieza el rechazo.
13. Los soldados dicen: esta vez no vamos a pasar, pero regresamos en 15 días y eso sí a huevos vamos a pasar.
14. Toman otro rumbo para bajar en otro poblado llamado San Alejandro, pueblo zapatista bases de apoyo, ahí estaban esperando 9 carros con 50 soldados y 10 policías municipales.
15. Donde bajaron los soldados, dejaron pisoteado el sembradillo de maíz, que es único alimento del pueblo para vivir.
16. Mientras, en el poblado zapatista de San Alejandro 60 represores provocadores se posicionaron como para estar dispuesto al enfrentamiento.
17. Reacciona el pueblo y toman lo que encuentran a la mano y rechazan a la fuerza federal.
18. En esta provocación participaron soldados de Toniná y soldados de Patiwitz y soldados de San Quintín.
19. Pueblo de México y al mundo queremos decirles que no será tan tarde habrá enfrentamiento y eso si es provocado por Calderón y Juan Sabines y Carlos Leonel Solórzano, presidente municipal de Ocosingo. Mandando a sus perros de represores de cualquier corporación.
No somos narcotraficantes, somos lo que ya saben hermanos y hermanas de México y del mundo.
Está claro que vienen por nosotros los y las zapatistas, y vienen los 3 niveles de malos gobiernos encima de nosotros, y nosotros estamos dispuestos de resistir y si es necesario cumplir nuestro lema, que es: vivir por la patria o morir por la libertad.
20. Pueblo de México y el mundo, ustedes saben que nuestra lucha está dirigida en la lucha política y pacífica, como dice nuestra Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona, lucha política y pacífica, conocido como OTRA CAMPAÑA y vean por dónde viene la provocación de la violencia.
21. Compañeras y compañeros de la otra campaña de México y de otros países, pedimos que estén atentos, porque los soldados dijeron que en 15 días vendrán nuevamente, no queremos guerra, queremos paz y con justicia y dignidad. No nos queda de otra, defender, rechazar y resistir porque nos vienen a buscar para enfrentarnos, por eso nos está buscando a nosotros, los pueblos zapatistas bases de apoyo.
22. Sólo nos queda decirles que vean por dónde viene esta provocación. Ahí los estamos informando si es que nos da tiempo.
Es todo nuestras palabras
A T E N T A M E NT E
La Junta de Buen Gobierno
Elena Gordillo Clara Claribel Pérez López
Freddy Rodríguez López Rolando Ruiz Hernández
La JBG El Camino del Futuro denuncia la incursión militar de 200 soldados, así como policías y judiciales, en los pueblos zapatistas de Hermenegildo Galeana y San Alejandro, del Caracol de La Garrucha.
CARACOL DE RESISTECIA
HACIA UN NUEVO AMANECER
JUNTA DE BUEN GOBIERNO
EL CAMINO DEL FUTURO
CHIAPAS, MÉXICO
4 DE JUNIO DEL 2008
DENUNCIA.
ACTO DE PROVOCACIÓN
El que suscribe, la Junta de Buen Gobierno El Camino del Futuro.
Al pueblo de México y al mundo, a los compañeros y compañeras de la otra campaña de México y del mundo, a los medios de comunicación nacional e internacional, a los defensores de los derechos humanos, a los organismos no gubernametal honestos:
Por medio de la presente, la Junta de Buen Gobierno El Camino del Futuro, Chiapas, México, denuncia:
1. Columna de convoy militar y seguridad pública y policía municipal y PGR, a las 9 de la mañana, hora sur oriental, 2 carros grandes de soldado y 3 carros chicos de soldado y 2 carros de seguridad pública, 2 carros de policía municipal y una tanqueta y un carro de PGR.
2. Un total de alrededor de 200 provocadores.
3. Antes de entrar en el pueblo de Garrucha, sede del Caracol, a 30 metros de la orilla del pueblo, se paran 3 convoy y bajan del carro 4 soldados, como queriendo flanquear al pueblo de Garrucha, aprovechando de nuestro camino del trabajadero colectivo de milpa, reacciona el pueblo para rechazarlo y empiezan a organizarse, al instante los soldados suben de su carro y siguen su camino, mientras los otros que están adelante está intimidando a la población tomando películas y fotografiando, y así mientras están esperando los que están provocando.
4. Llegando en la otra posición de los soldados de Patiwitz, se incorpora otro convoy militar con rumbo a donde fueron a provocar nuevamente.
5. Llegan a la ranchería de Rancho Alegre, conocido como Chapuyil.
6. Se bajan todos en sus carros y agarran rumbo al pueblo de Hermenegildo Galeana, donde todos y todas son bases de apoyo zapatistas, acusando que en ese pueblo tienen sembradillos de mariguanas.
7. Toda la zona zapatista de Garrucha y sus autoridades autónomos somos testigos que no existe plantíos, sólo hay zapatistas y hay trabajadero de milpa y platanar, y están dispuestas y dispuestos a luchar por libertad, justicia y democracia. Rechazar cualquier provocación.
8. Como 100 soldado y 10 seguridad pública y 4 judicial se disponen a ir a enfrentar al pueblo de Galeana, todos los represores se pintan la cara para confundirse y no sean reconocidos dentro del monte, caminan unos tramos del camino y se meten al monte y así van avanzando rumbo al pueblo.
9. Es guiado por una persona llamado Feliciano Román Ruiz y es conocido que es policía municipal de Ocosingo el quien lleva a la columna de federales.
10. El pueblo de Galeana, hombres, mujeres, niñas y niños, se organizan para rechazarlos dispuestos y dispuestas a lo que salga.
11. En el medio del camino se encuentran y comienza el alboroto, llenos de coraje, las zapatistas mujeres y hombres, niños, niñas, diciéndoles a los soldados que regresen, y diciéndoles que no los necesitan aquí, queremos libertad, justicia y democracia, no soldados.
12. Los soldados responden: venimos aquí porque sabemos que hay marihuana y vamos a pasar a huevos, y es ahí donde el pueblo sacan sus machetes, palos, piedras, resorteras, hondas y todo lo que haya en el alcance de la mano y empieza el rechazo.
13. Los soldados dicen: esta vez no vamos a pasar, pero regresamos en 15 días y eso sí a huevos vamos a pasar.
14. Toman otro rumbo para bajar en otro poblado llamado San Alejandro, pueblo zapatista bases de apoyo, ahí estaban esperando 9 carros con 50 soldados y 10 policías municipales.
15. Donde bajaron los soldados, dejaron pisoteado el sembradillo de maíz, que es único alimento del pueblo para vivir.
16. Mientras, en el poblado zapatista de San Alejandro 60 represores provocadores se posicionaron como para estar dispuesto al enfrentamiento.
17. Reacciona el pueblo y toman lo que encuentran a la mano y rechazan a la fuerza federal.
18. En esta provocación participaron soldados de Toniná y soldados de Patiwitz y soldados de San Quintín.
19. Pueblo de México y al mundo queremos decirles que no será tan tarde habrá enfrentamiento y eso si es provocado por Calderón y Juan Sabines y Carlos Leonel Solórzano, presidente municipal de Ocosingo. Mandando a sus perros de represores de cualquier corporación.
No somos narcotraficantes, somos lo que ya saben hermanos y hermanas de México y del mundo.
Está claro que vienen por nosotros los y las zapatistas, y vienen los 3 niveles de malos gobiernos encima de nosotros, y nosotros estamos dispuestos de resistir y si es necesario cumplir nuestro lema, que es: vivir por la patria o morir por la libertad.
20. Pueblo de México y el mundo, ustedes saben que nuestra lucha está dirigida en la lucha política y pacífica, como dice nuestra Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona, lucha política y pacífica, conocido como OTRA CAMPAÑA y vean por dónde viene la provocación de la violencia.
21. Compañeras y compañeros de la otra campaña de México y de otros países, pedimos que estén atentos, porque los soldados dijeron que en 15 días vendrán nuevamente, no queremos guerra, queremos paz y con justicia y dignidad. No nos queda de otra, defender, rechazar y resistir porque nos vienen a buscar para enfrentarnos, por eso nos está buscando a nosotros, los pueblos zapatistas bases de apoyo.
22. Sólo nos queda decirles que vean por dónde viene esta provocación. Ahí los estamos informando si es que nos da tiempo.
Es todo nuestras palabras
A T E N T A M E NT E
La Junta de Buen Gobierno
Elena Gordillo Clara Claribel Pérez López
Freddy Rodríguez López Rolando Ruiz Hernández
6/2/08
New Targets For Tomato Pickers
New Targets For Tomato Pickers
June, 01 2008
By Dick Meister
Dick Meister's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food restaurants have done it. Now it's time for other fast-food chains to do it. And for WalMart, Whole Foods and the other large supermarket chains to do it.
It's time for them to join the drive to guarantee decent pay and decent working conditions to the highly exploited farmworkers who pick most of the country's tomatoes.
The pickers work in the Immokalee area of southern Florida. Most of them are undocumented Latinos who have had little choice but to accept the truly miserable conditions imposed on them.
They work under the blazing sun in open-air sweatshops -- usually from sunrise to sunset --for up to seven days a week. During a typical day, each of them picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. .
For all that, the pickers rarely get more than $10,000 a year. They have no paid holidays or vacations, no overtime pay, no health insurance, no sick leave, pensions or other benefits. No union rights.
Most of them are forced to live in crowded, dilapidated trailers. that rent for as much as $50 per person per week. After paying their rent and other expenses, they may net as little as $20 for a week of very hard labor.
Some of the workers are held in virtual slavery by the labor contractors who hire them for the tomato growers. The contractors make deductions from the workers' wages for transportation, food, housing and other services that can force them to turn over their entire paychecks and continue working against their will until their debts to the labor contractors are paid off.
It's been like that for years. But finally a coalition of workers, student, labor, community and religious activists, lawmakers and others has mounted a nationwide drive aimed at raising the workers' pay and improving their miserable working and living conditions.
They've been holding marches, rallies and other demonstrations, petition drives, and arguing their case before legislative committees. The coalition -- the Coalition of Immokalee Workers or CIW -- has been scoring some important victories.
The first victory came in 2005 after a four-year-long boycott against Taco Bell, which is owned by a corporation, Yum Brands, that also owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, A & W, Long John Silver's and All America Food Restaurants.
Yum Brands agreed to the CIW's demand that fast food restaurants increase by a penny what they had been paying growers for a pound of tomatoes and give the extra penny directly to workers. That would nearly double their pay of just a little over one cent per pound picked -- a piece rate that had not increased since the 1970s. That would add as much as $7,000 a year to the average picker's pay -- enough to provide a living wage.
The coalition also won the right to monitor the payment and treatment of workers, to investigate complaints about poor treatment, and to confer with growers on improving conditions.
Last year, the CIW won a similar agreement from industry leader McDonald's, just as it was about to carry out its threat to wage a nationwide boycott of the chain.
Just this month, the world's second largest fast-food chain, Burger King, came to terms. But reaching that agreement did take another nationwide boycott. Burger King, with annual revenues of well over $2 billion, held out for nearly a year.
Burger King didn't go down easily. It hired a private security firm that specializes in union busting to secretly obtain information about student and farm labor organizations that helped wage the boycott. The corporation's vice president actually posted derogatory comments about the coalition on You Tube and other internet outlets under an assumed name. Burger King also tried to pressure McDonald's and Yum Brands to rescind their agreements with the coalition.
But Burger King is singing a different tune now. The corporation's CEO, John Chidsey, apologized "for any negative statements about the CIW or its motives previously attributed to Burger King or its employees and now realize that those statements were wrong."
What's more, Chidsey pledged that Burger King will now work with the coalition "to further the common goal of improving Florida tomato farm workers' wages, working conditions and lives" and to seek "industry-wide, socially responsible change."
The CIW's Lucas Benitez also had something important to say. Once, he noted, the tomato pickers were treated as "just another tool and nothing more. But we aren't alone anymore. There are millions of consumers with us, willing to use their buying power to eliminate the exploitation behind the food they buy."
That's very likely to be proved once again at supermarkets and other fast-food outlets that have yet to do what desperately needs to be done.
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer. He's co-author of "A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America's Farm Workers" (Macmillan). Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/17784
June, 01 2008
By Dick Meister
Dick Meister's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace
Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food restaurants have done it. Now it's time for other fast-food chains to do it. And for WalMart, Whole Foods and the other large supermarket chains to do it.
It's time for them to join the drive to guarantee decent pay and decent working conditions to the highly exploited farmworkers who pick most of the country's tomatoes.
The pickers work in the Immokalee area of southern Florida. Most of them are undocumented Latinos who have had little choice but to accept the truly miserable conditions imposed on them.
They work under the blazing sun in open-air sweatshops -- usually from sunrise to sunset --for up to seven days a week. During a typical day, each of them picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. .
For all that, the pickers rarely get more than $10,000 a year. They have no paid holidays or vacations, no overtime pay, no health insurance, no sick leave, pensions or other benefits. No union rights.
Most of them are forced to live in crowded, dilapidated trailers. that rent for as much as $50 per person per week. After paying their rent and other expenses, they may net as little as $20 for a week of very hard labor.
Some of the workers are held in virtual slavery by the labor contractors who hire them for the tomato growers. The contractors make deductions from the workers' wages for transportation, food, housing and other services that can force them to turn over their entire paychecks and continue working against their will until their debts to the labor contractors are paid off.
It's been like that for years. But finally a coalition of workers, student, labor, community and religious activists, lawmakers and others has mounted a nationwide drive aimed at raising the workers' pay and improving their miserable working and living conditions.
They've been holding marches, rallies and other demonstrations, petition drives, and arguing their case before legislative committees. The coalition -- the Coalition of Immokalee Workers or CIW -- has been scoring some important victories.
The first victory came in 2005 after a four-year-long boycott against Taco Bell, which is owned by a corporation, Yum Brands, that also owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, A & W, Long John Silver's and All America Food Restaurants.
Yum Brands agreed to the CIW's demand that fast food restaurants increase by a penny what they had been paying growers for a pound of tomatoes and give the extra penny directly to workers. That would nearly double their pay of just a little over one cent per pound picked -- a piece rate that had not increased since the 1970s. That would add as much as $7,000 a year to the average picker's pay -- enough to provide a living wage.
The coalition also won the right to monitor the payment and treatment of workers, to investigate complaints about poor treatment, and to confer with growers on improving conditions.
Last year, the CIW won a similar agreement from industry leader McDonald's, just as it was about to carry out its threat to wage a nationwide boycott of the chain.
Just this month, the world's second largest fast-food chain, Burger King, came to terms. But reaching that agreement did take another nationwide boycott. Burger King, with annual revenues of well over $2 billion, held out for nearly a year.
Burger King didn't go down easily. It hired a private security firm that specializes in union busting to secretly obtain information about student and farm labor organizations that helped wage the boycott. The corporation's vice president actually posted derogatory comments about the coalition on You Tube and other internet outlets under an assumed name. Burger King also tried to pressure McDonald's and Yum Brands to rescind their agreements with the coalition.
But Burger King is singing a different tune now. The corporation's CEO, John Chidsey, apologized "for any negative statements about the CIW or its motives previously attributed to Burger King or its employees and now realize that those statements were wrong."
What's more, Chidsey pledged that Burger King will now work with the coalition "to further the common goal of improving Florida tomato farm workers' wages, working conditions and lives" and to seek "industry-wide, socially responsible change."
The CIW's Lucas Benitez also had something important to say. Once, he noted, the tomato pickers were treated as "just another tool and nothing more. But we aren't alone anymore. There are millions of consumers with us, willing to use their buying power to eliminate the exploitation behind the food they buy."
That's very likely to be proved once again at supermarkets and other fast-food outlets that have yet to do what desperately needs to be done.
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer. He's co-author of "A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America's Farm Workers" (Macmillan). Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/17784
Mixtecs on the border fall on hard times
Mixtecs on the border fall on hard times
© Indian Country Today June 02, 2008. All Rights Reserved
Posted: June 02, 2008
by: Victor Morales
Lagging economy affects southern neighbors
MEXICALI, Mexico - For eight years, indigenous Mixtecs from the Mexican southern state of Oaxaca have sustained themselves by selling merchandise to U.S.-bound travelers waiting in line to cross the border that divides Mexicali and Calexico in southeastern California.
The 150 Mixtecs have carved out a neighborhood in this sprawling frontier city of almost 1 million where foreign factories, including some of the biggest U.S. aerospace companies, have set up industrial plants. The Mixtecs park their jalopies in front of their tiny cinderblock homes not far from the city's Mercedes-Benz dealer and newest Wal-Mart. They have cell phones and their children attend public schools.
They have lived in relatively calm and reasonable conditions since joining the exodus escaping the 38 - 50 percent poverty level that Mexican think tank CONEVAL estimates plagues Oaxaca and other southern Mexican states in 2005 data.
But several abrupt forces have the Mexicali Mixtec cornered.
They have been ousted from the Mexican customs compound.
Mexicali municipal officials have agreed to allow them to sell on the city limits near the federal compound after the Mixtecs attended a council meeting to protest the federal government's treatment.
But the municipal officials issued few and expensive permits. And municipal officials have also issued a considerable amount of permits to other non-Mixtec vendors, a Mexicali spokesman said. The Mixtecs have traditionally monopolized the port, but now have to contend with more competition for fewer customers. The changes have many Mixtecs resenting the government, claiming they are targets of discrimination in a nation that still sees indigenous groups under a colonial eye and where they are ranked at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
''We are being taxed for this very ground we stand on,'' said Pedro Barrios, president of the Mixtec Civil Association.
Municipal officials said they have done much for the Mixtec by granting them the permits and soliciting assistance from the state of Baja California on their behalf. Each vendor has received $100 (U.S.) to replace merchandise lost or confiscated during the recent purges. But the Mexicali municipality has no control over access into the traveler-congested federal compound.
''In other words, the municipal government can't issue commercial permits for street vendors in that zone and, to put it simply, we don't have jurisdiction,'' Mexicali municipal spokesman Alejandro Dominguez said in an e-mail.
Mixtec vendors who have city permits stay within the city limits, but have few travelers to sell to. Those who don't, circumvent Mexican federal customs officers and sometimes their K-9s by rounding the port and precariously entering the port close to U.S. inspections stations through holes cut in fences. U.S. customs officers allow them at the port mostly because the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency does not have enough officers to shadow the vendors, said Billy Whitford, port director of the Calexico port of entry.
The Mixtec have also been impacted by the dwindling U.S. economy. Travelers, most with U.S. ties, buy less and bargain more.
For 29-year-old Fedilina Barrios, the $20 (U.S.) per day profit she used to make last year selling beverages was tolerable. Now she is lucky if she makes half that, she said.
''They don't buy anything. I don't know how long we could do this.''
In addition, officials of the U.S. border county of Imperial have claimed the long border lines have interrupted their economy. Their fervent pleads to U.S. authorities to mitigate prolonged wait times has the line down significantly since increased security measures were implemented after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But that has had an inverse effect on the Mixtecs who depend on the lines.
