By Will Falk
I am searching for redemption
wishing for La Fonda beach to form
the sandy altar of my own Eucharist
an offering of the body and blood
the body and blood of me
by Will Falk
by Source
“Four years and we haven’t seen a single result.”
By D. Gutiérrez
Despite the rain, dozens of protestors assembled outside the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Saturday afternoon, March 1st. Representatives from multiple grassroots organizations, as well as professors, students, and concerned citizens gathered to voice their anger at the growing amount of deaths that have occurred at the hand of the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Family members of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas were also present to denounce the four years they have endured without any justice.
Anastasio Hernández Rojas was killed in 2010 while detained by Border Patrol and CBP agents. Videos surfaced some time later documenting the brutal death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas. Multiple government agents crowded around the handcuffed Hernan-dez to inflict bodily harm as another agent electrocuted him with a taser gun.
Despite compelling video, four years have passed and still no one was been punished for the crime. [Read more…]
by Source
By Southern Border Communities Coalition
Southern border communities continue to call for transparency from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after the Los Angeles Times published a story on a report critiquing the agency’s use of force policy. The story indicated that reporters have reviewed a copy of the Police Executive Review Forum’s (PERF) report, a document that has been withheld from the public.
The PERF Report – an independent review by the Police Executive Research Forum commissioned by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection — evidently says border agents deliberately provoked confrontations that led to avoidable violence.
“Today’s revealing information by the Los Angeles Times, while damning, is not shocking to southern border communities,” states Christian Ramírez, Director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC). [Read more…]
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By Dave Maass / Electronic Frontier Foundation
FBI agents arrested a Mexican tycoon named Jose Susumo Azano Matsura at his Coronado, Calif. home on Wednesday as part of a political bribery investigation based on captured emails, seized banking records, and covertly recorded conversations.
The unfolding scandal is soaked in irony: Azano is a surveillance evangelist whose company won a secret, no-bid contract with the Mexican military for computer and mobile phone hacking and spying technology in 2011. He is chairman of a company called Security Tracking Devices SA de CV, and he is now chained to a tracking device—on house arrest. [Read more…]
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Call for a Week of National and International Solidarity
By Jessica Davies / Upside Down World
Following recent events in Chiapas, the Network for Solidarity and against Repression has urged “adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, and every organization, collective, and honest person in Mexico and the world who, from your own places, extend your embrace to the dignified rage of the Zapatistas,” to participate in the Week of National and International Solidarity, “If they touch the Zapatistas, they touch all of us”, to be held from February 16 to 23, to “denounce the counterinsurgency war” and express that “the Zapatista communities are not alone.”
This call results from great concerns about recent events, denounced by the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center as: “the Chiapas government’s failure to prevent attacks on the support bases of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) from the 10 de Abril community,” leading to “an imminent possibility of new attacks and an intensification of the violence, which would be a risk to life and personal integrity, in addition to the violations of the right to territory and autonomy of the Zapatista peoples.” [Read more…]
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By David Martinez / Upside Down World
The papers on every news kiosk in Mexico City in late August, 2013, blared denunciations: “Imagine – Mexico Without Soccer!” screamed one newspaper. Pictures of crying children stuck outside of a stadium clutching the colors of their favorite team were plastered on the front page of another paper.
The target of the media’s ire was the National Coordinator of Education Workers, or CNTE, Mexico’s nationwide teachers’ union, who had the previous day shut down a soccer match by surrounding the stadium. For weeks, crowds of teachers had been disrupting anything they could in Mexico’s capital, including the massive Benito Juarez International Airport.
The teachers were out in force to protest against President Enrique Pena Nieto’s (or EPN’s) proposed changes to the country’s education system, political system, and petroleum. Named the “Pacto Por Mexico” (Pact For Mexico), an eerie echo of the U.S. Republican Party’s 1990’s “Contract With America”, these “reforms” were widely seen as blatant neoliberal attacks upon the Mexican body civic. [Read more…]
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“We are not paramilitaries, we are working people and we have helped to liberate our towns. The government or any cartel doesn’t support us.”
By Clayton Conn / Upside Down World
Over the past several weeks, the national and international press has been swarming in the Mexican state of Michoacán as armed clashes have erupted between members of the Knights Templar drug cartel, armed civilians, and security forces of the federal police and army in the region known as Tierra Caliente.
