Minor editorial revisions
Lo water
Lo, “the other Laura”, who had to move to Mexico because her boyfriend couldn’t stay in the U.S., isn’t living in the pricey gringo ghettos of Mexico City, nor in the more urban areas like my own Santa Maria de la Ribera but out in the burbs… Maybe everything’s up to date in Kansas City, but in Chimulhuacan, some things are a little more … uh… earthy.
We are lucky in that here we have a shower, albeit a cold one. In many houses around here, a shower is a bucket filled with water (hopefully heated, with an electrical heating coil). But this house has running water, hooked up to the shower, to the sink in the bathroom, and to one sink outside, where we wash our dishes and our clothes. A shower is a luxury, but of course as with any cold shower, it’s a quick affair and water waste is kept to a relative minimum.
The toilet is another matter. As it is not connected to the running water, we must “manually” flush it after every use. This entails scraping up some water from somewhere and pouring it into the toilet. Sometimes, if someone has done laundry recently, there’s a store of recycled water to use for purposes like flushing the toilet. Otherwise, we can haul up water from an underground cistern right outside our door. I remember reading somewhere that flushing a toilet takes an ungodly amount of water, a fact that I am blissfully blind to in the U.S. Here, where I fill a bucket with water to flush the toilet, I experience firsthand that yes, flushing the toilet takes a ridiculous amount of water, even when you’re doing it by hand.
My natural first reaction when I compare the availability of water here to the U.S. is that everyone should have plentiful, clean, running water. But a big problem in Mexico City and the surrounding areas is that the population is huge. I often try to imagine what would happen if everyone here had the same easy access to water as we have in the U.S., but I can’t imagine how an already strained environment could possibly handle it.
Logging out…
Smugglers, a police-army operation, angry locals, politics, death threats. Nope, it isn’t drugs. It’s something much more valuable: wood and water.
(Today’s Jornada story by Israel Davila and Rene Ramon. My translation)
Over 300 residents of San Pedro Nexapa, a community in Amecameca, Mexico (State) frustrated a joint police-military operation meant to combat illegal logging. For three hours yesterday, residents detained 45 persons, including soldiers, state police and federal inspectors..
About noon yesterday, the Federal Prosecutor for the Environment (Profepa, for its abbreviation in Spanish), the Forestry Service (Probosque), 10 soldiers, AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigación – federal police) and ASE (Agencia de Securidad Estatal, State Police) detained six presumed illegal loggers and seized a light truck filled with wood in the mountain forests around San Pedro Nexapa and the nearby community of San Juan Tehuixtitlán.
However, upon returning to San Pedro Nexapa, a community near Popocatépl volcano, they were met by over a hundred residents, who were joined about another two hundred people.
Following two hours of negotiations, the authorities agreed to set the six loggers free and return the truck and its cardo. About 16:30, the residents freed the Profepa and Probosque inspectors, along with the 10 soliders from Zona Miliar 37-B and the AFI and ASE agents.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Ocuilan, Félix Alberto Linares González, announced that military patrols would continue indefinitely in the forests to stop clandestine logging. The official was joined by the Secretary of National Defense, Guillermo Galván Galván.
The Interior Secretary for the State of Mexico, Humberto Benítez, also announced that a permanent detachment of State Police would be sent to assist municipal authorities.
On Wednesday, an Edil (roughly equivalent to a “county commissioner”) representing the PRD, sought federal and state assistance after receiving death threats following discussions with the Secretary of Defense about the Army’s role in protecting forests in the Sierra de Zempoala, on the Mexico-Morelos state line.
The 22nd Military Zone, headquartered in Toluca, was given responsibility for setting up roadblocks in the area, as requested by the Edil.
The Army has taken on two anti-logging operations in the area around the lakes of Zempoala, and state police sent 10 officers to assist, but recalled them after only two days.
Thirty members of the Rapid Reaction force of the State Police were sent to Ocuilan and the State also sent more than a dozen long and short arms for the ten municipal policemen working in this community.
