Bush,Calderon Plot Economic and Military Integration at NOLA Summit

At the center of today’s “Three Amigos” Summit in New Orleans between George W. Bush and his homologues, Mexico’s Felipe Calderon and Stephen Harper of Canada, is the sovereignty-swallowing nexus between trade, migration and military policy. As mentioned in this AP piece, Bush and Calderon held bilateral talks today in which they discussed NAFTA, the proposed free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia and regional security. Much of the chatter in the press focused on how Calderon and Bush “defended” NAFTA and free trade.

Lacking in all of the coverage of this and other regional summits is any notion of the symbiotic relationship between trade and militarization throughout hemisphere, including the U.S.. None of the press, for example, makes the connection between how economy-integrating trade policies like NAFTA or the proposed U.S.-Colombia FTA are inevitably accompanied by increases in the domestic policing and military budgets of the U.S. and its “Latin American trade partners” like Colombia, home to the worst human rights record in the Americas thanks to the more than $4 billion in military aid it receives from the U.S.

As they continue negotiating an exponential increase in the military aid Mexico receives from the U.S., Bush and Calderon appear to be plotting a Colombianization (drug wars, counterinsurgency wars combined with free trade) just a stones throw from our southern border.

Nothing was said in today’s summit coverage about how Calderon and Bush are actually “defending” free trade with real guns and real troops.This link between increased free trade and mushrooming military budgets makes sense when we consider that border-smashing corporate interests represented by Bush and Calderon need uniformed people with guns to quash social tensions (formerly known as class conflicts) exacerbated by economic restructuring. Put another way, when the soft power middle class cushion between rich and poor gets tattered beyond repair by free trade, it is replaced by the hard power military cushion in both the U.S and Mexico.

Following the same free trade+militarism=freedom formula, Bush and Calderon continued their plans to implement “Plan Merida”. Better known as “Plan Mexico”, Bush and Calderon’s plan is a “security” agreement designed deal with the “threat to our societies by drug trafficking and other criminal organizations operating on both sides of our common border. According to the Times Picayune, Bush told Calderon “I want to work with you in close coordination to defeat these drug traffickers”. After agreeing with Bush, Calderon added, “Recently, NAFTA has come under criticism, and I don’t believe people are realizing the benefits it has brought to the United States and Mexico”.

As I’ve stated here and elsewhere, such “benefits” come complete with plans for intensified militarization to respond to the post-cold war need for new enemies that both legitimate militarism and promote free trade as well as the idea of the state itself. Bush and Calderon are clear that, in the absence of the internal and external communist threat of the previous era, immigrants, drug cartels and youth gangs are joining “terrorists” in the mish mash of enemy-making in the post-Cold War politics of the hemisphere. For more on how this applies to immigrants in the U.S., see this recent piece. Those protesting the cheapening of their lives in the U.S. and Mexico are also joining the ranks of the unruly masses requiring enhanced legal and police control. Policing at protests like those of New Orleans preview and expand the closing of public space and rights by the true sovereign of our political and economic system: border-hopping big capital.

Interestingly, those protesting the summit included both locals organizing a very important “People’s Summit”, some left-leaning Latin American solidarity organizations and right-leaning Lou Dobbs “pro-sovereignty” groups and individuals, many of whom are quite anti-immigrant. Also curious was how Bush introduced New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin as “el alcalde” (Spanish words for “the mayor”). I remember being in New Orleans shortly after Katrina and hearing responses to Nagin’s statements about the need to “stop New Orleans from being overrun by Mexican workers.” I wonder what Nagin was thinking as he stood next to Bush and Calderon (see below) while they announced trade and military agreements that will foment further migration to New Orleans from Mexico?

California University Launches Country’s First Central American Studies Major

This article from the L.A. Times talks about the first Central American Studies major established at any university in the U.S.

I had the privilege to work with students and faculty to help found this new discipline, which, from its inception, adopted a transnational approach that surveys the reality of Central Americans on the isthmus and here in the United States.

You can also find the piece below.

Central American studies gaining acceptance

The degree program at Cal State Northridge seeks to advance knowledge about the millions of migrants in the U.S. and their history. It touches some lingering sore spots too.

By Larry Gordon
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 9, 2008

The large wave of refugees from war-ravaged Central America that arrived two decades ago has transformed more than neighborhoods, the workforce and restaurant cuisine of Southern California.