Altogether, the shorter lines, fewer customers and increased competition, scrutiny and consumer fear are forcing the Mixtecs to rethink their future on the frontier. For the first time since settling in Mexicali, they are mulling over the idea of traveling yet farther north and working in the U.S. as farm workers.
''If we don't have any other choice, we may have to do it. We are beginning to look into it,'' Barrios said.
© Indian Country Today June 02, 2008. All Rights Reserved
Posted: June 02, 2008
by: Victor Morales
Lagging economy affects southern neighbors
MEXICALI, Mexico - For eight years, indigenous Mixtecs from the Mexican southern state of Oaxaca have sustained themselves by selling merchandise to U.S.-bound travelers waiting in line to cross the border that divides Mexicali and Calexico in southeastern California.
The 150 Mixtecs have carved out a neighborhood in this sprawling frontier city of almost 1 million where foreign factories, including some of the biggest U.S. aerospace companies, have set up industrial plants. The Mixtecs park their jalopies in front of their tiny cinderblock homes not far from the city's Mercedes-Benz dealer and newest Wal-Mart. They have cell phones and their children attend public schools.
They have lived in relatively calm and reasonable conditions since joining the exodus escaping the 38 - 50 percent poverty level that Mexican think tank CONEVAL estimates plagues Oaxaca and other southern Mexican states in 2005 data.
But several abrupt forces have the Mexicali Mixtec cornered.
They have been ousted from the Mexican customs compound.
Mexicali municipal officials have agreed to allow them to sell on the city limits near the federal compound after the Mixtecs attended a council meeting to protest the federal government's treatment.
But the municipal officials issued few and expensive permits. And municipal officials have also issued a considerable amount of permits to other non-Mixtec vendors, a Mexicali spokesman said. The Mixtecs have traditionally monopolized the port, but now have to contend with more competition for fewer customers. The changes have many Mixtecs resenting the government, claiming they are targets of discrimination in a nation that still sees indigenous groups under a colonial eye and where they are ranked at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
''We are being taxed for this very ground we stand on,'' said Pedro Barrios, president of the Mixtec Civil Association.
Municipal officials said they have done much for the Mixtec by granting them the permits and soliciting assistance from the state of Baja California on their behalf. Each vendor has received $100 (U.S.) to replace merchandise lost or confiscated during the recent purges. But the Mexicali municipality has no control over access into the traveler-congested federal compound.
''In other words, the municipal government can't issue commercial permits for street vendors in that zone and, to put it simply, we don't have jurisdiction,'' Mexicali municipal spokesman Alejandro Dominguez said in an e-mail.
Mixtec vendors who have city permits stay within the city limits, but have few travelers to sell to. Those who don't, circumvent Mexican federal customs officers and sometimes their K-9s by rounding the port and precariously entering the port close to U.S. inspections stations through holes cut in fences. U.S. customs officers allow them at the port mostly because the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency does not have enough officers to shadow the vendors, said Billy Whitford, port director of the Calexico port of entry.
The Mixtec have also been impacted by the dwindling U.S. economy. Travelers, most with U.S. ties, buy less and bargain more.
For 29-year-old Fedilina Barrios, the $20 (U.S.) per day profit she used to make last year selling beverages was tolerable. Now she is lucky if she makes half that, she said.
''They don't buy anything. I don't know how long we could do this.''
In addition, officials of the U.S. border county of Imperial have claimed the long border lines have interrupted their economy. Their fervent pleads to U.S. authorities to mitigate prolonged wait times has the line down significantly since increased security measures were implemented after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But that has had an inverse effect on the Mixtecs who depend on the lines.
Altogether, the shorter lines, fewer customers and increased competition, scrutiny and consumer fear are forcing the Mixtecs to rethink their future on the frontier. For the first time since settling in Mexicali, they are mulling over the idea of traveling yet farther north and working in the U.S. as farm workers.
''If we don't have any other choice, we may have to do it. We are beginning to look into it,'' Barrios said.
Un buen paso frente a la carrera armamentista
Un buen paso frente a la carrera armamentista
Editorial Gara
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=68180&titular=un-buen-paso-frente-a-la-carrera-armamentista-
La Conferencia de Dublín ha concluido con un éxito rotundo al haber conseguido sus organizadores que un total de 111 gobiernos de todo el mundo firmen un Tratado Internacional contra las bombas de racimo, uno de los tipos de armamento más peligrosos, mortales e indiscriminados. En sí mismo ese tratado supone un gran paso adelante frente a la carrera armamentista promovida durante décadas por las principales potencias, especialmente los Estados Unidos de América. Y es que la mayoría de países y poblaciones que han sido víctimas de bombardeos masivos con este tipo de armas, lo han sido de la mano de los EUA, como Irak, o cuando menos con su apoyo explícito, como Líbano. Tanto gobiernos firmantes como movimientos sociales contrarios al desarrollo de la industria armamentística coinciden en valorar positivamente el acuerdo adoptado que, además, no admite ni prórroga ni enmienda.
No obstante, hay que destacar que el tratado firmado ayer se da en el marco del Proceso de Oslo, que ha sido deliberadamente organizado al margen de las Naciones Unidas para poder así evitar el veto de los miembros del Consejo de Seguridad. Es evidente que la iniciativa ha tenido éxito, puesto que exceptuando al Estado francés y a Gran Bretaña, ninguno de los otros miembros de ese Consejo -Rusia, China y los EUA- ni sus más cercanos y peligrosos aliados militares y políticos -por ejemplo Israel, Pakistán o India- han rubricado el documento. Eso evidencia que, de haberse dado el mismo debate en el marco de la ONU, la iniciativa hubiese caído en un camino burocrático sin salida.
Todo ello debería llevar a la reflexión y a una acción concertada a aquellos países y a aquellas organizaciones internacionales que aún creen en unas relaciones internacionales más justas, equitativas y libres. Así mismo, debería desembocar en una profunda reorganización de las mal llamadas Naciones Unidas. Pero eso será otro día, porque hoy es el momento para celebrar una de las pocas noticias positivas que llegan de este ámbito en muchos años.
Editorial Gara
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=68180&titular=un-buen-paso-frente-a-la-carrera-armamentista-
La Conferencia de Dublín ha concluido con un éxito rotundo al haber conseguido sus organizadores que un total de 111 gobiernos de todo el mundo firmen un Tratado Internacional contra las bombas de racimo, uno de los tipos de armamento más peligrosos, mortales e indiscriminados. En sí mismo ese tratado supone un gran paso adelante frente a la carrera armamentista promovida durante décadas por las principales potencias, especialmente los Estados Unidos de América. Y es que la mayoría de países y poblaciones que han sido víctimas de bombardeos masivos con este tipo de armas, lo han sido de la mano de los EUA, como Irak, o cuando menos con su apoyo explícito, como Líbano. Tanto gobiernos firmantes como movimientos sociales contrarios al desarrollo de la industria armamentística coinciden en valorar positivamente el acuerdo adoptado que, además, no admite ni prórroga ni enmienda.
No obstante, hay que destacar que el tratado firmado ayer se da en el marco del Proceso de Oslo, que ha sido deliberadamente organizado al margen de las Naciones Unidas para poder así evitar el veto de los miembros del Consejo de Seguridad. Es evidente que la iniciativa ha tenido éxito, puesto que exceptuando al Estado francés y a Gran Bretaña, ninguno de los otros miembros de ese Consejo -Rusia, China y los EUA- ni sus más cercanos y peligrosos aliados militares y políticos -por ejemplo Israel, Pakistán o India- han rubricado el documento. Eso evidencia que, de haberse dado el mismo debate en el marco de la ONU, la iniciativa hubiese caído en un camino burocrático sin salida.
Todo ello debería llevar a la reflexión y a una acción concertada a aquellos países y a aquellas organizaciones internacionales que aún creen en unas relaciones internacionales más justas, equitativas y libres. Así mismo, debería desembocar en una profunda reorganización de las mal llamadas Naciones Unidas. Pero eso será otro día, porque hoy es el momento para celebrar una de las pocas noticias positivas que llegan de este ámbito en muchos años.
Two Years Later in Oaxaca: Part II
Two Years Later in Oaxaca: Part II
What’s The Difference? - Networking and Local Autonomy: The Thigh Bone’s Connected to The Knee Bone
http://www.narconews.com/Issue54/article3123.html
By Nancy Davies
Commentary from Oaxaca
June 2, 2008
Read Part I of this series here.
Part II
Oaxaca, Mexico now serves as the crossroad for national social movements – and perhaps international ones as well, according to David Venegas, the former political prisoner and activist of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials).
The annual occupations by frustrated members of Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE in its Spanish initals) in their 2008 strike add to the frustration of the population. Permission to convoke a statewide teachers assembly to legitimize new officials for Section 22 within SNTE is clearly a union-busting maneuver, and a dangerous one at that. Stymied by the unsavory Elba Esther Gordillo, abetted by Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO) in not yielding on this most important union piece, the tension grows in Oaxaca as we approach the June 14 anniversary of the movement.
Section 22 in the midst of their struggle incorporated other concerns, particularly the privatization of the petroleum industry. This is the legitimate task of teachers – they plow the ground; the social movement plants the seeds. Inside the teachers’ plantón, education proceeds. Alongside the encampment in the Alameda, another anti-privatization forum took place on May 29, sponsored by the National Democratic Alternative (ADN) of the National Democratic Party (PRD).
And if the avalanche of initials and organizations overwhelms you, so does it me –organizations and sectors of organizations are multiplying like rabbits.
Barring another not impossible social explosion, the changes in Oaxaca answer this query:
Where is the APPO? My response, and the difference after the 2006 events, is people organizing on the ground. A network of activists spread across the state who are all, in some sense “the APPO.” As David Venegas told me, when the youth caravan El Sendero del Jaguar arrived in small communities on the Isthmus in May, although the youngsters do not identify themselves as APPO (many don’t belong to the APPO), the townspeople rushed out to meet them shouting “the APPO is coming! The APPO is here!”
We Are All The APPO
The main body of the APPO, those thousands who took to the streets in 2006, are not attending quarrelsome ideological meetings – but they haven’t vanished. “The head bone‘s connected to the neck bone, the neck bone’s connected to the shoulder bone…, now hear the word of the Lord!” Good song. The word of the Lord in Oaxaca is that everything and everybody is connected, in a cascade of inter-related events and movements. The APPO has been described as a movement of movements, and morenow than ever, that seems accurate.
I postulate that a two-fold change in consciousness in Oaxaca has taken root. One involves networking. Civil society caught on to the government policy of deliberate isolation and separation of communities and groups, often accompanied by PRI-provoked violence. That power tactic is being discussed and acted on via cross-cultural communication. The other change is confrontation of authoritarian top-down control. Local control, horizontal control and autonomy leap up within town after town. They create in-your-face challenges to the resident caciques.
This is not to disregard the fact that many social organizations retain a top-down internal structure, many consist of not more than two people, many hold conservative positions. Nor could I disregard the cost in lives: for example the two Triqui radio broadcasters. Nor government harassment. Nevertheless, as the APPO shouted “elbow to elbow”, the social movements spread like water, very strong and not only horizontal, but respectful of each others programs and priorities.
The Journey of the Sendero del Jaguar
I met the sisters of David Venegas Reyes while they were working to get David out of prison. Sonya was raising money, selling calendars. Natalya was speaking and traveling; both attended meetings of the APPO.
As for David himself, I met him for the first time at a public forum regarding political prisoners on the day after he himself was released. He spent eleven months in the hands of the government, grabbed off the street in April of 2007 and framed with a sequence of false criminal charges, then re-charged, and re-charged again, until finally the courts declared an end to it and he was released.
The siblings live in Oaxaca with their parents, and David graduated from a Oaxaca university with a “agricultural engineer” degree, a title he finds now to be totally useless. As he explained, all they were taught was from the north: agribusiness and chemicals. David is a committed anarchist (in the best sense of the classic political tradition), and a member of VOCAL, the APPO-anarchist socialist faction. In person, he sizzles with energy, a handsome twenty-five year old, seemingly tireless and fearless. When I met him the second time he was heading a march to demand release of other prisoners.
According to David, “The Path of the Jaguar for the Regeneration of our Memory” is the result of the collective work of activist boys and girls who participated in the first youth meeting of the social movement, convoked by the APPO in its third state assembly. This meeting of youngsters, carried out in the month of February of 2008 in the town of Zaachila, organized the caravan of thirty young people who have as their fundamental objective “the reorganization of the Oaxaca social movement.”
On May 27 Las Noticias displayed a half-page ad entitled “Pronunciamiento Politico.” It was signed Caravana “El Sendero del Jaguar por la Regeneración de Nuestra Memoria.” In part it reads:
”As in Mexico and the world, many peoples are struggling and resisting (neoliberal) development and progress because they know it will only benefit some few and those few are not the legitimate owners of the land nor of what is found in it. In the region of the Isthmus de Tehuantepec, towns such as Jalapa del Marqués, Juchitán, San Blas Atempa, Zanatepec and Benito Juárez Chimalapas are located at strategic points for the development of mega-projects like the Plan-Puebla-Panama, the Area of Free Commerce of the Americas (ALCA, or NAFTA), the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and the Alliance for Security and Prosperity of North America (ASPAN).”
The youngsters’ caravan with David Venegas on board left Oaxaca City on May 5, 2008 from in front of the teachers’ building. David’s opinion piece/explanation appeared on the internet blog “Kaos en la Red” and in the newspaper Las Noticias.
The Oaxaca Social Movement: Local Control as a Political Model
Public acknowledgement of issues regarding privatization vs. community ownership – autonomy, local control, indigenous rights and cultural identity – emerged as an integral part of the discourse in 2008. The lawsuits on the Isthmus filed against foreign contractors for the wind generators charge fraud, failure to obtain local input, unfair rental payments as well as misleading environmental studies and failure to observe indigenous rights. It would be a model for the nation if it were won and enforced. It is legally based on violation of the Mexican constitution, closely related to the prohibitions of turning oil over to foreign investors. In the words of Sendero:
“ ... this (2006) movement against globalization not only touched the gates of heaven, took them by storm, which meant that the antagonists–”the governor”, “the state”, “neoliberalism”– were recognized. The demands were direct, they were pressed by solidarity, but also by the insults and discontent of an immoral economy.
The APPO …underlined the necessity of thinking about a new type of authority, one far from Persons governing and Persons governed, but instead (based on the model) “lead by obeying”, as followed by the Zapatistas…to imagine what forms of life suit them, their own beliefs, ...without repeating authoritarian socialism…acting with alliances in which they could fully call themselves “communities”... the APPO simply put forward the idea of returning to “the customary” (usos y costumbres) which expresses alternative forms of possession and of doing politics, in the search for different senses of justice and autonomy for everyone, not for just some.”
The first caravan visited five communities in the troubled Isthmus region, communities on the receiving end of neoliberal assaults. As David explained to me, the misinterpretation that indigenous people oppose “development” is founded on their unwillingness to accept the capitalist model of private gain, which inevitably leads to greed and individual power-grabs. Instead, they seek “development” which evenly benefits the entire community at the same time, leaving nobody side-lined.
As for the Sendero’s caravan, the point was to listen and learn, an attempt to understand. It sounds like the Zapatista caravans, but with a definite difference. In Chiapas, David claims, only one model, the caracoles, prevails. But in Oaxaca each community provides its own model, it’s own version of how to live. Oaxacans, he continued, are much more territorial, not only in the countryside but in the city where the assemblies of colonias meet. “Community” is personal and face-to-face.
Santa Maria Jalapa del Marquez on May 5 observed 47 years since the town was submerged to create the Benito Juárez Dam, an event allegedly achieved through threats and false promises – no surprise there. The relocated population slowly rebuilt, many becoming fishermen. In 2003 the government sprang the idea of the construction of a hydroelectric generator on the dam. Before protests were launched, the government divided the town by handing out lands to those who would vote in favor. Nevertheless, the community won, really because studies showed the hydroelectric project was not feasible. Nevertheless the state and federal governments didn’t let go: the army and police arrived to maintain order.
The Benito Juarez Dam provides water to irrigate farmland in Region 19 of Juchitán and Tehuantepec, among other towns. But something has gone wrong. There’s no water. The Pemex refinery in Salina Cruz receives its quota, but after April nothing went to the campesinos and agriculture. The crop loss is reported at 100%. As the dam’s water levels drop, the church and houses of the drowned town appear like ghosts on the cracked dry ground. The town of Jalapa, now radicalized, alerts other towns threatened with similar mega-projects.
San Blas Atempa, site of a nasty repression and assassination allegedly authored by the PRI cacique Agustina Acevedo Gutiérrez, an ally of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, was visited on May 6. The people came out to greet the Sendero young people, with the women speaking in public assembly against the ambitious, corrupt and criminal woman who is the cacique.
In Juchitán de Zaragoza on May 7, the Sendero met with the Assembly in Defense of Land, involved in the confrontation with the installation of the Eólic Corridor. Endesa, Hiberdrola, Gamesa and Union Fenosa are the transnationals, which installed “La Venta I” starting with eight generators; now La Venta II occupies 850 hectares of land. The electricity generated is sold to the Federal Electric Commission. The goal is 5,000 generators on more than 3,000 hectares of land previously used for agriculture and cattle gazing.
A decade ago in a sweet Oaxaca landscape, cream-colored oxen grazed by the side of the lagoon road, a dreamy vision of peace. Wind-generators are not un-pretty, and the trade-off for clean energy is evident. But it’s not so simple. The noise of the generators effectively drives out every living thing. La Venta IV is projected for another 2,300 hectares – on Zapotec lands. Protests have resulted in 76 orders for arrest.
The Sendero also visited the community radio in Juchitán, “Radio Totopo” which discusses in both Zapotec and Spanish the problems of the various communities on the Isthmus. Neighbors sustain Radio Totopo personnel with food and necessities. Another resistance campaign formed against Wal-Mart and its outlet, Aurrera. Community radio provides another networking link.
May 8 the caravan arrived at Benito Juárez, in the municipality of San Miguel Chimalapa. This community guards the jungle against exploitation and handing over of concessions. It’s on the border with Chiapas, the Chiapas government forty years ago began to give concessions for cutting wood, and sent Chiapanecos to settle there. The governments encouraged battles between the newcomers and the residents. On their own, the rival groups recognized they observe the same spirit of maintaining the natural environment. In one of the first environmental victories, the Chimalapa territory, covered in woods and virgin jungle and with immeasurable biological wealth and water, held back the government and its commissions. The peoples’ maintain the area.
As an aside, in the midst of the electricity-generation wars, these Chimalapa territories have no electric service. The land legally belongs to Oaxaca; the two state governments collude in privatizing the once commonly-held lands as the relentless neoliberal assault continues.
The caravan ended its first tour on May 14. The final day, the ministerial police of Zanatepec stopped and searched the caravan out in the country, away from any population. According to the caravan spokespersons, the cops came out of the woods to threaten them. Nevertheless “reorganization” of the APPO, that is, the population base, goes on as links are forged. The Sendero youngsters, raging in age from 14 up to “elder statesmen” in their late twenties, plan to visit the entire state, region by region. As David told me, they don’t need to speak with civil organizations, which already have their own agendas. They listen to the indigenous people, the campesinos, the ones trying to guard their lives and their visions. They learn what it is so unique about Oaxaca, which inspires the world.
