When Los Angeles County threatened to reduce the number of hospital beds available to poor and working residents, the state’s Latino political leadership rallied to block the plan. When the city’s highest ranking Latino educator came under attack this fall, Latino politicians came out to defend one of their own. And when television crews captured the grainy images of two Riverside County sheriff’s deputies beating undocumented immigrants two years ago, Latino civil rights and elected officials marched and called for a federal investigation of the incident.
But six months after the eruption of one of the worst corruption scandals in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department — in which it was revealed that a rogue anti-gang unit ran amok in the Latino community, shaking down gang members, illegally harassing immigrants and in one case shooting and planting a gun on an unarmed drug dealer — the state’s powerful Latino political bloc remains curiously quiet.
“It’s amazing that you haven’t seen or heard any of the elected or self-anointed Latino leadership speaking out on this issue,” says Sam Paz, a local civil rights attorney. “I think it’s really sad that we have worked so hard to build a body of Latino elected officials and organizations and they have all been paralyzed in terms of speaking out on this case.”
The scandal began when Rafael Perez, a former officer in the LAPD’s Rampart Division, was arrested in September after he was caught stealing 8 pounds of cocaine from a police evidence room. He agreed to cooperate with investigators in exchange for receiving a lighter sentence. He was sentenced late last month to five years in prison.
Perez detailed how Rampart’s special anti-gang units, known as CRASH, routinely framed individuals. Perez himself confessed to shooting Javier Francisco Ovando, an unarmed gang member, and planting a gun on him. Ovando, who was left paralyzed by the shooting, served three years of a 23-year sentence before being released.
More damaging evidence surfaced in January, including information that Rampart officers routinely targeted immigrants for arrest and deportation. The allegations are a direct violation of a city ordinance known as Special Order 40, which prohibits police from stopping anyone based on their immigration status. At the end of February, the FBI joined the investigation into the Rampart Division.
Adding to the flap over police treatment of immigrants, last week two agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service filed a lawsuit against the LAPD alleging they were falsely arrested and roughed up by officers.
One city councilman has described the Rampart scandal as “the worst manmade disaster this city has ever faced.” But despite months of startling revelations, Latino leaders have remained in the background, saying little. Last week Assemblywoman Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, took a small action, introducing a bill in the Legislature calling for stiffer penalties for officers caught tampering with evidence.
The silence has been even more striking in light of the recent political changes that have characterized California’s politics. Last spring, opposition to Proposition 187 — the ballot measure that sought to cut off medical and educational services to undocumented immigrants — propelled Latino politicians into powerful new roles. Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, Rep. Xavier Becerra and state Senate Majority Leader Richard Polanco are just a few of the state’s powerful new Latino elite — and all four represent districts involved in the Rampart scandal.
Many of the cops implicated in the scandal are Latino, but no one interviewed believes that is what has kept leaders from speaking out.
So why the silence? Politics.
Insiders say with elections just around the corner, once-outspoken leaders such as Villaraigosa and Becerra, both of whom are running for mayor, have been taking a more cautious position.
No one wants to appear soft on crime, political strategists say. So candidates are choosing their words carefully. Speaking out too harshly against the LAPD could cost them votes among the city’s Anglo voters. And appearing soft on gangs could alienate middle-class Latino voters who want to get rid of gangs at nearly any cost.
More important, however, no candidate appears willing to risk angering the city’s powerful police union. “The Police Protective League is very friendly with a lot of people. And no one wants to come out and hit their friends,” says Leo Brillones, a political consultant who has worked on some of the toughest campaigns in recent years. “Their endorsement means a lot.”
That has angered civil rights attorneys who have often fought alongside Villaragoisa and Polanco.
“If it weren’t for the black community speaking out on cases like Rodney King, where would we be?” says Paz.
Now that Latinos are gathering power, activists want to see them use it. “Among the reasons these politicians were elected is because one presumed they would provide a voice for this community, and now they are silent,” says Antonio Rodriguez, a civil rights attorney representing a victim of the Rampart scandal.
