All Notebook Entries

Barrick Gold, coring out mountains around the world for small amounts of gold, is ready to carve the sacred mountain of the Western Shoshone into a crater, with cyanide leaching

By Brenda Norrell

CRESCENT VALLEY, Nev. -- The U.S. Department of Interior, through its Bureau of Land Management, has approved one of the largest open pit cyanide heap leach gold mines in the United States on the flank of Mount Tenabo, an area well-known for its spiritual and cultural importance to the Western Shoshone. Western Shoshone, Timbisha Shoshone and the Great Basin Resource Watch filed a complaint today in federal court to halt the desecration.

Western Shoshone grandmother Carrie Dann said, "The destruction of the water is like the destruction of the blood of the earth; you are destroying life of the earth and the people and wildlife that depend on it. Dewatering is taking the life of future generations. Water is sacred, all life depends on it.

By Al Giordano

Eleven years ago, on December 22, 1997, paramilitary troops in earshot of a federal military base massacred 45 unarmed civilians - mostly women and children - as they prayed in a Church in the Mexican town of Acteal. The gunmen - every major human rights and media organization now agrees - sliced open the bellies of the pregnant women and shot the 45 Tzotzil-speaking farmers and their children at point blank range. The victims were members of a pacifist Catholic organization known as Las Abejas ("The Bees").

Bill Clinton was the president of the United States, Madeleine Albright his Secretary of State, and the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere was Jeffrey Davidow, a State Department lifer with the dubious record of having been political officer at the US Embassy in Chile during the September 1973 US-backed coup d'etat there.

For more than a week prior to the massacre, non-governmental organizations in Chiapas, Mexico, had warned the US State Department of the impending atrocity. But the deal had already been struck with the Mexican regime that in exchange for its acquiescence to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the US would turn a blind eye to all matters of human rights in Mexican territory.

The story of Acteal is not an isolated incident nor aberration. I reported on it then and have reported too many hundreds of such stories since from Mexico and across this hemisphere. I would be happy to answer anybody's questions about it and the details of US complicity in a strategy of terror against peaceful social movements in Mexico and elsewhere that, I'm sure many will agree, has been the policy of the administration of the forty-third president George W. Bush but, as some will be reluctant to accept, was also the policy of the Clinton 42, Bush 41 and Reagan 40 administrations before it.

For some, whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, it does not matter or pinch their consciences what happens to subsistence level indigenous farmers in a small town in Mexico. (Nor do they want to look at the direct consequences to their own communities when millions of Mexicans over the past 14 years have streamed over the border to the United States to escape from the economic and political harms that have inflicted them since the enactment of NAFTA.) So let me please tell you another story that should hit anyone of the most minimal conscience a bit closer to home...

Nine years and many more atrocities after the Acteal massacre, on June 14 of 2006, in the next-door state of Oaxaca, Mexico, that state's despot governor Ulises Ruiz attacked a peaceful encampment of thousands of striking schoolteachers and their supporters. He sent 3,000 police in at dawn, as the protesters slept, with bullets, nightsticks and teargas canisters shot from the ground and dropped from a helicopter. It was only the latest incident in a violent and repressive chain. Only this time, the public, armed with nothing but sticks and stones and strength in numbers, regrouped and chased the police out of the city. They established their own government by popular assembly, set up locally-organized and volunteer-staffed barricades in each neighborhood, and the governor's security forces were unable to enter - although they had tried on multiple occasions - for five months after that. This publication published a book about those five months: The People Decide: Oaxaca's Popular Assembly, by Nancy Davies (2007, Narco News Books).

A 37-year-old Indymedia reporter by the name of Brad Will, whom I had known from my organizing days in New York, went to Oaxaca in early October 2006 to videotape the story. Responding to him via email, I had suggested that the situation had grown very dangerous - especially for any reporter not already familiar with the territory and the players on all sides -  and recommended that he not go. Still, as was his prerogative, he went. On October 27, 2006, he filmed gunmen loyal to the despot governor - some of them members of police forces, but not in uniform - attacking one of the blockades and shooting their guns directly at him. He died with his camera in his hand. You can see Brad's final footage, here:

The case of Brad, a constituent from 2001 until his death of New York's Junior United States Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York), continues to provide a lurid example of the consequences of a violent and undemocratic Mexican regime and the bipartisan US policy that protects that government at all costs as long as it tows the line on trade, drug policy, and other matters.

