La Luchita: Paz, Justicia y Libertad

Liberty Square and Beyond

2011-10-19T10:16:00.000+08:00

Homecoming: Chinatown Bus Conflagaration

2011-08-21T12:50:00.000+08:00

Some people don't like it when I punctuate comments about the future by saying "God willing." However, as my recent homecoming trip shows, you never know when the bus you are traveling on might explode.

And the aftermath

Mi daiquiri en la Floridita

2011-07-24T01:18:00.002+08:00

Lomography

2011-04-01T15:43:00.001+08:00

I took my first steps into the warped, tunneled world of cheap plastic camera photography known as "lomography."

Upsidedown car

2011-03-26T19:13:00.000+08:00

How did it get here?

Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain,...: A generation later, echos of '89

2011-02-22T19:04:00.001+08:00

Courtesy of Al Jazeera: Project for a New Arab Century

When Mohammed Bouazizi attempted suicide by fire in the center of the Western Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid as a lonely protest against unemployment and corruption, he could not have known that he would ignite the whole Arab world. Within a month the 23 years of corrupt and authoritarian Tunisian government of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had fallen. The government of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt fell only 18 days after the protests started.

Bouazizi died on January 5th, but his suicidal protest spread, with self immolation protests in Algeria, Iraq, Morrocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia , and Mauritania. While strikes spread across post-Mubarak Egypt, protesters are negotiating with the military over the disappeared and the shape of Egypt's future after the military (hopefully) releases power into the hands of some popular body. Tunisia and Egypt continue to struggle with political and economic instability.

This year will go down in history as a pivotal moment as important as 1989-1990 was a generation ago. While the economic hard times have contrasted with the the wealth of corrupt and brutal authoritarian regimes, the youth of the Arab world have asserted a generational challenge to an entire regional paradigm of power. This moment is as momentous as the fall of the Berlin wall, the Tian'anmen Square protest and following massacre, the Velvet revolutions in Prague and Ulaan Batar.

Meanwhile another wave of protests have exploded. In Bahrain foreign police under the monarchy's orders have repeatedly open fire on protesters with live rounds, killing many to dislodge them from strategic positions. Gulf leaders have been meeting in Bahrain, leading many to speculate Saudi influence, and maybe even Saudi riot police are pushing this repression. In Libya, dozens have been killed in violent uprisings that may have seen Gadaffi's repressive police lose control of parts of the country. The initial crackdown was called a Tian'anmen response, though its clear the scale of the massacre in Benghazi, Tripoli and elsewhere have gone far beyond the violence 20 years ago, one night in Beijing. Yemen is also a seen of ongoing battles between police and protesters. Just as the Yemeni and Bahrain governments initially offered some concessions hoping to head off protests, so too is this wave affecting policy in Jordan.

Peking University Student Run Free Clinic

2011-01-27T16:40:00.000+08:00

I've been working with medical student founders of the Peking University Student Run Free Clinic and helped them submit to the Lancet Student blog an announcement of their work so far.

English in Changping: With the Children of Migrant Workers

2011-01-23T17:11:00.001+08:00

A rambling commentary on environmental health and migrant workers' issues framed from an English class for the children of migrant workers. The first citation, Chan's "The household registration system and migrant labor in China: notes on a debate" is particularly good, and worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.

Teaching myself SAS with a soundtrack

2011-01-14T11:21:00.002+08:00

Proc freq Data=Work.Queens; Tables JamMasterJ;
Run; *DMC taught how to walk This Way;

Harbin Snow and Ice Festival

2011-01-06T14:21:00.001+08:00

First Public Speaking in Chinese

2011-01-04T12:12:00.001+08:00

大家晚上好。我叫 Simon Fitzgerald。我的中文名字是费希孟。免费的费。希望的希。孟子的孟。我是 State University of New York 大学医学专业的学生。在我的大学里，从 2008 年开始，几个医学院的大学生建立了一个免费的医疗诊所，我是其中的一名志愿者。因为我的中文不太好，所以下面的话我将用英语来说。

O No

2010-12-27T13:08:00.001+08:00

A horrible accident on the 8th floor of University Hospital of Brooklyn. This is the worst thing to happen since Ms. Green was watched to death at the Kings County Psychiatric Emergency Room waiting room. Much worse than the dead fetus in the laundry.

Sinicized French Fries: Physical Activity, Diet and Disease in 21st Century China

2010-12-14T11:01:00.001+08:00

The Political Economy of Chinese Food
The rapid globalization of China’s economy that has accompanied its industrialization and economic expansion in the post Mao era has resonated in the global consciousness, with iconic imagery such as the (now closed) Starbucks in the heart of Beijing’s Forbidden City. Just as the rise in car ownership and car culture have lead to a decrease in bicycle use and physical activity, the influx of fast food by international corporations is similarly impacting dietary habits, with profound effect on the health and future of China.

Though I tend to avoid eating fast food, during a recent breakfast at a bustling Beijing McDonalds I meditated over diet and chronic disease in 21^st century China.

With 24 hour home delivery, McDonald’s golden arches and popular hamburgers have arrived at China’s doorstep. Famously, YUM brands’ massive profits have made their marketing of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut a model for foreigners hoping to make money in China.

With a reputation for higher, international standards of hygiene, and certain exotic premium to familiar food like spicy chicken, KFC has not only become the leader in Chinese fast food. It has been described to me as a cultural space in small cities across the country where the aspiring middle class people can meet and and taste something representative of international opportunity in the new China.

Its worth noting that a Chinese Pizza Hut would be almost unrecognizable to Americans. Over coffee and tiramisu another American health researcher pointed out escargot and other high end options on the Pizza Hut menu that seem unimaginable at the American counterpart.

Fast Food and Public Health

After a recent talk by American CDC head Dr. Thomas Friedan at the Chinese Center for Disease Control, repeated questions from the audience addressed an anxiety about the rise of fast food consumption in China. One malaria specialist expressed concern that his son preferred KFC to all other food, wondering how much this food was introducing transaturated fats and other unhealthy nutrition to the Chinese diet. He asked how Friedan’s experience changing food health policy in New York (for example banning trans fats) could inform Chinese policy. Another student researcher pointed out that candy manufacturers such as Mars have stated a desire to increase Chinese consumption of sweets and candy (traditionally lower than in Western countries) because China represents such a large growth opportunity.

The influence of such corporations raises some interesting contradictions. A recent Conference on Physical Activity and Health was sponsored by Coca-Cola and Nestle with a special presentation by representatives from Nestle about their work place exercise policy.

The lunch offered to participants at a recent China CDC interdepartmental sports and exercise competition included of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a snickers bar. Medical literature has established that these types of food choices and the environment that promotes them contributes to the obesity epidemic. The literature has also begun describing the late rise of childhood obesity in China and other developing countries.

Chinese Tobacco and Salt

China of course has its own health problems related to domestic culinary and corporate culture. The tobacco industry, domestically controlled by a Chinese government monopoly, makes huge profits, while Chinese smoking prevalence is among the highest in the world. In corporate culture, cigarettes form a fundamental currency for “pulling guanxi” (拉关系) and developing business relationships. As Dr. Friedan noted in his speech, they are often given as gifts when different professionals or businessmen meet. Smoking cigarettes is a essential punctuation of business negotiations, at the beginning middle and end. Though China has recently instituted some limitations on smoking (such as in hospitals), the persistence of cigarettes in the majority of public spaces, including the bathrooms of China CDC, show how rooted this suicidal habit is in modern Chinese culture.

While New York under Friedan and other parts of the world have used taxes to limit smoking access, the Chinese government interests in tobacco profits make such options especially politically complicated in China.

Chinese food is also notoriously high in salt (as well as oil). Chinese rates of hypertension are astronomical and constitute, according to some health researchers, the greatest public health issue in China at the moment. Research into salt reduction and substitution are hot topics for research in China now.

As smoking cessation is politically difficult in China, salt reduction is technically more difficult, requiring gradual reduction in salt use in package food, restaurant food and household cooking.

As Dr. Friedan said at his lecture, though China still does far better than the U.S.A. and other countries when it comes to childhood obesity, they are starting to take the worst of both worlds. The high fat diet of processed and fast foods developed by Western corporations, as well as the more traditional habits of a high salt and heavy tobacco use. Such habits are sure to add to the chronic disease burden of China's aging population.

Fort Carroll

2010-12-05T15:10:00.001+08:00

Photo: Gene Carl Feldman

One place I failed to visit on my brief trip to Baltimore is Fort Carroll, the small hexagonal man-made island visible just to the south of the Francis Scott Key Bridge as you drive on the Baltimore Beltway I-695.

Built in 1848 under the oversight of Robert E. Lee before he became a Confederate general, the site has long been abandoned and is now essentially a bird sanctuary.

While I had hoped to cross the busy Chesapeake Bay shipping lanes on canoe or kayak to reach the rotting relic of concrete, iron and wood, time just did not allow it.

Maybe next time. I wonder if Four Square has a Fort Carroll mayor?

Photo: Avi8tor4fun Flickr page

Lexington Market

2010-12-01T00:25:00.000+08:00

Where else will the Utz girl sell you an assault rifle, the dope fiend in a lean sell you Xanax without a prescription, and Faidley's sell you the best crab cake in the world.

Khamenei dying of cancer?

2010-11-29T14:11:00.001+08:00

Among the vast number of communiques released by Wikileaks "cablegate," one from August 2009 in Tehran suggesting that supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dying of leukemia (and would in fact likely only live a few months). The supreme ayatollah has been chronically ill for years, and rumors that he has cancer (often lung cancer) have been published since at least 2006.

The 2009 cable suggests that some Iranian political players may be cautious to act too boldly until Khamenei passes and the reform leader Rafsanjani might be able to position himself to be appointed the next ayatollah by the Assembly of Experts.

This same cable also mentions a general "invisible strike," where Iranian workers have been showing up but not working as a form of nonviolent resistance in the aftermath of the fraudulent elections and political violence.

Wikileaks Diplomatic Cables

2010-11-29T07:01:00.000+08:00

DIY researchers and journalists are bouncing off the walls tonight, as Wikileaks has released hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world. About half are classified in some way. Among the bombshells already described by NYTimes:

When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.”

The cables are now published on line in full (with some redactions and deletions austensibly to protect the release of identities and some other sensitive information. However, access is inconsistent reportedly because of a "cyberattack."

Best Greeting Card Ever

2010-11-22T07:37:00.000+08:00

Under the BQE

2010-11-22T02:21:00.000+08:00

出差

2010-11-21T02:46:00.002+08:00

出差
I recently took a trip to a rural area of Henan province for work. I have to admit being too shy with my camera, but the Chinese business trip (出差) is an experience worth describing in itself, and the little I can say about Henan ( 河南) is worth noting.

I've been researching the health of Chinese elderly, particularly centenarians. The county I visited in Henan province has a particularly high concentration of centenarians. They also had some unexpected results on routine blood tests, so we went to pay a site visit to meet some study participants and to see the lab where the blood tests were processed.

We took a train from Beijing (北京) to the capital of Henan, Zhengzhou（郑州). Passing some curious sites along the way.

Like one might imagine in a country as large and diverse as China, there are many regional stereotypes and prejudices. One Chinese friend in Beijing told me in Chinese, perhaps with a certain sense of irony, “中国人不喜欢河南人,” "Chinese people don't like Henanese people." I was told they have a reputation for dishonesty and thievery. I am assuming that the reputation is not entirely fair. Henan is one of the poorest provinces, though its distance from the coastal cities of wealth is not nearly as great as Western China.

While Henan was the birthplace of the first literate Chinese imperial dynasty, its more recent history is notorious enough to resonate with these prejudices.

Henan AIDS Villages
As described in Cohen's 2004 article in Science, businessmen in the 1990s set up commercial blood "donation" centers in rural areas, taking advantage of the peasants' poverty to purchase blood and blood products on the cheap. However, Chinese are culturally not very comfortable losing blood, so the centers offered to return the blood cells to the donors to prevent anemia (and allow them to donate more often). With the support and encouragement of local government, villagers donated blood that was then pooled with other plasma and the red blood cells returned to the donor. As a result of the mix of plasma and blood and re-use of tubing and other equipment, an estimated 55,000 plasma donors were infected with HIV. Other viruses such as Hepatitis C were also rampant. This came at a time well before China was prepared to acknowledge, let alone treat HIV among its population.

The most famous Henanese physician, gynecologist Gao Yaojie, built her international reputation calling attention to the unsanitary commercial plasma purchasing business and the numerous "AIDS villages" in their wake. Now, as a 84 year-old dissident living in Harlem, she estimates the total number of AIDS cases in China (including those who have already passed away) at 10 million, well above the official figure of 740,000 HIV positive Chinese that is commonly circulated in the medical literature.

Arrival
When i arrived in Zhengzhou I was talking to an American who had married a local woman, and they had been living together in Henan for years. Before parting ways, the Henanese woman warned me to be careful around the train station for the immingrants from Xinjiang, where the famous Uighers are from, who are notorious pickpockets. I guess everyone has their own prejudices.