The police have been unable to identify the person or persons responsible for the 15 May murder of Aldo Zamora, the son of local environmentalist Idelfonso Zamora.
Linares González, the mayor of Ocuilan, reminded the press that there is an initiative awaiting approval by the State’s Governor, which will increase the penalties for illegal logging. The proposal was approved by a legislative committee last Friday, and is expected to approved next week.
Clandestine logging in the State of Mexico is not considered a serious crime, resulting only in penalties of two to eight years imprisonment. PRD, PAN and the State Governor all agreed that illegal logging should be considered a serious crime, which can result in a prison sentence of five to twenty years.
Illegal logging over the last 15 years has led to the deforestation of 1,500 of the 6000 hectares of forest in Paraje La Piedra, which lies in both Mexico and Morelos states. Those who depend on communal goods in San Juan Atzingo and Ocuilan have warned federal and state authorities that the damage is severe enough to affect the aquifers which the Federal District, as well as the local communities depend upon for their water.
For a lot of Mexican, illegal logging is as serious an issue as narcotics trafficking. The narcos, at least until recently, were exporting their products, but weren’t really damaging Mexico’s countryside, other than littering the place up with dead gangsters (and that’s why God invented vultures, anyway). And, marijuana and opium poppies are a relatively benign agricultural crop, not particularly damaging to the environment.
Over-logging though, in a country that is mostly desert or thin, acidic-soil jungle, is a very serious matter. As is protecting the watershed. It’s the Army’s task to guard natural resources, and only secondarily to go chasing narcos. While there are these sorts of national v. local fights (here, won temporarily by the locals, who will probably be defended by Zapatistas) it shows that the police and the Army do have REAL issues to deal with, and there are serious problems.
I don’t mean to make light of the narcotics traffickers, but I do think we — and the Mexican media — is giving the traffickers a lot more legitimacy and power by treating them as the #1 threat to the nation, rather than as common criminals who need their money and guns cut off, while ignoring serious long-term threats to the people’s survival.
Unfortunately, the Army and the Police don’t have a very good reputation for defending the people, and the people’s goods… another interesting thing about this story. Notice too that the local police normally don’t have weaponry, and the State Police had to send in armaments. If you were wondering why the local police in Cananae got massacred by gangsters a few weeks back, this is why. The gangsters buy illegal weapons, which the cops don’t have. The gangsters are fighting with American firepower and an American-style war against local coppers meant only to be officer unfriendly– rousting drunks, breaking up bar fights and shaking down speeding motorists.
I’m waiting to hear what was behind the huge turnout in San Pedro Nexapa, and who is behind it. Or who it’s blamed on. One possible clue is that the PRD and PAN both support stronger penalties for clandestine logging. That should leave the PRI, or local PRI officials as the “usual suspects,” or the old financial powers connected to the local PRI. Or gangsters… which may turn out to be the same folks.
This is one to watch.
Pyramid of the Moon
Teotihuacan – “the place where men become gods”… part of a series of digitized photos by “addicted eyes” who shuffles off from Buffalo camera in tow, finding great photo ops around the world. Very nice work!
I wonder what took the New York Times so damned long, but David Leonhart’s Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobb is a turd in the punchbowl for the frat-party of nativism that’s been infecting any sober discourse on Latin America (especially about Mexico and the Mexicans) over the last few years.
Lou Dobbs is, frankly, a fuckin’ moron, but the New York Times is much too polite to say that. Instead, Leonhart writes:
Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.
Second, Mr. Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a list of other such guests from “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”
Finally, Mr. Dobbs is fond of darkly hinting that this country is under attack. He suggested last week that the new immigration bill in Congress could be the first step toward a new nation — a “North American union” — that combines the United States, Canada and Mexico. On other occasions, his program has described a supposed Mexican plot to reclaim the Southwest. In one such report, one of his correspondents referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico’s president, as a “Mexican military incursion.”
