THERE WILL BE NO MEANINGFUL IMMIGRATION REFORM. Not this year, and not next year. If it lurches up to the starting gate in any form, it will be in a cruel, misshapen, bruised, and weeping condition.

The Much-Vaunted LATINO VOTE

No, the question is how will those of us who took hope in hearing Obama’s campaign-trail passion on the issue react to this news, once it manifests? The immigration-talk theater being put on now between Democrats and Republicans boils down, as I see it, to a theatrical piece where the players joust to show their base who defeated/championed a legislative effort at all. Because they translate that piece of fantasy into votes for or against them when nothing passes.

The purpose of the charade is, too (and equally important), to let us down very gently in order to dull a wave of reaction that might hurt them at the voting booth. As was done with the Public Option popping in and out and in and out of play during the Health Care talks, until our nerves were greatly numbed to the idea of either outcome. These politicians are nearly sociopathic in their ability to read and manipulate large masses of people. That’s their job, they do it well, and they learn all the wrong lessons. But one they stick close to is blunt the edge of any potential progressive populist anger. That anger, after all, is not pro-corporation.

They tell us that our power lies in our votes. But does it?

The Democratic party assumes that Liberals and Latinos alike won’t defect, in the end. Even if they punt on the immigration issue. “After all,” they imagine us saying, as they play puppet games in the library whilst drinking outlandishly expensive cognac, “Democrats fought for health care! And what is the GOP today anyway, except a festering, miserable, fearful, warlike, racist contingent of the rich and the wanna-be rich? Surely no place for us there!”

Or…we stay home and do not vote. Or…we vote third party just to say fuck you, you cynical, cowardly, well-funded, well-fed, well-powdered power brokers. All of you.

The People

I attended the march and rally for immigration reform on Sunday, March 21, in Washington DC. I shot a video of it for my weekly news/commentary video series, News With Nezua. This week’s piece—“200,000 Strong”—is featured at La Frontera Times.

Here’s an article at the American Prospect covering the same event:

Last Sunday, 200,000 immigrant-rights protesters shared the National Mall with a Tea Party crowd that shouted racial epithets and spat at members of Congress. Unsurprisingly, the media focused on the histrionics of the Tea Partiers, but Sunday’s immigration demonstration was an important manifestation of the movement’s building impatience. In its enthusiasm and optics — legal and undocumented immigrants chanting “Sí se puede,” singing folk songs, and waving both American and Mexican flags — the demonstration was reminiscent of the immigration protests in 2006.

Yes, you are right that it is “unsurprising” that “the media” focused on the histrionics of the relatively miniscule opposition. It is unsurprising in a context where an article writer like yourself poses the two as comparative entities in the first line of your essay! Ay.

Let me tell you something. The Teabaggers, and the NumbersUSA crowd were SO SMALL in the overall reality of that day that I never once bumped into them. I actually set out to find them, and could not. So that article (while not a bad one at all) begins disingenuously. Not malevolently, I just think the writer desired a certain entrance.

Further compounding the sense of unreliability in the text is the line equivocating the waving of “both American and Mexican flags.” Writer is stretching hard, here, to justify the mirroring that they propose between 2006 and now.

I shot photos all day. I took audio. I shot video–on both my camcorder as well as my iPhone. I interviewed the young and the old. I traversed the grounds from riser and Press tent to the street and the dirty dusty danced-up soil of the National Mall until my entire body hurt and I could barely walk anymore. I squatted, ran, walked, and even hung from one arm on a tree to get a good shot. There were maybe…three Mexican flags that I saw amidst the thousands I laid eyes on. And one was tiny and hanging from my own back pocket. You go ahead and peruse the images and video you find online. And if you discover any kind of ratio that would justify that article’s imagining of an equivalency between flag-waving, come back and tell me! (Incidentally, though a bit irrelevant perhaps nonetheless, I did see a handful of El Salvadorean flags, but RIFA went to a lot of trouble to avoid a replay of the 2006 march, where the sight of Mexican flags in the street caused many, many palpitations on the Right side of the aisle.)

What IS IT with reporters today? There is so much drama and passion and honesty and fight and meaning out there. You don’t need to make things up!

No, the message transmitted by the rally and march was strongly contained and crafted and directed. That much is clear. It was a good show. RIFA did a great job. White clothes (Mexican tradition as far as I know regarding marches and protest) for a positive, clean feeling; chants of “USA! USA!” to sooth the fragile trembling tissues of the Buchananites, who toss and turn nightly over visions of Indians leaping fences to plant flags bright with writhing cobras and hungry eagles in pure pristine AMERICAN soil; big showing of proudly self-identifying Christians for immigration reform….and so on. I don’t mind, I don’t think it’s anything but smart. You would have to take control of this message in particular if you were hosting an event that large, sure.

Anyway, human rights advocates understand (one hopes!) that being involved in a pro-migrant cause requires one to push back against many nation-deep memes that feed on Indian blood, a nation that overall prefers its darkies in cells and chains or at least busing tables.

And this is a show, after all! Politics is not about truth, and even when it is, Politics has two arms. One is draped in diamonds and silks and shows up on TV, and one holds a gun and leans its elbow into the dry sand of foreign nations as it clambers ever closer to the dizzying scents of petroleum and blood. The fine line between entertainment and war, says Rage Against the Machine.

So put on the show.

My video was not celebrating the chances of reform passing. I appreciate that La Frontera Times tweeted today that I “captured a celebration of hope.” That’s just what I felt was my imperative to do on the scene, once I was there and had walked around a bit.

As a…Journalartist or…an Artivist… (or someword that combines Journalism, activism, politics, and art), my job at these events is to capture and translate the mood and feel of the happening. To tell the truth as a journalist would—by showing you who was there and what was happening—and to send it flying with the power embedded in the poetic passport only an artist may employ to launch a truth into your heartspace. The “activism” part (if it must be called something, this will do) is simply in the fact that we all know, and it is not hidden in the video, that I do not pretend to be showing some middle-of the road, “neutral” piece, but am certainly there vibing with the people I am presenting. Nonetheless, I was not there to push any political entities’ agenda, nor to lie about what I see—and finally, not to claim that what I see is all there is, either. (Though I deny an equivalent number of Mexican and US Flags!)

Fact is, if it felt different in DC on that day, the video would have come out different. I soaked it all up, and I give it back. The day felt utterly positive, true, real, and beautiful. And that was not due to the speeches (which is why my video has hardly more than one line of those in it), but to the heart and soul and bodies and voices and needs of the people.

The very people who are being lied to and used by more powerful forces in a bid for continued power.

O, the People. Who is left to fight for the People? Many who won’t show up on TV. And if they weren’t out there doing their thing, we’d all suffer a lot more than we do. But as far as politicians and well-paid pundits? For the most part they are welded to the beast, to the iron tumbling beast that will soon find the bottom of the ocean. They shout into microphones, extolling the beautiful landscape along the way.

Indian Killers Vs. The Safe and Sanitized Left

The GOP grapples with a number of problems. But at the core, their main problem is their philosophy. It is not real. It relies on a reshaping of the Real which requires endless violence and delusion, rather than meeting the Real to see how we can learn from and nourish the human race’s organic arc. By their ideological nature, they cannot progress (“Conservativism” embraces stasis, tradition, a reductive approach, an exclusivity that stunts, withdraws, retracts, rejects; this philosophy cannot sustain itself) and so we see them tearing at themselves now. It’s ugly. It’s painful. There is no cure. The ideology has a fatal flaw that only grows more egregious and destructive as the rest of the world changes.

At heart, you can trace so many Right-Wing objections to the naturally-shifting ethnic demographics of the USA back to German philosophers like Johann Gottleib Fichte, with their notions of Romantic Nationalism. Undiscussed by the paid-for propaganda stations on your TV are how the very same notions of a cultural and national supremacy beset by invaders from within resulted in movements like Nazi Germany.

Surely nothing (aside from rounding up people and shuffling them en masse into concentration camps) is more Hitleresque than enacting laws and social norms and mainstreaming violent language that targets the spoilers of the Pure. (I make these comparisons very carefully, but know that half my family came here fleeing Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe about 3 generations ago and I for one do see a disturbing overlap in this revulsed, persecutory, culturally superior aggression against Mexican immigrants today.)

And that is what the US Right Wing response is to today’s immigration issue, health care reform (which they imagine is a handout to people of color), and Obama’s presidency boils down to. From the laws creeping forth like chokeweed in Arizona, to guns and sleazy assassination talk as rejoinders to Democratic (centric and corporatist!) legislation.

SOSHALIST! FOREIGN AGENT! FASCIST PRESIDENT! ILLEGAL INVADERS! MEXICAN FLAGS! WELFARE QUEENS! AFFIRMATIVE ACTION! I WANT MY COUNTRY BAAAAAAAAAACK

The deepening fracture in the GOP echoes that which took down the 19th century Whigs—centering, as it does, around racism. The GOP cannot move into the future. It is, at heart, built to comfort and sustain the lives and ideas of elite whites, and mostly elite white property-owning men. And that is not today’s real world. As it was, the notion has always had to be brought to bear behind the barrel of a gun in the first place. That is another reason the GOP is dying. You cannot sustain a culture without respecting and revering women. And you cannot sustain a political party on a room full of old white men…and a living pinup. That’s for other types of partying…I suppose.

When the Right embraces a woman, it has to be a person who is racist herself, devoid of intellectual integrity, and crammed full of hypocrisy, condescension, and power lust [Palin]. When it embraces (and I use the word embrace purely functionally, not emotionally!) a black man (Michael “Bling is My Thing” Steele) it is a cynical and insincere motion used only to counter a larger political or cultural force (the election of Barack Obama). When the Right elevates a Latino/Hispanic like Alberto Gonzales, he by needs must abdicate his own family roots (lie about how they got here, disowning story and allegiance and pride and truth in the process) and aid the US war machine in killing hundreds of thousands of brown humans in Iraq. When the Right  has an Asian American hero, such as in the case with John Yoo, he would of course have to be a cold-blooded advocate of testicle-crushing, torture-wheeling, bomb-dropping aggressions in the Middle East.

These Indian-killers in the GOP (and when I use that term I reference the illegal Irish immigrant Phillip Sheridan who wreaked holy historical hell on the American Indigenous during his tenure in the US military) cannot change their stripes. They can only fracture within as some members attempt even the tiniest departure from a reflexive racist stance, or die out, sputtering, hissing, contorting, and shrieking all the way.

I say “indian killers” because there is nothing more rational at the root of so much of their ideology—be it opposing non-white immigration, denigrating the civil rights era, or fearing a black president’s every move—than what was behind General Sheridan’s imperative to genocide-by proxy the American Indian by slaughtering every bison on the land, when not directly killing indians. It’s built into their DNA by now; To these sorts (despite what they say out loud, and they say plenty out loud!) people of color stand for all the evils in the world, and these types have a guilt that has perverted itself over the many sins leveled against the Other and projected itself skewedwise upon us, just as the notorious Gang of Perverts (GOP) is well-known for introducing punitive anti-gay legislation all while secretly engaging in meth-fueled, scuba-geared, rest stop stall-centric homosexual hijinks on the down low. To these spoilers and stealers, it is people of color who stand for crime, for corrosion of culture, for the faltering of White Empire.

The Right simply cannot abdicate that position, because to renegotiate these ideas would be to admit their stores of wealth and (relative) sanity are but founded upon falsity and evil.

The latest shape in which the GOP offers up its ubiquitous racial animosity and white supremacy is one choice vehicle to truly draw forth their ire and bile: the immigration issue. The white liberal faction of activism and punditry claims the GOP attacks the idea of immigration due for the most part to their fear of instilling a mass of future Democrat voters. Not really. Not unless the Dems are employing their own code language here.

It’s just what it sounds like. It’s not far from the thirst for racial purity that we associate with some very creepy chapters of world history. And it’s just as dangerous an impulse. And it’s dangerous, too, not to name it. Because how will we face and defeat this ugly, ancient impulse if we pretend it’s about voting booths? Anyway, voting booths are just about power, and the power the GOP wants to maintain and propagate is one that—again—would erase the Civil Rights gains, suppress your wage, declare your teeth and health a luxury that you cannot afford, and while you sweat in the sun mowing their grass so pretty, invade your ancestors’ land to steal more fuel to power your mower.

How is the GOP and the “conservative” mind attempting to enforce racial purity in today’s world? In so many ways. From the loop that the Criminal Justice system sets up to pack the prisons with black and brown, to the banks’ targeting customers of color and immigrants to exploit with higher rates and scams, to the erasure or minimizing in Texas’ textbooks of the achievements of people of color, to the ENTIRE IDEA of IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT which by now seems to be discussed as an item of faith, as if it is not a trumped up WAR ON TERROR part two. Yes, other things come into it, such as the State making money for policing and incarcerating this new population. Our war economy is failing us. And our nation knows no better way to make cash than go to war on yet another population. At this point states are blatantly justifying 287g programs and such because new prisons and detention centers are springing up in their towns.

And many Democrats are championing those same programs, and the same “heavy enforcement” talk, telling me that they need to do all this to convince the American people that these word games indicate the right approach to “our broken immigration system.” But you know what? Social justice is not a word game. It is a bloody fight and if your hands are clean, you may be on the dodgeball court, but you ain’t in the struggle.

A Progressive Lens

This war on people of color and on the indigenous of this continent (because oh yes, the CIA has its hands deep in Latin America, too, and has for yearrrrrs) rolls on. This must be seen and championed by “Progressives” or they’ve got nothing. There is no Progressive movement without that lens. Nothing at all at the heart. And nothing for the future of the movement but running around the exhaust pipes of the GOP for the rest of their own doomed existence. True justice lies in employing a fearless lens upon the birth and the current fractures of this nation and how this plays out in our international policies and wars and thus, our current state. And it has to do with Imperialism and white supremacy and exploitation of the Other. Way more than most liberals are comfortable examining, aside from a snarky line or two in a blog post. These truths of our imbalances maintained must become part of our national dialogue. We must accept nothing less from the Democratic politicians. You cannot blame the US for being a “soundbyte nation” if you are validating and employing and not fighting that tendency! Run from the GOP and their accusations of “Blame America First”? Retreat behind flag pins? Join them in talk about locking up and deriding immigrants? This is the way down. This validates the very party and ideology the Left ought lock horns with and do fierce battle.

In my opinion, confronting that comfort is the path forward. And maintaining that comfort simply makes you a meek aide to the Republican machine; less than they. For at least they know their cause and they stand behind it unapologetically.

Not that there is any shortage of opportunities to engage. And the immigration issue certainly presents a giant opportunity. And by all means, join in. It’s not for Mexicans that anyone ought do it, really. It’s because unless the People take up the cause of all the People, then the People will fail, divided by the professional manipulators who have everything at stake in keeping us apart.

One of President Obama’s great hopes for Republican bipartisanship on the immigration issue is Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer is most recently known in immigration advocacy circles for his turn to the right when it comes to talking about immigrants. He wanted harsher talk. He pooh-poohed the idea that we ought refer to them as anything but “illegal” immigrants or aliens. He laughed at the idea that “undocumented” was sufficient. This is a strangely hostile position for a “liberal” to take, considering the connections between how we are talking about these populations (and I include MY population, being of Mexican descent and Hispanic name) and the violence that finds us. Schumer is not a champion of progressive thought, nor my friend, nor my ally. For what that is worth. But I won’t take it personally.

Another of Obama’s hopes is Republican Senator Lindsay Graham. Recently, Graham was the one to come forth and say that immigration is dead this year. And because Obama had to go and push the Health Care thing. That’s Graham’s story and he’s sticking with it. You don’t need me to tell you he’s full of shit. The GOP must try to destroy Obama and all he does. And anything he does. This, too, is tied to their belief system. This is why they went crazy when Obama spoke in schools. For children to see a black man as President destroys a space in the mind that Republicans would use to plant their ideologies about racial superiority. Just that sight—of an articulate, handsome, well-spoken, kind and powerful black man—could alter the lives of those children in a fractal sense. One new image that provides a foundation for a series of other thoughts and beliefs, that very possibly do not lead to a worldview supported by Conservatism. So the GOP cannot rescind Obama’s electoral tidal wave, but their next best hope is that the nation feels the first black President was a failure. That—now that—could be worked into their ideologies. “Sure,” they’d say to their deluded children, “it was White Guilt and Black Racism that elected Obama. And maybe a bit his pretty speechifyin’. But mostly the first two, just like I tell you all the time about Affirmative Action. So he caught a boost into the Oval Office. He got to play dress-up for a while. But of course he failed in the end, Ruthy! He’s….well. He tried hard, you gotta give him that. And he sure could play some mean b-ball, eh kids?”

So let’s just get that straight and know that Lindsay Graham would never have helped Obama secure anything he believes could be successful for Obama, Democrats, or people of color. I mean, didn’t we just learn from watching the GOP tantrumize the entire Health Care debate how willing they are to work with the Dems? Lindsay, pleeeeease.

Nevermind that this immigration issue affects Irish immigrants, as well. Don’t even bother with that. This issue is about Mexicans. Period. That’s all we are talking about with fences and “invaders” and “culture changing.” Shit. Nobody is concerned about one more Irish fella at the pub on March 17! Pat Buchanan is not terrified that O’Malley’s will run out of bar seats under another wave of Irish immigration. This is about Mexicans. You know, cockroaches. Etc.

Lindsay Graham did say a bit more to the Spanish Speaking press in an interview with La Opinión. [Google-translated page]

WASHINGTON, D.C.— El senador Lindsey Graham (R-SC) la figura clave del Partido Republicano en las negociaciones sobre reforma migratoria en la Cámara Alta, aseguró a La Opinión que los indocumentados tendrían que “declararse culpables de un delito menor para obtener su legalización”. A su vez, el legislador enfatizó que la reforma migratoria no tiene posibilidades este año en la Cámara Alta.

La semana pasada, el presidente del Subcomité de Inmigración, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) y Graham presentaron juntos una columna de opinión en The Washington Post, donde aseguraron que los indocumentados tendrían que admitir que violaron la ley.

“Para los 11 millones de inmigrantes que ya están ilegalmente en este país, teníamos que ofrecer un camino duro pero justo. Se les exigiría admitir que violaron la ley y el pago de su deuda a la sociedad mediante la realización de servicio comunitario y el pago de multas e impuestos atrasados. Estas personas estarían obligadas a pasar controles de antecedentes y ser competentes en inglés antes de ir a la parte de atrás de la fila y ganar la oportunidad de trabajar hacia la residencia legal permanente”, dice la columna.

Consultado por La Opinión respecto a “¿qué significa admitir que se violó la ley”, Graham aseguró “la parte que se refiere a la solución de la inmigración ilegal, es que van a tener que admitir que cometieron un crimen, declararte culpable de un misdemeanor o delito menor, pagar una multa y realizar servicio comunitario”.

Un delito menor es una ofensa criminal que resulta en un récord. Tiene un grado menor de severidad que las felonías, pero mayor que las infracciones civiles. En general, se le considera un crimen que se paga a través de prisión, libertad bajo palabra y multas.

It goes on. He is essentially saying that a) Immigration Reform is dead this year and b) his terms for signing a bill in any case involve the usual terms offered by the GOP such as learning English, but the novel and disturbing proposition that the undocumented community, before becoming proud and naturalized US citizens, admit to criminality and carry a misdemeanor crime on their record evermore. In addition, the newly-shamed and minted criminal class will do community service and pay a fine.

The Eternal Servant-Criminal Class

I am not surprised at these types of ideas coming from a Republican. From an old white Conservative man. Never mind that currently being undocumented is not even a criminal offense but a civil one! (ICE has got around this by charging people with document fraud, thus shuttling the cases into criminal court where immigrants often don’t have adequate representation and sign whatever they are told to, ending up in—yup, you guessed it—a detention center where the taxpayers support their imprisonment, rather than benefit from their working and adding to the local economy and workforce.)

Do you know that law officers already generally assume you are a criminal or have an arrest record if you are a person of color? Or at least that you were up to something recently! Or perhaps that your shirt smells like Marijuana. It’s true! That is why people of color get stopped for driving for no reason, get tailed in stores (hate this one, it’s very distracting) get harassed by cops in the first place. It is part of the Prison loop. See you as criminal, create you as criminal. Target you more, prosecute you further, assume guilt, search ’til they find some. Punish. Repeat.

Republicans like Graham and Sessions and so on are essentially incapable of viewing an abstract Mexican or group of Mexicans as ANYthing but something deviant, shameful, criminal, and destructive. Of course he wants ten million brown people to have a police record! In his mind it’s already one and the same, he aches to flesh his bias into life. As Joe Arpaio does by criminalizing those he feels are already criminal by nature.

And a police record will lead to further trouble with the law. It’s bad enough getting harassed more because of a name or physical traits, but to be harassed and then found to have a record already? As I said, these things compound each other, and sometimes, very fast. Punishments increase in severity, less lenience is given, you feel more uptight about further trouble, which might make you act funny around cops who are already looking at you funny…see? It’s a loop. And that’s the point of it.

So Lindsay Graham (R) is basically saying “Okay. I will agree to let millions more Mexicans into this culture, but they must play the roles in which I see them. This preserves my white supremacist culture, after all. I don’t want you here, but if you have to be here and you are already, then you are criminals. That fits the script.”

And Arizona is all over this, too. As I covered in the latter part of News With Nezua | Whoa Canada! (the specific Arizona segment is here on YouTube), a mesh of laws are being enacted in that state that turn the presence of any undocumented person into a violator of criminal laws, as well as anyone who transports them to work, or to look for work, or home from work. These laws (primarily enshrined in SB 1070) empower police and government workers anywhere in the state to stop anyone they think may be undocumented for any reason and require proof of citizenship…or be swept into ICEville. Yup. Bad, bad news. Bad, bad move. (Did you know the massive marches of 2006 were mostly in reaction to the Sensenbrenner bill which proposed the very same thing?)

That is essentially the ground that Graham is preparing for the entire nation.

You think cops harassing people of color is bad now? Just imagine. Watch that segment on the new Arizona laws, and imagine how that could play out on an entire nation where people of color or who have accents are already under fire or derision; already being scapegoated for the economic destruction wrought by greedy blue-eyed bankers. These laws that empower local police to increasingly view and treat the undocumented—and by extension, Latinos—as criminal suspects who owe obeisance at any moment (Your papers??!) serve as a very, very poor response to the shifting cultural face of the nation. In fact, it’s safe to say that this creeping violence and force is the last gasp of Whiteness, meaning to do by gun and prison what it cannot maintain by propaganda and illusion.

In today’s civilized and progressive era, everything will be by law and decree and politically viable and sound and acceptable. And yet, the jails continue to grow. And grow too small. And be it in Haiti or Iraq or Mexico, it is still a certain kind of dweller on this planet doing the plundering. The Marines and police are still sent in to secure the Imperialist hustle in every market on the planet.

And the Democrats are often the ones tearily waving them goodbye as they embark on their patriotic journeys.

And Ye Shall Reap What Ye Sow

Bill Clinton recently admitted to what many have been saying for many years: that creating conditions that flood a foreign nation/entity with imports from the US while disabling that locations ability to farm and produce food for themselves wreaks destruction on an area. This is actually a pretty important statement for him to make. (Must be why after the first day, the article is buried and took me a while to track down!) Because the US does this…as a pattern. And when you stop and think about it, there is no more confusion about my level of emotion on how my own birth-nation treats humans around the world, known here as “immigrants” or as “illegals” or “illegal immigrants” by all the GOP and some members of the Democratic party. Because it’s a very nasty and disgusting and immoral and deceptive way to act. And I expect better from this world, in this time.

You cripple a nation’s agricultural market so that THE USA MAY BENEFIT from this NATION OF BROWN PEOPLE. This destroys the market in Haiti, as it did in Chile, as it did in Mexico. It’s not an accident. It’s not that Clinton is just realizing it. This is how the US stays strong and economically viable. China makes a lot of things we use! I would be lost without all my gear imported from China. China has a leg up exporting because they make SO. MUCH. STUFF. The US exports by creating famine conditions and then conveniently being around when people are hungry. In essence. I’m being a bit dramatic, but good, because it all ends up the same. It’s like locusts. We strip them down so that we can fly. It’s vile. But that’s not the end of it.

When these people flee, and come here—the much-trumpted LAND OF OPPORTUNITY and LAND OF PLENTY—from those lands that are economically stunted or crippled, we consider them criminals. We say they have to admit what wrong they did. Even Democrats insist that they be punished, this low person on the ladder! Dems and GOP insist they be shamed! It sickens my gut. Where is the discussion of what the US has done wrong in this? Better yet, a way forward where we can do right by what went wrong? An intelligent cause and effect talk? This is tyranny of the strong, to punish these tiny humans scattering about in the wake of imperial boots that tear through towns collecting our bounty.

Bill Clinton has made it clear that he understands this. And if this tiny piece of truth could make its way into our national dialogue on economy, foreign policy, and immigration? It would upset and rearrange the entire trajectory. Or it would have the potential, at least. We know it wouldn’t have a chance in the murky, corrosive depths of US political discourse.

And then people even on the “left” want to talk about a “soundbyte culture.”

The Democrats are now talking about sending in guns, or having some special type of arrangement with Mexico so our Marines can go in and join his drug war that has spiraled out of control and is eating human beings every day. It’s not like they can run through the desert to escape the war. I suppose soon our troops will be waiting for them there, and our bullets firing upon them from Mexican rifles.

Bill Clinton’s tears mean about as much to me as Glenn Becks’.

Siphon

The Democrats are doing their job. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, and recently wrote about journalists: it’s not that they aren’t doing what they were elected to do, it’s that people are confused about their purpose. And the Democrats’ purpose is to siphon off genuine populist outrage on the Left side of the spectrum. To give us the Good Cop to the GOP’s Bad Cop. That results in our being “trapped” into a Two Party mindset. The dynamic is a powerful one, because it taps into a couple things personally (nevermind the practical chances/difficulty in electing a third party candidate). One, most people who are scared of outcomes or of being in a scary situation (or perhaps I should call it “uncertainty”) will choose the easiest way out. For another thing, The Good Cop/Bad Cop routine presupposes you don’t have enough personal strength to offer yourself a third option in what currently presents as a binary, and a pressing one. These are generally sound assumptions to make with most people, at most times. And of course, there are other reasons that are systemic.

But however you shake it out, the current Democratic party is a pretty inadequate choice for people truly interested in social justice; in a sound, healthy, vibrant society that respects human rights and has the confidence and joy at heart that a thriving culture would. No, the American voting public is, sometimes, like beaten children ready to take what we are given because our imaginations and hope has been kicked in until it cannot expand any further.

