Latinos / Hispanics

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Seth Myers: This week, Arizona signed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country which will allow police to demand identification papers from anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. I know there’s some people in Arizona worried that Obama is acting like Hitler, but could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying "Show me your papers?"

California Court Okays Discrimination Against Section 8 Tenants

Remember Donald Sterling, the NBA team owner and Los Angeles mega-landlord who has been sued multiple times for outrageous housing discrimination, most recently by the U.S. Department of Justice? Sterling is back in the news this week, again for discrimination in his role as landlord. This time, however, Sterling convinced a California Court of Appeal that it was just fine for him to discriminate against a Section 8 tenant. At this point, anyone who still believes in the myth that judges are “liberal activists” needs to have his or her head examined.

Click the picture to see how they did it 55 years ago

Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?

By John Perkins

August 07, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- I recently visited Central America. Everyone I talked with there was convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the democratically-elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and its new president were not standing up for democracy.

Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International Inc. (formerly United Fruit) and Dole Food Co had severely criticized Zelaya for advocating an increase of 60% in Honduras’s minimum wage, claiming that the policy would cut into corporate profits. They were joined by a coalition of textile manufacturers and exporters, companies that rely on cheap labor to work in their sweatshops.

Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala’s democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya’s.

I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, “Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”

Who's Behind Lanny Davis' Putsch Paycheck?

Following the money trail in the Honduran coup

By Bill Conroy

July 22, 2009 "Narco News" -- (Lea en Español Aquí) -- Going to bat for an illegal coup used to be the job of shadowy CIA operatives back in the good ol' days of the Cold War.

But that is bygone era. Today’s junta-enablers no longer have to work in secret. In fact, illegal usurpers can now shop openly in Washington for a hired gun of their choosing to grease the wheels of Congress and commerce to assure their coup d'état remains a fait accompli.

Enter Lanny Davis — a long-time friend and Yale Law School chum of Hillary Clinton and former White House Counsel to Bill Clinton [as well as a consummate shill for their agendas].

Davis also is a lawyer and lobbyist now employed by the D.C. office of global law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. In that capacity, Davis was recently retained by the Business Council of Latin America (CEAL) to hawk for the coup in Honduras — or as is the preferred description among the pushers of simulation, the administration of “de facto” Honduran President Roberto Micheletti [elected by virtue of having cast the most bullets in deposing the people’s choice in Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya).

Davis is now scampering about the Hill setting up meetings with Congressional insiders and throwing money around on advertising and other such frills to build a case for supporting the new militarily elected Honduran regime.

Davis may be many things, but one thing he is not is cheap. So the question is begged: Whose paying for this charade?

The best way to get a peek under those covers most certainly should be to take a look at who is in bed with CEAL, Davis’ current contract employer.

Well, here’s the scoop on the pecuniary bedfellows:


Camilo Alejandro Atala Faraj, president of the Honduras chapter of CEAL, also happens to be a vice president of a major banking institution in Honduras, Banco Financiera Comercial Hondurena S.A [or Banco Ficohsa), which is part of the financial holding company Grupo Financiero Ficohsa.

A Few Thoughts on the Coup in Honduras

It is impossible to imagine that the US was not aware that the coup was in the works. At minimum, the US could have flexed its tremendous economic muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand down.

By Jeremy Scahill

There is a lot of great analysis circulating on the military coup against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. I do not see a need to re-invent the wheel. (See here here here and here). However, a few key things jump out at me. First, we know that the coup was led by Gen. Romeo Vasquez, a graduate of the US Army School of the Americas. As we know very well from history, these “graduates” maintain ties to the US military as they climb the military career ladders in their respective countries. That is a major reason why the US trains these individuals.

Secondly, the US has a fairly significant military presence in Honduras. Joint Task Force-Bravo is located at Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras. The base is home to some 550 US military personnel and more than 650 US and Honduran civilians:

They work in six different areas including the Joint Staff, Air Force Forces (612th Air Base Squadron), Army Forces, Joint Security Forces and the Medical Element. 1st Battalion, 228th Aviation Regiment, a US Army South asset, is a tenant unit also based at Soto Cano. The J-Staff provides command and control for JTF-B.

The New York Times reports that “The unit focuses on training Honduran military forces, counternarcotics operations, search and rescue, and disaster relief missions throughout Central America.”

Significantly, according to GlobalSecurity, “Soto Cano is a Honduran military installation and home of the Honduran Air Force.”

This connection to the Air Force is particularly significant given this report in NarcoNews:

The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.

[I've wanted to do this for a week but haven't had time. And I know this has been covered ... a little bit ... but no where near as much as the Iranian elections which have had wall-to-wall coverage. Wonder why that is? And it's nice that the Peruvian Parliament has "suspended" the disputed laws which caused the protests, but I have a feeling they will go back into place once the US military base at Palanquero, Colombia gets built - what? you haven't heard of it? Hmmm, sounds like one of the next blogs. Anyway click the links for the three articles, and here's another really good one from indymedia Ireland]

Massacre in the Amazon: The U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement Sparks a Battle Over Land and Resources

Raúl Zibechi | June 16, 2009

On June 5, World Environment Day, Amazon Indians were massacred by the government of Alan Garcia in the latest chapter of a long war to take over common lands—a war unleashed by the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Peru and the United States.