Now, as Vanessa Guerrero’s new diploma shows, the influence of that migration is being embraced academically by one of the region’s largest public universities.

At her recent midyear graduation from Cal State Northridge, Guerrero became the first student in the United States to earn a bachelor’s degree in Central American studies, officials say. Eight years after starting the nation’s first minor in the field, the school took another unprecedented step last fall by elevating it to a diploma-worthy major.

Like many of her classmates with family roots in Central America, Guerrero said she wanted her studies to help pierce the walls of silence that older generations built around memories of violence and economic turmoil in their homelands.

“A lot of our families don’t talk about it very much, and if they do, we hear only one side of the story,” said Guerrero, 23, who was 5 when her family fled civil war in El Salvador. “I was definitely interested in learning more about my culture and my history.”

Some friends questioned the usefulness of Central American studies, an interdisciplinary program in history, sociology, literature, anthropology and the arts. But Guerrero, a North Hills resident who also majored in business administration, said the courses “helped me understand the issues of why people migrated, why we’re here, why I’m here” and would aid her plans to become an immigration or family law attorney.

Cal State Northridge has one of the largest groups of Central American students in the country, most of Salvadoran and Guatemalan descent. An estimated 3,500, or about 10% of the student body, were born in Central America or have immigrant parents who settled here, often near downtown Los Angeles or in the San Fernando Valley.

The university is known nationally as a pioneer in ethnic studies. Its Chicano and African American studies departments arose from late 1960s student protests, and the campus later added programs in Asian American, Armenian and Jewish studies. Supporters say ethnic studies are needed in a multicultural world, while critics contend that those classes foster racial identity instead of solid scholarship.

Central Americans constitute the vast majority of the 50 students enrolled in the new major and the several hundred others taking its courses. But some students had little previous contact with Central American cultures and “really want to understand this community and work with it,” according to program coordinator Beatriz Cortez, who was born in El Salvador and is an expert in Central American literature and art.

The program offers 21 courses, including Survey of Central American Literature, Changing Roles of Central American Women and others about film, religion and revolutionary movements. It has three full-time professors plus six others who work part time or are from other campus departments.

“Some of us recognized a need for there to be a kind of academic discipline to both document and analyze the Central American experience, especially given the huge Central American population in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington,” said Roberto Lovato, who helped found the program and has taught in it.

At first, classes cobbled together readings from various sources because textbooks about Latino literature and history tend to concentrate on Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans. “We are the new kids on the block, and we still have a long way to go,” said Lovato, a son of Salvadoran immigrants and now a writer in New York.

Larry Estrada, president of the National Assn. for Ethnic Studies, said that Central American classes are usually included in more general Latino programs and that Cal State Northridge’s degree is the only one he knows of in the country.

“It’s a welcome addition,” said Estrada, a professor at Western Washington University. (Cal State established a Central American minor last year within its Latin American studies program.)

Northridge’s Central American classes were initially part of Chicano studies. People involved say the split involved sentiments akin to Central Americans’ resentments about Mexican American dominance in Latino life in Los Angeles.

“Central American studies was a new entity, and it deserved its own space,” recalled professor Rodolfo Acuna, founder of the university’s Chicano studies department. “No group wants to be eclipsed by another.”

The Central American program faced initial budget and planning problems, and its status will be reviewed in five years. But it seems to have escaped earlier ideological battles surrounding ethnic studies at schools nationwide, in part because it does not focus on one country or ethnicity. For example, UCLA students staged a two-week hunger strike in 1993 to gain departmental status for Chicano studies, a goal not reached until 2005.

The Cal State Northridge classes look at Central America’s seven nations — Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama — and their complicated tapestry of cultures and languages. Next fall, the program will add a professor, an anthropologist who specializes in the Creole and African-derived cultures along the Caribbean coast.

At a recent class of Modern History of Central American Peoples, instructor Celia Simonds lectured to 30 students about the federation that included most of the now-separate nations in Central America from 1824 to 1839 and the tensions between liberals and conservatives over economic and religious issues.

Simonds also spoke of how the region’s racial prejudices affected her own Costa Rican family. Her mother, a dark-skinned woman with some indigenous ancestry, was ridiculed by Simonds’ light-skinned paternal grandmother of Spanish heritage.

Another frequent theme is the political and emotional aftermath of the conflicts in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Douglas Carranza, an anthropologist who is director of the program’s affiliated research institute, said some students’ parents were afraid of opening old wounds. “It is sometimes too painful to talk about,” he said.