What’s The Difference? - Networking and Local Autonomy: The Thigh Bone’s Connected to The Knee Bone
http://www.narconews.com/Issue54/article3123.html
By Nancy Davies
Commentary from Oaxaca
June 2, 2008
Read Part I of this series here.
Part II
Oaxaca, Mexico now serves as the crossroad for national social movements – and perhaps international ones as well, according to David Venegas, the former political prisoner and activist of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials).
The annual occupations by frustrated members of Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE in its Spanish initals) in their 2008 strike add to the frustration of the population. Permission to convoke a statewide teachers assembly to legitimize new officials for Section 22 within SNTE is clearly a union-busting maneuver, and a dangerous one at that. Stymied by the unsavory Elba Esther Gordillo, abetted by Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO) in not yielding on this most important union piece, the tension grows in Oaxaca as we approach the June 14 anniversary of the movement.
Section 22 in the midst of their struggle incorporated other concerns, particularly the privatization of the petroleum industry. This is the legitimate task of teachers – they plow the ground; the social movement plants the seeds. Inside the teachers’ plantón, education proceeds. Alongside the encampment in the Alameda, another anti-privatization forum took place on May 29, sponsored by the National Democratic Alternative (ADN) of the National Democratic Party (PRD).
And if the avalanche of initials and organizations overwhelms you, so does it me –organizations and sectors of organizations are multiplying like rabbits.
Barring another not impossible social explosion, the changes in Oaxaca answer this query:
Where is the APPO? My response, and the difference after the 2006 events, is people organizing on the ground. A network of activists spread across the state who are all, in some sense “the APPO.” As David Venegas told me, when the youth caravan El Sendero del Jaguar arrived in small communities on the Isthmus in May, although the youngsters do not identify themselves as APPO (many don’t belong to the APPO), the townspeople rushed out to meet them shouting “the APPO is coming! The APPO is here!”
We Are All The APPO
The main body of the APPO, those thousands who took to the streets in 2006, are not attending quarrelsome ideological meetings – but they haven’t vanished. “The head bone‘s connected to the neck bone, the neck bone’s connected to the shoulder bone…, now hear the word of the Lord!” Good song. The word of the Lord in Oaxaca is that everything and everybody is connected, in a cascade of inter-related events and movements. The APPO has been described as a movement of movements, and morenow than ever, that seems accurate.
I postulate that a two-fold change in consciousness in Oaxaca has taken root. One involves networking. Civil society caught on to the government policy of deliberate isolation and separation of communities and groups, often accompanied by PRI-provoked violence. That power tactic is being discussed and acted on via cross-cultural communication. The other change is confrontation of authoritarian top-down control. Local control, horizontal control and autonomy leap up within town after town. They create in-your-face challenges to the resident caciques.
This is not to disregard the fact that many social organizations retain a top-down internal structure, many consist of not more than two people, many hold conservative positions. Nor could I disregard the cost in lives: for example the two Triqui radio broadcasters. Nor government harassment. Nevertheless, as the APPO shouted “elbow to elbow”, the social movements spread like water, very strong and not only horizontal, but respectful of each others programs and priorities.
The Journey of the Sendero del Jaguar
I met the sisters of David Venegas Reyes while they were working to get David out of prison. Sonya was raising money, selling calendars. Natalya was speaking and traveling; both attended meetings of the APPO.
As for David himself, I met him for the first time at a public forum regarding political prisoners on the day after he himself was released. He spent eleven months in the hands of the government, grabbed off the street in April of 2007 and framed with a sequence of false criminal charges, then re-charged, and re-charged again, until finally the courts declared an end to it and he was released.
The siblings live in Oaxaca with their parents, and David graduated from a Oaxaca university with a “agricultural engineer” degree, a title he finds now to be totally useless. As he explained, all they were taught was from the north: agribusiness and chemicals. David is a committed anarchist (in the best sense of the classic political tradition), and a member of VOCAL, the APPO-anarchist socialist faction. In person, he sizzles with energy, a handsome twenty-five year old, seemingly tireless and fearless. When I met him the second time he was heading a march to demand release of other prisoners.
According to David, “The Path of the Jaguar for the Regeneration of our Memory” is the result of the collective work of activist boys and girls who participated in the first youth meeting of the social movement, convoked by the APPO in its third state assembly. This meeting of youngsters, carried out in the month of February of 2008 in the town of Zaachila, organized the caravan of thirty young people who have as their fundamental objective “the reorganization of the Oaxaca social movement.”
On May 27 Las Noticias displayed a half-page ad entitled “Pronunciamiento Politico.” It was signed Caravana “El Sendero del Jaguar por la Regeneración de Nuestra Memoria.” In part it reads:
”As in Mexico and the world, many peoples are struggling and resisting (neoliberal) development and progress because they know it will only benefit some few and those few are not the legitimate owners of the land nor of what is found in it. In the region of the Isthmus de Tehuantepec, towns such as Jalapa del Marqués, Juchitán, San Blas Atempa, Zanatepec and Benito Juárez Chimalapas are located at strategic points for the development of mega-projects like the Plan-Puebla-Panama, the Area of Free Commerce of the Americas (ALCA, or NAFTA), the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and the Alliance for Security and Prosperity of North America (ASPAN).”
The youngsters’ caravan with David Venegas on board left Oaxaca City on May 5, 2008 from in front of the teachers’ building. David’s opinion piece/explanation appeared on the internet blog “Kaos en la Red” and in the newspaper Las Noticias.
The Oaxaca Social Movement: Local Control as a Political Model
Public acknowledgement of issues regarding privatization vs. community ownership – autonomy, local control, indigenous rights and cultural identity – emerged as an integral part of the discourse in 2008. The lawsuits on the Isthmus filed against foreign contractors for the wind generators charge fraud, failure to obtain local input, unfair rental payments as well as misleading environmental studies and failure to observe indigenous rights. It would be a model for the nation if it were won and enforced. It is legally based on violation of the Mexican constitution, closely related to the prohibitions of turning oil over to foreign investors. In the words of Sendero:
“ ... this (2006) movement against globalization not only touched the gates of heaven, took them by storm, which meant that the antagonists–”the governor”, “the state”, “neoliberalism”– were recognized. The demands were direct, they were pressed by solidarity, but also by the insults and discontent of an immoral economy.
The APPO …underlined the necessity of thinking about a new type of authority, one far from Persons governing and Persons governed, but instead (based on the model) “lead by obeying”, as followed by the Zapatistas…to imagine what forms of life suit them, their own beliefs, ...without repeating authoritarian socialism…acting with alliances in which they could fully call themselves “communities”... the APPO simply put forward the idea of returning to “the customary” (usos y costumbres) which expresses alternative forms of possession and of doing politics, in the search for different senses of justice and autonomy for everyone, not for just some.”
The first caravan visited five communities in the troubled Isthmus region, communities on the receiving end of neoliberal assaults. As David explained to me, the misinterpretation that indigenous people oppose “development” is founded on their unwillingness to accept the capitalist model of private gain, which inevitably leads to greed and individual power-grabs. Instead, they seek “development” which evenly benefits the entire community at the same time, leaving nobody side-lined.
As for the Sendero’s caravan, the point was to listen and learn, an attempt to understand. It sounds like the Zapatista caravans, but with a definite difference. In Chiapas, David claims, only one model, the caracoles, prevails. But in Oaxaca each community provides its own model, it’s own version of how to live. Oaxacans, he continued, are much more territorial, not only in the countryside but in the city where the assemblies of colonias meet. “Community” is personal and face-to-face.
Santa Maria Jalapa del Marquez on May 5 observed 47 years since the town was submerged to create the Benito Juárez Dam, an event allegedly achieved through threats and false promises – no surprise there. The relocated population slowly rebuilt, many becoming fishermen. In 2003 the government sprang the idea of the construction of a hydroelectric generator on the dam. Before protests were launched, the government divided the town by handing out lands to those who would vote in favor. Nevertheless, the community won, really because studies showed the hydroelectric project was not feasible. Nevertheless the state and federal governments didn’t let go: the army and police arrived to maintain order.
The Benito Juarez Dam provides water to irrigate farmland in Region 19 of Juchitán and Tehuantepec, among other towns. But something has gone wrong. There’s no water. The Pemex refinery in Salina Cruz receives its quota, but after April nothing went to the campesinos and agriculture. The crop loss is reported at 100%. As the dam’s water levels drop, the church and houses of the drowned town appear like ghosts on the cracked dry ground. The town of Jalapa, now radicalized, alerts other towns threatened with similar mega-projects.
San Blas Atempa, site of a nasty repression and assassination allegedly authored by the PRI cacique Agustina Acevedo Gutiérrez, an ally of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, was visited on May 6. The people came out to greet the Sendero young people, with the women speaking in public assembly against the ambitious, corrupt and criminal woman who is the cacique.
In Juchitán de Zaragoza on May 7, the Sendero met with the Assembly in Defense of Land, involved in the confrontation with the installation of the Eólic Corridor. Endesa, Hiberdrola, Gamesa and Union Fenosa are the transnationals, which installed “La Venta I” starting with eight generators; now La Venta II occupies 850 hectares of land. The electricity generated is sold to the Federal Electric Commission. The goal is 5,000 generators on more than 3,000 hectares of land previously used for agriculture and cattle gazing.
A decade ago in a sweet Oaxaca landscape, cream-colored oxen grazed by the side of the lagoon road, a dreamy vision of peace. Wind-generators are not un-pretty, and the trade-off for clean energy is evident. But it’s not so simple. The noise of the generators effectively drives out every living thing. La Venta IV is projected for another 2,300 hectares – on Zapotec lands. Protests have resulted in 76 orders for arrest.
The Sendero also visited the community radio in Juchitán, “Radio Totopo” which discusses in both Zapotec and Spanish the problems of the various communities on the Isthmus. Neighbors sustain Radio Totopo personnel with food and necessities. Another resistance campaign formed against Wal-Mart and its outlet, Aurrera. Community radio provides another networking link.
May 8 the caravan arrived at Benito Juárez, in the municipality of San Miguel Chimalapa. This community guards the jungle against exploitation and handing over of concessions. It’s on the border with Chiapas, the Chiapas government forty years ago began to give concessions for cutting wood, and sent Chiapanecos to settle there. The governments encouraged battles between the newcomers and the residents. On their own, the rival groups recognized they observe the same spirit of maintaining the natural environment. In one of the first environmental victories, the Chimalapa territory, covered in woods and virgin jungle and with immeasurable biological wealth and water, held back the government and its commissions. The peoples’ maintain the area.
As an aside, in the midst of the electricity-generation wars, these Chimalapa territories have no electric service. The land legally belongs to Oaxaca; the two state governments collude in privatizing the once commonly-held lands as the relentless neoliberal assault continues.
The caravan ended its first tour on May 14. The final day, the ministerial police of Zanatepec stopped and searched the caravan out in the country, away from any population. According to the caravan spokespersons, the cops came out of the woods to threaten them. Nevertheless “reorganization” of the APPO, that is, the population base, goes on as links are forged. The Sendero youngsters, raging in age from 14 up to “elder statesmen” in their late twenties, plan to visit the entire state, region by region. As David told me, they don’t need to speak with civil organizations, which already have their own agendas. They listen to the indigenous people, the campesinos, the ones trying to guard their lives and their visions. They learn what it is so unique about Oaxaca, which inspires the world.
En estado crítico, las garantías en Oaxaca, considera la CCIODH
En estado crítico, las garantías en Oaxaca, considera la CCIODH
Octavio Vélez Ascencio (Corresponsal)
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/06/02/index.php?section=politica&article=005n2pol
Oaxaca, Oax., 1o. de junio. A casi dos años de que se inició un conflicto político-social en la entidad, la situación de los derechos humanos en Oaxaca permanece en estado crítico, sostuvo la Comisión Civil Internacional de Observación por los Derechos Humanos (CCIODH).
“Los casos documentados de desapariciones forzadas, homicidios, torturas, detenciones arbitrarias y cateos ilegales, con la nueva modalidad de violaciones sexuales, se producen en un estado de excepción latente, a pesar de las declaraciones oficiales en sentido contrario, y nos acercan a la guerra sucia de los años 70”, afirmó Iñaki García, vocero de la CCIODH, al presentar el informe de la sexta visita del organismo, realizada entre el 30 de enero y el 20 de febrero pasado.
En conferencia de prensa, que ofreció con otros miembros del organismo, el activista expuso que la ausencia de una respuesta política y jurídica a las graves transgresiones a los derechos humanos detectadas en la anterior visita, esto es, las derivadas de las movilizaciones magisteriales y la conformación de la Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO) y la posterior respuesta represiva, constituyen un “elemento grave”.
También es preocupante, dijo, la continuidad del hostigamiento a los miembros o simpatizantes de la movilización social que representa la APPO, y la aparición de nuevas situaciones que vulneran los derechos humanos, que se extienden a otros sectores sociales afectados por casos tan dispares como los de pederastia, delito insuficientemente perseguido en la esfera judicial.
También, anotó, se documentaron desapariciones forzadas en contextos de fuerte conflictividad política, que la CCIDOH considera relacionadas con las estrategias represivas del gobierno estatal, como los casos de las mujeres triquis Daniela y Virginia Ortiz Ramírez, y el de los miembros del Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR) Edmundo Reyes Amaya y Gabiel Alberto Cruz Sánchez.
Subrayó que desde noviembre de 2006 la respuesta de los gobiernos federal, estatal y municipal a las demandas sociales “se basa en el hostigamiento a la sociedad civil para disuadirla de cualquier tipo de disidencia, lo que recuerda la estrategia de los manuales de contrainsurgencia tradicionalmente empleada contra los movimientos armados”.
García dijo que la CCIODH documentó “numerosos” casos de homicidios ocurridos en 2007, así como la persistencia en la práctica de la tortura y la desaparición forzada de personas. En este contexto destacó que el conflicto político social en la entidad ha dejado 62 muertes.
Por lo referido, recomendó a las autoridades gubernamentales atender las causas profundas del conflicto, principalmente los problemas estructurales de pobreza, caciquismo, desigual acceso a los recursos, ausencia de canales de participación, y realizar una reforma profunda de las instituciones del estado, así como desmontar el modelo de represión contra las expresiones de disidencia social, cultural y política.
Octavio Vélez Ascencio (Corresponsal)
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/06/02/index.php?section=politica&article=005n2pol
Oaxaca, Oax., 1o. de junio. A casi dos años de que se inició un conflicto político-social en la entidad, la situación de los derechos humanos en Oaxaca permanece en estado crítico, sostuvo la Comisión Civil Internacional de Observación por los Derechos Humanos (CCIODH).
“Los casos documentados de desapariciones forzadas, homicidios, torturas, detenciones arbitrarias y cateos ilegales, con la nueva modalidad de violaciones sexuales, se producen en un estado de excepción latente, a pesar de las declaraciones oficiales en sentido contrario, y nos acercan a la guerra sucia de los años 70”, afirmó Iñaki García, vocero de la CCIODH, al presentar el informe de la sexta visita del organismo, realizada entre el 30 de enero y el 20 de febrero pasado.
En conferencia de prensa, que ofreció con otros miembros del organismo, el activista expuso que la ausencia de una respuesta política y jurídica a las graves transgresiones a los derechos humanos detectadas en la anterior visita, esto es, las derivadas de las movilizaciones magisteriales y la conformación de la Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO) y la posterior respuesta represiva, constituyen un “elemento grave”.
También es preocupante, dijo, la continuidad del hostigamiento a los miembros o simpatizantes de la movilización social que representa la APPO, y la aparición de nuevas situaciones que vulneran los derechos humanos, que se extienden a otros sectores sociales afectados por casos tan dispares como los de pederastia, delito insuficientemente perseguido en la esfera judicial.
También, anotó, se documentaron desapariciones forzadas en contextos de fuerte conflictividad política, que la CCIDOH considera relacionadas con las estrategias represivas del gobierno estatal, como los casos de las mujeres triquis Daniela y Virginia Ortiz Ramírez, y el de los miembros del Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR) Edmundo Reyes Amaya y Gabiel Alberto Cruz Sánchez.
Subrayó que desde noviembre de 2006 la respuesta de los gobiernos federal, estatal y municipal a las demandas sociales “se basa en el hostigamiento a la sociedad civil para disuadirla de cualquier tipo de disidencia, lo que recuerda la estrategia de los manuales de contrainsurgencia tradicionalmente empleada contra los movimientos armados”.
García dijo que la CCIODH documentó “numerosos” casos de homicidios ocurridos en 2007, así como la persistencia en la práctica de la tortura y la desaparición forzada de personas. En este contexto destacó que el conflicto político social en la entidad ha dejado 62 muertes.
Por lo referido, recomendó a las autoridades gubernamentales atender las causas profundas del conflicto, principalmente los problemas estructurales de pobreza, caciquismo, desigual acceso a los recursos, ausencia de canales de participación, y realizar una reforma profunda de las instituciones del estado, así como desmontar el modelo de represión contra las expresiones de disidencia social, cultural y política.
Fighting potential health horrors
Fighting potential health horrors
© Indian Country Today June 02, 2008. All Rights Reserved
Posted: June 02, 2008
by: Stephanie Woodard
Yankton Sioux stand firm as hog farm goes to court
MARTY, S.D. - In a commencement address at Marty Indian School's high school graduation May 16, Gary Drapeau, Ihanktowan Dakota and a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe's elected leadership, praised the graduating class.
''You have carried yourselves with dignity and respect,'' he told the 24 students, many of whom had won college scholarships and prizes. ''The day you were born, you were somebody, and you've continued to be that spirit who walks with you.''
Drapeau went on to note that several students were arrested at recent protests against a large-scale hog farm, or ''concentrated animal feeding operation [CAFO],'' that Hull, Iowa-based Long View Farms is working around the clock, seven days a week, to construct on private land within reservation boundaries.
The company's rush seems to arise from its precarious legal position. In defiance of a tribal court exclusion order, the firm is using a BIA road to access the site. To overcome that obstacle, Long View Farms has gone to federal court seeking a ruling that the tribe has no jurisdiction over it, even on tribal property.
Another federal suit, by tribal members, asks a judge to halt construction because the farm did not do an environmental impact statement, as required for reservation projects, and would violate federal regulations protecting children's health.
In the meantime, the Ihanktowan have set up an ongoing protest site, including tribal flags and a permanent fire, on tribal property bordering the farm.
''We stood up for the nation,'' Drapeau told the graduates. ''It hasn't been pleasant, but we did it for the children.''
Neurotoxins and superbugs
The youngsters to whom Drapeau referred include not only students at Marty Indian School, located in the Yankton Sioux's main village about four miles from the farm, but also preschoolers at the Head Start about a mile away. All would be exposed to potent poisons, including ammonia and the neurotoxin hydrogen sulfide, emitted by the vast amounts of manure created by the 70,000 pigs that would be produced annually.
