PÚLSAR/Adital
El Consejo Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas (Conoc) emitió un comunicado en que critica manera en que el Gobierno de México pretende implementar el presupuesto rural para el año próximo.
Según informó la agencia de noticias Adital, la entidad expresa su posición ante el presupuesto recientemente aprobado, afirmando que hay un alto riesgo de que los recursos presupuestarios sean utilizados de manera discrecional con el objetivo de fortalecer clientelas electorales.
Los campesinos piden equidad y transparencia en la distribución de los recursos para el sector rural, para enfrentar la crisis alimentaria defendiendo la economía nacional.
El texto del comunicado sostiene que "si bien existe un incremento en los recursos asignados al campo con respecto al año anterior, no compartimos el triunfalismo con que algunos actores se refieren a un presupuesto histórico o que el campo fue una de las prioridades en el presupuesto".
En tal sentido, el Consejo Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, afirma que se trata de un "presupuesto inercial, sin una visión de inversiones estratégicas para el desarrollo rural sino más bien con el acento puesto en aspectos asistenciales".
El comunicado concluye convocando a todas las organizaciones campesinas a participar de la aplicación de los recursos, a fin de evitar que un grupo de funcionarios tome decisiones unilateralmente.
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12/3/08
Young president pledges to revive Ecuador’s Indigenous Movement
By Daniel Denvir, Today correspondent
Story Published: Nov 14, 2008
Story Updated: Nov 13, 2008
http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/global/34424719.html
QUITO, Ecuador – On Jan. 31, 32-year old Marlon Santi was inaugurated President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE). Santi wore a traditional feathered cap and stood alongside incoming and outgoing members of the organization’s leadership under the indigenous movement’s multicolored wiphala flag.
The CONAIE, founded in 1986, is one of the most powerful social movements in the Americas. It represents many of Ecuador’s indigenous people, estimated to number up to four million, or about 30 percent of Ecuador’s population. Activists hope that Santi will return the CONAIE, in recent years shaken by internal divisions and political setbacks, to its former strength.
The CONAIE is now organizing against President Rafael Correa’s plans to support large-scale mining and other policies that the organization considers a threat to Ecuador’s indigenous people.
Santi worked as a grassroots leader in the Amazonian territory of Sarayaku before his election and has held no previous national or regional positions. He came of age in the 1980s as an activist struggling against the multinational oil giant Arco. For many, Santi signals a return to grassroots community organizing and an end to the opportunism that has characterized much of the CONAIE’s recent history.
Economist and adviser to the CONAIE Pablo Dávalos said that “Santi’s election shows that the CONAIE is a united, strong and solid organization. It is also a sign of support for the Amazonian organizations’ struggle in defense of their territories and resistance to the oil companies.”
In 1990, the CONAIE burst onto the political scene, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people in a massive nation-wide uprising demanding land rights and economic aid. Protesters blocked highways, occupied large estates and effectively immobilized the country for an entire week, forcing the government to make concessions. The CONAIE later took the lead in successful mobilizations to stop a Free Trade Agreement with the United States and, in alliance with junior military officers led by Colonel Lucio Gutierréz, overthrew President Jamil Mahaud in January 2000.
But the formation of Pachakutik, a political party to represent the CONAIE and other Leftist social movements, led to problems later down the road — most seriously, the co-optation of leaders and internal divisions under the Presidency of Gutierréz, elected with the CONAIE’s support after their collaboration during the 2000 uprising. Gutierréz quickly turned on the CONAIE and sought good terms with the U.S. government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Given these experiences, Santi emphasizes that its relationship with any government will be more circumspect. “There will be no alliances,” he said. “We in the grassroots didn’t want the CONAIE to form an alliance with the government. They became ministers and subsecretaries. In the long run, Gutierrez used them and then got rid of them — and by that time Gutierrez was very powerful. The bonds of unity had been broken.”
Santi is now busy strengthening the organization’s community bases. He says that the process has been difficult. “We have had to walk in all of the communities, the bases, the federations. This is a 24-hour a day job, a superhuman job, revisiting the bases to spread the message that only through unity can we confront our challenges. “
The CONAIE has had a complicated relationship with Correa, despite his Leftist rhetoric. There have been conflicts over issues such as mining, as well as territorial, cultural and language rights. Pachakutik ran former CONAIE president Luis Macas in the 2006 presidential elections. Macas received only 2 percent of the vote and the organization threw their weight behind Correa in the second round, where he faced a right-wing banana magnate named Alvaro Noboa, Ecuador’s richest man.
In his campaign, Correa picked up the longtime indigenous movement call for a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution that reflected native demands for territorial rights and for Ecuador to be declared a plurinational state. The Assembly, which began its work in November 2007, addressed a number of issues of importance to the indigenous movement.
Pachakutik Assembly Members teamed up with the Leftist and indigenous Members from Correa’s Alianza País party to push their demands. Santi says that the constitution reflects many of the movement’s demands, including the declaration of a plurinational state. But Pachakutik and their legislative allies failed to include a provision requiring communities’ “prior consent” before mining or oil exploitation activities take place on their land. Correa and his party’s more conservative members joined the traditional right wing in opposing these measures.
The CONAIE and most social movement organizations supported the constitution, which voters overwhelmingly approved in a September national referendum. Santi said, “The indigenous movement supports. ... the constitution because the state is recognizing that Ecuador is a plurinational state. It also promotes the rights of Mother Earth or the Pachamama, and the [indigenous concept of] “good living” or sumak kawsay.”
But the heated rhetoric between the CONAIE and President Correa has only increased in recent weeks and Santi says that the organization is now prepared to take action. “The CONAIE now has mobilizing power. We can organize for any mobilization.” The CONAIE will soon be put to the test. The organization and other social movement groups are planning a national day of action against mining in mid-November.
Daniel Denvir is an independent journalist in Quito, Ecuador, and a 2008 recipient of the North American Congress on Latin America’s Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Grant. He is the editor in chief of caterwaulquarterly.com.
Story Published: Nov 14, 2008
Story Updated: Nov 13, 2008
http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/global/34424719.html
QUITO, Ecuador – On Jan. 31, 32-year old Marlon Santi was inaugurated President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE). Santi wore a traditional feathered cap and stood alongside incoming and outgoing members of the organization’s leadership under the indigenous movement’s multicolored wiphala flag.
The CONAIE, founded in 1986, is one of the most powerful social movements in the Americas. It represents many of Ecuador’s indigenous people, estimated to number up to four million, or about 30 percent of Ecuador’s population. Activists hope that Santi will return the CONAIE, in recent years shaken by internal divisions and political setbacks, to its former strength.
The CONAIE is now organizing against President Rafael Correa’s plans to support large-scale mining and other policies that the organization considers a threat to Ecuador’s indigenous people.
Santi worked as a grassroots leader in the Amazonian territory of Sarayaku before his election and has held no previous national or regional positions. He came of age in the 1980s as an activist struggling against the multinational oil giant Arco. For many, Santi signals a return to grassroots community organizing and an end to the opportunism that has characterized much of the CONAIE’s recent history.
Economist and adviser to the CONAIE Pablo Dávalos said that “Santi’s election shows that the CONAIE is a united, strong and solid organization. It is also a sign of support for the Amazonian organizations’ struggle in defense of their territories and resistance to the oil companies.”
In 1990, the CONAIE burst onto the political scene, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people in a massive nation-wide uprising demanding land rights and economic aid. Protesters blocked highways, occupied large estates and effectively immobilized the country for an entire week, forcing the government to make concessions. The CONAIE later took the lead in successful mobilizations to stop a Free Trade Agreement with the United States and, in alliance with junior military officers led by Colonel Lucio Gutierréz, overthrew President Jamil Mahaud in January 2000.
But the formation of Pachakutik, a political party to represent the CONAIE and other Leftist social movements, led to problems later down the road — most seriously, the co-optation of leaders and internal divisions under the Presidency of Gutierréz, elected with the CONAIE’s support after their collaboration during the 2000 uprising. Gutierréz quickly turned on the CONAIE and sought good terms with the U.S. government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Given these experiences, Santi emphasizes that its relationship with any government will be more circumspect. “There will be no alliances,” he said. “We in the grassroots didn’t want the CONAIE to form an alliance with the government. They became ministers and subsecretaries. In the long run, Gutierrez used them and then got rid of them — and by that time Gutierrez was very powerful. The bonds of unity had been broken.”
Santi is now busy strengthening the organization’s community bases. He says that the process has been difficult. “We have had to walk in all of the communities, the bases, the federations. This is a 24-hour a day job, a superhuman job, revisiting the bases to spread the message that only through unity can we confront our challenges. “
The CONAIE has had a complicated relationship with Correa, despite his Leftist rhetoric. There have been conflicts over issues such as mining, as well as territorial, cultural and language rights. Pachakutik ran former CONAIE president Luis Macas in the 2006 presidential elections. Macas received only 2 percent of the vote and the organization threw their weight behind Correa in the second round, where he faced a right-wing banana magnate named Alvaro Noboa, Ecuador’s richest man.
In his campaign, Correa picked up the longtime indigenous movement call for a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution that reflected native demands for territorial rights and for Ecuador to be declared a plurinational state. The Assembly, which began its work in November 2007, addressed a number of issues of importance to the indigenous movement.
Pachakutik Assembly Members teamed up with the Leftist and indigenous Members from Correa’s Alianza País party to push their demands. Santi says that the constitution reflects many of the movement’s demands, including the declaration of a plurinational state. But Pachakutik and their legislative allies failed to include a provision requiring communities’ “prior consent” before mining or oil exploitation activities take place on their land. Correa and his party’s more conservative members joined the traditional right wing in opposing these measures.
The CONAIE and most social movement organizations supported the constitution, which voters overwhelmingly approved in a September national referendum. Santi said, “The indigenous movement supports. ... the constitution because the state is recognizing that Ecuador is a plurinational state. It also promotes the rights of Mother Earth or the Pachamama, and the [indigenous concept of] “good living” or sumak kawsay.”
But the heated rhetoric between the CONAIE and President Correa has only increased in recent weeks and Santi says that the organization is now prepared to take action. “The CONAIE now has mobilizing power. We can organize for any mobilization.” The CONAIE will soon be put to the test. The organization and other social movement groups are planning a national day of action against mining in mid-November.
Daniel Denvir is an independent journalist in Quito, Ecuador, and a 2008 recipient of the North American Congress on Latin America’s Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Grant. He is the editor in chief of caterwaulquarterly.com.
Kessel, secretaria de Energía, afirma oficialemte que Pemex explorará y extraerá crudo en la selva Lacandona
Cita un análisis que revela que la zona podría producir 500 mil barriles diarios en 2021
Hermann Bellinghausen y Ángeles Mariscal
La Jornada
Por primera vez de manera oficial, mediante la secretaria de Energía, Georgina Kessel Martínez, el gobierno federal anunció que Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) iniciará en fecha próxima la exploración y extracción de crudo en la selva Lacandona, como parte de la que llama “cuenca del sureste”. La funcionaria participó este jueves en el Consejo Consultivo de la Comisión Federal de Electricidad en Tuxtla Gutiérrez y luego se reunió con representantes del gobierno estatal.
En entrevista, Kessel dijo que “hay varias cuencas que se van a estar explotando en los próximos años. Básicamente las más grandes, que se encuentran Chincontepec (Veracruz), las del sureste y las aguas profundas del Golfo de México”.
Declaró que a finales de 2009 se iniciará la licitación para empresas privadas interesadas en prestar bienes y servicios a la paraestatal. En la cuenca del sureste, reconoció, se ubican los yacimientos de la selva Lacandona. “Hay campos donde se podría estar generando nueva producción de crudos.” Citó un análisis de Pemex de dicha cuenca, a partir del cual se estima que para 2021 se estarían generando alrededor de 500 mil barriles diarios.
La página electrónica de la paraestatal informa que, “considerando el desarrollo de Chicontepec y de los recursos prospectivos de las cuencas del sureste, entre 2008 y 2021 se requerirá perforar más de 17 mil pozos, número similar al que Pemex ha perforado a lo largo de toda su historia, pero en una tercera parte del tiempo”.
Cabe recordar que luego del alzamiento del EZLN, en 1994, los propios indígenas de la selva Lacandona, sobre todo en las cañadas de Ocosingo, testimoniaron que hacia 1993 (y antes), grupos de prospección y exploración, al parecer extranjeros, se habían internado en la zona, confirmando la existencia de yacimientos petrolíferos. En medio de una bruma declarativa del gobierno, quedaron abandonados “pozos” como los de Nazareth, cerca del actual caracol zapatista de La Garrucha, y otros más adentro, en las cañadas.
Durante su visita, la secretaria de Energía se reunió con el gobernador Juan Sabines Guerrero, ante quien destacó la importancia de la instalación aquí de una planta de biocombustibles con tecnología colombiana, “una oportunidad de crecimiento en materia de bioenergéticos para el estado”. Afirmó que Chiapas es “un lugar estratégico” para la puesta en marcha de esta planta.
Kessel Martínez consideró que la entidad tiene “vocación” para producir la materia prima de biocombustibles, y habrá “ingresos adicionales en beneficio de la economía de la población”. Esto lo expuso en una reunión de trabajo en torno al plan de desarrollo regional entre México, Colombia y Centroamérica conocido como Proyecto Mesoamérica (antes Plan Puebla-Panamá).
El pasado 11 de noviembre, los gobiernos de México y Colombia habían difundido el avance de las gestiones para instalar en Chiapas una planta de biocombustibles con tecnología colombiana. En conferencia conjunta con el presidente Álvaro Uribe, el presidente Felipe Calderón confió en que el proyecto impulsará “la relación energética entre los dos países”.
Para ese biocombustible se empleará una maleza (jatrofa), que según las versiones presidenciales no competirá con la producción de alimentos. Algo que especialistas y activistas ambientales ponen en duda, pues dichos recursos biológicos evidentemente competirán por los suelos, la mano de obra y el agua. Por su parte, Kessel Martínez mencionó que las plantaciones del monocultivo se harán por “módulos” con un costo aproximado de un millón de dólares cada uno.
Y no quedó ahí. La secretaria también adelantó la intención de generar energía eólica en la entidad. La implementación de planes similares en el istmo de Tehuantepec (Oaxaca) por parte de empresas trasnacionales españolas ha generado problemas ambientales y el rechazo de las comunidades en esa región.
Ante la contradicción del discurso oficial, que por un lado proclama la protección ambiental y de recursos bióticos como prioridad en la selva Lacandona y Montes Azules, y por el otro promueve la explotación de energéticos, la funcionaria descartó que se vayan a causar perjuicios. Argumentó que la reciente “reforma” legal de Pemex “asegura la protección y restauración de ecosistemas”. Por lo pronto, la selva sí va al mercado petrolero.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/11/24/index.php?section=politica&article=017n1pol
Hermann Bellinghausen y Ángeles Mariscal
La Jornada
Por primera vez de manera oficial, mediante la secretaria de Energía, Georgina Kessel Martínez, el gobierno federal anunció que Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) iniciará en fecha próxima la exploración y extracción de crudo en la selva Lacandona, como parte de la que llama “cuenca del sureste”. La funcionaria participó este jueves en el Consejo Consultivo de la Comisión Federal de Electricidad en Tuxtla Gutiérrez y luego se reunió con representantes del gobierno estatal.
En entrevista, Kessel dijo que “hay varias cuencas que se van a estar explotando en los próximos años. Básicamente las más grandes, que se encuentran Chincontepec (Veracruz), las del sureste y las aguas profundas del Golfo de México”.
Declaró que a finales de 2009 se iniciará la licitación para empresas privadas interesadas en prestar bienes y servicios a la paraestatal. En la cuenca del sureste, reconoció, se ubican los yacimientos de la selva Lacandona. “Hay campos donde se podría estar generando nueva producción de crudos.” Citó un análisis de Pemex de dicha cuenca, a partir del cual se estima que para 2021 se estarían generando alrededor de 500 mil barriles diarios.
La página electrónica de la paraestatal informa que, “considerando el desarrollo de Chicontepec y de los recursos prospectivos de las cuencas del sureste, entre 2008 y 2021 se requerirá perforar más de 17 mil pozos, número similar al que Pemex ha perforado a lo largo de toda su historia, pero en una tercera parte del tiempo”.
Cabe recordar que luego del alzamiento del EZLN, en 1994, los propios indígenas de la selva Lacandona, sobre todo en las cañadas de Ocosingo, testimoniaron que hacia 1993 (y antes), grupos de prospección y exploración, al parecer extranjeros, se habían internado en la zona, confirmando la existencia de yacimientos petrolíferos. En medio de una bruma declarativa del gobierno, quedaron abandonados “pozos” como los de Nazareth, cerca del actual caracol zapatista de La Garrucha, y otros más adentro, en las cañadas.
Durante su visita, la secretaria de Energía se reunió con el gobernador Juan Sabines Guerrero, ante quien destacó la importancia de la instalación aquí de una planta de biocombustibles con tecnología colombiana, “una oportunidad de crecimiento en materia de bioenergéticos para el estado”. Afirmó que Chiapas es “un lugar estratégico” para la puesta en marcha de esta planta.
Kessel Martínez consideró que la entidad tiene “vocación” para producir la materia prima de biocombustibles, y habrá “ingresos adicionales en beneficio de la economía de la población”. Esto lo expuso en una reunión de trabajo en torno al plan de desarrollo regional entre México, Colombia y Centroamérica conocido como Proyecto Mesoamérica (antes Plan Puebla-Panamá).
El pasado 11 de noviembre, los gobiernos de México y Colombia habían difundido el avance de las gestiones para instalar en Chiapas una planta de biocombustibles con tecnología colombiana. En conferencia conjunta con el presidente Álvaro Uribe, el presidente Felipe Calderón confió en que el proyecto impulsará “la relación energética entre los dos países”.
Para ese biocombustible se empleará una maleza (jatrofa), que según las versiones presidenciales no competirá con la producción de alimentos. Algo que especialistas y activistas ambientales ponen en duda, pues dichos recursos biológicos evidentemente competirán por los suelos, la mano de obra y el agua. Por su parte, Kessel Martínez mencionó que las plantaciones del monocultivo se harán por “módulos” con un costo aproximado de un millón de dólares cada uno.
Y no quedó ahí. La secretaria también adelantó la intención de generar energía eólica en la entidad. La implementación de planes similares en el istmo de Tehuantepec (Oaxaca) por parte de empresas trasnacionales españolas ha generado problemas ambientales y el rechazo de las comunidades en esa región.
Ante la contradicción del discurso oficial, que por un lado proclama la protección ambiental y de recursos bióticos como prioridad en la selva Lacandona y Montes Azules, y por el otro promueve la explotación de energéticos, la funcionaria descartó que se vayan a causar perjuicios. Argumentó que la reciente “reforma” legal de Pemex “asegura la protección y restauración de ecosistemas”. Por lo pronto, la selva sí va al mercado petrolero.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/11/24/index.php?section=politica&article=017n1pol
In Arizona, immigrants protest Sheriff Joe’s nativist agenda
The Selma of Immigration Rights
By Andrew Stelzer
www.inthesetimes.com
The battle began in front of a furniture store.
Like hundreds of other street corners, the intersection at 36th Street and Thomas Road in Phoenix was where immigrant workers arrived before dawn, hoping that someone would pick them up for a day’s work in construction. But last October, the parking lot of Pruitt’s furniture became more than a pick-up spot. First, the store’s owner hired off-duty sheriff’s deputies to act as security guards, claiming that the laborers were causing a disturbance.
Later that month, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” decided to act on a handful of complaints he had received. He made Pruitt’s parking lot the centerpiece of a neighborhood sweep. Arpaio’s deputies began arresting undocumented immigrants in the neighborhood and turning them over to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation proceedings.
In response, civil and immigrants’ rights activists began gathering every Saturday outside the store, protesting what they believe were racially and ethnically motivated crackdowns. Soon, nativist groups from across the southwestern United States — with names like the Patriots Border Alliance and Mothers Against Illegal Aliens — arrived to counter-demonstrate. Waving American flags, the anti-immigrant crowd stood across the street, holding signs that declared support for the mass arrests, the closing of the Mexican border and the immediate deportation of all “illegal aliens.”
