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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Are Latinos oppressed in America?


Some time back, the Mexican foreign minister said to us: Got terrorism problems? You're on your own! Want a new Iraq U.N. resolution? Don't count on our vote in the Security Council! You don't like Fidel Castro? That's too bad. We like him, again; in fact, we're rebuilding our links with him. We don't get all this human rights stuff you Yankees worry about.


And the Mexican press said this week: Your new California governor, Arnold, is a racist. Pete Wilson is advising him and we're ready to raise hell if that womanizing bodybuilder mistreats our countrymen as they keep California's economy alive!

Does this sound contrived? Not in interpreting the Mexican messages. Meanwhile, the Mexican government and a lock-stepped Mexican press are aggressively pushing and cajoling the Bush Administration to sign up to legalize the millions of illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. They are also working on and feeding the U.S. Latino-oriented media hard and using any U.S. “immigrant rights” advocates they can get to shill for them in promoting legalization of these workers and their families. So why are the top Mexican officials suddenly kicking us in the shins as this goes on?

Here's another incident. On Friday night, October 10, a prominent Los Angeles radio talk show host encouraged his large audience to boycott Mexico as a tourist destination. His reasons, he said, “Why spend our dollars there? They don’t like us and they disrespect us.” Foreign policy reasons? No. The radio host, Al Rantell of KABC, devoted more than an hour of his show to the stories around Armando Garcia, a Mexican national. Garcia allegedly shot and killed a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff in cold blood — and escaped across the border to safety and freedom. He is not even incarcerated in Mexico.

Over the hour, Rantell had as guests L.A. District Attorney, Steve Cooley, the murdered deputy sheriff’s widow, and several other surviving spouses and parents and siblings of murdered, raped, and kidnapped Angelinos, all victims of presumed Mexican illegals who had fled to Mexico after committing their crimes. From Los Angeles County alone, Mr. Cooley estimated that three hundred of these violent and heinous criminals are enjoying the protection of the Mexican government from extradition back to the United States for trial!

What is the Mexican official response to inquiries from hundreds of U.S. law enforcement and relatives? Mexico says the country has no capital punishment or life imprisonment without parole, and that all criminals can supposedly be rehabilitated. Thus, Mexico will not allow a fugitive-from-American-justice Mexican national to be returned for trial since, if convicted, he or she might face punishment of the death penalty or an indeterminate sentence for a crime, no matter its seriousness.

Consider the irony. U.S. immigrant advocates and their Mexican government prevaricators preach at us constantly about the horrible death toll of Mexicans in the northern Sonora desert or Arizona and Texas badlands as they attempt illegal border crossings. Yet it's impossible to recall comparable stories in ours or the Mexican press about the hundreds of American residents (many Latino) who have died violently or been raped or otherwise violated by willful attacks from Mexican citizens on U.S. soil who then fled and reached safe haven in Mexico. Are Mexican desert deaths more “relevant” than American victims of Mexican killers?

Even beyond this hypocrisy is the total lack of media stories of the Mexican criminals who return home (sometimes coming back, committing more U.S. crimes, and returning to Mexico again!), knowing full well that a few dollars spread here and there assure their safety from apprehension and extradition back to the U.S. They might be cold-blooded killers but they will never serve one day in jail if they remain in Mexico. This behavior of Mexico is not a mere kick in the shins; it is a boot in the American gonads!

But let's get back to the Mexican insults to Arnold Schwarzenegger, selected on October 7 by 48 percent of California's voters as Governor-elect of California. La Jornada, a major Mexico City newspaper covering U.S./Mexico affairs with a vengeance, on October 8 deplores the election of Arnold, calling him “a Republican actor” who is “racist, anti-Mexican, anti-Hispanic, discriminatory and a sexual exploiter of women who work with him.” Of those California Latinos (40 percent) who voted Republican, La Jornada says they engaged in “un acto político que raya en actitudes autodestructivas” or “a political act marked by an attitude of self-destructiveness.”

The Mexican media clips with the above quotes and those below are provided by the “Institute of Mexicans Abroad” (IME), an official mechanism of the SRE, Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, the Mexican foreign ministry. The IME has 100 U.S. Mexican residents (presumably legal) as advisors. The opinions and sentiments expressed in the Mexican press quoted here are therefore obviously considered proper for U.S. interests to recognize and understand as reflecting Mexican government support! Conflicting clips are never provided in the SRE newsletter.

