Author: mopress

Email from Jay Johnson-Castro.

Hola y’all…

Here you are. The official itinerary for Hands Across el Rio…a 1250 mile…17 day protest against the border wall. See the border ambassadors web site.

We are not launching as early as anticipated…but the launch date is going to be worth the weight. Yesterday, we received the commitment of El Paso to support our project with a press conference on August 25th and a send off on August 26th. Folks in the Big Bend region want to support the Presidio-Ojinaga event on August 28th. Both Mayors of Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña are pledged to support the event 31st. Mayor Chad Foster of Eagle Pass is in touch with the Alcalde of Piedras Negras to receive us on September 1st.

Mexican Congresswoman, Maria Dolores Gonzales-Mendivil will lead the coordination of Los Dos Laredos Hands Across el Rio on September 2nd. She is also coordinating support to the four Mexican neighboring states of Texas , the alcaldes along el Rio Bravo (mayors on the Mexican side) and Mexican consuls. We’re lining up similar commitments from Roma-Miguel Aleman, Rio Grande City-Camargo, Los Ebanos-Diaz Ordaz, McAllen/Hidalgo-Reynosa on down to Brownsville-Matamoros on September 8th. We will finish our journey at the mouth of the Rio Grande at Boca Chica on Sunday, September 9th.

LULAC National, Rosa Rosales , President and Jaime Martinez, Treasurer, have committed their support of Hand Across el Rio. The same is true of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement. We anticipate the support of many other organizations and coalitions, from environmental, cultural, economic, political, faith-based, and tourism.

With the exception of El Paso y Juarez…we will launch kayaks and canoes upriver from each principal international pedestrian bridge. Any one who wants to join our flotillas for any portion or any day of this historical event is welcome to do so. Kayaks, canoes, inner-tubes. We will paddle down river to each international bridge respectively and meet up with fellow grass roots citizens from both sides of our Rio who are opposed to the wall. As we experienced in Roma and Miguel Aleman this past weekend…we will be inviting the grass roots folks from both sides of el Rio…to form a human chain in symbol of our border solidarity and amistad.

As Mayor Chad Foster says…”We’re joined at the hip”. That’s something that folks like Lou Dobbs and members of Congress who have never lived inside the checkpoints do not understand. Our Congressmen and Texas legislators from the border region have spoken out against the border wall. The Texas Border Coalition of our border mayors, judges and economic experts have all spoken in our behalf…in solidarity…against the wall. Our border sheriffs have spoken out against the wall. No one in Washington is listening to them. Now…we the people of the Rio Grand Corridor…from both sides of el Rio…must make our voices heard. “NO Border Wall…!” “Hell NO!!!

We can tell the Congress and the national media all day long that we who live on the border live in friendship with our neighbors on the other side of el Rio. We can tell them that we don’t want to be in a militarized zone…on American soil…here in Texas . Now…we will show them why we don’t need one. We get along just fine!

En amistad and solidarity…

Jay

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr

(830)768-0768

jay@villadelrio.com

By Nick Braune
Mid-Vally Town Crier
by permission

The July 8th front page of McAllen’s paper, The Monitor, had an article, ‘Border Patrol May See Surge,’ discussing a proposed increase (surge) in numbers of Border Patrol agents. This momentarily caught my attention for two reasons.

First, the U.S. has not done well with surges lately: ‘The Surge’ in Iraq has produced nothing but a resented brutal lockdown of Baghdad and its suburbs. And secondly, I always suspect there are too many Border Patrol agents already.

But the article kept my attention. I take it that a private contracting company, DynCorp International of Virginia, is sending out press releases (basically advertising itself) hoping to be hired by Homeland Security in this border region. It is offering ‘to train and deploy 1,000 private agents to the U.S.-Mexican border within 13 months, offering a quick surge of law enforcement officers to a region struggling to clamp down on illegal immigration.’

Note that the company thinks we don’t know that the 100,000 private contractors in Iraq, with at least half of them doing policing and fighting functions, have a horrible reputation. (See the documentary ‘Iraq for Hire.’)

DynCorp, it seems from The Monitor, is touting its mercenary — ‘we’ll fight anyone for pay’ — experience in Iraq and says that many of their cadre have law enforcement backgrounds and are licensed officers. (The company does not use the term ‘mercenaries’ however, preferring terms like ‘officers,’ ‘private agents,’ and ‘contract agents.’ The company also does not say what countries the mercenaries are ‘licensed officers’ in. These big contractors recruit from all over the world; Latin America and Fijian mercenaries have made the news lately.)

To the credit of the Border Patrol, their spokesman told The Monitor that they do not need outside help from private contractors like DynCorp and are recruiting and training new people every day. This claim, however, contains a untruth. The Border Patrol has already contracted ($50 million) to Wackenhut/GEO, a notorious private policing and jailing corporation, for transporting migrants back to Mexico. (Tucson Weekly, May 3, 2007)

So much for the claim that the Border Patrol doesn’t need help from private contractors; in the past, transporting migrants to Mexico was done by the Border Patrol itself. To the credit of The Monitor, it quoted a critic, a sociologist studying the border region, who said that private contractors wouldn’t have the proper training for this work. The critic was also quoted as taking a dig at the National Guard troops supplementing the Border Patrol, reminding us that three guardsmen recently were arrested on suspicion of smuggling immigrants in Laredo.

Three admittedly impressionistic responses:

First, on the Border Patrol itself: I am unconvinced that their agents, in contrast to the mercenaries, are much better trained and ‘professional.’ (I have watched their uniformed agents accepting free coffee and discounts on sandwiches…a sure sign of problems.) And I believe, once again, that there are actually too many of them driving around in vans and standing around at the checkpoints already.

Secondly, on the mercenaries — they’d be worse. Even if they were trained to Border Patrol standards, do we really want these mercenaries, who have been in Iraq (maybe helping at Abu Ghraib while reading ‘Soldier of Fortune’ magazine) patrolling our Valley? The humanist philosopher back in the 1500s, Erasmus of Rotterdam, referred to mercenaries as ‘vile excrement of criminality holding life less dear than a small piece of profit.’ (They could write caustically in those days.) The ‘for sale’ mercenaries Erasmus saw coming back from fighting in the Middle East seemed horrifying to him, emotionally contorted.

Thirdly, because border leaders have had such a bad experience with privatized prisons, I would think they would be wary of privatizing policing functions as well. Just last week a prison in Spur, Texas run by contractors (Wackenhut/GEO, which is part of the mercenary business.) was blasted in the press by the State of Idaho. Idaho has sent overflow prisoners to Texas, but one of them committed suicide recently causing Idaho to investigate the treatment. Investigators were shocked, calling it the worst facility they had ever seen.

This is the second scandal in a Wackenhut/GEO prison in Texas triggered by a suicide. A previous suicide, in Val Verde County, apparently resulted from sexual abuse. Our political leaders should be wary of private contractors promising to provide low cost social services.
(Here are the first two sentences of a 1999 Gregory Palast article on Wackenhut: ‘New Mexico’s privately operated prisons are filled with America’s impoverished, violent outcasts – and those are the guards. That’s the warning I took away from confidential documents and from guards themselves who nervously spoke on condition that their names never see the light of day.’)

The importance of The Monitor article: using private contractors directly for border immigration policing is now being publicly floated. Beware. The article even reports that one congressman, Mike Rogers (R-Ala), is authoring legislation mandating the use of ‘contractors’ by the Border Patrol, if hiring goals are not met. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rogers wants to deputize the Minutemen.

By Joey Gomez
Rio Grande Guardian

BROWNSVILLE, July 19 – The four members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams participating in the group’s Borderlands Witness Drive say they have collected moving testimony on the impact of the nation’s failed immigration policy.

In Arizona, where the group started its drive, many of stories were about immigrants dying in the desert. In Texas, CPT has found widespread fear that a border wall will tear families on either side of the Rio Grande apart.

“It’s like cutting the heart to divide them,” said CPT member Haven Whiteside, of Tampa Bay, Florida. . . .

By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Construction of a polarizing fence along the Texas-Mexico border is expected to begin by this fall, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff confirmed Wednesday, adding that border communities will be consulted “in terms of style” so the government doesn’t “create any eyesores.”

“I expect we’ll be doing some construction in Texas this fiscal year,” Chertoff said, referring to the government’s fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

The construction timeline appears to be the first acknowledgment by Homeland Security of a start time for the fence’s construction in Texas. Federal officials, however, have still not disclosed the fence’s location. . . .

By Nick Braune
Special to the Texas Civil Rights Review

On Tuesday morning, in yet another display of the militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border, about 50 border police spent two hours unloading and searching through crutches, wheelchairs and commodes from the 12 brightly painted vehicles constituting this year’s Pastors for Peace caravan.

The border agents know what is in the buses and trucks, exactly what the Pastors say is in them: humanitarian supplies being taken across the Mexican border and, from there, taken to Cuba. For goodness sakes, the group has been doing this for about two decades.

The agents spitefully ended up confiscating 12 computers. (One can see how dangerous computers might be in medical clinics and educational centers in Cuba – not.)

The Bush administration also stopped breast pumps and stethoscopes and hospital gowns from going across the Canadian border last week because they were destined for this caravan.

Reverend Lucius Walker, the executive director of their organization, said in the Pastors for Peace press release,

“We are going to allow Homeland Security a couple of weeks to reconsider their decision to seize these computers today. By then we will have returned from Cuba and our supporters around the U.S. will have contacted their elected officials to let them know about the pettiness of the U. S. government’s policies toward Cuba. And we will be prepared to mount yet another campaign to win the release of this humanitarian aid for our sisters and brothers in Cuba.”

The 130 people going over the border to move humanitarian goods to Cuba through Mexico were in great spirits in a rally on Sunday night at the Our Savior Lutheran Church in McAllen. There was a talent show put on by the participants, including an energetic and barbed song by a group of singing grandmas. They warmed the audience up for a group of young performers who put on a really spectacular hip hop performance and excellent break dancing.

At one point, the hip hop performers chanted “we don’t want to get paid, we want to break the blockade” and everyone cheered wildly.

Everyone I spoke to was very well informed on the blockade and the vicious nature of the Bush administration, and everyone was interested in the discussion about the Border Wall, (Some who had arrived early enough had made it to the Roma demonstration against the wall on Saturday.)

Several had heard about the problems with the immigrant detention centers. I spoke to one person from the United Kingdom who had taken his vacation time to join the caravan.

Although everyone I talked to was upbeat, there was also a realization that the militarizing and confrontational stance of this government (toward Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, China, Korea, Europe, Mexico, Cuba, America’s immigrants, the poor, etc.) is indeed menacing.