The circus-like scene made for good TV, and Arpaio, a media hound by most accounts, seemed egged on by the protests. In a Dec. 5 sheriff’s office press release, Arpaio said, “I will not give up. All the activists must stop their protest before I stop enforcing the law in that area.”
Finally, in January, after more than 67 undocumented immigrants had been arrested, the owner of Pruitt’s agreed to stop hiring off-duty officers.
Arpaio, however, wasn’t done.
Modern-day Selma
The next few months saw several more sweeps — what Arpaio calls “crime suppressions” — in different parts of Maricopa County, netting about 240 arrests, according to a sheriff’s department spokesperson. However, in a pattern of obfuscation that characterizes the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), the department claims it wasn’t keeping arrest logs for the first four sweeps, so it isn’t sure how many of those arrested were in the country illegally.
On June 27, during a typical sweep in the town of Mesa — also in Maricopa County — only 28 of 72 people arrested were undocumented immigrants, according to the sheriff’s office.
An April raid in the dusty town of Guadalupe has become one of the most controversial. The town of 5,732 people, mostly Latinos and Native Americans, has no police force, so it contracts out its policing needs to the MCSO.
The two-day sweep netted 47 arrests, including nine undocumented people. And like the other pre-announced operations, the action brought hundreds of protesters into the streets.
The increased police presence has also scared residents from leaving their homes. Santino Bernasconi, a pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, says that some women were afraid to bring their children to confirmation ceremonies. His parish’s mental health agency, Centro de Amistad, has seen a rise in anxiety disorders in children — fearful for themselves or, if they were born in the United States, fear they will lose their parents.
“I don’t compare it in terms of what the Jews went through in Nazi Germany,” says Bernasconi. “But a lot of our people are beginning to feel that syndrome like Anne Frank, of ‘Who knows when the next knock on the door is the sheriff to cart off everybody?’ “
Meanwhile, he adds, real crime in Guadalupe has gone unaddressed.
“[Arpaio’s] got time to be stopping people because you got a broken headlight,” Bernasconi says, “but he doesn’t have time to provide the services that are much more serious. … And when we call them they don’t show up.”
During the sweeps, Guadalupe Mayor Rebecca Jimenez told Arpaio that she believed the arrests were instances of racial profiling and that she would begin looking into getting out of the contract with the MCSO and find another source for the town’s law enforcement needs.
At first, Arpaio refused to back down, announcing in an April 4 press release that, “Even if they do [cancel the contract], the Sheriff still has jurisdiction here and I will still enforce the illegal immigration laws in that town.”
However, in September, he decided to cancel the contract with Guadalupe himself. The sudden move resulted in lawsuits that accuse him of retaliating against Jimenez’s free speech.
This stark divide now defines Maricopa County, which local activist Rick Romero calls the “Selma, Ala., of the immigrant rights movement.”
Anti-immigrant cowboy
“Sheriff Joe” first gained fame after he created a tent-city prison in 1993 to prove that he could always find room for criminals, rather than release them early because of a lack of space.
In 110-degree heat, prisoners wear county-issued pink underwear, are allowed only a handful of educational TV channels, and are denied access to coffee, cigarettes, salt and pepper, and other vices that cost taxpayer money.
In 1995, Arpaio started a male chain gang, and an all-female chain gang soon followed. Sheriff Joe’s prison philosophy — “If you don’t like it, don’t come back” — made him a hero with the tough-on-crime crowd.
When Arpaio decided to make immigrants his new target in 2005, he adopted some of the more extreme views of the anti-immigrant movement. Press releases from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office refer to people smuggled into the country as “co-conspirators.” It’s a charge the office has levied on undocumented immigrants since 2005, when Arizona’s human smuggling law, the toughest in the country, went into effect.
The MCSO has arrested more than 1,000 people under the law, which allows for Class 4 (two and a half years in prison for the first offense) felony charges to be filed against both the coyote — who smuggles people in — and those who are being transported.
In 2006, Arpaio had 160 of his deputies trained by ICE. The training, conducted under a federal agreement called 287-G, allowed deputies to arrest anyone they think is illegal and then refer them to ICE. If the deputy who pulls over a suspect isn’t trained under 287-G, he or she can call for backup, so that a qualified officer comes to the scene.
Maricopa County isn’t the only local U.S. agency training under 287-G — there are 63 active agreements with state and local agencies nationwide — but it’s certainly the one most aggressively using it. Out of the 840 officers nationwide who have undergone 287-G training, nearly 20 percent are from Maricopa County.
Chief among Arpaio’s enemies is Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, who wrote the FBI and Justice Department in April, asking them to investigate the sheriff for racial profiling and other civil rights abuses. (Arpaio told In These Times that the letter was “garbage.”)
In response, anti-immigrant forces launched an effort in May to recall Gordon, but they failed to collect enough signatures to make the November ballot.
Gordon says Arpaio’s consistent re-election over the past 16 years and high approval ratings are irrelevant.
“Whether the majority of the people support that individual is not the question with respect to whether the actions are legal,” Gordon says. “The sheriff shouldn’t be measuring what he’s doing on the basis of polls.”
Gordon says that a third of his community is Latino, and “if [the people are so] terrorized, legal or not legal, that they are afraid to come out and testify because the sheriff is going to arrest them, it is counterproductive to the safety of this community.”
Magdalena Schwartz, assistant pastor at Iglesia Communidad de Vida church in Mesa, recounts stories about her parishners, many of whom are undocumented. There’s the mother of six honor-roll students who was held in detention for three days, unable to call and tell her family where she was. There’s the 17-year-old son of a permanent U.S. resident, ready to graduate high school, who was sent back to Guatemala, where he hadn’t been since he was 3.
Worst of all was the girl who called the police to report that her boyfriend was abusing her. The police arrested her undocumented boyfriend — and also the girl.
“They asked [her] for ID, and she showed a Mexican ID, and they immediately said ‘You are illegal here. OK, let’s go,’ ” Schwartz recalls. “So what kind of confidence [can] we have now to call the police or the sheriff to report a crime?”
Operation Endgame
Compounding the sheriff’s sweeps is that the MCSO hasn’t collected any data about the detained. Sheriff’s office spokesman Paul Chagalla told In These Times that the department doesn’t keep data on the ethnicity of arrestees.
It wasn’t until the fifth “crime suppression operation” that the MCSO began compiling arrest logs from each operation — a move that came only after repeated demands for information by the press and the public. That lack of hard numbers presents obstacles for legal tactics like a class-action lawsuit filed in July by the ACLU, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and others that charges the MCSO with racial profiling.
“We have to be really smart about collecting the data that we need in order to put a stop to this,” says Lydia Guzman, who founded Respect/Respeto — an organization with a 24-hour hotline for immigrants. Since its founding in January, Guzman’s group has been receiving up to 50 calls per day.
Rick Romero, the chief organizer of the Citizens Walk for Human Dignity, a weeklong protest march from Tucson to Phoenix, says he has been asked for proof of citizenship several times — including once at a hospital, as a condition of admission for treatment. He says his wife has also been stopped and questioned.
“I learned because I’ve been pulled over so many times for various reasons that the only thing that really settles the argument is if you have a Social Security card,” says Romero, who was born and raised in Arizona.
Many who joined Romero on the 120-mile journey focused their daily press conference comments on Operation Endgame, a 2003 ICE directive to “remove all removable aliens” from the United States by 2012. Some fear the major ICE raids this past summer in Iowa and Mississippi — and an increasing number of smaller raids throughout the country — could be a step toward Endgame’s unattainable goal.
One of Endgame’s written objectives, according to documents obtained by the Massachusetts ACLU, is to “enhance partnerships with local law enforcement agencies to develop, implement, and maintain an integrated system to share information, intelligence and resources, and to coordinate enforcement actions.”
Cooperation between the MCSO and ICE certainly meets this objective, and many Arizonans believe their home state is a test case for whether the removal strategy can work on a national level.
Anti-immigrant laws
Anti-immigrant fervor in Arizona began in earnest in the wake of 9/11, and increased over the next few years. In 2004, Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, a citizen’s initiative that mandated people to show proof of citizenship at the polls on Election Day.
“That opened the floodgates to more anti-immigrant rhetoric by legislators, because they saw the overwhelming support that it had by voters,” says Guzman. “So by the 2006 election, all of the candidates [who] were running … had something to say about immigration because it was a popular thing.”
That same election also saw a flurry of ballot initiatives targeting the Spanish-speaking population:
• An amendment to the state constitution making English the official state language. (In 2000, voters had already made English the only language that could be taught in Arizona public schools.)
• A law that denied awarding punitive damages in civil court cases to persons who are in the United States illegally.
• Another law that denied bail to undocumented immigrants who are charged with serious felonies.
• And last but not least, Proposition 300, which denied all “state and local benefits” to those who could not provide proof of citizenship, including college scholarships and financial aid.
State Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has been battling the anti-immigrant forces since she was elected in 2004.
“Many members of the legislature are placed in a very precarious position,” Sinema says. “They personally don’t agree with these pieces of legislation, but are facing a lot of intense pressure from fringe elements of their political party.”
She estimates that about 25 percent of the people who enter the United States illegally live in Arizona. Compounded with a tough economy, she understand why that makes people upset. But Sinema, like Mayor Gordon, says the solution lies with the feds.
“If the federal government refuses to act … what you’re seeing in Arizona will get worse,” Sinema says, “and you’ll see other states begin to take this kind of misguided and inappropriate action.”
Bankrupting Maricopa County
Arpaio rejects all charges of racial profiling or scare tactics.
“The only people that should be fearing to go out are those that have violated the law … and that includes illegal immigrants,” he says.
While prisons and chain gangs made Arpaio famous, so far no evidence exists that the measures have prevented crime. In fact, a 1998 study by Arizona State University Criminal Justice professor Marie L. Griffin — and commissioned by Arpaio himself — found no difference in the recidivism rate or the attitude of inmates who served time after Arpaio’s new prison policies were implemented. Crime rates haven’t decreased, and the prison population itself has continued to grow in correlation with the national average.
Meanwhile, the financial impact of Arpaio’s policies has begun to draw fire, as well. A December 2007 investigation by the Phoenix New Times, a weekly paper, found that from 2004 until 2007, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has more than 50 times as many lawsuits filed against it than sheriffs’ agencies in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York combined.
Losses in court, legal fees and out-of-court settlements (mostly for the mistreatment or neglect of prisoners) have cost county taxpayers more than $41 million since Arpaio took office in 1993. What’s more, the deductible for the county’s insurance policy that covers lawsuits against the sheriff has risen from $1 million to $5 million over the past decade.
At the same time, the number of undocumented immigrants in Arizona may be dwindling.
“They’re leaving,” says Bernasconi, who had trouble finding subcontractors to finish building his daughter’s house in Guadalupe earlier this year. “They don’t have the people for laying the tile, putting in the carpets, putting in the cabinets. … They are going to other states or they are returning to Mexico.”
Annie Loyd, an independent candidate for a local congressional seat, points out that Arpaio’s sweeps are the second recent hit to local business. The first came in January, when a new state law came into effect, fining employers for hiring undocumented workers, and eventually shutting down those businesses.
“Our employer sanctions law created an un-level playing field for us as a state in comparison to other states,” Loyd says. “Immigration is a federal issue and needs to be resolved at a federal level … because it is supposed to be applied equally, across-the-board, throughout the country.”
In the end, it may be the business community that determines if the Maricopa crackdown will continue unabated.
“I consider myself a conservative voter,” says Bob Sitesburg, the owner of Golden Sky Construction in Phoenix. But he says laborers have become increasingly hard to find, and adds that the immigration issue could affect his vote in November. “I’m in an industry where we need those workers,” Sitesburg says.
In January, Arizona became the first state to legally require employers to use E-verify, a Homeland Security system that verifies new employees legal status. President Bush followed suit in June, signing an executive order that mandates all government agencies to use E-verify.
But the system is widely criticized by government officials and business owners, for its 4.1 percent error rates, and for the fact that participating in E-verify doesn’t protect a business that is caught employing illegal immigrants, even if those workers were cleared by the system. It’s just the latest burden for Arizona businesses, which have put a proposition on the November ballot that would loosen the new employer sanctions law.
Local businesses in Phoenix have become increasingly concerned, as well. People moving away or hiding at home means fewer customers, and the bad press associated with nativist groups squaring off against immigrants in the streets doesn’t help the local chamber of commerce attract new business to the area.
Nathan Newman, policy director for the Progressive States Network, who authored a September report titled “The Anti-Immigrant Movement That Failed,” says workplace sanctions, in particular, have raised bipartisan opposition.
“It’s probably the only [issue] I could see,” he says, “where you end up with the chamber of commerce, the head of labor unions, religious groups and human rights groups, all so unanimous in saying ‘This is the wrong approach.’ “
Newman’s study found that the majority of states haven’t jumped on the anti-immigrant bandwagon. And because of business concerns, he doesn’t believe they will.
“It’s not like these waves of anti-immigrant legislation are new things in American history,” Newman says. “This comes in waves, and states have gone through this sort of hysteria in the past. California went through this in the early ’90s. And they looked at it and said ‘Yeah, well, we don’t think so.’ “
But Arizona is not California, and there was no Sheriff Joe in Sacramento 15 years ago. Joan Koerber Walker, CEO of the Arizona Small Business Association, compares Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the United States, to Detroit, which held that rank in the ’60s.
“Law enforcement [in Detroit], with the best intentions, went into heavily racially concentrated areas, specifically looking for felons and lawbreakers,” she says. “The community became polarized, eventually violence broke out, and the businesses in the city of Detroit, many of them never reopened and never recovered.”
She adds: “I would hate to see Phoenix go the same way.”
Andrew Stelzer, a freelance journalist in Oakland, Calif., is a producer at "Making Contact," a weekly public affairs radio program. His reports have appeared on "The World," "Free Speech Radio News" and "Latino USA," among others. Stelzer has been a contributor to In These Times since 2005, and can be contacted at www.andrewstelzer.com.
By Andrew Stelzer
www.inthesetimes.com
The battle began in front of a furniture store.
Like hundreds of other street corners, the intersection at 36th Street and Thomas Road in Phoenix was where immigrant workers arrived before dawn, hoping that someone would pick them up for a day’s work in construction. But last October, the parking lot of Pruitt’s furniture became more than a pick-up spot. First, the store’s owner hired off-duty sheriff’s deputies to act as security guards, claiming that the laborers were causing a disturbance.
Later that month, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” decided to act on a handful of complaints he had received. He made Pruitt’s parking lot the centerpiece of a neighborhood sweep. Arpaio’s deputies began arresting undocumented immigrants in the neighborhood and turning them over to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation proceedings.
In response, civil and immigrants’ rights activists began gathering every Saturday outside the store, protesting what they believe were racially and ethnically motivated crackdowns. Soon, nativist groups from across the southwestern United States — with names like the Patriots Border Alliance and Mothers Against Illegal Aliens — arrived to counter-demonstrate. Waving American flags, the anti-immigrant crowd stood across the street, holding signs that declared support for the mass arrests, the closing of the Mexican border and the immediate deportation of all “illegal aliens.”
The circus-like scene made for good TV, and Arpaio, a media hound by most accounts, seemed egged on by the protests. In a Dec. 5 sheriff’s office press release, Arpaio said, “I will not give up. All the activists must stop their protest before I stop enforcing the law in that area.”
Finally, in January, after more than 67 undocumented immigrants had been arrested, the owner of Pruitt’s agreed to stop hiring off-duty officers.
Arpaio, however, wasn’t done.
Modern-day Selma
The next few months saw several more sweeps — what Arpaio calls “crime suppressions” — in different parts of Maricopa County, netting about 240 arrests, according to a sheriff’s department spokesperson. However, in a pattern of obfuscation that characterizes the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), the department claims it wasn’t keeping arrest logs for the first four sweeps, so it isn’t sure how many of those arrested were in the country illegally.
On June 27, during a typical sweep in the town of Mesa — also in Maricopa County — only 28 of 72 people arrested were undocumented immigrants, according to the sheriff’s office.
An April raid in the dusty town of Guadalupe has become one of the most controversial. The town of 5,732 people, mostly Latinos and Native Americans, has no police force, so it contracts out its policing needs to the MCSO.
The two-day sweep netted 47 arrests, including nine undocumented people. And like the other pre-announced operations, the action brought hundreds of protesters into the streets.
The increased police presence has also scared residents from leaving their homes. Santino Bernasconi, a pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, says that some women were afraid to bring their children to confirmation ceremonies. His parish’s mental health agency, Centro de Amistad, has seen a rise in anxiety disorders in children — fearful for themselves or, if they were born in the United States, fear they will lose their parents.
“I don’t compare it in terms of what the Jews went through in Nazi Germany,” says Bernasconi. “But a lot of our people are beginning to feel that syndrome like Anne Frank, of ‘Who knows when the next knock on the door is the sheriff to cart off everybody?’ “
Meanwhile, he adds, real crime in Guadalupe has gone unaddressed.
“[Arpaio’s] got time to be stopping people because you got a broken headlight,” Bernasconi says, “but he doesn’t have time to provide the services that are much more serious. … And when we call them they don’t show up.”
During the sweeps, Guadalupe Mayor Rebecca Jimenez told Arpaio that she believed the arrests were instances of racial profiling and that she would begin looking into getting out of the contract with the MCSO and find another source for the town’s law enforcement needs.
At first, Arpaio refused to back down, announcing in an April 4 press release that, “Even if they do [cancel the contract], the Sheriff still has jurisdiction here and I will still enforce the illegal immigration laws in that town.”
However, in September, he decided to cancel the contract with Guadalupe himself. The sudden move resulted in lawsuits that accuse him of retaliating against Jimenez’s free speech.
This stark divide now defines Maricopa County, which local activist Rick Romero calls the “Selma, Ala., of the immigrant rights movement.”
Anti-immigrant cowboy
“Sheriff Joe” first gained fame after he created a tent-city prison in 1993 to prove that he could always find room for criminals, rather than release them early because of a lack of space.
In 110-degree heat, prisoners wear county-issued pink underwear, are allowed only a handful of educational TV channels, and are denied access to coffee, cigarettes, salt and pepper, and other vices that cost taxpayer money.
In 1995, Arpaio started a male chain gang, and an all-female chain gang soon followed. Sheriff Joe’s prison philosophy — “If you don’t like it, don’t come back” — made him a hero with the tough-on-crime crowd.
When Arpaio decided to make immigrants his new target in 2005, he adopted some of the more extreme views of the anti-immigrant movement. Press releases from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office refer to people smuggled into the country as “co-conspirators.” It’s a charge the office has levied on undocumented immigrants since 2005, when Arizona’s human smuggling law, the toughest in the country, went into effect.
The MCSO has arrested more than 1,000 people under the law, which allows for Class 4 (two and a half years in prison for the first offense) felony charges to be filed against both the coyote — who smuggles people in — and those who are being transported.
In 2006, Arpaio had 160 of his deputies trained by ICE. The training, conducted under a federal agreement called 287-G, allowed deputies to arrest anyone they think is illegal and then refer them to ICE. If the deputy who pulls over a suspect isn’t trained under 287-G, he or she can call for backup, so that a qualified officer comes to the scene.
Maricopa County isn’t the only local U.S. agency training under 287-G — there are 63 active agreements with state and local agencies nationwide — but it’s certainly the one most aggressively using it. Out of the 840 officers nationwide who have undergone 287-G training, nearly 20 percent are from Maricopa County.
Chief among Arpaio’s enemies is Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, who wrote the FBI and Justice Department in April, asking them to investigate the sheriff for racial profiling and other civil rights abuses. (Arpaio told In These Times that the letter was “garbage.”)
In response, anti-immigrant forces launched an effort in May to recall Gordon, but they failed to collect enough signatures to make the November ballot.
Gordon says Arpaio’s consistent re-election over the past 16 years and high approval ratings are irrelevant.
“Whether the majority of the people support that individual is not the question with respect to whether the actions are legal,” Gordon says. “The sheriff shouldn’t be measuring what he’s doing on the basis of polls.”
Gordon says that a third of his community is Latino, and “if [the people are so] terrorized, legal or not legal, that they are afraid to come out and testify because the sheriff is going to arrest them, it is counterproductive to the safety of this community.”