For their part, Latino leaders such as Villaraigosa dismiss critics who say they’ve been shy about taking on the issue. “No one asked me about this until now,” says Villaragoisa. He says he spoke out about the scandal in an editorial published in October. For now, he says he wants to be responsible and review the function of the CRASH units. “I’m not an ambulance chaser,” he says.
Others such as Becerra don’t want to bash “the people who are there to protect my wife and children just because there are some truly bad apples in the department,” as he recently told the Los Angeles Times.
Critics say many politicians aren’t willing to risk an election to defend a community that still lacks political clout.
“I think both Latino elected officials and whites look at this community as being largely from an area that doesn’t vote, either because they don’t have documents or don’t want to,” says Rodolfo Acuna, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University at Northridge. “And besides, historically the Latino community has done little about police abuse issues.”
But don’t expect things to stay quiet. The latest revelation involving the illegal deportation of immigrants may finally spark a reaction.
“I think this will tip the scales,” says Rodriguez. “The subject of deportation has always been a special hurt in the Latino community.” In the 1940s, thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were rounded up and deported.
Already some leaders are beginning to act.
Democratic Rep. Lucille
Roybal-Allard announced last week she was meeting with federal
officials to discuss the immigrations charges.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund has begun
meeting with other groups on the issue to
discuss a strategy,
including litigation that would strengthen Special Order 40.
And last week civil rights attorneys including Paz, Rodriguez and Connie Rice sat down to hash out a collective response to the scandal.
In the meantime, however, the strongest voices of protest have come from the city’s white politicians, including state Sen. Tom Hayden, who has been meeting with the U.S. attorney and the INS. “I haven’t been getting any calls from my colleagues,” says Hayden.
Some say no one should be surprised by the silence from Latino leaders. After all, this is politics, and if Latinos play to win they have to consider the rules. “How they handle this will determine if [Latino politicians] become the big hitters,” says Raymond Rocco, a professor of political science at UCLA. “And in the end it will be a sticky situation for them no matter how they choose to handle it.”
On Jan. 21, Alex Sanchez walked along the streets of Los Angeles’ mid-Wilshire area, as he had many times on his way home. But that night as Sanchez, a stocky 27-year-old with closely cropped hair and a smattering of tattoos, moved toward his car, he was stopped suddenly by a Los Angeles police officer and handcuffed.
Sanchez, a former gang member, was arrested on a 2-year-old warrant from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He faces federal criminal charges stemming from his reentry into the U.S. after having been deported in the early 1990s. He could be deported to his native El Salvador. His arrest has sparked protest from gang peace organizations in Los Angeles and added to the controversy over the LAPD’s Rampart division, which has been facing one of the most widespread and highly publicized police corruption investigations in U.S. history.
Once a member of one of the city’s most violent gangs, Mara Salvatrucha, Sanchez had transformed his life. In recent years he has split his time between work, family and heading up Homies Unidos, a bi-national gang peace organization with roots in Los Angeles and San Salvador. As the lead organizer of Homies, Sanchez’s work had captured the attention of some of the city’s most noted gang peace advocates, as well as California state Sen. Tom Hayden, who believed Sanchez was helping to bring peace in a war that has claimed thousands of lives.
Why would a police officer seek to arrest a man who works successfully to stop gang violence? As it turns out, Sanchez and arresting officer Jesus Amezcua had met several times before — at hearings in which Sanchez spoke out against police harassment of former gang members like himself. Sanchez also happens to be a witness in a murder case that pits Amezcua’s credibility against the word of a teenage gangbanger.
Amezcua, a veteran of the force, picked up Sanchez on what by many accounts is a stale immigration warrant. Some claim Amezcua is guilty of violating Special Order 40, a decade-old city ordinance that forbids police from stopping someone to ask about their immigration status. The ordinance was put in place after police and activists agreed that allowing police officers to act as immigration officers would inhibit the city’s large population of undocumented immigrants from cooperating with police or reporting crimes, for fear of being deported.