The political writers who don’t see immigration as a “pet issue” have started picking up on this. Somebody named “Dave” has done a bang-up job at Orcinus, writing:
Dobbs has a history of citing … white supremacists as credible, while failing to explain to the audience their background. Among such Dobbs guests is Glenn Spencer, the head of the racist American Patrol, whose theories on immigration — including a conspiracy theory about a Mexican “invasion” and a plot to return the Southwest to an “Aztlan” — Dobbs has reported on as credible.
Perhaps the most notorious of these instances involved Dobbs running a map of “Aztlan” taken from the Web site of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. Dobbs apologized for using the CofCC as a source — but never retracted or corrected the substance of the story itself, which was not just factually bogus but outrageously inflammatory as well.
I’m hoping the political bloggers out there hit on this, and hit it hard. One of my “favorite” nativist sites, which based on a Los Angeles lawyer who contributes to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s work for a website that was sponsored by a human rights group that — among other coalition members — included a quasi-governmental agency in Mexico, concluded that the SPLC has “indirect ties to the Mexican government.” is Lone Wacko. Lone Wacko is going ballistic about the Leonhard piece, and promising to “a list of those who helped retransmit Leonhardt’s smears.”
Free PR is good PR, and my hit count is down, so what the hell. Besides, without going into a lot of details, I had to change my would-be net server and web designer for my soon to start commercial site. It seems the guy I was going to hire to handle the page design and servers was NOT, as he told me, handing data for the federal government, but is running a “turn in an illegal alien” site, with links to the Minutemen.
I’ve had to pull out of the deal, which has bollixed up some financing, so am still looking for donations and or pre-paid advertising (write me at triotimes@excite.com for details)
He sent me an e-mail suggesting I tell the truth about immigration, so I will. Morons like Lou Dobbs and his nativist supporters and cheerleaders don’t know their ass from a hole in the border fence.
And, if this doesn’t get me “Lone Wacko’s Enemies’ List,” I’ll be very very disappointed.
Hugo, Felipe and el blogosphero
Some of my best resources are the folks who “get it wrong”… or, rather, just don’t “get it”. Not so much that I enjoy playing the pedantic know-it-all (though I do), as they make my work a lot easier, alerting me to trends and issues I would otherwise miss.
I’m not talking about right-wing cranks like the Minutemen and VDARE.com, though I check them out regularly for the latest in anti-immigration “spin” (which is dangerous, since it is so avidly regurgitated by “respectable” sources – folks who are looking for a rationale for their feelings, and just assume a site that appears scholarly (like VDARE) is something other than what it is (I don’t even link to them anymore, since it’s such a hassle to put up a “hate group” warning every time).
What I’m talking about are otherwise legitimate sites that are focused on something else, and try to fit a Mexican event into it, but miss the connection.
Bloggings by Boz is an excellent resource for mainstream U.S.-based reporting from and about Latin America in general. I recommend it, though I disagree with Boz’ conclusions about vario
us things, especially in regard to the Venezuelan administration.
Mark in Mexico, which I also regularly read, is sometimes useful. It has done some decent reporting on Oaxaca, but has — whether out of unconscious ideological bias, or simply to cover up obvious facts — been completely wrong on a few occasions, but it is sometimes useful for knowing what to look for in the news from Oaxaca.
I don’t list it as a Mexican or Mexico-based website because it focuses on the U.S. Republican Party , and only incidentally on where it is physically located (much as I consider myself a Mexican website, though physically, I’m 150 Km north of Ojinaga, Chihuahua).
Mark gets more than a little “snarky” about the APPO and the leftist opposition to Oaxaca’s despised governor, Ulises Ruiz and his henchmen. Mark apparently runs some kind of English tutorial service in that city, and sells trinkets, so I suppose he has a better right to carp than those of us outside the community. And the opposition aren’t saints, but neither is the Republican Party. But what caught my attention was his post on APPO defense lawyers making the claim that they are not being protected from death threats.