Much of the coverage depicts a scene where local townspeople, fed up by a decade of cartel threats, extortions, kidnappings, murders, along with corruption by municipal and state authorities, have taken up arms to restore security and peace in their communities.
However, some analysts suggest that the lines and intentions are much blurrier, with the state deliberately whacking the hornet’s nest to wrestle a stake in control over the flow of capital generated by criminal and illicit business ventures. [Read more…]
by Source
Use-of-Force Policies Called to Question as the Agency’s Culture of Violence is Unabashedly Taught to Children
By Ricardo Favela / San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium
Different images shared by an anonymous source and found online depict Border Patrol staff showing children of various ages how to use paintball guns to shoot at a target wearing clothing with the border fence in the background.
Pedro Ríos, Chair of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, states, “The target is dressed to resemble a migrant and is located within 100 feet from Virginia Avenue where actual persons have been killed by Border Patrol gunfire.”
Mr. Ríos continues, “While encouraging children to use guns to shoot at a migrant effigy is unconscionable, it is also symbolic of the agency’s unabashed culture of violence which has grown from a lack of accountability, oversight and unprofessional standards that rebuke best practices in situations involving use-of-force.” [Read more…]
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First Statement from the Self-Defense Group of Aquila, Michoacán
Today, the residents of the municipal seat of Aquila, tired of the extortions, rapes, killings, kidnappings and all sorts of criminal acts committed by the Knights Templar; given the complete abandonment of the citizenry by the municipal and state governments who for 12 years did not provide the security needed for our people to have a peaceful and dignified life; we have decided to organize our self-defense group in order to expel organized crime from our town, and we invite the rest of the people of the municipality to rise up against crime, so they never again feel fear or pay protection fees. [Read more…]
by Doug Porter
By Doug Porter
The big story today concerns the dark side of campaign finance. Acomplaint unsealed in federal court yesterday indicates that law enforcement agencies are building a case around illegal contributions made by Mexican businessman Susumo Azano to candidates in recent San Diego elections.
Ravi Singh, owner of ElectionMall Inc., and retired SDPD detective Ernesto Encinas have alreday been charged with conspiring to funnel more than $500,000 of illegal contributions to various campaign committees during 2012 and 2013. The candidates’ names are redacted in the federal complaint, which refers to them as c1, c2,c3,and c4.
Campaign finance records and inside sources talking to reporters at UT-San Diego indicate the monies went to PACs working to support District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis’ mayoral run, former Mayor Bob Filner and former Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher. One candidate, who ran for federal office in 2012, remains unidentified. [Read more…]
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Mari’s story is harrowing and heartbreaking, but hardly unique.
By Brooke Binkowski
This week, I visited a home in Tijuana for young girls who have been trafficked — bought and sold into slavery, sometimes across international borders, sometimes not, but always horrifically abused and tortured either psychologically, physically, or both — and spoke with them, an adult trafficking victim, and Alma, who started the home.
The issue of human trafficking is enormous and difficult to fully appreciate, so I will only focus on thing: a woman I met who I’ll call Mari.
Mari is 40 years old. She was born in Mexico, and spent the first few years of her life in Tijuana. She had always heard that the United States were where you could go to make money to take care of your family, so when a friend of her parents said he was going to the US, she asked him to take her along. [Read more…]
by Doug Porter
By Doug Porter
City Attorney Jan Goldsmith’s office has, once again, taken actions guaranteed to make San Diego a national embarrassment. A sexual assault victim suing the city because her assailant was a police officer is now being portrayed in court documents as having committed a criminal act.
According to an article in today’s UT-San Diego, our city’s chief legal advocate has chosen to adopt a strategy of blaming the victim as a defense in a civil suit filed in the wake of the 2011 conviction of former SDPD officer Anthony Arevalos on charges of sexual battery, bribery and related charges.
Our tax dollars paid for a legal document filed by Goldsmith’s office alleging that “Jane Doe” offered her underwear as a bribe to escape arrest on a drunk-driving charge on March 8, 2011.
UPDATE, 5PM WEDS: The City Attorney’s office has now decided this accusation wasn’t such a good idea, after all. [Read more…]
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