In Zhengzhou I was picked up by a representative from the Henan state CDC and his driver in a new black Buick, which is much more of a luxury brand in China than in America. The drive out to the county study site took hours on the new expressway. The road was relatively empty except for truckers, and speed limits appeared to only be enforced by geographically fixed speed cameras, as described by Peter Hesler in Country Driving. Needless to say we flew over past the trucks, the driver slowing periodically for the hundred or so meters around the predictable speed traps.

Upon arrival in the county seat, it was dark. We, of course hadn't eaten dinner, and the real ritual of the Chinese business travel was about to begin. The roll of the Chinese host is very important culturally, and this tradition seems exceptionally important when welcoming professional visitors. Our elaborate dinner with motorized lazy Susan was punctuated with the almost competitive ritual drinking and choreographed toasts to guests and hosts that would make the glasses of wine at the Jewish seder seem like grape juice. We drank first glass of the anise flavored erguotou liquor (二锅头) before the first dish had arrived. I had been warned to respond to the question of "Can you drink" with "我不会" ( "I don't know how"), so they went easy on me. One of the health officials from Zhengzhou was more firm in his refusal to drink, leaving 3 or 4 ounces of liquor untouched in front of him while he repeatedly toasted our hosts graciously with water. After dinner my colleague came to my room where I was working a little to tell me that he was drunker than he had ever been before and needed to stay up to drink some water and talk a little bit.

Health of the Chinese Centenarians
Our work in Henan started the next day with a presentation from my colleague updating the local CDC officials on our progress in the study that they had collected data for. I was struck by the juxtaposition of the Hammer, sickle and AIDS ribbon, but perhaps that combination of iconography is becoming more common.

We also visited their laboratory to test the equipment related to some funny results in the data. They also had a special HIV lab, though I did not take a picture, for the many HIV + patients who were plasma donors.

We also met some of the local elderly featured in much of the local CDC's recent work. One woman said, when asked loudly and closely, that she was 109 years-old. Her neighbor, tightly gripping a bird in his left hand, described her family history, relative good health and strong appetite,

and a couple in their late 80s.

CCTV building at dusk

2010-11-17T13:47:00.000+08:00

More NYTimes

2010-11-14T18:55:00.000+08:00

The New York Times has two more interesting articles.

One describing how Chinese mental wards have been used/abused to control "assertive" or activist individuals by authorities. On the brighter side, while the recent Burmese election appears to have largely been a sham, the image of Aung San Suu Ky speaking to thousands of supporters in the streets of Yangon is enough to make one irrationally optimistic about the possibilities that exist in this world.

Psychiatry in China

2010-11-11T21:33:00.002+08:00

The New York Times highlights the tenuous position of psychiatry and mental illness treatment in China.

Tunneling through the great wall again

2010-11-11T12:53:00.004+08:00

I've had some internet issues recently, along with being busy. Back on my VPN to access forbidden fruit. I have a couple of substantive posts I should write, so hope to have more online shortly.

In any case, guess what happens when you surround me with nine year olds and point a camera at us...

Halloween

2010-11-05T18:37:00.000+08:00

A little late, but halloween in Beijing started with another English class to rowdy 9 year old children of migrant workers, starting late because of an unexplainable traffic jam on the bus. Next was a subway party on the #2 line I attended in a Mongolian Del, capped off with a boisterous playing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. If only more Chinese people could experience an interactive showing of Tim Curry in drag...

Strong Work, Marty

2010-11-03T20:02:00.000+08:00

Little brother has been in Nevada for several of months working on the Harry Reid campaign. Strong work, Marty.

NIH Director, Beijing Free Clinic and English Class

2010-10-24T17:29:00.000+08:00

The past week has quickly become the busiest, with a lot of small projects coming to pass at the same time including:
A speech by NIH director Dr. Francis Collins at Peking University Health Science Center

Where the staff photographer was also a volunteer at the Peking University Student Run Free Clinic which had its first trial run this past weekend.

I was able to visit that at the end of my day teaching English to 3rd grade children of migrant workers.

Does Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Prize Matter?

2010-10-22T23:24:00.000+08:00

In the wake of Liu Xiabo's Nobel Peace Prize, Chinese officials have been furious. Some have openly wondered, with good cause, if the prize does more harm than good to Xiaobo and his allies. It certainly has increased pressure on his network of activist friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that Xiaobo and his awarding of the nobel prize are relevant in China today.

Soon after his prize, a prominent group of communist party elders, somewhat protected by retirement, have written an open letter, distributed by email and on the blogs of Sina.com, calling for freedom of speech in China. The letter, described in a recent TIME article, is clearly in solidarity with Xiaobo and shares many themes in common with his Charter 08.

It would be naive to say that Xiaobo has brought these ideas into Chinese political discourse, but he is forcing them into the spotlight. The letter notes that many of the basic freedoms of speech are in fact guaranteed by the country's constitution, but are denied by a government censorship apparatus with little accountability. The letter references with indignation the fact that the censors have even blocked domestic publication of the Premier Wen Jiabao's words abroad when they call for more reform than those responsible for censorship are comfortable with.

A Chinese-born American friend points out how the transfer of Hong Kong to China, with its inherited status from the end of British colonialism, has been pushing this conversation deeper into Chinese consciousness. Indeed, the letter above notes that even under British occupation, Hong Kong enjoyed greater press freedom than the Chinese censors allow their their own people.

This energy, of course, is not to be overstated. Much of the country, especially in rural areas without much access to international media, are unlikely to be discussing Xiaobo's importance in the political discourse. They, in fact, may be completely unaware of the June 1989 Beijing protest, uprising and massacre that propelled Xiaobo into infamy (in the government's eyes).

Even in center of Chinese internationalism, there is a widespread nationalist sentiment that is indignant about how the international media covers this prize. While the growth of the Chinese economy has lifted countless millions out of poverty (among other things), many urban youth and professionals find the focus on contentious weeks in 1989 or limits of press freedom to miss the point. In this way the argument by the Chinese government that the prize awarded to Xiaobo represents an "Anti-China" sentiment resonates with popular Chinese frustration, pride or insecurity about its accomplishments and their perception abroad.

Dearly Departed

2010-10-16T23:45:00.002+08:00

This past Tuesday, October 12 the world lost a young giant.

Sujal Parikh, a 2010 Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholar died in a motorcyle accident in Uganda, where he was continuing research that he first laid the groundwork on in 2008.

His death was painful for a lot of people that, like myself, barely knew him. We spent less than three weeks of our lives together. Beside a moment of truth that we once shared, I also could tell that Suj was working on greatness. While I struggled to bring enough copies of my CV to a marathon of different interviews, he had all of the interviewers' CVs ready at hand. I once struggled to stop a session of congress for half an hour in protest of their support for the Iraq war, he helped shut down the city of San Francisco. I was trying to figure out how to make a start in global health research, he was well on his way. While several years younger, he wasn't hoping a site would let him do research, he was shopping for mentors with the most resources and common goals.

His death seems senseless, but like the murder of Stephen Pitcairn, such is our mortality. My psychiatry professor, Dr. Wesley Dickerson, used to say in reference to others' attempts to pschoanalyze pscyhotic patients, "pathology owes us no deeper meaning." Trying to find a reason in the madness of Suj's death feels the same way.

I wrote to a group of young researchers that I met with Suj right before I moved to Beijing, and after learning of Pitcairn's death. Excerpted below, I wrote to these people I had gotten to know a little over 2 weeks:

Some of us became close; some of us shared fleeting moments of truth; I passed by others in silence like ships in the night. Nevertheless, it was an honor to share that time and space with all of you.

On my way to Beijing I passed through my home town of Baltimore just long enough to hear about the murder of a 23 year old Hopkins researcher 1/2 block from the corner where I used to live when I was a 24 year old Spanish interpreter working at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

In short, our future is not promised. I am grateful for the opportunity to have met all of you and look forward to opportunities to collaborate in the future. Next time we meet, don't be surprised if I remember your name. I'm both sentimental and forgetful, ambitious and nostalgic. Whether we have a chance to meet in Baltimore, Brooklyn, Beijing, Port-Au-Prince, Dhaka, Kampala or La Habana, look me up.

It was the last communication I ever had with Suj. He never made it home from Kampala.

It is impossible to know what his impact would have been on this world, if only...

But like the Jewish belief I have been taught that the dead live on in our memories, Suj's impact on our lives, even those who passed by him like ships in the night, will continue to shape our world. His energy, courage, imagination, and discipline redefine my expectations of myself and others, and not just in preparations for my next interview.

Last letter to a Fallen Comrade

2010-10-13T15:45:00.003+08:00

The tragedy of an October accident

Tears of unfinished research

Of injury related morbidity and mortality

An aspiring doctor of limitless potential

Whose sense of justice gave me solace

When his record made me

Wish I wasn’t jealous
I pour Jack Daniels
On a Beijing curb

Next one’s on me

Dear Stranger

Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Prize on a Hazy SaturWorkDay in Beijing

2010-10-12T21:18:00.000+08:00

This weekend weekend on a hazy work day on a Saturday in Beijing. Since this past week was the week-long national holiday celebration, yesterday was a national day of make-up work when all Chinese employees are expected to report to work.

Night time pollution shines like halos around the Beijing street lights.

The haze hides the buildings across the street.

After a string of blue sky days last month, pollution has been particularly bad for Beijing this October. According to the US Embassy Twitter feed on air quality (banned from China's networks), the particulate matter levels have been at "hazardous" levels for the fifth straight day. As an international conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 60 miles away in Tianjin "shows little signs" of progress, the haze has clouded the sun in an eerie bluish blanket like something out of a science fiction movie from the not so distant future. Meanwhile, the China Open tennis tournament has had to turn on the flood lights during midday matches, and, as reuters reports

Air quality is so bad at the China Open in Beijing that players should have access to oxygen tanks on court to help them breathe through the smog, says world number two Novak Djokovic.

Back in Oslo, the Nobel committee awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo ( 刘晓波). The former Columbia University literature professor has been a human rights activist since leaving his American position to join the hunger strikers during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest (similar to the Mongolian protests the next year) and June 4th "Beijing massacre," did his first term in prison, detailed in an LA Times feature. He will spend the his awards ceremony in a Chinese prison cell where he is serving an 11 year sentence for "subversion" for drafting a circulating a petition known as Charter 08 to allow more political and press freedom in China (named after a similar petition of the Czechoslovakians during the Prague Spring of 1968 quite similar to the Cuban Varela Project in 1998 made possible by the internet that used the limited legislative institutions to push reform).

The Chinese government responded with threats to Norwegian-Chinese relations and coercive silence internally. In general, the topic of the Tiananmen protests of 1989 is still not up for discussion, as google has found out (A brief history is online at the NYTimes). Though unprecedented and something of a turning point in recent Chinese history, young people are not generally aware of the events of that Spring. Even the physical landscape of the Square has been changed in the last two decades, sorrounded by gates, checkpoints and metal detectors that prevent any free movement that could create a situation that even briefly looked like 1989.

During the Nobel committee's announcement, CNN and BBC were completely blacked out. Afterwords, Chinese websites removed all mention of the Nobel Peace Prize, and "Liu Xiaobo" and the "Nobel Peace Prize" were censored from search engines. Within Chinese media, the prize was only discussed in one English language editorial in the Global times (bemoaning the "anti-China" purpose of the prize "loaded with Western ideology" that wants to see China collapse like the Soviet Union). The foreign ministry reportedly described the decision as "blasphemy." The controversial cartoonist Kuang Biao reportedly put a cartoon of the nobel prize behind bars on his sina.com blog, but I have been unable to find the image.

Liu Xiaobo for his part has not been able to communicate with the world outside of his prison. His wife was taken out of Beijing by uniformed police who kept her from a press conference she planned to hold, and told her she was being taken to visit her husband. She is apparently now on house arrest. Deutche-Presse reports that many activist colleagues of Liu Xiaobo have been followed, put on house arrest, or taken into custody. According to the report from this weekend, some activists seem to have been disappeared. Their phones are not working and no one had yet heard where they were at the time the article went to print.

The Washington Post has an editorial suggesting that the prize may do Liu and his allies more harm than good.

The legacy of the 1989 protests is a complicated and controversial topic that i am ill prepared to write much about, but its echos clearly continue bouncing a generation later, as in this case, from the cell blocks of Jinzhou prison to the stage of Oslo's City Hall.

National Holiday in Yangshuo

2010-10-07T10:52:00.001+08:00

I spent the Chinese National Day holiday in the city of Yangshuo (阳朔县). Since the Chinese government extended the holiday several years ago to a week-long affair, domestic tourism has increased exponentially in the area, with karst formations with impressive peaks, scenic river rides and some of the best rock-climbing in China. The resulting crowds, tourist traps and confusion left me feeling at times like this first image from our arrival.

Retire the Dragon

2010-09-29T15:48:00.000+08:00

I've been considering some more news commentary while so far away so people interested in how my mind is changing can watch the world reflect off my computer screen. The trick, of course, is not to misspend too much time doing it.

But for those who found the dragon image I referenced for China in my first post to be a tired cliche, Christina Larson at Foreign Policy shows you are not alone.