Boz, in a post on press freedoms (or lack thereof) in Venezuela, also mentions the threats posed by gangsters to the Mexican press, specifically the problems at Cambio Sonora and Tabasco Hoy!. Both papers have shuttered their doors because of intimidation by gangsters, but Boz quotes from the Washington Post:
President Felipe Calderón has called the intimidation of journalists “an unacceptable situation,” promised to protect journalists and discussed possible legislation to achieve that goal.
I don’t know if the two read each other’s sites. They have different goals and audiences, so there’s no reason they should. But I sense a theme here. A commentator on Boz’ site asked “Where is Calderon and his new emphasis on law enforcement in all of this?” and of course I left my own “snarky” response before I’d taken a look at Mark’s site. I said “You’re assuming the Calderón administration wants to protect a free press. Given his Porfirian tendencies, and willingness to use “una mano dura” towards dissenters AND criminals, I don’t see him lifting a finger to protect regional papers, which are among his harshest critics.”
In regard to the Oaxacan lawyers, I’d make the same comment.
I think the foreign press is misreading Calderón’s use of the Army in police matters as a reform. The Mexican media, and Mexican observers don’t see it as progressive, but as a dangerous threat to democracy and civil society. We’re buying the excuse that a military solution to a civil problem (a gang war) is somehow necessary, overlooking the use of equally ham-handed response to dissent.
Qui bono?
I have said more than once (at least twice) that Calderón’s administration resembles Porfirio Diaz’s more than most administrations do. While other administrations have used the army to put down dissent (notably Diaz Ordaz and Echeverria) and others have courted foreign investors (Carlos Salinas et. passum), they haven’t been coordinated like this in at least the last 100 years.
Not to say that Calderón has a free hand – congress, the Supreme Court, the Human Rights commission and the independent media (not to mention the free and lively blogosphero) all limit the president’s power. But, having even less legitimacy than Don Porfirio (who at least was a modernizer and nationalist), I think we’re looking at the wrong Latin American country if we want to see a closet dictator. Hugo Chavez was undoubtedly elected, and his programs, like them or not, are what the Venezuelan voters want. Felipe Calderón may or may have not have been elected, and much of his goals are NOT those wanted by the Mexicans.
It’s not just corn, and not just Mexico
Everyone’s favorite anarchist weighs in on the effects of U.S. agricultural policies on the rest of the world:
…[President George W.]Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the industry.
Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices of corn — and tortillas — have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.
The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role, one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving Mexican producers off the land.
Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA came into force, primarily among corn producers — a direct consequence of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural work force has been displaced in the NAFTA years, a process that is continuing, depressing wages in other sectors of the economy and impelling emigration to the US.
It is, presumably, more than coincidental that President Clinton militarised the Mexican border, previously quite open, in 1994, along with implementation of NAFTA.
The “free trade” regime drives Mexico from self-sufficiency in food towards dependency on US exports. And as the price of corn goes up in the United States, stimulated by corporate power and state intervention, one can anticipate that the price of staples may continue its sharp rise in Mexico.
(Noam Chomsky, Starving the Poor International News, 16-May-2007. Reprinted by truthout.org)
Bad fences make for cranky neighbors
I’m trying to get confirmation on a visit by the Minutemen to my town (oh boy, the freak show is coming!), so have been looking around for what’s going on with that outfit.
They’re not doing well. Boo-hoo.
The latest from Jonathan Clark of the Sierra Vista (Arizona) Herald/Review:
BISBEE — A man who mortgaged his home in order to help the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps build border fencing on private land in Cochise County is suing the group and its president, Chris Simcox, for fraud and breach of contract.
In a complaint filed May 22 in Maricopa County Superior Court, Jim Campbell, a retired homebuilder and Air Force veteran from Fountain Hills, accused Simcox and the MCDC of falsely promising to build a multi-layered Israeli-style security barrier on the Palominas ranch of John and Jack Ladd.