The arrest raises questions about whether the LAPD is able to clean up its act in the wake of a scandal that began in September, when allegations first surfaced that Rafael Perez, a Rampart officer, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from an LAPD evidence room.
Perez agreed to cooperate with investigators in the hopes of getting a lighter sentence. His testimony includes admissions that he and other officers routinely planted drugs and weapons on people and even shot Javier Francisco Ovando, an unarmed gang member, and planted a gun on him. Ovando was left paralyzed and sent to prison. He was released in September after serving three years of a 23-year sentence.
A Los Angeles Times report estimates approximately 20 officers are under investigation in connection to the case. Police Chief Bernard Parks announced Jan. 26 that the corruption probe had extended into Latin America. Investigators traveled to El Salvador and Guatemala in an effort to locate some of the victims framed by former officers. Those victims had been deported after their arrests.
Sanchez’s arrest by Amezcua — as well as the department’s reaction — has ignited allegations that little has changed at Rampart and that some police officers are still targeting innocent people for retaliation.
The LAPD has denied wrongdoing, offering its own version of the events leading to the arrest. “To try and create a nexus between this case and the Rampart investigation is a bit of a stretch,” says Cmdr. Robert Kalish, a spokesman for the LAPD. “We have not violated Special Order 40 because he had committed a crime. He reentered the country illegally.”
But the LAPD’s explanation of why Sanchez was arrested has changed several times. First, a spokesperson said Sanchez was stopped after a traffic violation that revealed he had an outstanding INS warrant. A few days later, officials said Amezcua saw him and knew he had an outstanding warrant. On Monday, yet another version was offered that revealed some Rampart division officers had been in contact with the INS and discussed Sanchez’s case. “The officers knew he was wanted because they had had conversations with INS agents,” said Rampart Capt. Robert B. Hansohn. “They routinely talk to the INS,” he said.
For their part, police are fighting back. During a recent press conference outside the Rampart division where 15 police officers stood guard as protesters filed a complaint, one officer accused Hayden, one of Sanchez’s strongest supporters, of trying to further his political career.
If Sanchez’s past raised questions, so have Amezcua’s tactics over the past year. A member of the Rampart division’s anti-gang unit, known as CRASH, he had stopped Sanchez and other members of Homies on several occasions. Amezcua was also on hand when Sanchez testified before a state Senate subcommittee on gang violence and police abuse.
Hayden, who chaired the hearing at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in the mid-Wilshire, described Amezcua’s conduct at that event. “He came into the room like he was tailing Alex and the guys from Homies. No one had asked him to come to the meeting. He was very intimidating,” Hayden added, “and for a moment it seemed like they” — Amezcua and other officers — “were going to break up the meeting.”
But it wasn’t just Amezcua’s presence that night that has led Hayden and others to allege that the officer is retaliating against the former gang member.
On Aug. 12, Amezcua arrested Jose Dimas Rodriguez, another Homies Unidos member. Rodriguez, 14, was booked for the murder of a rival gang member who had been killed that night. Rodriguez insisted he was innocent and even offered an alibi. He told investigators he was at a Homies Unidos meeting at the time of the murder.
Sanchez, along with a handful of others at the meeting, vouched for Rodriguez. “I was with him that night,” says Thom Vernon, a coordinator with Arts Expand, a citywide program that works with Homies Unidos. “A bunch of us including Alex were with him. We didn’t get out of here until well after 9:30 p.m. This is absurd,” Vernon said of the charges against Rodriguez, “but it doesn’t surprise me because the police have been harassing Homies for a long time.”
Since Sanchez is in jail and could be deported, he may never get a chance to testify in Rodriguez’s case. “Alex is at the center of a lot of stuff,” says Jorge Gonzalez, Rodriguez’s attorney. Gonzalez is among a handful of Latino attorneys in Los Angeles who routinely handle police abuse cases. “He’s a material witness in a murder case and he is out there talking about police abuse against gang members.”
There are also serious concerns about Sanchez’s safety in El Salvador should he be deported. At least two former Homies leaders who returned to San Salvador have been murdered. Rival gangs as well as paramilitary groups are suspected in the killings.