Brad's family and friends have sought justice now for two years, but the gunmen captured on video continue to walk free, while, in an unbelievable (except that we must believe it) perversion of justice, the state recently charged - without any evidence at all - some of the protesters Brad had befriended as a journalist sympathetic to their cause with his assassination.

Some members of the New York Congressional delegation - like US Rep. Jose Serrano (D-Bronx) - have taken up the cause of seeking justice in that case.

But multiple and sustained efforts by Friends of Brad Will in New York to convince Senator Clinton to use her international bully-pulpit to help bring justice and closure to the case have gone unanswered.

A month ago, on October 22, some of them sat in front of Senator Clinton's New York office, at 780 Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan, and fasted to appeal for her assistance to her late constituent, his family and friends.

According to one report, Senator Clinton was physically present in the office on at least one of those days, but avoided responding to or speaking with those fasting out in front, much less writing the letters and making the public statements to bring justice to the case that any authentic advocate of human rights would do, especially if it involved a constituent.

There are those who claim that Senator Clinton is a "champion" of human rights, based on a solitary speech she gave in September of 1995 to the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, China, because her most quoted soundbite from that speech was "women's rights are human rights."

Nobody - certainly not this correspondent - takes issue with that truth: Women's rights are human rights, as are men's rights, children's rights, minority rights, and everybody else's. But if a politician doesn't have a basic understanding of what human rights are to begin with, and has shrunk from the duty to defend them time and time again even when they have hit close to home, that politician is not going to be able and ready to extend them to any gender or demographic.

In Latin America, as everywhere, the doctrine of Human Rights, begun in the Carter administration but left to atrophy by all administrations since, walks hand in hand with any pro-democracy agenda. When human rights are deprived as part and parcel of state terror campaigns against peaceful dissidents, labor, environmental and other community organizers, the chilling effect on all free speech and freedom of association makes democracy impossible.

And that's a big part of the story in Mexico for as long as the living can remember. The same goes for Colombia and other lands, where Democratic and Republican presidents - beginning with Clinton and continued under Bush - chose multi-billion dollar US military intervention (known as "Plan Colombia") and pushed for pro-corporate trade agreements over defense of human rights. Such policies have only emboldened the state terror campaigns in both countries and led to human tragedy after human tragedy.

Undeterred by the abject failure of "Plan Colombia" to improve human rights and democracy in that country (but probably spurred on by how it has given that country's despot, President Alvaro Uribe, the tools to repress the peaceful dissidents and movements that oppose him), the Bush administration proposed, and Congress approved, "Plan Mexico" last year which is already funding a kind of Colombianization of the country next-door to the United States.

Those policies have also damaged Americans at home as companies have closed their factories in the United States and moved them to Mexico and elsewhere where the state terror campaigns keep unions from organizing and citizens from speaking out against the pollution they cause to the natural environment.

And you might say that, "the next Secretary of State will have to follow the policies of the next president." In an ideal world, that would be true. But so much happens, day in, day out, in so many lands... so many daily attacks on dissidents, community organizers, and others who dare speak and act to improve their lives... that no US president could possibly micro-manage the situation and take preemptive action on each pending atrocity from the Oval Office. That's what a State Department is for: to handle the constant communications that are necessary with other governments.

And if - as the mass media seems to agree right now - US President-elect Barack Obama is about to install someone as the next Secretary of State who has shown zero understanding of, much less passion and action for, human rights in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere (except in isolated cases where the same mass media has turned a particular case into an international cause celébre), we're going to see more of the same terrible story happen over and over again.

If you can't get somebody to act to defend human rights when she's your own local elected representative, do you really believe that such a person would begin to do so if she suddenly represented the entire country before the world?

I write these words in memory of my late good friend and labor lawyer Carlos Sánchez López (1954-2003), of Juchitán, Oaxaca, assassinated on the night of his daughter's fifteenth birthday, in August of 2003, who lived and died so that someday a change might truly come.

Sources within the US Congress have confirmed to Narco News that the US government has released approximately USD$90 million of the $116.5 million in foreign military financing (FMF) under Plan Mexico, also known as the Merida Initiative or Plan Merida.  The $90 million comprises approximately 77% of Mexico's total FMF allotment under Plan Mexico in 2008. 