Other airborne pollutants released by hog farms include drug-resistant pathogens that are the result of the antibiotics the pigs consume, according to former U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher James Zahn. His findings were suppressed by the agency, generating sharp criticism by the Union of Concerned Scientists, among others.
Because air pollution travels on the wind, a large area may be affected. ''At Rosebud, we can smell the hog farm we've been trying to get rid of here for 18 or 19 miles,'' said district council member Claudette Arcoren, Sicangu Lakota. Arcoren, who has long fought such facilities, joined the Yankton protesters.
''CAFOs are an enormous public health problem in the making, on our reservation and nationwide,'' said Faith Spotted Eagle, Ihanktowan Dakota, cultural resources specialist and therapist.
Fears for the environment
The siting of the farm on the Yankton reservation has provoked concerns that manure spills, along with the application of toxin-ridden manure to fields in the surrounding watershed - as Long View Farms plans to do - will contaminate the local water and wreak regional environmental devastation.
The operation is on a hilltop right on top of two aquifers: a shallow one that feeds some local wells, and the low-lying Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies deeper wells and contains water for much of the Great Plains.
Within a few miles of the CAFO are springs and wetlands. A nearby stream empties into a 100-mile stretch of the Missouri that is designated a National Wild and Scenic River, which could potentially suffer algae blooms resulting from ammonia contamination. Tribal members also fear impacts on several endangered species thriving in and around the waterway, as well as hundreds of bald eagles in a preserve bordering it.
A personal story
''People think hog farms' odor is simply a nuisance,'' said Joan Olive, speech therapist at Marty Indian School. ''In fact, it's a serious health risk. Several years ago, I was exposed to hydrogen sulfide when farmers a mile from my parents' Iowa farm spread manure on the fields. It caused me to suffer what appeared at first to be a stroke.''
Olive recalled that her speech suddenly became slurred, and muscles all over her body began to twitch. ''It took a month to recover, and now I have severe chemical allergies. It changed my life.''
She fled Iowa, where air quality has plummeted and neurological disorders due to hydrogen sulfide exposures are rising, according to The New York Times. She got a job she loves at Marty Indian School, which she calls ''a school with heart,'' and settled down in the rolling hills of the Yankton reservation.
With the advent of the hog farm on the reservation, her life changed again. She began working to bring members of the non-Native community into the fight against the CAFO. Many attended a public forum on the farm, and county officials are preparing zoning that would bar such operations in the future.
''Factory farms look for counties that don't have zoning and are desperate for economic development. But this farm offers the county just 13 jobs. And is it development if you have to spend your money on medical care?''
Research by Steve Wing and Suzanne Wolf, epidemiologists at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, supports Olive's assessment. Corporate-owned farms tend to site their operations in poor and non-white communities, which are taking the brunt of CAFO-related health risks, the scientists found.
''The wealthy pollute, and the poor suffer,'' Olive said.
Looking forward
''Standing up to the farm has been a solidarity builder for the nation,'' said Glenn Drapeau, Ihanktowan Dakota and a biology teacher at Marty Indian School.
Other Native communities have sent their flags to be flown with the Yankton Sioux flag and others already at the site, Drapeau reported. ''We're in the center of Turtle Island. This could be the beginning of an indigenous United Nations.''
© Indian Country Today June 02, 2008. All Rights Reserved
Posted: June 02, 2008
by: Stephanie Woodard
Yankton Sioux stand firm as hog farm goes to court
MARTY, S.D. - In a commencement address at Marty Indian School's high school graduation May 16, Gary Drapeau, Ihanktowan Dakota and a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe's elected leadership, praised the graduating class.
''You have carried yourselves with dignity and respect,'' he told the 24 students, many of whom had won college scholarships and prizes. ''The day you were born, you were somebody, and you've continued to be that spirit who walks with you.''
Drapeau went on to note that several students were arrested at recent protests against a large-scale hog farm, or ''concentrated animal feeding operation [CAFO],'' that Hull, Iowa-based Long View Farms is working around the clock, seven days a week, to construct on private land within reservation boundaries.
The company's rush seems to arise from its precarious legal position. In defiance of a tribal court exclusion order, the firm is using a BIA road to access the site. To overcome that obstacle, Long View Farms has gone to federal court seeking a ruling that the tribe has no jurisdiction over it, even on tribal property.
Another federal suit, by tribal members, asks a judge to halt construction because the farm did not do an environmental impact statement, as required for reservation projects, and would violate federal regulations protecting children's health.
In the meantime, the Ihanktowan have set up an ongoing protest site, including tribal flags and a permanent fire, on tribal property bordering the farm.
''We stood up for the nation,'' Drapeau told the graduates. ''It hasn't been pleasant, but we did it for the children.''
Neurotoxins and superbugs
The youngsters to whom Drapeau referred include not only students at Marty Indian School, located in the Yankton Sioux's main village about four miles from the farm, but also preschoolers at the Head Start about a mile away. All would be exposed to potent poisons, including ammonia and the neurotoxin hydrogen sulfide, emitted by the vast amounts of manure created by the 70,000 pigs that would be produced annually.
Other airborne pollutants released by hog farms include drug-resistant pathogens that are the result of the antibiotics the pigs consume, according to former U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher James Zahn. His findings were suppressed by the agency, generating sharp criticism by the Union of Concerned Scientists, among others.
Because air pollution travels on the wind, a large area may be affected. ''At Rosebud, we can smell the hog farm we've been trying to get rid of here for 18 or 19 miles,'' said district council member Claudette Arcoren, Sicangu Lakota. Arcoren, who has long fought such facilities, joined the Yankton protesters.
''CAFOs are an enormous public health problem in the making, on our reservation and nationwide,'' said Faith Spotted Eagle, Ihanktowan Dakota, cultural resources specialist and therapist.
Fears for the environment
The siting of the farm on the Yankton reservation has provoked concerns that manure spills, along with the application of toxin-ridden manure to fields in the surrounding watershed - as Long View Farms plans to do - will contaminate the local water and wreak regional environmental devastation.
The operation is on a hilltop right on top of two aquifers: a shallow one that feeds some local wells, and the low-lying Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies deeper wells and contains water for much of the Great Plains.
Within a few miles of the CAFO are springs and wetlands. A nearby stream empties into a 100-mile stretch of the Missouri that is designated a National Wild and Scenic River, which could potentially suffer algae blooms resulting from ammonia contamination. Tribal members also fear impacts on several endangered species thriving in and around the waterway, as well as hundreds of bald eagles in a preserve bordering it.
A personal story
''People think hog farms' odor is simply a nuisance,'' said Joan Olive, speech therapist at Marty Indian School. ''In fact, it's a serious health risk. Several years ago, I was exposed to hydrogen sulfide when farmers a mile from my parents' Iowa farm spread manure on the fields. It caused me to suffer what appeared at first to be a stroke.''
Olive recalled that her speech suddenly became slurred, and muscles all over her body began to twitch. ''It took a month to recover, and now I have severe chemical allergies. It changed my life.''
She fled Iowa, where air quality has plummeted and neurological disorders due to hydrogen sulfide exposures are rising, according to The New York Times. She got a job she loves at Marty Indian School, which she calls ''a school with heart,'' and settled down in the rolling hills of the Yankton reservation.
With the advent of the hog farm on the reservation, her life changed again. She began working to bring members of the non-Native community into the fight against the CAFO. Many attended a public forum on the farm, and county officials are preparing zoning that would bar such operations in the future.
''Factory farms look for counties that don't have zoning and are desperate for economic development. But this farm offers the county just 13 jobs. And is it development if you have to spend your money on medical care?''
Research by Steve Wing and Suzanne Wolf, epidemiologists at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, supports Olive's assessment. Corporate-owned farms tend to site their operations in poor and non-white communities, which are taking the brunt of CAFO-related health risks, the scientists found.
''The wealthy pollute, and the poor suffer,'' Olive said.
Looking forward
''Standing up to the farm has been a solidarity builder for the nation,'' said Glenn Drapeau, Ihanktowan Dakota and a biology teacher at Marty Indian School.
Other Native communities have sent their flags to be flown with the Yankton Sioux flag and others already at the site, Drapeau reported. ''We're in the center of Turtle Island. This could be the beginning of an indigenous United Nations.''
Two Years Later in Oaxaca: Part I
What’s The Difference?
http://www.narconews.com/Issue53/article3113.html
By Nancy Davies
Commentary from Oaxaca
May 27, 2008
Part I
Nobody here in Oaxaca says things are better. I am trying to put my finger on what is different, and while different, where it might be going. It’s all a question of attitude, and to comment on the subjective existence of a different attitude leaves me open to hoots and cat-calls. But I think I’ll try it.
Below is my sketch of what has changed since the brutal repression of the 2006 social movement’s five month control of the city of Oaxaca. The “social movement”, not to be confused with the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE) or the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), resides in the populace seeking change. It is alive and well. It lives in all eight regions of the state, strongly situated within civil society and non-governmental organizations.
Many aspects of the social movement flourish in ways I have not seen before, especially in the form of local organizing and local battles. One example is the lawsuit on the Isthmus against the international wind generation complex built on communal indigenous lands. Other environmental examples include struggles against foreign ownership of mines, and water projects.
Today the most outstanding example is participation in the national movement for public dialogue, on the topic of privatizing PEMEX, Mexico’s oil producer. A national issue, yes, but Oaxaca has Salina Cruz, the big oil city on its southern coast. In Oaxaca, people first gathered during the 2006 movement to discuss public policy, and they are doing it now.
On Monday, May 26 the city of Oaxaca’s public forum (among hundreds of state-wide forums) for discussion of “la Reforma Energética”, (meaning privatization of oil) took place at Casa de la Ciudad at 10:00 AM: The sponsoring organization are civil society: Sinergia, Sevices for Alternative Education (EDUCA) , Insitute for Development of Oaxaca Women
(IDEMO) and the Center of Assistance to the Popular Movement (CAMPO). As the federal Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) legislator Othón Cuevas said, “With this meeting today, Oaxaca is sending to all Mexico a message: the Oaxacans want to act as citizens and no longer as subjects. They want to have an effect before things happen and not fold their arms in the face of decisions imposed from the heights of power. This forum also represents the demand of a society which with just reason feels each moment less represented by its governors and its legislators, and in consequence, wants to make heard its voice.”
These public discussions all over Mexico, and across the state of Oaxaca, come at the instigation of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the “defeated” PRD presidential candidate and leader of the anti-privatization campaign. Lopez Obrador came to Oaxaca on Tuesday, May 20. He spoke at an “invitation only” event at the Hotel Mision de Los Angeles, to about 1,200 people. He recruited hundreds of them in “brigades” to go door-to-door to collect signatures in opposition to privatization, and dozens to head up the statewide forums.
The national Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has split along lines of supporting, or not, the petroleum “reform” initiative of President Felipe Calderón. In support stands our governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), he who is so indebted to President Calderón for keeping him in office. But things change. When URO was in big trouble, so was Calderón, who barely could control his own National Action Party (PAN) and needed the PRI to vote with him in the congress. Now Calderón holds control. Meanwhile a PRI faction headed by former best-buddy Roberto Madrazo and Beatriz Pagés opposes the energy reform “because it is anti-constitutional”, which in fact it is. (The split reflects internal PRI conflict, as Heraclio Bonilla Gutierrez writing for La Noticias says, “like Sicilian Mafia families”.) With the PRI split on oil privatization, Calderón has little left to gain by supporting URO. Furthermore, the criminal activities of URO created international embarrassment, especially since the news started to leak out about the probable guilt of URO’s executive branch (that could be read “executioners” branch) in state terror.
URO’s bargaining power diminished when an information leak went to the feds. The first leak came from a retired military general, Juan Alfredo Oropeza Garnica; followed by others of lesser position inside the state attorney general’s office. The information clearly implicates URO’s right-hand man, Jorge Franco Vargas who held the position of Secretary of Government for URO while URO was out campaigning for Madrazo’s failed presidential bid. Franco Vargas has been implicated in running the death squads, along with torture and disappearances in the crimes against humanity perpetrated during 2006. Worse for URO, Franco Vargas is implicated in the 2007 forced disappearance of two men from the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), which claims responsibility for blown up oil pipelines in retaliation. The EPR is now “bargaining”; discussing the situation with Calderón. URO, who can only claim that Franco Vargas acted without URO’s orders or knowledge, is becoming a national and international liability.
In another “sign” of URO’s decline, the Supreme Court of Mexico accepted a case of pederasty charges which had been rejected by Oaxaca courts. The case was brought by a mother of a four year old who was assaulted in his plush private kindergarten, allegedly by members of URO’s friendship “bubble”. The Oaxaca court’s failure to proceed implies that URO, or Franco Vargas, is protecting the pederasts. Mothers unite! This particular outraged mother won’t let go. A comfortable middle class woman, she is yet another person radicalized by URO – she includes the entire 2006-2007 repression when she blasts him. This furthers URO’s power-shrinkage, because while many can tolerate murder, few can tolerate child-molesting.
The Movimiento Nacional por la Defensa del Petroleo may be a player in the next election
But no matter. The exciting part is that the public is taking it on itself to organize opposition to the privatization of PEMEX. Being cynical, we may put this in the same category as anti-war protests which are routinely over-ridden by governments – but I salute the Oaxaca context: a state like many others in Mexico where dirty war terrorizes the population.
More than 150 people showed up on May 26, a Monday workday, at the city forum to discuss energy privatization. The structure of the forum gave the first set of presentations to four politicians: the PRD federal deputy Othón Cuevas; the PRI federal senator Adolfo Toledo Infazón; the Convergencia fedral senator Alberto Esteva Salinas; and the state National Action Party’s secretary general, Carlos Moreno Alcantara. Toledo Infazón duly and dully opposes privatization. Convergencia’s Esteva Salinas was over-dressed in a suit, but said the right things. Carlos Moreno Alcantara claimed that the Calderón’s plan “is not about privatization”, but the position of Mexico in the world today. Thinking ahead for our grandchildren, he said, there must be a plan for “strategic resources to defend capitalism, and no more government than is necessary.” He said that. I’m not kidding. The applause was slight. His words rang a echo to the common gossip that Calderón was elected with oil money from Exxon and Chevron, who expect him to pay back the favor.
With vigor and spirit, Cuevas responded by declaring that Mexico and its oil is not on earth to defend the interests of the USA which is squandering billions in Iraq while trying to control Iraq’s oil supply. The audience responded with questions, and after a break the intellectuals and academics had their say, followed again by audience participation. The actual details of the PEMEX ploy (that’s my term, one can hardly think that a company earning over $100 profit per barrel of oil cannot repair its own pipelines or pay for its own deep water wells) have been explained and exposed, in what is probably one of the most profound examples of public education in Mexico, and in direct contradiction to what is coming over national television.
Coincidentally, on May 19, Section 22 of SNTE once again set up their twenty-one day annual encampment to highlight demands for renewing the union contract. Once again, I went to look, along with tourists and footloose residents, at the marvelous combination of organization, defiance, and clever propaganda.
The rainy season in Oaxaca is underway, and vendors, unimpeded in occupying the zócalo and the streets around it, offered both pretty and practical products. Blankets were unfolded and carried off to the tents, hand-made jewelry and pottery sat displayed for the tourists.
The plantón (encampment) covers 15 street blocks. The union demands, in addition to the economic and educational needs, also include liberty for the political prisoners, cancellation of arrest orders, and restoring the schools held by Section 59 and the PRI to Section 22 control. Thus far there has not been much government response to demands for breakfasts, uniforms and shoes, sanitation facilities, community kitchens or basic materials for the 13,500 Oaxaca schools. Section 59 still holds schools, and confrontations continue.
Two years after the mega-encampment there still is no point in mud-slinging regarding the issue of education quality, teacher training or readiness, because this failure – this huge government failure – in Oaxaca cuts across all sectors. A higher proportion of Section 59 teachers with neither classroom experience nor college degrees is cited by Section 22, who themselves will soon lose their ability to hand down their teaching posts to their children with or without the same qualifications. But the problem is so widespread as to make it necessary for the state normal schools, employing professors from the Autonomous University of Benito Juarez of Oaxaca, to conduct classes in pedagogy to the teachers on strike, weekends in the zócalo. These teachers have not yet earned college degrees; in reality, they are teacher-apprentices.
At the moment we first saw the color and movement of the 2008 plantón, in our excitement none of us commented on who the vendors were. Now it’s claimed they are PRI promoted, in the same game of sneak, sell and tell as their PRI predecessors in 2006. Besides infiltration, they also serve to block access to the cafes around the zócalo, provoking another bitter complaint against the teachers on the part of the restaurant and cafe owners. I want to comment on change, but how can I put aside this small fact: the infiltration, according to opinion in Las Noticias, represents the on-going work of Jorge Franco Vargas, the infamous “El Chucky”, even while he’s under investigation for the assassinations, death squads, kidnappings and disappearances and torture of social movement activists in 2006. Two years have passed, and I am sitting in front of my computer trying to put my finger on what has changed. Damn.
Those of us who lived Oaxaca, 2006, do feel a touch of dejá vú, although the size of the teachers’ occupation is modest in comparison to that year’s: the teachers are camping in rotation as they come in from the eight regions of the state. Courtesy (or is it caution?) seems more pronounced. The shop-keepers who suffered financial losses in 2006 asked nicely that the teachers not block access, but as each region rotates in and out that courtesy dissipates. What the teachers try to avoid the vendors accomplish. And since nobody can forget (and many cannot forgive), the 2008 atmosphere also hints of wariness. The Ministerial Police circle the center in vans, but no police are evident inside the zócalo where the sidewalks are occupied and cafe tables stand empty.
Section 22 remains the manpower backbone of the social movement, with about 65,000 education workers. It is the income of 70,000 teachers (including Section 59) which recycles as the largest economic machine in Oaxaca’s economy, (unlike tourism dollars which largely leave the state). The teachers’ income, lost, did great harm; income regained and improved benefits all of Oaxaca’s economy. Teachers’ salaries (re-zonification) are always on the table. At this writing, a reasonable settlement within the next two weeks between the government and Section 22 seems likely because of threats of further disruption. The union presently holds toll booths on the highway, blocks access to the airport and buildings outside the city, and conducts normal strike activities.
The change most evident to me is not the relatively low–key occupations by Section 22. The real changes lie in answering this question: Where is the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO)? Who is now the big player on the field? My response, and the reason I see a post 2006 difference: the people organized.
What’s The Difference?
http://www.narconews.com/Issue53/article3113.html
By Nancy Davies
Commentary from Oaxaca
May 27, 2008
Part I
Nobody here in Oaxaca says things are better. I am trying to put my finger on what is different, and while different, where it might be going. It’s all a question of attitude, and to comment on the subjective existence of a different attitude leaves me open to hoots and cat-calls. But I think I’ll try it.
Below is my sketch of what has changed since the brutal repression of the 2006 social movement’s five month control of the city of Oaxaca. The “social movement”, not to be confused with the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE) or the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), resides in the populace seeking change. It is alive and well. It lives in all eight regions of the state, strongly situated within civil society and non-governmental organizations.