The Rebirth of Chinggis: A laowai's glimpse at 21st century Mongolia

2010-09-26T23:12:00.006+08:00

The glistening image of Chinggis Khan

Ulaan Baatar- Sandwiched on a plateau between global powers Russia and China, it is easy for an American ignorant of the region to imagine the sparsely populated Mongolia as a marginal nation that will forever be coerced in the shadow of its giant neighbors. Of course, Mongolians remember that, at its height, the Mongol empire was the largest land empire, stretching from Bulgaria to Korea. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Mongolian national identity has been rising like a 130 foot steel image of Genghis Khan (known locally as Chinggis Khan).

Mongolian religious art and culture culture, from what I can gather, appears to be a rich mix of traditional shamanistic practices and buddhist influences from afar as Tibet and India. The art and iconography of Mongolia's buddhist temples, ritualistic masks and traditional dress is intensely colorful, powerfully violent at times, erotically sexual at others, and suprisingly psychodelic.

Masked dancers of the Tumen Ekh National Song and Dance Ensemble.

Other ethnicities, including the Kazakh, add layers of different traditions, designs, art and rituals. With a semi-nomadic herding tradition, the basic unit of social organization is the Ger, a home that can be built in 60-90 minutes and taken apart in half as much time with materials that can be shipped on the backs of camels or horses.

Twin gers of relatively affluent Kazakh herding family with wind turbine and solar panel (on right ger just above and to the side of the entrance. Their herd of sheep is visible in the distance to the viewers left.)

Southwestern Mongolia is also believed to be where throat singing began. The singing styles based on the harmonies of the singers voice of resonant overtones in the throat and mouth are essential parts of Mongolian art, and even the chanting styles of Buddhist monks I saw in the Gandantegchinlen Monastery (pictures not included).

Throat singing with the Tumen Ekh ensemble. I'm afraid I failed to save the names of the singer or the musicians.

This style of singing has become famously associated with Mongolia's northern neighbor, the Tuva Republic (part of Russia), from the documentary Genghis Blues in which blind American blues singer travels to Tuva for the first time to win the Tuvan national throat singing championship (a clip is on Youtube, forgive the German subtitles).

Tall Shadows

The standard English language historical text in the Mongolian Museum of National History, as well as the bookstores and gift shops of Ulaan Baatar, is Baabar's History of Mongolia: From World Power to Soviet Satellite, printed in a joint venture by Cambridge University Press and Mongolian national publishers.

Baabar describes how the 1911 Mongolian independence became possible with the the imminent collapse of the Qing dynasty which had dominated Mongolia as a foreign power. With the Bolsheik revolution to the Northwest, both Russian White Guard and Chinese nationalist troops invaded in 1917. This era included a Russian dictator with a ragtag army of soldiers from Eastern Europe to Japan named Roman Ungren von Sternberg whose wikipedia page is just too bizarre for me to comprehend.

While the national government failed to raise enough support and troops to throw out the invaders, several rebel groups organized into the Mongolian People's Party enlisted the aid of the Soviet army, starting a series of events that would shape the future of the Mongolia for the next 70 years. With military might came political advisors. After the Czarists and the Chinese were defeated, a process of sovietization of the society over the next generation collectivized farms and other property in 1928. This was wildly unpopular with many Mongolians, particularly the nobility and Buddhist clergy. Disorganized rebellions were easily put down with Mongolian-Soviet military power into the early 1930s, coinciding with a war against the Japanese over control of parts of Mongolia. With Soviet propanda against Japanese spies, a whole generation was purged. Climaxing in 1937 with mass murder of almost the entire Buddhist clergy and the execution of the exiled prime minister Genden who refused to carry out the purge, no level of Mongolian society was spared the purge.

This history seems to be an important part of the Mongolian national consciousness. A Museum of Political Persecution was founded documenting much of this. But, with the exception of the bullet riddled skulls excavated in 2003 from a Soviet mass grave in Mongolia, the museum is poorly organized for an English-speaking audience.

Bullet riddled skulls excavated in 2003 from a Soviet mass grave in Mongolia.

Zorig and the New Mongolia

Soviet control of Mongolian affairs continued into perestroika, but in the late 1980s several organizations, particularly the Union of Mongolian Composers, created space for students and young adults to openly discuss politics and the future of Mongolia.

From this energy sprung the Mongolian Democratic Union, which organized protests and open letters, some carried in the press, calling for elections with a multiparty system and basic political freedoms. The coming out party for this movement, described well in an excerpt of Mossabi's Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists, was a small but boisterous December 10 1989 Human Rights Day Protest in Sükhbaatar square. Though Rossabi argues that the demonstrations reflected divisions within the ruling Mongolia People's Revolutionary Party, the government did not respond to the demands, the protests swelled in size and became increasingly rowdy, immortalized by the photo of Sanjaasürengiin Zorig, the "Golden Magpie of Democracy," calming the crowd as it seemed about to lay seige to government offices. The confrontation ultimately climaxed in a March 1990 hunger strike demanding that the entire politburo of communist leadership resign, arrange for multi-party parliamentary elections and separate Mongolian government functions from MPRP party functions. By mid-April Mongolia had entered a new phase in its history.

Infamous photo of Sanjaasürengün Zorig from Mongolian newspaper reports from early 1990. I am unable to find the photographer's name.

Sükhbaatar Square now is a center for congregation for young and old; bicycle, roller blade and power wheel

Language

During my first moments in Mongolia, reading the cyrillic script and overhearing fragments of conversations in a language where I could barely distinguish the syllables, there was something extremely foreign and somewhat intimidating in the Mongolian language. I imagined that the Klingon language might have been modeled after Mongolian, carrying its history of conquest under the Mongol empire and representing a Soviet styled nemesis of the USA-like Federation of planets.

Of course, that impression reflected more on my ignorance than on the Mongolian language. Though written in cyrillic, it is not at all a slavic language. Several alphabets pre-existed the use of cyrillic, famously including the alphabet introduced by Zanabazar shown below whose first symbol is on the Mongolian flag.

Part of Soyembo alphabet introduced by Zanabazar in the 17th century.

Another alphabet was used in the pre-soviet area, and was elegant enough to be used on typewriters.

However, at that time illiteracy, especially among herders, was the norm. As part of the literacy programs devised under soviet advisors in the 1930s, the cyrillic alphabet was adapted and taught all across the country. The result was a linguistic as well as economic and cultural Sovietization. While the traditional scripts are still studied, as are Tibetan and Sanscrit in this Buddhist country, they are still only marginally used in public context outside of the monasteries and universities.

Post-Soviet Discontent
Though Mongolians are apparently quite proud of the peaceful transition from Soviet domination to a new Mongolian national identity, the post-Soviet era has also been wrought with disappointment, corruption and inequality. There is a palpable tension in Mongolia, a mix of frustration and aggression that is simmering underneath the apparent economic growth and outward political stability.

The post-Soviet transition to democracy also left Mongolia's economy without the Soviet support it had become dependent on. Before 1990, the exchange of Mongolian Tugriks to the American dollar was about 10:1. Now that ratio is above 1300:1. The period of privatization was heavily directed by foreign lending institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank, resulting in a defunding of education and health care. The mining sector was being increasingly exploited by foreign corporations with relatively small benefit to the Mongolian economy.

The "end of the romantic phase of post-Soviet Mongolia" occurred in 1998 when Sanjaasürengiin Zorig was stabbed to death in his apartment the day he was nominated as the candidate for Prime Minister. His widow speculated that the still unsolved crime was related to corruption in the privatization phase that Zorig refused to participate in or allow.

I met a highschool English teacher who was skipping work at school to make money as a guide to foreign tourists because of the difference in money. She hoped to give up teaching and help her sister start and run a hostel. Our driver says he was a doctor trained in women's health, (though he also claims to have been a gun and drug runner with the Mongolian mafia in 1990s until he was shot at and decided that wasn't the life for him). He says he gave up working as a doctor in order to work for a tourism agency for better pay and lifestyle.

This distortion of economic incentive is not the recipe for good social and economic development. Despite the apparent boom of construction in Ulaan Baatar, as numerous cranes tower over the city, many construction sites are half-finished shells with no signs of active construction. Some streets are coming apart, and there is a strange sense of growth and decay at the same time. The national recreation park contains a new amusement park with rides and bumper cars, but the rest of the park around it seems like a scene out of the depressing "Return to Oz" movie.

While the poor outskirts of most modern cities like Mexico City are defined by the shanty town, Ulaan Baatar is wringed with Ger districts of new rural to urban migrants in search of work. Particularly bad winters at the end of the 1990s led to an increase in poor immigrants and a rush of homeless children, many of them living in the sewer, a number of them involved in prostitution. Since then more orphanages and NGOs such as Save the Children have been addressing the problem but it continues. Violent crime and property crime also appear to be on the rise.

The ecology and economy of the Ger show similar dichotomies. Some gers have wind turbines and solar panels to charge the batteries they run their household electronics off of. Those with substantial herds can burn the dung for energy, but they also apparently burn and dump the trash, much of it plastic. The drainage ditches and roadsides of Mongolia are sadly decorated with plastic wrappers, drink bottles, and broken glass.

Mongolian Fascism and the Duality of the Swastika (Khas)
The failures of the post-soviet democratic leadership to provide economic stability for Mongolia have occurred in the context of simmering resentment towards Mongolia's Soviet experience and socialist ideals and animosity toward foreign interests profiting in Mongolia. This has created fertile ground for what would seem an unlikely location for the rise of Nazi-inspired Fascism.

Photo: Dan Chung of The Guardian newspaper

Youth fascists have been involved in increasingly common incidents of violence targeting inter-racial couples, homosexuals, transsexuals, foreigners (especially Chinese) and Mongolian women associating with foreigners. NPR describes a recent "song by a band called 4 Zug. The title: 'Don't Overstep The Limits, You Chinks.' It is a violent, hate-filled tirade against Mongolia's massive neighbor, China." After shopping for a made in Mongolia hat and jacket at the "Black Market" of Naran Tuul, I met one such shaved head youth wearing a German cross pendant around his neck throwing a punch in my direction.

Many have pointed out the irony of a Mongolian political philosophy respectfully modeled after the racist Nazi policies that targetted Mongolian POWs for execution. Perhaps more interesting is how Hitler's rebranding of the swastika, a Hindu and Buddhist symbol, as a Nazi emblem gives fascism a strange symbolic connection to the pre-Soviet Mongolian buddhist tradition.

The symbol, called a "Khas" in Mongolian appears not only in traditional design, but in traditional games and on the first Bank Note of the Republic of Mongolia in 1921.

It was explained to me to be something like a spiritual compass rose, taking in energy from the four cardinal directions and unifying it into oneness.

Though my Mongolian is woefully inadequate. I believe this book states that traditionally the Khas was part of a spiritual machine that kills fascists.

So Much to Say: I've Said too Much
Its impossible for me to do justice to the Mongolian experience with 5 days and no Mongolian education. The future of Mongolia remains in contention, poverty remains rampant while social services like transportation, education, health care and child care are in ruins. While a sparsely populated country, the lack of clear ecological policies are going to catch up with the Mongolian environment. The youth movements, in tension between the democratic revolutionaries of the previous generation and the rise of Mongolian hip-hop culture, are significantly influenced by fascism, but its impossible for me to appreciate other influences and the dynamic between them all.

As I return to work in Beijing, I can't help but fantasize about interesting possibilities for a health worker collaborating with Mongolian doctors and researchers to push the standards of Mongolian health care...

ed. note: The phrase laowai is an anglicization of the Chinese 老外 (lao wai = old foreigner). See the 1st post from China for more.

Mid-Autumn Festival

2010-09-24T00:16:00.002+08:00

月饼
Its mid-autumn festival. Moon cakes (月饼=yùe bĭng) for everybody!

Beijing to Ulaan Baatar

2010-09-20T08:57:00.002+08:00

Улаанбаатар

Ulaan Baatar- This weekend I took the long train ride from Beijing to the Mongolian capital on a Mongolian Railway train. The 20 hour trip included a surprisingly fun three hour layover at Erlian (二连浩特).

My Fogarty colleague Sarah planned most of the trip. From Summer in Beijing, its quickly becoming winter weather in the desert of Mongolia, with nightly lows below freezing this week. With much more to say, it will have to wait. The early Mongolian morning calls...

Beach House in the Big Leagues

2010-09-12T09:48:00.002+08:00

Now that Beach House is in the big leagues, when they coming to tour China?

More on Changping

2010-09-12T09:45:00.003+08:00

I thought i would include some pictures of where I've been spending some time.


The first shows the gleaming glass facade of the proud new CDC building, complete with fountain and flags of China and the CDC logo.

From large hill on campus, the CDC in its context. Beyond the cafeteria in the near background, there isn't much else before the mountains in the distance.


Shuttle buses line up to take people home at 4:00. Don't miss the bus, or you might have to find your own way home. I like the texture of this picture, but I noticed that I caught this sign as far down as the Boiler Room.


If you can read what comes below Boiler Room, you may understand why i was later disappointed I missed "动物中心" in the photo above. Its one of those details that rewards a viewer who takes time to really see the whole picture.

