Minnesota genocide wounds fester

Minnesota genocide wounds fester
© Indian Country Today June 06, 2008. All Rights Reserved
Posted: June 06, 2008
by: Rob Capriccioso


150th birthday celebration prompts protests, education efforts

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Minnesotans who expected to have a happy 150th state birthday celebration this year have had their party crashed by several vocal American Indian activists and advocates.

Many have transformed the ongoing statewide event into a backdrop for recognition of historical travesties committed by Europeans against tribes and individual Indians in the state.

Protests involving nooses have sprung up at the state Capitol, angry letter-writing campaigns have ensued, and some Natives have been arrested as a result of their educational efforts.

''What does it mean when Minnesotans continue to celebrate what they gained as a consequence of genocide, ethnic cleansing, policies of extermination, policies of forced removal, mass hangings and bounties?'' asked Waziyatawin, a Dakota woman from the Upper Sioux reservation. ''It's a question that most Minnesotans really have not wanted to ask.''

Waziyatawin, who was arrested in May after protesting a celebration event at the state Capitol, changed her name from ''Angela Wilson'' last summer because she feels that the traditional naming process in the U.S. is just another way Indians have been colonized. Her Dakota name translates to ''woman of the north.'' She will begin teaching on indigenous governance issues at the University of Victoria in July and has previously taught at Arizona State University.

Minnesota, which contains 11 tribal nations, is the historic home of the hangings at Mankato of 38 Indians for their part in the Dakota War of 1862. The event, according to Minnesota historians, remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history. In 1863, many Dakotas were forcibly removed from the state, and a massive incarceration of Dakota men ultimately prevented some of the Indian population from reproducing.

Waziyatawin and others believe that many Americans today don't realize that Indians are still paying the costs of these devastating actions. Most Dakota Indians don't live on the historical homelands and have lost some of their traditional culture and even language. Ojibwes in the state have fared somewhat better, but have still experienced many of the negative effects of colonization.

''There has not been a single generation of Minnesotans that has attempted to do justice,'' Waziyatawin said. ''Every generation has continued to enjoy the benefits of these policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing without doing justice. Everyone is invested in maintaining the status quo.''

Members of the Minnesota Sesquicentennial Commission recently acknowledged ethnocide and genocide against American Indians living in Minnesota during the state's early history. The commission, appointed by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, has overseen the celebrations recognizing Minnesota's 150th anniversary of statehood.

''Minnesotans pride themselves today on living in a state that is forward-thinking and compassionate,'' according to a statement on the commission's Web site. ''We have become a haven for refugees from countries where genocide still occurs. We recoil at the holocausts of World War I and II, and the more recent acts of savagery in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

''Yet we remain either unaware of or unable to look at our own history and acknowledge the painful wounds of ethnocide and genocide right here in Minnesota. We have a very hard time acknowledging that the pain remains and that it has affected much of our history thru to the present day.''

Waziyatawin believes the statement is a nod in the right direction, but at the same time thinks it's impossible to make up for genocide in the context of a statewide birthday party.

Griff Wigley, project leader of the commission's Native American outreach component, said the commission has attempted ''to engage the greater citizenry of Minnesota to take a look at these things and to open their eyes.'' In that effort, he's started a blog that notes Native history and news, which is linked to from the commission's Web site.

''There are a lot of people out there like me who are willing to have their eyes opened,'' Wigley said. ''Many more things can be done that will have an impact on the education of the public.''

Wigley said some state legislators are currently exploring the possibility of sponsoring bills that would formally apologize for the sins of the past. Some in the state have also eyed with enthusiasm the April passage of a Colorado Legislature resolution comparing the deaths of millions of American Indians after colonization to the Holocaust.

''I see it happening real quick now that there's this precedent with Colorado,'' said Thomas Dahlheimer, director of Rum River Name Change Organization. The group is focused on getting the Rum River's name changed back to its sacred Dakota Indian name ''Wakan,'' which, in English, means ''great spirit.''

Leonard Wabasha, a hereditary chief of the Dakota and director of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community Cultural Resource Department, said he believes any apology is beyond the scope of what the sesquicentennial commission alone can accomplish.

''This is a national issue. These aren't isolated instances that occurred here in Minnesota.''

Wabasha said he and other members of the Dakota Nation have been talking to state legislators regarding the issue of reconciliation.

The key to making something happen is not to ''ram this down non-Indians' throats,'' he said. ''You can end up tainting your message.

''One of our premiere values is respect. As long as we practice that, then what we preach will be more easily respected. It may take a little longer, but it will eventually be accepted.''

Waziyatawin disagrees that there's not room for strong activism.

''I think we need to use multiple ways to try to get the point across. I've tried to reason with people and if they aren't listening. What other option is there?''

Whether a state or national apology happens anytime soon, Waziyatawin and others agree that there's a dire need for more education about the historical genocide committed toward Natives.

''We're the ones who have the moral high ground here,'' Waziyatawin said. ''We're trying to engage in truth-telling.''

How Do You Say Justice in Mixteco?

How Do You Say Justice in Mixteco?
June, 12 2008

By David Bacon
Source: t r u t h o u t

David Bacon's ZSpace Page
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http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/17898

Fresno, California - Erasto Vasquez was surprised to see a forklift appear one morning outside his trailer near the corner of East and Springfield, two small rural roads deep in the grapevines, ten miles southwest of Fresno. He and his neighbors pleaded with the driver, but to no avail. The machine uprooted the fence Vasquez had built around his home and left it smashed in the dirt. Then. the forklift's metal tines lifted the side of one trailer high into the air. It groaned and tipped over, with a family's possessions still inside. "We were scared," Vasquez remembers. "I felt it shouldn't be happening, that it showed a complete lack of respect. But who was there to speak for us?"



Eight farmworker families lived in this tiny "colonia," or settlement, on the ranch of Marjorie Bowen. Their rented trailers weren't in great shape. Cracks around the windows let in rain and constant dust, which carried with it all the fertilizer and chemicals used to kill insects on the nearby vines. Some trailers had holes in the floors. None had heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer.



Still, they were home. Vasquez had lived in his trailer for 17 years. His youngest daughter, Edith, was born while the family lived there. By the time the forklift appeared, she had started middle school, while her brother Jaime was in high school and her sister Soila had graduated. "Señora Bowen was a nice lady, and even though we had to make whatever repairs the trailers needed ourselves, sometimes she'd wait three or four months for the rent, if we hadn't been working," Vasquez says. The families had labored in her vines for years.



But Marjorie Bowen died in 2005. Her daughter, Patricia Mechling, inherited the ranch and wanted the trailers removed before selling it. That September, she sent the families letters, giving them 60 days to clear out. It was the picking season, however, when there are many more workers in the San Joaquin Valley than places for them all to live. Vasquez's family couldn't immediately find another home, nor could the others. They asked for an extension. Mechling refused.



At the last moment, the farmworkers actually did find someone to speak for them - Irma Luna, a community outreach worker at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA). They had their first meeting at CRLA's Fresno office that November, before the forklift arrived. Luna and De La Cruz informed their clients and Mechling's attorney, James Vallis, of the legal requirements that must be followed before carrying out evictions. Vallis denies that Luna had notified him she had met with Vasquez. On the following Monday, however, November 14, 2005, the forklift cut short the legal process.



"Destroying the trailers in front of the families that lived in them wasn't a reasonable or legal way to evict them," Luna says. "The families didn't really understand their rights in the legal process. Many speak only Mixteco [an indigenous language in Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico]."