Many aspects of the social movement flourish in ways I have not seen before, especially in the form of local organizing and local battles. One example is the lawsuit on the Isthmus against the international wind generation complex built on communal indigenous lands. Other environmental examples include struggles against foreign ownership of mines, and water projects.
Today the most outstanding example is participation in the national movement for public dialogue, on the topic of privatizing PEMEX, Mexico’s oil producer. A national issue, yes, but Oaxaca has Salina Cruz, the big oil city on its southern coast. In Oaxaca, people first gathered during the 2006 movement to discuss public policy, and they are doing it now.
On Monday, May 26 the city of Oaxaca’s public forum (among hundreds of state-wide forums) for discussion of “la Reforma Energética”, (meaning privatization of oil) took place at Casa de la Ciudad at 10:00 AM: The sponsoring organization are civil society: Sinergia, Sevices for Alternative Education (EDUCA) , Insitute for Development of Oaxaca Women
(IDEMO) and the Center of Assistance to the Popular Movement (CAMPO). As the federal Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) legislator Othón Cuevas said, “With this meeting today, Oaxaca is sending to all Mexico a message: the Oaxacans want to act as citizens and no longer as subjects. They want to have an effect before things happen and not fold their arms in the face of decisions imposed from the heights of power. This forum also represents the demand of a society which with just reason feels each moment less represented by its governors and its legislators, and in consequence, wants to make heard its voice.”
These public discussions all over Mexico, and across the state of Oaxaca, come at the instigation of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the “defeated” PRD presidential candidate and leader of the anti-privatization campaign. Lopez Obrador came to Oaxaca on Tuesday, May 20. He spoke at an “invitation only” event at the Hotel Mision de Los Angeles, to about 1,200 people. He recruited hundreds of them in “brigades” to go door-to-door to collect signatures in opposition to privatization, and dozens to head up the statewide forums.
The national Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has split along lines of supporting, or not, the petroleum “reform” initiative of President Felipe Calderón. In support stands our governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), he who is so indebted to President Calderón for keeping him in office. But things change. When URO was in big trouble, so was Calderón, who barely could control his own National Action Party (PAN) and needed the PRI to vote with him in the congress. Now Calderón holds control. Meanwhile a PRI faction headed by former best-buddy Roberto Madrazo and Beatriz Pagés opposes the energy reform “because it is anti-constitutional”, which in fact it is. (The split reflects internal PRI conflict, as Heraclio Bonilla Gutierrez writing for La Noticias says, “like Sicilian Mafia families”.) With the PRI split on oil privatization, Calderón has little left to gain by supporting URO. Furthermore, the criminal activities of URO created international embarrassment, especially since the news started to leak out about the probable guilt of URO’s executive branch (that could be read “executioners” branch) in state terror.
URO’s bargaining power diminished when an information leak went to the feds. The first leak came from a retired military general, Juan Alfredo Oropeza Garnica; followed by others of lesser position inside the state attorney general’s office. The information clearly implicates URO’s right-hand man, Jorge Franco Vargas who held the position of Secretary of Government for URO while URO was out campaigning for Madrazo’s failed presidential bid. Franco Vargas has been implicated in running the death squads, along with torture and disappearances in the crimes against humanity perpetrated during 2006. Worse for URO, Franco Vargas is implicated in the 2007 forced disappearance of two men from the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), which claims responsibility for blown up oil pipelines in retaliation. The EPR is now “bargaining”; discussing the situation with Calderón. URO, who can only claim that Franco Vargas acted without URO’s orders or knowledge, is becoming a national and international liability.
In another “sign” of URO’s decline, the Supreme Court of Mexico accepted a case of pederasty charges which had been rejected by Oaxaca courts. The case was brought by a mother of a four year old who was assaulted in his plush private kindergarten, allegedly by members of URO’s friendship “bubble”. The Oaxaca court’s failure to proceed implies that URO, or Franco Vargas, is protecting the pederasts. Mothers unite! This particular outraged mother won’t let go. A comfortable middle class woman, she is yet another person radicalized by URO – she includes the entire 2006-2007 repression when she blasts him. This furthers URO’s power-shrinkage, because while many can tolerate murder, few can tolerate child-molesting.
The Movimiento Nacional por la Defensa del Petroleo may be a player in the next election
But no matter. The exciting part is that the public is taking it on itself to organize opposition to the privatization of PEMEX. Being cynical, we may put this in the same category as anti-war protests which are routinely over-ridden by governments – but I salute the Oaxaca context: a state like many others in Mexico where dirty war terrorizes the population.
More than 150 people showed up on May 26, a Monday workday, at the city forum to discuss energy privatization. The structure of the forum gave the first set of presentations to four politicians: the PRD federal deputy Othón Cuevas; the PRI federal senator Adolfo Toledo Infazón; the Convergencia fedral senator Alberto Esteva Salinas; and the state National Action Party’s secretary general, Carlos Moreno Alcantara. Toledo Infazón duly and dully opposes privatization. Convergencia’s Esteva Salinas was over-dressed in a suit, but said the right things. Carlos Moreno Alcantara claimed that the Calderón’s plan “is not about privatization”, but the position of Mexico in the world today. Thinking ahead for our grandchildren, he said, there must be a plan for “strategic resources to defend capitalism, and no more government than is necessary.” He said that. I’m not kidding. The applause was slight. His words rang a echo to the common gossip that Calderón was elected with oil money from Exxon and Chevron, who expect him to pay back the favor.
With vigor and spirit, Cuevas responded by declaring that Mexico and its oil is not on earth to defend the interests of the USA which is squandering billions in Iraq while trying to control Iraq’s oil supply. The audience responded with questions, and after a break the intellectuals and academics had their say, followed again by audience participation. The actual details of the PEMEX ploy (that’s my term, one can hardly think that a company earning over $100 profit per barrel of oil cannot repair its own pipelines or pay for its own deep water wells) have been explained and exposed, in what is probably one of the most profound examples of public education in Mexico, and in direct contradiction to what is coming over national television.
Coincidentally, on May 19, Section 22 of SNTE once again set up their twenty-one day annual encampment to highlight demands for renewing the union contract. Once again, I went to look, along with tourists and footloose residents, at the marvelous combination of organization, defiance, and clever propaganda.
The rainy season in Oaxaca is underway, and vendors, unimpeded in occupying the zócalo and the streets around it, offered both pretty and practical products. Blankets were unfolded and carried off to the tents, hand-made jewelry and pottery sat displayed for the tourists.
The plantón (encampment) covers 15 street blocks. The union demands, in addition to the economic and educational needs, also include liberty for the political prisoners, cancellation of arrest orders, and restoring the schools held by Section 59 and the PRI to Section 22 control. Thus far there has not been much government response to demands for breakfasts, uniforms and shoes, sanitation facilities, community kitchens or basic materials for the 13,500 Oaxaca schools. Section 59 still holds schools, and confrontations continue.
Two years after the mega-encampment there still is no point in mud-slinging regarding the issue of education quality, teacher training or readiness, because this failure – this huge government failure – in Oaxaca cuts across all sectors. A higher proportion of Section 59 teachers with neither classroom experience nor college degrees is cited by Section 22, who themselves will soon lose their ability to hand down their teaching posts to their children with or without the same qualifications. But the problem is so widespread as to make it necessary for the state normal schools, employing professors from the Autonomous University of Benito Juarez of Oaxaca, to conduct classes in pedagogy to the teachers on strike, weekends in the zócalo. These teachers have not yet earned college degrees; in reality, they are teacher-apprentices.
At the moment we first saw the color and movement of the 2008 plantón, in our excitement none of us commented on who the vendors were. Now it’s claimed they are PRI promoted, in the same game of sneak, sell and tell as their PRI predecessors in 2006. Besides infiltration, they also serve to block access to the cafes around the zócalo, provoking another bitter complaint against the teachers on the part of the restaurant and cafe owners. I want to comment on change, but how can I put aside this small fact: the infiltration, according to opinion in Las Noticias, represents the on-going work of Jorge Franco Vargas, the infamous “El Chucky”, even while he’s under investigation for the assassinations, death squads, kidnappings and disappearances and torture of social movement activists in 2006. Two years have passed, and I am sitting in front of my computer trying to put my finger on what has changed. Damn.
Those of us who lived Oaxaca, 2006, do feel a touch of dejá vú, although the size of the teachers’ occupation is modest in comparison to that year’s: the teachers are camping in rotation as they come in from the eight regions of the state. Courtesy (or is it caution?) seems more pronounced. The shop-keepers who suffered financial losses in 2006 asked nicely that the teachers not block access, but as each region rotates in and out that courtesy dissipates. What the teachers try to avoid the vendors accomplish. And since nobody can forget (and many cannot forgive), the 2008 atmosphere also hints of wariness. The Ministerial Police circle the center in vans, but no police are evident inside the zócalo where the sidewalks are occupied and cafe tables stand empty.
Section 22 remains the manpower backbone of the social movement, with about 65,000 education workers. It is the income of 70,000 teachers (including Section 59) which recycles as the largest economic machine in Oaxaca’s economy, (unlike tourism dollars which largely leave the state). The teachers’ income, lost, did great harm; income regained and improved benefits all of Oaxaca’s economy. Teachers’ salaries (re-zonification) are always on the table. At this writing, a reasonable settlement within the next two weeks between the government and Section 22 seems likely because of threats of further disruption. The union presently holds toll booths on the highway, blocks access to the airport and buildings outside the city, and conducts normal strike activities.
The change most evident to me is not the relatively low–key occupations by Section 22. The real changes lie in answering this question: Where is the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO)? Who is now the big player on the field? My response, and the reason I see a post 2006 difference: the people organized.
Soboba, sheriff negotiate peace after shooting deaths
Soboba, sheriff negotiate peace after shooting deaths
© Indian Country Today May 30, 2008. All Rights Reserved
Posted: May 30, 2008
by: Gale Courey Toensing / Indian Country Today
SAN JACINTO, Calif. - The chairman of the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians is working with local law enforcement officials and federal agents on a plan to improve cooperation and reduce conflicts following the deaths of three tribal members in shootouts with sheriff's deputies on the reservation in early May.
Robert Salgado said he could not yet discuss the details of the negotiations that began at a May 16 meeting with representatives from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, the BIA and the federal Justice Department, which is acting as a mediator in the negotiations.
''Now we've got a little gag order going; then when we get done with all our package of changes, we'll have a press conference,'' Salgado told Indian Country Today.
The May 16 meeting occurred just four days after a deadly gun battle in which deputies shot and killed 36-year-old Joseph Arres and 30-year-old Angelica Lopez, also known as Tamara Angela Hurtado, both enrolled members of the Soboba Band.
According to the sheriff's department, deputies were dispatched to the reservation in response to a 911 call ''in reference to an assault by a deadly weapon.''
The Los Angeles Times reported that Arres had a warrant out for his arrest at the time of his death and, according to court records, he twice pleaded guilty in 2006 to being a felon or narcotics addict in possession of a firearm. Arres' mobile home in San Jacinto burned down shortly after he died.
Salgado said the tribe has hired a private investigator to probe the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
Those deaths followed the killing May 8 of Eli Morillo, 26, during a long gunfight with deputies and SWAT members in armored vehicles on the reservation. In 2002, his brother, Peter, was shot and killed by police off the reservation.
The May 12 incident provoked anger and frustration on the reservation after the sheriff's office sent in helicopters and a SWAT team of more than 100 deputies who locked down the reservation, refusing to allow residents to return to their homes and confronting others at gunpoint.
Salgado said the sheriff's department trampled on the tribe's civil rights by violating the limits of their jurisdiction under Public Law 280 - a 1950s termination-era law that gives certain states criminal jurisdiction on Indian land. He threatened to bring legal action against the sheriff's department.
Salgado carried a ceremonial eagle feather to the May 16 meeting, prayed for the families of the dead, and offered an apology for saying the sheriff's deputies behaved like Gen. George Custer and the ''7th Cavalry'' and turned the reservation into a ''war zone.''
''The escalation of violence has produced bad blood between myself and the sheriff's department. As the leader, you have to hold your cool; but when you get your back up against the wall, you express your feelings. If I offended anyone, I'm sorry,'' Salgado said at the start of the meeting, which was held on the reservation at the Country Club at Soboba Springs, according to the Los Angeles Times.
''I did apologize, yes,'' Salgado told ICT. ''Well, you know, the old Indian way is you've got to ask for forgiveness, but they didn't say anything, so I dusted my hands off. It's on them now.''
At the end of the meeting, the grim-faced participants filed out of the room, stood stiffly at a podium, read a prepared statement and refused to take questions.
Dale Morris, the BIA's regional director, said the meeting was ''an important and productive first step toward reviewing and defining policies and procedures to effect change that will benefit all those concerned,'' according to the report.
Salgado said the core issues to be resolved concern communication, cultural sensitivity and respect for tribal sovereignty.
''It's really about communications and the government-to-government relationship - mostly between the tribal government and the sheriff's department.
''We're looking for just the understanding that they recognize we are leaders, that they be sensitive to our tradition and beliefs, and recognize the tribe's sovereignty. And that they should not overstep the bounds of Public Law 280 and just acknowledge that we are running our community on a good merit and they shouldn't look at us all as criminals.''
The tribe will continue to meet with the sheriff's office and other parties around every two weeks to detail a plan of action. But a legal action against the sheriff's department is still an option. ''We're still in the process of looking at that issue.''
The reservation has remained calm since the tragic shootings.
The Soboba Band's security force does not carry weapons. The sheriff's office responds to 911 calls from the reservation. California was one of six states upon which P.L. 280 was imposed when that law was passed in 1953. The only way out of the mandate would be if the state were to retrocede from the law, giving back criminal jurisdiction over tribal land to the federal government.
But that's not likely to happen any time soon.
''It's kind of hard because you've got so many small tribes who don't have the finances to do their own police work, so they have to rely on the state,'' Salgado said. ''We have 108 tribes in the state of California and I'd say 75 to 80 percent of them are on the poverty level.''
© Indian Country Today May 30, 2008. All Rights Reserved
Posted: May 30, 2008
by: Gale Courey Toensing / Indian Country Today
SAN JACINTO, Calif. - The chairman of the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians is working with local law enforcement officials and federal agents on a plan to improve cooperation and reduce conflicts following the deaths of three tribal members in shootouts with sheriff's deputies on the reservation in early May.
Robert Salgado said he could not yet discuss the details of the negotiations that began at a May 16 meeting with representatives from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, the BIA and the federal Justice Department, which is acting as a mediator in the negotiations.
''Now we've got a little gag order going; then when we get done with all our package of changes, we'll have a press conference,'' Salgado told Indian Country Today.
The May 16 meeting occurred just four days after a deadly gun battle in which deputies shot and killed 36-year-old Joseph Arres and 30-year-old Angelica Lopez, also known as Tamara Angela Hurtado, both enrolled members of the Soboba Band.
According to the sheriff's department, deputies were dispatched to the reservation in response to a 911 call ''in reference to an assault by a deadly weapon.''
The Los Angeles Times reported that Arres had a warrant out for his arrest at the time of his death and, according to court records, he twice pleaded guilty in 2006 to being a felon or narcotics addict in possession of a firearm. Arres' mobile home in San Jacinto burned down shortly after he died.
Salgado said the tribe has hired a private investigator to probe the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
Those deaths followed the killing May 8 of Eli Morillo, 26, during a long gunfight with deputies and SWAT members in armored vehicles on the reservation. In 2002, his brother, Peter, was shot and killed by police off the reservation.
The May 12 incident provoked anger and frustration on the reservation after the sheriff's office sent in helicopters and a SWAT team of more than 100 deputies who locked down the reservation, refusing to allow residents to return to their homes and confronting others at gunpoint.
Salgado said the sheriff's department trampled on the tribe's civil rights by violating the limits of their jurisdiction under Public Law 280 - a 1950s termination-era law that gives certain states criminal jurisdiction on Indian land. He threatened to bring legal action against the sheriff's department.
Salgado carried a ceremonial eagle feather to the May 16 meeting, prayed for the families of the dead, and offered an apology for saying the sheriff's deputies behaved like Gen. George Custer and the ''7th Cavalry'' and turned the reservation into a ''war zone.''
''The escalation of violence has produced bad blood between myself and the sheriff's department. As the leader, you have to hold your cool; but when you get your back up against the wall, you express your feelings. If I offended anyone, I'm sorry,'' Salgado said at the start of the meeting, which was held on the reservation at the Country Club at Soboba Springs, according to the Los Angeles Times.
''I did apologize, yes,'' Salgado told ICT. ''Well, you know, the old Indian way is you've got to ask for forgiveness, but they didn't say anything, so I dusted my hands off. It's on them now.''
At the end of the meeting, the grim-faced participants filed out of the room, stood stiffly at a podium, read a prepared statement and refused to take questions.
Dale Morris, the BIA's regional director, said the meeting was ''an important and productive first step toward reviewing and defining policies and procedures to effect change that will benefit all those concerned,'' according to the report.
Salgado said the core issues to be resolved concern communication, cultural sensitivity and respect for tribal sovereignty.
''It's really about communications and the government-to-government relationship - mostly between the tribal government and the sheriff's department.
''We're looking for just the understanding that they recognize we are leaders, that they be sensitive to our tradition and beliefs, and recognize the tribe's sovereignty. And that they should not overstep the bounds of Public Law 280 and just acknowledge that we are running our community on a good merit and they shouldn't look at us all as criminals.''
The tribe will continue to meet with the sheriff's office and other parties around every two weeks to detail a plan of action. But a legal action against the sheriff's department is still an option. ''We're still in the process of looking at that issue.''
The reservation has remained calm since the tragic shootings.
The Soboba Band's security force does not carry weapons. The sheriff's office responds to 911 calls from the reservation. California was one of six states upon which P.L. 280 was imposed when that law was passed in 1953. The only way out of the mandate would be if the state were to retrocede from the law, giving back criminal jurisdiction over tribal land to the federal government.
But that's not likely to happen any time soon.
''It's kind of hard because you've got so many small tribes who don't have the finances to do their own police work, so they have to rely on the state,'' Salgado said. ''We have 108 tribes in the state of California and I'd say 75 to 80 percent of them are on the poverty level.''
Campaña contra el consumo de Coca Cola y Pepsi
Campaña contra el consumo de Coca Cola y Pepsi
Desde Abajo
Atendiendo a la campaña que Conacc ha iniciado para eliminar el consumo de bebidas como la Coca Cola y la Pepsi Cola, así como productos como “Sabritas” y similares fabricados por estas empresas, no sólo por los daños que provocan para la salud, según lo reportado por las autoridades médicas, sino por el papel tan nocivo en el plano económico y político que por décadas han venido representando para nuestro país. Tan sólo para mencionar un ejemplo, en la Sierra de Zoogocho, Oaxaca, donde el Teatro Tecolote, adscrito al Conacc, se ha llegado a constatar la labor que esta transnacional está llevando a cabo entre las comunidades indígenas mediante engaños para obtener el control y explotación de los recursos de esa región. En otras palabras, la misma historia de siempre: el oro por espejitos.