Given: The way the GOP is veering downward and righty-right-righto-right as of late draws the distinction between them and the Democrats a valuable one, admittedly. Also, while the insurance reform bill that was just passed does enshrine the worst parts of the capitalist system, as I think Taibbi said, and is a giveaway to the corporate moguls, the current GOP was really rubbing its Class War Club quite unabashedly and certainly is off on an irrational trajectory that ends in abject class war. Beck telling us our teeth are not a Constitutional right. Oh, I’ve got a few things to tell Mr. Beck and people like him about teeth! But that’s for another time.

That said, even with the historic healthcare legislation achievement, the Dems will continue to fund the utter destruction of our neighbors in the world. Be it in Afghanistan, where the CIA now operates as if another branch of the military; in Pakistan where drones drop down death on the daily; in Iraq or wherever the US Pentagon decides we go next without needing to call it “war” and thus launch it legally. And people will continue to flee these nations (if they live through it) and many will make their way here. The US—both Left and Right—will continue to speak of these migrations as violations of our law and border, a law and border that are like one-way doors for bullets, bombs, and people and through their precise functioning undermine any and all we say about opportunity, fairness, and liberty. The US will continue to lock people up in the already overburdened and ridiculously blooming prison system. Movies like Blindside will continue to win Oscars and make white America feel it’s a good place, at heart. And once in a while, the Democrats will make a big show of passing a center-left piece of legislation.

Meanwhile, no branch of our government is doing much to help heal the world at large, or at least slow the destruction and degradation of our global community and its future.

It can be a scary thought if you dwell on it. Dancing helps.

Fear Felt Up High

And so the Democratic Party is now feeling a bit of anxiety over the immigration issue. I know because I am contacted sometimes by Democratic aides in DC. The Washington-Blogger relationship is new, and I’m sure they are not quite sure what to do with it, but I credit them for approaching and making contact with me and making an effort to…well. I guess that is the question. What are they after? How do they see a blogger? We know the protocol for the Press and the White House…but I am not quite that. All these areas are new. I am open to how they flesh out. But I am certainly not here to simply pass on messaging. I am not a tri-corder, or whatever Colbert called the MSM. No, Jim, I’m a blogger. And that means I’ll not just pass on what was said, but how I perceive that statement, or various statements. I’ll report on it, but I’ll report on it, and I’ll report on me, too! REPORTING ON IT! It’s like frakken Gonzo Ummagumma up in here.

After my multiple talks, I began to feel such a desire on their part to have me carry out certain actions and spread specific messages that I replied that they should find a way to pay me! This of course sent them off running for the moment. Not to mention it would ultimately be a unethical. That remark was my way of hinting that I don’t do specific jobs that other entities benefit solely from unless I’m paid or want to.

But I’ll pass on their words in case you do want to, or in case they are valuable. In that sense, sure. I’m happy to help. And they said to pressure Graham. Activists should be “outraged” about Graham’s proposal to criminalize immigrants. We should pressure the GOP so that they come on board to Obama’s side (bill?) and feel the heat.

But what bill? What leadership? Are they really asking bloggers, now, to fulfill Obama’s promise to the community?

Oye, if the nation can see or hear or yawn at what’s been going on so far with the immigrant community, well. As I said, we are pushing back against some deeply entrenched imaginations of what brown people are and so on. It’s a tough economy (I know, it’s hitting me hard) and it’s easy to begin hoarding and fearing. Especially when the government feeds that impulse! As I said to to both of them in so many words, how do you expect the grassroots to get excited and work for you? You are out there saying all these things about immigrants! Helping to spread fear and a punitive outlook! I laid out my thoughts as I’ve done here to them, to one of them. I brought up the larger global picture of what is going on in immigration. He said, true, “but this is a soundbyte nation.” And I said that I don’t want to treat my country like it is stupid. Why are the Democrats not educating people on this? Why do they bow to the Right with the talk of criminality and punishment? I talked about blaming the weakest link in the chain and about the Tyranny of the strong. And I said I had to take serious disagreement with the idea that making the People comfortable involves playing into the criminalization of Mexicans and immigrants. Nope. Not buying it.

I didn’t really know what they could do with everything I said. Maybe they passed it on, maybe they just wondered why they called The Angry Mexican in the first place and left it at that.

But I had to speak on why I had no passion really to run errands for the Democrats’ capitulatory, cowardly asses. “You need 60 votes for anything” one said, over and over. Which is fine. But who is leading the charge? Not Obama. Not the tiniest bit. And who made beautiful speeches to la comunidad via NCLR events and so on? Wait for it…yup. That was Obama.

After speaking to both an aide to a major Democratic player in  Congress and their Hispanic Outreach person, I can tell that they are sweating our reaction. New Media, activists, advocacy groups, the People. Why? Probably because they don’t plan on moving anything. President Obama tells the GOP that they have to offer up a bill, or that he said he was open, but he needs more of them on board. Reid’s office states it will introduce something by the end of the year if nothing happens. Schumer and Graham are out having beers and swatting at piñatas or something as they talk about how to extract the most shame from one square mile of tomato skins.

President Obama won’t be leading this charge. I love the man, no doubt. But look, son. He wouldn’t even come out swinging for his old disabled aunt. You think he’s gonna risk his ass over ten million Mexicans? No, I know stall talk when I hear it, and he won’t be championing the issue. He’d already be out there.

Today and Tomorrow

Which is why I began this piece with the question how do we react to this? Now? Let’s think and plan and know now, so that by the time it’s made inarguably clear through the ole up/down/up/down Public Option style desensitization method, we already know our plan. Do away with the doubt and hope so we can get practical. In what way? I don’t know. I guess that depends. It might be a purely personal plan, having to do with voting, or lifestyle or living area, brand of pop-tarts you buy…I can’t imagine. But despite our own personal reactions, we have to understand that this is not a tiny let down or broken promise, nor should it be. I can’t call it for you. But I think it’s safe to say despite the excuse-making, we were had.

That the Democrats will continue deporting Latin Americans at an astonishing rate (1,000 a day now?), enacting laws that devastate communities and punish individuals for what is really a larger issue (next we can punish the seals for drowning as our industries melt their icebergs) and our charming, sweet, and eloquent President will most certainly not use that enlivening tenor to educate the US masses on what they really need: to understand exactly what is going on that ties the health care issue together with the economy, our international policy, and immigration. The GOP will continue to react as if despoilers of the Pure need to be fought within her borders and across oceans, and never will the entire picture or truthful dialogue be presented to the People so that something—some real thing—might change in this whole setup.

Finally, as expected, the Democrats will stall on immigration and offer feints and tuff-guy soundbytes, but they will not come through, nor will they break it all down and get real with the People.

They can’t. The Good Cop, no matter how comforting, still needs you to fear the cell for his shtick to work.

Proclama a los Pueblos de México
para organizar la revocación de mandato a Felipe Calderón

De nueva cuenta nuestra nación se debate en una crisis que sólo es comparable a las que dieron paso a la Revolución de Independencia, las Guerras de Reforma y a la Revolución Mexicana. Hoy como ayer, la crisis es total y de larga duración, abarca la economía, la política y la cultura.

La crisis pone en cuestión el futuro de los pueblos y la Nación mexicana. En el esquema de la clase política y de los grandes capitalistas, nacionales y extranjeros, carecemos de esperanza: los mexicanos no tenemos ya lugar en el mundo de la globalización neoliberal salvo como parias y mano de obra desechable.

En tales circunstancias, para enfrentar la crisis profunda de nuestra patria y los problemas de los pueblos de México se precisa de una transformación patriótica y democrática de la política, la economía y la cultura que desplace a la oligarquía burguesa y a su clase política de la conducción del Estado y acabe con el dominio imperialista sobre México. Se necesita la construcción de una nueva mayoría que incluya a todas las fuerzas patrióticas e instaure un nuevo gobierno y un nuevo Estado, capaces de recuperar el control y la propiedad de la planta productiva de la nación, de sus recursos estratégicos y de garantizar el desarrollo sustentable, la justicia social, la soberanía nacional, las autonomías de los pueblos indios y el ejercicio de la democracia popular.

El primer paso en la dirección de darle una salida nacional, popular y democrática a la crisis actual tiene que ver con la restauración del orden constitucional; con la lucha en contra de la usurpación del gobierno de la república por parte del grupo de políticos, empresarios, magistrados y militares del que forma parte Felipe Calderón. En las circunstancias actuales la recuperación de la dignidad nacional y solución a la miseria, el desempleo y la inseguridad pasan por la lucha para revocar el mandato presidencial que los golpistas confirieron a Felipe Calderón.

El jefe del ejecutivo federal de facto es la principal referencia de un régimen político corrompido y antinacional, el instrumento de los grandes empresarios y las trasnacionales para avanzar en la completa depredación y saqueo de nuestra capacidad de trabajo, de la propiedad pública y social y de nuestros recursos naturales. Calderón es la figura visible de la mafia que pretende consumar la instalación de un Estado obsecuente a Estados Unidos y de carácter delincuencial, de un régimen policíaco-militar al estilo colombiano. La lucha contra el usurpador y el grupo dominante, que incluye la defensa de nuestros derechos sociales y libertades políticas y civiles, prepara la ruta para remover del gobierno a los neoliberales que traicionaron al pueblo y a la patria.

Motivos legales y humanos para revocarle el mandato a Felipe Calderón sobran, la situación del país, o lo que queda de él, no puede ser más grave. En menos de tres años el número de mexicanos pobres aumentó en 10 millones; hoy más de 70 millones de pobladores viven en la pobreza; 24 o 25 millones de ese total son pobres extremos que padecen la miseria más degradante e inhumana. Según las cuentas oficiales, el “presidente del empleo” tiene en su haber el despido de casi millón y medio de trabajadores.

Calderón, que supuestamente encabeza la guerra contra la inseguridad y la delincuencia, ha convertido a México en el país más inseguro y violento del mundo en tiempos de paz. Fruto de su guerra contra el narcotráfico o contra uno de sus bandos, se han producido más de 15 mil asesinatos y más de siete mil desaparecidos. Sin embargo, ni la violencia, ni los secuestros tienen para cuando disminuir y mucho menos cesar. Mientras tanto, entre 25 mil y 40 mil millones de dólares se blanquean en bancos y empresas de la respetable iniciativa privada, con el beneplácito de los gobiernos de Calderón y Obama.

Mientras tanto, la impunida d reina, los responsables del crimen industrial de Pasta de Conchos siguen libres, al igual que Ulises Ruiz, Mario Marín, Javier Lozano y los verdaderos culpables del caso de la Guardería ABC; qué decir de las muertas de Juárez o de las violaciones a los derechos humanos en San Salvador Atenco, Acteal y tantos más. Mientras tanto, los magistrados de la Suprema Corte de Justicia siguen ganando más de 340 mil pesos al mes; mientras que Ignacio del Valle y sus compañeros —entre muchos otros luchadores sociales y personas inocentes— siguen secuestrados en las ilegales cárceles de máxima o baja seguridad.

El presidente de facto ha desplegado a las fuerzas armadas por todo el territorio nacional en misiones de seguridad pública que violentan el artículo 129 de la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos y, en consecuencia, ha degradado a la institución armada, transformando al elemento castrense en un Ejército de ocupación y contrainsurgencia al servicio de los oligarcas. En su papel de comandante supremo ha subordinado a las fuerzas armadas a las estrategias militares y policiacas del gobierno de Estados Unidos, a través de la Alianza para la Seguridad y Prosperidad de América del Norte y la Iniciativa Mérida, entre otros acuerdos y acciones pactadas a espaldas del pueblo mexicano que afectan gravemente la soberanía nacional y que, en su esencia, constituyen actos de traición a la Patria.

Con base en atribuciones que no le corresponden, ha llevado a la economía nacional al colapso, a la recesión, a la contracción del mercado interno, al crecimiento astronómico de la ilegal deuda interna y externa, a la destrucción de la planta productiva, a una mayor dependencia técnica y científica, a la devastación del campo y al fin de la autosuficiencia alimentaria, provocando mayor migración de trabajadores y afectando el nivel de vida de toda la población. Además ha entregado ilegalmente el territorio a empresas mineras, petroleras, agrícolas y hoteleras, solapando los daños ambientales y las afectaciones criminales en contra de pueblos y comunidades enteras, que son ya irreparables en términos humanos, ambientales y económicos.

Violando el artículo 123 de la Constitución y siguiendo la política antilaboral de sus antecesores, recientemente transgredió la autonomía del Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME), con el solo propósito de dar un paso más en la destrucción de nuestra soberanía energética y la privatización de la energía eléctrica y los servicios derivados del uso de la fibra óptica, lanzando a la calle a más de 44 mil de trabajadores que de forma permanente se habían caracterizado por su oposición a los planes gubernamentales.

Ante este sombrío proyecto en desarrollo las preguntas centrales son: ¿estamos dispuestos los ciudadanos que no votamos por Calderón, los que nos abstuvimos, o incluso quienes se han arrepentido de su voto por el PAN a soportar otros tres largos años de penurias, autoritarismo, desnacionalizaciones y entreguismo? ¿Sobrevivirá la nación mexicana como ente soberano ante el acoso sistemático privatizador de los apátridas que gobiernan para beneficio exclusivo de las corporaciones capitalistas? ¿Es necesario pagar un altísimo precio en vidas humanas, daños ambientales, sufrimientos y esfuerzos inútiles por aguantar a un gobierno que ya resulta intolerable para millones de mexicanos? ¿Existe alguna duda razonable sobre la naturaleza reaccionaria y regresiva del actual grupo gobernante, que pudiera dar lugar a la esperanza de una posible corrección del rumbo por parte del usurpador y de su gente?

