Homenaje perpetúa imagen admirable del narco(2)

             

La estrella mexicana de las telenovelas Kate del Castillo.

Homenaje, parte 2.

Huizar nació en Zacatecas, México, pero emigró junto a sus padres cuando tenía tres años. Es el primer político nacido fuera de los Estados Unidos en ser electo como concejal en Los Angeles.

Un estudio conducido por la Universidad Stanford, y publicado en el 2013 llamado “Mexican American Mobility: an accumulation of wealth trayectories”, indica que los mexicoamericanos que hablan inglés acumulan propiedades personales y compran bienes raíces lentamente en comparación a los anglos. Además, la movilidad hacia trabajos bien remunerados y profesionales indica que las segundas o terceras generaciones descendientes de migrantes son los que alcanzan estas metas.

El no hablar, entender buen inglés o no tener educación formal pone en gran desventaja a migrantes de primer ingreso en la calidad de trabajos, sus ingresos y las prestaciones que pueden obtener, remata el estudio.

           

El periódico “The Christian Science Monitor” reportó en mayo 8 del 2013 que uno de cada 10 residentes en el condado de Los Angeles vive indocumentado. Según indica la página web del gobierno del condado de Los Angeles, 10.4 millones de personas viven ahí, lo que tabula la cantidad de indocumentados en 1.4 millones.

El 67% de ellos son mexicanos, lo que equivale a 938,000 personas, reporta el periódico. El resto son salvadoreños, filipinos, coreanos y de otras naciones. Los Angeles es el condado más poblado de Estados Unidos.

Sí a esto le agregamos que el bagaje educativo formal del migrante mexicano muchas veces no es el mejor, debido a que gran parte de la información y recreo la obtienen de los medios electrónicos tradicionales y de tabletas celulares, su formación es deficiente.

Insisto, lo que políticos mexicoamericanos y personajes de la TV mexicana debieran hacer es mirar hacia las necesidades de mejora comunitaria de sus audiencias y representados, dejar el circo televisivo y establecer programas educativos, vocacionales y de salud para sus gentes. Las imagenes y cultura de narcotraficantes mexicanos perpetúa estereotipos de ignorancia social, y forja campañas y actitudes anti-inmigrantes dificiles de controlar.

From Missouri to Syria, journalists are targets

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/world/middleeast/from-arrests-to-beheadings-conflict-reporting-takes-harsh-toll-on-journalists.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

Police militarization goes beyond Ferguson(1)

Armed police near a fast food restaurant in Ferguson, Mo. 

The shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in the southern United States earlier this month has led to widespread public outrage around issues of race, class and police brutality.

In particular, a flurry of policy discussions is focusing on the startling level of force and military-style weaponry used by local police in responding to public demonstrations following the death Aug. 9 of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The situation has galvanized support from both liberal and conservative members of Congress for potential changes to a law that, since the 1990s, has provided local U.S. police forces with surplus military equipment. The initiative, overseen by the Department of Defense and known as the “1033 program”, originally came about in order to support law-enforcement personnel in the fight against drug gangs.

“We need to de-militarize this situation,” Claire McCaskill, one of Missouri’s two senators, said last week. “[T]his kind of response by the police has become the problem instead of the solution.”

In a widely read article titled “We Must Demilitarize the Police”, conservative Senator Rand Paul likewise noted that “there should be a difference between a police response and a military response” in law enforcement.

During attempts to contain public protests in the aftermath of the shooting, police in Ferguson used high-powered weapons, teargas, body armor and even armored vehicles of types commonly used by the U.S. military during wartime situations. Now, it appears the 1033 program will likely come under heavy scrutiny in coming months.

“Congress established this program out of real concern that local law enforcement agencies were literally outgunned by drug criminals. We intended this equipment to keep police officers and their communities safe from heavily armed drug gangs and terrorist incidents,” Carl Levin, chair of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said Friday.

“[W]e will review this program to determine if equipment provided by the Defense Department is being used as intended.”

Drugs and terrorism

Despite this unusual bipartisan agreement over the dangers of a militarized police force, there appears to be no extension of this concern to rising U.S. support for militarized law enforcement in other countries.

While a 2011 law requires annual reporting on U.S. assistance to foreign police, that data is not yet available. However, during 2009, the most recent data available, Washington provided more than 3.5 billion dollars in foreign assistance for police activities, particularly in Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan and the Palestinian Territories.

According to an official report from 2011, “the United States has increased its emphasis on training and equipping foreign police as a means of supporting a wide range of U.S. foreign-policy goals,” particularly in the context of the wars on drugs and terrorism.

In the anti-terror fight, African countries are perhaps the most significant recipients of new U.S. security aid. Yet a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) highlights the dangers of this approach, focusing on the U.S.-supported Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) in Kenya.

The report, released Monday, builds on previous allegations against the ATPU of arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Yet neither the Kenyan authorities nor the ATPU’s main donors – the United States and United Kingdom – have seriously investigated these longstanding allegations, HRW says. Washington’s support for the ATPU has been significant, amounting to 19 million dollars in 2012 alone. Yet while U.S. law mandates a halting of aid pending investigation of credible reports of rights abuse, HRW says Washington “has not scaled down its assistance to the unit”.

Read Police, page 2. 

Police militarization goes beyond Ferguson(2)

Ferguson is a suburb of the city of St. Louis.

Police, page 2. 

“The goals of supporting the police in general are laudable and in line with concerns over rule of law,” said Jehanne Henry, a senior researcher with HRW’s Africa division.

“The problem here is it’s clear that, notwithstanding the goals of the assistance, it’s serving to undermine rule of law because the ATPU is taking matters into its own hands. So, our call is for donors to be smarter about providing this kind of assistance.”

Unseen since the 1980s

Meanwhile, Mexico and Latin American countries have been seeing an uptick in U.S. assistance for security forces as part of efforts to crack down on the drug trade.

“Currently the Central American governments are relying more and on their militaries to address the recent surge in violence,” said Adriana Beltran, a senior associate for citizen security at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a watchdog group.

“While the U.S. is saying it’s not providing any assistance to these forces, there is significant assistance being provided through the Department of Defense for counter-narcotics, which is channelled through the militaries of these countries.”

According to a new paper from Alexander Main, a senior associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank here, U.S. security assistance to the region began strengthening again during the latter years of President George W. Bush’s time in office.

“Funding allocated to the region’s police and military forces climbed steadily upward to levels unseen since the U.S.-backed ‘dirty wars’ of the 1980s,” Main writes, noting that a “key model” for bilateral assistance has been Colombia. Since 1999, an eight-billion-dollar program in that country has seen “the mass deployment of military troops and militarized police forces to both interdict illegal drugs and counter left-wing guerrilla groups”.

Yet last year, nearly 150 NGOs warned that U.S. policies of this type, which “promote militarization to address organized crime”, had been ineffective. Further, the groups said, such an approach had resulted in “a dramatic surge in violent crime, often reportedly perpetrated by security forces themselves.”

Mexico has been a particularly prominent recipient of U.S. security aid around the war on drugs.

“From the 1990s onward, the trend has been to encourage the Mexican government to involve the military in drug operations – and, over the past two years, also in public security,” said Maureen Meyer, a senior associate on Mexico for WOLA.

In the process, she said, civilian forces, too, have increasingly received military training, leading to concerns over human rights violations and excessive use of force, as well as a lack of knowledge over how to deal with local protests – concerns startlingly similar to those now coming out of Ferguson, Missouri.

“You can see how disturbing this trend is in the United States, and we are concerned about a similar trend towards militarized police forces in Latin American countries,” Meyer notes. “We have a lot of military equipment and hardware looking for a place to end up, and that tends to be local law enforcement.”

Marchan contra pandillas, drogas en Koreatown(1)

Rosalba Naranjo.

Por Alfredo Santana

Las calles lucen menos sucias y con menos grafito desde que Rosalba Naranjo comenzó a recorrer los barrios de Koreatown y Pico-Union junto a los voluntarios y trabajadores del grupo de Disabilitados Unificados Latinoamericanos (UDLA), para buscar el fin a las pandillas y el crimen en esas comunidades.

Marchas pacíficas de residentes locales, campañas de limpieza de basura de voluntarios con disabilidades, en coordinación con mejores patrullajes y control de actos violentos de policías de la División Olympic del Departamento de Policías de Los Angeles han mejorado la calidad de vida de miles en la zona.

Se han mostrado advances, pero hace falta trabajo por delante.

En su quinta edición anual, la Marcha Pacífica Contra el Crimen y las Drogas, la que partió del Parque Internacional Seúl, y culminó en la estación del LAPD, atrajo a unas 300 adultos y niños, incluyó a representantes comunitarios, y hasta  sirvió para lanzar un llamado a mejorar cuestiones financieras de familias que cargan aún problemas de altos pagos de hipotecas.

Naranjo, quien portaba una pancarta con la frase “Queremos una comunidad libre de drogas”, dijo que nota una gran diferencia para bien desde el 2009, cuando la estación Olympic inició sus funciones.

“Nosotros venimos con un grupo de padres de familia, llamados ‘embajadores’ que nos manifestamos en contra del grafito”, dijo Naranjo. “No nos gusta que haya drogas, ni que afecten a nuestros hijos”.

Hace varios años, al hijo de Naranjo lo asaltaron a la salida de la escuela preparatoria West Adams, y le robaron su teléfono celular. Con el aumento de la presencia policial, el crimen ha bajado mucho, pero aumenta tan luego los chicos vuelven  a clases después de las vacaciones de verano.

“Esta marcha es una buena idea. Caminamos por las calles para parar la violencia,  ayuda mucho a captar la atención”, dijo Samuel Cid, un joven músico que toca el tambor en el grupo “Pueblos Unidos”, cuyos integrantes acompañaron a los manifestantes por el trayecto de dos millas. “Así se enteran de lo que estamos haciendo”.

Lea Marcha, página 2. 

Marchan contra pandillas, drogas en Koreatown(2)

Edgar Murillo.

Marcha, página 2.

La estación Olympic reportó que el mes pasado hubo 79 crimenes violentos en el area, y 44 de ellos fueron asaltos violentos. Hubo 244 robos a propiedad y casas, y se arrestaron a 394 personas.

El área urbana que maneja la estación Olympic incluye el borde con la autopista 10 al sur, la calle Hoover al este, el bulevar Beverly al norte, hasta el cruce con la Avenida Normandie. También cubre al norte con la calle Melrose, y al oeste hasta topar con las calles Gower y Plymouth.

Para Edgar Murillo, las secuelas de la Gran Recesión aún se muestran en el número de pandillas que aumenta durante tiempos de crisis económica, y por la falta de trabajos con paga para jóvenes. Dijo que para él es muy difícil, ya que se transporta en silla de ruedas, y por el momento trabaja en UDLA por tiempo parcial.

“La economía es dura, personalmente la vivo en carne propia y para uno aún hay pocos trabajos con paga. Hacen falta programas de capacitación [vocacional] y de artes para los jóvenes, y que se involucren en actividades comunitarias, como deportes, etc.”, dijo Murillo.

Freelance workers grow in California's economy

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-contract-economy-20140803-story.html#page=1