In Mexico City, El Financiero, a respected financial newspaper, reported that the secretary of the interior, Santiago Creel Miranda, and Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez assured their nation publicly on October 8 that because of the Schwarzenegger victory “the Mexican Government will be particularly vigilant to denounce any violation of human rights or worker’s rights of their compatriots in California.” Even the governor of Baja California, Eugenio Elordoy, predicted “difficult times” because of ex-governor Pete Wilson being on Arnold's team since he represented a past “administration characterized by anti-immigrant policies.” So much for the immediate possible success of cross-border harmony in the Californias!

Before the California Recall exercise ended, in late September, El Universal, a more moderate Mexico paper than La Jornada, reported that Foreign Secretary Derbez had announced a new “security doctrine” for Mexico. It clashed with what Washington had expected would be a dependable partnership with Mexico and other nations in the war on terror. Never using the word “terrorism,” Derbez said that the concept of “one for all and all for one” was an “outdated World War II concept!”

No state can impose on another its own security agenda, nor the order of its priorities,” Derbez added as he opened a conference on regional security. He went on: “Security should be understood as a reality for each country — not as hemispheric, because there is no military, strategic or ideological enemy outside the region which is attacking it as a whole.” Huh?

This weird posture is not just a kick in the shins directed at the U.S. It flies in the face of Mexico's assurances of cooperation with us on terrorism prior to this announcement and comes as we seek United Nations help for our work in what we see as the prime current theater for the war on terror, Iraq.

One must assume that Secretary Derbez checked in with President Vicente Fox before this strange positioning. Or is this really internal posturing, while Colin Powell and President Bush are otherwise being reassured? If so, the Mexicans forgot to tell the Dallas Morning News and a few other alert American papers who are still puzzled by these events and are reflecting American pique with these regrettable and irritating Mexican games.

And the reversal on Cuba? A Derbez deputy has said that Mexico was “starting to improve relations with Cuba,” and to build a “new agenda” for cooperation. Undersecretary Miguel Hakin's remarks followed a meeting in New York between Derbez and Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque. Yesterday, October 10, President Bush announced a new “get tough” policy with Cuba, saying the previously unspeakable, in effect: “Castro is bad. Castro has to go!”

How about that, Messrs. Fox and Derbez? Maybe Mr. Bush should have played back Secretary Derbez's own words, that security “should be understood as a reality for each country — not as hemispheric, because there is no military, strategic, or ideological enemy outside the region which is attacking it as a whole.”

Summing up, the new Mexican attitude and policies go beyond the mysterious. They seem illogical and certainly disturbing to ordinary Americans who are normally favorably disposed to the country. Mexico already dumped us on Iraq last year, and a repeat this year is almost expected. But the threat of non-cooperation on terrorism? Weird! Especially within the reality of NAFTA and immigration policy changes they want from us, including their need for U.S. dollars. The flaunting of a new Mexico-Fidel Castro buddy-buddy arrangement? Weirder!

And the unwarranted and stupid personal attacks on the governor-elect of their neighboring state with the fifth largest economy in the world? Incomprehensible.

The only sensible reaction from Americans is to remind Mexico that the “yanqui” has limits to his patience. Maybe we have to look harder at the billions of dollars that are shipped annually out of the U.S. by illegal “residents” back to Mexico. Maybe no immigration issues deserve addressing or meriting our support unless Mexico changes its inhuman and reprehensible policy of harboring perpetrators of violent, murderous crimes on Americans in their own homeland. On foreign policy, options abound. And common American citizens are not without a listened-to voice or controlled by their government as in other nations. Our press is free.

Just remember, Mexican friends: We are all walking through a dangerous jungle of new international hazards. Unless you are carrying a very large gun or are prepared to hide or run like hell, don't anger the lion who usually protects you!

Adapted from: Fernando Oaxaca on MEXIDATA.INFO.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

The forgotten 9/11 of Chile


What’s common between Richard Nixon’s plot to overthrow the government of Chile in 1973 and Al-Qaeda’s plot to blow up the World Trade Center in 2001? Answer: Both of these outrageously criminal conspiracies were brutally executed on September 11.


Today, the world sees 9/11 as the most direct reference to the sinister events two years ago that killed almost 3,000 people in the most well-crafted terrorist design of all times. Few, however, know that 9/11 also refers to the day in 1973 on which the Chilean armed forces, backed and helped by the United States, launched air and ground strikes against the presidential palace, killing Dr. Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president, that morning. What followed was a well-orchestrated destruction of Chile’s democratic machinery doctored by the Nixon government of the United States; a reign of terror, killing, torturing, exiling, and executing tens of thousands of peaceful Chileans. Chile burned under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet for 17 years, four years longer than Hitler.

George Bush’s Republican predecessor in 1970, Richard Nixon, skillfully manipulated his government’s covert power in systematically destroying Chile’s democracy, which had elected a president in an election, freer and fairer than the 2000 US vote. Chileans watched their democracy go up in flames. Their military with full support from Washington proceeded to wipe out their ancient bicameral legislature, independent judiciary, elected local and regional bodies, free trade unions and media and their broad-based civil liberties.

Not surprisingly, Washington has never admitted its actual role in the coup itself. According to a national security source, the Chilean Navy had coordinated with the US armada to hold maneuvers off the coast at precisely the time planned for their putsch. US military spy ships intercepted communiqués from Chilean military bases and forwarded them to the tyrants. The mutinous general and admirals would then be able to send sufficient force to repress those units whose messages indicated loyalty to the elected government, and thus avoid civil war.

Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted in April of 2003 that it is not a part of American history that we're proud of. Powell attributed the US role in the destabilization of Chile from 1970-73 (some of which is documented in Volume 7 of the 1975 Church Senate Select Committee report on US Intelligence) to the Cold War. This refers to Allende's political sin of allowing the Chilean Communist Party as one of the five political groupings inside his Popular Unity coalition.

In fact, for over a century, US policy makers have consistently plotted to overthrow disobedient regimes like Allende's socialist coalition in Chile. US forces occupied Nicaragua and Haiti for some 20 years each in the early 20th Century after tossing out governments in those countries that refused insufficient obeisance to Washington. Similarly, in Cuba under the terms of the US-imposed Platt Amendment, American forces occupied that island on several occasions (1906-9, 1912 and 1917-22).

Between 1900 and 1910, US troops went into Colombia, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Panama, mainly to put down revolutionary movements. These troop landings refer only to military actions in this hemisphere. During the same decade, Presidents deployed US troops in China (1900), Syria (1903), Korea (1904-5) and Morocco (1904).

But the 1973 Chile coup took the proverbial cake for blatant imperial illegality. Just days after Allende's September 1970 electoral victory, Secretary of State Kissinger and President Nixon plotted in the Oval Office to correct the destiny of Chileans who had foolishly elected the wrong man as president. For three years following Allende's electoral triumph, the CIA plotted violence, economic sabotage and psychological warfare against his government because it did not fall into line behind Washington dictates: not allow Communists to enter a government; not expropriate, even with compensation, US property; follow free market economics; eschew all relations with Castro's Cuba and never vote against the United States in any international forum.

As then CIA Director Richard Helms testified to the Church Committee, Nixon wanted a major effort to prevent Allende's accession to power. Nixon also ordered, as Helms' notes indicate, that Chile's economy should be squeezed until it screamed.

The CIA failed to stop Allende's inauguration, although in October 1970 it hired mercenaries to assassinate Chile's Army Chief General Rene Schneider since he opposed a military coup.
Nixon and Kissinger intended to save Chile, as they told Helms, meaning that they saw the elected socialist and quintessential Parliamentarian, Allende, as no different from the Soviet Communists. Although Moscow gave no significant aid to Allende, the Nixon-Kissinger ideological dogma nevertheless proved sufficient to motivate the CIA in its course of coup-fomenting or outright terrorism.

Did a memory lapse lead George W. Bush to nominate the terrorist Kissinger who withdrew his name some days later -- to investigate the 9/11/01 terrorism, or did some White House savant think that since Kissinger was a real-life practicing terrorist, he would have the kind of knowledge and experience to lead a probe in the subject?