CRLA eventually won a settlement, providing some compensation for destroyed belongings, rent abatement, withheld security deposits and emotional suffering. The incident illustrates the ongoing need for legal services for some of the state's poorest families. However, the case also highlights the challenges facing legal service providers as demographics change in a new generation of California farmworkers. CRLA has created an innovative program to meet some of these challenges. But the agency's staff and indigenous community leaders agree that a broader reality check and a rethinking of US immigration policy are also needed. In the meantime, CRLA itself, never the growers' darling, is in yet another battle to protect its farmworker clients and assure its own survival.



De La Cruz and the Fresno law firm Wagner & Jones, which provided pro bono co-counseling, filed suit against Mechling in August of 2006, alleging she'd violated section 789.3 of the Civil Code, by committing prohibited acts to get the families to move out; and section 1940.2, by making threats. De La Cruz also alleged that the eviction was in retaliation for complaints the families had made over substandard living conditions in the trailers. Attorney Vallis called the suit "a shakedown." It was settled the day before trial for $55,500, and Mechling has since sold the property.



Seven of the eight families come from the same tiny town, San Miguel Cuevas, in the mountains of Oaxaca, an area they poetically call the "land of the clouds." And while speaking only Mixteco created great difficulty for many in understanding the proceedings, their strong cultural traditions also gave them a sense of responsibility toward each other. During the period before the case was settled, Vasquez was elected in absentia as San Miguel's "sindico," a position responsible for taking care of injured people and making funeral arrangements for those who die. Election meant he had to return to Mexico for a year to fulfill this duty, called a "tequio."



When Vasquez was required to give a deposition, however, Luna (who hails from the same town) appealed to his sense of collective responsibility. Vasquez paid $600, at a time when he wasn't working, to travel back to Fresno. "I wanted the landlord and lawyer to pay for what they'd done, so that they'd feel what we felt," he explains. "I was also the one who convinced the other families that we had to do something. When it was my turn to give a deposition, I felt responsible to them, and to the case."



An increasing number of farmworkers in California share those traditions. Rufino Dominguez, coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB), says there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the US, 300,000 in California alone. The FIOB, with chapters in both Mexico and the US, defines indigenous communities as those sharing common languages and cultures that existed in the Americas before the Spanish conquest. Indigenous communities exist throughout the Americas - Oaxaca alone is home to 23.



While farmworkers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of Mexico with a larger Spanish presence, migrants today come increasingly from indigenous communities. "There are no jobs, and NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] made the price of corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore," Dominguez asserts. "We come to the US to work because we can't get a price for our product at home. There's no alternative." Economic changes like NAFTA are now uprooting and displacing Mexicans in Mexico's most remote areas, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived in the Americas.



In 2006, spreading poverty and the lack of a program to create jobs and raise living standards ignited months of civil conflict in Oaxaca, in which strikes and demonstrations were met with repression by an unpopular government. According to Leoncio Vasquez, an FIOB activist in Fresno (and a distant relative of Erasto), "the lack of human rights itself is a factor contributing to migration from Oaxaca and Mexico, since it closes off our ability to call for any change."



Dominguez estimates that 75 percent of the indigenous migrants from Oaxaca and other states in southern Mexico arrive in California with no immigration visas, an increase from 50 percent a decade ago. "A few of us benefited from the immigration amnesty in 1986, but not many," he explains. "The reality is there are no visas available in Mexico to come here, so even though it's harder, more expensive and more dangerous than ever to cross the border, many people still come because their need is so great. Neither the US nor the Mexican government will look at the root cause of migration."



Providing legal services to communities of indigenous farmworkers in California is complicated by the large number of people who lack legal immigration status, and by restrictions on some $7.2 million it receives from the Legal Services Corporation in Washington, DC. "Immigration status has always been a criteria for eligibility," says Jose Padilla, CRLA's executive director, "but until 1996 the law didn't restrict the use of other funds for that purpose. In '96, however, Congress said that so long as we receive even $1 in Federal funding, we can't represent undocumented people. The same legislation also prohibited us from collecting attorney fees, and filing class actions."



CRLA was particularly affected by the 1996 legislation because it had started reaching out to indigenous communities just a few years before. In the late 1980s, the agency opened an office in Oceanside, just north of San Diego. "We found people living in the bushes, in open country, ravines and canyons," Padilla recalls. "We began to understand that the people living in these extreme conditions came from a different part of Mexico. Although we've always had bilingual outreach workers who speak English and Spanish, here we found people with an indigenous language and culture we weren't prepared to serve."



At the same time, indigenous migrants were critical of CRLA for not responding to their needs. A network of Mixtec and Zapotec organizations, which eventually came together to form the FIOB in 1992, met with Claudia Smith, who headed the Oceanside office, and eventually with Padilla and other CRLA staff. As a result of those meetings, CRLA decided to hire its first indigenous staff member, Rufino Dominguez.



"We began to work on the basic problems of our communities," Dominguez recalls. "When we went out to the fields, we often found no bathrooms or drinking water. Some were working with the short-handled hoe [prohibited by state law], or weren't getting paid and had no rest breaks. Many people were living outside, or in unclean housing in bad condition. So we held workshops in homes and fields, and got on the radio."



At first, Dominguez and a second Mixtec-speaking outreach worker, Arturo Gonzalez, traveled all over the state educating people about their rights in Mixteco, the language spoken by the largest number of indigenous farmworkers. As word spread, complaints began to surface. At the Griffith Ives Ranch in Ventura County, two Mixtecos tunneled under fences that held laborers in virtual peonage, going first to the Mexican consulate and then to CRLA. With the assistance of Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles, CRLA lawyers filed suit in federal court alleging enslavement, as well as violations of the Agricultural Worker Protection Act and the RICO Act. Eventually, Edwin Ives pleaded guilty to RICO charges in a related criminal prosecution, in the first federal organized crime conviction in a civil rights case. Some 300 workers shared $1.5 million in back wages.



Outside of Fresno, a group of 32 Mixtec families were found living in a trailer park, located on an old toxic waste disposal site. Dominguez began the investigation of their situation, which was completed by Luna when she was also hired by indigenous outreach workers. Following negotiations among CRLA, Chevron Corp. and the Environmental Protection Agency, the area was declared a superfund site, and Chevron paid to relocate the families in new homes in a community called Casa San Miguel - named after their hometown in Oaxaca.



In October of 2003, another indigenous outreach worker, Fausto Sanchez, investigated the case of families exposed to chloropicrin, a toxic pesticide, as an onion field was sprayed near Weedpatch in October, 2003. The subsequent case and settlement required Sanchez to give 167 separate clients an ongoing understanding of a complex legal case in Mixteco for three years.



"Relations between CRLA and the FIOB were difficult at first, and some people said they didn't need us, or complained about our work," Dominguez says. "But we have a very close relationship now, and each of use recognizes the importance of the other." Dominguez left CRLA to become the FIOB's binational coordinator in 2001, and today CRLA has six Mixtec-speaking outreach workers, based in offices around the state. In addition to Luna and Sanchez, Jesus Estrada works in Santa Maria, Mario Herrera in Oceanside and Lorenzo Oropeza in Santa Rosa. Some are active in the FIOB, and others aren't. Antonio Flores started a separate organization in Oxnard, the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project. And last year, CRLA hired Mariano Alvarez, the first worker from another important community, the Triquis.



"We respect our differences," Dominguez emphasizes, "because it's good for us. When we work together we have a greater impact." Alegria De La Cruz and Jeff Ponting, CRLA attorney in Oxnard, are co-coordinators of CRLA's Indigenous Farmworker Project. "We've become an example to other legal aid organizations," Ponting says. "We employ more indigenous people than the state and federal governments combined, which indicates their lack of commitment to providing services to a growing and important community."



Predictably, cases generated by this work get CRLA into trouble with growers. "There are always employers who will not respect the basic labor rights of their workforce to minimum wage, overtime, or rest periods," Padilla says. "We do more employment work - about 16 to 20 percent of our cases-than 99 percent of legal service organizations, where the average is 2 percent."