Magdalena Schwartz, assistant pastor at Iglesia Communidad de Vida church in Mesa, recounts stories about her parishners, many of whom are undocumented. There’s the mother of six honor-roll students who was held in detention for three days, unable to call and tell her family where she was. There’s the 17-year-old son of a permanent U.S. resident, ready to graduate high school, who was sent back to Guatemala, where he hadn’t been since he was 3.
Worst of all was the girl who called the police to report that her boyfriend was abusing her. The police arrested her undocumented boyfriend — and also the girl.
“They asked [her] for ID, and she showed a Mexican ID, and they immediately said ‘You are illegal here. OK, let’s go,’ ” Schwartz recalls. “So what kind of confidence [can] we have now to call the police or the sheriff to report a crime?”
Operation Endgame
Compounding the sheriff’s sweeps is that the MCSO hasn’t collected any data about the detained. Sheriff’s office spokesman Paul Chagalla told In These Times that the department doesn’t keep data on the ethnicity of arrestees.
It wasn’t until the fifth “crime suppression operation” that the MCSO began compiling arrest logs from each operation — a move that came only after repeated demands for information by the press and the public. That lack of hard numbers presents obstacles for legal tactics like a class-action lawsuit filed in July by the ACLU, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and others that charges the MCSO with racial profiling.
“We have to be really smart about collecting the data that we need in order to put a stop to this,” says Lydia Guzman, who founded Respect/Respeto — an organization with a 24-hour hotline for immigrants. Since its founding in January, Guzman’s group has been receiving up to 50 calls per day.
Rick Romero, the chief organizer of the Citizens Walk for Human Dignity, a weeklong protest march from Tucson to Phoenix, says he has been asked for proof of citizenship several times — including once at a hospital, as a condition of admission for treatment. He says his wife has also been stopped and questioned.
“I learned because I’ve been pulled over so many times for various reasons that the only thing that really settles the argument is if you have a Social Security card,” says Romero, who was born and raised in Arizona.
Many who joined Romero on the 120-mile journey focused their daily press conference comments on Operation Endgame, a 2003 ICE directive to “remove all removable aliens” from the United States by 2012. Some fear the major ICE raids this past summer in Iowa and Mississippi — and an increasing number of smaller raids throughout the country — could be a step toward Endgame’s unattainable goal.
One of Endgame’s written objectives, according to documents obtained by the Massachusetts ACLU, is to “enhance partnerships with local law enforcement agencies to develop, implement, and maintain an integrated system to share information, intelligence and resources, and to coordinate enforcement actions.”
Cooperation between the MCSO and ICE certainly meets this objective, and many Arizonans believe their home state is a test case for whether the removal strategy can work on a national level.
Anti-immigrant laws
Anti-immigrant fervor in Arizona began in earnest in the wake of 9/11, and increased over the next few years. In 2004, Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, a citizen’s initiative that mandated people to show proof of citizenship at the polls on Election Day.
“That opened the floodgates to more anti-immigrant rhetoric by legislators, because they saw the overwhelming support that it had by voters,” says Guzman. “So by the 2006 election, all of the candidates [who] were running … had something to say about immigration because it was a popular thing.”
That same election also saw a flurry of ballot initiatives targeting the Spanish-speaking population:
• An amendment to the state constitution making English the official state language. (In 2000, voters had already made English the only language that could be taught in Arizona public schools.)
• A law that denied awarding punitive damages in civil court cases to persons who are in the United States illegally.
• Another law that denied bail to undocumented immigrants who are charged with serious felonies.
• And last but not least, Proposition 300, which denied all “state and local benefits” to those who could not provide proof of citizenship, including college scholarships and financial aid.
State Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has been battling the anti-immigrant forces since she was elected in 2004.
“Many members of the legislature are placed in a very precarious position,” Sinema says. “They personally don’t agree with these pieces of legislation, but are facing a lot of intense pressure from fringe elements of their political party.”
She estimates that about 25 percent of the people who enter the United States illegally live in Arizona. Compounded with a tough economy, she understand why that makes people upset. But Sinema, like Mayor Gordon, says the solution lies with the feds.
“If the federal government refuses to act … what you’re seeing in Arizona will get worse,” Sinema says, “and you’ll see other states begin to take this kind of misguided and inappropriate action.”
Bankrupting Maricopa County
Arpaio rejects all charges of racial profiling or scare tactics.
“The only people that should be fearing to go out are those that have violated the law … and that includes illegal immigrants,” he says.
While prisons and chain gangs made Arpaio famous, so far no evidence exists that the measures have prevented crime. In fact, a 1998 study by Arizona State University Criminal Justice professor Marie L. Griffin — and commissioned by Arpaio himself — found no difference in the recidivism rate or the attitude of inmates who served time after Arpaio’s new prison policies were implemented. Crime rates haven’t decreased, and the prison population itself has continued to grow in correlation with the national average.
Meanwhile, the financial impact of Arpaio’s policies has begun to draw fire, as well. A December 2007 investigation by the Phoenix New Times, a weekly paper, found that from 2004 until 2007, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has more than 50 times as many lawsuits filed against it than sheriffs’ agencies in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York combined.
Losses in court, legal fees and out-of-court settlements (mostly for the mistreatment or neglect of prisoners) have cost county taxpayers more than $41 million since Arpaio took office in 1993. What’s more, the deductible for the county’s insurance policy that covers lawsuits against the sheriff has risen from $1 million to $5 million over the past decade.
At the same time, the number of undocumented immigrants in Arizona may be dwindling.
“They’re leaving,” says Bernasconi, who had trouble finding subcontractors to finish building his daughter’s house in Guadalupe earlier this year. “They don’t have the people for laying the tile, putting in the carpets, putting in the cabinets. … They are going to other states or they are returning to Mexico.”
Annie Loyd, an independent candidate for a local congressional seat, points out that Arpaio’s sweeps are the second recent hit to local business. The first came in January, when a new state law came into effect, fining employers for hiring undocumented workers, and eventually shutting down those businesses.
“Our employer sanctions law created an un-level playing field for us as a state in comparison to other states,” Loyd says. “Immigration is a federal issue and needs to be resolved at a federal level … because it is supposed to be applied equally, across-the-board, throughout the country.”
In the end, it may be the business community that determines if the Maricopa crackdown will continue unabated.
“I consider myself a conservative voter,” says Bob Sitesburg, the owner of Golden Sky Construction in Phoenix. But he says laborers have become increasingly hard to find, and adds that the immigration issue could affect his vote in November. “I’m in an industry where we need those workers,” Sitesburg says.
In January, Arizona became the first state to legally require employers to use E-verify, a Homeland Security system that verifies new employees legal status. President Bush followed suit in June, signing an executive order that mandates all government agencies to use E-verify.
But the system is widely criticized by government officials and business owners, for its 4.1 percent error rates, and for the fact that participating in E-verify doesn’t protect a business that is caught employing illegal immigrants, even if those workers were cleared by the system. It’s just the latest burden for Arizona businesses, which have put a proposition on the November ballot that would loosen the new employer sanctions law.
Local businesses in Phoenix have become increasingly concerned, as well. People moving away or hiding at home means fewer customers, and the bad press associated with nativist groups squaring off against immigrants in the streets doesn’t help the local chamber of commerce attract new business to the area.
Nathan Newman, policy director for the Progressive States Network, who authored a September report titled “The Anti-Immigrant Movement That Failed,” says workplace sanctions, in particular, have raised bipartisan opposition.
“It’s probably the only [issue] I could see,” he says, “where you end up with the chamber of commerce, the head of labor unions, religious groups and human rights groups, all so unanimous in saying ‘This is the wrong approach.’ “
Newman’s study found that the majority of states haven’t jumped on the anti-immigrant bandwagon. And because of business concerns, he doesn’t believe they will.
“It’s not like these waves of anti-immigrant legislation are new things in American history,” Newman says. “This comes in waves, and states have gone through this sort of hysteria in the past. California went through this in the early ’90s. And they looked at it and said ‘Yeah, well, we don’t think so.’ “
But Arizona is not California, and there was no Sheriff Joe in Sacramento 15 years ago. Joan Koerber Walker, CEO of the Arizona Small Business Association, compares Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the United States, to Detroit, which held that rank in the ’60s.
“Law enforcement [in Detroit], with the best intentions, went into heavily racially concentrated areas, specifically looking for felons and lawbreakers,” she says. “The community became polarized, eventually violence broke out, and the businesses in the city of Detroit, many of them never reopened and never recovered.”
She adds: “I would hate to see Phoenix go the same way.”
Andrew Stelzer, a freelance journalist in Oakland, Calif., is a producer at "Making Contact," a weekly public affairs radio program. His reports have appeared on "The World," "Free Speech Radio News" and "Latino USA," among others. Stelzer has been a contributor to In These Times since 2005, and can be contacted at www.andrewstelzer.com.
Crimen y democracia: el caso de México
Crimen y democracia: el caso de México
Hermann Bellinghausen
La Jornada
¿Qué no describió ya el viejo Marx lo que hoy está ocurriendo, y todo lo que ha ocurrido desde su entonces? (Bueno, se le escapó prever el desarrollo del "socialismo real", que a lo largo del siglo XX lo reivindicaría como su ideólogo y guía).
"El delito, con los nuevos recursos que cada día se descubren para atentar contra la propiedad, obliga a descubrir a cada paso medios de defensa y se revela, así, tan productivo como las huelgas en lo tocante a máquinas. ¿Acaso sin los delitos nacionales habría llegado a crearse nunca el mercado mundial? Más aún, ¿existirían siquiera naciones?" (El pasaje proviene de unos apuntes para su Teoría de las plusvalías redactados hacia 1860, en la estupenda edición Elogio del crimen de Karl Marx, Sequitur, Madrid, 2008).
Como pocas edades del capitalismo burgués, nuestro presente es merecedor de la ironía marxiana. A fin de cuentas la primera conclusión firme sobre la globalización neoliberal es que favoreció, si algo, al crimen organizado, que estaba más preparado que nadie para los nuevos códigos y recursos del libérrimo mercado. Un ejemplo es Rusia. Y lo podemos ver en México. El llamado narco ha sobrepasado en eficacia al Estado, las empresas y los bancos legales (sin ignorar que éstos son pródigos en delitos "de cuello blanco").
Paradójicamente, nos dicen que ahora tenemos "más democracia" que nunca. Hace poco, en Tuxtla Gutiérrez, ante los empresarios nacionales, Enrique Krauze hasta le puso fecha a la "consolidación de la democracia": 2012. Al menos coincide su cronología con las "profecías mayas" antiguas, que para el mismo año fecharon el fin del mundo. Sería el clímax de la "transición" que se supone atravesamos, casualmente, desde que se desencadenó el ciclo neoliberal.
Con un gobierno federal "espurio" y un Estado además de inepto empequeñecido por partida doble (la propia decisión de "achicarse" y la avalancha criminal y económica que lo desafía), la democracia mexicana se presenta en extremo endeble y su tránsito podría ser a un nuevo autoritarismo represivo.
Los priístas lo han entendido mejor que nadie. No sólo son veteranos como políticos de Estado, también como delincuentes. Su futuro político en la democracia televisiva (incluyendo las telenovelas y los gossip shows) es prometedor. Los gobernadores tricolores, imper-meables al escándalo y las responsabilidades penales, han demostrado eficiencia en sus actuales señoríos: Oaxaca, Sonora, Coahuila, Puebla, Veracruz y sobre todo el estado de México. En Tamaulipas y Chihuahua, muy pragmáticamente, abdican o "cogobiernan" con la delincuencia organizada.
Nuestra democracia electoral es tan importante como negocio que la primera institución en alarmarse ante los inminentes recortes presupuestales que promete la crisis no fue una secretaría de salud, educación o desarrollo social, sino el Instituto Federal Electoral. Suyo, y de los partidos políticos, es el pródigo negocio de los comicios (y desde el Congreso, la aprobación de leyes privatizadoras y la distribución del gasto nacional). La gente, consumidora de esa democracia, no cuenta, aunque es la única base sólida en la pirámide virtual del poder político.
El crimen organizado (hasta las noticias lo llegan a reconocer) se entrelaza íntimamente con el poder que se supone lo persigue y "combate". Hasta una "guerra" le tiene declarada, para desasosiego del Ejército federal que la pelea. Como bien documentó Karl Marx, el crimen "impulsa las fuerzas productivas, descarga al mercado de trabajo de una parte de la sobrepoblación sobrante, reduciendo así la competencia y poniendo coto, hasta cierto punto, a la baja del salario, y al mismo tiempo, la lucha contra la delincuencia absorbe a otra parte de la misma población".
En suma, el delincuente produce "toda la policía y la administración de justicia penal, y a su vez, las diferentes ramas de la industria que representan otras tantas categorías de la división social del trabajo". Setenta años antes del fascismo, Marx ofrecía un ejemplo vigente: "Solamente la tortura ha dado pie a los más ingeniosos inventos mecánicos, y ocupa en la producción de sus instrumentos a gran número de honrados artesanos".
Dentro del capitalismo democrático de libre mercado a nadie le va mejor que a mafias, familias, hermandades, cárteles, partidos políticos, cúpulas y uno que otro sindicato. Se entregan a la "competividad". Por eso se pelean tan feo. Hacen la economía burguesa, y ésta los hace a ellos. Endogamia pura.
Hermann Bellinghausen
La Jornada
¿Qué no describió ya el viejo Marx lo que hoy está ocurriendo, y todo lo que ha ocurrido desde su entonces? (Bueno, se le escapó prever el desarrollo del "socialismo real", que a lo largo del siglo XX lo reivindicaría como su ideólogo y guía).
"El delito, con los nuevos recursos que cada día se descubren para atentar contra la propiedad, obliga a descubrir a cada paso medios de defensa y se revela, así, tan productivo como las huelgas en lo tocante a máquinas. ¿Acaso sin los delitos nacionales habría llegado a crearse nunca el mercado mundial? Más aún, ¿existirían siquiera naciones?" (El pasaje proviene de unos apuntes para su Teoría de las plusvalías redactados hacia 1860, en la estupenda edición Elogio del crimen de Karl Marx, Sequitur, Madrid, 2008).
Como pocas edades del capitalismo burgués, nuestro presente es merecedor de la ironía marxiana. A fin de cuentas la primera conclusión firme sobre la globalización neoliberal es que favoreció, si algo, al crimen organizado, que estaba más preparado que nadie para los nuevos códigos y recursos del libérrimo mercado. Un ejemplo es Rusia. Y lo podemos ver en México. El llamado narco ha sobrepasado en eficacia al Estado, las empresas y los bancos legales (sin ignorar que éstos son pródigos en delitos "de cuello blanco").
Paradójicamente, nos dicen que ahora tenemos "más democracia" que nunca. Hace poco, en Tuxtla Gutiérrez, ante los empresarios nacionales, Enrique Krauze hasta le puso fecha a la "consolidación de la democracia": 2012. Al menos coincide su cronología con las "profecías mayas" antiguas, que para el mismo año fecharon el fin del mundo. Sería el clímax de la "transición" que se supone atravesamos, casualmente, desde que se desencadenó el ciclo neoliberal.
Con un gobierno federal "espurio" y un Estado además de inepto empequeñecido por partida doble (la propia decisión de "achicarse" y la avalancha criminal y económica que lo desafía), la democracia mexicana se presenta en extremo endeble y su tránsito podría ser a un nuevo autoritarismo represivo.
Los priístas lo han entendido mejor que nadie. No sólo son veteranos como políticos de Estado, también como delincuentes. Su futuro político en la democracia televisiva (incluyendo las telenovelas y los gossip shows) es prometedor. Los gobernadores tricolores, imper-meables al escándalo y las responsabilidades penales, han demostrado eficiencia en sus actuales señoríos: Oaxaca, Sonora, Coahuila, Puebla, Veracruz y sobre todo el estado de México. En Tamaulipas y Chihuahua, muy pragmáticamente, abdican o "cogobiernan" con la delincuencia organizada.
Nuestra democracia electoral es tan importante como negocio que la primera institución en alarmarse ante los inminentes recortes presupuestales que promete la crisis no fue una secretaría de salud, educación o desarrollo social, sino el Instituto Federal Electoral. Suyo, y de los partidos políticos, es el pródigo negocio de los comicios (y desde el Congreso, la aprobación de leyes privatizadoras y la distribución del gasto nacional). La gente, consumidora de esa democracia, no cuenta, aunque es la única base sólida en la pirámide virtual del poder político.
El crimen organizado (hasta las noticias lo llegan a reconocer) se entrelaza íntimamente con el poder que se supone lo persigue y "combate". Hasta una "guerra" le tiene declarada, para desasosiego del Ejército federal que la pelea. Como bien documentó Karl Marx, el crimen "impulsa las fuerzas productivas, descarga al mercado de trabajo de una parte de la sobrepoblación sobrante, reduciendo así la competencia y poniendo coto, hasta cierto punto, a la baja del salario, y al mismo tiempo, la lucha contra la delincuencia absorbe a otra parte de la misma población".
En suma, el delincuente produce "toda la policía y la administración de justicia penal, y a su vez, las diferentes ramas de la industria que representan otras tantas categorías de la división social del trabajo". Setenta años antes del fascismo, Marx ofrecía un ejemplo vigente: "Solamente la tortura ha dado pie a los más ingeniosos inventos mecánicos, y ocupa en la producción de sus instrumentos a gran número de honrados artesanos".
Dentro del capitalismo democrático de libre mercado a nadie le va mejor que a mafias, familias, hermandades, cárteles, partidos políticos, cúpulas y uno que otro sindicato. Se entregan a la "competividad". Por eso se pelean tan feo. Hacen la economía burguesa, y ésta los hace a ellos. Endogamia pura.
“La Doctora” Bertha Muñoz Returns to Oaxaca after Nearly Two Years in Hiding
Despite Threats of Violence, and State Criminal Charges She has Returned Home to Face the Fear that Led Her into Exile
By Nancy Davies
Commentary from Oaxaca
www.narconews.com
In an emotional scene in the center of the city, “La Doctora” Bertha Muñoz returned to Oaxaca for the November 25 observance of the 2006 repression of the Oaxaca social movement. She joined leaders of Section 22 of SNTE on a stage constructed beside Oaxaca’s Catedrál, where APPO activists as well as the leaders of the teachers union addressed the post-march crowd .
Berta Muñoz spoke in a straightforward and simple way,. beginning, “Now I am here.” She continued, “I owe an explanation to those who are here and those who are not here. Why did I go? I went because of fear, fear for myself and my sons. I went due to fear. Others like me took the threats more or less seriously. I fled out of fear…
“I return because I am tired of living with fear. I am not an assassin or a criminal. I did not set fires, I did not kill anyone. With all the fear, I have returned. The fear goes on, but freedom will overcome it… I want to ask you to help me to understand what happened. Each person experienced the repression differently. .. I ask you to come on Sunday to the zócalo so we can talk and understand what happened to us. We have to do this ourselves.”
The crowd responded to La Doctora’s request for forgiveness by calling, “We love you, we love you”.
The full force of Mexico’s government fell on Oaxaca when then-president Vicente Fox ordered a random military sweep with combined national and state police. The armed troops swept through the streets of the historic center beating and grabbing whoever they found that night. More than 300 people were arrested.
Bertha Muñoz, who for months was the best-known voice of the social movement because of her broadcasts on Radio Universidad, fled shortly thereafter as a result of threats against her person, her home and her children. She received threats saying “they would cut her tongue out” and “they would set her house on fire”.
Dr. Muñoz appeared in public at the termination of the commemorative march despite warrants for her arrest on various trumped-up government charges. She has received federal protection, (in the form of amparos) but the state legal system in the control of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortega (URO) has maintained charges against her. Muñoz fled Oaxaca in December of 2006. In May of 2007 she was assisted into exile on the advice of the international Commission for Human Rights, who agreed she could not be safe from a government which routinely arrests, tortures and disappears those who stand against it. After many months in Bolivia she returned to Mexico in May of 2008, letting the world know through an interview with the CNN journalist Carmen Aristegui.