“You could say Alex’s life is in danger in El Salvador,” Hayden says, “and it appears to be here as well.” Hayden argued in a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece that Sanchez is just the latest victim of LAPD’s brutal war on gangs that now targets even those working to end the violence.
Beyond the issue of police conflict with the Homies, the case is also raising serious concerns over LAPD’s routine violation of Special Order 40.
Groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund have received complaints over the years that police routinely question immigrants about their status. “We went through this stuff with Rampart during the [1992] riots,” says MALDEF attorney Vibiana Andrade. “There were complaints that Rampart officers were picking people up and dropping them off at INS.”
While prosecution of immigration cases is not unusual, issuing a warrant in this case was very unusual, immigration attorneys say. Dan Keseselbrenner, director of the Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild in New York, said the circumstances of Sanchez’s arrest were peculiar. “This is very suspect to arrest someone on a stale warrant of this nature. Normally a warrant is issued when somebody is already in hand, when they’ve been caught at the border reentering or if they have been picked up for some other crime and it turns up they are here illegally.”
He adds that police have little time to pursue passive crimes. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles confirmed that most cases involving illegal reentry are prosecuted after someone is detained for another offense or caught at the border.
Last week, a U.S. magistrate released Sanchez on $50,000 bail, and Sanchez now sits in an INS detention center awaiting word on whether the agency will begin deportation proceedings or review his case.
Frustrated prisoners, tough immigration policies and money-hungry local officials combined to create the powder keg that erupted last week in St. Martinville, La.
The drama began last Monday when five Cuban-born prisoners armed with homemade weapons seized control of part of the parish jail. They threatened to kill their hostages — including the warden and three prison guards — if they were not set free. The siege ended Saturday when the hostage-takers freed their prisoners and surrendered, in exchange for the promise of safe passage to Cuba.
It is an unusual ending to the six-day standoff that shined a spotlight on thousands of otherwise forgotten prisoners — the roughly 2,400 Cubans caught in a prison twilight zone. In Immigration and Naturalization Service lingo, they are “non-removables” — inmates who cannot be deported because the U.S. doesn’t have diplomatic relations with their countries. Nor can the prisoners be released. In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring the INS to incarcerate criminal aliens until they can be deported.
But for the Cubans in St. Martinville, and more than 3,600 other non-removable inmates from countries like Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Cambodia and Laos, deportation is not an option. Even if they have already served their criminal sentences, non-deportable inmates are forced to serve a second indeterminate sentence — sometimes for life. One Cuban involved in the St. Martin Parish takeover says he has been in jail 13 years awaiting deportation to Cuba. INS and prison officials have not been able to confirm his story.
INS detainees have become the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population. In 1995, the agency had 6,600 inmates in custody. Today, the agency has more than 17,000. The non-deportable segment of the population is also soaring. A year ago, the INS had 2,800 non-removables. Today it has 3,600.
While the INS says non-deportables make up only a small segment of its detainees, officials admit that their detention creates an important revenue stream for local communities.
The crackdown on detainees has so overwhelmed INS’s own detention centers, that the agency is paying local facilities — like the St. Martin Parish Correctional Center — millions of dollars each year to board its prisoners. But the local jails are often ill-equipped to deal with the inmates, and that lack of preparedness likely contributed to the current standoff, say human rights watchdogs and immigration advocates.
“You see in letter after letter from prisoners the level of frustration, the level of depression that comes from years of indefinite detention,” says Allyson Collins, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. The Washington, D.C.-based international human rights organization issued a lengthy report in September 1998 titled “Locked Away: Immigration Detainees in Local Jails in the United States,” which chastised the INS for warehousing its prisoners in local jails for indefinite periods of time. The organization contends that along with substantial sums of money, the INS is surrendering the welfare of indefinite detainees to officials of small-town jails which in most cases, are not subject to a uniform set of guidelines and are not regularly monitored.