In 1996, the Republican-led Congress imposed new restrictions on legal services providers funded by the nonprofit Legal Services Corporation (LSC) in Washington, DC. Recipients could not initiate or participate in class actions, collect attorneys' fees from adverse parties or represent undocumented people. CRLA found private counsel to take over more than 100 active cases, including a significant number of class actions. CRLA now cooperates much more extensively with private lawyers - far beyond the legal requirement to use 12.5 percent of its resources to do so. Because private attorneys may collect fees, cooperation means that opponents face serious financial penalties, while the poorest workers don't have to pay for legal representation with a percentage of recovered wages. And private lawyers, unlike CRLA, are not barred from representing undocumented clients.



"Our relationships with private counsel are critical," says Padilla. "Not only can they represent individuals where we are barred, they also can ensure that farmworkers and the poor continue to have access to quality litigation. So long as CRLA doesn't directly represent any ineligible immigrants, it can participate in litigation that might benefit both eligible and ineligible case members."



By keeping strictly to the letter of the regulations, CRLA held its critics at bay for more than a decade. Early in 2000, however, CRLA began filing complaints against powerful dairy interests in the Central Valley, settling one of many cases on behalf of dairy workers for $475,000. According to Padilla, in late 2000, the first of several federal investigations of CRLA began, requested by Congressmen from rural California.



In 2006 the LSC issued a report, requested by Devin Nunes (R-Visalia), finding "substantial evidence that CRLA has violated federal law" by engaging in conduct prohibited by funding restrictions. A year later, Kirt West, outgoing LSC inspector general, issued a subpoena demanding 33 months of data on 39,000 clients to determine if CRLA "disproportionately focuses its resources on farm worker and Latino work." CRLA refused to comply with the subpoena, Padilla says, "because California law protects clients and their confidentiality." The case has been fully briefed and awaits either the scheduling of a hearing or a decision.



"The Office of Inspector General can make no conceivable use of the 39,000 client names and their spouse names it is seeking," says Marty Glick, a partner at San Francisco's Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, which represents CRLA. "It refuses to say why it wants or needs them. It is also demanding access to privileged and work-product memoranda and documents. One has to wonder what the purpose is. Why is the effort to give people redress for the failure to pay legal wages or overtime so controversial?"



Last year, the LSC put CRLA's funding on a month-to-month basis, but in 2008 relaxed restrictions to a six-month cycle. "But there's no end in sight," Padilla says. "The message we get is that CRLA should change the way it advocates for low-wage and Latino workers. We're being punished for protecting our clients."



To indigenous communities, however, the prohibition on representing undocumented people is a greater problem than the fight with the dairies. "That prohibition doesn't change the conditions that uproot our communities and turn us into migrants," Dominguez says. "But ranchers know there's no one to defend us. People decide not to file complaints because they're afraid, and bosses sometimes use undocumented status to threaten people if they try. In some places, just walking on the streets is dangerous if you have no papers."



Some members of Congress argue that more enforcement of employer sanctions (the provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that bars employers from hiring workers without valid immigration status) would stop the abuse. Workers without documents would be forced to leave the country, the logic goes, and growers would be forced to hire other, less vulnerable workers. "That won't stop migration either," Dominguez says, "since it doesn't deal with why people come."



"We know the law," Padilla says, "but whatever workforce is in the fields should have basic rights." CRLA and most labor unions today say it would be better to devote more resources to enforcing labor standards for all workers. "Otherwise, wages will be depressed in a race to the bottom, since if one grower has an advantage, others will seek the same thing."



Others in Congress - and some California growers - call for relaxing the requirements on guest worker visas. Under the current H2-A program for agriculture, growers can recruit workers on temporary visas for less than a year. These workers must remain employed by the contractor who recruits them. Although there are minimum wage and housing requirements, a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States," [DB26] documents extensive abuses under the system.



"These workers don't have labor rights or benefits," Dominguez charges. "It's like slavery. If workers don't get paid or they're cheated, they can't do anything." The Department of Labor allows H2-A contractors to maintain lists of workers eligible and ineligible for rehire - in effect, blacklists.



"The governments of both Mexico and the US are dependent on the cheap labor of Mexicans. They don't say so openly, but they are," Dominguez concludes. "What would improve our situation is legal status for the people already here, and greater availability of visas based on family reunification." The current immigration preference system set up by the 1965 Immigration Act places a priority on the ability of citizens and legal residents to petition for their family members abroad, rather than treating migrants simply as a low-priced labor supply. "Legalization and more visas would resolve a lot of problems - not all, but it would be a big step," he says. "Walls won't stop migration, but decent wages and investing money in creating jobs in our countries of origin would decrease the pressure forcing us to leave home."



Meanwhile, Erasto Vasquez says, "it's important to have someone like Irma."





David bacon is a california photojournalist who documents labor, migration and globalization. His book "Communities Without Borders" was just published by Cornell University/Ilr Press.

Las guerrillas no son una moda, son una respuesta a la represión y cerrazón políticas

Las guerrillas no son una moda, son una respuesta a la represión y cerrazón políticas

http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=68673&titular=las-guerrillas-no-son-una-moda-son-una-respuesta-a-la-represi%F3n-y-cerraz%F3n-pol%EDticas-

Pedro Echeverría V.
Rebelión


1. ¡Increíble! ¿Entró Hugo Chávez en un estado de desesperación o alguien imitó su voz para que los medios de información del mundo, al servicio del imperio yanqui, den a conocer jubilosamente sus declaraciones? Obviamente las FARC y demás guerrillas del mundo no le van a hacer caso a ese llamado que, al parecer, formuló el domingo a las guerrillas colombianas para que liberen, "a cambio de nada", a secuestrados en poder de los rebeldes; además, dijo que "la guerra de guerrillas pasó a la historia... y ustedes en las FARC deben saber una cosa: que ustedes se han convertido en una excusa del imperio, (el gobierno de los Estados Unidos), para amenazarnos a todos nosotros". Chávez ha recibido el aplauso de los gobiernos que están al servicio de EEUU y, aún más, ahora le exigen que cumpla su palabra. El siguiente paso de los perros del imperio será ahora exigirle que extermine a los terroristas, a los luchadores radicales y a los rebeldes. Todavía no lo creo.

2. Hugo Chávez sabe a perfección que los yanquis no necesitan excusa alguna para amenazar. El gobierno de EEUU amenaza y somete a quien le de la gana. Bush dividió al mundo en aliados y terroristas. Invadió a Afganistán porque, según dijo, allí se ocultaba Bin Laden. Después invadió Iraq con el argumento de que escondía un gran armamento, pero los enviados de la ONU informaron que nunca hubo tal. Sabe Chávez que EEUU no necesita ningún pretexto porque desde hace varios años seleccionó a los países que forman parte, según sus criterios, del “Eje del mal” e inició una serie de agresiones contra ellos y sus vecinos. Cuando EEUU decide dar un paso los pretextos siempre les sobrarán. Durante décadas de manera permanente dijo que sus repetidas intervenciones armadas eran para apoyar los intereses de sus connacionales y salvar sus inversiones. Chávez lo sabe mejor que nadie, por eso me ha parecido extraña su posición y hasta he tenido duda que sea él.

3. ¿Qué corriente de izquierda puede negar o regatear el enorme papel que Chávez ha jugado en los últimos ocho años en Venezuela y en América Latina frente al saqueador y asesino gobierno de Bush? Más aún, se ha concluido que es el alumno más aventajado y, al mismo tiempo, el heredero de las luchas antimperialistas de Fidel Castro en el continente. ¿Qué pasó entonces en la cabeza de Chávez o en la de sus consejeros al pensar que las condiciones políticas venezolanas son idénticas a las de México, Haití. Guatemala, El Salvador o Colombia? En México, cuando se da ese tipo de cambios intempestivos o que no nos damos cuenta, preguntamos: ¿Qué fumaste? o advertimos: “estás orinando fuera de la bacinica”. Chávez sabe muy bien que las guerrillas y otras formas de lucha como los movimientos de masas, las huelgas generales, los piquetes bloqueando avenidas y plazas, así como otras más batallas de los explotados, no pueden estar fuera de tiempo.