But he stressed that student curiosity about family travails soon expands into many other topics, such as ancient history and environment.

Josue Guajan, for example, was born in Chicago and raised mainly in Guatemala until his family returned to the U.S. when he was 16. Through a Cal State Northridge class he realized, “I didn’t know that much about Central America, even though I lived over there. That made me keep going and keep learning.”

Now 23 and a double major in television production and Central American studies, the Van Nuys resident wants to become a documentary filmmaker specializing in the region. He is a leader of the Central American United Student Assn., which has provided water-supply equipment to Salvadoran and Guatemalan villages.

Karen Romero, a U.S.-born daughter of Salvadorans, said she delayed graduation to take extra classes for a double degree in history and Central American studies. Now 25 and a resident of the Mid-City area of Los Angeles, she wants to teach history in high school or college and thinks her Northridge education will help her better relate to students in ethnically diverse classrooms.

Her mother, she said, was upset at first that Romero was studying Central American politics because it revived memories of friends murdered because of activism at Salvadoran universities in the 1970s. Now, Romero said, her mother is “very proud” and tells relatives her daughter “knows more about the history of Central America than we do.”

larry.gordon@latimes.com

Stronger Latin Currencies Signal Declining U.S. Hegemon(e)y

This article from Bloomberg talks about another indicator of the decline of U.S. power in the hemisphere: rising Latin currencies.

Good news for an América Latina preparing, like the rest of the world, for the noxious effects of the U.S. recession. Historically, the continent of América has contracted economic flu and typhoid when the U.S. economy gets a case of a recessionary cold. Stronger pesos, reales and other currencies mean that the countries of the hemisphere are better-able to deal with the trickle down effects of failed U.S. economic policy. According to the Bllomberg article,

“A slowdown in the U.S. will have an effect,” said Silvia Marengo, who manages $130 million of bonds at Clariden Bank in London. “What’s different now is that these countries find themselves in better financial positions. In the past, we would be talking about which Latin American country would be the next to default.”

Oddly enough, Latin America (yes) is home to three of the four best-performing currencies against the dollar this year among emerging markets.

So, buy pesos!

Philanthropy Illustrates How Immigration Will Not Stop Without 2 Things: Latin Development & Latinos

This story from the San Francisco Chronicle illustrates nicely how communities in América Latina and the United States are and must be at the heart reducing migration from Latin America to the United States (if indeed that’s what corporations and consumers really want, that is). Though I don’t think the implicit analysis of immigration in the story runs much deeper than a dry creek near the border, I do appreciate the focus on the border-smashing work of Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP), a group founded by Douglas Patino (a good and honored friend) and other, mostly Latino leaders from the growing universe of Latino philanthropy .

The story makes clear how, rather than adopt the tired and untrue (and largely ineffective) approach of traditional philanthropy, which limits itself to working within the confines of that deadly illusion known as “the border”, HIP adopts what wonks call a “transnational” approach to dealings within the hemisphere Of América.

HIP’s leader, Diana Campoamor, a Cubana immigrant of much consequence, has a choice quote in the story, one powered by her own personal and professional experience (as opposed to the political desperation mixed with a growing sense of decline that motivates politico and racist alike). The quote along with her example as a leader of Latino extraction makes the point solidly:

“People don’t leave their homes unless there’s a hardship, economic or political,” said Campoamor, the president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. “Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries.”

I really like this story because, too often, we forget the economic and material component of the migration equation and, instead, focus solely on the politics of immigration as if it were really defined by politicos, Lou Dobbs and aging (Minute)men in search of a new frontier, a less flaccid empire. Unless Obama (or whoever ends up inheriting the mantle of declining power) can reverse the decimation of the state undertaken by Reagan, his descendants and the corporations that support them, the solutions will have to come from the rest of us.

But before getting too gushy I should mention that, even with good work like that of HIP or the hometown associations (also mentioned in the story) that send billions to América Latina each year, migration to the U.S. will continue without 2 other essential things: stopping the addiction of U.S. corporation and consumers to imported cheap labor and dealing frontally, decisively with the failure of capitalism in the hemisphere. And Barack Obama will fix this in his first 100 days in the White House, right?