Muñoz hoped for legal protections against the state government’s arrest orders, but although lawyers repeatedly obtained court decisions to protect her, the government merely invented new charges, some of them patently absurd, such as setting fire to a Banamex ATM station.. Her pension for thirty years of teaching medicine at the University of Oaxaca medical school was rescinded –not overtly but by a systematic confusion in the paperwork required. Ultimately, Muñoz reported, she was told that she was “fired” for failure to show up at work, and her loss of pension was specifically ordered by the governor.
Finally Dr. Muñoz decided that she would no longer play the government’s game. She decided to return to Oaxaca. She arrived on Sunday in private transportation with considerable secrecy, and word of her homecoming was not public until Dr. Muñoz stood in the zócalo. For the fashion mavens among you, she wore a white lab coat over jeans, her curly white hair clearly visible above smaller people.
The doctor spoke with no notes, simply expressing her feelings, “What are we, animals? Where are human rights?” She referred to the assassination of reporters, “Where are the rights to work? There are no rights, only deeds (of repression)!” She asserted that the “failure” of the movement was not a failure of the people, who can hold their heads high. The federal government of Felipe Calderón chose to maintain the governor Ulises Ruiz and other PRI governors in power, in exchange for political support by the PRI: a moral failure on his part, she declared.
Doctor Muñoz, also referred to as “Doctor Escopeta,” broadcast in her much-loved rasp during the movement’s occupation of the capital city of Oaxaca in 2006. She hosted hours on Radio Universidad in the months before it was finally destroyed by government agents, speaking to and for the people in their struggle to rid themselves of the despotic governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, always in favor on non-violence and calm, even while the radio station itself was under attack. Her trademark cigarette and her spare frame were also seen in the streets during the time when the city was held by the people’s barricades. During marches she traveled in an ambulance ready to assist those injured.
In a later press conference with Section 22 leaders La Doctora said she would be willing to broadcast on the teachers’ station, Radio Plantón, since the university is now off limits.
The November 25 march publicized the current movement demands: get rid of Elba Ester Gordillo, president-for-life of The National Education Workers Union, do away with the Agreement for Quality Education (ACE) which is generally regarded to be a move toward privatizing education in Mexico, free all political prisoners, obtain justice for those government criminals now formally charged by the APPO, stop repression, and support other teachers sections across Mexico, specifically of Morelos where another repression occurred on the Oaxaca model following two months of teacher strikes. Teachers from Morelos in sympathy with the APPO and Section 22 also marched.
On the speakers platform, Flavio Sosa, Cástulo Lopez and Azael Santiago Chepi repeated calls for unity and putting aside the ideological differences which have hampered and all but destroyed the APPO since 2007. Lopez asked for a new beginning, with a new APPO assembly in January. Sanitago Chepi, a young Zaopoteco from the Sierra Norte, presents himself as more militant than his union predecessors, and more willing to take the strength of Section 22 into the streets on behalf of social protest. He issued a warning to Gordillo and Calderon: “We are building in the communities , and with the parents”. The movement is not dead, and clearly the new secretary general of Section 22 intends to be -without violence- on the front line of struggle.
Ironically, fighting broke out shortly thereafter in the same spot, between the EPR and VOCAL. Along the march route some unidentified –perhaps government agents- youngsters were destroying property and trying to break into Chedraui to steal food. Teachers lined up in front of Chedraui to protect it.
On the same morning of November 25, public transportation was suspended. Although it may have been at the orders of the governor, it is also clear that many bus company owners fear vandalism, which may or may not be paid for by this same government, whose goals include turning public opinion against the teachers. Those who wanted to join the megamarch, which dew more than 60,000 participants, set out on foot to reach the starting point at the crossroads of Viguera. Banners reading “We don’t forgive and we don’t forget” summarized the wrath of the public. Other banners held up the portrait of the man now imprisoned for the murder of Brad Will who filmed PRI officials running towards him shooting.
Remembrance of those arrested, tortured, and disappeared by the government. A cleansing ceremony, surrounded by a circle of family and friends of the dead, tortured or disappeared, sent sage smoke into the air in front of the Santo Domingo church.
A silent procession then wended its way along several streets where the repression occurred. At 6:00 PM a mass took place in the Catedrál, with the attending people carrying white flowers and food to share. Given the government’s clear intention to keep his fist clamped against any social protest, it may take more than prayers to improve the lives of poor Oaxaqueños.
By Nancy Davies
Commentary from Oaxaca
www.narconews.com
In an emotional scene in the center of the city, “La Doctora” Bertha Muñoz returned to Oaxaca for the November 25 observance of the 2006 repression of the Oaxaca social movement. She joined leaders of Section 22 of SNTE on a stage constructed beside Oaxaca’s Catedrál, where APPO activists as well as the leaders of the teachers union addressed the post-march crowd .
Berta Muñoz spoke in a straightforward and simple way,. beginning, “Now I am here.” She continued, “I owe an explanation to those who are here and those who are not here. Why did I go? I went because of fear, fear for myself and my sons. I went due to fear. Others like me took the threats more or less seriously. I fled out of fear…
“I return because I am tired of living with fear. I am not an assassin or a criminal. I did not set fires, I did not kill anyone. With all the fear, I have returned. The fear goes on, but freedom will overcome it… I want to ask you to help me to understand what happened. Each person experienced the repression differently. .. I ask you to come on Sunday to the zócalo so we can talk and understand what happened to us. We have to do this ourselves.”
The crowd responded to La Doctora’s request for forgiveness by calling, “We love you, we love you”.
The full force of Mexico’s government fell on Oaxaca when then-president Vicente Fox ordered a random military sweep with combined national and state police. The armed troops swept through the streets of the historic center beating and grabbing whoever they found that night. More than 300 people were arrested.
Bertha Muñoz, who for months was the best-known voice of the social movement because of her broadcasts on Radio Universidad, fled shortly thereafter as a result of threats against her person, her home and her children. She received threats saying “they would cut her tongue out” and “they would set her house on fire”.
Dr. Muñoz appeared in public at the termination of the commemorative march despite warrants for her arrest on various trumped-up government charges. She has received federal protection, (in the form of amparos) but the state legal system in the control of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortega (URO) has maintained charges against her. Muñoz fled Oaxaca in December of 2006. In May of 2007 she was assisted into exile on the advice of the international Commission for Human Rights, who agreed she could not be safe from a government which routinely arrests, tortures and disappears those who stand against it. After many months in Bolivia she returned to Mexico in May of 2008, letting the world know through an interview with the CNN journalist Carmen Aristegui.
Muñoz hoped for legal protections against the state government’s arrest orders, but although lawyers repeatedly obtained court decisions to protect her, the government merely invented new charges, some of them patently absurd, such as setting fire to a Banamex ATM station.. Her pension for thirty years of teaching medicine at the University of Oaxaca medical school was rescinded –not overtly but by a systematic confusion in the paperwork required. Ultimately, Muñoz reported, she was told that she was “fired” for failure to show up at work, and her loss of pension was specifically ordered by the governor.
Finally Dr. Muñoz decided that she would no longer play the government’s game. She decided to return to Oaxaca. She arrived on Sunday in private transportation with considerable secrecy, and word of her homecoming was not public until Dr. Muñoz stood in the zócalo. For the fashion mavens among you, she wore a white lab coat over jeans, her curly white hair clearly visible above smaller people.
The doctor spoke with no notes, simply expressing her feelings, “What are we, animals? Where are human rights?” She referred to the assassination of reporters, “Where are the rights to work? There are no rights, only deeds (of repression)!” She asserted that the “failure” of the movement was not a failure of the people, who can hold their heads high. The federal government of Felipe Calderón chose to maintain the governor Ulises Ruiz and other PRI governors in power, in exchange for political support by the PRI: a moral failure on his part, she declared.
Doctor Muñoz, also referred to as “Doctor Escopeta,” broadcast in her much-loved rasp during the movement’s occupation of the capital city of Oaxaca in 2006. She hosted hours on Radio Universidad in the months before it was finally destroyed by government agents, speaking to and for the people in their struggle to rid themselves of the despotic governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, always in favor on non-violence and calm, even while the radio station itself was under attack. Her trademark cigarette and her spare frame were also seen in the streets during the time when the city was held by the people’s barricades. During marches she traveled in an ambulance ready to assist those injured.
In a later press conference with Section 22 leaders La Doctora said she would be willing to broadcast on the teachers’ station, Radio Plantón, since the university is now off limits.
The November 25 march publicized the current movement demands: get rid of Elba Ester Gordillo, president-for-life of The National Education Workers Union, do away with the Agreement for Quality Education (ACE) which is generally regarded to be a move toward privatizing education in Mexico, free all political prisoners, obtain justice for those government criminals now formally charged by the APPO, stop repression, and support other teachers sections across Mexico, specifically of Morelos where another repression occurred on the Oaxaca model following two months of teacher strikes. Teachers from Morelos in sympathy with the APPO and Section 22 also marched.
On the speakers platform, Flavio Sosa, Cástulo Lopez and Azael Santiago Chepi repeated calls for unity and putting aside the ideological differences which have hampered and all but destroyed the APPO since 2007. Lopez asked for a new beginning, with a new APPO assembly in January. Sanitago Chepi, a young Zaopoteco from the Sierra Norte, presents himself as more militant than his union predecessors, and more willing to take the strength of Section 22 into the streets on behalf of social protest. He issued a warning to Gordillo and Calderon: “We are building in the communities , and with the parents”. The movement is not dead, and clearly the new secretary general of Section 22 intends to be -without violence- on the front line of struggle.
Ironically, fighting broke out shortly thereafter in the same spot, between the EPR and VOCAL. Along the march route some unidentified –perhaps government agents- youngsters were destroying property and trying to break into Chedraui to steal food. Teachers lined up in front of Chedraui to protect it.
On the same morning of November 25, public transportation was suspended. Although it may have been at the orders of the governor, it is also clear that many bus company owners fear vandalism, which may or may not be paid for by this same government, whose goals include turning public opinion against the teachers. Those who wanted to join the megamarch, which dew more than 60,000 participants, set out on foot to reach the starting point at the crossroads of Viguera. Banners reading “We don’t forgive and we don’t forget” summarized the wrath of the public. Other banners held up the portrait of the man now imprisoned for the murder of Brad Will who filmed PRI officials running towards him shooting.
Remembrance of those arrested, tortured, and disappeared by the government. A cleansing ceremony, surrounded by a circle of family and friends of the dead, tortured or disappeared, sent sage smoke into the air in front of the Santo Domingo church.
A silent procession then wended its way along several streets where the repression occurred. At 6:00 PM a mass took place in the Catedrál, with the attending people carrying white flowers and food to share. Given the government’s clear intention to keep his fist clamped against any social protest, it may take more than prayers to improve the lives of poor Oaxaqueños.
Thick as Thieves: The Private (and very profitable) World of Corporate Spying
by Tom Burghardt
www.dissidentvoice.org
When Comverse Infosys founder and CEO Jacob “Kobi” Alexander fled to Israel and later Namibia in 2006, the former Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur took along a little extra cash for his extended “vacation”–$57 million to be precise.
According to investigative journalist James Bamford’s exposé of the National Security Agency, The Shadow Factory, Alexander was facing a thirty-two-count indictment by the Justice Department “charging him with masterminding a scheme to backdate millions of Comverse stock options … that allowed Alexander to realize $138 million in profits–profits stolen from the pockets of the company’s shareholders.”
When the scandal broke, one former colleague told the New York Times, “The one thing about Kobi is that he did have a sense of entitlement,” said Stephen R. Kowarsky, who was an executive at Comverse from 1985-97. “Most people are a little bit shy or self-effacing about asking for something, but not Kobi. It was easy for him to say, ‘I want that. I deserve that.’”
Sounds like business as usual to me!
But there is a darker side to Verint. As investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham revealed on the muckraking website CounterPunch, U.S. intelligence agencies are wary of Israeli penetration and interception of U.S. military systems and advanced computing applications through a backdoor, called a “trojan,” secretly built into enterprise architecture. Ketcham wrote,
"According to former CIA officer [Philip] Giraldi and other US intelligence sources, software manufactured and maintained by Verint, Inc. handles most of American law enforcement’s wiretaps. Says Giraldi: “Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to US investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’ with its equipment to maintain the system.” Giraldi also notes Verint is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its R&D costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. According to Giraldi, the extent of the use of Verint technology “is considered classified,” but sources have spoken out and told Giraldi they are worried about the security of Verint wiretap systems. The key concern, says Giraldi, is the issue of a “trojan” embedded in the software. (Christopher Ketcham, “An Israeli Trojan Horse,” CounterPunch, Weekend Edition, September 27-28, 2008)"
Yet despite alarms raised by a score of federal law enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fearful that sensitive wiretap information was finding its way into the hands of international narcotrafficking cartels, virtually nothing has been done to halt the outsourcing of America’s surveillance apparatus to firms with intimate ties to foreign intelligence entities. Indeed, as America’s spy system is turned inward against the American people, corporations such as Verint work hand-in-glove with a spooky network of security agencies and their corporatist pals in the telecommunications industry.
Kobi Alexander would’ve certainly known the drill, exploiting family connections for advantage over competitors with movers and shakers in Washington. As they say, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. Kobi’s father Zvi was a fabulously wealthy oil baron who wound up running Israel’s state oil company. Bamford recounts how Zvi won drilling franchises: he’d bribe African cabinet ministers, “often in partnership with the U.S. tax cheat Marc Rich, who became a fugitive and was given sanctuary in Israel.”
That is, until Rich was handed a pardon during the waning days of the Clinton administration. In the aftermath of Clinton’s “gifting” the tax scofflaw with a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, Rich’s close confidant, attorney and convicted felon, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, denied that Rich had conspired to hide illegal profits or violate U.S. laws.
Yet despite a documentary record of shady dealings that spanned continents–and decades–a “neutral, leaning towards favorable” opinion on Rich’s petition for pardon was signed-off by none other than former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s apparent pick for U.S. Attorney General.
Like Kobi Alexander and his pals at Comverse, Rich too, had a dirty little secret as CNN reported back in 2001: “Marc Rich did help the Israeli security services in some way.” CNN doesn’t specify how Rich curried favor with Mossad, only that he did. Which just goes to show its a small world–of one hand washing the other.
(Memo to Obama supporters: you can forget about future Justice Department investigations of Bush cronies and war criminals. Why? Shortly before entering private practice at the tony law firm Covington & Burling, Holder was Bush’s Acting Attorney General until John Ashcroft’s nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Out of government, Holder made a killing defending Chiquita Brands International against charges that the firm paid the far-right Colombian, narcotrafficking AUC death squad millions in “protection money” to murder labor activists. But I digress.)
Meanwhile in the heimat, enterprising innovators such as Verint are inside–deep inside–America’s telephone and internet infrastructure. Keeping “America safe”–from its citizens–has become a veritable cash cow for dozens of corporate embeds busy as proverbial bees inventing new products for an alphabet-soup mix of intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, DHS, DIA, NGA, NRO and NSA.
Five months after the 9/11 attacks, the security bubble was rapidly expanding and the “homeland security” market was touted by Wall Street gurus as “the next big thing” on the corporate grifting horizon.
Alexander (before fleeing to the dry, but relatively safe harbor in Windhoek) rebranded Comverse Infosys, Verint Systems, Inc., an acronym for “verified intelligence.” The company, which made a fortune on a digital suite of wiretapping tools, AudioDisk, describes itself as a “a leading provider of actionable intelligence solutions for workforce optimization, IP video, communications interception, and public safety.”
Soon thereafter according to Bamford, Verint was selling its “actionable intelligence solutions” to “more than 5,000 organizations in over 100 countries” world-wide, including the worst human rights abusers on the planet. And why wouldn’t they? Verint’s already brisk business took off like a bat out of hell after 9/11.
As USA Today reported in 2006, “Most of the growth this decade will come from building what Homeland Security Research calls ‘a homeland defense infrastructure.’ Growth areas are likely to include technology for surveillance and for detection of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.” Or illegal spying by unaccountable state agencies and their private partners.
According to a Business Week company profile,
"Verint Systems, Inc. provides analytic software-based solutions for the security and business intelligence markets. Its analytic solutions collect, retain, and analyze voice, fax, video, email, Internet, and data transmissions from voice, video and IP networks for the purpose of generating actionable intelligence for decision makers. The company primarily offers communications interception solutions, such as STAR-GATE, RELIANT, and VANTAGE; networked video solutions that include NEXTIVA; and contact center actionable intelligence solutions, which include ULTRA. Verint Systems serves government entities, global corporations, law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, transportation agencies, retail stores, utilities, and communications service providers. (Verint Systems, Inc. Business Week, Information Technology Sector, accessed November 26, 2008)"
With total revenues of $249.8 million and gross profits in 2005 of $137.1 million, Verint, while not the largest firm in the security and intelligence “marketplace” nonetheless is connected to a host of spooky clients, including the National Security Agency and their “partners” at Verizon Communications.
As I wrote back in March, whistleblower and security consultant Babak Pasdar revealed how Verizon handed the FBI and one assumes the NSA, unrestricted access to their customers’ voice communications and electronic data via the Bureau’s “Quantico circuit.”
In a signed affidavit to the whistleblowing protection group, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), Pasdar described how his unnamed client (revealed by The Washington Post as Verizon Communications), listened in and recorded all conversations en-masse; collected and recorded mobile phone data use en-masse; obtained data that the company accessed from mobile phone usage, including internet access, e-mail and web browsing; trended calling patterns and call behavior; identified inbound and outbound callers; tracked all inbound and outbound calls; and traced a user’s physical location.
While Verizon and fellow telecom spy AT&T may have handed the FBI and NSA a treasure trove of their customer’s personal details, niche telecom companies such as Verint, rival Narus (another spooky Israeli security firm), Siemans and Ericsson to name but a few of the multinationals that build the surveillance tools hard-wired into America’s telecommunications infrastructure, have made a killing destroying our privacy.
The Ties that Bind: Verint’s Spooky Board of Directors
The close interconnections amongst firms such as Verint and the U.S. and Israeli National Security States are revealed by a glance at the firm’s Board of Directors.
When Kobi Alexander fled the country in 2006, Dan Bodner became the company’s CEO. According to Business Week, Bodner, a Comverse Infosys insider, “served in the Israeli Defense Forces in an engineering capacity.” A graduate of Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, Bodner was previously the President and CEO of Comverse Government Systems Corporation.
David T. Ledwell, Verint’s Chief Strategic Officer since 2003, was formerly the President and CEO of Verint subsidiary Loronix Information Systems, according to Business Week. Apparently Loronix has been folded into its parent company Verint, and no longer exists as a separate corporate entity. However, the firm’s products made the transition. According to Verint, the former Loronix division was responsible for its Nextiva IP Video Surveillance System. The “Nextiva portfolio” is loaded with “a broad array of solutions” for video recording and analysis in the banking, critical infrastructure, retail and mass transit “markets.”
Andre Dahan, CEO, President and Executive Director of Verint’s parent company Comverse Technology Inc., was a former CEO and President of AT&T Wireless Services Inc., Business Week reveals. Dahan, a graduate of the Jerusalem Institute of Technology, is described as having “more than 30 years of leadership experience in the information technology industry.”
Victor DeMarines, a Verint board member since 2002 and Advisor to National Security Solutions, Inc., a “private equity firm” that focuses on “services and software” in the security and homeland defense industries, served as President and CEO of the spooky MITRE Corporation, where he worked in the “command and control” field as general manager of MITRE’s Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems and oversaw the non-profit’s Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Systems. Interestingly enough, from 1967-1969 DeMarines “managed MITRE’s Bangkok, Thailand, site, where he helped coordinate MITRE’s support for Air Force systems … on support operations issues,” according to Business Week. In addition to his duties at Verint and MITRE, DeMarines is a member of the advisory group for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) that oversees operations of America’s fleet of military spy satellites.
Howard Safir, formerly New York City Police Commissioner under “Mr. 9/11″ himself, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, has been a Verint board member since 2002 according to his Business Week profile. After his tenure as Police Commissioner, Safir became the CEO of SafirRosetti, the intelligence and security division of GlobalOptions Group, Inc., described as a firm that provides “crisis management and emergency response plans for disaster mitigation, continuity of operations, and other emergency management issues.”