The US Congress authorized the release of up to 85%, or $99 million, of 2008 FMF funds pending a report from the Secretary of State on Mexico's compliance with the human rights conditions laid out in Plan Mexico.  However, congressional sources state that Mexico has not yet met the human rights conditions, so the State Department has not submitted the report.

Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales indicted for criminal conspiracy in private prison profiteering, resulting in prisoner assaults

By Brenda Norrell

WILLACY COUNTY, Texas -- US Vice President Dick Cheney was indicted today for a prison profiteering scheme and charged with abuse of prisoners. Cheney invested millions in the Vanguard Group, an investment management company with interests in the prison companies in charge of detention centers. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was also indicted in the prison profiteering scheme, resulting in ongoing prisoner assaults and at least one murder.
Human rights activists urged a probe into prison profiteering after the private prison corporations GEO Group and CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) began receiving enormous federal contracts to build detention centers to imprison migrants. GEO's new migrant prisons including prisons in Laredo, Texas and Jena, Louisiana.

The name of the US drone, 'Predator,' reflects what the United States has become

By Brenda Norrell

TUCSON -- The bad news is that the US Border Patrol has four drones flying out of Fort Huachuca over the US/Mexico border for surveillance. One drone has already crashed near Nogales and these unmanned aerial planes, provided first by Israel's Apartheid spy technology maker, Elbit Systems, are a risk to the lives of those on the ground in Arizona.

The good news is that Airforce pilots are not flying over in their planes. Airforce pilots in Tucson were so eager to smuggle cocaine in uniform, that the FBI halted Operation Lively Green. More than 50 Army, Navy, Marine and National Guard soldiers have been sentenced for smuggling cocaine for cash, from Nogales to Phoenix.

On Saturday, November 15th, 2008, Time published an incendiary piece of “reporting” by Alison Stateman, describing negative consequences experienced by supporters of California’s Proposition 8, with the sensationalistic title, “What Happens If You’re on the Gay ‘Enemies List.’” The deeply flawed article is a completely one-sided attempt to portray these individuals and businesses as innocent victims of a vengeful, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding gay mob, bent on the destruction of any who dare to stand between them and their goal of legalized gay marriage. This article is nothing more than journalistic arson, as it appears to have been commissioned with the goal of pouring gasoline on the fire of extant rifts between various communities –while polarizing straight people, and African-Americans in particular, against the gay community.

On Saturday, November 15th, up to one million people rallied in over 300 cities and towns across the United States and overseas to advocate for one common cause: marriage equality for all.

This event was born only eight days earlier when two women, Amy Balliett and Willow Witte, started exchanging emails about the passage of California's Proposition 8 and anti-gay initiatives in the states of Florida, Arizona and Arkansas. They created Join the Impact, and people flocked to their new website to network and publicize their own grassroots plans to rally. You can read more about Join the Impact in this great article from 365Gay.

I joined with the local LGBT rights organization Equality Action Now to help stage the Sacramento, CA demonstration. Many fine speakers, including local elected leaders, made the case for marriage equality. As they did, my mind wandered to consider the power of marriage, and three marriages in particular, to change the world.

Look back in time with me, then ahead to the future, to consider these three marriages.

In conjunction with the national grassroots movement Join the Impact, Equality. Action.

UPDATE: More death threats to border reporters before Rodriguez buried 

FronteraNorte Sur reports in "A Border Press Emergency," that the threats to border reporters continues. There were even death threats to others before Armando Rodriguez was buried.

"Even before murdered El Diario de Juarez reporter Armando Rodriguez was buried last week, more Ciudad Juarez journalists reported getting death threats. In one case, the director of a popular online news site took the threats so seriously he immediately left behind his property, packed up the family and fled to the United States.

"According to the Mexico City-based Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET), Jorge Luis Aguirre, director of the La Polaka news service, received a call on his cell phone last Thursday, one day after Rodriguez’s murder, which warned the news manager that he 'was the next in line.'" Read article.

By Brenda Norrell

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- News reporter Armando Rodriguez was the fifth reporter murdered in Mexico this year, and the 20th news reporter murdered in Mexico since 2000, when he was gunned down as he took his child to school on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008. These numbers increase when the number of independent journalists murdered are added to the list of media assassinated in Mexico.