4. Los empresarios y gobiernos, en todo el mundo, quisieran controlar absolutamente todo: monopolizar la economía, la política, la propiedad, la cultura; así lo hicieron durante siglos a pesar de las débiles oposiciones y protestas. Sin embargo esa clase social dominante ha tenido que dar pasos atrás, hacer concesiones y poner en práctica reformas agrarias, laborales, electorales, sólo por la presión de las luchas de los trabajadores. Hoy quizá en un 20 por ciento de países, sobre todo en Europa, por luchas que duraron siglos, la burguesía ha tenido que ser “inteligente” para respetar las luchas legales de la oposición; pero en el otro 80 por ciento de los países la represión contra los trabajadores ha sido abierta y brutal. Incluso en países como México, donde los procesos electorales se implantaron desde 1824, el 70 por ciento de la población sigue viviendo en la pobreza y la miseria. Basta con ese sólo dato para demostrar hasta qué grado la población es explotada y oprimida.

5. La guerrilla en América Latina no puede pasar de moda porque las condiciones económicas y políticas del continente, en perjuicio de la mayoría de la población, siguen vigentes. Se han registrado enormes cambios en las ciudades, la tecnología ha crecido sin paralelo, los automóviles se han multiplicado en las ciudades y el 80 por ciento de la población tiene por lo menos una televisión, pero para los explotados y oprimidos, para los millones de desempleados y marginados de siempre, pareciera que no han pasado los siglos. Para aprovecharse y dar continuidad a este estado de cosas la burguesía ha sometido con gran saña la más mínima protesta u oposición. Si Chávez no hubiera usado la fuerza, o cierto grado de fuerza, en Venezuela estuvieran gobernando los partidos burgueses tradicionales, los medios de información continuarían idiotizando a la población y los yanquis seguirían saqueando los recursos naturales. Quizá el mismo Chávez estaría siendo defraudado en lo electoral.

6. ¿Qué harían las FARC frente a un gobierno abiertamente asesino, como el de Álvaro Uribe (apoyado por el gobierno de Bush) que se frena un poco a bombardear campamentos por la existencia de presos canjeables? ¿Se olvida acaso que muchos de esos presos actuaron contra el pueblo y han sido una moneda necesaria de cambio con los heroicos presos guerrilleros que tiene el gobierno? Es entendible la desesperación de Chávez y la presión que sufre por parte de los familiares de esos presos, pero la guerrilla surgió hace 44 años para luchar por los intereses de los explotados y más pobres y es ella la que tiene que decidir qué hacer. Chávez no puede usar su prestigio, su gran autoridad para pedir la desaparición de la guerrilla. Seguramente en Venezuela, en Bolivia y Ecuador no es necesaria la guerrilla porque los pobres, los explotados, ahora están experimentando un nuevo gobierno que les ha dado espacios para encaminar sus peticiones y sus luchas, pero no en México, Guatemala y demás.

7. Fidel Castro asumió el poder en Cuba en enero de 1959 después de encabezar una guerrilla y con ella hacer posible el triunfo de la Revolución contra el dictador Batista. Después Castro, siendo presidente, apoyó más de cinco movimientos guerrilleros que luchaban contra gobiernos pronorteamericanos en el continente. No fueron apoyos materiales porque Cuba carecía de medios para otorgarlos, pero Fidel nunca dejó de analizar en sus largos discursos la pobreza y desesperación de los pueblos ante un imperio yanqui asociado a las burguesías nacionales de cada país. Hugo Chávez no asumió el poder por la vía guerrillera sino por el proceso electoral; pero tuvo que enfrentar la violencia con el apoyo del ejército cuando se rebeló contra el gobierno Carlos Andrés Pérez y cuando en 2002 fue “derrocado” por 48 horas. Los explotados nunca han sido violentos por gusto; han usado la violencia para defenderse contra la burguesía que nunca los ha dejado vivir en paz.

8. En México los movimientos guerrilleros han estado presente en toda su historia. Durante el coloniaje español la guerrilla indígena fue permanente. La misma lucha de Independencia se inició como un levantamiento que luego fue una resistencia guerrillera. Las invasiones yanquis y europeas a México en el siglo XIX sufrieron los permanentes acosos de heroicos guerrilleros. Durante el Porfiriato y la Revolución los guerrilleros, quizá más que los ejércitos formales, jugaron un importantísimo papel. ¿Qué fueron las guerrillas mexicanas de Ciudad Madera (Chihuahua), la de Jenaro Vázquez y Lucio Cabañas del estado de Guerrero, las guerrillas urbanas de principios de los 70 y por qué son las actuales guerrillas encabezadas hoy por el EPR? Cada guerrilla responde a condiciones concretas: injusticias, miseria, cerrazón, represión, desesperación, persecución, amenazas. Nadie podrá exterminar las guerrillas si no se transforman las relaciones sociales. Chávez lo sabe, por eso no creo lo que oí.

pedroe@cablered.net.mx

Audios y Fotos de conferencia de zapatistas liberados

Audios y Fotos de conferencia de zapatistas liberados
Ángel Concepción y Francisco Pérez compartieron su testimonio de encarcelamiento injusto por 11 años

http://www.rebelion.org/
Cedoz


Enlaces al material de audio y foto de la conferencia de prensa en donde Ángel Concepción y Francisco Pérez, bases de apoyo zapatistas, compartieron su testimonio de encarcelamiento injusto por 11 años.

Por parte de este Centro, el abogado Diego Cadenas comentó la situación jurídica en la que se encuentran los liberados y los aún presos en las cárceles de Chiapas.

Audio de la conferencia (para escuchar y/o descargar):
http://chiapas.indymedia.org/article_156826

Fotos:
http://www.frayba.org/fotos.php?ID=876&language_ID=1&hl=es

Más información en:
http://www.frayba.org/index.php

Agradecemos la solidaridad nacional e internacional que con distintos aportes hicieron posible esta liberación.

Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Frat Boy Graverobbers
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

http://www.counterpunch.com/dickinson06072008.html

By MICHAEL DICKINSON

How would you feel if you knew that the skull of your great grandfather, stolen from his tomb, was being used in the secret ceremonies of a spoilt elite brat pack whose members have included some of the most powerful men in the world? A bit pissed off, right?

And if you also learned that the American President, George W Bush, his father George and his brother Jonathan, have taken part in these ceremonies, and, what’s more, in fact, that the President’s great grandfather, Prescott Bush, was one of those who had stolen the skull from its grave in the first place, it wouldn’t be surprising if you felt a little outraged.

Sounds unlikely? But this is precisely the situation which faces Harlyn Geronimo, great grandson of the iconic Native American Apache rebel leader, whose name he has inherited.

After the massacre of his wife and three children by Spanish troops in 1858, the original Geronimo, (real name Goyathlay, “One who Yawns”), took up arms against the Mexicans and Americans as they broadened their horizons on the continent, forcing the original inhabitants to be confined to arid, government-sanctioned ‘reservations’ where they could be taught to obey the rules of their new dollar bosses.

Geronimo was one of the last tribal leaders of Native Americans to remain defiant, rebellious and free until the colonization of the country by the whites was complete. After being captured by the American army with his 35 braves at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona in 1886, Geronimo was held as a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, until his death in 1909, apart from the occasional outing to be exhibited at shows and pageants as a national attraction. He even rode in President Roosvelt’s 1905 inaugural parade. They paid him in dollars, of course.