En vísperas de la conmemoración del Bicentenario de la Independencia y del Centenario de la Revolución Mexicana y ante el agravamiento extraordinario de la crisis social y nacional, que nos ha colocado en la pendiente de salidas represivas y de la catástrofe económica y socioambiental más grave en toda la historia del país, es preciso dar un paso al frente y autoconvocarnos como en los tiempos de Hidalgo, Morelos, Juárez, Magón, Villa, Zapata y Cárdenas a la disputa por la nación, a la pelea por revocarle el mandato al presidente de facto Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa.

Para discutir las formas y los cómos, estamos organizando una primera reunión para el 5 de diciembre en Dr. Lucio 29, col. Doctores, DF (Sindicato de Tranviarios) a la que todos los mexicanos dispuestos a emprender está batalla están invitados en calidad de organizadores. En particular, hacemos un llamado al Movimiento en Defensa de la Economía Popular, el Petróleo y la Soberanía, al Movimiento por la Soberanía Alimentaria y Energética, los Derechos de los trabajadores y las Libertades Democráticas, a la Asamblea Nacional de la Resistencia Popular, a la Otra Campaña, a la Conferencia Nacional Unitaria de las Izquierdas a participar de las discusiones y acuerdos para que de una vez por todas, Calderón y su gobierno se vayan.

Respetuosamente.

Firman:

Personalidades y organizaciones:

Dr. Gilberto López y Rivas, Dr. Andrés Barreda Marín, Dr. Armando Rendón Corona, Dr. Enrique González Ruíz, Dra. Patricia de Oteyza, Antrop. Miguel Ángel Adame Cerón (ENAH-INAH), Dip. Hortensia Figueroa Peralta (Morelos), Ignacio Suárez Huape, Dr. Gerardo De La Fuente Lora, Dip. Alejandro López Villanueva (DF), Pietro Ameglio, Cecilia González Arenas y Víctor Ariel Bárcenas Delgado, Adriana Mujica, David Barkin (Profesor UAM), Carlos Aparicio (Drector de Radio Bemba y Representante de la Asociación mundial de Radios comunitarias de México), José Luis Mariño López, José David Vega Becerra, Silverio de la Mora, Juan Ignacio López Espinoza, Raúl Barba Arciniega, Rosalio Morales Vargas, Gloria Teresa Parada Arvayo, Martín Rodríguez, Celso Hernández, Guadalupe Sandoval, Antonio Mendoza, Enrique Zapata, Claudia Valadez, Isaías Martínez, Rodolfo Pérez Peralta (STUNAM), Juan Pablo Jardón (MNCNS), Irene Patricia Bautista Berriozabal (FNADEZ), Alfonso Jesús García Pérez (Barzón Industrial, AC), Antonio González Abundio y Joaquim H. Vela González (UDENA-Plan de Ayala), Ismael Cano Moreno (Organización de la Sociedad Civil Tlaliyapatl), René Torres Bejarano, María Fernanda Campa, Mara Rosas Baños (IPN), Marjory González Vivanco, Alberto Moreno Gaytán, Eulalia Eligio González, Adriana Chávez Tejeda, Horacio Castillo, Esteban Escudero, Mauricio Ortiz (Expresión Ciudadana), Cirilo Padilla García (Comité Democrático Ciudadano), José Antonio Espinosa Vázquez (Ciudadanos Libres de Azcapotzalco), Sergio Ávila Rojas (Movimiento Ciudadano del Sur), Marco Antonio Padrón Martínez (Sol Naciente de Iztapalapa), Cuauhtémoc Garduño (Poder Ciudadano Nacional), Marza Antonieta Farfa (Frente Amplio de Izquierda Queretana-FAIQ-MNCNS), Javier Pineda (metrópolis Poder Ciudadano), José Arturo Tapia Flores (MNCNS), Sergio García Ayala (Movimiento Entre Ciudadanos), Miguel Ángel Flores Trueba (Partido Comunista Mexicano), Fernando Sánchez Barreda, Alejandro Martínez Mondragón (Tequio Ciudadano A.B. D.F.), Frente de Asambleas Vecinales Heberto Castillo (FAVHECA DF), Alianza de Bases Ciudadanas, (ABC), Frente de Asambleas Municipales Heberto Castillo de Tlaxcala, Tabasco, Tamaulipas, Puebla y Chiapas, Unidad de la Fuerza Indígena y Campesina de Tlaxcala (UFIC Tlaxcala); Benito Baena Lome y Gustavo Ortega (Alianza de Tranviarios de México); Benito Mirón Lince, Alfredo Percastegui, Federico Abarca Reyes, Marcelo Herrera Herbert, Ismael Hernández Rojas, Juan Gutiérrez Calva, Daniel Carlos García, José Jiménez, David Villarruel Velazco (Movimiento Nacional Organizado “Aquí Estamos”); Paul Hersch Martínez, Arturo Figueroa Saucedo, Rafaél Trujano Fermoso, Jorge Martínez Soto, Antonio García Morales, Porfirio Barrera Jiménez, Dora Treviño, Juan Emilio González Espinosa Garrido, Elis Martínez, Nayar López Castellanos, Marjory González Vivanco,

Organizaciones nacionales:

Sección XVIII SNTE-CNTE Michoacán, Sección III SNTE-CNTE Baja California, Partido Popular Socialista de México, Frente Popular Francisco Villa, Coordinadora Metropolitana, Unidad de la Fuerza Indígena y Campesina, Red Izquierda Revolucionaria, Partido Comunista de México-Marxista Leninista, Frente Popular Revolucionario, Rumbo Proletario, Movimiento Socialismo Nuevo, Central Campesina Cardenista, UNTyPP, UNTCIP, Coordinadora Nacional de Municipios y Pueblos Originarios de México A.C., Nueva Fuerza Democrática Mexicana A.C., Alianza de Bases Ciudadanas (ABC); Sindicato de la Unión de Trabajadores del Instituto de Educación Media Superior del Distrito Federal (SUTIEMS), Organización Nacional del Poder Popular-PRP (Sociedad Cooperativa Emancipación del Pueblo, CUT-Coyoacán, A.C., Forjadores del mañana, A.C., UCISV-El Ejido, A.C., Movimiento de Pobladores, A.C., UCISV-1o. de mayo, A.C., UPTYL 10 De abril, MOPOPROVI 1O de junio, Colectivo Cultura y Democracia, Centro Cultural Comunitario Carlos Marx, Col. Pro-Revolución, Ecatepec, Comunidad Ecológica El Jobo, Catemaco, Ver., Agricultura Urbana Cinturón Verde El Molino),

Organizaciones estatales:

Baja California: MLN; Chihuahua: MLN; Chiapas: OCEZ-MLN, OPEZ-MLN, Sindicato de Salud Sección 50 (Adrián Vázquez Rodríguez y Víctor Hugo Zavaleta), OCD AC (Moguel Santiago), Frente Campesino Popular de Chiapas, Unión Campesino Totikez Anek (Ruly de Jesús Coello Gómez); Distrito Federal: Ediciones del Poder Popular, Pregón, Calpulli Tlatoani, Grupo Democracia Revolucionaria, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria Nueva Aztlan, Promotora de la CND, Frente de Asambleas Vecinales Heberto Castillo (FAVHECA); Durango: Comité de Defensa Ciudadana de la Región Lagunera, Consejo Coordinador Obrero Popular; Estado de México: Prof. Pedro Ramírez y Prof. José Figueroa González (Magisterio Democrático del Valle de México-Sección 36 SNTE-CNTE), Comité de Defensa de las Colonias (Tultitlan), UVVAC (Municipio Romero Rubio); Guerrero: MLN, Unión Estatal de Transportistas, AC (Presidente: Apolinar Segueda Dorantes), Dr. Pablo; Jalisco: Bases Democráticas Magisteriales de Jalisco (Francisco Montero), Consejo de Defensa de la Salud de Jalisco (Dr. Alberto Reyes), Coordinadora Estatal del Movimiento Urbano Popular de Jalisco (Mario Brown y Arq. Antonio Orozco); Morelos: Prof. José Basurto F., Saúl Roque M. (Comunidad de Xoxocotla), Guadalupe Zayago (Comunidad de Alpuyeca), Pregón; Nayarit: MLN, Organización Popular Teocalli de Aztlan (Martín Ulloa Benítez), José Manuel Ulloa Benítez, Martín Pérez Castañeda, Leopoldo Mora Iglesias, Partido Socialista Mexicano de Nayarit (Cutberto Ortiz Mariscal), Federación de Estudiantes de Nayarit (Presidente: Jorge Armando Ortiz), Unión de Colonias Independientes de Nayarit (Martha Isela Tirado González); Oaxaca: OOCEZ-MLN; Puebla: UPVA 28 de octubre; Jorge Amaya, Norberto Amaya, Humberto Sotelo, y Filomeno Gutiérrez (UNyR, Coordinación estatal Puebla), Gloria Hernández (Unión de Colonias Populares Democráticas de Puebla); Comisión política del Colectivo Ciudadano Carrillo Puerto (San Pedro Cholula), San Luis Potosí: Miguel Ángel Guzmán (FPFV), Martín Garay (Frente de Productores Potosino), Sebastián de la Cruz (Gobernador tradicional Xi-Iuy), Maximino Hernández (Gobernador tradicional Tenek); Sinaloa: Oscar Loza Ochoa (Regidor de Culiacán y defensor de Derechos Humanos); Sonora: Jorge Rountree Cons (Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores del STAUS), Rosa Ma. Oleary Franco, Javier Valenzuela, Mónica Soto Elizaga (Ciudadanos por el Cambio Democrático), Salvador Hernández Hernández, Dorotea Razcón Gámez (Secretaria General, STEUS), Cuauhtémoc Nieblas Cota (Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores, STEUS), Antonio García Morales, Jesús Martínez Soto, Arturo Figueroa Saucedo, Fco. Rafael Trujano Fermoso, Salvador Hernández Hernández, Ramón Valdéz, Catalina Soto Cota, (Ombusman de la Universidad de Sonora); Tlaxcala: Grupo Ecologista de Tlaxcala, Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra y el Agua Puebla-Tlaxcala (Región Malinche), Eco Global Arte A.C. (Sede Tlaxcala/Organización Internacional); Veracruz: Antonio Santos, José Antonio León Mendívil, José Juan Ríos, Carlos Morales, José Luis Morales, Luis Miguel López-Mena, (periodista), Hipólito Flores Alonso (despedidos de la ex CIVSA), Marisa Fernández Pérez (Xalapa), Alicia Castillo Díaz (Zoncuantla-Coatepec), Álvaro Brizuela Absalón (Xalapa); Zacatecas: Frente Social por la Soberanía Popular (FSSP), Coordinación Ejecutiva: Mirna E. Puch Ceballos, Efraín Arteaga Domínguez, Gregorio Sandoval Flores, José Luis Figueroa Rangel, José Santos Cervantes. Organizaciones que integran el FSSP: Federación de Sindicatos de Trabajadores al Servicio del Estado (FSTSE); Sección 46 del Sindicato de Telefonistas de la República Mexicana (STRM); Sección 34 del SNTE-CNTE; Sindicato Único de Trabajadores de la UTEZ (SUTUTEZ); Sindicato Único de Trabajadores Académicos de CONALEP (SUTACZ); Sindicato Único de Personal Docente y Administrativo de COBAEZ (SUPDACOBAEZ); Sindicato de Trabajadores de la UAZ (STUAZ); Coordinadora del Magisterio Democrático de Zacatecas, Secc. 58; Sindicato de Trabajadores de CECyTEZ (STCECyTEZyEMSAD); Sindicato de Trabajadores de Confianza de CECyTEZ (SITCOCECyTEZ); Secciones 95, 201 y 166 del Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros; Metalúrgicos y Similares de la República Mexicana (SNTMMySRM); Sección 59 del Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la SEMARNAT (SNTSEMARNAT); Sección 29 del Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores del Seguro Social (SNTSS); Asociación Nacional de Empresas Comercializadoras de Productores del Campo (ANEC); Movimiento del Sindicalismo Revolucionario (MSR); Frente Nacional de Organizaciones Braceroproa, A.C.; Asociación Civil “5 de Mayo de Guadalupe y Zacatecas; Solidaridad Cívica Zacatecana, A. C.; Agrupación Política Nacional (APN) “Nueva Democracia”; Promotora por la Unidad Nacional Contra el Neoliberalismo (PUNCN); Colectivos y trabajadores de la Otra Cultura; Federación de Organizaciones Sociales del Estado de Zacatecas-Movimiento Avance por la Democracia (FOSEZ); Barzón Zacatecas; Frente Popular de Lucha de Zacatecas-Coordinadora Nacional Plan de Ayala (FPLZ-CNPA); Jóvenes por el Socialismo (JPS); Alianza Ciudadana de Comunidades Urbanas y Rurales, A. C. (ACCUR, A.C.); Integradora Estatal de Productores de Frijol; Comercializadora “Alfonso Medina” SPR de RI; E.I.S.A.; Enlace al Campo SPR de RI; Los Ejidos SPR de RI; Vaqueros de La Cocinera SPR de RI; Tianguis La Campesina; Sección 32 del Sindicato nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación para Adultos (SNTEA).