洗手间
The experience of the Chinese bathroom is also a little different, and worth noting (without getting dramatic about the Asian-style squat toilet). I've had the strange experience of walking into the bathroom of the national center for disease control and prevention and hearing diarrhea and smelling cigarette smoke. It's strange to imagine an individual in that situation, but i suppose it may mask the bathroom smell.


Here is an example of a shiny clean squat toilet complete with cigarette butt.

Perhaps even more strange to me was the use of the western toilet stall for storage for the week or so that some building maintenance and repairs were going on.

These are just the minor details that color one's sense of being foreign. More soon on the deeper meaning of work and life in China.

感冒

2010-09-05T23:10:00.003+08:00

我感冒
This was a pretty miserable week for me. I went to bed Sunday night with some aches and an increasing fever that gave me some delirious dreams. Monday I awoke with a headache, some disorientation and malaise. On Tuesday I stayed home, and while the headache was a little better, I developed a productive cough with green sputum. This all gradually has been improving, with some interspersed moments of near syncope. Whether this was viral, or more likely some bacterial illness, I learned the word 感冒, cold or flu, which apparently hits Western visitors to China particularly hard.

Hopefully, my sickness hasn't discolored my outlook on life in Beijing too much. On the bright side, though one of the teachers on ChinesePod states that "everyone in China has diarrhea... right now," at least I don't have 拉肚子.

Beijing Commute
My daily routine begins shortly before my 5:40 alarm every morning. I have a habit of nervously waking up at the first signs of a lit sky, usually around 5:38. After getting dressed and packed for work, I walk 5 minutes to a shuttle bus. I might stop by a store for this great honey sweetened yogurt for 2 rmb (about U$0.25, plus the deposit on the ceramic container).

My shuttle bus picks up in front of the buildings that, until this past year, were the headquarters of the China CDC. The China CDC was founded in 2002 by the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine as a quasi-governmental NGO with ties to the Ministry of Health. Its founding was described in the paper, The Current State of Public Health in China, which I cited in my previous post. The office was opened up in four buildings just West of 天坛 (Temple of Heaven), shown by the arrow on the map of Beijing below.

After eight years, the CDC was overflowing, and began to rent out space from a hotel across the street.

In the interest of more space, a sprawling suburban campus some 40-50 kilometers out of Central Beijing, behind a cornfield in the Changping District. On the above map it... does not fit. Zooming out, here it is, identified with the arrow north of the Sixth Ring Road.

Since there was little mass transit to that cornfield before the CDC moved in, and since car ownership is still relatively low among Chinese workers and students, China CDC has to provide shuttle buses from more than a dozen different neighborhoods around the city.

My commute takes an hour to work every day (without traffic) and 75-100 minutes on the way home when traffic is worse. Though some have been asking, I have not been stuck in the 10,000 car traffic jam or the 10 day traffic jam. While those epic calamities are farther in the country-side, this town is still daily gridlock.

我工作
I have spent the last couple of weeks starting my job as a researcher/data analyst at the China CDC. I gave my first presentation on Friday updating my boss and colleagues on my work analyzing the geographical differences in anemia in Chinese elderly, and preparing to use CDC data to find an appropriate level of hemoglobin to use as a definition of anemia among this population. It was four days of data analysis, since I only made sense of the data at the beginning of the week (it's mostly in Chinese, I needed an English copy of the survey, etc.). But I guess the presentation was satisfactory, since my boss suggested I give him a draft of the paper in 2-3 weeks...

New Nikon: First Fotos

2010-09-04T22:27:00.002+08:00

Dancing statues across from Tianqiao Acrobatics Theatre

Beijing disappears into the haze outside the 摄影器材城 where I bought this camera

Los desaparecidos de hoy

2010-09-03T22:45:00.003+08:00

Violence on the Homefront
The last week brought a wave of notable stories related to violence on the homefront. The tragic killing of a Jamaican-born hustler and hip hop record executive Jewish convert brought a good New York Times article on the black orthodox Jewish community of (where else) Brooklyn. The Baltimore Sun highlighted the return of a long time teacher to kindergarden classroom for the first time since a former pupil murdered her son. And several random attacks on Central Americans in Baltimore, including the beating death of a 51 year-old Honduran by a 19 mentally ill man who reportedly "hated Hispanics," and the shooting of two Hondurans (one fatally) by a 14-year-old girl in East Baltimore.

Desaparecidos: Ahora y Entonces
In Mexico, the bodies of 72 South and Central American migrants were found stacked in a shed, after one survivor managed to alert police after being shot in the throat. This mass grave is one of a string of recent findings of mass graves in abandoned mine shafts, ranches, and shallow pits. Most of the recent mass graves are thought to be where rival drug gangs are burying the bodies of their slain rivals, many of them showing signs of torture.

This new find raises questions to me about that narrative.

The bodies of a couple hundred forgotten migrants already litter the deserts of the USAmerican Southwest every summer. Countless more Cubans and Haitians have disappeared in the Straights of Florida heading North.

Los Dasaparecidos, also a song by Rubèn Blades, refers to those left-wing, community and/or labor activists kidnapped off of the streets and imprisoned, tortured, exiled, murdered and sometimes thrown into the sea. Originally coined in Argentina, where the torturers became known by their green Ford Falcon, the phenomenon was common in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Uruguay and other places around the world.

It strikes me that the disappeared of our world may not be always much the community organizer that political power hopes to silence (though they are certainly at risk in today's world), but also the poor people that private or corporate power (such as the cartel) find disposable (as perhaps the powerful so often do).

From Motherland to Forbidden Fruit

2010-09-02T21:33:00.001+08:00

My roommate has started posting a series on her blog about her recent trip to North Korea. I passed on the trip offer, largely because of the expense and the strictly controlled movement. I must sound so boring.

The humorous, quotidian and more

2010-08-28T10:29:00.002+08:00

For those interested in funnier moments of daily life in Beijing, as well as the deeper identity issues of a Chinese/Taiwanese-American returning to the country where her grandparents' families were separated by Mao's revolution, check out my flatmate's blog "Han Solo: Return to the Motherland." You can see pictures of me in a Beijing Bikini in 天安门 (Tian'anmen Square), pictures of our apartment, and a menu featuring "Pot-Braised Pig Fallopian Tube."

As Mercedes Sosa (whose triumphant 1982 concerts at Teatro Colòn upon returning from exile to Argentina give me goose bumps every time I listen) used to sing:

"lo cotidiano se vuelve màgico."

老外在北京

2010-08-22T20:55:00.014+08:00

老外在北京
New York and D.C. are often described as the "Belly of the Beast" or the "Brain of the Monster" by those critical of American Power. China, on the other hand, has been given the mythical image of the dragon, including National Geographic's recent "Inside the Dragon" issue. China certainly has entered the world economic stage like a Bruce Lee movie. (ed. note: Enter the Dragon)

If China's economic engine has been the dragon, its cities have become the dragon's lair. Much has been written of the thick smog that usually blankets Chinese cities like Beijing, especially in the time around the arrival of the Olympics. The US embassy now has a twitter feed with up to date information on the air quality (the irony of course is that twitter, like blogger.com is hidden from Chinese networks behind so-called The Great Firewall of China). The haze sometimes obscures the view of the building across the street or hides the sun for days at a time. At times I wake up with a little sore throat, or feel my asthma assert itself after long day, but this morning I woke up to a beautiful clear blue sky after last night's rain. While i still don't have a camera (pictures to follow eventually) its worth sharing some of my first impressions as an ignorant 老外 (lao wai = old foreigner. Its my Chinese name) 在 (zai = in) 北京 (Beijing).

Contradictions
Beijing is massive. Home to more than 20 million people from almost every country of the world and every province in China. Like a mix of Manhattan, Mexico City and Havana (only safer and full of Chinese speakers) it seems to have everything, from wealth, luxury and high technology to poverty and debris.

Its seems a collision of traditional and modern. As the United States, founded as the land of the free and the home of the slaves, is full of contradictions, my limited understanding of China is framed by a web of contradictions. Because the language, history, culture and concepts here are still largely foreign to me, there is much I cannot perceive. I anticipate I won't be able to reconcile my reality for quite some time.

Here the most powerful communist party in the world leads one of the most aggressive capitalist economies. While increasing numbers of cars chase bicycles off its street, China is becoming a world leader in green energy technology like wind turbines. Sometimes the contradictions are surreal, such as the view of a Wal-Mart megastore in Caishikou from the rubble of a demolished hutong (胡同) neighborhood. Other times it is farcical like taking the toboggan ride down from the great wall in Mutianyu.

Anarchy in the PRC
But now is a very exciting time to be in China. Possibilities seems limitless.

A Beijing-based musician explained to me the political significance of various youth movements, and I've come to realize that the cultural space has opened up tremendously. The rock scene has been so energetic that analysts have taken to calling it Anarchy in the PRC, referencing the Sex Pistols "Anarchy in the UK" and the 2002 collaboration by Chinese punk groups Brain Failure and Anarchy Jerks pictured at left.

Health Care in China
I've spent part of the last week researching the history of public health in China. China obviously has a rich, ancient tradition of medicine and a track record of advances in rural medicine early in the second half of the 20th century. However, there is consensus that the current health care system is dysfunctional. The Washington Post described the situation of the Chinese health care system during recent debates over health system reform in the United States. The New York Times described so much distrust between doctors and patients that armed confrontation in the hospital is not entirely uncommon. A recent report from the China CDC stated that

Old operating models of public health cannot meet present requirements... [because of]... poor capacity to respond to public health emergencies, severe inequality of health care services, and lagging development of public health information systems.

农民工
This dilemma faced by Chinese policy makers particularly and Chinese society in general are illustrated to me by the conditions of the migrant workers that have been the construction workers building Beijing and the manpower of many of the nation's factories. These "peasant workers" ( 农民工 ), often live in informal, precarious communities, while access to services like health or education is based on formal proof of local residency or employer-based health insurance.

The decentralization and privatization of the Chinese system beginning in the 1980s gave up central government responsibility for social services to the provinces and municipalities. So many migrant families, with neither proper residency in Beijing nor their home provinces, have no access to proper health care; their children have no right to education, and migrant schools constantly struggle with transient student body, a lack of funding or recognition, and the constant threat of closure. The informal nature of many of their employment arrangements also do not allow many workers access to employer-based insurance described in Chinese labor law.

Reform?
Fortunately, these problems have become part of the national discourse. Premier Wen Jiabao has recognized the plight of migrant workers and suggested the government will attempt to address it; China has begun a (slow) process of health care reform, and (after the embarrassing mismanagement of the SARS outbreak) public health practitioners have been found increasing freedom to do important public health work. Big things may be happening.

From the right vantage point, China in 2010 might be the best place to catch a glimpse of our collective future.

Bodymore: a reflection

2010-07-29T02:55:00.007+08:00

I passed through Baltimore two weeks ago on my way to Beijing, just long enough to read about the murder of Hopkins researcher Stephen Pitcairn the night before. Walking home from the train station two days before his 24th birthday he was callously stabbed to death over his iPhone and pocket money on St. Paul Street near 26th St. At age 24 I was living less than a half block north, working as a medical interpreter at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The murder caused a visceral sensation like the moment a roller coaster drops. There is no good reason that wasn't me. I've walked that corner in the hour before midnight 100 times. His death and my survival are unexplainable evidence of our own mortality in Bodymore, Murdaland.

Pitcairn's murder seemed to touch many people profoundly in a city with more than a murder every other day. Peter Hermann compared the outcry over Pitcairn's death to silence that followed the murder of 21 year old Emmanuel Thomas, shot less than a mile south, supposedly because he witnessed a previous murder. His article suggested that race played a large factor, and in a city defined by bigotry and racial tension, race is sure to color our collective memory of traumatic events.

But the better comparison is with the B-More Elite basketball Allstar and highly recruited John Crowder, recently shot to death near his grandmother's Kirk Ave home. Crowder's teamates won the national AAU championship in his absence.

The truth is that Pitcairn has become part of a sad legacy of once limitless potential. James Smith III, Maishan St. Patrick Nelson, Rocco C. Cash, Rio-Jarrell Tatum, Lawanda Dawson, Juan Dawson, Kevin Dawson, Keith Dawson, Carnell Dawson Jr., Lucero Espinoza, Ricardo Espinoza, Alex Espejo Quezada, Javon Thompson, Sintia Mesa, Kiuna Jackson, Shneara Kerrie Boone, Zachariah Hallback, Zach Sowers, Crowder, Pitcairn, and countless others I can't remember off hand. Each year brings new horror stories of death in young lives in what was once a great American city. The oral history has become an unending tragedy, or as Randall Robinson says of Haiti, an Unbroken Agony.

In one of the best scenes in The Wire, homicide detective Bunk chastises Omar, a stick-up man who robs drug dealers, for the change in baltimore from when they were both in high school at Edmondson.

Rough as that neighborhood could be, we had ourselves a community. Now all we got is bodies and predatory mother-fuckers... It makes me sick... how far we done fell.

The murder of 70 year-old Milton Hill during the robbery of his scooter shows the city not only eats its young, but also sacrifices its elders toward this predatory greed. The rally and outcry over his murder show race is not the defining factor in our anger, but this is still not the type of organizing likely to create transformative change. Even the recent death of Khia Edgerton suggests to me that we are unable to take care of those that we value in our community.

Frustrated officers have complained that Pitcairn's killers had enough of a violent criminal record that they should not have even been on the street. The justice system in Baltimore is clearly broken, and the police department has little rapport with many of the communities it polices. While there is much that could be done to improve policing and prosecution, I doubt that law and order strategies are sufficient answers when the prisons themselves reinforce the logic of gang violence and sexual predation. Now, two generations after the riots that consumed the city in flames, and more than a generation after the rise of crack cocaine that sent murder rates to unprecedented numbers, what will it take to heal the scarred remains of the communities in the shell of a shattered city.

Immigration Raid on Broadway (in Baltimore)

2007-01-24T06:00:00.000+08:00

Agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 24 people for immigration violations January 23 in Baltimore, Maryland. On the same day in Southern Californica, some 761 immigrants were arrested on immigration violations on "one of the biggest such sweeps ever" by US law enforcement agents.

Representatives from United Workers' Association, including Spanish speaking workers who were in the area of Broadway and Lombard on the morning of January 23rd said that, at 11:30, unmarked cars rolled up to that corner in front of the 7-11 and rounded up Hispanic immigrants waiting for work there. At 10:30 the corner was full of people waiting for offers of work for the day.

They reported that "24 people were confirmed arrested." A press conference was organized in the early afternoon at that corner by the UWA, Casa de Maryland and other organizations announcing the arrests and condemning them as attacks on people just trying to make a living.

At least 3 television news outlets were reporting from the corner, including CBS and Channel 2. Witnesses said the raid was carried out by "Immigration" or ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security). There is no word yet if this was an isolated raid or part of a coordinated, multi-city effort that purposefully coincided with the raids in Southern California.

The United Workers Association is a human rights organization that organizes low wage workers and builds leadership from their ranks with the goal of ending poverty. The mission of the organization takes inspiration from the Poor Peoples' Campaign of 1968. Martin Luther King was killed on a stop of this campaign as he fought side-by-side with striking sanitation workers.

Batman Sent to Syria in Extraordinary Rendition

2007-01-21T23:51:00.000+08:00

Experts blame the increased use of torture around the world to the rise of supervillian The Penguin to the head of covert operations of the American Imperial Government.

Son of Nun Concert and Protest Against the War

2007-01-20T06:54:00.000+08:00

Local Socialist MC and winner of the CityPaper's "Best Verbal Beat Down" award Son of Nun is playing tonight at St. John's Church in Charles Village.

R.A.M. Benefit for Red Emma's [Bmore]

R.A.M. is the Revolutionary Artist Movement and it consists of
*Eric Jah Hannibal
*Jassaga David Sawyer
*S.O.N.
*Ron Kipling Williams

what does a former black panther w/ a guitar alongside a poet/drummer, spoken word artist, and an emcee sound like? come through St. John's Church to find out as we pay tribute to Dr. King and raise funds for Red Emma's radical bookstore/coffee shop!
St. John's Church @ 27th & St. Paul
8pm - $10 donation
*sorry for the late notice!

Also remember the upcoming Antiwar Demonstration is going to be big. (For whatever that is worth).

01.27.07 - Sat. - UFPJ's National Antiwar Demonstration [D.C.]

don't sleep on the democrats, they'll cut you quicker than clinton can say welfare reform, and don't buy the b.s. of gradual withdrawal - vietnam was more intense than this war and the u.s. didn't gradually withdraw from that conflict - unless you call a helicopter flying off the roof of the embassy gradual.
Stop U.S. Imperialism!
Bring The Troops Home Now!
Reparations for Iraq (and others of course) Now!
*if you're in bmore and need a ride there are buses going down - contact me for more info.

New Orleans Blowing Up

2007-01-09T10:34:00.000+08:00

While my attention has been focused across the border in Mexico and here at home in Baltimore, New Orleans and Haiti have been suffering amid the sounds of gunshots.

Not too long ago I remarked that the murderous neglect that allowed the body count of Katrina to rise was eerily reminiscent of the response of the Haitian coup-installed government to the flooding of hurricane Jeanne not long before.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune now details a rash of killings in New Orleans that has left 9 dead since the start of the New Year. While every violent death is no doubt devastatingly tragic to the survivors, two have come to represent the profound loss amid the ruins of New Orleans.

The New Orleans Musician Relief Fund details in "A House Not Meant to Stand" the murder of Dinerral Shavers, a drummer with the Hot 8 Brass Band.

Dinerral was caught in the crossfire of a teen allegedly aiming for his stepson. He probably saved his family's life, driving away from the shooter and toward safety as he died. It took an hour for the ambulance to come as he lay in the street.

Police urged the NOMRF not to perform the traditional New Orleans jazz funeral march for Shavers,

Dinerral's second line will take place anyway because you can't wash away culture ingrained that deeply. It's his well-deserved last gig. But it's where gangs sometimes try to settle a grudge among the chaos.

In the Marigny neighborhood Helen Hill was killed in her home at about 6:00 AM and her husband Paul Gailiunas was shot in the neck while he held his two-year-old son. The Times-Picayune has more on the shooting and the couple's lives in New Orleans. Gailiunas is a physician who ran a Little Doctors Neighborhood Health Clinic in the Treme neighborhood that gave free and discounted medical care to those who could not otherwise afford to visit the doctor. He was also the founder of New Orleans Food Not Bombs, that took food from places like Whole Foods that would not be sold and prepared meals for the homeless. He also performed musically in an act called Ukulele Against the Machine.

A gunshop burglary in nearby Metaire has also been a source of concern. An arrest in that case has just been made.

Journalist Refuses to Testify in Court Martial of Iraq War Refuser

2007-01-02T12:22:00.000+08:00

Sarah Olson, a regular reporter for Truthout.com, interviewed Lt. Ehren Watada for the August 2006 issue of Left Turn Magazine (#21, Estamos en la Lucha).

In this interview, Ehren Watada first publicized that he was refusing to serve in the Iraq War, stating

I’ve come to believe this is an illegal and an immoral war, and the order to have us deploy to Iraq is unlawful. I won’t follow this order and I won’t participate in something I believe is wrong.

Watada, the first commisioned officer to refuse to serve in Iraq, is now awaiting a February 2007 court-martial for his refusal, and the U.S. Army has subpeonaed Sarah Olson. They have also named independent reporter Dahr Jamail, who regularly reports from Iraq and frequently contributes to Left Turn Magazine, as a proseuction witness.

Olson has just published her response to the Army, titled "Why I Object to Testifying Against Lt. Watada," saying

The U.S. Army has cobbled together portions of my interview with Lieutenant Watada and these statements comprise the foundation of one charge of conduct unbecoming an officer. To substantiate this alleged crime, the Army has subpoenaed me to testify on behalf of their prosecution...

It is my job as a professional journalist to report the news, not to act as the eyes and ears of the government. I am repelled by this approach that jeopardizes my credibility and seeks to compel my participation in muting public speech and dissenting personal opinion.

The army may have her sent to jail for refusing to testify in the court-martial proceedings.

Despite the unprecedented nature of such a subpeona, very few news outlets have reported on the event. According to Google News, only independent media outlets, the Guardian of London, the Army Times, some Arab-American press, local San Francisco Bay area press, and CBS news have picked up the story at all.

Journalists and others are calling for support on behalf of Sarah Olson on the grounds of freedom of speech and freedom of press. Lt. Watada is also only the highest ranking of many soldiers and sailors that have refused to fight in Iraq on legal and moral grounds in the face of court martials. Others include Camilo Mejia, Kevin Benderman, Pablo Paredes and Abdullah Webster. A more complete list is available on the web page U.S. War Heroes from the Iraq War. This phenomenon of soldier resisters is also occurring in Israel, as documented by the book Breaking Ranks. As the new film Sir, No Sir documents,a similar pattern during the Vietnam War ultimately forced the U.S. government to withdraw their forces and end the war.

On the Occasion of Saddam Hussein's Execution

2006-12-31T00:00:00.000+08:00

Juan Cole writes about the "Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein". An excerpt:

Saddam Hussain was one of the 20th century's most notorious tyrants, though the death toll he racked up is probably exaggerated by his critics. The reality was bad enough.

The tendency to treat Saddam and Iraq in a historical vacuum, and in isolation from the superpowers, however, has hidden from Americans their own culpability in the horror show that has been Iraq for the past few decades. Initially, the US used the Baath Party as a nationalist foil to the Communists. Then Washington used it against Iran. The welfare of Iraqis themselves appears to have been on no one's mind, either in Washington or in Baghdad.

The Immigration War: Attacking the Poor, Supporting Their Exploiters

2006-12-18T09:07:00.000+08:00

Bill Conroy at Narco News has a good analysis of the recent raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, the former INS) division of the Department of Homeland Security in the Swift company meat packing plants.

The owners of Swift are very connected to the Bush administration and are not being charged with any violations of labor law or immigration law. Meanwhile, many of the undocumented immigrants arrested were merely taken across state lines and released. It seems to have been mostly a PR stunt.

Mexican Federal Troops Operating in Calderón's Home State of Michoacán

2006-12-14T01:54:00.000+08:00

In international news, while Mexican Federal Police are still bogged down in the rebelious state of Oaxaca, (where residents are fighting for the resignation of the repudiated governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz), new president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (himself suffering from challenges to his presidency and its legitimacy) has sent thousands of federal troops to the Pacific state of Michoacan to take over areas reportedly under the control of violent drug trafficking gangs. It was in Michoacan that a gang called "la familia" entered a crowded bar and threw five severed heads on the dance floor along with a poorly written letter that stated that "the family does not kill women nor innocents. The family only kill those that need to be killed." La Familia is also said to be responsible for a recent prison uprising.

The operation is said to have resulted in 56 detained, compared to the 160 detained after a recent nonviolent protest in Oaxaca.

After the operation in Michoacan, Calderon's home state, officials are saying the army will be sent to Guerrero (where Acapulco is located), Nuevo Leon (Monterrey), Tamaulipas, and Sinaloa.

Revolutionary Childcare

2006-12-12T23:55:00.000+08:00

RJ, the Zapagringo, writes about Revolutionary Childcare with the New York organization Regeneración. I have been working on a similar project that is kind of stalled with United Workers Association.

The Rich Ejecting the Poor: Gentrification in Baltimore

2006-12-12T00:17:00.000+08:00

The Baltimore Sun is currently running a three-part series about "Baltimore's arcane system of ground rents ... a vestige of colonial[ism]" in Maryland. Parts 1 and 2 of On Shaky Ground have already been published, and detail how rising property values in Baltimore have lead a handful of wealthy investors, lawyers and real estate agents to seize houses from their owners for debts as little as $84. Since the arcane laws allow ground rent holders to add $1,500 in legal fees (there was no cap on the fees before 2003) when they sue home owners in "ejectment" proceedings, homeowners can be faced in court with an unpayable fine twenty times more then they originally owed in unpaid ground rent payments. If the homeowner does not pay the additional fees and unpaid ground rent, they can lose their homes in the legal proceedings. Over 500 homeowners have lost their properties in Baltimore in recent years from such lawsuits.

The Sun pieces recognize that these proceedings are part of a "gentrifying" process in Baltimore, and mention that many of these same ground-rent-holding entities also buy up tax liens and sue property owners for their properties over unpaid taxes. A previous set of articles on homeless teenagers in Baltimore City public schools included the case of a young Gary Sells who was made homeless when his house was confiscated over hundreds of dollars in unpaid taxes that he was not aware of. He found out when uniformed officials came to the door of the house his family had owned for over 30 years to tell the residents that they were now trespassing on what had been their family's home.

While legal, these procedures by which wealthy professionals take the homes out from under poor or working families by way of legalistic con games and anachronistic laws is clearly immoral. The lawyers and real estate developers interviewed by the Sun who exploit the ground rents for a living argued that they were just making an honest living. One said "you can make a lot of money doing this, but you have to be ruthless." Another explained that the process was justified, and the only reform needed was a raise in the amount of fees that could be tacked on to unpaid ground rent at ejectment proceedings.

The problem is that the people seizing poor peoples' homes over small sums of unpaid archaic ground rent are right. What they are doing is perfectly ethical within the logic of capitalism "in a business where somebody else has to lose in order for you to gain."

Indeed, this is the most nefarious side of that double-edged sword called gentrification. While I have long argued that the process should be easier for people looking for housing to seize properties from negligent landlords who allow their properties to crumble without paying any upkeep or taxes, it is evil to use that logic to make families homeless. Indeed, this process of kicking out marginalized people, which in this town that usually means poor or working-class black people, in neighborhoods like Patterson Park that have become desirable to wealthier (and whiter) people is the inverse of the Blockbusting phenomenon of the 1950's and 1960's. In those days, the spectre of invading black families was used to scare white families into selling their houses below market value to exploitative real estate firms. Due to the dual housing market at the time, those real estate firms could sell the homes to black families at prices above the previous market value that white families had paid for the homes.