Siendo la Cooperativa Pascual un ejemplo de lo que el esfuerzo de los trabajadores mexicanos puede lograr sin la injerencia de capitales extranjeros, lo cual adquiere enorme relevancia en el presente contexto en el que la derecha pretende entregar PEMEX a las empresas norteamericanas y españolas, nos parece de una gran importancia que intensifiquemos esta campaña para que el consumo de los productos Pascual se extiendan en todo el territorio nacional, para ayudar así a esta empresa mexicana enviando además, un mensaje político claro y contundente.
El correo electrónico de los compañeros de la Comisión de Enlace Político es: enlace@pascual.com.mx , y ellos son: Ada Griselda Mercado y José Rosendo Zavala
http://www.desdeabajo.org.mx/wordpress/?p=1227
Desde Abajo
Atendiendo a la campaña que Conacc ha iniciado para eliminar el consumo de bebidas como la Coca Cola y la Pepsi Cola, así como productos como “Sabritas” y similares fabricados por estas empresas, no sólo por los daños que provocan para la salud, según lo reportado por las autoridades médicas, sino por el papel tan nocivo en el plano económico y político que por décadas han venido representando para nuestro país. Tan sólo para mencionar un ejemplo, en la Sierra de Zoogocho, Oaxaca, donde el Teatro Tecolote, adscrito al Conacc, se ha llegado a constatar la labor que esta transnacional está llevando a cabo entre las comunidades indígenas mediante engaños para obtener el control y explotación de los recursos de esa región. En otras palabras, la misma historia de siempre: el oro por espejitos.
Siendo la Cooperativa Pascual un ejemplo de lo que el esfuerzo de los trabajadores mexicanos puede lograr sin la injerencia de capitales extranjeros, lo cual adquiere enorme relevancia en el presente contexto en el que la derecha pretende entregar PEMEX a las empresas norteamericanas y españolas, nos parece de una gran importancia que intensifiquemos esta campaña para que el consumo de los productos Pascual se extiendan en todo el territorio nacional, para ayudar así a esta empresa mexicana enviando además, un mensaje político claro y contundente.
El correo electrónico de los compañeros de la Comisión de Enlace Político es: enlace@pascual.com.mx , y ellos son: Ada Griselda Mercado y José Rosendo Zavala
http://www.desdeabajo.org.mx/wordpress/?p=1227
"Chingan a Sus Madres!"
"Chingan a Sus Madres!"
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico
http://www.counterpunch.com/ross06022008.html
By JOHN ROSS
"Chingan a sus Madres!" ("Fuck Your Mothers!"), the inebriated governor of Jalisco, Emilio Gonzalez Marquez, a charter member of the extreme right-wing clique "El Yunque" ("The Anvil") snarled at detractors during a Guadalajara public presentation this past April 24th while a nervous Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniguez fidgeted in his seat. Irate citizens of that west central state have been harshly critical of the governor's use of state funds to underwrite several projects near and dear to the Cardinal's heart, including the "Sanctuary of the Martyrs" to be built in the Guadalajara suburb of Tlaquepaque in memory of 26 Catholic martyrs slain during the 1926-29 Cristero war. Opponents dub Gonzalez's gift to the Church as the "Macro-limosna" ("super charitable donation.")
Floor plans for the sanctuary, a 2.2 billion peso mega-project of which Gonzalez has pledged 90 million pesos of taxpayers' money, reveal a 200,000 square meter domed structure, twice as big as Mexico City's Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most lucrative shrine in Christendom, raking in two billion pesos in an average year. The "Sanctuary of the Martyrs" would be topped by a 65 meter illuminated cross visible from the moon and will have space for 118,000 reserved burial crypts to be subscribed at 25,000 pesos each with all proceeds accruing to Sandoval's archdiocese. Governor Gonzalez justifies the "Macro-limosna" as stimulating religious tourism and creating jobs.
"Alelujah! Alelujah Chinga la Madre Tuya!" ("Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Go Fuck Your Own Mother!") protestors assembled by the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) howled on the threshold of Guadalajara's colonial cathedral the next day in response to the governor's outburst. Police cordoned off the PRDers from furious counter-demonstrators chanting "Viva Cristo Rey!" ("Long Live Christ the King!"), the battle cry of the Cristero movement.
The Cristero conflict erupted after post-revolutionary strongman General Plutarco Elias Calles closed down all Mexican Roman Catholic churches and seized Church property in 1926. Mexico's just-reorganized revolutionary army was dispatched to Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacan to combat Cristo Rey guerrilleros who had risen in rebellion against Calles, blowing up troop trains and burning protestant missionaries and rural school teachers alive to rid the region of "Bolsheviks." According to a count kept by historian Jean Meyer, a total of 30,000 Mexicans on both sides were killed during the three year-long skirmish, including the 26 martyred Christ-the-King warriors. Decades later the martyrs were beatified by the late Pope John Paul II over the objections of secularists who consider the Cristeros to have been "bandits, terrorists and traitors" to the "patria" (fatherland.)
This past April, Pope John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI AKA Josef Ratzinger, a member of a Nazi youth group in his native Germany, offered a Vatican Mass for the martyrs of Fascism and Communism, amongst whom he pointedly included the slain Christ-the-Kingers.
The revival of the Cristero crusade (for Catholic zealots in central Mexico it has never gone away) obeys the hierarchy's strategy to reaffirm the Catholic Church's place in Mexican history as the upcoming bicentennial of independence from the Spanish Crown and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution coalesce in 2010. Indeed, both of those watershed events were motivated by anti-Church sentiments. In 1810, a soon-to-be defrocked priest Miguel Hidalgo led the brown and black underclass (Mexico was a third black at liberation) against the Crown and the Church, the largest landowner in the colony whose bishops openly collaborated with Spain. A century later, impoverished Mexicans rose up against a dictator who had ruled for 34 years with the backing of the Catholic Church.
Plans for the Sanctuary and the "Route of the Pilgrims", a 90 kilometer knock-off of Spain's highly profitable Camino to Santiago Compostela pilgrims road, will put the Catholic Church's signature on the upcoming celebrations.
Despite encroachment on Catholic hegemony by Evangelical "sects" (as the hierarchy here labels Protestant denominations), the Church of Rome has gained remarkable traction during the presidencies of Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Felipe Calderon, elected in highly questioned 2006 balloting. Both are members of the National Action Party founded in 1939 by a pair of Catholic bankers to oppose the "Bolshevik" polices of then-president Lazaro Cardenas. Under Fox, who campaigned for high office literally wrapped in the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Pope John Paul paid his final visits to the Aztec nation. Secular Mexicans were appalled at the spectacle of their president kneeling to kiss the Pope's ring.
The Mexican Constitution delineates a sharp separation between Church and State and does not recognize the authority of "God" - some Church officials label Mexico's Magna Carta an "atheistic" document.
Vicente Fox, a native of the Guanajuato bajio or lowlands where the Cristero war is still a living memory, salted his administration with suspected members of the secretive Catholic organization El Yunque, among them Interior minister Carlos Abascal and Social Development secretary Ana Teresa Aranda who is now Calderon's Undersecretary of the Interior for Religious Affairs. Other Yunquistas who have served or serve Felipe Calderon include former Interior Minister Francisco Ramirez Acuna, Gonzalez's predecessor as Jalisco governor, and Agricultural secretary Alberto Cardenas who was Fox's environmental chief.
The genealogy of the Mexican Right and its ties to ultra-conservative elements in the Catholic hierarchy can be traced from the Cristero conflict to the founding of the PAN at the beginning of the second World War where the movement bifurcated - those who chose to move Mexico to the right through electoral politics set about to build the National Action Party, a grueling process that would not bring the PAN to power for another 60 years.
Radicalized militants aligned with the National Union of Sinarquists or "El Gallo" ("The Rooster" by virtue of the movement's logo), brownshirts who preached anti-Semitism and backed Hitler - the Sinarquistas were able to delay Mexico's participation in World War II through 1942. One of the Sinarquistas' founding fathers was Salvador Abascal, father of Fox's Interior Secretary. Although seriously diminished, the Sinarquist movement has never completely disappeared and the Gallo is applying for registration as a political party with an eye to running a candidate in 2012 presidential elections.
The Yunque which evolved from the Sinarquistas and the Christ the King Right was founded in Puebla in 1955 according to one-time militant Luis Paredes Moctezuma, former PAN mayor of Puebla city, and was financed by big landholders and industrialists
such as Hugo Salinas Price, father of tycoon Ricardo Salinas Pliego, now the owner of TV Azteca, Mexico's second television network.
During the turbulent 1960s, a Yunque youth group, code-named MURO fought left-wing students at the University of Guadalajara - several leftist student leaders were assassinated. The MUROs themselves split and one faction, the CARA ("Armed Revolutionary Action Commandos") took to kidnapping businessmen and sticking up telegraph offices much like their leftist counterparts, according to "El Yunque", a recently published volume assembled by investigative reporter Alvaro Delgado.
Besides Abascal and Aranda, other prominent PANistas who make no bones about their Yunquista inclinations are Manuel Espino, former PAN party president and now secretary general of the Christian Democrat Organization of the Americas (ODCA), and Jose Reyes Espina, former head of the COPARMEX, one of Mexico's most conservative business federations.
Also linked to the Yunque are litigating attorneys Jose Antonio Ortega Sanchez and Guillermo Velasco Arzac - both are the public face of the political action group "Better Government, Better Society" which recently ran a venomous primetime hit piece campaign attacking leftist former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as a follower of "Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet" (sic.)
Among supporting organizations that signed on to the group's registration papers are the National Union of Sinarquists and ProVida, an anti-abortion lobby whose board of directors lists Calderon's Undersecretary for Religious Affairs, the Yunquista Aranda, as a member. Jalisco governor Gonzalez is also an avowed supporter of ProVida and recently fired his state AIDS commission chairman for distributing condoms to non-homosexuals, accusing him of fomenting immorality.
One creepy similarity between Gonzalez's governance and the conservative Catholic hierarchy: both defend pederasty. For decades, the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to charges that Legionnaires of Christ founder Macial Marcial was sodomizing acolytes - Marcial was finally retired by Rome and ordered to spend the rest of his life in penitence. Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera stands accused of protecting the serial rapist priest Nicolas Aguilar, charged with abusing over 90 young boys. Governor Gonzalez has thrown up a protective wall around his attorney general and longtime associate Tomas Coronado who is under investigation for fondling two teenage girls at a private fiesta - Coronado remains Jalisco's attorney general.
"I have here this pinche papelito" ("damn piece of paper") Gonzalez hiccupped, waving a check for down payment on the Sanctuary of the Martyrs at Cardinal Sandoval, "if there are people who don't like it, well then chingan a sus madres!" In accepting the check, the Cardinal absolved the governor of blasphemy.
Sandoval himself has been less than polite in ripping his enemies - pro-choice advocates, feminists, gays and lesbians, condoms, and the infernal PRD against which he conducts, in his own words, "a holy war."
At 75, the Cardinal is determined to complete his pet projects before he is obligated to retire by the Church, a process that has apparently been stayed by Pope Benedict - unlike liberationist Chiapas bishop Samuel Ruiz who Ratzinger forced out the day he turned 75.
But Sandoval's "Mega-limosna" is not assured. Congress has ordered an audit of the Jalisco budget to ascertain whether or not the donation violates the constitutional separation of Church and State. Still, even if Sandoval is rebuffed, he will always have the "Narco-limosnas" (charitable donations by drug lords) with which to build his sanctuary. Although never substantiated, it has often been suggested that the Cardinal is the recipient of top dollar donations from the nation's narco lords seeking to buy their way into heaven.
Juan Sandoval Iniguez was appointed Guadalajara Cardinal following the May 23rd, 1993 assassination of his predecessor Juan Jesus Posadas, gunned down at the Guadalajara airport 15 years ago in what authorities described as a "mistaken identity" killing when he was purportedly caught in a crossfire between rival drug gangs. Posadas was also suspected of drawing down big bucks from the narcos - the Cardinal performed Mass once a month at the Colinas de San Javier neighborhood chapel which was regularly attended by some of the most notorious names in Narcodom.
It is conjectured that Posadas' facility for raising narco-limosnas for the Church was instrumental in his promotion from Archbishop of Guadalajara to Cardinal. But when he subsequently began turning down the tainted donations, the drug lords, operating on the time-honored principal of "plata o plomo" (money or lead) had him whacked.
Following the Posadas assassination, two Arellano Felix brothers representing the Tijuana Cartel, which had been implicated in the hit, visited Papal Nuncio Giralamo Prigione to ask absolution.
Although Posadas' murder was pinned on a case of mistaken identity, the Cardinal, who was shot from close range, was plainly identifiable in his Church robes with a foot-long pectoral cross around his neck, and Sandoval has always insisted that Posadas was a victim of a "Jacobin" (anti-clerical) plot organized by then-president Carlos Salinas. Posadas' successor has intensified his campaign to clear up the matter from year to year and the lawyer in the case, the aforementioned Jose Antonio Ortega Sanchez, remains on perpetual retainer thanks to the deep pockets of Governor Emilio Gonzalez - in 2008, the 15th anniversary of the Cardinal's assassination, the Jalisco state government has kicked in 700,000 pesos of taxpayers' money for Ortega Sanchez's services.
The specter of the Narco-limosnas has troubled the Mexican Council of Bishops or CEM for years. Ramon Godinez, the late Bishop of Aguascalientes, was out front in his acceptance of donations from local narcos, insisting that he "purified" the dirty money by doing good works with it. More recently, current CEM president Carlos Aguir confessed that the nation's narcos have approached Church leaders for "guidance and orientation" and praised kingpins as being "very generous" in building chapels and supporting the Church's social service programs in remote communities.
When leftists charged that such donations constitute nothing less than money laundering, particularly during a narco-war that is drowning Mexico in blood, Calderon's Undersecretary for Religious Affairs the Yunquista Ana Teresa Aranda refused to intervene, claiming that holding bishops accountable would be in violation of the "secret of the confessional", a response that not all the members of the CEM were happy with. "How can a father go to a church that was built with the blood of his children?" challenged Saltillo bishop Raul Vera, a liberationist and one-time coadjutor of Samuel Ruiz.
Despite ocular evidence that the narcos are financing construction, the CEM has not ordered any Catholic church structure suspected of being tainted with Narco-limosnas to tear itself down.
John Ross will be watching the NBA finals in California for the next three weeks. These dispatches will be published every ten days during his spree. For further disinformation write johnross@igc.org
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico
http://www.counterpunch.com/ross06022008.html
By JOHN ROSS
"Chingan a sus Madres!" ("Fuck Your Mothers!"), the inebriated governor of Jalisco, Emilio Gonzalez Marquez, a charter member of the extreme right-wing clique "El Yunque" ("The Anvil") snarled at detractors during a Guadalajara public presentation this past April 24th while a nervous Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniguez fidgeted in his seat. Irate citizens of that west central state have been harshly critical of the governor's use of state funds to underwrite several projects near and dear to the Cardinal's heart, including the "Sanctuary of the Martyrs" to be built in the Guadalajara suburb of Tlaquepaque in memory of 26 Catholic martyrs slain during the 1926-29 Cristero war. Opponents dub Gonzalez's gift to the Church as the "Macro-limosna" ("super charitable donation.")
Floor plans for the sanctuary, a 2.2 billion peso mega-project of which Gonzalez has pledged 90 million pesos of taxpayers' money, reveal a 200,000 square meter domed structure, twice as big as Mexico City's Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most lucrative shrine in Christendom, raking in two billion pesos in an average year. The "Sanctuary of the Martyrs" would be topped by a 65 meter illuminated cross visible from the moon and will have space for 118,000 reserved burial crypts to be subscribed at 25,000 pesos each with all proceeds accruing to Sandoval's archdiocese. Governor Gonzalez justifies the "Macro-limosna" as stimulating religious tourism and creating jobs.
"Alelujah! Alelujah Chinga la Madre Tuya!" ("Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Go Fuck Your Own Mother!") protestors assembled by the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) howled on the threshold of Guadalajara's colonial cathedral the next day in response to the governor's outburst. Police cordoned off the PRDers from furious counter-demonstrators chanting "Viva Cristo Rey!" ("Long Live Christ the King!"), the battle cry of the Cristero movement.
The Cristero conflict erupted after post-revolutionary strongman General Plutarco Elias Calles closed down all Mexican Roman Catholic churches and seized Church property in 1926. Mexico's just-reorganized revolutionary army was dispatched to Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacan to combat Cristo Rey guerrilleros who had risen in rebellion against Calles, blowing up troop trains and burning protestant missionaries and rural school teachers alive to rid the region of "Bolsheviks." According to a count kept by historian Jean Meyer, a total of 30,000 Mexicans on both sides were killed during the three year-long skirmish, including the 26 martyred Christ-the-King warriors. Decades later the martyrs were beatified by the late Pope John Paul II over the objections of secularists who consider the Cristeros to have been "bandits, terrorists and traitors" to the "patria" (fatherland.)
This past April, Pope John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI AKA Josef Ratzinger, a member of a Nazi youth group in his native Germany, offered a Vatican Mass for the martyrs of Fascism and Communism, amongst whom he pointedly included the slain Christ-the-Kingers.
The revival of the Cristero crusade (for Catholic zealots in central Mexico it has never gone away) obeys the hierarchy's strategy to reaffirm the Catholic Church's place in Mexican history as the upcoming bicentennial of independence from the Spanish Crown and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution coalesce in 2010. Indeed, both of those watershed events were motivated by anti-Church sentiments. In 1810, a soon-to-be defrocked priest Miguel Hidalgo led the brown and black underclass (Mexico was a third black at liberation) against the Crown and the Church, the largest landowner in the colony whose bishops openly collaborated with Spain. A century later, impoverished Mexicans rose up against a dictator who had ruled for 34 years with the backing of the Catholic Church.
Plans for the Sanctuary and the "Route of the Pilgrims", a 90 kilometer knock-off of Spain's highly profitable Camino to Santiago Compostela pilgrims road, will put the Catholic Church's signature on the upcoming celebrations.
Despite encroachment on Catholic hegemony by Evangelical "sects" (as the hierarchy here labels Protestant denominations), the Church of Rome has gained remarkable traction during the presidencies of Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and Felipe Calderon, elected in highly questioned 2006 balloting. Both are members of the National Action Party founded in 1939 by a pair of Catholic bankers to oppose the "Bolshevik" polices of then-president Lazaro Cardenas. Under Fox, who campaigned for high office literally wrapped in the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Pope John Paul paid his final visits to the Aztec nation. Secular Mexicans were appalled at the spectacle of their president kneeling to kiss the Pope's ring.
The Mexican Constitution delineates a sharp separation between Church and State and does not recognize the authority of "God" - some Church officials label Mexico's Magna Carta an "atheistic" document.
Vicente Fox, a native of the Guanajuato bajio or lowlands where the Cristero war is still a living memory, salted his administration with suspected members of the secretive Catholic organization El Yunque, among them Interior minister Carlos Abascal and Social Development secretary Ana Teresa Aranda who is now Calderon's Undersecretary of the Interior for Religious Affairs. Other Yunquistas who have served or serve Felipe Calderon include former Interior Minister Francisco Ramirez Acuna, Gonzalez's predecessor as Jalisco governor, and Agricultural secretary Alberto Cardenas who was Fox's environmental chief.