Campbell alleges that, after hearing the MCDC publicize the plan in April 2006, he had three telephone conversations with Peter Kunz, project manager for the effort, in which Kunz promised the Israeli-style barrier would be built along 10 miles of the Ladd ranch.
Encouraged by the plan, Campbell says he took out a loan on his home and donated $100,000 to the project on May 22, 2006, with the stipulation that it be used to purchase steel tubing for the Ladds’ fence. However, by the May 27, 2006, groundbreaking, the Ladds had rejected the double-layered, 14-foot barrier in favor of a traditional range fence. “To date, MCDC has not constructed any ‘Israeli-style’ border fencing on the property where the groundbreaking ceremony took place, in breach of agreement between it and Campbell,” the complaint states.
Campbell says he asked for his donation back, but Simcox told him the money would be used to build an Israeli-style barrier along 9/10 mile of Richard Hodges’ border-front ranch in Bisbee Junction.
Instead, Campbell alleges, the money was diverted to other MCDC projects and affiliated groups, while work on Hodges’ fence languished.
Campbell is asking for a total of $1,220,845 in damages and reimbursements from Simcox, the MCDC and Kunz. His suit also names Diener Consultants, a Chicago-based fund-raising organization that has played a central role in the fence-building campaign, and the MCDC-affiliated Declaration Alliance, a Virginia-based charity founded by conservative activist Alan Keyes.
Simcox was puzzled by the complaint, saying Campbell had not only donated the $100,000, but had purchased and delivered $60,000 worth of steel tubing himself. Those tubes were used to build the first segment of fencing at Hodges’ property, Simcox said, and the remaining $40,000 was used to purchase steel panels for the barrier.
“That steel is in the ground,” Simcox said. “His $100,000 is sitting out there on the Hodges ranch. We’ve showed good faith.”
Simcox acknowledged that work on Hodges’ fence had stalled, but he promised that it would begin again as soon as the necessary funds are raised.
“I’m sorry it has not gone as quickly as we had thought, but you can only erect as much fence as you have the donations for,” he said.
Last week, Simcox fired at least four MCDC volunteer officials who held a meeting May 19 in Phoenix to air grievances about the group’s executive leadership.
He said the expelled officials — New Mexico Chapter Director Bob Wright, Oklahoma Chapter Director Greg Thompson, National Operations Officer Bill Irwin and former Arizona chapter head Stacey O’Connell — had violated MCDC policy by calling an unauthorized meeting. And he accused them of attempting to seize control of the Minutemen in response to a plan to restructure the group’s leadership.
Wright denied that he and the others were attempting a power grab. He said they simply wanted to address several perceived problems, including a lack of financial accountability and Simcox’s heavy-handed leadership style.
“This was a tragic, tragic misjudgment on (Simcox’s) part because these were just state leaders who were seeing some things going on inside MCDC they thought could be fixed,” Wright said.
“None of these guys make a dime, none of them stand to profit. They spend thousands of dollars of their own money to come down and help secure that border, and I believe that that expenditure of time and money makes them shareholders in the Minutemen and gives them a voice in how things are going.”
Minuteman border fence timeline
• April 2006: MCDC President Chris Simcox announces that his organization will begin constructing border fences on private land unless the White House deploys military personnel to the border by May 25.
• May 2006: A post to the Minuteman HQ Web site shows a fence design based on an Israeli model: two parallel 12- to 15-foot fences mounted with surveillance cameras flanked by trenches and razor wire.
According to the Web site, more than 1,000 people have signed up to help build the barrier and supporters have donated more than $225,000 to the effort.
• May 15, 2006: MCDC Executive Director Al Garza says the Minutemen are going ahead with their fence-building plan, and that a ranch in Cochise County has been chosen as the site for the first fence.