The fact that this process works just as well in reverse shows that the problem neither is nor was the white families or the black families moving from one area to another. Rather, speculative capitalists exploit the real estate market in any way possible to make what one of the ground rent owners in the Sun story calls "windfall profits." Like the brothers said on that Grand Master Flash song "The Message" , "Its all about the money, ain't a damn thing funny." The legal and cultural establishment of the United States values greed and views community solidarity with suspicion if not outright contempt.

The third installment of the Sun piece is supposed to suggests reforms to the ground rent system to prevent its abuse. But there are other methods in addition to legislative changes that people could use to defend themselves. First of all, if homeowners had legal resources (like pro-bono laywers) they could successfully challenge much of the home seizure attempts with legal arguments that the ground rent owner never honestly tried to collect the rent before going to court. More importantnly, the community could organize to defend the homes of families who face eviction.

During the great depression whole communities would confront sheriffs executing an eviction proceeding, either refusing to let him pass or taking the personal items of the evicted from the street in front of the house back inside through a back door. Unfortunately the high rates of addiction and incarceration in the community, the persistent intra-community violence and the distrust that this violence sows among neighbors make me think that the legislative route may be easier. Though without the organizational capacity to follow-up on the effects of any reforms, such changes may be only temporarily effective.

James Baker, the Iraqi Study Group and the Privatization of Iraqi Oil

2006-12-08T00:11:00.000+08:00

Amy Goodman interviewed Antonia Juhasz on Democracy Now about the Iraq Study Group report, James Baker and their suggestion to privatize the iraqi oil industry.

Simon
La Luchita

What Happens When Castro Dies?

2006-12-07T23:33:00.000+08:00

Much was made of Fidel Castro's 80th birthday this past week, which Fidel was too ill to attend. Recent pictures of Fidel from the hospital show a gaunt, weak man who appears to be fatally afflicted by the still unidentified intestinal condition.

The question of what happens in Cuba after Fidel's death has long been a question. While Fidel's brother Raul has been acting Commander in Chief (supposedly on a temporary basis) since Fidel fell ill, it seems likely that he will be made dictator for life. Roig has already commented on this scenario years ago in a piece titled "Democracy For Cuba."

Of course, the great question Americans have about Cuba is “what is going to happen to Cuba when Castro dies.” While there is still hope that Castro’s government will offer a clear plan of transition, this has not yet happened. Most Cubans seem to think that a military regime will then be headed by Fidel’s brother Raul Castro, currently the Minister of the Interior. This position is in some ways equivalent to the U.S. position of Director of Intelligence that is held by John Negroponte as it oversees the Cuban equivalents of the CIA and FBI. Raul does not command respect or admiration as Fidel does, and I got the sense that Cubans saw him much as they see George W. Bush (a slow, inarticulate individual with a “alcoholic personality” from a politically connected family).

At the same time the United States will step up the intensity of its war of attrition against Cuba has happened from 1992-1996 after the fall of the Soviet Union. During this “special period” Cubans came close to dying in the streets of hunger for the first time since 1960 and, as life became more desperate and uncertain, the levels of violence and crime escalated across the island.

I hope that the destruction of Iraqi society has made clear that true democracy cannot be brought by warfare. We can only free others from injustice if we support them in their own struggles, learning from their lead.

If anyone really wants to bring democracy to Cuba, I encourage him/her to go to the island, learn Spanish, make friends, ask critical questions, and offer concrete support (in private Cubans will often go on talking about such things as much as you let them). Furthermore, it is important for Americans to realize that Cuban democracy will not be a product of Washington or Miami politics. It must spring from the will and direction of the Cuban people. In any case, while the U.S. government attempts to scare Americans away, there are still legal opportunities to travel to the island that can be found in a search of the internet. Others decide to go without permission, which can still be done safely if done carefully. Instead of sending smart bombs, we can send smart students, and figure out a better future than the perpetual warfare now being offered.

APPO Forced into Hiding, Flavio Sosa Arrested in Mexico City

2006-12-06T03:47:00.000+08:00

Flavio Sosa, outspoken leader of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials) has been arrested in Mexico City after a news conference. There had long been a warrent for his arrest (though the warrent is the generalized pre-emptive type the Mexican government uses to mass arrest organizers of protest movements). I met Sosa in Mexico City a day before rounds of negotiations were to begin with the Ministry of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación), where Sosa let it be known that a temporary leave of absence by the repudiated Oaxacan governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz would probably be enough to bring the barricades in Oaxaca down.

At that time, the high-profile negotiations with the federal government and the de facto control of Oaxaca by APPO affiliated protesters made an arrest of Sosa too risky. Now that Calderón is in office, the iron fist appears to be falling on APPO and the Oaxacan protesters.

According to Juan Trujillo of Narconews (whose article I have translated into English for Narconews), Sosa is being transferred to a high security facility in the state of Mexico (Altiplano, also known as La Palma) where Atenco prisoners are still held.

Meanwhile, Florentino Lopez, APPO spokesperson, announced from hiding that a national and international series of protests will be launched this week from Mexico City to demand the release of APPO members detained this past week.

This past week also saw an statement announcing continued resistance from the protesters by State Council of the Popular Peoples' Assembly of Oaxaca, a broader organization started by the APPO to geographically and inclusively organize the protest movement to form a new state consitutional convention.

Radio Universidad Falls Silent, Brad Will's Killer's go Free, and Calderón Inaugurates His Presidency

2006-12-03T01:42:00.000+08:00

Today, December 1, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, of the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN for its Spanish initials) takes power as President of the United States of Mexico after an election victory that many see as fraudulent.

The San Lazaro legislative Palace, the home of the Mexican national congress, had become a strange sort of battle ground as legislators of the PAN and of the center-left Party of Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática) physically fought to control the podium. Expecting a coordinated action designed to prevent the inauguration of Calderon in San Lazaro, as the PRD had done to prevent President Fox from giving his state of the union address (informe) in September, the PAN delegation pre-emptively seized the stage November 28th. Fighting off PRD delegates, the PAN legislators even sleeped on the floor of congress in order to hold the stage and allow Calderon to be sworn in.

Calderon was indeed sworn in today. A private ceremony was held, without prior announcement at midnight in the Presidential Palace. This unprecendented secretive nighttime inauguration was followed this morning at 9:48 in San Lazaro, as reported by La Jornada. In both cases, President Vicente Fox turned over power to Felipe Calderon, but not before new physical altercations between PAN and PRD legislators, as well as catcalls and chants desinged to interrupt the ceremony. In any case, Felipe Calderon is now the official president of Mexico.

Radio Universidad Falls Silent

All of this noise in Mexico City drowned out the important news coming out of Oaxaca. In addition to the "toma de protesta" (inauguration) of Calderon and the return of The Other Campaign to Mexico City, December 1 was supposed to be a key moment in the popular uprising in the southern state of Oaxaca.

For months a common rallying cry of the Oaxacan people was "si Ulises no se va, Calderón caerá," (If Gov. Ulises doesn't go, Calderon will fall") connecting the demand that the repudiated Oaxacan governor resigned with a threat to nationalize the state's uprising against the (perhaps fraudulently) elected president.

Nevertheless, this past week has seen a de-escalation of the Oaxacan peoples' movement. Last weekend, state and federal police (as well as vigilantes) attacked a protest of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca as they surrounded a Federal Preventative Police (PFP) encampment in the Oaxacan city center for a "48 hour nonviolent seige" of the PFP. The attack triggered a five hour battle and city-wide riot. Some 160 people were arrested, many of them randomly from the site of the police attack. Others were "disappeared," though initial reports of dead protesters have not been confirmed. For days after the attack, protesters remained hidden in homes and offices, afraid to walk through the streets to return to their own homes and families. Fourteen such people were hiding out in the office of Nueva Izquierda when it was shot up and burned to the ground. Thirteen managed to escape, and one is considered "disappeared." I wrote about this several days ago, detailing as much as possible. Since then many other important stories have come out.

John Gibler writes about a human rights observer from Mexico City who was arrested randomly, and has had ample opportunity to observe human rights abuses in police custody. Luis Hernandez Navarro suggested that this attack marked "the end of tolerance" for the protest, and connected the violent repression with the inauguration of Calderon.

Furthermore, this attack at the rank and file of the protest, instead of against its leadership, seems to have severely weakened the APPO. The attack of a peaceful march, the arrest of so many people, their transfer to far away states where family cannot see them, and the torture employed by the captors seems to have been the first serious blow to the movement's motivation.

On October 29, Radio Universidad fell silent. The administrators of the radio broadcasting station turned it over to the university where it is located. The decision was made after the barricade of Cinco Señores, at the doorstep of the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca, was left unguarded. Federal and state police were able to simply drive up and dismantle the same barricade where, at the beginning of November, an attempt to do the same caused an epic six hour battle in which two armored police trucks were torched, and the PFP eventually retreated.

After the fall of the last barricade around the university, the the administrator's of the radio station, also called Radio Planton and Radio APPO, decided to turn it over to university officials so that federal police would not invade the campus as they had been threatening to do. The defense of this station had been the primary goal of the Oaxacan resistance ever since the PFP entered Oaxaca on October 27th. International listerners can still hear Radio APPO's silence over the internet.

Flavio Sosa, member of Nueva Izquierda and a leader of the APPO, says that the government is trying to crush the movment with a "dirty war." Sosa's brother is currently being held by the PFP. It remains to be seen if this is a strategic retreat on the side of the Oaxacan protesters, but it makes them look week. Radio Universidad made calls for reinforcements over the air, when people did not show up ready to defend the station, as they had previously, they decided to avoid a fight they could not win. Felipe Calderon is promising to dialogue with any one who is interested in dialogue (which APPO have repeatedly called for since the uprising began this summer). With foreign media largely ignoring it, the left wing of the Mexican media relegating it from the front page, and Radio Universidad falling silent- will any body ear Calderón's iron fist fall on Oaxaca?

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, as always, has information on Calderon's inauguration and the situation in Oaxaca. John Gibler: the unprecendented private inauguration ceremony "a sign of the weakness of this presidency."

Government Murders Bradley Will with Impunity

While some 160 Oaxacan protesters were arrested without warrents or even charges, news comes that the two murderers of New York Indymedia videographer who had been arrested have been released. The killers, cheif of security for Santa Lucía del Camino ("regidor" also called a city council member by some media), Abel Santiago Zárate, and Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello, an official under his command with the Municipal police, were caught on film and publicly identified by newspapers such as El Milenio and El Universal. They were not sought by authorities for a week, until pressure from news reports made their arrests unavoidable. The same authorities responsible for murder and torture of protesters in support of Gov. Ulises Ruiz seem to be allowing two of their own to kill with impunity. WIll anyone notice?

____________________________________

Simon Fitzgerald recently returned from Mexico where he reported on The Other Campaign and translated Spanish-language articles into English for Narconews. He also runs the web log La Luchita.

Baltimore Crime

2006-11-29T01:12:00.000+08:00

The Sun writes more on the killing of 14-year old Bernard Simon on his porch within the housing projects of Cherry Hill, South Baltimore. His death, the 21st juvenile killed in Baltimore City this year, is "part of a unsettling trend in the city."

Three brothers are being arrested and charged with attempted murder and attempted armed robbery for the botched hold-up of an off-duty officer in which two of would be attackers were shot.

Anne Arundel County police are seeking 23-year old Ronald Francis Dawson II of Glen Burnie for the killing of 18-year old Taveon Jawon Watson on Friday. Dawson's picture is in the print edition, but I can't find it online.

An Ellicot City man Michael F. Zemanick, 53, of Ellicot City is guil for stealing about $4,500 from a Howard County bank. As his 7th robbery conviction in less than ten years he is going to jail for a mandatory 10 years. Zemanick "It's the insanity of the addiction."

A North Carolina man, Ramon Pena, pleaded guilty to hauling some 170 pounds of cocaine on I-95.

Mark Vincent Dyson, 18, pleads guilty to two counts of homicide by motor vehicle for killing two 16-year old friends while driving under the influence of alcohol in 2005. He will serve 18 months in Carrol County Detention Center.

The 18-year old Phillip M. Carter of Baltimore pleaded guilty to two brutal assaults in Baltimore, including one on a 73-year old Sun reporter. He faces up to 30 years at sentencing.

A Woodlawn woman is held in the fatal stabbing of her boyfriend.

An Arbutus man surrendered to police for a spate of robberies, and an Ex-Bakery employee is guilty of embezzling $88,000 in Howard County.

Albert Givens is going on trial for the fifth time on the murder and sexual assault his friend's mother, 55 at the time of her death, in Arnold, Anne Arundel County 15 years ago.

Baltimore County is putting police dogs closer to the community.

A Harford Country sherrif's deputy died in a car accident while on duty.

In politics, two Anne Arundel County Democrats who have not conceded their loses in recent local elections for the state house of delegates are going to court to appeal for a paper ballot recount.