The genealogy of the Mexican Right and its ties to ultra-conservative elements in the Catholic hierarchy can be traced from the Cristero conflict to the founding of the PAN at the beginning of the second World War where the movement bifurcated - those who chose to move Mexico to the right through electoral politics set about to build the National Action Party, a grueling process that would not bring the PAN to power for another 60 years.
Radicalized militants aligned with the National Union of Sinarquists or "El Gallo" ("The Rooster" by virtue of the movement's logo), brownshirts who preached anti-Semitism and backed Hitler - the Sinarquistas were able to delay Mexico's participation in World War II through 1942. One of the Sinarquistas' founding fathers was Salvador Abascal, father of Fox's Interior Secretary. Although seriously diminished, the Sinarquist movement has never completely disappeared and the Gallo is applying for registration as a political party with an eye to running a candidate in 2012 presidential elections.
The Yunque which evolved from the Sinarquistas and the Christ the King Right was founded in Puebla in 1955 according to one-time militant Luis Paredes Moctezuma, former PAN mayor of Puebla city, and was financed by big landholders and industrialists
such as Hugo Salinas Price, father of tycoon Ricardo Salinas Pliego, now the owner of TV Azteca, Mexico's second television network.
During the turbulent 1960s, a Yunque youth group, code-named MURO fought left-wing students at the University of Guadalajara - several leftist student leaders were assassinated. The MUROs themselves split and one faction, the CARA ("Armed Revolutionary Action Commandos") took to kidnapping businessmen and sticking up telegraph offices much like their leftist counterparts, according to "El Yunque", a recently published volume assembled by investigative reporter Alvaro Delgado.
Besides Abascal and Aranda, other prominent PANistas who make no bones about their Yunquista inclinations are Manuel Espino, former PAN party president and now secretary general of the Christian Democrat Organization of the Americas (ODCA), and Jose Reyes Espina, former head of the COPARMEX, one of Mexico's most conservative business federations.
Also linked to the Yunque are litigating attorneys Jose Antonio Ortega Sanchez and Guillermo Velasco Arzac - both are the public face of the political action group "Better Government, Better Society" which recently ran a venomous primetime hit piece campaign attacking leftist former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as a follower of "Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet" (sic.)
Among supporting organizations that signed on to the group's registration papers are the National Union of Sinarquists and ProVida, an anti-abortion lobby whose board of directors lists Calderon's Undersecretary for Religious Affairs, the Yunquista Aranda, as a member. Jalisco governor Gonzalez is also an avowed supporter of ProVida and recently fired his state AIDS commission chairman for distributing condoms to non-homosexuals, accusing him of fomenting immorality.
One creepy similarity between Gonzalez's governance and the conservative Catholic hierarchy: both defend pederasty. For decades, the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to charges that Legionnaires of Christ founder Macial Marcial was sodomizing acolytes - Marcial was finally retired by Rome and ordered to spend the rest of his life in penitence. Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera stands accused of protecting the serial rapist priest Nicolas Aguilar, charged with abusing over 90 young boys. Governor Gonzalez has thrown up a protective wall around his attorney general and longtime associate Tomas Coronado who is under investigation for fondling two teenage girls at a private fiesta - Coronado remains Jalisco's attorney general.
"I have here this pinche papelito" ("damn piece of paper") Gonzalez hiccupped, waving a check for down payment on the Sanctuary of the Martyrs at Cardinal Sandoval, "if there are people who don't like it, well then chingan a sus madres!" In accepting the check, the Cardinal absolved the governor of blasphemy.
Sandoval himself has been less than polite in ripping his enemies - pro-choice advocates, feminists, gays and lesbians, condoms, and the infernal PRD against which he conducts, in his own words, "a holy war."
At 75, the Cardinal is determined to complete his pet projects before he is obligated to retire by the Church, a process that has apparently been stayed by Pope Benedict - unlike liberationist Chiapas bishop Samuel Ruiz who Ratzinger forced out the day he turned 75.
But Sandoval's "Mega-limosna" is not assured. Congress has ordered an audit of the Jalisco budget to ascertain whether or not the donation violates the constitutional separation of Church and State. Still, even if Sandoval is rebuffed, he will always have the "Narco-limosnas" (charitable donations by drug lords) with which to build his sanctuary. Although never substantiated, it has often been suggested that the Cardinal is the recipient of top dollar donations from the nation's narco lords seeking to buy their way into heaven.
Juan Sandoval Iniguez was appointed Guadalajara Cardinal following the May 23rd, 1993 assassination of his predecessor Juan Jesus Posadas, gunned down at the Guadalajara airport 15 years ago in what authorities described as a "mistaken identity" killing when he was purportedly caught in a crossfire between rival drug gangs. Posadas was also suspected of drawing down big bucks from the narcos - the Cardinal performed Mass once a month at the Colinas de San Javier neighborhood chapel which was regularly attended by some of the most notorious names in Narcodom.
It is conjectured that Posadas' facility for raising narco-limosnas for the Church was instrumental in his promotion from Archbishop of Guadalajara to Cardinal. But when he subsequently began turning down the tainted donations, the drug lords, operating on the time-honored principal of "plata o plomo" (money or lead) had him whacked.
Following the Posadas assassination, two Arellano Felix brothers representing the Tijuana Cartel, which had been implicated in the hit, visited Papal Nuncio Giralamo Prigione to ask absolution.
Although Posadas' murder was pinned on a case of mistaken identity, the Cardinal, who was shot from close range, was plainly identifiable in his Church robes with a foot-long pectoral cross around his neck, and Sandoval has always insisted that Posadas was a victim of a "Jacobin" (anti-clerical) plot organized by then-president Carlos Salinas. Posadas' successor has intensified his campaign to clear up the matter from year to year and the lawyer in the case, the aforementioned Jose Antonio Ortega Sanchez, remains on perpetual retainer thanks to the deep pockets of Governor Emilio Gonzalez - in 2008, the 15th anniversary of the Cardinal's assassination, the Jalisco state government has kicked in 700,000 pesos of taxpayers' money for Ortega Sanchez's services.
The specter of the Narco-limosnas has troubled the Mexican Council of Bishops or CEM for years. Ramon Godinez, the late Bishop of Aguascalientes, was out front in his acceptance of donations from local narcos, insisting that he "purified" the dirty money by doing good works with it. More recently, current CEM president Carlos Aguir confessed that the nation's narcos have approached Church leaders for "guidance and orientation" and praised kingpins as being "very generous" in building chapels and supporting the Church's social service programs in remote communities.
When leftists charged that such donations constitute nothing less than money laundering, particularly during a narco-war that is drowning Mexico in blood, Calderon's Undersecretary for Religious Affairs the Yunquista Ana Teresa Aranda refused to intervene, claiming that holding bishops accountable would be in violation of the "secret of the confessional", a response that not all the members of the CEM were happy with. "How can a father go to a church that was built with the blood of his children?" challenged Saltillo bishop Raul Vera, a liberationist and one-time coadjutor of Samuel Ruiz.
Despite ocular evidence that the narcos are financing construction, the CEM has not ordered any Catholic church structure suspected of being tainted with Narco-limosnas to tear itself down.
John Ross will be watching the NBA finals in California for the next three weeks. These dispatches will be published every ten days during his spree. For further disinformation write johnross@igc.org
Obama y Clinton: Dos caras de la misma moneda imperial
Obama y Clinton: Dos caras de la misma moneda imperial
Carlos Rivera Lugo
Claridad
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=68098&titular=obama-y-clinton:-dos-caras-de-la-misma-moneda-imperial-
Si hay algo que ha llamado la atención sobre la presente campaña electoral en Estados Unidos, sobre todo la reñida contienda por la candidatura presidencial por el Partido Demócrata, es el entusiasmo por el tema del cambio y la ruptura con el status quo que mantiene en Washington los poderes establecidos. Es un entusiasmo un tanto angustiado ante el monumental desastre que ha resultado los pasados siete años y medio de la administración de George W. Bush. A partir de las políticas fallidas de ésta en los político, lo militar y lo económico, ha hundido a Estados Unidos en el guerrerismo, la corrupción y una recesión dictada por el apetito insaciable del gran capital. De ahí que el grito por el cambio que se ha escuchado con una fuerza inesperada entre el electorado estadounidense constituye una búsqueda desesperada por una apertura hacia un nuevo rumbo nacional e internacional para el país.
La figura que más ha logrado canalizar esa esperanza ha sido el candidato Barack Obama. Incluso, contra todos los pronósticos iniciales, el senador afronorteamericano por el estado de Illinois, logró desplazar como favorito a la senadora por el estado de Nueva York, Hillary Clinton. Ante ello, ésta, ni corta ni perezosa, entendió que no era la continuidad lo que más deseaba el electorado de su partido –lo que ella, como ex primera dama de su esposo el presidente William J. Clinton, representaba- sino que el cambio. De ahí que ella también empezara a prometer cambios a diestra y siniestra, sobre todo en beneficio de los más desfavorecidos.
Sin embargo, el imperio es una telaraña. Su estado es un entramado organizacional complejo de relaciones sociales que va jalonando a sus participantes hacia lo que el sociólogo irlandés John Holloway llama “una reconciliación con la realidad del capitalismo”. Advierte el catedrático de la Universidad de Puebla que si pretendemos canalizar nuestras luchas por el cambio a través de ese estado, que tiene sus particulares prácticas diseñadas en función de los intereses del capital, éstas se van a ver presionadas a encausarse en cierta dirección afín a dichos intereses. El estado capitalista no existe como instrumento de autodeterminación del pueblo, sino como mecanismo cooptador de la voluntad popular y reproductor de la hegemonía del bloque dominante de poder. La lógica del sistema lleva, pues, hacia la reconciliación permanente con sus intereses dominantes, es decir, a la traición efectiva, si se quiere, de toda esperanza de cambio real.
Un buen ejemplo de lo anterior es la candidatura de Barack Obama. Mientras más se acerca a la designación como candidato presidencial del Partido Demócrata, más compelido se siente a “traicionar” la multiplicidad de expectativas de cambio real que pretende representar y a reconciliarse con los fuertes parámetros fijados por la realidad absorbente del imperio.
Así ocurrió en días pasados con motivo de su almuerzo con la derechista Fundación Cubano Americana, una desprestigiada organización, la más antigua del exilio cubano, promotora activa de actos de terrorismo contra el pueblo de Cuba y de las políticas fallidas de Washington en torno a dicho país antillano. Asegurando que bajo un gobierno suyo Estados Unidos podrá “recuperar el liderazgo del hemisferio”, Obama acudió sin embargo a los anticastristas, los principales oponentes al cambio de la política exterior de ese país sobre Cuba y la América Latina toda. Para colmo, queriendo congraciarse con éstos en busca de su voto, les aseguró que de llegar a la presidencia mantendrá el criminal embargo económico contra Cuba, “porque nos da peso político con el actual régimen. Si se dan pasos significativos hacia la democracia, comenzando por liberar a todos los prisioneros políticos, empezaremos a normalizar las relaciones. Eso impulsará un cambio real en Cuba, mediante una diplomacia fuerte, inteligente y con principios”.
Ahora bien: Obama fue más allá en su reconciliación con las lógicas imperiales: enmarcó como un problema de “seguridad” la actual situación de la América nuestra.
En un mensaje en el que pretendió delinear los contornos generales de su llamada nueva política hacia la América nuestra, Obama señaló: “Para demasiada gente en el hemisferio la seguridad es una carencia en sus vidas... Nunca habrá verdadera seguridad a menos que concentremos nuestros esfuerzos en todas las fuentes de temor para América Latina, y eso es lo que haré como presidente de Estados Unidos.” Abundó que para lograr eso “ordenaré a mi procurador general y a mi secretario de Seguridad Interna reunirse con sus homólogos latinoamericanos durante el primer año de mi gestión. Lucharemos por un esfuerzo unido. Proveeremos los recursos y pediremos a cada nación hacer lo mismo. Colaboraremos en la lucha contra el narcotráfico, la corrupción y el crimen organizado”.
Incapaz de comprender en su justa medida el proceso de cambios que caracteriza hoy a la región, Obama sucumbió a la lógica imperial reduccionista que, al igual que el actual mandatario George W. Bush, parece criminalizar todas las expresiones de lucha y los conflictos que se escenifican actualmente en ésta. Llegó incluso a endosar las intervenciones ilegales del gobierno del presidente Álvaro Uribe en Colombia en los territorios vecinos de Ecuador y Venezuela.
De ahí un paso a su sorpresivo endoso a la notoria Doctrina Monroe: “Durante 200 años —expresó Obama— Estados Unidos ha dejado en claro que no vamos a soportar la intervención en nuestro hemisferio, sin embargo debemos ver que hay una intervención importante, el hambre, la enfermedad, la desesperación. Desde Haití hasta Perú podemos hacer algo mejor las cosas y debemos hacerlo, no podemos aceptar la globalización de los estómagos vacíos”.
Sin embargo, “estómagos vacíos” es su amenaza para Cuba si no se doblega a la voluntad imperial de Washington. Así lo denunció el líder cubano Fidel Castro Ruz en su más reciente reflexión: “El discurso del candidato Obama se puede traducir en una fórmula de hambre para la nación”.
“Los Estados Unidos de hoy no tienen nada que ver con la declaración de principios de Filadelfia formulada por las 13 colonias que se rebelaron contra el colonialismo inglés. Hoy constituyen un gigantesco imperio, que no pasaba en aquel momento por la mente de sus fundadores”, apuntó el ex presidente cubano. Invitó a Obama a conocer mejor a Cuba antes de criticarla, y familiarizarse con las circunstancias que condujeron a la revolución, sobre todo el intervensionismo estadounidense y el coloniaje económico resultante.
“La Revolución fue producto del dominio imperial. No se nos puede acusar de haberla impuesto... Ningún otro país pequeño y bloqueado como el nuestro habría sido capaz de resistir tanto tiempo, a base de ambición, vanidad, engaño o abusos de autoridad, un poder como el de su vecino. Afirmarlo constituye un insulto a la inteligencia de nuestro heroico pueblo”, advirtió el líder cubano.
La candidata demócrata Hillary Clinton se ha inscrito dentro de la misma lógica imperial hacia Cuba y la América Latina. Según el corresponsal en Estados Unidos de La Jornada de México, John D. Cockcroft: “Obama y Clinton aceptan las doctrinas de la guerra contra el terrorismo. Ambos han votado en el Congreso en favor de la agenda Bush/Cheney en términos de los presupuestos por ‘la defensa’ y las guerras. También han votado la línea Bush/Cheney en cuanto a la tortura, el espionaje interno y otras violaciones de derechos civiles. Sus consejeros tienen fuertes vínculos con los oficiales militares más guerreros e incluyen halcones como Zbigniew Brzezinski y Anthony Lake por Obama y Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger y Richard Holbrooke por Clinton”. Y añade: “Aunque Obama a diferencia de McCain y Clinton está dispuesto a encontrarse con líderes cubanos, la política de los tres acerca de América Latina es casi igual. Dicen que los gobiernos de Cuba y Venezuela no son democracias sino dictaduras, y habrá que cambiarlos”.
En fin, ambos, Obama y Clinton, en su infinita ignorancia de las circunstancias históricas particulares de nuestras naciones, se han reconciliado con la antigua y desgastada lógica imperial del destino manifiesto de su país para mandar sobre la totalidad de las Américas. De ahí que Nuestra América sólo puede esperar aquellos cambios que conquiste y construya, a partir de sus propias luchas, desde las entrañas de sus propias sociedades y en contra de los continuados designios imperiales del vecino del Norte. Y ese es nuestro destino manifiesto.
Carlos Rivera Lugo
Claridad
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=68098&titular=obama-y-clinton:-dos-caras-de-la-misma-moneda-imperial-
Si hay algo que ha llamado la atención sobre la presente campaña electoral en Estados Unidos, sobre todo la reñida contienda por la candidatura presidencial por el Partido Demócrata, es el entusiasmo por el tema del cambio y la ruptura con el status quo que mantiene en Washington los poderes establecidos. Es un entusiasmo un tanto angustiado ante el monumental desastre que ha resultado los pasados siete años y medio de la administración de George W. Bush. A partir de las políticas fallidas de ésta en los político, lo militar y lo económico, ha hundido a Estados Unidos en el guerrerismo, la corrupción y una recesión dictada por el apetito insaciable del gran capital. De ahí que el grito por el cambio que se ha escuchado con una fuerza inesperada entre el electorado estadounidense constituye una búsqueda desesperada por una apertura hacia un nuevo rumbo nacional e internacional para el país.
La figura que más ha logrado canalizar esa esperanza ha sido el candidato Barack Obama. Incluso, contra todos los pronósticos iniciales, el senador afronorteamericano por el estado de Illinois, logró desplazar como favorito a la senadora por el estado de Nueva York, Hillary Clinton. Ante ello, ésta, ni corta ni perezosa, entendió que no era la continuidad lo que más deseaba el electorado de su partido –lo que ella, como ex primera dama de su esposo el presidente William J. Clinton, representaba- sino que el cambio. De ahí que ella también empezara a prometer cambios a diestra y siniestra, sobre todo en beneficio de los más desfavorecidos.
Sin embargo, el imperio es una telaraña. Su estado es un entramado organizacional complejo de relaciones sociales que va jalonando a sus participantes hacia lo que el sociólogo irlandés John Holloway llama “una reconciliación con la realidad del capitalismo”. Advierte el catedrático de la Universidad de Puebla que si pretendemos canalizar nuestras luchas por el cambio a través de ese estado, que tiene sus particulares prácticas diseñadas en función de los intereses del capital, éstas se van a ver presionadas a encausarse en cierta dirección afín a dichos intereses. El estado capitalista no existe como instrumento de autodeterminación del pueblo, sino como mecanismo cooptador de la voluntad popular y reproductor de la hegemonía del bloque dominante de poder. La lógica del sistema lleva, pues, hacia la reconciliación permanente con sus intereses dominantes, es decir, a la traición efectiva, si se quiere, de toda esperanza de cambio real.
Un buen ejemplo de lo anterior es la candidatura de Barack Obama. Mientras más se acerca a la designación como candidato presidencial del Partido Demócrata, más compelido se siente a “traicionar” la multiplicidad de expectativas de cambio real que pretende representar y a reconciliarse con los fuertes parámetros fijados por la realidad absorbente del imperio.
Así ocurrió en días pasados con motivo de su almuerzo con la derechista Fundación Cubano Americana, una desprestigiada organización, la más antigua del exilio cubano, promotora activa de actos de terrorismo contra el pueblo de Cuba y de las políticas fallidas de Washington en torno a dicho país antillano. Asegurando que bajo un gobierno suyo Estados Unidos podrá “recuperar el liderazgo del hemisferio”, Obama acudió sin embargo a los anticastristas, los principales oponentes al cambio de la política exterior de ese país sobre Cuba y la América Latina toda. Para colmo, queriendo congraciarse con éstos en busca de su voto, les aseguró que de llegar a la presidencia mantendrá el criminal embargo económico contra Cuba, “porque nos da peso político con el actual régimen. Si se dan pasos significativos hacia la democracia, comenzando por liberar a todos los prisioneros políticos, empezaremos a normalizar las relaciones. Eso impulsará un cambio real en Cuba, mediante una diplomacia fuerte, inteligente y con principios”.