In response to pleas from inmates across the country, Human Rights Watch spent 18 months investigating the INS detention system. Monitors visited 14 jails in seven states and received letters from and interviewed more than 200 INS detainees, including detainees in St. Martin Parish Correctional Center. (Human Rights Watch investigators were not allowed to tour the jail, however.)
What the group discovered was troubling. Detainees cited the denial of appropriate medical care, lack of outdoor exercise, correctional officers without language or other skills necessary to deal with INS prisoners. They also mentioned a shortage of law materials and reading materials in foreign languages, excessive or inappropriate discipline, commingling with accused or criminal inmates, and isolation from family and friends through restrictive telephone, correspondence and visitation policies.
Immigration detainees, whether held in INS detention facilities or in local jails, have a right to legal counsel, but holding them in local jails makes it more difficult for them to obtain legal assistance. And since INS prisoners can be frequently and unexpectedly shuffled from one local jail to another, depending on available bed space, maintaining consistent legal representation can be nearly impossible.
Because the INS doesn’t have space for its burgeoning inmate population, it has farmed them out. Its jails of choice are often in small towns and counties in Louisiana and Texas, where rents range between $30 and $55 a day, per prisoner. That’s cheaper than elsewhere — the INS pays an average of $58 per day, per detainee, with rates running as high as $100 a day in some places. The agency pays $45 per day to the St. Martin Parish Sheriffs Office to house each of its approximately 60 prisoners.
This system of farming out detainees to area jails creates a harsh environment for non-removables, Human Rights Watch concluded. While INS enforces minimum standards in its own detention centers and privately contracted facilities, there are few standards for local jails. The result has been inconsistent, inadequate treatment for some detainees. The only laws or regulations regarding detention conditions for INS detainees are four minimal requirements contained in federal regulations: 24-hour supervision, compliance with safety and emergency codes, food service and emergency medical care. No other laws or regulations are in place for facilities holding INS detainees. The loose regulatory environment has fostered an active market for counties eager to make money off of federal prisoners.
A survey of Texas counties with INS contracts conducted last year for the Austin Chronicle found communities making as much as $6 million per year by housing INS prisoners. It’s a windfall that has helped stabilize or lower taxes in some areas and enabled several counties, including Comal County and Denton County, to embark on major capital building projects. These projects include prison expansions, which local officials say are planned at least partly with future INS detainees in mind.
And Texas is not alone. St. Martin Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Capt. Audrey Thibodeaux told reporters recently that the reason the county is holding INS inmates is that, “It’s a source of revenue.” Before the hostage crisis began, 60 of the 160 prisoners being held in the St. Martin jail were non-removable Cubans.
The hostage situation in St. Martinville is the latest incident in which frustrated INS prisoners have lashed out at the system. In March of last year, INS detainees in El Centro, Calif., assaulted security officers, barricaded themselves in their barracks and burned mattresses. In June of 1998, 34 INS detainees were moved out of a Florida jail after they alleged that they had been mistreated by officers at the Jackson County jail. In 1987, Cuban inmates being held by the INS rioted at facilities in Oakdale, La., and in Atlanta.
INS officials contend that the non-removable population is a relatively small part of the 170,000 prisoners who will pass through INS custody this year. “The average length of detention in INS custody for a criminal alien is about 45 days. Our population turns over rather quickly,” said INS spokesman Russ Bergeron. In addition, Bergeron said his agency is trying to move as many non-removable inmates into more secure federal facilities. But it is being constrained by the federal budget. At present, about a quarter of the INS’s non-removable prisoners are being held by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The federal prison system is “better able to handle them and better able to meet the needs of people in long-term custody,” said Bergeron, who added that the INS plans to transfer an additional 1,000 non-removable prisoners to the Federal Bureau of Prisons during the current fiscal year.
But even this INS project won’t do much to quiet critics. In its report last year, Human Rights Watch specifically condemned the U.S.’s indeterminate sentencing policy, saying it is “clearly prohibited by international law.” It also said that “detention becomes arbitrary when detainees, who are not serving a criminal sentence, do not know when they will be released and have no genuine mechanism to challenge the indefinite nature of their detention.”
Two international human rights documents prohibit the use of indefinite detention, including the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which was ratified by the members of the United Nations in 1948. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by the United States in 1992, also prohibits the practice.
Nov. 2, 1999
Stories about “comfort women” abducted and raped by the Japanese military during World War II (as detailed in Naked World Monday) may suggest that sexual slavery is an extinct barbarism that haunts only impoverished or war-torn countries. But recent reports testify that such exploitation continues to this day, sometimes in our own, peaceful backyards. Indeed, many young women who migrate illegally to the “land of the free” find themselves imprisoned in skanky, clandestine brothels.
On Aug. 17, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service busted a smuggling ring in Atlanta that had “recruited” from 500 to 1,000 young women and girls, aged 13-28, from China, Thailand, Laos, Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam.
The bust, chronicled in November’s International Enforcement Law Reporter, unveiled 17 brothels in residential neighborhoods. Often held in “prison compounds,” the women lived encircled by barbed wire and fences with chained dogs and gang members as guards. According to the Associated Press, the women slept on mattresses separated by hanging bedsheets and splayed on the brothel floors surrounded by “used and unused condoms, piles of towels and tubes of lubricant.”
As in much modern sexploitation, what had begun as a consensual arrangement turned into violent coercion. Originally, the imprisoned women signed contracts promising to pay $30,000-$40,000 to smuggling agents, called “snakeheads,” for transport into the United States. Many of the women told investigators they thought they’d be working as seamstresses or masseuses to pay off the debt, but what awaited them was prostitution in confinement. Clients paid $100 per trick; $30 went to the smuggling group and the remaining $70 was deducted from the sex slave’s debt. This meant that the average woman needed to satiate about 500 johns before earning her freedom.
Modern sex slavery isn’t confined to Atlanta. Recent investigations have uncovered brothel-prisons in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with additional sex-slave rings suspected in 16 states and the District of Columbia. Deputy Chief Gary Beamish of the Toronto police estimates in Monday’s Toronto Star that some 30 million women worldwide have become victims of the sex trade.
What happened to the Atlanta sex slaves who were set free by federal investigators? Quick deportation back to their homeland. How sad that these young women perhaps spent most of their sojourn in the land of liberty gazing wistfully out the windows of their sordid chambers.
CHERAN, Michoacan –
Jaime, Salvador and Benjamin Chavez-Munoz set out two months ago from this small Indian town in Michoacan’s highlands for Watsonville, Ca., to pick another season’s crops. They never made it. The pick-up they were riding in along with 23 other
undocumented immigrants catapulted off the highway in a high-speed chase with the U.S. Border Patrol. The three brothers and five others were killed in the crash.
The accident occurred on April 6, five days after the highly publicized beating of three undocumented Mexicans by Riverside sheriff’s deputies. Before the end of that month there was another fatal accident involving a truck smuggling immigrants into California. On Father’s Day, three Mexican nationals were found dead, apparently from dehydration and exposure to the Arizona desert sun. At least 14 others have been found dead in the California desert since the beginning of the year.
As the toll mounts, the numbers begin to look like body counts from a battle front. A study by the University of Houston documented over 3,000 deaths along the border in the last decade, most of them immigrants who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande.
The Border patrol hopes the mounting body count will serve as a cautionary tale for immigrants across Mexico — a kind of
symbolic deterrent. Late last month, it initiated a campaign called “Stay Out, Stay Alive” — the equivalent of
hanging dead bodies like scarecrows on the border fence.
Maria Elena Chavez-Munoz, mother of the dead brothers, would rather no one left Cheran for the North ever again. “I don’t want any mother to have to go through the pain I feel,” she tells visitors in her one-room dirt-floor house. But for others here, the North, 1,000 miles away, still represents a chance — albeit an increasingly dangerous one — for life. “There’s just no way to feed my wife and child here,” says Wenze Cortez, Maria Elena’s 19-year-old son-in-law, who is all set to make a break for the United States. “What’s worse, this living death or dying trying to truly live?”