Indeed, refer again to CIA Chief Helms' notes taken from his September 1970 conversation in the Oval Office with Nixon and Kissinger where he received his orders to overthrow the government of Chile. Not concerned risks involved, Helms had written. $10,000,000 available, more if necessary. A similar conversation could have taken place somewhere in Saudi Arabia two years before 9/11/01, with Osama bin Laden talking with his fiends about risks and costs involved for hijacking jumbo jets and flying them into the twin towers and Pentagon.

Suppose, I ask myself, I had lost my father or brother in the Moneda Palace in 1973! You can't sue Kissinger or even pursue justice abroad. US military and political officials, Bush insists, must retain immunity from prosecution outside the United States, thus protecting the terrorists in his Administration and those violent ghosts from regimes past.

In this very born-again nation, with people making pilgrimages to the recently removed Ten Commandments monument in Alabama and piety dripping from the fundamentalist lips of the political leaders, it seems odd that few can remember the words that follow the opening phrase of the Christian adage: Do unto others.



Video courtesy Google videos.
Excerpts from zmag.org.

I hate Latinos


Accounting for about 15% of all Americans, the 42-million Latinos living in the United States are the largest growing population group in the country. However, despite this growth, their contributions to the American society, sports, culture, media, business, and politics remain increasingly significant. Ever wondered what they get in return from the so-called “elite” White society? Here’s an excerpt from a post made on the subject on a popular web-forum:


The word "hate" implies passion and fervid emotion towards the object it is pointed to. I don't "hate" Hispanics. I do, however, feel disdain. I lived in South Texas (a.k.a. little Mexico) and was a productive, tax-paying citizen. It was so nice to see Mexicans (which you are) at the store pulling out their Lonestar Card (food stamps) from their Gucci purse, dressed up like sluts for their husbands (that were probably out with "their" mistresses at the time). They (the Mexican trash) abused the government system, took advantage of our health care system by getting it for free (while I paid insurance premiums to see my doctor and paid for my medicines), lived in Section 8 housing for literally dollars a month (while I paid hard-earned money, a lot, to live comfortably in my home) to spit out a child a year from their womb for me to pay for as well.

You are proud of your heritage? Your kind is bringing down our standard of living to your low level. Middle class America is dwindling down to near non-existence thanks to you and your breed. How can I make a better living for myself and my children when I am too busy paying for benefits for "your" people? The argument that white people use Medicaid and food stamps is true. They do. I've seen it with my own two eyes and those people make me ashamed. Why? They're usually hand in hand with Negroes and Mexicans or they've got a half-breed child in a stroller, complete with a gold bracelet around its dimpled wrist.

Go back to Mexico, love your culture there. Or at least, from what I've seen, revel in the lack of pride in your culture and go try to earn a dollar doing nothing or selling what you've stolen from someone else. THAT's the real Mexican.


And here’s a Latino’s response to the above racial slur:

Oh no, I am not cool with that slut comment at all. I see women of all races dress like sluts, which does not include me. You talk about Mexican trash, but it'd be just as easy to talk about white trash. Have I started talking like that? No. My family (and me included) worked very hard to get to where we are, and your stereotypes don't help one bit. What do you mean about the 'real Mexican' being a criminal low-life? We're typically law-abiding. People can't do anything about the racial background that they're born into. What would you have done if you were born Mexican? Do you think that God asks people what they want to be before they're born? No, He doesn't. We just are what we are. What am I? American, all the way. I'm studying to be an RN, by the way, and I am earning As and Bs in my classes. You know that we're not going to be expelled from America, and that there won't be a race war. How are we affecting your standard of living? You get what you work for, and I don't support giveaways for lazy parasites either. Most Mexicans (a.k.a., Mexican Americans) are hard working people that deserve respect.

Are we really living in a free world? Is this the same land which was discovered and colonized by immigrants in a steady process spanning several centuries? Is this not a nation built by the illegal immigrants from Europe over the graves of millions of native Indians? Are we supposed to be the unofficial protectors of liberty and democracy in the whole world? Or are we just another society of double-standard hypocrites? Think again.

Cited from: StormFront.org.