Ahora bien: Obama fue más allá en su reconciliación con las lógicas imperiales: enmarcó como un problema de “seguridad” la actual situación de la América nuestra.
En un mensaje en el que pretendió delinear los contornos generales de su llamada nueva política hacia la América nuestra, Obama señaló: “Para demasiada gente en el hemisferio la seguridad es una carencia en sus vidas... Nunca habrá verdadera seguridad a menos que concentremos nuestros esfuerzos en todas las fuentes de temor para América Latina, y eso es lo que haré como presidente de Estados Unidos.” Abundó que para lograr eso “ordenaré a mi procurador general y a mi secretario de Seguridad Interna reunirse con sus homólogos latinoamericanos durante el primer año de mi gestión. Lucharemos por un esfuerzo unido. Proveeremos los recursos y pediremos a cada nación hacer lo mismo. Colaboraremos en la lucha contra el narcotráfico, la corrupción y el crimen organizado”.
Incapaz de comprender en su justa medida el proceso de cambios que caracteriza hoy a la región, Obama sucumbió a la lógica imperial reduccionista que, al igual que el actual mandatario George W. Bush, parece criminalizar todas las expresiones de lucha y los conflictos que se escenifican actualmente en ésta. Llegó incluso a endosar las intervenciones ilegales del gobierno del presidente Álvaro Uribe en Colombia en los territorios vecinos de Ecuador y Venezuela.
De ahí un paso a su sorpresivo endoso a la notoria Doctrina Monroe: “Durante 200 años —expresó Obama— Estados Unidos ha dejado en claro que no vamos a soportar la intervención en nuestro hemisferio, sin embargo debemos ver que hay una intervención importante, el hambre, la enfermedad, la desesperación. Desde Haití hasta Perú podemos hacer algo mejor las cosas y debemos hacerlo, no podemos aceptar la globalización de los estómagos vacíos”.
Sin embargo, “estómagos vacíos” es su amenaza para Cuba si no se doblega a la voluntad imperial de Washington. Así lo denunció el líder cubano Fidel Castro Ruz en su más reciente reflexión: “El discurso del candidato Obama se puede traducir en una fórmula de hambre para la nación”.
“Los Estados Unidos de hoy no tienen nada que ver con la declaración de principios de Filadelfia formulada por las 13 colonias que se rebelaron contra el colonialismo inglés. Hoy constituyen un gigantesco imperio, que no pasaba en aquel momento por la mente de sus fundadores”, apuntó el ex presidente cubano. Invitó a Obama a conocer mejor a Cuba antes de criticarla, y familiarizarse con las circunstancias que condujeron a la revolución, sobre todo el intervensionismo estadounidense y el coloniaje económico resultante.
“La Revolución fue producto del dominio imperial. No se nos puede acusar de haberla impuesto... Ningún otro país pequeño y bloqueado como el nuestro habría sido capaz de resistir tanto tiempo, a base de ambición, vanidad, engaño o abusos de autoridad, un poder como el de su vecino. Afirmarlo constituye un insulto a la inteligencia de nuestro heroico pueblo”, advirtió el líder cubano.
La candidata demócrata Hillary Clinton se ha inscrito dentro de la misma lógica imperial hacia Cuba y la América Latina. Según el corresponsal en Estados Unidos de La Jornada de México, John D. Cockcroft: “Obama y Clinton aceptan las doctrinas de la guerra contra el terrorismo. Ambos han votado en el Congreso en favor de la agenda Bush/Cheney en términos de los presupuestos por ‘la defensa’ y las guerras. También han votado la línea Bush/Cheney en cuanto a la tortura, el espionaje interno y otras violaciones de derechos civiles. Sus consejeros tienen fuertes vínculos con los oficiales militares más guerreros e incluyen halcones como Zbigniew Brzezinski y Anthony Lake por Obama y Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger y Richard Holbrooke por Clinton”. Y añade: “Aunque Obama a diferencia de McCain y Clinton está dispuesto a encontrarse con líderes cubanos, la política de los tres acerca de América Latina es casi igual. Dicen que los gobiernos de Cuba y Venezuela no son democracias sino dictaduras, y habrá que cambiarlos”.
En fin, ambos, Obama y Clinton, en su infinita ignorancia de las circunstancias históricas particulares de nuestras naciones, se han reconciliado con la antigua y desgastada lógica imperial del destino manifiesto de su país para mandar sobre la totalidad de las Américas. De ahí que Nuestra América sólo puede esperar aquellos cambios que conquiste y construya, a partir de sus propias luchas, desde las entrañas de sus propias sociedades y en contra de los continuados designios imperiales del vecino del Norte. Y ese es nuestro destino manifiesto.
Police Sniper 5 Tribal Members
LA VOZ DE AZTLAN
http://www.aztlan.net/soboba_indian_reservation.htm
Los Angeles, Alta California
May, 14 2008
ALTA CALIFORNIA: Tribal Chief says Indian Reservation
"in a near state of war" with Riverside County Sheriff's
(NOTE: Please see update below:)
Seven (7) separate gun battles involving the Soboba Indian Reservation and the Riverside County Sheriff's Department has left 5 tribal members dead. Tribal Chief of the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians, Robert Salgado, said that in just the last week two raging gun battles lasting for hours has resulted in the deaths of three tribal members, one a woman and another the son of a prominent Luiseno Indian family.
The first of the most recent gun battles occurred on Thursday May 8. Tribal member Eli Morillo, age 26, was killed during the gunfight inside the reservation that went on for hours. The gun battle involved numerous Sheriff SWAT team members and armored vehicles. Eli Morillo's brother, Peter Morillo, was also shot dead by police in 2002. Their mother, Rosemary Morillo, is a former tribal chairwoman.
The second recent gun battle with Sheriff's deputies occurred Monday. In a raging gun battle that lasted for more than an hour, a Sheriff's SWAT team of deputies and snipers killed two tribal members, 36-year-old Joseph Arres and an unidentified woman. It is not known if Joseph Arres is related to Gordon Arres, a tribal member, who was also killed by a Sheriff's deputy on December 27, 2007.
Tribal Chief Robert Salgado has accused the Sheriffs of waging war against the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians and of acting like "the 7th Calvary." He informed the Los Angeles Times that his reservation was "in a near state of war" with Riverside County Sheriff's. He has asked for help from the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the state attorney general's office, the U.S. attorney's office and civil and human rights attorneys and organizations.
UPDATE
May 15, 2008
Soboba Indian Reservation mother killed by Riverside County Sheriff's sniper identified
Yesterday La Voz de Aztlan published a report at http://www.aztlan.net/soboba_indian_reservation.htm describing 7 gun battles in which the Riverside County Sheriff's Department has killed a total of 5 tribal members of the Soboba Indian Reservation located near the town of San Jacinto in Southern California. We mentioned that the most recent gun battle occurred on Monday leaving two tribal members dead. At the time the female killed by a Sheriff's sniper was not yet identified.
Today, the father identified the victim. She is mother Tamara Angela Hurtado, age 30, a resident of the reservation. Speaking at a Lighthouse Ministry memorial, Mr. Gary Hurtado, father of Angela, said that there was great sadness on the reservation. He saw his daughter Angela just a few days before the shooting,
"She was a nice person," Mr. Hurtado said. "She had a lot of love. She was a housewife and the mother of a 9-year-old son."
http://www.aztlan.net/soboba_indian_reservation.htm
Los Angeles, Alta California
May, 14 2008
ALTA CALIFORNIA: Tribal Chief says Indian Reservation
"in a near state of war" with Riverside County Sheriff's
(NOTE: Please see update below:)
Seven (7) separate gun battles involving the Soboba Indian Reservation and the Riverside County Sheriff's Department has left 5 tribal members dead. Tribal Chief of the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians, Robert Salgado, said that in just the last week two raging gun battles lasting for hours has resulted in the deaths of three tribal members, one a woman and another the son of a prominent Luiseno Indian family.
The first of the most recent gun battles occurred on Thursday May 8. Tribal member Eli Morillo, age 26, was killed during the gunfight inside the reservation that went on for hours. The gun battle involved numerous Sheriff SWAT team members and armored vehicles. Eli Morillo's brother, Peter Morillo, was also shot dead by police in 2002. Their mother, Rosemary Morillo, is a former tribal chairwoman.
The second recent gun battle with Sheriff's deputies occurred Monday. In a raging gun battle that lasted for more than an hour, a Sheriff's SWAT team of deputies and snipers killed two tribal members, 36-year-old Joseph Arres and an unidentified woman. It is not known if Joseph Arres is related to Gordon Arres, a tribal member, who was also killed by a Sheriff's deputy on December 27, 2007.
Tribal Chief Robert Salgado has accused the Sheriffs of waging war against the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians and of acting like "the 7th Calvary." He informed the Los Angeles Times that his reservation was "in a near state of war" with Riverside County Sheriff's. He has asked for help from the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the state attorney general's office, the U.S. attorney's office and civil and human rights attorneys and organizations.
UPDATE
May 15, 2008
Soboba Indian Reservation mother killed by Riverside County Sheriff's sniper identified
Yesterday La Voz de Aztlan published a report at http://www.aztlan.net/soboba_indian_reservation.htm describing 7 gun battles in which the Riverside County Sheriff's Department has killed a total of 5 tribal members of the Soboba Indian Reservation located near the town of San Jacinto in Southern California. We mentioned that the most recent gun battle occurred on Monday leaving two tribal members dead. At the time the female killed by a Sheriff's sniper was not yet identified.
Today, the father identified the victim. She is mother Tamara Angela Hurtado, age 30, a resident of the reservation. Speaking at a Lighthouse Ministry memorial, Mr. Gary Hurtado, father of Angela, said that there was great sadness on the reservation. He saw his daughter Angela just a few days before the shooting,
"She was a nice person," Mr. Hurtado said. "She had a lot of love. She was a housewife and the mother of a 9-year-old son."
In the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day
In the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day
A Guaranteed Day's Work
http://www.counterpunch.com/sainath05312008.html
By P. SAINATH
He says he is not 70 but is, in fact, "quite a few years older." "Anyway, how can I tell exactly?"
But age has not stopped Gadasu Ramulu from doing hard physical labour in searing temperatures well above 110F in Nalgonda. There have been nearly 60 heat wave deaths here in two months, the highest for any district in Andhra Pradesh this year. His passbook shows he has worked 39 days at the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act site since such work began at his village of Tatikolu. At the other end of the age spectrum are many in their early teens trying to pass off as adults in order to get some work and help out their families.
Hunger and rising prices are driving the old and the very young to the work. In this time of crisis, "NREG work" is their lifeline.
Gadasu Ramulu thinks it's a good programme. "It should be there," he says. His wife Anjamma insists: "Listen, it's essential. We won't eat without it."
Then why does the record show he only worked three days at the site in the past 10 days or so? "Look at me," he says. "This is hard work and it is very hot. So typically I work four days and rest four days. I cannot do it continuously for a week. Sometimes I find other work that might pay less but is lighter. I'd like to do both, actually. In truth, you do what you get — and what you can manage physically."
His household includes a daughter — and her children — abandoned by her husband. All the adults do "whatever work we can find." Including Anjamma who is past 65.
"He's burning the energy he has," she says of Ramulu. "Which is bad when we are eating less. But what is the option? That's why he has to take a break every few days."
The family does not have an Antyodaya card (that is meant for the poorest of the poor) that would make their food cheaper. At the NREG site he can make "up to Rs. 80 a day." In the lean times, that makes the difference between "something and nothing." She adds: "Without it, we'd be in far more trouble."
More than three million people have found some work at NREG sites across Andhra Pradesh. Nobody here calls it by that name, though. It's nooru rojula pani (a hundred days' work), or "government work."
Here, in Devarkonda mandal, the average daily wage at such sites is around Rs. 84. It is possible, though not easy, to get private work that is higher-paid than that, on some days. As a neighbor puts it, applying an old Telugu saying: "Rather than running to drink milk, better to stand still and drink water."
It might seem an odd analogy, since the work that she, Ramulu and others do at the NREG site can be, and is, very heavy. "But at least it's there," she says.
Across several worksites in the districts of Nalgonda and Mahbubnagar are others who are well into their sixties, actively seeking such work. We also ran into at least three others close to Ramulu's age returning to labour in order to eat. Being malnourished makes the work that much harder.
Things are bad at home, too. "All the children here go without milk," says Anasuya in Tatikolu. "This year, with the costs shooting up, the chance doesn't arise of their having it." Her husband is the field assistant at the local NREG site.
"At least 40 children have had to be turned away from the work site," says her neighbour in this Dalit colony. "Families are terribly hungry. Yes, the rice at Rs. 2 a kg is there for some, but it has only just come in." And milk which was around Rs. 12 a liter is now between Rs. 16-18 a litre. "And those with bigger families, or widows with orphans, are having a bad time of it. Some days, people borrow money to buy food." Often, girls of 12 or 13 wear sarees and try to appear more mature than they are, in order to get work.
"What can people do?" asks Lakshmamma, a widow herself. She gets work now and then at the site. "My job is to pour water over the spot to be dug to make it less hard."
Young Damodar, who first tapped NREG work when he was 15, dropped out of school after his father died. He goes to work on some days with his mother. "A widow has to be accompanied by someone," she says. "Otherwise, getting work can be difficult."
Villagers complain that the work they get is often too hard. "Try digging for hours in this heat." And the price rise is making things a lot worse with people being hungry and eating less.
"What we're doing is going downwards in steps," says Krishnaiah. "First, people change the type of food and go in for poorer quality which is cheaper.
They move to the cheapest vegetables, then no vegetables at all. Then they give up milk. That's how the changes come." Amongst the changes is that older people, particularly older widows, get much less to eat within the household.
Krishnaiah is among the more fit and fortunate ones, who also goes out to do stone-breaking work at a higher rate of wages at private sites. "But that doesn't come always and it is even harder to do. The stones are terribly hot. The tools also get very hot. Your feet are burning all the time."
That, say the others, is the case with all of them. "We work to meet our hunger, but we burn up the food we eat with that work."
The complaints are many and often justified. People are sometimes exasperated by the way the NREGA system works. But there is unanimity on its worth and value. It's hard to find a single poor person here who says the program is of no use, that it ought to be wound up.
"It keeps us going," says Gadasu Ramulu. "What's more, it's right here, in our village. We need this."
P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece appears, and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com
A Guaranteed Day's Work
http://www.counterpunch.com/sainath05312008.html
By P. SAINATH
He says he is not 70 but is, in fact, "quite a few years older." "Anyway, how can I tell exactly?"
But age has not stopped Gadasu Ramulu from doing hard physical labour in searing temperatures well above 110F in Nalgonda. There have been nearly 60 heat wave deaths here in two months, the highest for any district in Andhra Pradesh this year. His passbook shows he has worked 39 days at the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act site since such work began at his village of Tatikolu. At the other end of the age spectrum are many in their early teens trying to pass off as adults in order to get some work and help out their families.
Hunger and rising prices are driving the old and the very young to the work. In this time of crisis, "NREG work" is their lifeline.
Gadasu Ramulu thinks it's a good programme. "It should be there," he says. His wife Anjamma insists: "Listen, it's essential. We won't eat without it."
Then why does the record show he only worked three days at the site in the past 10 days or so? "Look at me," he says. "This is hard work and it is very hot. So typically I work four days and rest four days. I cannot do it continuously for a week. Sometimes I find other work that might pay less but is lighter. I'd like to do both, actually. In truth, you do what you get — and what you can manage physically."
His household includes a daughter — and her children — abandoned by her husband. All the adults do "whatever work we can find." Including Anjamma who is past 65.
"He's burning the energy he has," she says of Ramulu. "Which is bad when we are eating less. But what is the option? That's why he has to take a break every few days."
The family does not have an Antyodaya card (that is meant for the poorest of the poor) that would make their food cheaper. At the NREG site he can make "up to Rs. 80 a day." In the lean times, that makes the difference between "something and nothing." She adds: "Without it, we'd be in far more trouble."
More than three million people have found some work at NREG sites across Andhra Pradesh. Nobody here calls it by that name, though. It's nooru rojula pani (a hundred days' work), or "government work."
Here, in Devarkonda mandal, the average daily wage at such sites is around Rs. 84. It is possible, though not easy, to get private work that is higher-paid than that, on some days. As a neighbor puts it, applying an old Telugu saying: "Rather than running to drink milk, better to stand still and drink water."
It might seem an odd analogy, since the work that she, Ramulu and others do at the NREG site can be, and is, very heavy. "But at least it's there," she says.
Across several worksites in the districts of Nalgonda and Mahbubnagar are others who are well into their sixties, actively seeking such work. We also ran into at least three others close to Ramulu's age returning to labour in order to eat. Being malnourished makes the work that much harder.
Things are bad at home, too. "All the children here go without milk," says Anasuya in Tatikolu. "This year, with the costs shooting up, the chance doesn't arise of their having it." Her husband is the field assistant at the local NREG site.
"At least 40 children have had to be turned away from the work site," says her neighbour in this Dalit colony. "Families are terribly hungry. Yes, the rice at Rs. 2 a kg is there for some, but it has only just come in." And milk which was around Rs. 12 a liter is now between Rs. 16-18 a litre. "And those with bigger families, or widows with orphans, are having a bad time of it. Some days, people borrow money to buy food." Often, girls of 12 or 13 wear sarees and try to appear more mature than they are, in order to get work.
"What can people do?" asks Lakshmamma, a widow herself. She gets work now and then at the site. "My job is to pour water over the spot to be dug to make it less hard."
Young Damodar, who first tapped NREG work when he was 15, dropped out of school after his father died. He goes to work on some days with his mother. "A widow has to be accompanied by someone," she says. "Otherwise, getting work can be difficult."
Villagers complain that the work they get is often too hard. "Try digging for hours in this heat." And the price rise is making things a lot worse with people being hungry and eating less.
"What we're doing is going downwards in steps," says Krishnaiah. "First, people change the type of food and go in for poorer quality which is cheaper.
They move to the cheapest vegetables, then no vegetables at all. Then they give up milk. That's how the changes come." Amongst the changes is that older people, particularly older widows, get much less to eat within the household.
Krishnaiah is among the more fit and fortunate ones, who also goes out to do stone-breaking work at a higher rate of wages at private sites. "But that doesn't come always and it is even harder to do. The stones are terribly hot. The tools also get very hot. Your feet are burning all the time."
That, say the others, is the case with all of them. "We work to meet our hunger, but we burn up the food we eat with that work."
The complaints are many and often justified. People are sometimes exasperated by the way the NREGA system works. But there is unanimity on its worth and value. It's hard to find a single poor person here who says the program is of no use, that it ought to be wound up.
"It keeps us going," says Gadasu Ramulu. "What's more, it's right here, in our village. We need this."
P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece appears, and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com
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