“Just days after the brothers were killed, a bus carrying 80 people left Cheran for the north,” says Jose Luis Macias, a public school teacher here. Macias’s own family is split between Cheran and “los United.” The town’s mostly unpaved roads are clogged with cheap and sometimes not-so-cheap cars brought back by immigrants after stints in the U.S., bearing license plates from California, Missouri, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Indeed, Cheran, population 30,000, would wither away without money from relatives working in the States. Mayor Salvador Campanur estimates some $3 million comes back from the North each year in “remesas” (money orders). Roughly half the town’s families still live in dirt-floor adobe brick or scrap aluminum structures, but a good number of concrete-and-plaster two-story homes, crowned by satellite dishes, line the streets.
Sergio Velasquez, an attendant at the only gas station in
town, first went north at age 16. Now 22, married and with a
daughter, he built a modest home from money he earned picking tomatoes in Mississippi, tobacco in North Carolina, watermelon in Kentucky. As a youngster in Cheran, he dreamed of owning his own bicycle. Only in the U.S. was he able to afford a second-hand one. “At least I had that one luxury, something I could call my own. Once you’ve tasted the fruits of your work, it’s difficult to let that go.”
The Chavez-Munoz brothers’ tombstone is an elegant, five-foot high
miniature of a white twin-steepled church set on a slate-gray slab —
paid for by donations that have trickled in from relatives, friends and strangers ever since the news of the accident arrived via one of the town’s two long-distance public phones.
Now the family is being pressured by the local loan-shark who lent the brothers about $1,200 for the trip. “It’s an insult to the dead,” cemetery worker Ramiro Payeda says. He falls silent as a blast sounds from the engine of a bus grinding along the highway, headed north. Another chance to die. Another chance to live.
) Pacific News Service
Quotes of the day
There’s something happening here…
“Something is going on here that’s beyond politics. A lot of people have tended to draw the conclusion that we cut taxes in the 1980s, and the rich got richer. Here we’ve increased taxes in the 1990s, and they still got richer.”
– Bruce Bartlett, Senior Fellow at the conservative think-tank National Center for Policy Analysis, on a Census Bureau report showing that the income gap may have widened faster under Clinton than under Reagan. From “Income Disparity Between Poorest And Richest Rises,” in Thursday’s New York Times.
…what it is ain’t exactly clear…
“My wife was here six days last week, and she’ll be back next week, and she does an outstanding job. And when I’m elected, she will not be in charge of health care. Don’t worry about it. Or in charge of anything else. I didn’t say that. It did sort of go through my mind. But she may have a little blood bank in the White House. But that’s all right. We need it. It doesn’t cost anything. These days, it’s not all you gave at the White House — your blood. You have to give your file. I keep wondering if mine’s down there. Or my dog. I got a dog named Leader. I’m not certain they got a file on Leader. He’s a schnauzer. I think he’s been cleaned. We’ve had him checked by the vet but not by the FBI or the White House. He may be suspect, but in any event, we’ll get into that later. Animal rights or something of that kind. But this is a very serious election.”
– Bob Dole, on the campaign trail, in Bakersfield, Calif.
No internal split at Sierra Club
Environmental organization’s executive director responds to Salon story
Mark Dowie’s article on the Sierra Club’s new President, Adam Werbach, captures Adam’s spirit admirably — but Dowie cannot seem to bring himself to admit that an organization can change, evolve, and renew itself without a bitter internal split, and with leaders old and new collaborating to define the new direction.
During the past three years, under the leadership of Michele Perrault and Robbie Cox, Adam’s immediate predecessors, the Sierra Club has dramatically streamlined its national governance structure, initiated a major project to strengthen the community outreach capabilities of its local chapters and groups, and decisively shifted its focus towards organizing and energizing the American people to act on their environmental values through the democratic process.
The American people are committed to protecting our nation’s
environment for our families and our nation’s future. It is the job
of a grassroots democratic organization like the Sierra Club to inform
an energized citizenry so that elected politicians are held accountable to the environmental values of the American people, not
the selfish narrow agendas of their campaign contributors.
Carl Pope
Executive Director
Sierra Club