Firmas solidarias:

Manuel Talens, escritor (España), MEPLA: Luis Acevedo Fals, Cineasta, Beatriz Muñoz Chan, Historia del Arte, Vivian Tabares Hechevarria, Secretaria, Daylet Acevedo Pérez, Editora, Ledys Pérez Corvea, Fotógrafa (Cuba), Percy Francisco Alvarado Godoy (Escritor guatemalteco) Correo: revocacionmandato@gmail.com

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Call to the Peoples of México to Organize the Revocation of the Presidency of Felipe Calderón

On the Eve of the 2010 Bicentennial of Mexican Independence, an Organizing Campaign Begins

Our nation is debating a crisis on par with that which gave birth to the Revolution of Independence, The Reformation wars and the Mexican Revolution. Just as was the case then, this is a long overarching crisis in our economy, politics and culture.

This crisis brings into question the future of the Mexican Nation and it’s people. In this political scheme by the grand capitalists, domestic and foreign, we lack hope. The Mexican people do not have a place in this world of neoliberal globalization except as pariahs and a disposable labor force.

Given these circumstances, we need a patriotic transformation and a democratization of the political system, the economy and the culture that can confront this deep crisis of our country and the problems of the Mexican people. We need a transformation that will push out the bourgeois oligarchy and the political class that governs the state and the imperialist domain of Mexico. There is a need to construct a new majority that includes all of the patriotic forces that will install a new government and a new state. A new majority that is capable of taking back control and the property of the productive forces and strategic resources of the nation, and also able to guarantee sustainable development, social justice, national sovereignty, the autonomy of the indigenous pueblos and the practice of popular democracy.

The first step towards a national exit strategy, popular and democratic is the actual crisis. We have to see a restoration of constitutional order through struggle against the usurpation of the government of the Republic by the group of politicians, business magnates, judges, and military officials that are behind Felipe Calderón. In order to recuperate our national dignity and find a solution to misery, unemployment and insecurity, there must be a battle waged to revoke the presidential mandate that the coup leaders conferred upon Felipe Calderon.

The de facto chief of the federal executive is the primary evidence of a political regime that is corrupted and anti-nation, an instrument of large businesses and transnational corporations that advance the complete depredation and plunder of our work force, public property and our social and national resources. Calderón is the most visible figure of the mafia that pretends to consume the installation of the State obedient to the United States and the delinquent characters of a Police State, a la the Colombian Military. This struggle against this usurper and the dominant group includes the defense of our basic rights including, social and political and civil freedoms, and also laying the groundwork to remove this neoliberal government who have betrayed the people and the motherland.

The grave situation our country finds itself in creates the legal and human motives to revoke the mandate of Felipe Calderón. In less than three years the number of poor Mexicans has increased by 10 million. Today, more that 70 million people live in poverty; 24 or 25 million of these live in extreme poverty suffering a degrading, inhuman misery. Calderón may be known as “The President of Employment” yet he has caused almost a million and half workers to lose their jobs.

Calderon who is supposedly in charge of the “War against insecurity and delinquency” has converted Mexico into the least secure and most violent country in the world in a time of peace. His war against narco-trafficking has left more that 15,000 people assassinated and more than 7000 disappeared. Neither the violence nor the kidnappings seemed to be diminishing and much less are ceasing to exist. Meanwhile between 25 and 40 billion dollars are in the banks and the companies of this respectable private initiative with the approval of the government of Calderón and Obama. Meanwhile impunity reigns, and those responsible for the industrial crimes in the Pasta de Conchos mine disaster remain free along with Ulises Ruiz, Mario Marín, Javier Lozano and the real culprits of the case of the ABC daycare center. Not to mention the deaths in Juarez, or the violations of human rights in San Salvador Atenco, Acteal and many more.

Meanwhile the judges of the Supreme Court of Justice continue making more than 340,000 pesos per month, while Ignacio del Valle and his compañeros along with many other social justice fighters and innocent people continue to be held in illegal jails of maximum and low security. The president has deployed the armed forces throughout national territory in his mission of public security, in violation of article 129 of the Mexican Political constitution. He has consequently degraded the Armed Forces by transforming a military into an occupation army and a counter-insurgency force in service of the oligarchies. As his role of Supreme commander he has subordinated the Armed Forces and the police of the government of the United States, behind the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America and The Merida Initiative. These agreements gravely affect national sovereignty, which in essence are acts of treason against the motherland.

With a base of attribution that does not correspond, they have brought the national economy to collapse, the recession and the contraction of the internal market, the astronomical growth of the illegal internal and external debt and the destruction off industrial productivity as well as a major technical and scientific dependence on the devastation of farmland and the end of self sufficient farming. This has led to a major migration of workers, affecting the quality of life for all sectors of the population. Moreover Calderón has illegally given territory to the mining, oil, agricultural and hotel owning interests leading to environmental degradation and criminal affliction against people and entire communities that have already been irreparably damaged in human, environmental and economic terms.

In violation of article 123 of the Constitution and according to the anti-labor politics of his predecessors, recently the transgression of autonomy of the Mexican Union of Electricians “Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas” (SME) whose only purpose was to take a step forward to destroy our energy sovereignty as well as to impose the privatization of electric energy and the services derived from the use of fiber optics, and the firing of more that 44,000 workers who have been characterized for their opposition to governmental plans.

Before the shady development project the central questions are: “are we stripped of our citizenship because we didn’t vote for Calderón? Or because we abstained, including those who have repented for voting for the PAN party and supporting three long years of shortages, authoritarianism, anti-nation and betrayal. Will the Mexican nation survive as a sovereign entity between the systematic privatized harassment of the anti-patriots who govern for the exclusive benefit of the capitalist corporations? Is it necessary to pay the highest price for human life, environmental damage, suffering and useless force to endure a government that has already yielded intolerable results for millions of Mexicans? Does there exist any reasonable doubt about the regressive and reactionary nature of the current governing group that could give anyone hope toward redirecting the course of the country on part of the usurper and his people?

In the days leading up to the commemoration of the Bicentennial of Mexican Revolution we are confronted with this extraordinary escalation of social and national crisis leading us on a downward slope of repressive measures and an economic socio-environmental catastrophe graver than any in the history of the country. It is necessary for us to take a step forward and convene ourselves just as Hidalgo, Morelos, Juárez, Magón, Villa, Zapata y Cárdenas did and fight to revoke the mandate of the de facto president Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa.

To discuss the ways and means we are organizing a first meeting for December 5 at the Railworkers Union hall at Calle Dr. Lucio #29, Colonia Doctores, Mexico City, two which all Mexican citizens ready to wage this battle are invited in the quality of organizers. In particular, we call upon the Movement in Defense of Popular Economy, Oil and Sovereignty, the Movement for Food and Energy Sovereignty, Workers’ Rights and Democratic Freedoms, upon the National Resistance Popular Assembly, upon the Other Campaign and upon the National Unity Conference of the Left to participate in the discussions and agreements so that once and for all Calderón and his government will be gone.

Respectfully.

Signed:

Personalities and organizations:
Dr. Gilberto López y Rivas, Andrés Barreda Marin, Dr. Armando Rendón Corona, Enrique González Ruiz, Dr. Patricia de Oteyza, Antrop. Miguel Angel Adame Cerón (ENAH-INAH), Dip. Hortensia Figueroa Peralta (Morelos), Ignacio Suarez Huape, Dr. Gerardo De La Fuente Lora, Dep. Alejandro López Villanueva (DF), Pietro Ameglio, Cecilia Gonzalez Barcenas Ariel Sands and Victor Delgado, Adriana Mujica, David Barkin (Professor UAM), Carlos Aparicio (Radio Bemba Drector and Representative of the World Association of Community Radio in Mexico), Jose Luis Mariño López, José David Vega Becerra, Silverio de la Mora, Juan Ignacio Lopez Espinoza, Raul Barba Arciniega, Rosalio Morales Vargas, Gloria Teresa Parada Arvay, Martin Rodriguez, Celso Hernandez, Guadalupe Sandoval, Antonio Mendoza, Enrique Zapata, Claudia Valadez, Isaias Martinez, Rodolfo Perez Peralta (STUNAM), John Paul Jardon (MNCNS), Irene Patricia Bautista Berriozabal (FNADEZ), Jesus Alfonso García Pérez (Barzon Industrial AC), Antonio Gonzalez Abundio and Joaquim H. Vela González (UDENA-Plan de Ayala), Ismael Moreno Cano (Civil Society Organization Tlaliyapatl), René Torres Bejarano, Maria Fernanda Campa, Mara Rosas Baths (IPN), Marjory Gonzalez Vivanco, Alberto Moreno Gaytan, Eulalia Eligio Gonzalez, Adriana Chavez Tejeda, Horacio Castillo, Esteban Escudero, Mauricio Ortiz (Expresión Ciudadana), Cirilo Padilla Garcia (Democratic Committee Citizen), Jose Antonio Espinosa Vázquez (Free Citizens Azcapotzalco), Sergio Avila Rojas (South Citizens Movement), Marco Antonio Padrón Martínez (Rising Sun of Iztapalapa), Cuauhtemoc Garduño (National Citizen Power), March Antoinette Farfa (Frente Amplio de Izquierda Queretana-Fa’iq-MNCNS), Javier Pineda (metropolitan Poder Ciudadano), Jose Arturo Tapia Flores (MNCNS), Sergio García Ayala ( Movement Between Citizens), Miguel Angel Flores Trueba (Mexican Communist Party), Fernando Barreda Sanchez, Alejandro Martínez Mondragón (Tequio Citizen ABDF) Neighborhood Assemblies Front Heberto Castillo (FAVHECA DF), Civic Alliance Base (ABC), Front Heberto Castillo Municipal Assemblies of Tlaxcala, Tabasco, Tamaulipas, Puebla and Chiapas Force Unit Indigenous and Peasant Tlaxcala (Tlaxcala UFIC) Lome and Gustavo Baena Benito Ortega (Tram Alliance for Mexico), Benito Miron Lince, Alfredo Percastegui, Federico Reyes Abarca, Marcelo Herrera Herbert, Ismael Hernández Rojas, Juan Gutiérrez Calva, Daniel Carlos Garcia, Jose Jimenez, David Villarruel Velazco (National Movement organized “Here we are”), Paul Hersch Martínez, Arturo Figueroa Saucedo, Rafael Trujano Fermoso, Jorge Martinez Soto, Antonio Garcia Morales, Porfirio Jimenez Barrera, Dora Trevino, Juan Emilio González Espinosa Garrido, Elisa Martínez, Nayar López Castellanos, Marjory Gonzalez Vivanco

National organizations:
Section XVIII SNTE-CNTE Michoacan, Section III SNTE-CNTE Baja California, Mexico Socialist People’s Party, Frente Popular Francisco Villa, Coordinating Unit, Metropolitan Force Indigenous and Peasant Red Revolutionary Left, Mexico’s Communist Party-Marxist Leninist Front Popular Revolutionary Proletarian Rumbo, new social movements, Central Campesina Cardenista, UNTyPP, UNTCIP, National Coordinator of Municipalities and Native Peoples of Mexico AC, New Democratic Force Mexicana AC, Citizens Alliance Base (ABC); Union Workers Union Media Institute of Higher Education of the Federal District (SUTIEMS), National Organization of People’s Power-PRP (People’s Empowerment Cooperative Society, CUT-Coyoacan, AC, Builders of Tomorrow, AC, UCISV-El Ejido, AC, settler movement, AC , UCISV-1o. May, AC, UPTYL April 10, MOPOPROVI June 1O, Collective Culture and Democracy, Community Cultural Center Carlos Marx, Col. Pro-Revolution, Ecatepec, Ecological Community El Jobo, Catemaco, Veracruz, Agriculture Urban Green Belt El Molino),