• May 22, 2006: Jack Ladd, owner of the ranch where the fence is to be built, tells the Herald/Review he is not interested in the Israeli-style barrier. Instead, he wants the Minutemen to build a reinforced five-strand range fence that will protect his cattle and stop drive-throughs on his property.
• May 27, 2006: The Minutemen hold a groundbreaking ceremony at the Ladd ranch featuring speeches from former ambassador to the United Nations Alan Keyes, MCDC president Chris Simcox and Jim Campbell, a Fountain Hills man who mortgaged his home to donate $100,000 to the effort. Simcox says his group is eyeing a property 4 1/2 miles east of Naco for its next fence-building project — a property later identified as Richard Hodges’ ranch in Bisbee Junction.
• July 18, 2006: Cochise County Planning Director Judy Anderson rules the county cannot block construction of a double-layered, 14-foot high-tech security fence at Hodges’ ranch because the barrier will serve an agricultural purpose.
• August 2006: The Minutemen break ground on 9/10 mile of fencing at Hodges’ ranch. The group also announces that a private Washington-based company called FOMGuard USA has agreed to donate $7.8 worth of fiber-optic sensor meshing to the project.
• Jan. 28, 2007: MCDC volunteers finish constructing 9 1/2 miles of range fencing on the Ladd ranch.
• January 2007: Work on the partially completed MCDC fence at the Hodges ranch is suspended, reportedly due to a lack of funds and volunteers.
• February 2007: Simcox sends a letter to MCDC volunteers asking for donations to raise the more than $300,000 necessary to finish Hodges’ fence.
• May 2007: The MCDC announces to its volunteers that work on Hodges’ fence is about to begin again and that it needs $400,000 in donations to finish the project.
• May 22, 2007: Jim Campbell files a $1.2 million lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court accusing the MCDC, Simcox and several related parties of fraudulent misrepresentation and breach of contract.
What, no honor among… well, not exactly thieves (maybe) but… fools?
The fall of empire… or just a fall?
Mexico – Miss USA Rachel Smith’s strut down the catwalk to model her evening gown during the Miss Universe pageant didn’t quite go as planned.
Smith slipped and fell on her rear during Monday night’s Miss Universe pageant in Mexico City.
She was also seemingly booed during her interview by Hispanic audience members who were chanting “Mexico! Mexico!” until she spoke in Spanish, the Associated Press reports.
Judge for yourself if she “spoke in Spanish”:
At the Miss Universe competition, Miss USA fell on her ass… quite literally. As you can see on the youtube video ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=zySMQ0xQGr4)
Miss USA’s selection as a semi-finalist was greeted about the same as every other selection. Whether she was being boo-ed for her fall, or for her mangling of the Spanish language… or even if she IS being booed… doesn’t matter much to our right-wingers.
Mention Mexico and the issue is immigration, reconquista and whines that “they hate us”. Batshit crazy anchor-baby Michelle Malkin demands action:
Will President Bush speak out against the treatment Miss USA received in Mexico? Will any amnesty peddler in Washington? Imagine if Miss Mexico were booed, heckled and subjected to chants of “USA, USA” if the pageant had been held here.
Oh yeah, by the way, Miss Japan won.
All publicity is good…
I guess the Canadians have the common sense to recognize that their press is full of spin — source: CTV.ca
…a new report states Canadians are travelling more than ever before and Mexico is their destination of choice after the U.S.
Statistics Canada’ s “International Travel Survey,” released on Tuesday, states Mexico surpassed the United Kingdom in 2006 as the most visited foreign destination by Canadians outside of the U.S.
Canadian tourists made an estimated 842,000 overnight visits in Mexico, which is an increase of six per cent from 2005, despite reports that Canadian travellers are assaulted in Mexico more than in any other country.
Gives us your tired, your poor and $930
No wonder it’s called a “green card”… you need a lot of green to get one:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration will announce increases in immigration-application fees today that will nearly double the cost of citizenship and almost triple the cost of becoming a legal permanent resident.
Immigrant advocates and some members of Congress said the new fees, reflecting an average 66 percent increase from current costs, could bar poorer immigrants from attaining citizenship.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials countered that the increases were essential to help the overloaded agency reduce its backlog and speed up service.
“The reason we’re raising the fees, short answer, is that we need the money,” said Emilio Gonzales, director of the CIS. “A lot of people are going to be affected by this, there’s no sugar-coating it.”
Gonzales said 99 percent of the agency’s budget comes from user fees, a system based on the principle that immigrants should bear the costs of citizenship.
Under the increases, which cover almost all immigration benefits, the cost of bringing a foreign fiancé or fiancée will jump from $170 to $455. The price of a green card, or a legal permanent-resident visa, will rise from $325 to $930, and the cost of citizenship papers will increase from $330 to $595.
The fee increases come as the Senate debates a wide-ranging immigration bill that would give illegal immigrants in the United States, estimated to number 12 million or more, a way to gain legal status. Gonzales said the fee increase, which will take effect at the end of July, was not announced with the Senate bill in mind.
Frank Rich writes in today’s New York Times (taken from the “free” excerpt in Editor and Publisher:
Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”
… The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.
Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum… A bill passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all interpreters.
While like any half-way decent human being, I recognize how appalling this is, it really doesn’t have much to do with Mex Files, does it?
In a roundabout way, it does. It has to do with the Catholic Church and the Jews. And the Mexicans.
The Chaldeans are the descendants of one of the first – if not the first – Christians. The Church was founded by Saint Thomas the Apostle (“doubting Thomas”) but, being outside the Roman Empire, they developed a very different liturgy and tradition than either the Roman, or the Orthodox Churches. They did not fully reunite with Rome until 1994. The best known Chaldean was Tarik Aziz, Saddam Husain’s Foreign Minister.
Stalin once asked “how many divisions does the Pope have?” The answer is how many does he need? Had John Paul II been in better health, there is some speculation he might have, say, ordered every Catholic school and hospital in the United States, Spain and Britain to close, and forbidden Catholics to participate in the invasion. If anyone remembers, the then Pope was practically immobile by then, but the U.S. administration was worried enough about the possibility that they sent neo-Con Catholics to lobby the poor old guy. He should have whacked them with his walker. And told them – officially – to go to Hell.
Saddam was an tyrant, but an equal opportunity tyrant. The Chaldeans (already a small minority in Iraq) left him alone, and he left them alone. They’d outlasted the fall of the Persian Empire, the Islamic invasion, the Mongol invasion, the Ottoman invasion, etc. etc. etc. over the past two millenia. Then came…
Mission “Iraqi Freedom” [which] appears to be emerging as a civil war between the minority, formerly dominant, Sunni Muslims who seek through violence to prevent the inevitable emergence of the majority Shia Muslims to the position of power and control of the state and its oil and gas reserves. As for the Christian minorities in Iraq, their situation as infidels in a Muslim country grows ever more precarious. Christians are publicly harassed; their women are insulted for not dressing as Muslims; their businesses destroyed; and their churches are bombed, with the result that many are fleeing abroad.
(The Chaldean Church: The Christians in Iraq)
To where? Not the United States, obviously, except by stealth.
This is where the Jews come in. Saddam’s political party, Ba’ath, was modeled on the Nazi Party. Since the early 1930s, Mexican foreign policy had been anti-fascist (it describes itself as the first anti-fascist country) and, will still admit anyone fleeing fascism. When Saddam was still technically the head of state in Iraq, Iraqis claiming persecution were admitted (it helped that the few stopped at the U.S. border found a sponsor in the person of a fellow Arab Catholic named Carlos Slim).
Mexico, everyone forgets, or was never taught, saved more Jews from Hitler than the rest of the allies put together. Mostly by simply looking the other way. Jews poured into Mexico and the Central American Republics on sometimes very dubious papers, the dubious papers having been issued on orders from Presidents Lazaro Cardenas and Miguel Avilla Camacho by the Mexican embassies throughout Europe up until Mexico declared war on Germany in May 1942. Even afterwards, Jews showed up throughout Central America thanks to a network of Central American diplomats working out of the Mexican embassy in Switzerland.
How many of these Jews later crossed into the United States isn’t known, but a good number stayed. It never occurred to me that the Prepa boys on my bus in the morning were anything but ordinary Mexican teenage kids. It wasn’t until they all got on wearing “cappas” (and I had to figure out it was one of the Jewish holy days) that it ever occurred to me that they were the grandchildren of people no one thinks of when they think of Mexico.
And, today, it’s Chaldeans. Every once in a while you hear some tale of Iraqis “sneaking across the border” into Texas. It’s true. They do. Todd Bensman writes about them in the San Antonio Express-News:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show only about 100 Iraqis have been caught at the borders between 9-11 and the end of last year, more than 60 of them along the Southwest border and about 20 in Texas.
But there are not the Al Quadas of a Minuteman’s wet dream, or even Arabs recruited by Hugo Chavez (a tale I heard today). These are people like George and Baida, and their two children.
They had done what hundreds of thousands of other Christian Iraqi families have since the American invasion: sold everything in the face of horrific and systematic religious persecution, and fled north to Damascus, Syria, or Amman, Jordan.
Out of options, the family joined an increasing number of such refugees who are proceeding toward America, bent on crossing the border illegally.
…
Chaldean Christian refugees in the U.S., Syria and Jordan say the American-led war unleashed Islamic militants who have targeted them because of their religion in vicious campaigns of murder, kidnapping for ransom and forced property expropriations.
Ordinarily, religious persecution can qualify victims for U.S. resettlement visas. But the U.S. State Department hasn’t issued visas to Chaldeans and won’t recognize them as especially persecuted for their religion, asserting that they are among many groups amid Iraq’s sectarian strife who could make the claim. So they wait.
While most are sitting out the war as refugees in Syria and Jordan, other Chaldean Christians have chosen not to.
They are coming illegally to Texas, and to other border states, sometimes getting entangled along the way, in entire families, pregnant women, single mothers and young men going it alone or in small groups.
But maybe the Minutemen and Lou Dobbs are right. It is a conspiracy:
Umru “Crazy Tiger” Hassan, an interpreter for the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq until Islamists threatened to kill him, personifies the situation. Hassan, a Christian, divulged to the Express-News in Damascus that he was on his way to Texas. …
…
He left his military job and went to Damascus about six months ago, where he and his sister make a subsistence living running a tiny laundry called “Iraq Cleaning.” He was frustrated there with the lack of opportunity and money.
So Hassan decided a more prudent course was to plot a route to Texas.
He said Hispanic soldiers with whom he was serving told him how easy it was to cross the Mexico-Texas border, and they offered the help of their own families in Mexico. He plans to take advantage of the offer.
“If I make it successfully in this way, I’m going to bring my family the same way,” said Hassan, who has a young daughter still in Iraq.
George and Baida and their two very young children, George and Toni, are awaiting a hearing on their refugee status. Even the Border Patrol realized terrorists usually don’t travel with babies and the family is staying with relatives in Detroit, where Chaldeans have settled for years (Detroit and San Diego have had Chaldean communities for years. Saddam Hussein contributed 1.5 million dollars to help build Sacred Heart Church in Detroit).
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find Tijuana and Mexico City added to the list. My old neighborhood Santa Maria de la Ribera had Dutch and German and Spanish residents in the 30s and 40, and now a Congolese internet cafe and a couple of Russian restaurants (serving very good tacos, by the way!) and Ethiopians and Brazilians working in the “Cuban” cafe. I’ll betcha Crazy Tiger Hassan can sling a mean taco and his kids would be – like the Dutch, and German and Spanish and Congolese and Ethiopian and Brazilian immigrant’s kids, Mexicans.
mexfiles.net 