Larry Myers, another MITRE alumni was MITRE’s Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. At MITRE, Myers’ brief included work on that firms’ wide-ranging contracts for computer systems for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and “several organizations” in the “U.S. intelligence community,” according to Business Week. He joined Verint’s board in 2003.
Paul D. Baker, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Corporate Communications of Comverse Technology, joined Verint’s board in 2002 according to his Business Week profile. Additionally, Baker is a director with Ulticom, Inc., a firm that provides the telecommunications industry with “Mobility, Location, Payment, Switching and Messaging services within wireless, IP and wireline networks,” according to Ulticom’s website.
Lt. General (retired) Kenneth Minihan, joined Verint’s board in 2002, according to Business Week. Described by the business publication as the “most connected” member on Verint’s board of directors, after leaving his post as the Director of the National Security Agency, NSA’s Central Security Service and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Minihan became managing director of the Paladin Capital Group. A private equity firm based (where else!) in Washington, D.C. Paladin’s management team is loaded with heavy-hitting embeds from the security-intelligence complex, including among others, Dr. Alf Andreassen, described by his Paladin profile as having “promoted technological innovation in the area of national security … for AT&T’s support of classified national programs in the areas of Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence” (C3I). Minihan is well placed on some 17 boards of directors to implement the Pentagon’s vision of creating a panoptic police state. Indeed, while at NSA Minihan oversaw that agency’s transition into the digital age of surveillance.
Shortly after Minihan’s appointment to Verint’s board, Verizon Communications installed STAR-GATE, an intrusive communications interception system. According to a blurb on the firm’s website,
"STAR-GATE … [is] designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers or disrupting service. Verint partners with leading switch and network equipment vendors across the globe to deliver passive, active, and hybrid solutions for a wide range of communication technologies and communication services. … STAR-GATE can manage network topologies from small, single-switch implementations to country-wide deployments. (Verint, “STAR-GATE Lawful Interception and Data Retention Compliance Solutions for Communication Service Providers,” accessed November 28, 2008)"
Another product marketed by Verint for security and intelligence agencies world-wide is RELIANT, described by the firm as a monitoring center for “interception compliance, evidence gathering and historical data analysis by law enforcement agencies.” The Verint brochure touts RELIANT’s ability “to collect, retain, analyze, investigate and distribute intercepted voice data and multimedia communications and historical data to facilitate more productive investigations and the gathering of evidence.”
VANTAGE, according to Verint’s product description, is specifically designed for “mass and target communications interception, investigation and analysis, including COMINT for intelligence and national security agencies.” Indeed the VANTAGE monitoring center promises to deliver a “mass and target interception system” that “intercepts, filters, and analyzes voice, data and multimedia for intelligence purposes, with sophisticated probing technology for passively collecting maximum communications, with Verint’s real-time filtering mechanisms to extract the most important information, and stored data analysis for generating intelligence from data collected over time.”
Amongst the “features” touted by Verint are: mass communications related to specific “areas of interest;” target interception of “known entities;” a “unified interception” and “investigation workflow” specifically designed for “intelligence generation;” the “historical data analysis of call records” conveniently “imported from service providers;” and “tools” that facilitate the “passive monitoring of virtually any type of network.”
The Failure of the National Security-Surveillance State
While America turns its intelligence and security apparatus inward and targets its own citizens, especially leftist dissenters, labor organizers, environmentalists and antiglobalization activists, threats from well-trained far-right jihadis–many of whom were witting or unwitting Western intelligence assets deployed on countless battlefields from Afghanistan to Kosovo and beyond–or neo-Nazi hooligans training for the next Oklahoma City atrocity, go unaddressed.
“Reading the tea leaves” from petaflops (a quadrillion bits) of data vacuumed-up from the internet, cell phones, land lines, spy satellites, personal business transactions or CCTV cameras is not “intelligence” but the height of folly as the recently-concluded attacks in Mumbai starkly demonstrate. The Indian intelligence apparatus, particularly its Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) are hardly slouches when its comes to tradecraft or high-tech security “solutions.”
The close relationship built-up over decades amongst RAW and Mossad for example, did not prevent commandos with alleged links to Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a militant group aligned with al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s “state within a state,” the Inter-Sevices Intelligence agency (ISI) from striking at the heart of India’s financial center with devastating effect. While it appears unlikely that the Pakistani government was involved in the Mumbai massacre, pro-Taliban elements within ISI or the military may be seeking to enflame tensions between the two South Asian nuclear nations.
RAW, like their counterparts in the CIA, MI6 or Mossad, rely on an inexhaustible stream of signals intelligence (SIGINT), communications intelligence (COMINT), human intelligence (HUMINT) and increasingly, imagery intelligence (IMINT) from India’s fleet of spy satellites to prevent attacks. Indeed, Verint and other high-tech firms have sold RAW the same equipment with the same promise of “security” that they sold their American and European counterparts. RAW’s headquarters in New Delhi may sport the latest in surveillance technologies, including high-speed supercomputers and yet, 195 people’s lives were snuffed-out by a determined gang of miscreants.
While high-tech “solutions” may give the cops the geolocation of young anarchists slated for preemptive arrest or which journalists may pose “problems,” all the data-mining on the planet will not prevent terrorism; indeed terrorism is the reactionary handmaid of a system at the end of its rope. As the global capitalist economic crisis deepens as industry after industry succumb to the hammer blows of an historic crisis of confidence, new social and political struggles inevitably, appear on the horizon.
Although the close–and well compensated–interconnections amongst securocrats and corporate grifters capitalizing on the homeland security investment bubble will continue well into the next administration, real security in any meaningful sense of the word will only come by creating a just society. Anything less is a fraudulent exercise in self-delusion fueled by the Gordon Gekko’s and Kobi Alexander’s of America’s (very profitable) “war on terror.”
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily and Pacific Free Press. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.
www.dissidentvoice.org
When Comverse Infosys founder and CEO Jacob “Kobi” Alexander fled to Israel and later Namibia in 2006, the former Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur took along a little extra cash for his extended “vacation”–$57 million to be precise.
According to investigative journalist James Bamford’s exposé of the National Security Agency, The Shadow Factory, Alexander was facing a thirty-two-count indictment by the Justice Department “charging him with masterminding a scheme to backdate millions of Comverse stock options … that allowed Alexander to realize $138 million in profits–profits stolen from the pockets of the company’s shareholders.”
When the scandal broke, one former colleague told the New York Times, “The one thing about Kobi is that he did have a sense of entitlement,” said Stephen R. Kowarsky, who was an executive at Comverse from 1985-97. “Most people are a little bit shy or self-effacing about asking for something, but not Kobi. It was easy for him to say, ‘I want that. I deserve that.’”
Sounds like business as usual to me!
But there is a darker side to Verint. As investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham revealed on the muckraking website CounterPunch, U.S. intelligence agencies are wary of Israeli penetration and interception of U.S. military systems and advanced computing applications through a backdoor, called a “trojan,” secretly built into enterprise architecture. Ketcham wrote,
"According to former CIA officer [Philip] Giraldi and other US intelligence sources, software manufactured and maintained by Verint, Inc. handles most of American law enforcement’s wiretaps. Says Giraldi: “Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to US investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’ with its equipment to maintain the system.” Giraldi also notes Verint is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its R&D costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. According to Giraldi, the extent of the use of Verint technology “is considered classified,” but sources have spoken out and told Giraldi they are worried about the security of Verint wiretap systems. The key concern, says Giraldi, is the issue of a “trojan” embedded in the software. (Christopher Ketcham, “An Israeli Trojan Horse,” CounterPunch, Weekend Edition, September 27-28, 2008)"
Yet despite alarms raised by a score of federal law enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fearful that sensitive wiretap information was finding its way into the hands of international narcotrafficking cartels, virtually nothing has been done to halt the outsourcing of America’s surveillance apparatus to firms with intimate ties to foreign intelligence entities. Indeed, as America’s spy system is turned inward against the American people, corporations such as Verint work hand-in-glove with a spooky network of security agencies and their corporatist pals in the telecommunications industry.
Kobi Alexander would’ve certainly known the drill, exploiting family connections for advantage over competitors with movers and shakers in Washington. As they say, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. Kobi’s father Zvi was a fabulously wealthy oil baron who wound up running Israel’s state oil company. Bamford recounts how Zvi won drilling franchises: he’d bribe African cabinet ministers, “often in partnership with the U.S. tax cheat Marc Rich, who became a fugitive and was given sanctuary in Israel.”
That is, until Rich was handed a pardon during the waning days of the Clinton administration. In the aftermath of Clinton’s “gifting” the tax scofflaw with a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, Rich’s close confidant, attorney and convicted felon, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, denied that Rich had conspired to hide illegal profits or violate U.S. laws.
Yet despite a documentary record of shady dealings that spanned continents–and decades–a “neutral, leaning towards favorable” opinion on Rich’s petition for pardon was signed-off by none other than former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s apparent pick for U.S. Attorney General.
Like Kobi Alexander and his pals at Comverse, Rich too, had a dirty little secret as CNN reported back in 2001: “Marc Rich did help the Israeli security services in some way.” CNN doesn’t specify how Rich curried favor with Mossad, only that he did. Which just goes to show its a small world–of one hand washing the other.
(Memo to Obama supporters: you can forget about future Justice Department investigations of Bush cronies and war criminals. Why? Shortly before entering private practice at the tony law firm Covington & Burling, Holder was Bush’s Acting Attorney General until John Ashcroft’s nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Out of government, Holder made a killing defending Chiquita Brands International against charges that the firm paid the far-right Colombian, narcotrafficking AUC death squad millions in “protection money” to murder labor activists. But I digress.)
Meanwhile in the heimat, enterprising innovators such as Verint are inside–deep inside–America’s telephone and internet infrastructure. Keeping “America safe”–from its citizens–has become a veritable cash cow for dozens of corporate embeds busy as proverbial bees inventing new products for an alphabet-soup mix of intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, DHS, DIA, NGA, NRO and NSA.
Five months after the 9/11 attacks, the security bubble was rapidly expanding and the “homeland security” market was touted by Wall Street gurus as “the next big thing” on the corporate grifting horizon.
Alexander (before fleeing to the dry, but relatively safe harbor in Windhoek) rebranded Comverse Infosys, Verint Systems, Inc., an acronym for “verified intelligence.” The company, which made a fortune on a digital suite of wiretapping tools, AudioDisk, describes itself as a “a leading provider of actionable intelligence solutions for workforce optimization, IP video, communications interception, and public safety.”
Soon thereafter according to Bamford, Verint was selling its “actionable intelligence solutions” to “more than 5,000 organizations in over 100 countries” world-wide, including the worst human rights abusers on the planet. And why wouldn’t they? Verint’s already brisk business took off like a bat out of hell after 9/11.
As USA Today reported in 2006, “Most of the growth this decade will come from building what Homeland Security Research calls ‘a homeland defense infrastructure.’ Growth areas are likely to include technology for surveillance and for detection of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.” Or illegal spying by unaccountable state agencies and their private partners.
According to a Business Week company profile,
"Verint Systems, Inc. provides analytic software-based solutions for the security and business intelligence markets. Its analytic solutions collect, retain, and analyze voice, fax, video, email, Internet, and data transmissions from voice, video and IP networks for the purpose of generating actionable intelligence for decision makers. The company primarily offers communications interception solutions, such as STAR-GATE, RELIANT, and VANTAGE; networked video solutions that include NEXTIVA; and contact center actionable intelligence solutions, which include ULTRA. Verint Systems serves government entities, global corporations, law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, transportation agencies, retail stores, utilities, and communications service providers. (Verint Systems, Inc. Business Week, Information Technology Sector, accessed November 26, 2008)"
With total revenues of $249.8 million and gross profits in 2005 of $137.1 million, Verint, while not the largest firm in the security and intelligence “marketplace” nonetheless is connected to a host of spooky clients, including the National Security Agency and their “partners” at Verizon Communications.
As I wrote back in March, whistleblower and security consultant Babak Pasdar revealed how Verizon handed the FBI and one assumes the NSA, unrestricted access to their customers’ voice communications and electronic data via the Bureau’s “Quantico circuit.”
In a signed affidavit to the whistleblowing protection group, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), Pasdar described how his unnamed client (revealed by The Washington Post as Verizon Communications), listened in and recorded all conversations en-masse; collected and recorded mobile phone data use en-masse; obtained data that the company accessed from mobile phone usage, including internet access, e-mail and web browsing; trended calling patterns and call behavior; identified inbound and outbound callers; tracked all inbound and outbound calls; and traced a user’s physical location.
While Verizon and fellow telecom spy AT&T may have handed the FBI and NSA a treasure trove of their customer’s personal details, niche telecom companies such as Verint, rival Narus (another spooky Israeli security firm), Siemans and Ericsson to name but a few of the multinationals that build the surveillance tools hard-wired into America’s telecommunications infrastructure, have made a killing destroying our privacy.
The Ties that Bind: Verint’s Spooky Board of Directors
The close interconnections amongst firms such as Verint and the U.S. and Israeli National Security States are revealed by a glance at the firm’s Board of Directors.
When Kobi Alexander fled the country in 2006, Dan Bodner became the company’s CEO. According to Business Week, Bodner, a Comverse Infosys insider, “served in the Israeli Defense Forces in an engineering capacity.” A graduate of Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, Bodner was previously the President and CEO of Comverse Government Systems Corporation.
David T. Ledwell, Verint’s Chief Strategic Officer since 2003, was formerly the President and CEO of Verint subsidiary Loronix Information Systems, according to Business Week. Apparently Loronix has been folded into its parent company Verint, and no longer exists as a separate corporate entity. However, the firm’s products made the transition. According to Verint, the former Loronix division was responsible for its Nextiva IP Video Surveillance System. The “Nextiva portfolio” is loaded with “a broad array of solutions” for video recording and analysis in the banking, critical infrastructure, retail and mass transit “markets.”
Andre Dahan, CEO, President and Executive Director of Verint’s parent company Comverse Technology Inc., was a former CEO and President of AT&T Wireless Services Inc., Business Week reveals. Dahan, a graduate of the Jerusalem Institute of Technology, is described as having “more than 30 years of leadership experience in the information technology industry.”
Victor DeMarines, a Verint board member since 2002 and Advisor to National Security Solutions, Inc., a “private equity firm” that focuses on “services and software” in the security and homeland defense industries, served as President and CEO of the spooky MITRE Corporation, where he worked in the “command and control” field as general manager of MITRE’s Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems and oversaw the non-profit’s Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Systems. Interestingly enough, from 1967-1969 DeMarines “managed MITRE’s Bangkok, Thailand, site, where he helped coordinate MITRE’s support for Air Force systems … on support operations issues,” according to Business Week. In addition to his duties at Verint and MITRE, DeMarines is a member of the advisory group for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) that oversees operations of America’s fleet of military spy satellites.
Howard Safir, formerly New York City Police Commissioner under “Mr. 9/11″ himself, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, has been a Verint board member since 2002 according to his Business Week profile. After his tenure as Police Commissioner, Safir became the CEO of SafirRosetti, the intelligence and security division of GlobalOptions Group, Inc., described as a firm that provides “crisis management and emergency response plans for disaster mitigation, continuity of operations, and other emergency management issues.”
Larry Myers, another MITRE alumni was MITRE’s Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. At MITRE, Myers’ brief included work on that firms’ wide-ranging contracts for computer systems for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and “several organizations” in the “U.S. intelligence community,” according to Business Week. He joined Verint’s board in 2003.
Paul D. Baker, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Corporate Communications of Comverse Technology, joined Verint’s board in 2002 according to his Business Week profile. Additionally, Baker is a director with Ulticom, Inc., a firm that provides the telecommunications industry with “Mobility, Location, Payment, Switching and Messaging services within wireless, IP and wireline networks,” according to Ulticom’s website.
Lt. General (retired) Kenneth Minihan, joined Verint’s board in 2002, according to Business Week. Described by the business publication as the “most connected” member on Verint’s board of directors, after leaving his post as the Director of the National Security Agency, NSA’s Central Security Service and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Minihan became managing director of the Paladin Capital Group. A private equity firm based (where else!) in Washington, D.C. Paladin’s management team is loaded with heavy-hitting embeds from the security-intelligence complex, including among others, Dr. Alf Andreassen, described by his Paladin profile as having “promoted technological innovation in the area of national security … for AT&T’s support of classified national programs in the areas of Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence” (C3I). Minihan is well placed on some 17 boards of directors to implement the Pentagon’s vision of creating a panoptic police state. Indeed, while at NSA Minihan oversaw that agency’s transition into the digital age of surveillance.
Shortly after Minihan’s appointment to Verint’s board, Verizon Communications installed STAR-GATE, an intrusive communications interception system. According to a blurb on the firm’s website,
"STAR-GATE … [is] designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers or disrupting service. Verint partners with leading switch and network equipment vendors across the globe to deliver passive, active, and hybrid solutions for a wide range of communication technologies and communication services. … STAR-GATE can manage network topologies from small, single-switch implementations to country-wide deployments. (Verint, “STAR-GATE Lawful Interception and Data Retention Compliance Solutions for Communication Service Providers,” accessed November 28, 2008)"
Another product marketed by Verint for security and intelligence agencies world-wide is RELIANT, described by the firm as a monitoring center for “interception compliance, evidence gathering and historical data analysis by law enforcement agencies.” The Verint brochure touts RELIANT’s ability “to collect, retain, analyze, investigate and distribute intercepted voice data and multimedia communications and historical data to facilitate more productive investigations and the gathering of evidence.”
VANTAGE, according to Verint’s product description, is specifically designed for “mass and target communications interception, investigation and analysis, including COMINT for intelligence and national security agencies.” Indeed the VANTAGE monitoring center promises to deliver a “mass and target interception system” that “intercepts, filters, and analyzes voice, data and multimedia for intelligence purposes, with sophisticated probing technology for passively collecting maximum communications, with Verint’s real-time filtering mechanisms to extract the most important information, and stored data analysis for generating intelligence from data collected over time.”
Amongst the “features” touted by Verint are: mass communications related to specific “areas of interest;” target interception of “known entities;” a “unified interception” and “investigation workflow” specifically designed for “intelligence generation;” the “historical data analysis of call records” conveniently “imported from service providers;” and “tools” that facilitate the “passive monitoring of virtually any type of network.”
The Failure of the National Security-Surveillance State
While America turns its intelligence and security apparatus inward and targets its own citizens, especially leftist dissenters, labor organizers, environmentalists and antiglobalization activists, threats from well-trained far-right jihadis–many of whom were witting or unwitting Western intelligence assets deployed on countless battlefields from Afghanistan to Kosovo and beyond–or neo-Nazi hooligans training for the next Oklahoma City atrocity, go unaddressed.
“Reading the tea leaves” from petaflops (a quadrillion bits) of data vacuumed-up from the internet, cell phones, land lines, spy satellites, personal business transactions or CCTV cameras is not “intelligence” but the height of folly as the recently-concluded attacks in Mumbai starkly demonstrate. The Indian intelligence apparatus, particularly its Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) are hardly slouches when its comes to tradecraft or high-tech security “solutions.”
The close relationship built-up over decades amongst RAW and Mossad for example, did not prevent commandos with alleged links to Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a militant group aligned with al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s “state within a state,” the Inter-Sevices Intelligence agency (ISI) from striking at the heart of India’s financial center with devastating effect. While it appears unlikely that the Pakistani government was involved in the Mumbai massacre, pro-Taliban elements within ISI or the military may be seeking to enflame tensions between the two South Asian nuclear nations.
RAW, like their counterparts in the CIA, MI6 or Mossad, rely on an inexhaustible stream of signals intelligence (SIGINT), communications intelligence (COMINT), human intelligence (HUMINT) and increasingly, imagery intelligence (IMINT) from India’s fleet of spy satellites to prevent attacks. Indeed, Verint and other high-tech firms have sold RAW the same equipment with the same promise of “security” that they sold their American and European counterparts. RAW’s headquarters in New Delhi may sport the latest in surveillance technologies, including high-speed supercomputers and yet, 195 people’s lives were snuffed-out by a determined gang of miscreants.
