Category: Uncategorized

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

The Border Patrol is planning on doing some aerial spraying (herbicides) near Laredo, Texas. Because Laredo and the Mexican city across the river from it, Nuevo Laredo, each have about 350,000 people (not exactly one of Texas’ sparsely populated county areas), concern about the spraying has been growing.

However, the Border Patrol says it is not going to be spraying people, it is simply intending to spray a herbicide over a one mile-long stretch of unpopulated land, the purpose being to kill a tall plant (carrizo cane, similar to bamboo) which has been growing wildly there. The Border Patrol thinks it is too easy for undocumented people to hide in the carrizo where the Patrol does not have a clean line of sight.

The Border Patrol argues that spraying the carriso is a practical, common sense, solution, although quite a few people in the Laredo area, on both sides of the border, are not convinced it is necessary and are not staying quiet. Logically, the burden of proof falls heavily on the Border Patrol — they are not spraying in a desolate region and the spray must be pretty powerful to knock out these bamboo-like shoots. The stretch lies between the Laredo Railroad Bridge and the Laredo Community College, directly across from a populated area in Mexico, according to an article in Frontera NorteSur on March 21st.

According to the Frontera article, the manager for Nuevo Laredo’s water utility said that the Border Patrol advised his office to start turning off water pumps when the spraying takes place. The fact that the Border Patrol has warned the Mexican side that it should not pull water from the Rio while the spraying is taking place made a water manager for Nuevo Laredo raise the obvious question: The utility manager is quoted as saying, “If there is no problem, why are they asking us to do this?” And in a phone interview for this column, Jay Johnson-Castro, the Executive Director of the Rio Grande International Studies Center at Laredo Community College, said that the U.S. authorities are actually suggesting the Mexicans not draw off any river water for a day or two after the spraying as a precaution.

Johnson-Castro was at a meeting of the city council in Nuevo Laredo where they voted 20 to 0 to call on the U.S. to stop the spraying. No doubt many people felt there was a danger and felt confused about the necessity of the project: if the carrizo cane is such a problem, why doesn’t the Border Patrol just hire some crews to cut it down? The Border Patrol has two million dollars for the project, according to Johnson-Castro.)

Johnson-Castro, in the phone interview, said bluntly, “The Border Patrol has not been upfront.” They have been talking about “eradication” of the carrizo cane for some time, but they were not telling many people that they were intending aerial spraying with herbicides. “Back in July, they advertized for one day that they were carrying out an environmental assessment. People just didn’t know this was being discussed.”

Later, according to Johnson-Castro, government people said that they had done an environmental assessment, although the city council members and the city’s environmental department personnel told Johnson-Castro that they hadn’t even seen the report. “The environmental assessment process was abused.” And as far as Mexico goes, says Johnson-Castro, “I myself sent out the initial warning to the health and water departments in Nuevo Laredo and Tamaulipas. If I hadn’t done that, I wonder if the Border Patrol, now sending warnings on the water, would have ever informed them.”

The chemical being used is Imazapyr. Versions of this are made by BASF and Monsanto. Is it safe for people, plants, animals, water? Well, chemical safety standards vary by country. It is labeled as relatively safe in the U.S., but Mexican regulators label it as more toxic and dangerous. And the Europeans have virtually banned it for these defoliation uses, according to Johnson-Castro.

How does the matter stand at present? An association of citizens called Barrio De Colores, composed of residents of the barrios El Cuatro and De Colores, whose homes are near the proposed Border Patrol pilot project site for helicopter spraying, filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the planned action. It was filed one day before the March 25th starting date for the spraying. A judge has responded and the spraying is temporarily being held off. This may be extremely important in the long run because the Laredo spraying is intended as a “pilot project” for several stretches of the river, Great Bend to Brownsville.

(Just some thoughts-in-progress. In the above discussion, I didn’t connect this arrogant Border Patrol spraying plan to the increased militarization of the Border. But President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano have just this week pushed — good grief — for more Feds down here on the Border. And they are deliberately, it seems, giving mixed (friendly/unfriendly) messages to Mexico and seem to want to run Mexico’s anti-drug campaign.)

By Nick Braune

The Monitor of McAllen, Texas reported this week that on January 9th the government began its new policy of collecting DNA samples from every undocumented immigrant detained on civil violations. The ACLU and other groups have protested.

The collecting of DNA is part of the criminalization of immigration violations begun by the Bush administration with vigorous connivance of the Democratic Congress. Being undocumented has traditionally been considered a civil violation, not criminal. But this has been changing rapidly with the Border Patrol’s Operation Streamline and with ICE’s offensive lately, typified by the immigration raid in the early summer of 2008 in Postville, Iowa, where three hundred undocumented workers in a meat packing plant were arrested and then were forced to plea bargain themselves, shackled in front of judges, to five months in prison before being deported.

As The Monitor reports, “In the last fiscal year alone, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against more than 25,000 immigrants in the judicial district from Houston to the Rio Grande Valley.” That number does not include, of course, the thousands who were deported without being given criminal charges.

Although collecting DNA from the undocumented may seem somewhat innocuous in itself, it is another part of the criminalization drift, a drift which slaps at international law and basic moral principles. (An interesting read: Google “Strangers No Longer,” a well-argued document written by the U.S. and Mexican Catholic Bishops Conference in 2003.)

The drift is insidious. Not only are immigrants The Other (an impersonal economic problem to be handled, an obstacle in our lives to be overcome) but The Other is also increasingly labeled as dangerous and evil. Those immigrant workers are not just poor and out of compliance, they are latent criminals!…Get a cheek swab from all of them, get their DNA results into our databases, just in case they rape someone or in case they leave some personal trail behind in some violent, bloody robbery next year…you never know.

Provisions for the expanded DNA collection were quietly tucked into the 2006 update to the Violence Against Women Act, which is sadly ironic because the criminalization of undocumented immigration is taking a growing toll on women and families generally.

A second bit of news. A McAllen peace and justice group last week discussed the new ABC prime time series, Homeland Security USA. The group’s members who had seen the series, described it as a slick propaganda vehicle with dangerous undercurrents. It is a Good Guys versus Bad Guys show, with a “reality TV” flavor, glorifying the Border Patrol — please — and ICE and their wonderful efforts against terrorists, drug traffickers and undocumented immigrant workers. The wholesome (8 p.m. EST) Tuesday night program, virtually produced by Homeland Security, was described as blatant, straight, governmental indoctrination.

A television review by Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times has this criticism: “Viewers long ago became inured to the blurring of news and entertainment. Shows like ‘Cops’ on Fox, which follows real-life deputies and police officers as they raid crack dens, break up domestic disputes and chase speeding cars, have proven appeal. Yet there is something more than usually troubling about a network series that purports to cover the full canvas of homeland security and that is made with the assistance — and censorship (they call it ‘prescreening’) — of the Department of Homeland Security. The result is an exclusive, inside look at a recruitment video.”

“The series…is paced like a reality show, with the same close-ups of bewildered subjects and repetitions of cliffhanger moments. It is framed with the graphics and musical effects of procedural dramas like ‘NCIS’ and even a thriller like ‘24.’”

Although the Times finds the work a poor entertainment choice and obvious self-serving departmental ego-boosting, it does not nail the program as dangerous drumbeating against outsiders. Activists and critics of today’s evolving immigration policy, which federal law enforcement has called the “Endgame,” will be offering sterner criticisms of the ABC series.

Read an expanded version of this story at The Rag Blog

On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of next week Texas plans three lethal injections in a row. And in each case, there are troubling questions.

On Tuesday, Larry Swearingen is scheduled to be executed for a crime that probably took place while he was in jail. Scott Henson reviews the facts at Grits for Breakfast.

* * *

On Wednesday, Virgil Martinez is scheduled to be killed for shooting to death an ex-girlfriend, her friend, and two children. An awful crime. But Martinez was arrested at a mental hospital where he had admitted himself for hearing voices ordering him to kill, and jurors were never told that he suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The Brazosport Facts published a good overview of the Martinez case in 2006.

According to federal court records accessed by the Texas Civil Rights Review, a magistrate judge concluded in 2005, and a federal district judge agreed in 2006, that the trial attorney for Martinez could have made better use of medical evidence about TLE and “post-seizure aggression.”

The federal documents further indicate that Martinez did exhibit “bizarre and at times violent behavior” during his time at a mental hospital.

But in 2007 a federal appeals panel argued that the trial attorney for Martinez was justified in not telling jurors that the defendant had a condition that could cause “savage and uncontrolled” aggressiveness. Such information, along with other facts about his history of aggression and jealousy, might persuade the jury that a death penalty would be most appropriate.

The appeals panel agreed with the magistrate and district judges that the lawyer did not understand the difference between violence during a seizure and “post-seizure” aggression. But, giving strict attention to the question that was put to them, the appeals panel refused to label this failure as a mark of attorney incompetence.

So it may still be the case that “post-seizure” aggression is a medical condition that affects Martinez, and which affected him at the time of the four killings. Setting aside the question about whether his lawyer was competent in selecting a defense strategy under the circumstances of the trial, the appeals record has produced a fact that is significant.

Perhaps we can still expect a stay in this case.

* * *

On Thursday, Ricardo Ortiz is scheduled to be killed by lethal injection because he was convicted of lethally injecting a cellmate with a triple dose of heroin.

The official account posted by Texas prison authorities says that Ortiz and two other cellmates cooked up three doses of heroin in an El Paso cell and that Ortiz injected all three doses into the victim who died of an overdose.

The Texas Attorney General adds that Ortiz committed the crime in order to prevent his cellmate “from testifying against him” about some bank robberies.

So here is what Texas officials tell us: they held a prisoner in an El Paso cell with someone who could testify against him. They allowed three doses of heroin into the cell, didn’t smell it while it was cooking, and didn’t notice a thing until the next cell count revealed a dead prisoner.

Are Texas authorities so into lethal injections that they’d set up the ideal conditions for one and then use their own malpractice as a foundation to practice another? — gm

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has posted their reasons for granting a stay of execution in the matter of Larry Ray Swearingen.

But the key phrase strikes us as worth quoting: “but for the alleged constitutional error of the State sponsoring the false testimony of Dr. Carter, no reasonable juror could find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

In the words of the court:

At trial, [Harris County Medical Examiner] Dr. Carter testified that Trotter’s body had been left in the forest for approximately twenty-five days, which was consistent with the State’s theory that Swearingen murdered Trotter on
December 8, 1998, and left her body in the forest. In her affidavit, Dr. Carter does not address the correctness of her original testimony based on decomposition and fungal growth, but states that if she had been provided certain additional data, she would have testified that the findings of her autopsy
“are consistent with a date of exposure in the Sam Houston National Forest within fourteen days of discovery, and incompatible with exposure for a longer period of time.”