State organizations:
Baja California: MLN; Chihuahua MLN Chiapas OCEZ-MLN-MLN OPEZ, Union of Health Section 50 (Adrián Vázquez Rodríguez and Víctor Hugo Zavaleta), OCD AC (Moguel Santiago), Frente Popular de Chiapas Peasants, Farmers Union Totikez Anek (Ruly of Jesus Coello Gomez) Ontario: Ediciones del Poder Popular, Proclamation, Calpulli Tlatoani, Democracy Group Revolutionary New Revolutionary Left Movement Aztlan, Promoter of the CND, Neighborhood Assemblies Front Heberto Castillo (FAVHECA), Durango: Citizen Defense Committee of the Region Lagunera, Obrero Popular Coordinating Council, State of Mexico: Prof. Prof. Pedro Ramirez and Jose Figueroa Gonzalez (Democratic Teachers Valley-Section 36 SNTE-CNTE Mexico), Committee for the Defense of the Colonies ( Tultitlan) UVVAC (County Romero Rubio), Guerrero: MLN, State Transportation Union, AC (Chairman: Segueda Apolinar Dorantes), Dr. Paul, Jalisco: Jalisco Magisterial Democratic Bases (Francisco Montero), Council of Health Advocacy Jalisco (Dr. Alberto Reyes), State Coordinator of Urban Popular Movement of Jalisco (Mario Brown and architect Antonio Orozco); Morelos: Prof. Jose Basurto F., Saul M. Roque (Community of Xoxocotla), Guadeloupe Zayago (Community Alpuyeca), Proclamation, Nayarit: MLN, Aztlan Teocalli People’s Organization (Martin Ulloa Benitez), José Manuel Ulloa Bonilla, Martin Perez Castaneda Leopoldo Mora Iglesias, Nayarit Mexican Socialist Party ( Cuthbert Ortiz Mariscal), Nayarit Students Federation (Chairman: Jorge Armando Ortiz), Union of Independent Colonies Nayarit (Martha Isela Gonzalez Tirado), Oaxaca: OOCEZ-MLN Puebla UPVA Oct. 28; Jorge Amaya, Norberto Amaya, Humberto Sotelo, and Filomeno Gutierrez (UNyR, Puebla State Coordination), Gloria Hernandez (Popular Democratic Union Colony of Puebla); Commission Policy Watch Collective Carrillo Puerto (San Pedro Cholula), San Luis Potosi: Miguel Angel Guzman (FPFV) Martin Garay (Front Potosino Producers), Sebastian de la Cruz (traditional Governor Xi-iuy), Maximino Hernandez (traditional Governor Tenek); Sinaloa: Oscar Loza Ochoa (Ruler of Culiacan and human rights defender), Sonora: Jorge Rountree Cons (Secretary of Foreign Affairs of staus), Rosa Maria Oleary Franco, Javier Valenzuela, Monica Soto Elizaga (Citizens for Democratic Change), Salvador Hernández Hernández, Dorothea Razcón Gamez (Secretary General, STEUS), Cuauhtemoc Mists Cota (Secretary of Foreign Foreign STEUS), Antonio Garcia Morales, Jesús Martínez Soto, Arturo Figueroa Saucedo, Rafael Trujano Fco Fermoso, Salvador Hernandez Hernandez, Ramon Valdez, Catalina Soto Cota, (Ombudsmen at the University of Sonora); Tlaxcala Tlaxcala environmental group, People’s Front in Defense of Land and Water Puebla-Tlaxcala (Region Malinche), Global Eco Art AC (See Tlaxcala / International), Veracruz: Antonio Santos, Jose Antonio Leon Mendivil, José Juan Ríos, Carlos Morales, Jose Luis Morales, Luis Miguel Lopez-Mena, (journalist), Hipolito Flores Alonso (dismissed from the former ICVF) Marisa Fernández Pérez (Xalapa), Alicia Castillo Diaz (Zoncuantla-Coatepec), Alvaro Brizuela Absalom (Xalapa); Zacatecas Social Front for Popular Sovereignty (FSSP), Executive Coordination: Mirna E. Puch Ceballos, Efrain Arteaga Domínguez, Gregorio Sandoval Flores, Jose Luis Figueroa Rangel, José Santos Cervantes. FSSP member organizations: Federation of Unions of Workers in State Service (FSTSE), Section 46 of the Telephone Workers Union of the Mexican Republic (STRM), Section 34 of SNTE-CNTE; Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de la UTEZ (SUTUTEZ) ; Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores Academic CONALEP (SUTACZ) Single Union of Teachers and Administrative COBAEZ (SUPDACOBAEZ) Workers of the UAZ (STUAZ) Democratic Teachers Coordinator of Zacatecas, Sec. 58 Workers Union CECyTEZ (STCECyTEZyEMSAD) Workers CECyTEZ Confidence (SITCOCECyTEZ) Sections 95, 201 and 166 of the National Union of Miners, Metallurgical and Similar Mexico (SNTMMySRM), Section 59 of the Union National Workers SEMARNAT (SNTSEMARNAT), Section 29 of the National Union of Social Security (SNTSS) National Association of Manufacturers Traders del Campo (ANEC) Revolutionary Labor Movement (MSR), Frente Nacional de Organizaciones Braceroproa AC, Asociación Civil “May 5, Guadalupe and Zacatecas Civic Solidarity Zacatecana, A. C.; Association National Policy Congress (NPC) New Democracy; Promoter for National Unity Against Neoliberalism (PUNCN) Collective and workers of the other culture; Federation of Social Organizations of the State of Zacatecas Forward Movement for Democracy (FOSEZ ); Barzon Zacatecas Popular Front for the Struggle of Zacatecas-Plan de Ayala National Coordinating Committee (FPLZ-CNPA), Youth for Socialism (JPS) Citizens Alliance for Urban and Rural Communities, A. C. (ACCURA, AC); Integrative Bean Growers State; Comercializadora “Alfonso Medina” SPR RI; EISA; Link to Camp RI SPR; The SPR Ejidos RI; Cowboys SPR The Cook RI; Tianguis La Campesina; Section 32 of the National Union of Workers in Adult Education (SNTE).
Signatures solidarity: Manuel Talens, writer (Spain), MEPLA: Luis Acevedo Fals, Film, Beatriz Muñoz Chan, Art History, Vivian Tabares Hechevarria, Secretary, Daylet Acevedo Perez, Editor, Ledys Corvea Perez, Photographer (Cuba), Percy Francisco Alvarado Godoy (Guatemalan writer)
Email: [revocacionmandato][@][gmail][.][com]

From Narco News

—

IN THIS WEEK’S News With Nezua, I touch on Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s latest move of cutting off half a million peoples’ power (and thus their wells and water) due to the municipality being delinquent on bills. This story winds down deep into the fabric of Mexican politics and power struggles.

Pobre México is fighting to stay solvent, as the economic downturn of course, has a passport, and crosses the border all day, both ways. And with FeCal at the helm, well. His idea of change was an onslaught of failed drug war (an estimated 16,500 corpses stacked up at FeCal’s door now) that the USA is still helping to fund via the Mérida Initiative that Bush brokered. Ugh.

Pobre México. Tan lejos de dios, y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.

—Porfirio Díaz

Here is, at first glance, a fleeting fragment of news from October, wherein FeCal opted not to close Luz y Fuerza, México’s second-largest power utility.

• Mexico Ministry Rules Out Creating New State Power Company

“Mexico decided it won’t create a new state power company to replace Luz y Fuerza del Centro, the Energy Ministry said. … President Felipe Calderon ordered on Oct. 11 the liquidation of Luz y Fuerza, the nation’s second-largest power supplier, firing more than 40,000 electricity workers. The decree was because the company’s finances were “unsustainable” amid mounting losses, he said.”

The thing is, in the US when we read news in English language on typical US news sites (like above) we almost always get FeCal’s desired spin, or I should say the government’s point of view only. And FeCal and his crew are not El Voz de la Gente, bleeve that.

Note that in this article, it claims FeCal was going to close Luz y Fuerza for rather dry reasons. “Unsustainable” and all that. Sure. Just fire FORTY THOUSAND WORKERS, another day in the life, move along. There’s more to this story, have no doubt.

If you have been following Mexican news at all, FeCal (a not so nice name for Felipe Calderón) was—to oversimplify a bit, as I am here overall—their George W. Bush. In fact, Felipe Calderón stole the presidential election with the help of some of the same players who helped Bush. I know all this should have links, but if you go to El Grito (I’m running around this morning, have errands, tiny break in video production schedule) and search for these people and you will find it all. Many hours spent on those stories back then.

Manuel Lopez Obradór was running as (and I do think he is far more of this camp than FeCal) Mister Downtrodden, Mister Para la Gente. Mister Left. While FeCal was and is Mister “Let’s Be Like the USA,” working with the Bush admin. He is Mister “Let’s Do All They Want Us To, Let’s Militarize This Joint, Let’s Wiretap, Let’s Bring on a Drug War.” And of course, that’s why he was given the presidency, and why the US GOP GOV would surely cheer it on. (Although Obama is fully committed to funding Mérida, even past its expiration date which really, really, really angers me with his adminstration.)

It’s unfortunate to me that the US is so very in the dark on all Mexico’s politics…because truth is, we better know this stuff. It’s all affecting us, all the time. And the relationship between the US and MX has so much history. And the media and governments actually use the language barrier and the apathy that dwells north of the Rio Bravo to the advantage of the elites and to the people’s detriment.

Anyway. I hope to help bridge this gap a tiny bit myself, and my plans are to become far more effective at it in time. It will take time, and it will take many of us. For now, I can offer you the bare outline of  some of these shapes, and if you like you can research and find out more.

Mexican Electrical Workers Union members protest the summary firing of 44,000 members. Photo: La Jornada

There’s history and politics, of course, behind what is going on with the power plants in Mexico. And in general, North and South of the border, you and I need to keep an eye on the plight of workers and the unions. That (and the media) is where the people’s power lies. And that’s where oppressive power cracks down hard. (Peep the body count that journalism produces in war zones.)

Things aren’t as cut and dry with the Luz y Fuerza story as bloomberg.com would have you believe. As one could learn in the Narcosphere:

In the middle of the night last Saturday, President Felipe Calderon sent six thousand soldiers and militarized Federal Police to take over state power company Luz y Fuerza installations in Mexico City and the states of Mexico, Puebla, Morelos, and Hidalgo.  Immediately following the takeover, Calderon issued an executive order closing Luz y Fuerza.  Because no law or decree can go into effect until it is published in the federal government’s Official Diary of the Federation, the government published the executive order in a special edition of the Official Diary of the Federation to coincide with the military and police raids that closed Luz y Fuerza.

Federal Police occupy a Luz y Fuerza building. Photo: La Jornada

Mexican legal experts have criticized Calderon’s action as illegal, unconstitutional, and “an excessive and abusive use of power” because he by-passed Congress when he decided to close Luz y Fuerza and deploy the military and police against workers.

The government’s official justification for closing Luz y Fuerza is that the company’s operating expenses exceed those of other state-owned companies.  It claims its use of the military and militarized federal police was a pre-emptive strike: it wanted to prevent workers from striking, taking control of the facilities, and cutting off power in protest of the closing of Luz y Fuerza.  However, a week prior to the police and military takeover, the union specifically stated in a press release that it had no intentions of striking nor cutting off power to electricity customers.

Jose Hernandez, a leader of the Mexican Union of Electricity workers (SME)

As little as I know about Mexican politics and media, once you find one spot of corruption, you will find more. And they all magically seem to connect the more you read. Even these recent events, and the arc of Mexican right wing politics since FeCal stole the office.

…[I]n Mexico, we have an ultra-right national government. Formally its considered Christian democratic, but its lead by the extreme right group, el Yunque. This group is anti-communist and well linked to the right wing groups of the Catholic Church. They’re committed to the privatisation of the energy sector, of electricity and oil and last year they wanted to pass reforms to privatise the oil, but they didn’t achieve it because of a large national mobilisation.”

“These mobilisations were lead by Manuel Obrador, who’s a leader of the PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party) and from the most nationalist and progressive section of this party. He also ran in the 2006 elections, in which all most all studies say there was fraud. Calderon won by 0.56%. Despite large mobilisations we couldn’t overturn the fraud.”

“So this right wing government aims to deepen what they call the structural reforms, reform the work law to allow for flexibility of the working day, for unstable work, for sub-contracted labour, and the biggest obstacle to be able to pass these reforms is the SME.”

—Jose Hernandez, a leader of the Mexican Union of Electricity workers (SME)

The Mexican Union of Electricity Workers (SME) is almost 100 years old, known for being very independent of the MX government, and democratic in nature. This is a rarity in México, as most unions are corrupt and inextricably linked with the government. SME  won the right to retirement for workers in 1936 through strikes, which was a huge strengthening of the working class. And most importantly, SME works out of Luz y Fuerza. As we can see, like Lopez Obradór, SME is aligned with the People, and not with Big Business or Iron-Fisted Gobierno, and thus is an enemy to the FeCal administration.

And so Felipe Calderón and his forces have been doing all they can to destroy Luz y Fuerza, and take down SME with it. But this predates even FeCal, and is a long running motion recognizable in many nations, when the richest and most powerful suck upon the necks of the  poorest and most vulnerable.

“The government has been trying to destroy the SME for 20 years, they’ve been investing in the CFE, in modernising it, and not in Luces y Fuerzas. So now Luces y Fuerzas seems like an inefficient company and its equipment is ancient and it needs a lot of maintenance to work. The government effectively took away its ability to generate electricity, and now it’s buying 98% of it its electricity from CFE.”

“And the government designed a system of accounting to make it seem like Luces y Fuerzas was going bankrupt.” …

And of course, this isn’t just about electricity, though the power utilities are surely a massive force to control. The government of Mexico is looking ahead. This is yet one more strike against the people—and we are mostly talking the indigenous in México, the poor, because this won’t hurt most of the expats or the ones cashing in—and a strike for the illusion that Mexico can become a “first world country” if it just keeps erecting hotels, strengthening the military, and crushing the poor.

“Another reason why the government wants to privatise Luces y Fuerzas and destroy our union is because of the possibility of further profit. With the new technology the power lines and cables can also be used to transmit images, voice, and information- that is, television, internet and phone. It’s a bigger business than electricity. The union has proposed that Luces y Fuerzas provide those services, without any concessions to private companies, which is what the government wants.”

“It shows the irrationality of capitalism, these things could be provided free to society, but they want to privatise it all to make money.”

So you see, it wasn’t just that the Mexican President decided, oh, that finances weren’t quite working out so they laid off a few people. This isn’t about a steward of the nation making wise decisions about safeguarding the People’s interest, no not at all! This is about greed, corporate and state hunger, and the People’s needs aren’t even in the picture.