While high-tech “solutions” may give the cops the geolocation of young anarchists slated for preemptive arrest or which journalists may pose “problems,” all the data-mining on the planet will not prevent terrorism; indeed terrorism is the reactionary handmaid of a system at the end of its rope. As the global capitalist economic crisis deepens as industry after industry succumb to the hammer blows of an historic crisis of confidence, new social and political struggles inevitably, appear on the horizon.
Although the close–and well compensated–interconnections amongst securocrats and corporate grifters capitalizing on the homeland security investment bubble will continue well into the next administration, real security in any meaningful sense of the word will only come by creating a just society. Anything less is a fraudulent exercise in self-delusion fueled by the Gordon Gekko’s and Kobi Alexander’s of America’s (very profitable) “war on terror.”
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily and Pacific Free Press. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.
El México Profundo de Guillermo Bonfil
Gilberto López y Rivas
La Jornada de Morelos
El México Profundo de Guillermo Bonfil es una obra que ha trascendido las fronteras temporales, antropológicas y nacionales, a más de dos décadas de haber sido publicado. El mismo término de "México profundo" es usado profusamente para identificar a la población indígena, pueblos, comunidades y sectores sociales portadores de maneras de entender el mundo y organizar la vida que tienen su origen en la civilización mesoamericana, y a su influencia cultural en otros ámbitos mayoritarios de la sociedad nacional.
Se trata de una obra que expone una visión panorámica y multiforme de lo indio en nuestro país y que reflexiona sobre el significado --para nuestra historia, nuestro presente y nuestro futuro-- de la coexistencia de dos civilizaciones: la mesoamericana y la llamada “occidental”.
El autor sostiene la pertinencia de discutir el problema de los proyectos civilizatorios en medio de la crisis que vivía el país en el momento en que escribe la obra, afirmando que cualquier decisión que se tome para reorientar la vida nacional, implica una opción en favor de uno u otro de esos proyectos civilizatorios en pugna. Este debate resulta todavía actual, particularmente después de la sublevación indígena de 1994 y de la profundización de la crisis económica, social y política que caracteriza la realidad nacional de nuestros días.
Bonfil mantiene la tesis de que la historia de México ---en los últimos 500 años-- es la historia del enfrentamiento entre quienes pretenden encauzar el país en el proyecto de la “civilización occidental” y quienes resisten a ello arraigados en formas de vida de estirpe mesoamericana. A ese sector que encarna el proyecto dominante en nuestro país, Bonfil lo denomina “el México imaginario.”
El México imaginario y el México profundo, con sus expresiones y elementos culturales propios, han nutrido a grupos y clases sociales de una pirámide en cuya base se encuentran los pueblos y en cuya cúspide se encuentran los impulsores del proyecto occidental.
El autor defiende la idea de una estructura colonial interna que niega y excluye la cultura del colonizado, misma que es considerada como símbolo de atraso y obstáculo a vencer. El México profundo resiste permanentemente; no es un mundo pasivo o estático, renueva su identidad propia de acuerdo a las circunstancias de una lucha secular.
Bonfil propone la necesidad de formular un nuevo proyecto de nación que incorpore las formas culturales del México Profundo, esto es, toda la rica experiencia milenaria de la civilización negada, para desplazar de una vez y para siempre el proyecto del México imaginario, ya caduco.
A partir de esta introducción, en la que plantea sus tesis principales, el autor desarrolla su obra en tres partes:
La civilización negada. Aquí desarrolla la imagen general de la presencia de la civilización mesoamericana en el México contemporáneo. Se hace un esbozo histórico del surgimiento y desarrollo de esta civilización para, sobre esta base, hacer una descripción de la civilización mesoamericana tal como se vive hoy en la cultura de los pueblos indios. Bonfil afirma que los pueblos que participan de esta estirpe mesoamericana "conservan una cosmovisión en la que están implícitos los valores mas profundos de esa civilización…los que conforman la matriz cultural que da sentido a todos sus actos."
En esta primera parte, el autor explora la presencia de la civilización mesoamericana en otros grupos de la sociedad mexicana que no se reconocen a si mismos como indios, introduciendo el concepto de desindianizacion como la perdida de la identidad colectiva original, como resultado del proceso de dominación colonial.
Bonfil concluye su primera parte con una descripción de los sectores que encarnan el México imaginario, proyectando una imagen de la sociedad mexicana con formas culturales que corresponden a dos civilizaciones diferentes, nunca fusionadas, aunque si ínter penetradas. El México imaginario intenta subordinar a su proyecto-afirma Bonfil--- al resto de la población, siendo este el dilema de la cultura mexicana.
La parte dos de la obra explica “como llegamos a donde estamos”; esto es, las líneas principales del proceso histórico, las tendencias generales que ayudan a explicar la persistencia del proyecto externo, las maneras como se ha agredido a los pueblos indígenas, el secular empeño por negarlos. En la sección final de esta segunda parte se expone de manera sucinta las formas de resistencia del México profundo.
La parte final trata sobre las opciones posibles para construir un nuevo proyecto nacional, que-según Bonfil- "debe estar enmarcado en un nuevo proyecto civilizatorio que haga explícita nuestra realidad, no que la oculte”.
El autor plantea un punto muy actual, cuando afirma que es necesario para ello poner en primer término la cuestión de la democracia. “Pero no la democracia formal, dócil y torpemente calcada de Occidente, sino la democracia real, la que debe derivarse de nuestra historia y responder a la composición rica y variada de la sociedad mexicana.”
Algunas tesis adicionales que Bonfil plantea a lo largo de la obra destacan la originalidad de la civilización mesoamericana, anotando que lo indio en México proviene de ella, su raíz y punto de partida. No hay una continuidad histórica de los mexicanos con ese pasado, una vinculación, se considera como pasado del territorio, no como el pasado nuestro, que es lo indio.
Define pueblos como sociedades particulares y sostiene que en el territorio de lo que hoy es México, se da una continuidad cultural que hizo posible el surgimiento y desarrollo de una civilización propia. Esa civilización tiene sus inicios hace unos 30 mil años a partir grupos nómadas de cazadores y recolectores que ante la reducción de la fauna por los cambios climáticos y una mayor dependencia en la recolección, inician los procesos de domesticación y cultivo de plantas fundamentales como el fríjol, la calabaza, el chile pero, en particular, el maíz, que vendría a ser el factor esencial de la economía mesoamericana y de una buena parte de su cosmogonía, al grado de considerar en sus mitos fundacionales al hombre hecho de maíz.
Como sabemos, los Olmecas, en aproximadamente el año de 1500 antes de nuestra era, dan inicio a la civilización mesoamericana, como una especie de cultura madre, que pese a la diversidad se le considera como un mismo horizonte de civilización, con las inscripciones, el calendario, uso de terrazas artificiales, canales, represas y chinampas y las formas de organización social calificada como señoríos teocráticos, aunque se da la discusión sobre lo apropiado de identificar estas culturas como dentro del modo de producción tributario.
Un punto importante del planteamiento de Bonfil en esta sección es que la conformación del México actual es el resultado de una historia cultural milenaria, cuya huella profunda no ha sido borrada por los cambios de los últimos 500 años y que esa milenaria presencia de la especie humana en el actual territorio mexicano produjo una civilización, cuyos testimonios nos rodean; una civilización que sirve de base común y de orientación fundamental a los proyectos históricos de todos los pueblos que la comparten.
Cualquier comunidad campesina, por ejemplo, tiene su asentamiento en función de los requerimientos locales del cultivo del maíz, sus casas, el espacio interno y externo tiene que ver con el maíz. Hay una cultura viva, un acerbo de conocimientos acumulados durante siglos, con esquemas de valores profundamente arraigados, con formas particulares de organización social.
Así, los mexicanos que no dominan alguna lengua indígena -según Bonfil- han perdido la posibilidad de entender mucho del sentido de nuestro paisaje cultural, cuya historia esta en los toponímicos, muchos de los cuales --a pesar de los esfuerzos de la colonia y de la república-- aun perduran en su origen mesoamericano. Lo mismo ocurre con el idioma castellano de los mexicanos que incluye una gran cantidad de vocablos de procedencia india. El punto que quiere probar Bonfil es que las lenguas indígenas poseen una terminología más rica que el español pues otorgan un conocimiento mas preciso de las características botánicas del maíz, lo cual es normal en otros muchos casos de especialización lingüística y ocupación del entorno.
Otro tanto ocurre con los rostros, afirma Bonfil. Y aquí entra a una disquisición pertinente en el sentido de reconocer las determinaciones sociales y culturales en los procesos de reproducción biológica. Sin embargo, nuestro autor defiende la idea arraigada acerca de una población de 25 millones de personas en el territorio de México antes de la llegada de los europeos, lo cual es difícil de aceptar. En todo caso, defiende el argumento de que la mayoría de la población tiene rasgos indios por esta mayoría demográfica. También insiste en que no se vive una democracia racial; de que el mestizaje no ha ocurrido de manera uniforme, sino a partir de las concepciones de superioridad de una raza.
Lo que enfatiza Bonfil en este aspecto es que el rostro indio de la gran mayoría de la población indica la existencia, a lo largo de cinco siglos, de formas de organización social que hicieron posible la herencia predominante de esos rasgos. Esto fue resultado de la segregación colonial que estableció espacios sociales y culturales para la reproducción indígena.
Bonfil sostiene que no hay mucha diferencia somática entre indios y mestizos, debido a que estos forman el contingente de indios desindianizados. Esto es, poblaciones que se han visto forzadas a renunciar a su identidad indígena por la acción de fuerzas etnocidas que terminan con impedir la continuidad histórica de un pueblo como unidad social y culturalmente diferenciada.
De la misma manera, Bonfil explica las características somáticas de los grupos que detentan y heredaron riqueza y poder a partir de la negativa de lo indio, del rechazo a cualquier vinculación real con la civilización mesoamericana, que es el espejo en el que no queremos miramos.
En la parte final, Bonfil desarrolla el tema de la población que efectivamente es reconocida como perteneciente a un pueblo indio: los indios genéricos, los remanentes del pasado, lo que quedo de aquello. No habiendo una definición jurídica de la condición de indio, --esbozada en el antiguo cuarto y en el actual segundo artículos constitucionales--, los censos registran cantidades que son discutidas y puestas en duda; incluso es pertinente referir al llamado “etnocidio estadístico”. Desarrolla en esta sección una caracterización de pueblo o grupo indígena como proveniente de una historia particular, que de generación en generación trasmite una cultura, misma que es definida como abarcando objetos y bienes materiales territorios recursos naturales, que contiene formas de organización social, conocimientos, valores, todo lo cual conforma una identidad; saberse y asumirse como integrante de un pueblo y ser reconocido como tal por propios y extraños, esto es, la auto adscripción y la adscripción de los otros que plantea Frederick Barth, en la obra colectiva coordinada por él, Los Grupos étnicos y sus fronteras.
En esta dirección, Bonfil define al indio como el que pertenece a una colectividad organizada (un grupo, una sociedad, un pueblo), que posee una herencia cultural propia que ha sido forjada y transformada históricamente por generaciones sucesivas. A partir de estos criterios resulta difícil saber cuantos pueblos indios hay en México, o cual es el número de la población indígena.
También, nuestro autor refiere a la atomización histórica de los pueblos, reducidos a lo local, haciendo una especie de clasificación en pueblos continuos, como los Mayas, pueblos históricos, como los Zapotecos, cuya diversidad histórica ha sido acentuada por la dominación colonial, y los pueblos en riesgo de extinción por la acción etnocida.
Con todo, Bonfil trata de argumentar la existencia de una civilización única como la matriz cultural de todos los pueblos de México, el trasfondo cultural común, así como la experiencia también común de la dominación colonial.
A partir de esta base trata de describir un perfil de la cultura india, de la que se destaca:
Noción del salario ajena; la tierra no se concibe como mercancía; unidad inseparable entre grupo y territorio; autoridad unida al prestigio social, civil, religioso, moral; economía de prestigio; concepción cíclica del tiempo; actividad productiva principal: la agricultura (maíz, fríjol, calabaza, chile); armonía con la naturaleza; autosuficiencia; bajo nivel de acumulación de excedentes; participación activa de la mujer; endogamia. Estos son elementos que --de acuerdo con el autor-- constituyen lo que el llama la cultura autónoma de los pueblos, esto es la que se fundamenta en la herencia cultural que cada pueblo recibe y sobre la cual ejerce control y decisión. Con base en esta cultura autónoma cada grupo se adapta a las nuevas circunstancias, resiste, se transforma.
En el capitulo III, Bonfil plantea –dicotomicamente-- una tesis sobre la cultura nacional: esta no existe como tal sino en realidad constituye un conjunto heterogéneo de formas de vida social disímil y aun contradictoria. Mientras en los indios todo es unidad y coherencia en las culturas de los no indios se carece de ambas, haciendo una revisión de la diversidad regional, del contraste entre lo rural y lo urbano y, finalmente, después de 76 páginas, menciona las diferencias culturales que obedecen a la división jerárquica de la sociedad en estratos y clases.
Después de expresar esta tesis, Bonfil pasa al análisis más detallado de ciertos sectores: el mundo campirano, que es descrito por nuestro autor como comunidades con cultura india que han perdido la identidad correspondiente, la lengua, comunidades indias que no saben que son indias.
Lo indio en las ciudades. A pesar de ser la ciudad un bastión colonial, el indio se encuentra en ella. Había segregación espacial a través de los barrios indios, mismos que han sido amenazados o destruidos por los procesos de urbanización modernos. Pese a esto, persisten las mayordomías, en algunos casos, la lengua, la familia extensa, ritos y celebraciones. También la identidad india subsiste enmascarada, clandestina, siendo la ciudad de México la localidad con más indios en todo el hemisferio.
En la sección “La raza de bronce y la gente linda”, Bonfil plantea la exaltación ideológica de lo indio por parte del Estado; el nacionalismo oficial que exalta al indio muerto en el arte, principalmente en el muralismo, en los museos, en las zonas arqueológicas. Como fin de esta sección, Bonfil vuelve a reiterar su tesis acerca de la escisión cultural de la sociedad mexicana que se expresa en el enfrentamiento de dos civilizaciones, la mesoamericana india y la occidental cristiana, pero aquí lo hace de una manera tal que otorga a esa ruptura un papel “que determina la estructura y la dinámica cultural de la sociedad mexicana”, como una estructura dual.
A manera de reflexión final
No cabe duda de la importancia de esta obra de Guillermo Bonfil como antecedente teórico del movimiento de rebeldía indígena iniciado por el Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional el 1 de enero de 1994, mismo que, lamentablemente, no pudo analizar por su muerte prematura. Sin embargo, en su momento plateamos nuestra crítica a esta visión etnicista y dicotomica de lo indígena versus el México imaginario. Desde nuestras posiciones, los indígenas no enfrentan un mundo genérico “occidental” sino a clases sociales específicas y sus representantes en el aparato de Estado. Las etnias existen firmemente relacionadas con la estructura socioeconómica y política en que se insertan. De aquí que las entidades étnicas no son concebidas como “armónicas” o “equilibradas”, sino incididas por su integración en la matriz clasista y por las contradicciones inherentes a la misma. Con todo, esta crítica no demerita la significativa aportación de Bonfil a los procesos liberadores y autonómicos de su México Profundo.
[I] Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. México Profundo, una civilización negada. México: CIESAS/SEP, 1987.
[II] Investigador del Centro INAH-Morelos, colaborador de La Jornada nacional.
La Jornada de Morelos
El México Profundo de Guillermo Bonfil es una obra que ha trascendido las fronteras temporales, antropológicas y nacionales, a más de dos décadas de haber sido publicado. El mismo término de "México profundo" es usado profusamente para identificar a la población indígena, pueblos, comunidades y sectores sociales portadores de maneras de entender el mundo y organizar la vida que tienen su origen en la civilización mesoamericana, y a su influencia cultural en otros ámbitos mayoritarios de la sociedad nacional.
Se trata de una obra que expone una visión panorámica y multiforme de lo indio en nuestro país y que reflexiona sobre el significado --para nuestra historia, nuestro presente y nuestro futuro-- de la coexistencia de dos civilizaciones: la mesoamericana y la llamada “occidental”.
El autor sostiene la pertinencia de discutir el problema de los proyectos civilizatorios en medio de la crisis que vivía el país en el momento en que escribe la obra, afirmando que cualquier decisión que se tome para reorientar la vida nacional, implica una opción en favor de uno u otro de esos proyectos civilizatorios en pugna. Este debate resulta todavía actual, particularmente después de la sublevación indígena de 1994 y de la profundización de la crisis económica, social y política que caracteriza la realidad nacional de nuestros días.
Bonfil mantiene la tesis de que la historia de México ---en los últimos 500 años-- es la historia del enfrentamiento entre quienes pretenden encauzar el país en el proyecto de la “civilización occidental” y quienes resisten a ello arraigados en formas de vida de estirpe mesoamericana. A ese sector que encarna el proyecto dominante en nuestro país, Bonfil lo denomina “el México imaginario.”
El México imaginario y el México profundo, con sus expresiones y elementos culturales propios, han nutrido a grupos y clases sociales de una pirámide en cuya base se encuentran los pueblos y en cuya cúspide se encuentran los impulsores del proyecto occidental.
El autor defiende la idea de una estructura colonial interna que niega y excluye la cultura del colonizado, misma que es considerada como símbolo de atraso y obstáculo a vencer. El México profundo resiste permanentemente; no es un mundo pasivo o estático, renueva su identidad propia de acuerdo a las circunstancias de una lucha secular.
Bonfil propone la necesidad de formular un nuevo proyecto de nación que incorpore las formas culturales del México Profundo, esto es, toda la rica experiencia milenaria de la civilización negada, para desplazar de una vez y para siempre el proyecto del México imaginario, ya caduco.
A partir de esta introducción, en la que plantea sus tesis principales, el autor desarrolla su obra en tres partes:
La civilización negada. Aquí desarrolla la imagen general de la presencia de la civilización mesoamericana en el México contemporáneo. Se hace un esbozo histórico del surgimiento y desarrollo de esta civilización para, sobre esta base, hacer una descripción de la civilización mesoamericana tal como se vive hoy en la cultura de los pueblos indios. Bonfil afirma que los pueblos que participan de esta estirpe mesoamericana "conservan una cosmovisión en la que están implícitos los valores mas profundos de esa civilización…los que conforman la matriz cultural que da sentido a todos sus actos."
En esta primera parte, el autor explora la presencia de la civilización mesoamericana en otros grupos de la sociedad mexicana que no se reconocen a si mismos como indios, introduciendo el concepto de desindianizacion como la perdida de la identidad colectiva original, como resultado del proceso de dominación colonial.
Bonfil concluye su primera parte con una descripción de los sectores que encarnan el México imaginario, proyectando una imagen de la sociedad mexicana con formas culturales que corresponden a dos civilizaciones diferentes, nunca fusionadas, aunque si ínter penetradas. El México imaginario intenta subordinar a su proyecto-afirma Bonfil--- al resto de la población, siendo este el dilema de la cultura mexicana.
La parte dos de la obra explica “como llegamos a donde estamos”; esto es, las líneas principales del proceso histórico, las tendencias generales que ayudan a explicar la persistencia del proyecto externo, las maneras como se ha agredido a los pueblos indígenas, el secular empeño por negarlos. En la sección final de esta segunda parte se expone de manera sucinta las formas de resistencia del México profundo.
La parte final trata sobre las opciones posibles para construir un nuevo proyecto nacional, que-según Bonfil- "debe estar enmarcado en un nuevo proyecto civilizatorio que haga explícita nuestra realidad, no que la oculte”.
El autor plantea un punto muy actual, cuando afirma que es necesario para ello poner en primer término la cuestión de la democracia. “Pero no la democracia formal, dócil y torpemente calcada de Occidente, sino la democracia real, la que debe derivarse de nuestra historia y responder a la composición rica y variada de la sociedad mexicana.”
Algunas tesis adicionales que Bonfil plantea a lo largo de la obra destacan la originalidad de la civilización mesoamericana, anotando que lo indio en México proviene de ella, su raíz y punto de partida. No hay una continuidad histórica de los mexicanos con ese pasado, una vinculación, se considera como pasado del territorio, no como el pasado nuestro, que es lo indio.