In the Queens borough of New York, Mayor Bloomberg has met with the Rev. Al Sharpton and community leaders. He defended Sean Bell, recently killed in a barrage of 50 bullets fired by 5 officers on his wedding day, and said the number of shots fired at unarmed men "unacceptable."

In international crime news, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole says crime in Iraq is so bad it looks like "the seventh level of hell." Meanwhile, Federal Police in the Mexican state of Oaxaca have been battling for control of the state capital city with local protesters who threw the state governor and other local police and politicians out of power over their brutality and corruption.

This post is a try-out for the popular Baltimore Crime web log on crime reports from Baltimore City.

Battle Rages in Oaxaca Over the Weekend

2006-11-28T00:50:00.000+08:00

What was supposed to be a peaceful eight-mile march to the Oaxaca City Center from the offices of the repudiated Governor of Oaxaca Ulises Ruiz ended in violent confrontations that spiraled into a five hour battle between police and protesters this past Saturday. These confrontations began less than an hour after the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) encircled the Federal Preventative Police (PFP in its Spanish intitials) for a "48 hour peaceful siege" of the PFP encampment in the Zocalo.

The offices Nueva Izquierda, the organization which the APPO leader Flavio Sosa represents, was attacked by a truck full of gunmen Sunday night. While 14 people slept in the offices, taking refuge after the "PFP Offensive" described in the text and links below, the attackers rammed the truck through the front door and burned the building (shown to the left after the fire as Octavio Velez saw it). According to La Jornada, thirteen of the those present inside at the time of the attack managed to escape. One has been classified as "diappeared." The low intensity war in Oaxaca is getting intense.

The Mexican League in the Defense of Human Rights has come out with a cronology of the events in Oaxaca on Saturday, saying that the PFP, specifically "police aggression, were "responsible" for the battle this past weekend. The report also talks about threats, provocation and violence by plain clothes "PRIistas," supporters of the Institutional Revolution Pary (PRI).

The authentic John Gibler (who recently published an article for Miami Herald's Mexican partner El Universal) reports today on Democracy Now, that police detained some 160 protesters and that there are unconfirmed reports of 3 protester deaths. What is known is that some two or three hours into the battle, police fired live rounds at protesters, in addition to massive amounts of teargas. Protesters also burned government buildings and broke windows on private business around the city, though it was unclear if certain business were specifically targeted or why.

Gibler also relays reports, confirmed by the director of the Hospital General Dr. Felipe Gama, that "plain-clothes gunmen, like the paramilitaries that have killed with impunity in the last months, entered hospitals around the city looking for injured protesters." Other witnesses claim that the gunmen threatened hospital staff with guns drawn and dragged some protestors from the hospitals.

The 160 people arrested were subjected to brutal beatings with batons and teargas fired at them from close range. Tear gas canisters fired at close range by the PFP have already killed one person in Oaxaca previously, and also killed Alexis Benhumea this past May in San Salvador Atenco.

The APPO also published a report on the confrontations, translated into English by Narconews. They identify some of the actors in the round-ups and arrests as Oaxacan ministerial police, which the PFP recently declared "out of control" for their violent, vigilante attacks and detentions of APPO members and others opposed to the government of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.

During such "spontaneous" detentions, APPO supporters have endured torture at the hands of their kidnappers.

Gibler also reports that the APPO planned to reinstate their encampments at 8 AM this morning. I will be listening to Radio Universidad, which seems to be affected by some incomplete jamming of their signal, for updates. "La Doctora" is saying that there has been a "complete suspension of all constitutional rights in Oaxaca."

UPDATE: Radio Universidad is reporting that the PFP has threatened to invade the station in execution of a search warrent that has supposedly already been ordered. I have no confirmation yet of the warrent to search the radio station on the campus of the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca. The radio announcersare calling for people to make an encampent in University City and to be prepared defend once again the autonomy of the university. Unlike US American universities, autonomous universities in Latin America are off limits to federal and state police unless they are called on campus by University administrators.

Nancy Davies has just published from Oaxaca an account of this weekend's events on Narco News. She writes:

At about 5:00 the PFP began to react to the protesters. In my opinion, there were some young people present who wanted to go beyond verbal insults and attack the PFP so as to drive them from the zocalo. Furthermore, there is no doubt that some of the protagonists were infiltrators who sparked the physical fighting. During this time the APPO, by way of radio broadcasts. was asking for a pacific and calm protest. Given that there had been sexual abuse of Oaxaca women by police the day before, and that the numbers of the PFP had increased, it did seem inevitable that confrontation would erupt. By 2:00 the usually busy pedestrian streets were deserted, and virtually all the shops surrounding the zocalo were locked.

After about an hour of the show-down, the PFP began to shoot at the demonstrators. The state ministerial police and the PFP began moving into some specific areas such as the Llano Park, Crespo Street, the Abastos Center, and other points. In this sweep they arrested approximately forty, including twenty women. Several were wounded. There were no warrants or official causes for arrests other than possible affiliation with the APPO or with barricades.

The PFP together with state police had been waging this ongoing detention against the members of the social movement in Oaxaca. Vans carrying police in civilian clothes, as well as other PFP forces, were carrying out massive detentions in several places in the city, including in front of the University, against citizens who were not carrying identification...

Battles were waged up and down the seven or eight blocks to the north and south of the zocalo, until they reached the ADO bus station on the main street of Niños y Heroes de Chapultepec. Ironically, the bus station was crowded with tourists trying to flee the embattled city while the Government forces were dedicating themselves to making the city once again “safe” for the business and tourist industries. The teargas followed them to the bus station.

At the same time, the esplanade of Santo Domingo church was cleared and burned of APPO tents and tables.

In the face of the overwhelming attacks, the APPO decided to retreat from the field, which happened around 10:00 PM, ... Many people took refuge in friendly homes and were able to avoid the police sweeps.

Meanwhile, blockades had been placed on the super-highway Cuacnopalan-Oaxaca, in the municipality of Nochixtlán, located about 80 kilometers from the state capital, and in the toll booth of Huitzo, some 25 kilometers away, to try to impede the entrance of APPO sympathizers into the city. It is difficult to say how many people were prevented from arriving. For those already in the city, the so-called Radio Ciudadana was broadcasting advice to government followers to throw hot water and muriatic acid from their roofs onto APPO sympathizers. The radio broadcasters have been identified as Alexis and Marco Tulio, affiliated with the PRI.

“Be careful,” Radio Universidad explained, “there are many PFP who are electrifying the wires on the roads. The PFP are in unmarked vans. This is the seventh mega-march, bring your placards, your slogans, be ready but don’t fall into provocations.”

Marches have occurred almost daily in the past week. Maintaining a steady drumbeat, although not a loud one, women marched against the sexual assault of a woman by the PFP. Students marched against the presence of the PFP in Oaxaca, and more students from the Technological Institute of Oaxaca protested the detention and the torture of their peer, Eliuth Amni Martínez Sánchez, suffered at the hands of the federal agents during the confrontation on Monday, November 20. Martinez Sanchez was located in Tlocolula Prison, thrown onto the floor of a cell in, missing one fingernail, with a severe head wound, a broken nose and a broken kneecap. The lawyers who found him obtained his transfer to a hospital. Thereafter, students from the Technological Institute demanded that the Institute honor its commitment to close down if violence against students continued. The Institute is now closed.
..
Sunday night, the time of writing this commentary, the radio is announcing that there is a possibility of another battle and to defend the barricades around Radio Universidad, whose signal has been steadily interrupted by government blocking.

At this time Radio Universidad is saying that there has been an attack on the medical team at the Siete Principes area (the medical school area). Last night, the voice of “La Doctora” announced that the PFP and state police had entered the hospital dressed as medical doctors, and then were able to arrest patients. The radio is also announcing a march for Monday morning to protest the situation.

Not spoken is that only a week remains before the inauguration of Felipe Calderon as the president of Mexico. Today a meeting of member APPO states took place in Mexico City.

According to Radio Universidad, the PFP has taken many of them out of state, as far as Nayarit and to La Palma prison in the state of Mexico (where prisoners of the PFP operativo en San Salvador Atenco last May are still held).

In other news, the Oaxacan and Mexican prosecutors have reportedly decided to ignore prosecution of the shooters caught on tape firing the fatal shots that killed Bradley Will. They are reportedly hoping to prosecute the APPO members that escorted him to the hospital in ambulance, under the theory that the shots that hit him in the chest, fired by local police and politicians, did not kill him. Rather APPO members are said to have fired the fatal shots on him later as he lay bleeding. The theory is so ridiculous, contrary to witness reports, news from mainstream sources like El Universal, and contradictory to the photo and video of Will's murder that the politically motivated prosecution of APPO members for Will's death seems unlikely to be successfully carried out.

Al Giordano also talks about the difficulties of authentic reporting on Oaxaca street battles. CNN has also reported on the confrontations, describing them as an APPO riot. BBC has yet to write about this past weekend in Oaxaca. Neither of these sources ever published the names of photos of Brad Will's killers, insisting (contrary to reports in the Mexican media) that the shooters were "unidentified." With consistently poor reporting from these English language sources, I have generally avoided taking much information from them without confirmation in the Spanish language press.

For Background Information, I am reprinting a passage about the origins of the conflict below. It is taken from an article I wrote as Mexican Federal Police arrived in Oaxaca and took over the Zocalo city center.

Friday October 27th was the bloodiest day in the ongoing uprising in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Nancy Davies writes for NarcoNews

The dead have now been identified as Emilio Alonso Fabián, Bradley Will and Eudocia Olivera Díaz. The fourth reported death, of Esteban Zurita López, is at the center of accusations by both sides of the conflict, with each blaming the other.

Brad Will was a filmmaker from New York Indymedia killed while his camera recorded by police and paramilitaries according to locals. Diego Enrique Osorno, writing for Narco News, identifies Emilio Alonso Fabián as a teacher from the Los Loxicha region and Esteban López Zurita a resident of Santa Maria Coyotepec where one of the paramilitary attacks occurred.

Many analysts now believe that the October 27 attacks were part of an escalation planned by members of the repudiated Oaxacan government to draw the federal government into the conflict against the APPO and other protesters.

These murders occured as part of a massive coordinated attack by armed, often masked, individuals reportedly working for state political parties. Calling themselves "neighbors" they "acted with impunity" attacking protesters with firearms. Mexican Press has identified as active participants in the murder of Brad Will, the cheif of police (Seguridad Publica) of Santa Lucia del Camino, Avel (sic) Santiago Zárate, the chief of personel of the PRI affiliated City Council, Manuel Aguilar, and a local elected Delegate of the PRI, David Aguilar Robles.

However, the whole time that the violence against the protesters built up into "low-intensity warfare," the federal government threatened to send forces, which locals interpreted as a way to repress the Oaxacan people as the PFP had done in Atecno (where the Federal Preventative Police killed two young people, beat many others, deported foreigners, raped female prisoners, and hold more than 30 political prisoners to this date).

The PFP had not come until now for several reasons. One has to do with the fact that Oaxacan Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz is from the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) and President Vicente Fox is from the National Action Party (PAN). Fox and the PAN were unwilling to dirty their hands on behalf of an opposing political party, especially before elections or while Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Party for Democratic Revolution (PRD) contested the victory of PAN candidate Felipe Calderon. The accusations that Calderon won the election fraudulently also explain why the federal government and the PAN will not pressure Ulises to step down. If Ulises, whose election victory has been contested as fraudulent, is thrown out of power by a popular uprising, then a dangerous precedent has been set for all of Mexican society as far as the political parties are concerned.

Al Giordano of Narco News also points out that the mathematics of a police repression in Oaxaca are different than Atenco. While the PFP sent about 3,000 agents into Atenco, a town of several hundred, the city of Oaxaca is inhabited by half of a million people, several thousand of which appear to be ready to fight at the barricades. The only thing worse than not sending in federal forces would be sending the forces in only to see them get chased out.

ORIGINS OF THE CONFLICT

This all started as a routine labor strike by Section 22 of the Mexican teachers union (often referred to in Spanish language press as "el magisterio") and escalated into a state-wide revolt after state police tried to violently evict the encampment of striking teachers on June 14.

The teachers union and the newly formed Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca made the ouster of unpopular governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, widely considered to have won the election by fraud, their primary demand. As violence by police, paramilitaries and mercenaries escalated, the protesters began barricading their neighborhoods in self-defense. For example, after the Radio Universidad radio station used by the teachers union was attacked, protesters responded with a wave of radio station takeovers. But the protesters also began organizing to put their demand into action, declaring Gov. Ulises "banned" from Oaxaca, seizing government buildings and chasing out politicians from the local and state governments.

Violent attacks had for months been escalating against protesters, in what protesters said was part of Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz's repressive Operation Iron ("Plan Hierro"). Brad Will himself documented this with an article a week ago called "Death in Oaxaca". With the murder of the indigenous teacher Panfilo Hernandez, the death toll was at 9 for the protesters. Meanwhile, political parties and the commerical Mexican media were reporting that the protesters were killing people, often without saying the name of the supposed victim or the time and place of the supposed killing. The killing of dissident teacher Jaime René Calvo Aragón, (who argued for the teachers to return to classes) was blamed by the government on protesters, while protesters blamed the government or paramilitary mercenaries of the PRI of killing the teacher as a pretext to repress the protestors, as reported by La Jornada.