Throughout his imprisonment , Geronimo never stopped asking to be allowed to return to his homeland in the Southwest, but his request was never granted. When he died, his body was buried in the Apache cemetery of Fort Sills.

There it lay until 9 years later when the grave was disturbed by members of a secret student society (including Prescott Bush) who were stationed at the fort on military duty at the time. The skull and thigh bones of Geronimo’s corpse were stolen and taken to a sombre stone windowless edifice in New Haven, Connecticut known as ‘the Tomb’, where Yale university’s elite student’s ‘order’ ‘Skull and Bones’, holds its secret meetings every week. On arched walls inside are carved slogans in German: “Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich," or, "Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death." Nearly a hundred years after the robbery of his grave, the skull and bones of Geronimo remain captive in the Tomb of his enemies.

It wasn’t until Ned Anderson, former Chairman of the San Carlos Apaches of Arizona, started agitating in the eighties to have Geronimo's remains returned to his native Arizona that he learned the true state of affairs. An anonymous letter from a Bones member sent him a photo of the skull and bones on show in a glass case inside the Tomb building at Yale, and the copy of an old Bones log book which recorded the robbery of the grave. Outraged, and describing the news as “a sacrilege and national disgrace”, Anderson asked the FBI to investigate. They said they would, if he turned over all his evidence to them, which he refused to do. In an attempt to retrieve the documentary evidence from Anderson, Bones member Jonathan Bush, brother of George W, met and offered him a skull which he claimed to be Geronimo’s as a swap. On examination the skull was identified as that of a ten year old child. Anderson, naturally, again refused to hand over the evidence. He asked senator John McCain to arrange a meeting with George Bush senior, but the request was refused.

In 1990 the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was signed into law. In accordance with this bill Yale’s Peabody Museum was forced to return certain artifacts it had held. Unfortunately the Act only applies to organizations that receive federal funding, and Yale’s secret societies are not directly affiliated to the University, exempting them from jurisdiction.

Still, members of Skull and Bones have violated laws preventing the desecration of graves and should be held responsible. If they continue to hold these remains they are participating in a continuing conspiracy to be in possession of stolen property.

In 2006 Harlyn Geronimo wrote to President Geoge W Bush to ask for his help in recovering the bones of his great grandfather so that they may be buried near his birthplace in the Gila Wilderness.

"Geronimo died as a prisoner of war, and he is still a prisoner of war because his remains were not returned to his homeland," said Harlyn. “According to our traditions the remains, especially in this state when the grave was desecrated, need to be reburied with the proper rituals. With the higher learning of these individuals, I don't know why they could resort to desecrating something that's very sacred to Native American people."

Two years later, the President has not responded.

Sign this Petition to Congress and demand the skull from the Bones!

Let Geronimo’s spirit rest in peace!

http://www.petitiononline.com/Geronimo/petition.html

Michael Dickinson, whose artwork graces the covers of Dime's Worth of Difference, Serpents in the Garden and Grand Theft Pentagon, lives in Istanbul. He can be contacted via his website http://yabanji.tripod.com/ or at: michaelyabanji@gmail.com

Policía irrumpe en Radio Tierra y Libertad

Policía irrumpe en Radio Tierra y Libertad

María Teresa Cervantes
Rebelión


Les informo que la PFP irrumpió en la Radio Tierra y Libertad, tiraron la puerta. Había tres camiones con agentes de la PFP (como 40 policías en cada camión con armas largas) bloquearon la calle por los dos extremos. En la radio estaba Héctor Camero, Esther Cardoso, y Maricela Stainles, apenas había terminado un programa conducido por niños y estos se acababan de retirar.

La gente de la Asociación Civil Tierra y Libertad llegó a defender la radio pero no la dejaban pasar, en la esquina de la calle 18 de Febrero y Almazán se aglomeró la gente (aproximadamente 300 personas) que gritaba consignas "No se va, no se va la radio no se va", “No nos callarán” etc. Algunos hablaban por micrófono. Hubo momentos tensos sobre todo al final cuando se retiraban los policías y la gente les gritaba, uno de ellos desde el camión mostraba amenazadoramente su arma. Finalmente se logró que no se llevaran a Héctor Camero pero se llevaron el equipo de radio y se robaron un celular y una grabadora. El viernes próximo tendrá que ir a declarar Héctor Camero pero le advirtieron que fuera solo,

Radio Tierra y Libertad ha sido hasta hoy una radio comunitaria que se escucha en el noreste de la ciudad en la que se trataban temas de educación, de salud, culturales, de derechos humanos y laborales así como de análisis político serio y en su programación había participación de la gente de la Asociación T y L y del público, todo lo que no hace la radio comercial y los otros medios de comunicación que sólo sirven para idiotizar a nuestro pueblo. Todos sabemos que son verdaderos monopolios y que desde la reforma de la Ley de Medios tratan de acabar con las radios comunitarias e independientes.

Este gobierno deja ver su cara represiva de manera descarada.

Killing Foods, Killing People

Fifty Million Go to Bed Hungry
Killing Foods, Killing People

By JOHN ROSS

"Orlando" (not his real name) eats after everyone else has eaten - if there's enough left over to eat. All day, he scavenges in the garbage cans outside of the three MacDonald's outlets here in the old quarter of the city with an occasional stop-off at KTC. He shows a neighbor his catch of the day: two mostly-eaten Big Macs, a gnawed chicken leg, a handful of stiff, ketchup-flecked French fries, and rubs his greasy belly in delight. Orlando has a hard time pronouncing words in the way others can understand. Most passer-bys studiously step around the filthy, crippled man as he sprawls on the public sidewalk.

Because Orlando has no fixed address, he is not counted on Mexico's official census of the hungry -- and, in fact, he isn't hungry today. As long as more affluent Mexicans continue to supersize themselves at the fast food franchises in the neighborhood, he isn't going to go hungry.

How many Mexicans are going hungry in these days of soaring food prices and diminishing reserves as food crisis sweeps what used to be called the Third World? The rightist government of Felipe Calderon counts 14,000,000 Mexicans living in extreme poverty who are enrolled in its ironically entitled "Oportunidades" (Opportunities) program. Another 12,000,000 at-risk citizens are counted in the administration's equally euphemistic "Vivir Mejor" ("Live Better") bureaucracy - both programs are designed to feed an electoral clientele and do not reflect actual hunger.

On the other hand, social economist Julio Boltvitnik, author of the "Moral Economy" column in the left daily La Jornada, figures the numbers of the hungry are more like 40,000.000, 40 per cent of the population - the stats square with a study done some years ago by Dr. Hector Borges at the National Nutrition Institute that calculated 42 per cent of the population suffers some degree of malnutrition. But the database is not current. Boltvitnik estimates that the current wave of price hikes incited by the global food panic is driving 10,000,000 more Mexicans into hunger. That's half the population.

According to the National Association of Self-Service Stores (ANTAD), led by Wal-Mart, the nation's number one food retailer and tortilla purveyor, food sales are down 5 per cent in the first three months of 2008. This doesn't signal that Wal-Mart customers have lost their appetites or have suddenly decided to go on a diet. Chicken part prices are up 11 per cent since the first of the year, milk 69 per cent, cooking oil 78 per cent, beans 93 per cent, not to mention lentils at 105 per cent, and eggs at 113 per cent. In January, packaged bread cost 13 pesos, in April 24 pesos.

The aisles at La Merced, the oldest produce market in the Americas, are just as packed as ever but more customers are buying less, reflects Jose Cuevas behind the counter of his chicken stand. Out on the market's back patio where sellers dump their rotting merchandise, a lot more people are scavenging for leftovers, scraping the bruised tomatoes and blotched potatoes into their pails and cans, since the last time this reporter looked in.