Define pueblos como sociedades particulares y sostiene que en el territorio de lo que hoy es México, se da una continuidad cultural que hizo posible el surgimiento y desarrollo de una civilización propia. Esa civilización tiene sus inicios hace unos 30 mil años a partir grupos nómadas de cazadores y recolectores que ante la reducción de la fauna por los cambios climáticos y una mayor dependencia en la recolección, inician los procesos de domesticación y cultivo de plantas fundamentales como el fríjol, la calabaza, el chile pero, en particular, el maíz, que vendría a ser el factor esencial de la economía mesoamericana y de una buena parte de su cosmogonía, al grado de considerar en sus mitos fundacionales al hombre hecho de maíz.
Como sabemos, los Olmecas, en aproximadamente el año de 1500 antes de nuestra era, dan inicio a la civilización mesoamericana, como una especie de cultura madre, que pese a la diversidad se le considera como un mismo horizonte de civilización, con las inscripciones, el calendario, uso de terrazas artificiales, canales, represas y chinampas y las formas de organización social calificada como señoríos teocráticos, aunque se da la discusión sobre lo apropiado de identificar estas culturas como dentro del modo de producción tributario.
Un punto importante del planteamiento de Bonfil en esta sección es que la conformación del México actual es el resultado de una historia cultural milenaria, cuya huella profunda no ha sido borrada por los cambios de los últimos 500 años y que esa milenaria presencia de la especie humana en el actual territorio mexicano produjo una civilización, cuyos testimonios nos rodean; una civilización que sirve de base común y de orientación fundamental a los proyectos históricos de todos los pueblos que la comparten.
Cualquier comunidad campesina, por ejemplo, tiene su asentamiento en función de los requerimientos locales del cultivo del maíz, sus casas, el espacio interno y externo tiene que ver con el maíz. Hay una cultura viva, un acerbo de conocimientos acumulados durante siglos, con esquemas de valores profundamente arraigados, con formas particulares de organización social.
Así, los mexicanos que no dominan alguna lengua indígena -según Bonfil- han perdido la posibilidad de entender mucho del sentido de nuestro paisaje cultural, cuya historia esta en los toponímicos, muchos de los cuales --a pesar de los esfuerzos de la colonia y de la república-- aun perduran en su origen mesoamericano. Lo mismo ocurre con el idioma castellano de los mexicanos que incluye una gran cantidad de vocablos de procedencia india. El punto que quiere probar Bonfil es que las lenguas indígenas poseen una terminología más rica que el español pues otorgan un conocimiento mas preciso de las características botánicas del maíz, lo cual es normal en otros muchos casos de especialización lingüística y ocupación del entorno.
Otro tanto ocurre con los rostros, afirma Bonfil. Y aquí entra a una disquisición pertinente en el sentido de reconocer las determinaciones sociales y culturales en los procesos de reproducción biológica. Sin embargo, nuestro autor defiende la idea arraigada acerca de una población de 25 millones de personas en el territorio de México antes de la llegada de los europeos, lo cual es difícil de aceptar. En todo caso, defiende el argumento de que la mayoría de la población tiene rasgos indios por esta mayoría demográfica. También insiste en que no se vive una democracia racial; de que el mestizaje no ha ocurrido de manera uniforme, sino a partir de las concepciones de superioridad de una raza.
Lo que enfatiza Bonfil en este aspecto es que el rostro indio de la gran mayoría de la población indica la existencia, a lo largo de cinco siglos, de formas de organización social que hicieron posible la herencia predominante de esos rasgos. Esto fue resultado de la segregación colonial que estableció espacios sociales y culturales para la reproducción indígena.
Bonfil sostiene que no hay mucha diferencia somática entre indios y mestizos, debido a que estos forman el contingente de indios desindianizados. Esto es, poblaciones que se han visto forzadas a renunciar a su identidad indígena por la acción de fuerzas etnocidas que terminan con impedir la continuidad histórica de un pueblo como unidad social y culturalmente diferenciada.
De la misma manera, Bonfil explica las características somáticas de los grupos que detentan y heredaron riqueza y poder a partir de la negativa de lo indio, del rechazo a cualquier vinculación real con la civilización mesoamericana, que es el espejo en el que no queremos miramos.
En la parte final, Bonfil desarrolla el tema de la población que efectivamente es reconocida como perteneciente a un pueblo indio: los indios genéricos, los remanentes del pasado, lo que quedo de aquello. No habiendo una definición jurídica de la condición de indio, --esbozada en el antiguo cuarto y en el actual segundo artículos constitucionales--, los censos registran cantidades que son discutidas y puestas en duda; incluso es pertinente referir al llamado “etnocidio estadístico”. Desarrolla en esta sección una caracterización de pueblo o grupo indígena como proveniente de una historia particular, que de generación en generación trasmite una cultura, misma que es definida como abarcando objetos y bienes materiales territorios recursos naturales, que contiene formas de organización social, conocimientos, valores, todo lo cual conforma una identidad; saberse y asumirse como integrante de un pueblo y ser reconocido como tal por propios y extraños, esto es, la auto adscripción y la adscripción de los otros que plantea Frederick Barth, en la obra colectiva coordinada por él, Los Grupos étnicos y sus fronteras.
En esta dirección, Bonfil define al indio como el que pertenece a una colectividad organizada (un grupo, una sociedad, un pueblo), que posee una herencia cultural propia que ha sido forjada y transformada históricamente por generaciones sucesivas. A partir de estos criterios resulta difícil saber cuantos pueblos indios hay en México, o cual es el número de la población indígena.
También, nuestro autor refiere a la atomización histórica de los pueblos, reducidos a lo local, haciendo una especie de clasificación en pueblos continuos, como los Mayas, pueblos históricos, como los Zapotecos, cuya diversidad histórica ha sido acentuada por la dominación colonial, y los pueblos en riesgo de extinción por la acción etnocida.
Con todo, Bonfil trata de argumentar la existencia de una civilización única como la matriz cultural de todos los pueblos de México, el trasfondo cultural común, así como la experiencia también común de la dominación colonial.
A partir de esta base trata de describir un perfil de la cultura india, de la que se destaca:
Noción del salario ajena; la tierra no se concibe como mercancía; unidad inseparable entre grupo y territorio; autoridad unida al prestigio social, civil, religioso, moral; economía de prestigio; concepción cíclica del tiempo; actividad productiva principal: la agricultura (maíz, fríjol, calabaza, chile); armonía con la naturaleza; autosuficiencia; bajo nivel de acumulación de excedentes; participación activa de la mujer; endogamia. Estos son elementos que --de acuerdo con el autor-- constituyen lo que el llama la cultura autónoma de los pueblos, esto es la que se fundamenta en la herencia cultural que cada pueblo recibe y sobre la cual ejerce control y decisión. Con base en esta cultura autónoma cada grupo se adapta a las nuevas circunstancias, resiste, se transforma.
En el capitulo III, Bonfil plantea –dicotomicamente-- una tesis sobre la cultura nacional: esta no existe como tal sino en realidad constituye un conjunto heterogéneo de formas de vida social disímil y aun contradictoria. Mientras en los indios todo es unidad y coherencia en las culturas de los no indios se carece de ambas, haciendo una revisión de la diversidad regional, del contraste entre lo rural y lo urbano y, finalmente, después de 76 páginas, menciona las diferencias culturales que obedecen a la división jerárquica de la sociedad en estratos y clases.
Después de expresar esta tesis, Bonfil pasa al análisis más detallado de ciertos sectores: el mundo campirano, que es descrito por nuestro autor como comunidades con cultura india que han perdido la identidad correspondiente, la lengua, comunidades indias que no saben que son indias.
Lo indio en las ciudades. A pesar de ser la ciudad un bastión colonial, el indio se encuentra en ella. Había segregación espacial a través de los barrios indios, mismos que han sido amenazados o destruidos por los procesos de urbanización modernos. Pese a esto, persisten las mayordomías, en algunos casos, la lengua, la familia extensa, ritos y celebraciones. También la identidad india subsiste enmascarada, clandestina, siendo la ciudad de México la localidad con más indios en todo el hemisferio.
En la sección “La raza de bronce y la gente linda”, Bonfil plantea la exaltación ideológica de lo indio por parte del Estado; el nacionalismo oficial que exalta al indio muerto en el arte, principalmente en el muralismo, en los museos, en las zonas arqueológicas. Como fin de esta sección, Bonfil vuelve a reiterar su tesis acerca de la escisión cultural de la sociedad mexicana que se expresa en el enfrentamiento de dos civilizaciones, la mesoamericana india y la occidental cristiana, pero aquí lo hace de una manera tal que otorga a esa ruptura un papel “que determina la estructura y la dinámica cultural de la sociedad mexicana”, como una estructura dual.
A manera de reflexión final
No cabe duda de la importancia de esta obra de Guillermo Bonfil como antecedente teórico del movimiento de rebeldía indígena iniciado por el Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional el 1 de enero de 1994, mismo que, lamentablemente, no pudo analizar por su muerte prematura. Sin embargo, en su momento plateamos nuestra crítica a esta visión etnicista y dicotomica de lo indígena versus el México imaginario. Desde nuestras posiciones, los indígenas no enfrentan un mundo genérico “occidental” sino a clases sociales específicas y sus representantes en el aparato de Estado. Las etnias existen firmemente relacionadas con la estructura socioeconómica y política en que se insertan. De aquí que las entidades étnicas no son concebidas como “armónicas” o “equilibradas”, sino incididas por su integración en la matriz clasista y por las contradicciones inherentes a la misma. Con todo, esta crítica no demerita la significativa aportación de Bonfil a los procesos liberadores y autonómicos de su México Profundo.
[I] Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. México Profundo, una civilización negada. México: CIESAS/SEP, 1987.
[II] Investigador del Centro INAH-Morelos, colaborador de La Jornada nacional.
Links between Mexican Security Secretary Garcia Luna and Drug Kingpin "El Mayo"
by Ricardo Ravelo, Proceso
translation (from the original Spanish) and notes by Kristin Bricker
Federal police say Garcia Luna's bodyguards witnessed the head of Mexico's Public Security Ministry discuss an "agreement" with a drug cartel gangster
The Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna, who is considered untouchable and Felipe Calderon's "spoiled official," has maintained numerous public officials accused of having links to drug traffickers--El Mayo Zamabada in particular--in his inner circle. An investigation carried out by agents who are opposed to the proposed police integration[1] assure in a letter sent to Congress, which Proceso has a copy of, that this past October numerous armed men intercepted Garcia Luna on a highway and disarmed members of his escort while a gangster warned him, "This is the first and last warning so that you know that, yes, we can get to you if you don't follow through on the pact..." The document adds that then Garcia Luna withdrew from the spot for four hours in order to negotiate with the gangster...
With his powerful tentacles and his ability to corrupt police and infiltrate the institutions responsible for combatting drug trafficking--including the National Defense Department--, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada Garcia has extensive control within the Public Security Ministry (SSP in its Spanish initials), which is led by Genaro Garcia Luna, whose main collaborators--some of them currently held under administrative detention--are accused of being at the service of the man who today is considered to be the top boss of the Sinaloa cartel.
The owner of estates and ranches, untouchable in Sinaloa--his stronghold--, Zambada Garcia has broad networks of complicity at his disposal in the most important departments in the PGR [Federal Attorney General's Office], such as the SIEDO [the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime], and in the SSP, where various top-level officials are being investigated for serving the gangster who, following the example of Amado Carrillo[2]--who for many years was his business partner--, transformed his appearance with plastic surgery.
Also untouchable and considered to be President Felipe Calderon's "spoiled official," Garcia Luna doesn't appear to escape the networks that Zambada Garcia and the Beltran Leyva brothers created in the SSP. The Beltran Leyva brothers left the Sinaloa cartel following a division sparked by the aprehension of Alfredo "El Mochomo" Beltran this past January.
Police who are opposed to the federal police unification project carried out an investigation regarding the alleged ties between Garcia Luna and Zambada Garcia's and Arturo "El Barbas" Beltran Leyva's cells.
In a field investigation, backed up by records and revelations that were supposedly made by Garcia Luna's own body guards, the police agents reconstructed an episode that occurred this past October 19 in Morelos state, which they recount in a letter sent to the Chamber of Deputies [Mexico's lower house of Congress] and the Senate with the goal of demonstrating, according to the agents, the danger that granting more power to the SSP would entail. They assert that a significant number of SSP police commanders are working for drug traffickers.
The document details:
...This past October 19 (...) the current Federal Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna and his escort, comprised of approximately 27 agents, (...) was intercepted or summoned on the Cuernavaca-Tepoztlan highway by a high-ranking gangster who was accompanied by an undetermined number of shooters or hitmen in approximately 10 armored Suburbans. Said official's escort did nothing to protect him, apparently due to a verbal order from him (Garcia Luna).
The letter that is now in the hands of legislators--a copy was delivered to Proceso--adds that members of Garcia Luna's escort, under orders "from the high ranking drug gangster," were disarmed and blindfolded for "approximately four hours."
The agents who are familiar with the incident, and whose names are omitted for fear of reprisals, state in the document that the "gangster's" voice said to Garcia Luna: "This is the first and last warning so that you know that, yes, we can get to you if you don't follow through on the pact."
The document asserts that, after the gangster's statement, Garcia Luna retreated, "leaving his escorts to their own luck, without knowing the route he took or what he did during those four long hours, time in which he could talk in a more comfortable place away from the spot where the alleged incident occurred."
And, in another point, the letter says:
It shouldn't go unnoticed that the Secretary in question is an expert actor in deceit. It should be remembered that in the past he created a circus around a kidnapping in Ajusco in Mexico City in which a French woman was supposedly involved, where he summoned the televised media and (...) manipulated all of his bodyguards, making them believe that what happened was a drug gangster's attempt to intimidate (a levanton or drug-related kidnapping), though the truth is that it was a meeting arranged by this alleged gangster.
According to investigations carried out by the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime (SIEDO), a good number of the officials closest to Garcia Luna appear to be contaminated by drug trafficking. Evidence that the SSP is one of the institutions most infiltrated by the Sinaloa cartel and other illicit organizations has arisen since the Vicente Fox adminstration, and even more under the current administration.
For example, Édgar Enrique Bayardo del Villar, ex-inspector assigned to the Federal Preventive Police's Operations Section, was taken into custody by the SIEDO for allegedly serving Zambada Garcia. Close to Garcia Luna, with a salary no higher than MX$26,000 monthly [at the time approximately USD$2,600], Enrique Bayardo rose out of poverty to achieve a magnificent wealth.
According to the investigation of the facts, in which PFP agents Jorge Cruz Méndez and Fidel Hernández are also implicated, Bayardo del Villar today owns two residences with a combined value of close to 9 million pesos.
Overnight, Bayardo del Villar broke out of his financial difficulties and bought himself BMW, aMercedes Benz, and an armored Cherokee. He spent 12 million pesos on these acquisitions and, just like his residences, he paid for them in cash.
Another piece of this network that is presumably at the service of the brothers Jesús and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada--within Garcia Luna's inner circle of trust--is Gerardo Garay Cadena, ex-commissioner of the PFP, who this past November 1 resigned from his position to voluntarily put himself "at the disposal of the authorities," although the SIEDO immediately put him under administrative detention. During the inquiries the spotlight also fell on other officials linked to Garay Cadena. One of them is Francisco Navarro, chief of the SSP's Special Operations, with broad control over the Mexico City International Airport, known as one of the major operations centers where drugs come in and drug trafficking money goes out.
Within this group that, according to the PGR, protected El Mayo Zambada, Luis Cárdenas Palominos also appears. Known as Garcia Luna's "right hand man," he wasn't put under administrative detention but he keeps being called to make statements to the SIEDO. Other high-ranking SSP and PFP officials who are held under administrative detention are Jorge Cruz Méndez and Fidel Hernández García.
The statement delivered to the federal Congress, in particular to the Security and Justice commissions--where the project to unify the federal police is being pushed, which is said will be resolved this year--, the AFI agents assert that Garcia Luna is incorporating personnel into the PFP and the SSP who have criminal records and ties to organized crime.
In the majority of the cases, they warn about inexperience and improvisation in investigations related to organized crime activity that, according to Edgardo Buscaglia, an investigator with the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), constitute a range of 25 crimes such as drug trafficking, contraband, kidnapping, and human trafficking.
In their statement, the agents tackle the corruption and disorder that run rampant in Garcia Luna's agency. They say that personnel called to leave the AFI [which Garcia Luna used to run] and join the Federal Police [which Garcia Luna now runs as head of the SSP] have not completed four years of police duty and that priority is given to those who come recommended or who are supporters of high-ranking officials, as well as "high-ranking officials' friends and lovers."
A number of the agents' statements and warnings can be confirmed even in recent incidents. For example, two days after Gerardo Garay's resigniation, on November 3, Garcia Luna named Rodrigo Esparza Cisterna as acting commissioner or the PFP. Esparza Cisterna has a history that is as long as it is shady.
In 1993, when Rodrigo Esparza was a PGR delegate in Sinaloa, the first rumblings surfaced over his alleged relationship with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, then a bitter rival of the Arellano Félix brothers, the bosses of the Tijuana cartel.
According to the official memo DGPDSC/UEA/1938/2005, dated August 12, 2005, and obtained through a request to the Federal Institute for Access to Information (record number 0001700181305), Esparza was accused of impeding the administration of justice. Said accusation was registered in the criminal proceeding 159/93, which came out of the criminal investigation 3423/93. On June 28, 1993, the charges were accepted by the Third Criminal Court in the Ramo District in Mexico City, and later he was imprisoned awaiting trial.
His detention was revoked on August 23, 1993, via judicial tricks. In less than three months, Esparza saw the investigation into his alleged wrongdoings buried with a stay of proceedings in his case. This precedent notwithstanding, Rodrigo Esparza is now Garcia Luna's right hand man in the PFP.
A Portrait of Power
El Mayo Zambada was chubby and round-faced, but one day Vicente and Amado Carrillo, who underwent plastic surgery in the Santa Monica clinic in Mexico City--the clinic where Amado Carrillo died in 1997--, suggested that he change his appearance and he accepted.
Zambada lost weight and made his cheeks smaller. His face became more chiseled and a bit elongated thanks to the face lift. When Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos[3] was head of the SIEDO, federal agents found, during a search of one of his multiple properties, a photograph where Zambada Garcia looked rejuvenated and slender. The photo was saved in the files related to the Juarez cartel, the organization that El Mayo belonged to. Untouchable for decades, Ismael Zambada has demonstrated his power and ability to increasingly infiltrate government institutions during the Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, and Felipe Calderon administrations: over 35 Federal District Attorney agents assigned to the SIEDO were his employees, and each one received USD$350,000-$400,000 monthly for leaking information about case files and preliminary investigations in progress against members of his organization. During Vicente Fox's term, the Sinaloa cartel even infiltrated the National Defense Department (Sedena), where, through Arturo "El Chaky" Gonzalez Hernandez, various high-ranking military officials who operated the telecommunications systems were coopted. They advised him in advance that in a matter of days or hours military operations would be carried out.
Moreover, El Mayo Zambada had control of the Sinaloa police, and high-ranking military commanders looked after his personal safety and his businesses. The impunity and power were of such a magnitude that in December 2005 at the El Mezquite ranch, a Christmas party was organized. The band Ilusion provided the entertainment. Zambada Garcia attended the party. Rivers of alcohol flowed, strong doses of cocaine were distributed, and shots were fired into the air.
This drew the attention of a sector of the Mexican military stationed in Sinaloa, which requested a search warrant in order to enter the ranch. Due to the fact that--rather unusually--it took hours to issue the warrant, Zambada Garcia had time to leave the site, which was protected by police, and calmly go to his hideout, a fortress whose entrances and sidewalks are permanently guarded by his people.
In May 2007, the United States Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control published a report that six companies and twelve people in Mexico are part of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada's financial network.
The US report indicates that Zambada's ex-wife, Rosario Niebla Cardoza, was well as his four daughters--Maria Teresa, Miriam Patricia, Monica del Rosario, and Modesta Zambada Niebla--play a key role in El Mayo's dirty businesses. They carry out an important function in the gangster's "property and control of his companies."
After the falling out between the Beltran Leyva brothers and "El Chapo" Guzman, the Sinaloa cartel--at its peak it was perhaps the most powerful criminal organization in Latin America--suffered a reduction in power, but it hasn't been brought down completely.
According to information from the SSP and the PGR, the Beltrans extended their tentacles: they penetrated the SIEDO, the PGR, and a good part of the military's regional commands, in addition to allying themselves with Los Zetas[4] and the Juarez cartel, whose current boss is Vicente "El Viceroy" Carrillo.
Zambada Garcia and Joaquin Guzman have maintained their alliance, and Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel[5] and the Cazares Salazar brothers[6] are also a part of this group.[7]
This drug clan suffered a loss recently: this past October 17, Jesus "El Rey" Zambada Garcia, El Mayo's brother who had a reputation for being discrete, was detained in Mexico City. Up until 2007, Jesus Zambada was not considered a kingpin--not even by United States intelligence agencies--, but after his capture Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora described him as one of the most important people in El Mayo Zambada's money laundering network.
Another event alluded to the true power of El Rey Zambada: in Culiacan, Sinaloa, a banner was hung near the state Congress that shot down the thesis that Jesus Zambada Garcia was a small-time player. The banner said:
Chapo Guzman, they kill your son and you keeping being murderers' friends. Don't be ashamed; how Nachito Coronel has changed you. He bosses you around to his liking and all because he takes care of you. Intelligent El Rey Zambada: you are killing counties, states, and ministerial cabinets, and he is unloading ephedrine and cocaine in the Mexico City airport.
In October--the month in which Garcia Luna was supposedly intercepted in Morelos, according to the agents' statement--, the blows against El Mayo Zambada's organization worsened. The Quinta La Paloma and Los Alpes ranches in Acaxochitlan, Hidalgo, were searched by federal police. The SIEDO said the properties belonged to El Rey Zambada.
El Mayo Zambada received a financial blow on September 18 when USD$26 million was seized--money which he had hidden in a safe house, carefully stacked in egg boxes.
Despite the blows against the Sinaloa cartel and notwithstanding the division that it suffered with its separation from the Beltran brothers, the organization continues afloat in drug trafficking: it controls sea ports and airports, and it has allies in high levels within the SSP who, according to the missive sent by federal police to Congress, "are obligated to follow through on the pacts."
Notes:
[1] The Mexican government has proposed combining the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI in its Spanish initials) with the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) under a single command: that of the SSP. The AFI is currently the Federal Attorney General's (PGR's) police force and was founded to be an investigative police force. The PFP, on the other hand, is the Public Security Secretary's police force. It aims to "prevent crimes" and is more militarized than other police forces. Over 150 agents from the PFP and AFI hit the streets in September in protest of the plan, arguing that it would give more control to Garcia Luna and the corruption-ridden SSP.
[2] Amado Carrillo Fuentes led the Juarez cartel along with other family members. Carrillo Fuentes died in 1997 during a plastic surgery operation that was intended to change his appearance. The doctors alleged to have botched the operation, Dr. Jaime Godoy Singh, Dr. Ricardo Reyes Rincón, and Dr. Carlos Humberto Avila Melgem, were widely reported to have been brutally tortured, murdered, and partially entombed in cement-filled oil drums. The PGR had charged the doctors with murdered Carrillo Fuentes, claiming that they should have known that administering the sleeping drug Dormicum would have killed him due to his liver problems. However, there are rumors that Dr. Rincón, also known as Pedro López Saucedo and Pedro Rincón, is alive and residing in the United States under the witness protection program in exchange for information about the Juarez cartel. The Washington Post reported that Dr. Rincón knew Carrillo Fuentes and had operated on many of his friends. "Rincón" means "secluded corner" in Spanish and may have alluded to his status as a back-alley doctor.
[3] Vasconcelos died in the November 4, 2008, plane crash that also killed Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño, three other government officials, three crew members, and six people who were on the ground when the plane hit Mexico City's financial district. The official explanation for the crash was that the pilot followed a Mexicana commercial airliner too closely and the resulting turbulence downed the plane.
[4] Los Zetas was a specialized unit of the Mexican military that received training in the US School of the Americas. After completing their US taxpayer-funded training, they defected from the military en masse and became drug cartels' armed thugs. They've been accused of running their own drugs, too.
[5] Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel is known as the "King of Crystal" because he dominates the crystal meth market. He is also alleged to move cocaine and run the Sinaloa cartel's finances.
[6] Blanca Margarita Cazares Salazar has been identified as being in charge of the Sinaloa cartel's money laundering operation.
[7] In previous publicaitons, Ricardo Ravelo has described the Sinaloa cartel has having a "rectangular" structure with numerous cells, as opposed to a top-down "pyramid" headed by one person. This makes the cartel more flexible and adaptable, and less vulnerable to operations that aim to pick off its leaders. Zambada Garcia, Guzman Loera, Coronel, and the Cazares Salazar family have all been identified by the US government as Sinaloa cartel leaders, and all appear on the US government's "Foreign Narcotics Kingpins" list.
translation (from the original Spanish) and notes by Kristin Bricker
Federal police say Garcia Luna's bodyguards witnessed the head of Mexico's Public Security Ministry discuss an "agreement" with a drug cartel gangster
The Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna, who is considered untouchable and Felipe Calderon's "spoiled official," has maintained numerous public officials accused of having links to drug traffickers--El Mayo Zamabada in particular--in his inner circle. An investigation carried out by agents who are opposed to the proposed police integration[1] assure in a letter sent to Congress, which Proceso has a copy of, that this past October numerous armed men intercepted Garcia Luna on a highway and disarmed members of his escort while a gangster warned him, "This is the first and last warning so that you know that, yes, we can get to you if you don't follow through on the pact..." The document adds that then Garcia Luna withdrew from the spot for four hours in order to negotiate with the gangster...
With his powerful tentacles and his ability to corrupt police and infiltrate the institutions responsible for combatting drug trafficking--including the National Defense Department--, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada Garcia has extensive control within the Public Security Ministry (SSP in its Spanish initials), which is led by Genaro Garcia Luna, whose main collaborators--some of them currently held under administrative detention--are accused of being at the service of the man who today is considered to be the top boss of the Sinaloa cartel.
The owner of estates and ranches, untouchable in Sinaloa--his stronghold--, Zambada Garcia has broad networks of complicity at his disposal in the most important departments in the PGR [Federal Attorney General's Office], such as the SIEDO [the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime], and in the SSP, where various top-level officials are being investigated for serving the gangster who, following the example of Amado Carrillo[2]--who for many years was his business partner--, transformed his appearance with plastic surgery.
Also untouchable and considered to be President Felipe Calderon's "spoiled official," Garcia Luna doesn't appear to escape the networks that Zambada Garcia and the Beltran Leyva brothers created in the SSP. The Beltran Leyva brothers left the Sinaloa cartel following a division sparked by the aprehension of Alfredo "El Mochomo" Beltran this past January.
Police who are opposed to the federal police unification project carried out an investigation regarding the alleged ties between Garcia Luna and Zambada Garcia's and Arturo "El Barbas" Beltran Leyva's cells.
In a field investigation, backed up by records and revelations that were supposedly made by Garcia Luna's own body guards, the police agents reconstructed an episode that occurred this past October 19 in Morelos state, which they recount in a letter sent to the Chamber of Deputies [Mexico's lower house of Congress] and the Senate with the goal of demonstrating, according to the agents, the danger that granting more power to the SSP would entail. They assert that a significant number of SSP police commanders are working for drug traffickers.
The document details:
...This past October 19 (...) the current Federal Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna and his escort, comprised of approximately 27 agents, (...) was intercepted or summoned on the Cuernavaca-Tepoztlan highway by a high-ranking gangster who was accompanied by an undetermined number of shooters or hitmen in approximately 10 armored Suburbans. Said official's escort did nothing to protect him, apparently due to a verbal order from him (Garcia Luna).
The letter that is now in the hands of legislators--a copy was delivered to Proceso--adds that members of Garcia Luna's escort, under orders "from the high ranking drug gangster," were disarmed and blindfolded for "approximately four hours."
The agents who are familiar with the incident, and whose names are omitted for fear of reprisals, state in the document that the "gangster's" voice said to Garcia Luna: "This is the first and last warning so that you know that, yes, we can get to you if you don't follow through on the pact."
The document asserts that, after the gangster's statement, Garcia Luna retreated, "leaving his escorts to their own luck, without knowing the route he took or what he did during those four long hours, time in which he could talk in a more comfortable place away from the spot where the alleged incident occurred."
And, in another point, the letter says:
It shouldn't go unnoticed that the Secretary in question is an expert actor in deceit. It should be remembered that in the past he created a circus around a kidnapping in Ajusco in Mexico City in which a French woman was supposedly involved, where he summoned the televised media and (...) manipulated all of his bodyguards, making them believe that what happened was a drug gangster's attempt to intimidate (a levanton or drug-related kidnapping), though the truth is that it was a meeting arranged by this alleged gangster.
According to investigations carried out by the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime (SIEDO), a good number of the officials closest to Garcia Luna appear to be contaminated by drug trafficking. Evidence that the SSP is one of the institutions most infiltrated by the Sinaloa cartel and other illicit organizations has arisen since the Vicente Fox adminstration, and even more under the current administration.
For example, Édgar Enrique Bayardo del Villar, ex-inspector assigned to the Federal Preventive Police's Operations Section, was taken into custody by the SIEDO for allegedly serving Zambada Garcia. Close to Garcia Luna, with a salary no higher than MX$26,000 monthly [at the time approximately USD$2,600], Enrique Bayardo rose out of poverty to achieve a magnificent wealth.
According to the investigation of the facts, in which PFP agents Jorge Cruz Méndez and Fidel Hernández are also implicated, Bayardo del Villar today owns two residences with a combined value of close to 9 million pesos.
Overnight, Bayardo del Villar broke out of his financial difficulties and bought himself BMW, aMercedes Benz, and an armored Cherokee. He spent 12 million pesos on these acquisitions and, just like his residences, he paid for them in cash.
Another piece of this network that is presumably at the service of the brothers Jesús and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada--within Garcia Luna's inner circle of trust--is Gerardo Garay Cadena, ex-commissioner of the PFP, who this past November 1 resigned from his position to voluntarily put himself "at the disposal of the authorities," although the SIEDO immediately put him under administrative detention. During the inquiries the spotlight also fell on other officials linked to Garay Cadena. One of them is Francisco Navarro, chief of the SSP's Special Operations, with broad control over the Mexico City International Airport, known as one of the major operations centers where drugs come in and drug trafficking money goes out.
Within this group that, according to the PGR, protected El Mayo Zambada, Luis Cárdenas Palominos also appears. Known as Garcia Luna's "right hand man," he wasn't put under administrative detention but he keeps being called to make statements to the SIEDO. Other high-ranking SSP and PFP officials who are held under administrative detention are Jorge Cruz Méndez and Fidel Hernández García.
The statement delivered to the federal Congress, in particular to the Security and Justice commissions--where the project to unify the federal police is being pushed, which is said will be resolved this year--, the AFI agents assert that Garcia Luna is incorporating personnel into the PFP and the SSP who have criminal records and ties to organized crime.
In the majority of the cases, they warn about inexperience and improvisation in investigations related to organized crime activity that, according to Edgardo Buscaglia, an investigator with the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), constitute a range of 25 crimes such as drug trafficking, contraband, kidnapping, and human trafficking.
In their statement, the agents tackle the corruption and disorder that run rampant in Garcia Luna's agency. They say that personnel called to leave the AFI [which Garcia Luna used to run] and join the Federal Police [which Garcia Luna now runs as head of the SSP] have not completed four years of police duty and that priority is given to those who come recommended or who are supporters of high-ranking officials, as well as "high-ranking officials' friends and lovers."
A number of the agents' statements and warnings can be confirmed even in recent incidents. For example, two days after Gerardo Garay's resigniation, on November 3, Garcia Luna named Rodrigo Esparza Cisterna as acting commissioner or the PFP. Esparza Cisterna has a history that is as long as it is shady.
In 1993, when Rodrigo Esparza was a PGR delegate in Sinaloa, the first rumblings surfaced over his alleged relationship with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, then a bitter rival of the Arellano Félix brothers, the bosses of the Tijuana cartel.
According to the official memo DGPDSC/UEA/1938/2005, dated August 12, 2005, and obtained through a request to the Federal Institute for Access to Information (record number 0001700181305), Esparza was accused of impeding the administration of justice. Said accusation was registered in the criminal proceeding 159/93, which came out of the criminal investigation 3423/93. On June 28, 1993, the charges were accepted by the Third Criminal Court in the Ramo District in Mexico City, and later he was imprisoned awaiting trial.
His detention was revoked on August 23, 1993, via judicial tricks. In less than three months, Esparza saw the investigation into his alleged wrongdoings buried with a stay of proceedings in his case. This precedent notwithstanding, Rodrigo Esparza is now Garcia Luna's right hand man in the PFP.
A Portrait of Power
El Mayo Zambada was chubby and round-faced, but one day Vicente and Amado Carrillo, who underwent plastic surgery in the Santa Monica clinic in Mexico City--the clinic where Amado Carrillo died in 1997--, suggested that he change his appearance and he accepted.
Zambada lost weight and made his cheeks smaller. His face became more chiseled and a bit elongated thanks to the face lift. When Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos[3] was head of the SIEDO, federal agents found, during a search of one of his multiple properties, a photograph where Zambada Garcia looked rejuvenated and slender. The photo was saved in the files related to the Juarez cartel, the organization that El Mayo belonged to. Untouchable for decades, Ismael Zambada has demonstrated his power and ability to increasingly infiltrate government institutions during the Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, and Felipe Calderon administrations: over 35 Federal District Attorney agents assigned to the SIEDO were his employees, and each one received USD$350,000-$400,000 monthly for leaking information about case files and preliminary investigations in progress against members of his organization. During Vicente Fox's term, the Sinaloa cartel even infiltrated the National Defense Department (Sedena), where, through Arturo "El Chaky" Gonzalez Hernandez, various high-ranking military officials who operated the telecommunications systems were coopted. They advised him in advance that in a matter of days or hours military operations would be carried out.
Moreover, El Mayo Zambada had control of the Sinaloa police, and high-ranking military commanders looked after his personal safety and his businesses. The impunity and power were of such a magnitude that in December 2005 at the El Mezquite ranch, a Christmas party was organized. The band Ilusion provided the entertainment. Zambada Garcia attended the party. Rivers of alcohol flowed, strong doses of cocaine were distributed, and shots were fired into the air.
This drew the attention of a sector of the Mexican military stationed in Sinaloa, which requested a search warrant in order to enter the ranch. Due to the fact that--rather unusually--it took hours to issue the warrant, Zambada Garcia had time to leave the site, which was protected by police, and calmly go to his hideout, a fortress whose entrances and sidewalks are permanently guarded by his people.
In May 2007, the United States Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control published a report that six companies and twelve people in Mexico are part of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada's financial network.
The US report indicates that Zambada's ex-wife, Rosario Niebla Cardoza, was well as his four daughters--Maria Teresa, Miriam Patricia, Monica del Rosario, and Modesta Zambada Niebla--play a key role in El Mayo's dirty businesses. They carry out an important function in the gangster's "property and control of his companies."
After the falling out between the Beltran Leyva brothers and "El Chapo" Guzman, the Sinaloa cartel--at its peak it was perhaps the most powerful criminal organization in Latin America--suffered a reduction in power, but it hasn't been brought down completely.
According to information from the SSP and the PGR, the Beltrans extended their tentacles: they penetrated the SIEDO, the PGR, and a good part of the military's regional commands, in addition to allying themselves with Los Zetas[4] and the Juarez cartel, whose current boss is Vicente "El Viceroy" Carrillo.
Zambada Garcia and Joaquin Guzman have maintained their alliance, and Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel[5] and the Cazares Salazar brothers[6] are also a part of this group.[7]
This drug clan suffered a loss recently: this past October 17, Jesus "El Rey" Zambada Garcia, El Mayo's brother who had a reputation for being discrete, was detained in Mexico City. Up until 2007, Jesus Zambada was not considered a kingpin--not even by United States intelligence agencies--, but after his capture Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora described him as one of the most important people in El Mayo Zambada's money laundering network.
Another event alluded to the true power of El Rey Zambada: in Culiacan, Sinaloa, a banner was hung near the state Congress that shot down the thesis that Jesus Zambada Garcia was a small-time player. The banner said:
Chapo Guzman, they kill your son and you keeping being murderers' friends. Don't be ashamed; how Nachito Coronel has changed you. He bosses you around to his liking and all because he takes care of you. Intelligent El Rey Zambada: you are killing counties, states, and ministerial cabinets, and he is unloading ephedrine and cocaine in the Mexico City airport.
In October--the month in which Garcia Luna was supposedly intercepted in Morelos, according to the agents' statement--, the blows against El Mayo Zambada's organization worsened. The Quinta La Paloma and Los Alpes ranches in Acaxochitlan, Hidalgo, were searched by federal police. The SIEDO said the properties belonged to El Rey Zambada.
El Mayo Zambada received a financial blow on September 18 when USD$26 million was seized--money which he had hidden in a safe house, carefully stacked in egg boxes.
Despite the blows against the Sinaloa cartel and notwithstanding the division that it suffered with its separation from the Beltran brothers, the organization continues afloat in drug trafficking: it controls sea ports and airports, and it has allies in high levels within the SSP who, according to the missive sent by federal police to Congress, "are obligated to follow through on the pacts."
Notes:
[1] The Mexican government has proposed combining the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI in its Spanish initials) with the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) under a single command: that of the SSP. The AFI is currently the Federal Attorney General's (PGR's) police force and was founded to be an investigative police force. The PFP, on the other hand, is the Public Security Secretary's police force. It aims to "prevent crimes" and is more militarized than other police forces. Over 150 agents from the PFP and AFI hit the streets in September in protest of the plan, arguing that it would give more control to Garcia Luna and the corruption-ridden SSP.
[2] Amado Carrillo Fuentes led the Juarez cartel along with other family members. Carrillo Fuentes died in 1997 during a plastic surgery operation that was intended to change his appearance. The doctors alleged to have botched the operation, Dr. Jaime Godoy Singh, Dr. Ricardo Reyes Rincón, and Dr. Carlos Humberto Avila Melgem, were widely reported to have been brutally tortured, murdered, and partially entombed in cement-filled oil drums. The PGR had charged the doctors with murdered Carrillo Fuentes, claiming that they should have known that administering the sleeping drug Dormicum would have killed him due to his liver problems. However, there are rumors that Dr. Rincón, also known as Pedro López Saucedo and Pedro Rincón, is alive and residing in the United States under the witness protection program in exchange for information about the Juarez cartel. The Washington Post reported that Dr. Rincón knew Carrillo Fuentes and had operated on many of his friends. "Rincón" means "secluded corner" in Spanish and may have alluded to his status as a back-alley doctor.
[3] Vasconcelos died in the November 4, 2008, plane crash that also killed Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño, three other government officials, three crew members, and six people who were on the ground when the plane hit Mexico City's financial district. The official explanation for the crash was that the pilot followed a Mexicana commercial airliner too closely and the resulting turbulence downed the plane.
[4] Los Zetas was a specialized unit of the Mexican military that received training in the US School of the Americas. After completing their US taxpayer-funded training, they defected from the military en masse and became drug cartels' armed thugs. They've been accused of running their own drugs, too.
[5] Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel is known as the "King of Crystal" because he dominates the crystal meth market. He is also alleged to move cocaine and run the Sinaloa cartel's finances.
[6] Blanca Margarita Cazares Salazar has been identified as being in charge of the Sinaloa cartel's money laundering operation.
[7] In previous publicaitons, Ricardo Ravelo has described the Sinaloa cartel has having a "rectangular" structure with numerous cells, as opposed to a top-down "pyramid" headed by one person. This makes the cartel more flexible and adaptable, and less vulnerable to operations that aim to pick off its leaders. Zambada Garcia, Guzman Loera, Coronel, and the Cazares Salazar family have all been identified by the US government as Sinaloa cartel leaders, and all appear on the US government's "Foreign Narcotics Kingpins" list.
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