Economic aid to give Mexicans, Central Americans work at home

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, January 6, 2008

From her office on the edge of San Francisco’s Financial District, Diana Campoamor was networking - meeting for drinks with a banker, compiling a briefing book for a foundation trustee, exchanging phone calls with colleagues in Mexico City.

She was putting all the pieces in place so her group, Hispanics in Philanthropy, could cut its first check this month for a three-year, $219,000 grant to expand a goat-cheese cooperative in Guanajuato, Mexico.

More goats, corrals, pasteurizing equipment and refrigerators should allow the operation to grow from one village to four, providing work for hundreds of peasant farmers who might otherwise join their siblings and cousins as illegal immigrants harvesting peaches, slaughtering chickens, driving nails and scrubbing dishes across the United States.

The group’s decision to fund economic development projects in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, after almost 25 years working in U.S. Latino communities, is part of a movement taking hold in Northern California to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration.

“People don’t leave their homes unless there’s a hardship, economic or political,” said Campoamor, the president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. “Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries.”

Immigration is again moving front and center on the U.S. political stage. On the presidential campaign trail, Republicans are vying to be the toughest on sealing the border and enforcing immigration law, while Democrats temper the bad-cop rhetoric with talk of guest worker programs and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here.

But if there is to be a lasting solution to illegal immigration, experts say, it will involve changes not just on this side of the border but in Mexico and Central America, which together account for three fourths of the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the United States.

“As far as what I’ve read about what the candidates are saying, I don’t see much discussion. It’s cheap rhetoric,” said Luis Guarnizo, a professor in the school of agriculture at UC Davis. “Everybody’s looking for a quick fix, the right slogan. … But we have to look at the larger picture. This is not just a law-and-order issue, it involves economic issues, social issues. Migration is a global process.”

In Northern California, some grassroots development and immigrant groups are trying a different approach. They reason that if people in Latin America had a way to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty, they wouldn’t need to leave home, risk their lives crossing the border and live on the margins of U.S. society to earn a living and support their relatives back home.

The projects range from small to large, and involve a variety of players - major foundations, socially conscious consumers and migrant workers themselves - in diverse approaches to improving life in some of the communities that are sending undocumented immigrants north. They’re helping build lagging village infrastructure, incubating productive rural projects and giving farmers fair access to global markets.

Part of the solution

Luis Alberto Rivera is president of an association of Californians originally from his hometown, Coalcomán, in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Seeing thousands of Coalcomanenses migrate to the United States, Rivera and his compatriots were determined to do something to help improve life back home.

“We decided to push the authorities to clean the rivers, because they’re polluted,” said Rivera, a U.S. citizen, from his home near Modesto. “The whole ecosystem, the ability of people to get food from the river is destroyed. People are migrating because their life is over when the rivers are polluted. But if we go back and restore them, I think that’s part of the solution.”

Rivera and members of his hometown association offered to fund a sewage treatment plant and talked the town government into installing a system of sewers to collect the wastewater. They’ve set a fundraising goal of $100,000 and have already held a couple of benefit dinners in the Central Valley.

And the group plans to apply for matching funds under the Three for One program, whereby the Mexican federal, state and local governments each pitch in a dollar for every dollar contributed to a project by Mexican migrants outside the country.

Recognizing the billions of dollars that expatriate Mexicans send home each year to their families, the Mexican authorities created the matching fund arrangement in 2002 to channel some of that money to public works. In 2006, more than 1,000 Mexican migrant groups contributed close to $20 million to community improvement projects in 845 rural and urban locations, according to Martha Esquivel of Mexico’s Department of Social Development.

Rivera hopes his efforts will encourage more migrants to get involved with their hometowns in Mexico and work to fix the problems that forced them to leave home in the first place.

But some observers criticize the matching-fund program, saying it’s the responsibility of the Mexican government to build clean water systems and to provide schools, ambulances and other infrastructure, not the duty of Mexicans who left home due to a lack of opportunity.

After years of being all but ignored by their government, however, “the Three for One begins to signal to remittance senders that they’re going to get some respect,” said Campoamor.

She is an advocate of building links between immigrants in the United States and their home countries, in the way that hometown associations do. But her organization has opted to channel its funds specifically into initiatives that create jobs in Latin American countries.

Creating jobs

In the village of Tamaula, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, Pedro Laguna hopes that expanding his five-family goat-farming cooperative with the grant from Hispanics in Philanthropy can help stanch the flow of young people to the United States.

“I have nine kids in the United States, three daughters and six sons, but I have very little communication with them,” said the 60-year-old father of 13 in a telephone interview. “I don’t want to lose my children. We want to invest in our community so we have work here where we live.”

An agronomist is advising the cooperative on getting the goats to produce milk year-round, instead of seasonally. With more milk, the farmers can make more cheese and the sweet, caramelized dulce de leche known as cajeta, both of which sell well in Irapuato, the nearest city.

Laguna plans to pass on his cheese-making expertise to a group of women in another village who were left behind by husbands who migrated north, and to a youth group, the children of immigrants. Most urgently, he is working to persuade his 16-year-old daughter, his youngest child, to stay on the farm.

“At first she wanted to follow her brothers and sisters north, but I’ve been trying to convince her that going to the United States is not easy, and returning is less so,” he said. “Little by little, she’s thinking more about staying in school and training to make cheese. And she’s realizing that she can sell her little goats to earn some money. When there are animals at home, there’s work. And when there’s work, there’s money.”

Hispanics in Philanthropy plans to make three-year grants to half a dozen more projects in Mexico this spring and to begin similar efforts in Nicaragua and Guatemala. The group is already working in the Dominican Republic and Argentina.

Fair Trade

On a larger scale, and with a somewhat different approach, Oakland-based TransFair USA is promoting fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate, bananas, rice and other agricultural products from Mexico and many other developing countries.

“Our goal is to give people the tools and the market access to lift themselves out of poverty. When you do that, people don’t want to leave home,” said TransFair founder and president Paul Rice.

Rice, who lived for 11 years in Nicaragua and is married to a Nicaraguan, said he has seen up close in his own family the intense pressures that push people to leave home and seek their fortunes in el norte.

In the early 1990s, after years of working on traditional development projects, Rice realized farmers needed not only access to capital and technical assistance, but better access to markets in order to flourish.

He helped a group of peasant coffee farmers sell their beans in Europe, where a fledgling fair trade market was taking hold, allowing small producers to earn a premium price by eliminating the middleman. Soon Rice was promoting the idea in the United States to businesses like Starbucks and Wal-Mart, eager to burnish their image as responsible corporations. His group is still the only fair trade certifying body in this country.

“Globalization has led to more trade and economic growth,” he said. “But growth for whom? The benefits are not trickling down to the poor. Fair trade tries to make free trade work for the poor. … It’s not free trade if you depend on the guy who drives up in his pickup and says, ‘The price is 10 cents a pound, take it or leave it.’ “

Today, the coffee cooperative Rice started can guarantee $1.51 a pound to its 2,300 member families and still has money left over to invest in community projects.

“In Nicaragua, migration has been growing steadily over the past decade because of the lack of jobs,” said Merling Preza, the cooperative’s manager, speaking from the northern town of Estelí. “It’s leading to family disintegration and a loss of values, and that means more social instability. But the small farmers who have organized into cooperatives and sell on the fair trade market don’t need to leave their communities to survive.”

All these efforts to create economic stability in Mexico and Central America are laudable, say observers, but by themselves they can only help a small fraction of the population. Wealth and complexity in a nation’s economy are created by manufacturing goods, not selling raw materials, and above all, by investing in the country’s human capital, said Guarnizo, the UC Davis professor.

“It’s a political decision,” he said. “Think of the case of India with high tech. How did they do it? Was it because Indians are very clever? No. It’s because the state made a decision to put money into education. It took over 40 years, but they have that now.”

But Mexico, where the economy does not currently create enough jobs for the population, has come to rely on the remittances sent home by migrant workers, said another immigration analyst, Jeff Faux, the director of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

“The deal works for the elites on both sides of the border. The U.S. business community gets cheap labor and suppresses wages, and the Mexican elite gets rid of people who are discontented and restless,” he said. “But you can’t develop a country by exporting your most ambitious people.”

Faux has proposed that the United States give Mexico a push to develop its economy through investing in its own people. In an article in this month’s American Prospect magazine, Faux suggests that the United States offer to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to promote economic growth and a more equal distribution of wealth in Mexico. That, he said, could produce a real solution to illegal immigration.

In the meantime, groups in the Bay Area and beyond are determined to keep chipping away at the poverty that causes people to migrate. Building economic sustainability in Mexico and its poorer neighbors, they say, will do a lot more to prevent illegal immigration than putting up border fences or even offering guest worker visas.

In Tamaula, Pedro Laguna has built new roofs on his goat pens and when spring comes he’ll be buying more animals. He hopes not only to keep his teenage daughter around, but to encourage some of his other children to return.

“I have one daughter in Georgia who hasn’t worked for a year. She’s going to come home and I’ll have a job for her,” he said. “I hope that in not too long, I’ll be able to offer work to all of them.”

Resources

Hispanics in Philanthropy:

www.hiponline.org, (415) 837-0427

TransFair USA:

www.transfairusa.org, (510) 663-5260

Three for One Program:

www.ime.gob.mx, (213) 487-6577

Hispanics in Philanthropy: www.hiponline.org, (415) 837-0427TransFair USA, www.transfairusa.org, (510) 663-5260Three for One Program: www.ime.gob.mx, (213) 487-6577

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.

LATINO AGENDAS RISING

Though it repeats some things written in previous posts, this piece I wrote for the Nation’s website describes how many different Latino agendas -regional, environmental, immigration-focused and others-are converging towards the creation of a new agenda, one that’s more integrated, global and less corporate than that of Latino organizations I think you know and are tired of. You know, the ones that have paid professionals whose job it is to be and speak for Latinos.

BROWN WATERS, CLEAR WATERS RUN DEEP AT LATINO CONGRESO

This week’s Latino Congreso taught me that, from Maywood, California to the Bronx and Cochabamba, Bolivia, brown people are drinking brown water. I also learned about the deepening wells of of elite fear beneath racist metaphors like “brown tide rising” used to describe the political ascent of Latinos across the continent.

But what struck me most was how problems like the dirty brown water are giving rise to a political clarity and unified vision unprecedented in the annals of hemispheric history. Like the oceans and subterrenean waterways that have always united us beneath the surface, political agendas from the Canadian border to Patagonia are starting to flow from the same source: the pursuit of justice.

I heard this from 22 year-old Latino Congreso delegate Karen Linares. After looking at a thick, rusted pipe and a bottle of brown water used as part of the presentation by a South LA activist on a panel about “Water Justice”, very smiley Salvadoran-Mexican college student Linares got a serious look about her. “The L.A. river water running by my house is full of filth. I saw the same brown water in El Salvador. In Tijuana you see the sewage trickling down the dirt roads.” Asked whether a and what, if any, connection existed between what she saw in her neighborhood and in her parent’s homelands the rather “shy” (ie; “You should talk to my friend cuz this is my first event and she knows more”) answered, “Clear water runs upward where the money runs. Brown water runs down where poor brown people are.” In listening to Linares’ “shy” brilliance one hears the political music of the spheres, the hemispheres being written.

The beauty I found running through the Congreso was in how the line connecting Linares’ issues and consciousness to the rest of the continent is growing. “I look at the facial expressions here and I see meetings I’ve been to in America Latina” said Bernardo Alvarez, the US Ambassador of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela who also attended the Congreso as part of a large Latin American contingent. “I listen to the issues they discuss and they are the same issues: housing, employment, the environment, women’s issues, community development and others. We support the agenda in Latin America and we support the Latino agenda in the United States.”

Though not yet concluded, the Latino Congreso has already managed to channel the insurgent energies of its more than 1,500 delegates towards the development of a broad, inclusive and different Latino agenda that brings together and connects many issues. For example, members unanimously passed a resolution calling on the US to stop signing trade agreements they believe are one of the primary causes of immigration. Also connecting several issues, Oscar Chacón, Executive Director of the National Association of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, a National Congreso convener said “NAFTA has been the main cause for more than 1.3 million Mexican campesinos to lose their livelihoods. Not surprisingly, the number of Mexicans who have emigrated to the United States rose 60 percent in the first six years after NAFTA,” adding “We can only resolve immigration issues by addressing the bigger question of what is forcing so many people to emigrate in the first place. The first step is to stop expanding the same agricultural rules of NAFTA to Peru and other Latin American nations.”

Chacón and other Congreso delegates also passed resolutions around such “non traditional” Latin issues as Renewable Energy, Farm Bill Reform, Production, Ocean Management , Green Schools and many others. And, of course, they also addressed the very continental issue of how to turn brown water into clear water - and clear continental thought. Have a a clarisimo day

R

LATINO CONGRESO: NOT JUST ANOTHER CORPORATE, PENTAGON-SPONSORED LOVE FIESTA

For the next few days, I’ll be in Los Angeles blogging from, speaking at the Latino Congreso. This 5-day convergence of Latino leaders and activists from across the US is an important new political expression of the Latino community, one that tilts to the left of the usual corporate, National Council of La Raza-like corporate & Pentagon-sponsored love fiestas that pass for Latino political gatherings these days.

Check out the Congreso’s website and see for yourself a Latino event that (fasten your seat belts) actually talks about stuff like the environment, the Iraq war, criminal justice and US relations to América Latina (several ambassadors and other hemispheric actors will be there too) to name a few (yes, U.S., we do think about more than stealing jobs & hubcaps, marching madly and stuffing ourselves wild with tacos & Budweiser).

Will try to be a digital fly on the wall and bring you interviews with some of the luminary and, yes, handsome (cuz we are) Latina(o)s and Latinoamericana(o)s I run across. I’ll also test rumors heard at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project about the possibility of intelligent life in the Latino universe (”rumors” cuz the Roswell secret of our intelligence means no other media in the U.S. allows we aliens to think publicly). Much more to come on this breaking story.

HURRICANE FELIX SPINS ON CENTRAL AMERICA’S BIGGEST CATASTROPHE: US POLICY

As you watch a “weaker”, but still dangerous Hurricane Felix flood and devastate the communities of some of the poorest people in the hemisphere, you might want to take special note of the US’s first priorities in response: its own interests. A report in today’s UK Guardian lays these priorities out succinctly:

“On Tuesday, in the final hours before Hurricane Felix hit, Grupo Taca Airlines frantically airlifted tourists from the Honduran island of Roatan, popular for its pristine reefs and diving resorts, while the U.S. Southern Command said a Chinook helicopter evacuated 19 U.S. citizens, including tourists and members of U.S. Joint Task Force-Bravo who were visiting the island.”

Felix’s path covers lush, verdant lands dotted with volcanoes, almond trees - and a long, painful history of US military presence. As the impacts of the hurricane become clearer, watch how the men and women in fatigues become the heroes of the story, a mainstream media story that will likely lack any explanation about why, for example, almost half of the people living in Honduras live on less than $2 a day. Neither will they report on how “Joint Task Force Bravo” is staging rescue operations from the same military bases where they trained and housed the infamous Contras as these “freedom fighters” killed more than 30,000 mostly noncombatant poor people in their failed Cold War quest to overthrow the Sandinistas who are now back in power.

If the mainstream media did report on this, it’d be obliged to mention that these same est. 2,000-5,000 US military personnel have a mission to help the governments in this economic desert of a region combat the new post-Cold War enemy: the poor. As you hear the media tell you how US and Honduran troops are helping rescue poor campesinos and their children, compare that with how this recent “exercise” of the US Southern Command in Belize conflates poor migrants with terrorists, traffickers and other “transnational security threats”:

Security, Illegal migration and illicit trafficking Exercises

One example of this type of multinational maritime exercise called TRADEWINDS which addresses transnational security threats in the Caribbean. Recent TRADEWINDS exercises have been crafted to provide Caribbean nations training for the security requirements they will have for the upcoming World Cricket Cup. This year, Belize hosted TRADEWINDS 2007 in which 16 countries enhanced their collective abilities of maritime and ground security forces to prepare for and respond to security threats.

While the hurricane of US economic policies like CAFTA are the primary source of the region’s poverty and propensity to migrate (ie; about 80,000 Hondurans try to migrate annually), the volcano of militarism also does its part to displace - and silence- the poor, especially poor youth, as noted in this report from Amnesty International, which documents how the same Honduran military that was trained for rescue operations is also being trained in counterinsurgency strategy and tactics targeting those most likely to rebel against a $2-a-day future: youth.

For a local perspective on the relationship between land, environment and militarism, see this excerpt from campesina leader and former refugee, Elvira Alvarado’s Don’t be Afraid Gringo. Though written during the height of the Central American wars of the 80’s and 90’s, it documents well how the elite “Gringos” saw powerful refugee women named Elvira and others as communist threats in need of a military solution. Hurricane felix provides another tragic object lesson about how, in the post-Cold War age of migration and other “national security threats”, hurricane survivors, environmetal refugees and other migrants named Elvira are now seen as requiring a military solution. Le Plus Ca Change… Le Plus C’est La Meme Chose.