Police occupy Luz Y Fuerza. Photo: El Pais

And that’s why it’s so important to keep our eyes on the unions and the strikes and the workers.

“The first thing we did in response was to mobilise; on 16 October there were nearly 500,000 people; unionists from various unions, students, Obrador’s movement, farmers- that is, the people mobilised, and despite the huge media campaign attacking the SME, saying we are corrupt, we’re lazy.”

“And in the legal terrain, we’ve been fighting as well, seeking legal protection before the actions of the government.”

And that’s one thing Mexicanos sure are good at. Standing up for their rights. Let’s hope they prevail, because for such injustices to sweep down and grab la gente by the neck and so close to us and without our help is a failure of activism and people power. If borders did not wall off humanity to sections of our brain, the People would have all the rights and powers that would help the world thrive. I’ll type that one more time because it’s so important.

If we did not use “the border” concept to separate in our imagination who is a friend, who is an enemy, who is “US” who is “THEM,” who is a resource, and who is in need, there would be no state power or army that could continue to make us toil and die for the continued power and wealth of the very few who are on top of this global pyramid.

It begins in the mind. Those who would rail against migration, against natural flow of river and human, who would deprive fellow humans of healing and medicine when they need it, who would insist on fences and walls and guns and prisons for those ousted by economic needs…when it is those very pieces of machinery that we are being penned into suffering with…today’s “immigration restrictionists” are members or affiliates of hate, they are distracted, they are simply tools of the same forces who delight in having us at each others’ necks while we are all exploited and robbed.

Here in the US, we see more and more laws being instituted that penalize the poor, that oust the homeless, that ticket those who feed them. And in México, half a million people in Ecatepec have had their wells shut off.

Where is our real fight? With people of different skin tones? With people who use different word sounds to express their dreams, their pain, their hope, their hunger?

Or with those who move hugely and cloaked over with flag and legal document, drawing blood worldwide and siphoning away oil, monies, and the very water that we need to live?

©NYTimes Photo

YESTERDAY, President Obama met with Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and México’s FeCal to make a show of talking about issues that affect the continent. It was a damn informal evening chillout and half a day of actual schedule the next day. Please. If we are to believe the press releases and quotes?

Then:

a) The torrent of human rights abuses that the Mexican military and army are perpetrating on citizens in the free-for-all atmosphere that descends when you set a massive gang against its own populace, some of which are very happy to live well on the backs of a criminalized drug war approach—is not occurring and

b) Even though the US backs the violence to this day—almost 900 dead last month and over 13,000 overall since 2006!!—and refuses anyone from México seeking asylum as they flee that violence, we are to believe that the rising number of sanctuary seekers being turned now from Canada’s border due to increased requirements just enacted are “fraudulent” cases and thus….

Who bears the brunt? Who owns up to this? I mean…México is waging WAR on itself. Or, actually, Felipe Calderón is waging the war. Midterm elections in México made clear that there was no visible support for the continuation of his outdated Drug War model.

Why would there be? Troops occupy the entire nation! Reported cases of human rights violations unleashed by the Army include “killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions.” [pdf report]. Terror.

Foto © Harvard U

In another example from August 2007, five soldiers detained a man, held him incommunicado in military installations for over 24 hours, beat and kicked him, placed a cloth bag on his head, tied his arms and feet, poured water on his face while they hit his abdomen, and applied electric shocks to his stomach. A federal prosecutor requested that a military prosecutor investigate the case. Despite the existence of medical exams documenting the torture, the military closed its investigation, determining it did not find evidence that the soldiers had committed a crime.

—Mexico: Hold Military to Account on Rights Abuses

And while we are talking about the corrupt forces whom the US GOVT (and our hard earned taxes!) are funding, I wonder who shot dead an attorney who was proving pretty good at defending drug traffickers?

People in México are running away from the poverty and violence unleashed in their beautiful country! They cannot escape it. The US believes in a wall to keep them there! Canada puts a host of paper walls up! This too, after the treaties created by these three nations have helped destroy the livelihoods of so many Mexicanos; a livelihood as ancient as many of the stone artifacts in her museums.

Foto ©Xinhuanet

Where do the people go? And who looks at this morally?

Forget morals. It’s like a dirty word to people in politics, I’ve found. They start calling you “pious” and negating your words or trying. But you cannot negate the plain truth. Or you negate humanity. And thus you negate your own soul. If that’s “pious,” deal with it.

Let’s look at this practically, then. Unless I am mistaken, organized crime was given foothold and opportunity by Prohibition, no? Forget a link, this is common sense! If you make a product illegal that most people using are not going to give up, then YOU have created a HUGE market for that product. Period. A market for commerce and a market for violence.

Watch smart people do it right in Portugal: rather than press on like a nutso boar on a wild rampage and deaf and blind to all evidence, Portugal has decriminalized drugs, and there is simply no denying the success of that move.

Just as there is no denying the abject failure of the current model. The deaths and the loss of the Mexican people’s support should be enough to make that clear. The drug trade goes on, even in prisons, if one needs another sign. But of course it does. Jail sales of drugs and contraband are a sub-economy for a subculture. There is no way to eliminate drugs and the selling of drugs in a house of convicted criminals who are made every day to feel dangerous and shamed and deprived of mobility or self empowerment but in a few narrow ways! These remain, after all, human beings.

We know the Drug War model doesn’t work. We know that. We know 13,000 bodies are not worth the “successes” traded. For there are none that we see. Support even in the US mainstream has been faltering—it’s very hard to ignore over ten thousand corpses stacking up at such a rate. Yet, the President uses his charisma and pulpit to assure us all that everything’s goin’ just fine.

So what is the goal? Either the government is run by absolute idiots who don’t know how to interpret studies and history, or there is a different goal than what they claim out loud. (I’d choose this one.)

Senator Leahy puts on his own show, acknowledging the human rights abuses by putting a hold on $100 mil of the aid that the US gives to MX for the Mérida initiative for México’s onslaught of weaponry, surveillance, and terror. More theater. Mexican state officials claim they need listen to nobody about human rights, certainly not the US.

While American shops are arming the cartels, the lawmakers said, they have no right to judge the Mexican army for fighting back. “We can never agree with a foreign government unilaterally judging us in return for economic help to deal with a shared problem,” said Rep. Tomas Torres.

Obama admits in that article, too, that he cannot stem the tide of guns going South. Nope. Gun lobby is just too strong.

Foto ©Google/AP

Our “solution” is more money for more violence, for “US trained death squads.” More prisons. Making the backward analogy that this massacre blooming every day in Mexico is akin to the fight against the mafia in the US. Backward because if the US hadn’t tried to outlaw people’s right to alter their consciousness (via alcohol in that instance), the mafia as such would not have existed! In the false analogy lies the very solution to the problem, and the suit fumbling with the analogy—Alan Bersin, the Homeland Security Department’s “border czar”—can’t even grasp that?

Lack of intelligence set loose up on the world. Lack of morality tossing money bags across borders. Lack of conscience the rule of the day. But we still get smiley photo ops and the assurance that next year immigration reform will be a priority. Meanwhile, the corrections and detention industry grows larger and is offered as a solution, and the entire transnational squeeze on the People while the prison corporations and the governments profit on our suffering is enabled by many a pundit today who won’t step back enough to peep the entire scene, or is unwilling to connect the dots.

What the hell happened to the human race up in here? What on Earth gave us the idea that life was so difficult and beyond our means the only answer was to wage war on our own people for each and every social fluctuation or challenge? And damn, just who are these ghouls who smile and tell us everything is going fine as they eat up our tax money and roll it into bullets and barbed wire?

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What the US is now doing to México by way of NAFTA and the overwhelming of México’s  market by US-subsidized Agribusiness (gutting their farming-based/corn-based market and glutting it with our own products, while employing many of their citizens at substandard rates and in substandard health conditions in order to help our own economy and prepare/manufacture/sell our food) it does directly in other nations through coups and forced legislation, Nations that are further from our border, and thus beyond the radar of the average US citizen. For example, Haiti, where the US’s Wilsonian fantasies and greed and neoliberalism led long ago to the destruction of the rice farmer’s ability to sustain him/herself and are a direct prerequisite to the food crisis they are experiencing now. USGOV has long been sucking the lifeblood of much of Latin America, and in the case of Haiti, refuse to let go the neck.

We can go further and talk about the undeniable thirst for the Strategic Crescent, the oil-rich Middle East, the wars to gain footholds (bases and massive “city within a city” embassies being built in Iraq as well as Af-Pak + lest we forget the “reservoirs of oil” that Iraq is “floating” atop). The US economy is collapsing, the nation is heavily armed, but hollowed out at the heart, waving numb fingers, and with a belly soon to feel real hunger pangs. It is supporting itself by draining the lifeblood of other nations and peoples. This is happening on many levels.

The Empire, in yet another shape, sprawls and burps and bleeds and chews up humans as it moves into its final phases—the phases where it self-destructs as all Empires do, as all man-made power-suction gold-glory death machine-staircases to the halls of the Gods must always do when they forget their place in the overall family of creatures and balances. It isn’t pretty, it will get uglier, but we must be ready. Because the danger we are used to reading in books and seeing in movies, or hearing about happening in a faraway lands is crawling closer and closer to our front doors, and in more cases than many of us care to think about, has already woven its caustic threads into the tapestry of our small, ambitious lives.

Borders are illusions, and they are perhaps necessary to some degree in a world where spirit is somewhat bound by containers. But in many cases they are a deadly illusion behind which humanity chokes. The illusion is disconnection. The illusion is that our worth is greater on one side than en el otro lado. The illusion is Us and Them. The illusion is that we are in control of nature’s deepest rhythms.

How to wake ourselves up from these dreams that suffocate so many?

TODAY IS THE DAY of México’s midterm elections. While Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa is not on the ballot, his policies are under scrutiny. Support for or against the National Action Party (PAN), FeCal’s party, will be interpreted as approval or disapproval for his violence-heavy policies. Of course, that’s assuming the vote tallies are legitimate. For one thing, it’s expected that turnout will be low, and that could have a lot to do with the way the last vote went. As with George W. Bush’s “presidency,” many will simply never accept the validity of the controversial election results, and some of that group surely has lost belief in the process, altogether.

It’s far too much to try and weave all the backstory together here, but since El Grito, we’ve talked about these things. Even many times in my TMC posts I’ve come back to them. But come on, we need to. The body count under FeCal’s “crackdown on the cartels” stylie is over 10,000 now! This is one of those cures that kills the patient.

Unsurprisingly, this latest outgrowth of the “War on Drugs” is much applauded by US powers, from our President to CNN—which describes the weave of systems and families that benefit from the drug trade as “cartels that have taken hold of Mexico, spreading corruption, fear and violence to all corners of the nation.” You could say the same for the police or military forces, though.

Fact is, too many make a living fighting those who make a living off of drugs…which is only possible due to the harsh criminalizing stance both the US as well as México have on drugs in the first place. It’s an outdated stance that harms many humans. Encouragingly, it seems people are beginning to act to change this.

Will the vote today reflect the awareness of the People, or the will of the global Oligarchy? Will anyone believe the results? Does the vote even matter?

IT LOOKS LIKE Mexican law is about to undergo a huge shift.

In what experts say is nothing short of a revolution, Mexico is gradually abandoning its centuries-old Napoleonic system of closed-door, written inquisitions — largely a legacy of Spanish colonial rule — that had long been criticized as rife with corruption, opaque decisions, abuse of defendants and red tape that bogged down cases for years.

—Mexican Prosecutors Train in U.S. for a Legal Shift

In the US, the idea is that we are innocent until proven guilty. Of course many of us are aware it doesn’t exactly always work this way , especially with the way more and more police use Tasers to lash back against anything that so much as bruises their own self-esteem (Amnesty International lists 351 deaths this year from use of the “non-lethal” weapons the majority of which are fired before a trial can determine one’s guilt!) But for the most part, this is how it is supposed to work. Not so in Mexico. Though the idea is this is going to change. Plea bargains, probation, trials open to the public, and greater use of forensics will now become a part of the legal process.

I can only imagine this is a very positive step, and a long time coming. While Spain and her language and architecture y la sangre still runs strong and always will, through the veins of Mexico and much of her children, I think we can all do without Inquisition-flavored behavior (ahem).

LA SANTA MUERTE is threatening Jesus Christ. And she don’t mess. Those who champion Mister Christ are lashing back. Or perhaps we might say the Mexican Oligarchy is acting like terrorists and destroying symbols that are dear to groups of people who frustrate them. However you word it, the People are under seige on more than one front.

I’ve written a few things here about Felipe Calderón (FeCal) and his misguided US-prompted War on the Cartels. That’s a very big story, with a lot of capillaries that run off of it and touch other parts of the world and México’s history, too. And there are many points of view one can travel while mapping those histories. For now, let’s take one branch down Nuevo Laredo way.

President Felipe Calderon has launched an army assault on Mexico’s drug gangs, but the increased firepower has failed to contain the violence, with some 6,300 people killed last year.

In 2007, gunmen from the powerful Gulf Cartel handcuffed three men and shot them dead at a Santa Muerte altar in Nuevo Laredo, leaving lit candles, flowers and a taunting message for rivals.

Ah, La Santa Muerte. She is the refuge for those who are judged everywhere else and find no shelter until they find her. She is a favorite of Narcos, and many others who live on the margins of society, you see.