Three MI-17 helicopters took off from the base of the National Police in El Milagro at six in the morning of Friday, June 5. They flew over Devil's Curve, the part of the highway that joins the jungle with the northern coast, which had been occupied for the past 10 days by some 5,000 Awajún and Wampi indigenous peoples. The copters launched tear gas on the crowd (other versions say that they also shot machine guns), while simultaneously a group of agents attacked the road block by ground, firing AKM rifles. A hundred people were wounded by gunshot and between 20-25 were killed.

The population of the nearby city of Bagua, some thousand kilometers northeast of Lima near the border with Ecuador, came out into the streets to support the indigenous people's demonstration, setting fire to state institutions and local office of the official party APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana). Several police officers were attacked and killed in the counter-attack, and other indigenous protestors were killed by police. At the same time, a group of 38 police who were guarding an oil station in the Amazon were taken hostage. Some were killed by their captors, while some 1,000 Indians threatened to set fire to Station Number 6 of the northern Peruvian oil pipeline.

The versions are contradictory. The government claimed days after the events that there are 11 indigenous dead and 23 police. The indigenous organizations reported 50 dead among their ranks and up to 400 disappeared. According to witnesses, the military burned bodies and threw them into the river to hide the massacre, and also took prisoners among the wounded in the hospitals. In any case, what is certain is that the government sent the armed forces to evict a peaceful protest that had been going on for 57 days in the jungle regions of five departments: Amazonas, Cusco, Loreto, San Martin, and Ucayali.

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (CIDH), part of the Organization of American States, condemned the violent acts on June 8 and reminded the Peruvian government of its obligation to clear up the facts and to compensate for the consequences and called on both sides to promote a process of dialogue.1 On June 9, the National Coordination of Human Rights announced that it found a series of irregularities and possible human rights violations in the Bagua area. It denounced the government's refusal to divulge what police are in charge of the investigation of the events, and expressed concern for the situation of 25 detained at the El Milagro base and the 99 arrested since a curfew was imposed in Bagua.2

President Garcia accused the Indians of being "terrorists" and spoke of an "international conspiracy," in which, according to government ministers, Bolivia and Venezuela are involved because as oil- and gas-producing countries they want to keep Peru from exploiting these resources and becoming a competitor.3 Just a few weeks ago, Peru granted asylum to the anti-Chavez leader, Venezuelan Manuel Rosas, accused of corruption, and three former Bolivian ministers from the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lazada prosecuted for the death of nearly 700 persons during the "gas war" of October 2003.

[...]

Peru: Battle lines drawn over the Amazon

Translation: The Untold Story of Victor Jara and The Disappeared

United States complicity: The U.S., the Argentine Military and the Coup; The Pinochet File; Pinochet: A Declassified Documentary Obit; Chile and Operation Condor; Operación Cóndor; Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents relating to the Military Coup, 1970-1976

A human rights mystery is solved in Chile

Details emerge about a Pinochet-era murder

By John Dinges - GlobalPost

Published: June 3, 2009 12:02 ET

NEW YORK — A Chilean court has uncovered the gruesome details surrounding the death of one of Latin America’s most famous human rights victims, the folk singer Victor Jara. A 4,500-word account of the singer’s death was published last week by the Chilean investigative journalism site CIPER, the day before the court announced murder charges against a former soldier who confessed to participating in the brutal killing in 1973.

The case attracted international attention after the military coup in September 1973 that brought Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to power and overthrew the elected government of Socialist president Salvador Allende. Victor Jara was a leading figure in the flourishing cultural scene during Allende’s 1,000-day presidency from 1970 to 1973. He was a theater director, poet and guitarist whose numerous songs became icons of the Latin American Nueva Cancion (New Song) movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

Jara was detained with other leftist activists at a Chilean university the day after the Sept. 11 military coup. His bullet-riddled body was found in the morgue four days later. The CIPER account, based on the court’s interrogation of soldiers at the detention center where Jara was held, described the brutal torture to which the folk singer was submitted, and the details of his execution in an interrogation cell. It also tells the story of a valiant government worker who discovered Jara’s body and prevented it from being buried anonymously in a mass grave.

The soldier, Jose Alfonso Paredes Marquez, was an 18-year-old army draftee assigned to guard prisoners in the Chile Stadium, a Santiago sports and performance arena that had been turned into a makeshift prison holding several thousand prisoners. He said Jara was among 15 prisoners brought to an interrogation room in the basement of the stadium. Paredes said he and other soldiers recognized Jara, who had already been severely beaten.

He said a second lieutenant, who was not identified in the court documents, singled out Jara and began to play Russian Roulette, pointing his pistol at Jara’s head and pulling the trigger until it fired. Paredes said Jara fell writhing to the floor. The second lieutenant ordered Paredes and the other guards to fire their weapons at the body to finish the execution. When Jara’s body was eventually found, it had 44 bullet wounds.

A community meeting for Justice for Luis Gutierrez, sponsored by a broad coalition of labor, Latino and civil rights organizations, will take place on Thursday May 28, 2009 at 6:30 PM at the Woodland Community Center, 2100 East Street, Woodland, CA. 95695. Yolo County Sheriffs Deputies killed Gutierrez, a farmworker who live with his parents in Woodland, on April 30. Here are all of the details from Al Rojas of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, AFL-CIO: