INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE & GOVERNANCE RECOVERY

Sunday, March 15, 2009

NEW WEBSITE: UNIDOS CONTRA EL MURO /\/\/\/\ UNITED AGAINST THE WALL




Eloisa Garcia Tamez signs banner of the people's protests that will travel to Washington D.C. with citizen delegation this week.

UNIDOS CONTRA EL MURO~UNITED AGAINST THE WALL LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE


Friday, March 13, 2009
Delegation to DC


CASA members continue united against the border wall, and during spring break, CASEROS will embark in a trip to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC to challenge the consciences of our elected officials, and policymakers. As members of CASA, we want to make sure that our elected officials hear our position against the border wall. There is a tremendous lack of political representation in our area, CASA members feel that our elected officials are not advocating for the interest of their constituents. They have heard the voices of the people who are opposing the border wall, but they have fail to listen to the concerns of the citizens.


--Elizabeth Garcia, CASA

Thursday, March 12, 2009

STILL BREAKING NEWS: NON-PROFIT SUES FEDS OVER BORDER FENCE

Published on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 by the Associated Press
Non-Profit Sues Feds Over Border Fence
by Christopher Sherman

McALLEN, Texas - A national consumer advocacy group sued the federal government Wednesday on behalf of a University of Texas law professor seeking documents about the planning of the border fence.

Public Citizen, the group founded by Ralph Nader, filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court in Washington against the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The suit alleges the agencies didn't comply with a request from the University of Texas Working Group on Human Rights and the Border Wall. Denise Gilman, a law professor and member of the group, used the Freedom of Information Act to request documents in April regarding the location of the fence segments and criteria used in determining its placement.

The lawsuit asks that the government provide the documents.

The government is nearing completion of 670 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. The project has met widespread opposition in South Texas, where segments will touch hundreds of private property owners and leave thousands of acres of farmland between the fence and the Rio Grande.

The Texas group has suggested the fence disproportionately impacted low-income minorities.

"Researchers have found statistically significant differences between the income and race of property owners whose land will be affected by the wall versus those whose land will remain unaffected," the lawsuit reads. "Affected property owners are, on average, less wealthy and include more people of color than property owners whose land will not be affected."

According to the lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security referred Gilman's request to Customs and Border Protection, which is overseeing the fence project.

That agency has provided a partial response to Gilman's request. The Army Corps of Engineers told Gilman that her request would incur copying costs of $54,545 and after appeals partially filled her request.

A Customs and Border Protection spokesman did not immediately return a call for comment.

"We sincerely hope that the Obama administration, which has pledged greater transparency and accountability in government, will release the requested documents so that informed debate and consultation regarding the border wall can take place before there is any further construction." Gilman said in a prepared statement.

© 2009 Associated Press

REPORT: NOW PUBLIC--CROWD POWERED MEDIA

Pentagon warns of US military intervention in Mexico’s drug war

Mexico drug gangs threaten cops on radio, kill them
TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican drug gangs near the U.S. border are breaking into police radio frequencies to issue chilling death threats to cops which they then carry out, demoralizing security forces in a worsening drug war. "You're next, bastard ... We're going to get you," an unidentified drug gang member said over the police radio in the city of Tijuana after naming a policeman.Robin Emmott
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51558E20090206Violence spills over into the US
Just as government officials had feared, the drug violence raging in Mexico is spilling over into the United States. U.S. authorities are reporting a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions connected to Mexico's murderous cartels. And to some policymakers' surprise, much of the violence is happening not in towns along the border, where it was assumed the bloodshed would spread, but a considerable distance away, in places such as Phoenix and Atlanta.ALICIA A. CALDWELL
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090209/ap_on_re_us/border_spillover_violenceEscalation, Escalation, Escalation.... something has to give (or be taken). -Seems to be playing out nicely.

GNN Reports: The United States Joint Forces Command issued a report last November to the effect that, in the very near future, Mexico is going to need the same kind of “help” as Pakistan.

USDFC Reports
The United States Joint Forces Command (USJFC), charged with anticipating global threats to US imperialism, issued a report last November entitled “Joint Operating Environment 2008 naming Pakistan and Mexico as the nations whose governments are most likely to undergo what it termed “rapid collapse.” This term goes largely undefined, beyond the assertion that it “usually comes as a surprise, has a rapid onset, and poses acute problems.”

Ominously, the study concludes: “Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.” The immense implications of this statement become clear when one considers that the USJFC—one of the nine branches of the Department of Defense—controls nearly all conventional military forces based in the continental United States—a force of 1.6 million.--Kevin Kearney

BREAKING NEWS: U.S. CONGRESS & OBAMA GEARING UP FOR TROOP DEPLOYMENT TO U.S.-MEXICO BORDER

OBAMA & U.S. COMMANDER DISCUSS MILITARY "INTERVENTION" IN MEXICO

Obama and US commander discuss military intervention in Mexicoby Bill Van Auken

Global Research, March 10, 2009
World Socialist Web Site

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen briefed President Barack Obama over the weekend on the so-called drug war in Mexico and the prospect of increased US military involvement in the conflict south of the border.

Mullen had just returned from a six-day tour of Latin America, which took him on his last and most important stop to Mexico City. There he held meetings with Mexico's secretary of national defense and other top military officials and discussed proposals for rushing increased US aid to Mexico under the auspices of Plan Merida, a three-year, $1.4 billion package designed to provide equipment, training and other assistance to the Mexican armed forces.

In a telephone press conference conducted as he returned from Mexico, Mullen said that the Pentagon was prepared to help the Mexican military employ the same tactics that US forces have applied in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US military, he said, was "sharing a lot of lessons we have learned, how we've developed similar capabilities over the last three or four years in our counterinsurgency efforts as we have fought terrorist networks." He added, "There are an awful lot of similarities."

With US backing, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has increasingly militarized the country, deploying tens of thousands of troops in areas ranging from Matamoros and Reynosa in the east to Tijuana, Guerrero, Michoacán and Sinaloa in the west.

On the eve of Mullen's visit, the Mexican military poured some 5,000 additional troops into Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, redoubling patrols by combat-equipped units and effectively sealing the city off with roadblocks. Some 2,500 troops had already been deployed in the city last spring.

He said that in his meetings with Mexican military officials he had discussed US aid focusing on "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance," or ISR in US military parlance.

He indicated that intelligence-sharing had already been implemented, but that "there are additional assets that could be brought to bear across the full ISR spectrum."

In the first instance, this could mean the deployment of US manned surveillance aircraft as well as unmanned drones over Mexican territory. It could likewise suggest the deployment of Special Forces units or military "contractors."

Mullen refused to answer when questioned whether unmanned drones had already been deployed over Ciudad Juarez and other Mexican cities.

According to an unnamed US military official cited by the Associated Press, the meeting between Mullen and Obama on Saturday focused on how to increase US military aid.

"Clearly one of the things the president was interested in was the US military capability that may or may not apply to our cooperation with the Mexicans," the official said. "He was very interested in what kind of military capabilities may be applied."

In a March 1 television interview, Defense Secretary Robert Gates sounded a similar note, praising Calderon for having "taken on the battle" against drug trafficking by deploying the army and claiming that the "old biases against cooperation" between Mexico and the Pentagon were "being set aside." As a result, Gates added, Washington was prepared to provide the Mexican military "with training, with resources, with reconnaissance and surveillance kinds of capabilities."

The indications of more direct US military involvement follow a growing chorus of official as well as media reports portraying Mexico as a potential "failed state" and a mounting threat to US national security.

In its annual report assessing global security threats, the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command lumped Mexico together with Pakistan as countries that "bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse." The document added a warning: "Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response, based on the serious implications for homeland security as well."

This was followed by a report released at the US Military Academy in January by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bill Clinton. Mexico, he wrote, is "fighting for survival against narco-terrorism" and required greater US intervention.

"The proposed US Government spending in support of the government of Mexico is a drop in the bucket compared to what we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan." McCaffrey continued. "Yet the stakes in Mexico are enormous. We cannot afford to have a narco-state as a neighbor."

In the media there has been a steady drumbeat of reports warning that the drug violence, which has claimed over 1,000 lives in Mexico so far this year, will inevitably spill across the border into US cities.

Obama's US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano echoed these warnings in an interview with PBS television last week. While acknowledging that there was no indication that such violence had crossed the border, she continued, "But let's be very, very clear. This is a very serious battle. It could spill over into the United States. If it does, we have contingency plans to deal with it."

What is deliberately obscured in all of these responses to the situation in Mexico, is that the decision of Calderon to pursue a militarized response to the longstanding and essentially socioeconomic problem of drug-trafficking, has everything to do with immense social tensions building up in the country as well as the political crisis of his own presidency, which a substantial portion of the population still sees as illegitimate following the disputed 2006 election.

These tensions have been immensely exacerbated by the onset of the world financial crisis, which has wiped out more than half a million jobs in Mexico since November—while driving large sections of manufacturing, and in particular the country's extensive auto assembly and parts production sector—into depression conditions. Last week, Volkswagen announced another 1,050 layoffs at its assembly plant in Puebla.

Meanwhile Ciudad Juarez, where the Mexican army is carrying out its current occupation, is also one of the main centers of the maquiladora industry, the assembly plants that exploit cheap Mexican labor in the production of consumer goods bound for the other side of the border. Layoffs have swept through many plants in the city, leaving large sections of the population desperate for work.

The official unemployment rate rose to 5 percent in January, from 4.32 percent the month before. This figure grossly underestimates the real situation, however, as it excludes the so-called informal sector, which accounts for 40 percent of the economy, and counts as employed anyone who works as little as an hour a week.

Last month, Mexico's telecom mogul Carlos Slim, counted as the second richest man in the world, warned that "unemployment will rise as we have never seen in our personal lives [and] companies small, medium and large will go bankrupt."

Meanwhile, the number of remittances sent by Mexican citizens working in the US fell by 20 percent between January 2008 and January 2009. This money sent home for the most part by poorly paid undocumented workers constitutes the second largest source of foreign exchange for the Mexican economy after oil exports. There is also a growing fear that many of the Mexican immigrants in the US, unable to find work, will begin returning home to find even worse prospects.

It is in this explosive context that Calderon's deployment of the military serves as a means of social control and repression.

The sending out of the army has resulted in a growing number of denunciations of severe human rights violations, with the military charged with crimes ranging from massacres to extra-judicial executions, torture, rapes and illegal detention. The government's own National Commission on Human Rights has reported receiving a total of 1,602 such complaints between January 2007 and December 2008.

One representative case took place in Ciudad Juarez in January with the military's abduction of Jaime Irigoyen. A 19-year-old law student at the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez and a varsity pitcher for the university's baseball team, he was dragged from his bed by uniformed soldiers as his family screamed in protest.

Later, as relatives protested outside the local military base, Irigoyen's blindfolded and gagged body was discovered dumped in the street. It is suspected that the abduction and execution was a case of mistaken identity, based on faulty intelligence obtained by means of torturing other suspects. Nonetheless, the military subsequently laid siege to the funeral home where Irigoyen's wake was held, searching the cars of mourners, blocking surrounding streets and arresting several of those in attendance.

It is under conditions of this type of ongoing military violence that the Obama administration and the Pentagon are now proposing to apply the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, while providing the hardware and advisors to prosecute a civil war against a restive working class south of the US border.

Bill Van Auken is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Bill Van Auken

Saturday, March 7, 2009

BREAKING NEWS: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ALONG TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER INVESTIGATE HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES

INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES ON THE TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER INVESTIGATING HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
Saturday, March 7, 2009, 9:57 a.m.

El Calaboz, TX, March 7. Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez, Lipan Apache, is talking with relatives and residents of the rancheria and collecting evidence related to her lands based upon reports from elder eyewitnesses who believe that the U.S. DHS/Contractors and U.S. Customs Border Patrol are encroaching upon the lands currently in dispute related to her legal case against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs Border Patrol and U.S. Army Corps Engineers to stop the construction of the Berlin-style wall on her ancestral lands. The construction of the wall, which now abuts Tamez' land, is clearly disturbing sensitive vegetation, wildlife, riparian, religious and cultural resources near, on and to the north of the levee. In a telephone communique this morning, Tamez indicated that she is documenting the possible violations against a standing court order which protects the lands in the area of dispute until her jury trial in June 2009. The land in question is situated within the International Boundary zone, which is governed by international customary law with related ties to indigenous international law. Tamez made telephone calls to the representative of the International Water and Boundary Commission numerous times on Friday. She attempted to communicate to IBWC officials of potential violations by contractors and to remind IBWC of the land-grant landowners' primary right-of-way in the dispute area. The IBWC failed to return her phone calls, nor has the IBWC provided a reasonable explanation as to why they have not processed her application to install a private property barrier across her section of the levee and riparian strip, an application which she filed more than nine months ago.

According to Tamez, the landowners of the original land grant have the first right of way to the land, resources, water and ecological and cultural resources. Tamez further insists that IBWC must consult land owners on all matters related to the levee and lands in question. According to Tamez, "the wall construction is now up to my property line on both sides--all the non-land grant peoples (those not descended from the original peoples) sold to the U.S. We're surrounded. By building the wall on the north side of the levee--literally at the foot of the levee--the U.S. reveals a rushed and forced process to spend the money Chertoff awarded to contractors. They built the footer right on top of the flood zone--putting the entire levee behind the wall and trampling over the property rights of land owners in litigation. When this weight dissolves the levee in a major storm, will they then ingress further? This is entirely out of hand. This is an outrage. They are encroaching upon my land and the impact is damaging. The Border Patrol units and the machines of the contractors are numerous; the high level of traffic in the area is intense. Not only is this harmful, it is dangerous. The levee is in no condition to hold this massive structure. It is obvious that this is about greed, payoffs and spending down the taxpayer's money in the final days of Chertoff's control. It appears that the new IBWC director (appointed by Bush after the sudden death of the former IBWC director, Carlos Marin) and the U.S. contractors made deals without consulting the land owners, nor did those of us-- in litigation against the construction of the wall-- receive prior notice or free and prior informed consent. By authorizing the construction of the wall on the north side of the levee, the IBWC is in violation of long-standing international laws, indigenous peoples' rights, human rights, and collective rights of indigenous peoples in El Calaboz. The customary laws of our community have protected lineal-descent land owners with Spanish land grant title."

El Polvo, Texas, March 7. Jumano-Apache community members are calling for an emergency investigation into widespread human rights violations targeting specific Jumano-Apache families by the U.S. Customs Border Patrol/I.C.E./DHS in the small community of El Polvo, situated on the banks of the Rio Grande River near the Big Bend National Park. A recent series of armed invasions by U.S. government personnel into the living spaces of noncombatant, unarmed Jumano-Apache communities have struck terror into parents, elders and children. Members of the Jumano-Apache community cite human rights violations stemming from forced displacement of rural indigenous families which they claim is a direct result of U.S. Customs Border Patrol abuses, threats, and armed assaults deployed against the quiet, rural village of traditional farmers in recent months. In the past year, numerous attempts by community members to resist Border Patrol violations of property rights, indigenous rights, community rights and human rights have been met with retaliatory measures in this community which is designated as one of the poorest in the United States, according the the 2008 U.S. Census. Eyewitnesses in El Polvo connect the violations experienced to intensified militarization of the Texas-Mexico border wall construction, the war on terror, the war on drugs and the war on migrant workers.
--Margo Tamez


Contact Eloisa G. Tamez (El Calaboz) at Eloisa.tamez1@gmail.com
and April Cotte (El Polvo) at acotte@igc.org
http://redfordtexas.blogspot.com/
lipanapachecommunitydefense.blogspot.com


Related Stories:

U.S. 'COUNTERINSURGENCY' 'AID' TO MEXICO

MEXICO SENDS TROOPS TO NORTHERN BORDER STATES/ (AFTER U.S. PROVIDES MONETARY & EQUIPMENT 'AID')