Rodriguez, a reporter for El Diario, the largest privately-owned daily in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, was shot dead outside his home.

Reporters without Borders said, "Rodriguez, aged 40, became the latest victim in a bloody war between the country’s major drug cartels which is centred on Ciudad Juarez, in Chihuahua State, with more than 1,300 casualties since the start of the year."

On Tuesday, November 4th, the United States took a bold step forward when it elected Barack Obama to be our next President. But the day was bittersweet for gay and lesbian Americans and their allies, because ballot initiatives limiting the civil rights of LGBT Americans passed in four states. Three, in California, Arizona and Florida, targeted same-sex marriage, and the especially pernicious Arkansas initiative placed new barriers to adoption, not only for same-sex couples, but for all unmarried couples.

Since that set of apparently contradictory electoral outcomes came to pass, there has been a groundswell of response. Some of it has been useless and divisive, such as finger-pointing at various classes and communities of people who predominately opposed marriage equality at the polls, but much of it has been inspiring.

The agencies in charge of Mexico’s drug war have high-ranking officials who protect the cartels

By Ricardo Ravelo, Proceso
Translation from the original Spanish and notes by Kristin Bricker

The animosity between the heads of Federal Attorney General’s Office and the Public Security Ministry don’t just immobilize the federal government and make its crusade against drug traffickers and organized crime futile.  It also shows that both institutions are so porous that the gangsters have already positioned themselves in them.  The infiltration is of such magnitude that even Eduardo Medina Mora and Genaro Garcia Luna have become suspect.

No one is illegal -- Somos un solo rio/We are all one river"

Article and photo by Brenda Norrell

SAN FRANCISCO -- AIM-West is hosting the 40th Anniversary Reunion of the American Indian Movement, Nov. 24 -- 28. With the theme, "No one is illegal -- Somos un solo rio/We are all one river," the topics include the militarization of the US borders, treaty rights, protection of sacred places, international Indigenous rights and religious freedom for prison inmates.

Bill Means, cofounder of the International Indian Treaty Council, is among the featured speakers at the sunrise gathering on Alcatraz Island on Thursday, Nov. 27. The weeklong AIM-West reunion includes Native Americans who have made history in the struggle for Indigenous Peoples rights, including Madonna Thunder Hawk, Manny Pino, Lenny Foster, Mike Flores, Charlie Hill, Patricia Bellanger and others.

By Jorge Carrasco Araizaga and Francisco Castellanos J., Proceso
Translated from the original Spanish by Kristin Bricker

Through confessions obtained “under torture” and with multiple irregularities, the Federal Attorney General’s office (PGR in its Spanish initials) maintains the three alleged culprits under arrest in the September 15 terrorist attack in Morelia, Michoacan—which left eight people dead and 106 injured—even though many family members and neighbors assure that the accused were in Lazaro Cardenas [250 miles south of Morelia] the moment the attacks occurred. 

Juan Carlos Castro Galeana, Julio Cesar Mondragon Mendoza, and Alfredo Rosas Elicea, the suspects in the grenade attack, were kidnapped and tortured by armed men in Lazaro Cardenas and later brought to a house in Apatzingan, where they were tormented again, before federal authorities took charge of them.

According to the criminal investigation PGR/SIEDO/UEITA/110/2008, the accused say they were kidnapped and psychologically and physically tortured for days so that they would confess to the attack and to being members of Los Zetas.

On the morning of November 9, a group led by a man who is alleged to have been involved in the 1997 Acteal massacre chased a family of adherents to the Zapatista's Other Campaign off of the land where they've lived since 1973.

The confrontation started when the group began work to construct a road through land occupied by adherents to the Zapatista’s Other Campaign in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. The adherents consider the construction of the road to be a pretext to evict them because the construction crew was accompanied by surveyors who came to measure the property’s boundaries, ostensibly in order to sell the land.  The land the adherents occupy is legally federal property and a protected zone because the Utrilla mansion, officially a historical monument, is located there.  However, the property is registered with the Zapatistas’ Good Government Council in Oventik.

Friday, Nov. 7 2008

The trial against three high placed government officials of the Mireya Moscoso administration for abuse of power in the release of terrorist Luís Posada Carriles has been postponed until November 24, La Prensa reports.

According to the newspaper, one of the accused was on a business trip outside Panama today.

Ex-minister of Government & Justice Arnulfo Escalona, the former director of the National Police Carlos Barés and the former sub-director of Immigration Javier Tapia are facing charges of abuse of authority. They are accused of releasing convicted terrorist Luís Posada Carriles and his accomplices hours before then President Mireya Moscoso pardoned them on the last day of her administration.

Read the story in The Isthmian.

NCAI urges new protections for sacred places, while Homeland Security seeks to keep secret the digging up of Native American graves during construction of the border wall

By Brenda Norrell

Photo Save the Peaks

Larry Summers has emerged within the media speculation machine as one of the leading candidates for the post of Secretary of Treasury. If he assumes that position under the Barack Obama presidency, he will undoubtedly play a key role in helping to manage the nation out of its current economic crisis.

Summers, no doubt, has the background in economics to deal with that mission, but it is worth noting that while he served in a leadership role in the Treasury Department under the Clinton administration, the agency chalked up a less-than-stellar record on civil rights issues, particularly with respect to Hispanic employees of the U.S. Customs Service then under the department’s umbrella.

One reason Raymond Kelly should not be considered for any federal position under a Barack Obama’s administration:  He is a racist!

DHS issues a policy to all employees not to talk to the Barack Obama’s Transition Team because the members are non-federal employees yet.  This "don't talk policy" sounds like a "gag-order" - what does the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has to hide?

On November 6, 2008, I heard on National Public Radio (NPR), as I was driving to the U.S. Post Office, that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had recently issued (one can assume that after U.S. Senator Barack Obama was officially declared our next U.S. President-Elect) a policy or order prohibiting all DHS employees from talking to any member (s) of the U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama’s Transition Team, because they are not federal employees yet.

Israel site of border training for US and Canada

By Brenda Norrell

Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño and drug prosecutor José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos died along with twelve other people when the plane carrying the government officials crashed into Mexico City's financial district last night.

Juan Camilo Mouriño had been at the center of numerous energy scandals.  He was Felipe Calderon's right-hand man and climbed the political ladder on the current president's coattails.  As Interior Minister he was the most powerful member of Calderon's cabinet.

José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos had received numerous death threats and survived two attempts on his life as a result of his work combatting drug cartels. 

BARACK OBAMA, 44th President of the United States - Congratulations Mr. President Obama!

I personally know the implications that an Obama's White House administration will bring.  JUSTICE!

This is the end of cronysm, favoritism, mismanagement, abuse of authority and corruption within our federal government.

Mexican Congress approves light reforms for the state oil company; legislators vow to continue the campaign to privatize Pemex

Mexican Congress approved light reforms to the state-owned oil monopoly Pemex at the end of October 2008. While the details of the reforms have still not been published in the government’s Official Diary of the Federation, details are trickling out through the media.

The biggest reform reported so far assigns specific blocks of the Gulf of Mexico to private companies to drill and explore. Private companies have been allowed to explore and drill in the Gulf of Mexico for years, but this is the first time they’ll have exclusive rights to specific blocks. This was one of the more contentious parts of the new laws, with opposition leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador calling for language specifically barring the government from assigning exclusive blocks to private companies. He sees this practice as an initial step towards further privatization of Mexico’s oil industry. However, Energy Secretary Georgina Kessel argued, "If we're drilling a well in one particular area, we can't allow somebody else to come along and do drilling in the same area."

According to the Los Angeles Times, U.S. senator Barack Obama's maternal grandmother has died in Hawaii.

I understand and feel the pain that Senator Obama may be undergoing knowing of the loss of his grandmother, who raised him at the age of 10.

I remember also the death of my maternal grandmother who raised me as I was growing up as my mother, a farm immigrant loaborer tended the farm fields of Arizona and California. 

By Brenda Norrell

TUCSON -- In Tucson, a community known for human rights organizations that are setting global standards, the University of Arizona has been co-opted by dollars to become spy central.
The university is very proud of its new millions to spy on people, by way of the Internet, and develop "technologies," including lasers on migrants' arteries.
Under the guise of the war on terror, human rights activists, especially peace activists, have been targeted throughout the United States and the world by unbridled US spy technology and US government lawlessness.