Mexico's poor are hardly the only Latin Americans going hungry these days. With income divides that resemble Africa (dixit the World Bank), Mexico and Brazil, the continent's two most successful republics, are scurrying to feed their least privileged citizens. CEPAL, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, estimates 50,000,000 residents of the region are going to bed hungry tonight. 9,000,000 extreme poor in South America and 2,100,000 in Central America and the Caribbean are on the brink of starvation. Bread in Bolivia has quintupled since the first of January and a loaf in Chile now costs two bucks Americano. A third of all Paraguayans, South America's most impoverished nation, have had to give up milk, and in Haiti, the basket case of the Americas, where the poor literally dine on mud cakes, people are so pissed off that President Rene Preval fired his prime minister after mobs stormed the congress.

Back in January 2007, Mexicans poured into the streets to protest the jump in tortilla prices from six pesos to upwards of 18 - the tortilla is the basic food unit here. Fearing riots, Calderon, who had just been awarded the presidency in egregiously fraudulent elections, moved swiftly to knock the hikes back to eight. But in the 18 months he has occupied the Mexican White House, 16 items in the basic food basket have risen 57 per cent - 63 per cent since January. 73 per cent of the daily minimum wage is dedicated to buying food here (in the U.S. it’s 15 per cent) and the Calderon administration sees trouble brewing on the horizon. Battered by a bloody narco war that has turned cities into killing floors and with his political credibility seriously challenged by the Left, the President and his associates have sought to retake the initiative.

This past May 25, Calderon and his finance minister, the 350 pound no-neck August Carstens, a former World Bank official, took to national television to outline a $200 million USD tariff-free emergency food import program - actually, all tariffs on 200 agricultural products were eliminated January 1 under provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Notwithstanding, food imports in the first three months of 2008 cost Mexico $5 billion USD more than they did in 2007. 14,000,000 extremely poor enrollees in the Opportunities program would now receive an extra 120 pesos ($12 USD) a month to cover soaring food costs, the officials affirmed. The Cargill Corporation, which dominates the Mexican grain distribution system, would also get an extra $12 on every ton of imported corn to cover increased transportation costs - the subsidy is in addition to a 525 peso per ton bonus Cargill now receives. Cargill, the world's largest privately held corporation, has garnered 1.2 billion pesos in subsidies from the Mexican government in the past six months, according to figures released by the Agriculture Secretariat.

Then, satisfied with their largesse, Calderon and Carstens went out to lunch.

The United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization (FAO) reports that the world food crisis has now touched 37 countries - 22 suffered food riots in 2007-08, not all of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Mexico's tortilla war was followed by Italy's spaghetti war when the price of pasta zoomed due to record increases in wheat prices. From then on, the rioting spread like the black plague to Mozambique, Mauritania, Morocco, Dakar, and Ouagadougou. The Horn of Africa is on the verge of famine despite the billions Bush pours in to fan the flames of his terror war in the region. The Philippines is running out of rice and Indonesians can't afford soy for tempah cakes, their kind of tortilla. Bread riots have become national security issues.

Riots are an effective way of getting governments' attentions, says Nicholas Minot, speaking for the International Food Policy Institute in Washington D.C. Poor people tend to be strategically concentrated at the heart of Third World cities. "If all these people were to rise, then the government will have to take care of it," Raisa Fikray told the New York Times while shopping in a Cairo market. "But everyone has to rise up together."

Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubharick smelled the coffee and dispatched the army to bake bread for the masses. Heavily armed troops guard trains and trucks transporting wheat in Pakistan. All over Asia where a kilo of rice costs 150 per cent more than it did two years ago, militaries are on alert.

40 years ago this spring, the world was caught up in a rolling youth rebellion that spread like wildfire from the streets of Paris to Prague to Mexico City and even to the U.S. Today, global rebellion threatens all over again - only the flashpoint has moved from the head to the pit of the belly as rioters demand bread in Tajikistan, Yemen, Bangladesh, and Cameroon.

At the annual spring meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, a smiling bank president Robert Zoellick posed for a photo op with a loaf of bread in one hand and a bag of rice in the other. Hikes that have priced the poor out of the food market should level off in two years, Zoellick, once a key NAFTA negotiator, beamed. How many desperately hungry people might die in the interval was not discussed. The crisis had a silver lining, Wolfowitz's successor suggested - high commodity prices are ballooning farmers' incomes but he didn't mean Mexican farmers, 6,000,000 of whom NAFTA imports have displaced from their corn plots, or the farmers of Burkina Faso.

It should be remembered that Zoellick is the president of an institution that imposed export agriculture models on needy countries, wiping out native crops and nutritional self-sufficiency, by encouraging the poor, three quarters of whom live off the land, to grow flowers and broccoli for First World tables.

There should be enough food to go around. World agricultural production increased 2.6 per cent last year yet more people went to sleep with an empty belly. The problem is not production but access to a globalized food system. Latin America, with its 50,000,000-strong hungry masses, produces 27 per cent of the world's fish supply and a third of its pork. World corn production was a record 764 million tons in 2007. The U.S. produced its biggest yields ever: 332 million tons but 81 million of them went into ethanol production to feed cars not people.

The experts attribute food panic to a confluence of "temporary" factors. A third of the price surge is blamed on diversion of basic grains to biofuels production. Calderon and other world leaders point fingers at the Chinese and Indians, a third of the planet's population, for wanting to eat three meals a day. Shortages of chemical fertilizers, a corporate industrial product, is where the oil crisis meets the food crisis, diminishing yields. Many consider global warming to be the devil - drought in southern Australia has wiped out rice production that once fed 20,000,000 Asians. Instead Australian farmers are substituting wine grapes. Great! Now Orlando can have a glass of Chardonnay with his scraps.

A billion human beings barely survive on $1 dollar a day - now with sky-high food costs that dollar is worth even less in terms of caloric intake. Every five seconds, a child under ten dies of hunger-related causes. You know the litany. Fidel Castro predicts a billion people will die of hunger because of how the First World uses food.

First Worlders don't eat well but they eat a lot. The Big Macs Orlando covets suck up ten kilos of grain for every ten quarter-pounders. Morbid obesity is epidemic in North America.

All this gorging means fat profits for U.S. farmers. Anything they plant this year will bring them the maximum price. Of course they farm for profit and not to feed the people. U.S. food exports to the Third World topped $101 billion last year, doled out to governments who comply with Bush's terror war dictates.

Fat farmers are fattened up by fat government subsidies. This year's Farm bill, colluded upon by Democrats and Republicans together, includes $4.6 billion USD in direct payments. Iowa's Tom Harkin complains that corporate farmers use the boodle to buy even more land, which, of course, generates even more subsidies. "It's a black hole."

Fat food groups from MacDonald's to Cargill (which controls 80 per cent of the earth's grain stocks) are snorkeling it up at the trough - Cargill's profits were up 87 per cent in 2007, Archer Daniel Midlands a mere 67 per cent. Ten leading food corporations are making a killing on the hunger of the people.

The floor of Chicago's Commodity Exchange is livelier than ever these days as traders snap up the future of food. "Everyone wants to eat like an American" consultant Dan Basse gloats to the New York Times. Hedge funds, which had the air knocked out of them in the mortgage fiasco, are in heavy, controlling 40 per cent of the futures.

"Orlando" doesn't know much about hedge funds. Lodged at the bottom of the global food chain, he is literally scraping by.

John Ross will rapsodize between bands (Celtic hiphoppers "Beltaine's Fire"; "Countless Others", manic garage punk) at El Balazo 2183 Mission in San Francisco Friday June 13 at 8 PM. "Rebels Rock On For Iraqi Refugees" is a benefit for the Collateral Repair Project produced by Mission district troubadour Tommy Strange. For further info check out www.collateralrepairproject.org

ICE Deporting More American Citizens

Amid Anti-Immigrant Fervor, ICE Deporting More American Citizens
By Jacqueline Stevens, The Nation
Posted on June 10, 2008, Printed on June 10, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/87467/

A headline in the San Francisco Chronicle screams, 900 Nabbed in State on Immigration Charges. The Seattle Times reports, Feds Combing Jails for Illegal Immigrants. An AP article declares, Immigration Raid in Iowa Largest Ever in US and reports 390 arrests. In 2007, more than 276,912 US residents were deported. Thanks to a recent Bush Administration crackdown, the net cast by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) is wide--so wide, it turns out, that some of those being deported are US citizens.

Is ICE an efficient law enforcement agency? Or, in the words of Robert, 38, a US citizen twice deported to Mexico, is ICE "just throwing us out for nothing"?

Consider what happened to Peter Guzman. Last year Guzman, a US citizen born in Los Angeles in 1977, drove onto the tarmac of a regional airport in his hometown of Lancaster, about eighty miles northeast of Los Angeles, boarded a charter plane without a ticket and refused to get off. Guzman was arrested and sentenced, and served forty-one days in a Los Angeles County jail. According to his lawyer, Mark Rosenbaum of the Southern California ACLU, Guzman was excited about being released in time for his brother's July wedding in Las Vegas. "It was a big deal to Peter. He was going to be the best man." It never occurred to Guzman that in July he'd be eating garbage and bathing in the Tijuana River.

But on May 11, 2007, he called his family and said he'd been deported. According to the ACLU lawsuit, before his sister-in-law could find out exactly where he was and give him instructions, the line was cut. She overheard him ask, "Where am I?"

In early August 2007, after Guzman had spent three months trying to return, his appeal to a border agent in Calexico was finally successful: Guzman was arrested for missing his first probation hearing and brought back to Los Angeles. ICE says it has Guzman's signature on a voluntary departure agreement. Guzman's attorneys say the signature was coerced and that it is never legal to deport a US citizen.

Gary Mead, ICE assistant director for detention and removal, testified at a Congressional hearing in February that Guzman's case is unique. But California Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren calls Guzman the "poster child" for an epidemic of detaining and deporting US citizens by ICE. Kara Hartzler, an attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project (FIRRP), agrees with Lofgren. Last year Hartzler's staff of six attorneys provided presentations and occasionally individual advice to more than 8,000 detainees in southern Arizona. About 10 percent of people ICE detains nationwide are sent to Florence and nearby Eloy, about sixty miles south of Phoenix. Hartzler testified, "The deportation of US citizens is not happening monthly, or weekly, but every day."

ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens. If larger trends are consistent with the pattern in Hartzler's caseload, since 2004 ICE has held between 3,500 and 10,000 US citizens in detention facilities and deported about half. US citizens are a small percentage of ICE detentions for this period, which totaled around 1 million, but in absolute terms the figure is staggering.

Phone interviews suggest the higher end may be more accurate. I called fifteen private immigration attorneys whose names appear on a Justice Department list of pro bono attorneys in Los Angeles and left messages asking whether they had clients in the past three years who were US citizens held in ICE detention for at least one month. Seven of them called back, each describing one to four clients who meet these criteria. Using these accounts, and those from attorneys at three nonprofit immigration clinics, I documented thirty-one cases from across the country of US citizens, eight born here, incarcerated as aliens for one month to five years. Fourteen were deported. Five remain in detention.

Between 2001 and 2007 Robert, who requested that his last name be withheld, was incarcerated for five years and deported to Tijuana twice because ICE refused to believe he was a US citizen. Robert described meeting seventeen other US citizens in ICE detention. Robert was born in Mexico in 1970 and orphaned at age 4. When he was 8 his uncle from Baldwin Park, California, adopted him. In 1983 he became a legal permanent resident, automatically acquiring US citizenship.

In 2000 Robert was arrested for a DWI and evading arrest. After serving sixteen months, he was transferred to El Centro Detention Facility, about 100 miles east of San Diego, where ICE set about deporting him as a criminal alien.

Robert told the court and his attorney, to whom he paid $5,000, that he was a US citizen, but his lawyer did not submit the necessary documents, and Robert lost the case. Robert believed an appeal was hopeless. The year he'd spent in detention was enough: "I decided to leave and come back [to the United States] the next day."

In February 2002 Robert disembarked from the ICE van in Tijuana with an order forever banishing him from the United States. The next day his sister-in-law picked him up and they drove into the United States together, telling the border agent they were US citizens, which they are. They drove to their homes in a Los Angeles suburb.

In 2003 Robert, fearful of being turned over to ICE, sped away from a police car signaling him to pull over. He was sent to a deportation center in Chino and had a video hearing: "You face the TV and some little judge is inside TV talking to you." He explained that he was a US citizen. The little judge ruled otherwise and told Robert an appeal would take nine months. Robert decided to repeat the 2002 routine. ICE again dropped him off in Tijuana.

Robert told the US patrol agent apprehending him during the middle of the night in the hills of El Centro, "I am a US citizen." The agent charged Robert with falsely impersonating a US citizen and other felonies associated with an illegal border crossing. The public defender told Robert to plead guilty to the impersonation charge, or he'd face additional time for entering the United States as an illegal immigrant. "I said, 'No, I can't. There's no way. I'm trying to tell you, my dad is a US citizen. I am a US citizen.' I told the judge that the things they're charging me with are not true, but I have no choice and if that's what it will take for me to go faster to my family, I will plead to that." Robert served three years for falsely impersonating a US citizen.

In 2006 Robert was released into ICE custody at Terminal Island in San Pedro. At this hearing the immigration judge considered the information Robert had assembled in the prison library and realized he was probably a US citizen. Robert was released on bond to find the relevant documents and a lawyer. A few months later Robert and his new attorney, Veronica Villegas, went to the Los Angeles United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office. Villegas told me, "The agent looked at his papers and said, 'Congratulations! You've been a US citizen since 1983.'"

ICE has no jurisdiction over US citizens. If someone claims birth in the United States, as Guzman did, then ICE agents must have a "reasonable suspicion" for disbelief before detaining him. Racial profiling doesn't count. "Not speaking English, not being white and appearing to be from a Central American country is not enough," says Rebecca Musarra, of the Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic of Washington College of Law. In practice, ICE detains thousands of people who were born in the United States and forces them to prove citizenship. According to Mario Quiroz at Casa de Maryland, which assists low-income Latinos, "People who have Spanish names, are five-four, have black hair, get profiled. At the end of the day, [ICE] only says, 'Oops, we made a mistake.' But somebody's life was messed up."

Proving citizenship can be tough, especially when the people who might help can't find you. An immigration judge, who requested anonymity, told me it was "notoriously common for people to be whisked away and nobody knows where they are. When you just want to get rid of someone, you don't want their family to know where they are. It's something that would happen in a Third World country. It's not something that should happen [here]."

Pastor Aquiles Rojas agrees. On October 11, 2007, he went to pick up his brother-in-law from a two-month sentence at the Honor Farm jail in Modesto, California. René Saldivar, 38, wasn't there. "They told me that immigration had taken him, and they didn't know where he was," says Rojas. He called everywhere: San Francisco, Sacramento, Arizona. "They told me they had no record of my brother-in-law. We thought maybe he was in Mexico, but we couldn't figure out why he didn't call. Certainly he was in trouble. We just wanted to find out where he's at." Saldivar's family was especially concerned because of Saldivar's impaired psychological condition.

After the family's five-month vigil, Saldivar called. He was in the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. Saldivar told me, "I didn't have no money and no way of talking to nobody." The center allows collect calls but cellphone plans will not accept them. Eventually a stranger lent Saldivar a calling card. In February Saldivar explained his ancestry to an immigration judge, who concluded that Saldivar most likely was a foreign-born citizen--like John McCain and George Romney--and sent the case to FIRRP.

Hartzler told me she thought she could get Saldivar released at his hearing on April 9, but she had to track down the Social Security employment records of her client's deceased father to prove his citizenship. She wrote, "I don't think it's appropriate for government proceedings with consequences as severe as lifetime deportation to rely on nonprofit organizations for their safeguards. For every René, there's dozens of people with valid claims to US citizenship who are deported."

Detainees with psychological disabilities find it especially hard to navigate their release, but according to a FIRRP social worker, Erin Maxwell, "Even people who are not diagnosably mentally ill or developmentally challenged still don't really get [why they're in deportation proceedings], and it can be very scary." One client of hers was arrested for possessing drug paraphernalia and then detained at Eloy for four months. "He didn't bring up his citizenship with the judge," Maxwell said. "Then I met with him and he said, 'I don't know why this is happening. Both my parents are US citizens.'"

According to Nancy Morawetz, a New York University Law School professor supervising the Immigrant Rights Clinic, "a lot of people don't know they're citizens." The rules for foreign-born citizenship are complicated. Different laws apply to different years of birth. Since the state does not guarantee legal representation in civil cases, 90 to 95 percent of detainees lack attorneys. Even the immigration lawyers seem not to understand the laws, the immigration judge told me. So it's not surprising that Saldivar's eleven siblings are just learning that they, too, are US citizens.

For the millions of US citizens who are foreign-born, court precedents shift the burden of proving citizenship onto them. But the Fourteenth Amendment states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" should be treated equally. Therefore, the Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic is planning to challenge the constitutionality of the burden of proof placed on US citizens born abroad.

Finally, it was April 9, and Saldivar had his hearing, where his documentation was deemed insufficient. The Social Security Administration's annual employment records in Arizona went back only to 1959. ICE wanted the additional two years to verify Isidoro Saldivar's US residence the entire ten years before René's birth in 1967. Hartzler was hoping the Washington office had the fifty-one-year-old employment records. René would begin his eighth month in detention.

Giving Saldivar his liberty while ICE figured out the paperwork would have made sense because of his family's roots in Stanislaus County, going back to 1940. In addition, NYU's Morawetz says that doing otherwise may be unlawful: "I believe they don't have the power to put a detainer on someone and figure it out later. It's an abuse of the detention power. They only have jurisdiction over people who are noncitizens."

When ICE detains and deports US citizens, it is not only illogical; it also can be false imprisonment, a felony. When I asked Rosenbaum, Guzman's ACLU attorney, why the government wasn't prosecuting ICE agents for civil rights and criminal violations, he laughed and said, "Good luck!" Rosenbaum said the ACLU's complaint was alleging false imprisonment, but US Attorneys were defending the government in the lawsuit. No US Attorneys have stepped forward to prosecute ICE agents. Meanwhile, immigration judges, many of whom are patronage appointments from the Bush Administration or former ICE agents, entertain the flimsiest of arguments on behalf of deportation.

The case of Anna (not her real name), arrested in Phoenix on October 8, 2007, for prostitution, is particularly tragic. When the police asked for her place of birth she answered, "Paris." When applying under another name for a US passport, in 1991, Anna wrote that she was from Tehran. According to Hartzler, Anna also claims JFK is her father and the Pope is her father. Anna is from France the way that Borat is from Kazakhstan. In February 2007 an Arizona Superior Court dismissed drug charges against Anna, finding her "unable to understand the nature of the proceedings" as well as "criminally incompetent and a danger to herself and others." Anna has been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.

On October 9, based only on her claim to have been born in Paris, Anna was taken to the Eloy Detention Center, where an ICE agent took full note of her US passport application and "8 different aliases, and 2 SSNs." On February 20 immigration judge Thomas Michael O'Leary, who had Anna's records, including the diagnoses of the court psychiatrists, issued an order to remove Anna from the country. The French consulate refused to issue travel documents for her, telling ICE that Anna is not a French citizen. Having been possibly stripped of her citizenship rights in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Americans With Disabilities Act, Anna will be held in detention for at least three months. If released, she is not functional enough to attend the meetings ICE requires of aliens remaining in the country with deportation orders. A warrant for her arrest will be issued, and in her next encounter with law enforcement the warrant will trigger an arrest. Kristine Brisson, the ICE agent initiating Anna's removal, did not return messages requesting comment. Judge O'Leary has been promoted to run the Tucson Immigration Court.

Anna's case may seem unusual, but US citizens with mental disabilities reflect the criminal inmate population ICE targets. According to a 2006 Justice Department press release, about 40 percent of the incarcerated population has "symptoms of mania." Twenty-four percent of the jail population and 15 percent of state prisoners have a "psychotic disorder, such as delusions or hallucinations." Rachel Rosenbloom of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice in Boston testified to Congress, "It is not uncommon for someone who is mentally ill and suffering from delusions to state that he or she was born abroad." By using the incarcerated population as its hunting grounds, ICE is inevitably going to snare mentally ill US citizens. The immigration judge observed, "If you don't have your marbles, or someone on the outside, there's no safety net."

Carlos Barrios, a Los Angeles private attorney who has represented US citizens in detention, notes, "It is strange. How can they keep a person detained in an immigration facility if they're a citizen?"

In response to different versions of this question from members of Congress in February, ICE's Mead pretended that the events brought before him did not exist. He repeated the law stating that ICE has no jurisdiction over US citizens, and then affected ignorance of ICE agents detaining US citizens. Mead was in the same room as US citizens testifying to ICE abuse. At one point Illinois Democrat Luis Gutierrez exploded in frustration over Mead's failure to have any comment on a racial-profiling incident in Chicago during which ICE detained more than 100 Latino men: "Thank you very much for not knowing any of the information about a very well-publicized case on which Secretary Chertoff has been well informed!"

The official line, as ICE public affairs officer Brandon Alvarez-Montgomery explained it to me, is that ICE does not "knowingly detain US citizens." This is false. Hartzler showed an ICE attorney the Minnesota birth certificate of Thomas Warziniack, and yet ICE held him for two weeks until his hearing. Morawetz described a citizen in detention whose attorney faxed a New York birth certificate "and detention says, 'How do we know this is that person's record?'" even though the law requires ICE to prove otherwise.

While Saldivar remained in detention, I sent Alvarez-Montgomery the details of his case, explaining that Social Security employment records for Saldivar's father did not exist before 1959. He responded, "Anyone who[se] first year of earnings were recorded between 1937 to the present will appear on the Social Security statement. For this case, it's safe to assume that 1959 was the first year of recorded earnings for his father."

Alvarez-Montgomery was wrong. Later, using ancestry.com, I found a Railroad Retirement Board (RRB) record for Isidoro Saldivar from before 1951. I sent it to Alvarez-Montgomery and other ICE officials. They did not reply or release René. I sent it to Hartzler, who contacted the RRB, which provided records of "compensation received by René's father each year from 1947 to 1958, as well as a copy of his application for a Social Security card in 1947." Hartzler gave these to ICE, which held René for six more days, releasing him on April 28.

Shortly after that I asked Saldivar, who was drywalling his sister's home in Chowchilla, how he understood what happened. "Someone took me to prison, even though I had my papers. It's bad. It's not fair," he told me. ICE alleged that René lacked legal permission to reside in the United States. Even if ICE is correct, the charge of undocumented residence is a minor civil infraction that requires release to be disputed and is not a crime. ICE's false imprisonment of US citizens and other legal residents, however, is a serious crime.

Jacqueline Stevens is an associate professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is completing her second book States without Nations.
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