For decades, thousands in some of Mexico’s poorest neighborhoods have prayed to Santa Muerte for life-saving miracles. Or death to enemies. Mexican authorities have linked Santa Muerte’s devotees to prostitution, drugs, kidnappings and homicides.

“Linked” her? Interesting. Fingerprints? DNA? Is she peeking out from the background of crime scene polaroids? Forgive me, just seemed an odd phrase.

We know she will have many enemies when her disciples are these sorts of people. And as she promises to love them all equally—quite Christlike of her—she is dearly revered by them.

Either way, the Mexican army has launched an offensive against this icon, bulldozing 30 shrines built to Santa Muerte in Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana just last month. What was their excuse for this sacrilege? Apparently they were “built without the proper licenses.”

But wait, is it really sacrilege? Nope. Turns out bulldozing or otherwise smashing to pieces the shrines dedicated to Santa Muerte is not only State-sanctioned, but Church-sanctioned, too. After all, Doña Sebastiana (or Lady Sebastienne) is an offense against the very idea that Christ was resurrected. She is, the Catholic Church will tell you, a pagan figure, and officially has condemned any observance of La Santisima Muerte (The Most Holy Death) as “devil worship.”

That’s pretty strong. But when it comes to México, and when the Catholic Church begins condemning pagan icons in México, we do have to remember that this is how the very first holy oppressors appeared to the Indians back in the early 1500s. With a GOD that demanded their other gods die, and the destruction of their written histories…and so on.

Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec God of Death. Some connect Mictlantecuhtli to La Santa Muerte

Clearly, those demands and that destruction has not stopped. And apparently, the people are still not subjugated to a conquest begun almost 500 years ago. Which is why this post is in a category called “The Long War on the Indigenous.”

Santa Muerte’s precise origins are a matter of debate. Some experts say its roots lie with Aztec spiritual rituals that mixed with Catholicism during Spanish colonial rule. What is clear, however, is that Santa Muerte developed a large following only in the last quarter century among Mexicans who had become disillusioned with the dominant Church and, in particular, the ability of established Catholic saints to deliver them from poverty. Residents of crime-tossed neighborhoods like Mexico City’s Tepito began revering Santa Muerte more than Jesus Christ, experts say. Some of its devotees eventually split from the Catholic church and began vying for control of Catholic buildings. That’s when Mexico’s Catholic church declared it a cult.

—Santa Muerte: The New God in Town, Time

And so the particulars are a little clearer. If your idol has let you down, and in the face of that, demands too much in hard times you create another idol in your own image. One that only asks for devotion and judges not.

“All you have to do is believe and ask and she delivers,” Sanchez said. “The Santa Muerte does not discriminate.”

As La Santa Muerte requires no middle man to collect her tithing and better yet, delivers on the prayers sent her way, she begins to replace the former idol. And you and I know this will never do. Dios Mio! Was the Inquisition for nothing, then???

Yet another instance today where huge entrenched powers see their grip slipping away as the People take it on themselves to remedy longstanding ills. It is still not in these entrenched powers’ interest to cure the People’s ails at their core, but instead to patch them over or repress them and continue to shore up their own power with flimsy lines justifying the oppression. This behavior is wreaking untold damage from the US to Somalia and I’m sure in many, many other places. These are patterns that repeat.

“It isn’t fair to repress our faith just because there are some narcos who believe in La Santisima too,” Isidro Pastrana, a middle-aged cook and cross-dresser, said as he walked along with a papier-mache scythe in his hand. “Our faith is much bigger than them.”

More numerous than drug lords and other underworld operators are the devotees drawn from the vast numbers of Mexicans living on the edge of personal disaster and on the fringes of legality. They ask the Santa Muerte for protection and for favours, at least in part, because they have no faith in the institutions around them.

Men such as Sergio Hernandez, a 24-year-old toilet cleaner, who insists he was falsely accused of car stealing last year, but doesn’t believe his innocence has anything to do with the freedom he enjoys today.

He recalled during the Palm Sunday march: “I really thought I was going to have to spend a few years in prison, but I appealed to the holy Santa Muerte and when the verdict came they let me go. These are the kind of things that really make you believe in her.”

—Mexican ‘Saint Death’ cult members protest at destruction of shrines

Of course, in reaction to the desecration of La Santa Muerte’s capillas, Mexicanos are taking to the streets in number. That’s just the way la gente roll.

Worshipers of the cult figure plan to march through Mexico City later on Good Friday in the latest of a series of protests after soldiers and police bulldozed elaborate roadside shrines to the death saint near the northern border with Texas. …

“We are doing these marches because there has been a lot of aggression from the government … It seems like they are fighting a holy war,” said 52-year-old vendor Ernesto Hernandez at a protest last week.

Mmmhm.

by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger

A grafik made in 2007 for an older post, resurrected here for this special purpose

In 2008, a disturbing trend developed in mainstream media regarding Mexico. While Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón began his aggression against the Cartels roughly two years ago, the resulting uptick in violence was of no real interest to mainstream media. But when the U.S. Joint Forces Command report Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008) was issued in November, 2008, and declared Mexico and Pakistan nations in danger of a “rapid and sudden collapse,” mainstream news outlets and certain politicians began broadcasting fears of violence spilling over into the US.

Coverage quickly snowballed into a cycle of reporting grounded in unsubstantiated fear, which led to calls to further militarize the border. Democracy Now! highlights how President Obama’s readiness to deploy the National Guard to the border is directly linked to the sensationalized mainstream coverage. In an interview with host Amy Goodman, Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program for the Center for International Policy, says:

When we started to look at some of these articles talking about spillover of Mexican violence into the United States, what we found is that there’s no evidence of that whatsoever at this point. … In the case of using statistics, like there’s a lot of talk about the number of kidnappings in Phoenix, it turns out that many times those statistics are spurious, and they have no backup. They’ve been invented, or they’ve been twisted in many cases.

This is a real warning sign for us, because when we see an exaggerated threat assessment, as we’re seeing right now in terms of spillover of Mexican violence to the United States, it’s generally a prelude to militarization.

And it is: Truthdig reports on “a crime-fighting operation targeting Mexican drug cartels on a scale not seen since the battles against the US mafia” in F.B.I. Runs for the Border.

The War on Drugs has returned, via aid/force packages like Plan Mérida that simply recycle failed plans (like Plan Colombia). Under increased militarization, drug production actually goes up, as does the body count, but the seizure of drugs decreases.

In the interests of full disclosure, the increasing exploitation of the Mexican people and militarization of border towns like Ciudad Juarez and El Paso—my father’s birthplace—affect me on a deeply personal level. My father was the first of Herreras in my family to be born here. I am a citizen. He makes sure to remind me that my abuela (grandmother) gained her green card legally. I read of harm done to people like my grandmother—legal and undocumented and citizens alike—in jails teeming with neglect and hatred and it disturbs me. Immigration must be discussed as a human, not military issue.

In the below video from GritTV, Rosa Clemente, Immigration Campaign Director for Amnesty International USA, talks about the lack of response from the Obama Administration on immigration, even though ICE is predicting 400,000 arrests in 2009 and our 2009 budget allots 6.1 billion to the construction of new prisons. How many of those prisons will be detention centers?

Opponents of immigration reform (who are often opponents of immigrants themselves) often imply that they really do adore legal immigrants. Joshua Holland makes it clear how very tenuous that line is in AlterNet’s I Married an Illegal Immigrant. Holland writes that “the difference between legal and illegal is often a matter of simple chronology rather than a reflection of the character of the person in question.”

Disguising undocumented “aliens” as an unwanted, criminal horde, rather than productive members of our own society runs counter to American ideals of freedom and equality. It becomes easier to simply lock down the border and take a harsher stance, even if many of those who migrate were displaced by our own government’s actions in the first place.

The Drug War model is a failed method of dealing with immigration, even though Obama seems intent to resurrect it. Writing for The Progressive, Yolanda Chávez Leyva says:

For more than twenty years, those of us who live on the border have witnessed the increasing militarization of the border. The border wall is a daily reminder of this, as are the helicopters that fly over our neighborhoods, the checkpoints manned by the Border Patrol and local law enforcement, as well as the daily harassment of citizens who happen to have darker skin. We are frequently the target of various “wars” —against undocumented migration, against terrorism and now against drugs. I am tired of living in a war zone.

The model of “war” has not worked, and it will not work.

President Felipe Calderón—who Democracy Now! reports was elected in “the most controversial election in Mexican history”—is spoken of glowingly by our politicians, who are full of praise for his violence against the Cartels. Elena Shore details some of this language for New America Media.

Going back to Lauren Carlsen’s interview with Democracy Now!: “It’s completely unacceptable to ask a society to accept higher levels of violence as a sign that we are winning the drug war.” She’s right. We will never “win” the “drug war.” The body count is growing. More prisons are being built. People of color are the primary victims. And now, President Obama talks of sending the military down to meet Mexico’s military at the border. But what about the people caught in the middle? What about the people suffering in ICE’s custody today? What about the 400,000 more that ICE plans to capture in 2009?

We need better solutions than more guns and more soldiers. Militarization simply leads to more violence.

——————-

Also featured at The Sanctuary, Huffington Post,Talking Points Memo, Open Salon, DailyKos, MyDD, Open Left, FDL, Rabble.

[As usual, this edit on UMX may differ from the version published at the media consortium site and that which circulates on the above named outlets]

Gracias a America’s Voice

“WE HAVE TO HAVE COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM.” President Obama begins.

And after all this stalemate and silence, it’s a good, clear talk, finally, on the subject. Of course, Obama gives the nods to all the Enforcement-Junkies by being very clear that this is Not A Free Pass and there is talk of the Back of the Line and such (I hope he realizes that some of the people he’s trying to please don’t care if he says “it’s not instant amnesty or anything” cuz I have no doubt they started shrieking AAAAMNESTYYYY the moment he got six palabras into this piece). He subtly and indirectly (almost) slips in a point about himself, the POTUS, being an immigrant, as well as his aunt being one. (What’s the status on Auntie’s deportation process, anyway?)

His idea of multiple pressure points sounds intelligent and practical. I wonder how it will play out. It’s a big, sticky, inter-national agenda. But someone has to take it on sooner or later. We honestly can’t afford for things to get much worse in this area.

I do wish he’d talk a bit on the horrific conditions in detention as well as what the ICE raids are doing to communities. Sure, people cheer for “They will have to learn English” but would they cheer for “They have to be afforded the rights and protection against abuse and exploitation that we’d want our nation to show any human being”? I wonder.

If Obama locks this one down I suspect the GOP will be shut out of any sizable portion of the Latino/Hispanic vote for quite a while. And that has some pretty big implications, politically. Of course, that’s not really where my focus is in all of this. Though I sure would love to start posting on some positive news when it comes to immigrants, Mexican@s, detention centers, raids….

I also suspect that since now all can clealry see which way the winds are blowing, not only will more hesitant or previously “strategic” minded media sites feel safe in getting behind this more vocally (or at all), but so will we see more and more of these kinds of articles. (It’s a good one.)

It all helps.

(Full text of President Obama’s speech below)

THE PRESIDENT: I just met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus today, which Congresswoman Sanchez is a member of — (applause) — to talk about this issue directly. As many of you know, during the campaign I was asked repeatedly about this, and I reiterated my belief that we have to have comprehensive immigration reform.

Now, I know this is an emotional issue, I know it’s a controversial issue, I know that the people get real riled up politically about this, but — but ultimately, here’s what I believe: We are a nation of immigrants, number one.

Number two, we do have to have control of our borders. Number three, that people who have been here for a long time and put down roots here have to have some mechanism over time to get out of the shadows, because if they stay in the shadows, in the underground economy, then they are oftentimes pitted against American workers.

Since they can’t join a union, they can’t complain about minimum wages, et cetera, they end up being abused, and that depresses the wages of everybody, all Americans. (Applause.)

So I don’t think that we can do this piecemeal. I think what we have to do is to come together and say, we’re going to strengthen our borders — and I’m going to be going to Mexico, I’m going to be working with President Calderón in Mexico to figure out how do we get control over the border that’s become more violent because of the drug trade.

We have to combine that with cracking down on employers who are exploiting undocumented workers. (Applause.) We have to make sure that there’s a verification system to find out whether somebody is legally able to work here or not. But we have to make sure that that verification system does not discriminate just because you’ve got a Hispanic last name or your last name is Obama. (Laughter.)

You’ve got to — and then you’ve got to say to the undocumented workers, you have to say, look, you’ve broken the law; you didn’t come here the way you were supposed to. So this is not going to be a free ride. It’s not going to be some instant amnesty. What’s going to happen is you are going to pay a significant fine. You are going to learn English. (Applause.)

You are going to — you are going to go to the back of the line so that you don’t get ahead of somebody who was in Mexico City applying legally. (Applause.) But after you’ve done these things over a certain period of time you can earn your citizenship, so that it’s not — it’s not something that is guaranteed or automatic. You’ve got to earn it. But over time you give people an opportunity.

Now, it only works though if you do all the pieces. I think the American people, they appreciate and believe in immigration. But they can’t have a situation where you just have half a million people pouring over the border without any kind of mechanism to control it.

So we’ve got to deal with that at the same time as we deal in a humane fashion with folks who are putting down roots here, have become our neighbors, have become our friends, they may have children who are U.S. citizens. (Applause.) That’s the kind of comprehensive approach that we have to take. All right. Okay. (Applause.)