Reporting on this situation has been non-existent on BBC and CNN, though BBC ran a story on the killing of Brad Will, mis-identifying him as William Bradley. This line by the AP is typical of English language press "Fox, who leaves office December 1, resisted repeated calls to send federal forces to Oaxaca until Saturday, a day after gunfire killed a U.S. activist-journalist and two residents."

Of course, they fail to mention the fact that the shooters have been identified and linked to local politicians and police officials, according to the Mexican commercial press. This intentional lack of reporting shows how they want to show the story that the troops are returning to roses by residents who are sick of protesters. If the facts contradict that analysis, then those facts are left out of the article.

Iranian UCLA student tazered mercilessly

2006-11-21T07:06:00.000+08:00

By now almost everybody has heard (and seen on YouTube) Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, get tazered mercilessly by University of California police for not showing his ID in the UCLA library in Los Angeles.

Max at IdeasForAction has links to other stories on the attack and some facts about tazering provided by Naomi from University of Michigan.

Roig was tazered once, luckily the Miami plainclothes police that hit him were not using the tazer correctly, they were pulling the trigger threateningly so much that it had no charge left when they used it on Roig. I saw that the tazer left Roig with a slight electricity burn that he said felt like a bug bite.

Tabatabainejad seems to have been hit much harder, causing him to screen in pain, frantically telling the police "I said I would leave" while he was most likely unable to move because of the effects of the electrical shock.

Haiti Update: New Blog, Quigley on Jean Juste...

2006-11-13T03:16:00.000+08:00

For almost a year my primary focus as a blogging journalist was the situation in Haiti since the February 2004 coup that chased President Jean Bertrand Aristide from the island (by armed US-Americans working for the embassy).

Well, Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti now has his own blog, which features a call to support Haitian priest Gerard Jean Juste by Bill Quigley, a Loyola, New Orleans law professor and amazing human being.

Jean-Juste was one of many prominent supporters of Haitian poor who were beaten and jailed after the coup on falsified charges. He, like many others, was considered a "prisoner of conscience" (or political prisoner) by Amnesty International. There was never any evidence against Jean Juste, (he was out of the country when the murder he was accused of committing occurred, and the murder victim was a family friend). People have speculated that his arrest was a preemptive move to keep Jean Juste, a popular political leader, from running for president against the coup supporters.

The coup government was voted out of power in favor of Lavalas movement candidate Rene Preval anyway, but many prisoners remain incarcerated. While Jean Juste was freed temporarily to seek cancer treatment in Miami (after an international campaign to prevent him from dying in prison), he is on his way back to Haiti currently, where he could still potentially face the bogus murder charges.

The letter from Bill Quigley begins as follows:
Friends of Pere Jean-Juste:

It is time again to ask for your support for Pere Jean-Juste.

Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste has completed a series of chemotherapy treatments in Miami and is hoping that he will receive permission from his doctors to return to Haiti in the next couple of weeks. When he returns to Haiti, Fr. Jean-Juste still faces pending criminal charges and the possibility of being returned to prison. Fr. Jean-Juste is prepared for whatever the government does when he returns.

However, there is another problem. It is with the Church.

Palestine to Oaxaca

2006-11-09T23:37:00.000+08:00

Max at IdeasForAction published on Sunday the English version of the COMMUNIQUÉ FROM THE POPOULAR ASSEMBLY OF THE PEOPLE OF OAXACA and his own analysis of the situation.

ZapaGringo RJ also has an interesting follow up on his piece "Zapatismo and the Levant", with a letter from Jamal Jumá,
Coordinator of the Palestinian grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign.

an excerpt...

The Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign Honors the Martyrs of Oaxaca

Jerusalem, November 3, 2006: In this dreadful Autumn of death and destruction, the Palestinian and Mexican people are united more than ever in a common history, mourning and struggle.

In Palestine in the last 48 hours a new massacre has been perpetrated. 20 martyrs from the refugee camp of Beit Hanoun have been added to the hundreds of victims that have been killed since June, when the Occupation forces launched another ruthless offensive in the Gaza Strip.

In the same way, since June the Mexican government has started to use all the destructive force of its military against the 70,000 educational workers in the state of Oaxaca who struggle for their rights. The same government that followed the demands of the US government to send its soldiers to invade and massacre the Iraqi people today turns these weapons against its own people in defense of imperialist interests.

Another Battle in Oaxaca? Not Yet.

2006-11-06T02:28:00.000+08:00

Nancy Davies, writing for Narconews from Oaxaca, has two important pieces of news confirmed by La Jornada.

First of all, a protest "megamarch" is underway from Ciudad Universitaria to the Oaxaca City Center. Busloads of people have been coming down from Mexico City, San Salvador Atenco and other parts of Mexico to participate with the Oaxacans. Davies also writes that "During the night helicopters brought military troops into the city," apparently citing Radio Universidad as a source.

While Radio Universidad is asking people to act nonviolently, Davies predicts that "the Sixth Megamarch will be another face-off between the peoples and the government forces."

In another act of paramilitary aggression, "this morning a student from the Technological Institute in front of Radio Universidad was shot in the chest. His name is Marcos Manuel Sanchez Martinez. He is still alive and receiving medical care." Radio Universidad reports this is part of a pattern of early morning attacks.

La Jornada On Line updates us on the "Megamarch" at 12:46 Oaxaca time, saying that the 1.5 kilometer march is advancing calmly toward the 5-mile march´s first stop at the Santo Domingo Church (the group originally planned to stop first at the Gov. Ulises Ruiz´ house.

\La Jornada estimates the march´s length at two kilometers. Meanwhile federal police installed razor wire fences around the Oaxaca City center (Zocalo). Perhaps in response, the march did not attempt to enter the Zocalo to avoid confrontations.

Stay tuned to Radio Universidad (Spanish), La Jornada (Spanish), La Luchita (English) or Narconews (English and Spanish) for this story as it develops.

Body Count Gaza or The Daily Shrapnel

2006-11-05T06:28:00.000+08:00

Zein El-Amine has been reporting on Lebanon with a piece he calls "The Daily Shrapnel," but the real body count has been in Gaza.

While North America's leftist have been fixated on the violence and uprising in Oaxaca, Israeli forces have killed some 42 people in Gaza since Wednesday. In the most dramatic violence, Hamas radio called on local women in Beit Hanoun to rescue local militants who were held up in a mosque by an Israeli seige. As a march of the women entered the mosque and took the men out, dressing them in women's clothing. Israeli police fired on the crowd, killing two women, and injuring ten people including a Palestinian cameraman. That brings the death count in Gaza due to the Israeli military to 300 since June.

These reports also talk about the terrible living conditions, lack of electricity and water, as well as a de facto curfew keeping people off of the streets. An interview on Democracy Now with American Amy Lowenstein talks about the conditions in Gaza hospitals among other things.

Oaxaca Update: War Escalates and Brad Will's Killers

2006-11-03T03:14:00.000+08:00

All photos shown in this article are taken from La Jornada

As the tear gas clears from the failed attempt of the Mexican Federal Preventative Police (PFP in its Spanish initials) to enter University City in Oaxaca (according to the protesters) or simply take down the surrounding barricades (according to the PFP spokespeople), Radio Universidad reports that many more federal police vehicles have been seen coming from the area around Puebla towards the city of Oaxaca. "While we won the battle" la doctora says on Radio Universidad "there are many more to come. Now is the time to organize even better."

Confrontations around Ciudad Universitaria
Nancy Davies with Narco News says that the PFP has begun to invade the Autonomous Benito Juarez University of Oaxaca (a violation of Mexican law). La Jornada confirms that confrontations in the area around the University City neighborhood have injured at least three people, including a photographer from El Universal and a reporter from Radio Libre. The University rector is demanding that the PFP (Federal Preventative Police) withdraw from the area of the University.

KeHuelga Radio in Mexico City is carrying Radio Universidad online. Listen for Spanish language updates from the South of Monster City (Ciudad Monstruo) according to Enemigo Comun. They are asking for students to come defend University Radio and their university and to bring (large bottle) rockets and empty bottles and reporting that gas bombs are being dropped by PFP helicopters.

At 2:38 PM EDST are reporting that state and federal police are attacking barricades again around University City with the help of PFP helicopters. There is also a burning bus put up in defense of the University. They are also asking for Oaxacans who aren't near University City to go to the Zocalo to divide the police.

At 2:40 they announced a police retreat, but at 2:45 they said that they police trucks were returning and that there is a person suffering from a serious head trauma that urgently needs the help of a Red Cross Ambulance. At 2:54 they repeated this call, and reported that paramilitaries were trying to plant weapons on the university campus.

They also reported that two of the PFP trucks had been taken out of service, and they called Oaxacans to bring paint thinner to the lines (which can be used to ruin the electrical system of the trucks) and oil, filthy water, or paint to cover their windsheilds. Oaxacans are also urged to throw these liquids from the roofs onto federal forces.

Police are reported to have been seen in the University City area wearing shirts with the logo of Chedraui, a large chain of Mexican supermarkets.

At 3:10 Baltimore time, Radio Universidad is asking doctors and other health professionals with the public hospitals of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) to call in and let everyone know if they are safe places for protesters to receive specialized treatment like surgery. According to the announcers, as late as yesterday the hospitals were safe and were trusted, but there is now reason for concern.

Mexican version of CNN is reportedly saying the the PFP are not entering in University City. At 3:18 EDST the police helicopters are throwing tear gas grenades at homes indiscriminately. A reporter for channel 40 spoke over the radio to say that she has not been kidnapped by Radio Universidad as some had thought. An El Universal reporter spoke to the announcers to say he has been giving the real information about what is happening, so that the Oaxacan people know he is working honestly.

A PFP truck is said to be burning near the "Cinco señores" gas station, as the Radio Universidad Announcers asked listeners to detain a specific patrol car (whose number was announced) because it contains people who had been taken prisoner off of the street.

At the Avenida Ferrocarril police are said to be withdrawing at 3:27 EDST. At "5 Señores" police are also said to be withdrawing as one of their trucks burn and as the helicopters throw tear gas "indiscriminately."

A protest in Mexico City is marching down reforma to the PFP headquarters, threatening to blockade the buildings surroundings until the university in Oaxaca is no longer under attack.

A local child is said to be having serious respiratory problems near University Radio, though an ambulance cannot be found.

La Jornada is following today's events in Oaxaca closely. The PFP is telling the media that it will not enter the university campus, though the Radio Universidad is announcing that some already entered, cutting the chains on a gate in the are of the School of Sciences.

The Minister of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación) has made an order for the PFP to withdraw, according to Radio Universidad. The Radio is telling protesters, who have the police surrounded, to open one lane for police to withdraw, to see if the order is for real or a bluff. Though another announcer is threatening to hold the police hostage until the political prisoners are freed.

Police are withdrawing from Cinco Señores though helicopters continue to drop tear gas at 3:48 EDST.

An APPO spokesperson is asking Oaxacans to allow PFP forces to withdraw from the city toward the airport, as per an announcement of a withdrawel by the Minister of Interior. Radio Universidad announcers ask repeatedly "what about our prisoners?"

As the protesters at the barricade of Cinco Señores celebrate on air, the announcers put "Venceremos" on air and ask people to stay firm and remember that "this was just a battle, we still can't sing our victory songs until Ulises Ruiz leaves Oaxaca."

Students from the front lines have been recounting the almost four hours of "resistance" that ended with a retreat by the Mexican (PFP) on Radio Universidad. Others are on the air to tell the names and the stories of the injured or those in police custody.

Juan Trujillo also has been reporting from Meixco City by way of Radio KeHuelga.

Greg Berger has a good discussion of the aftermath of the battle at the Ciudad Universitaria in the City of Oaxaca.

The recap of the day by the Jornada confirms the police retreat and also has several interesting details that I missed, including injuries to journalists of Proceso , El Universal and Radio W by projectiles that the protesters threw. There were also "least 15 buses in flames" as barricades in front of the University.

Brad Will's Killers

Amy Goodman reports on Democracy Now (as a result of research by El Milenio and Noticias de Oaxaca) the killers of New York journalist Bradley Will were not in custody as the Santa Lucia city coucil president, Manuel Feria of the PRI party (same party as the governor), had announced. John Gibler, who has also written for Left Turn, reports that the killers were still only blocks from the murder scene as late as yesterday.

La Jornada says that two of the five men filmed committing the murder Abel Santiago Zárate, a local politician ("regidor") with the PRI party, and Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello, Zarate's chief of security and also with the PRI, have been arrested and charged today. Presumably the El Milenio report pressured the Oaxacan PRI government to arrest the murderers. However, John Gibler says today that there has been no proof offered to journalists that the men are actually in custody, and he hopes to find evidence today of their whereabouts.

EZLN threatens to block roads on Nov. 1st and announces nationwide strike for Nov. 20

2006-10-31T05:44:00.000+08:00

Translated from La Jornada en linea
The EZLN and The Other Campaign express "complete support" to the APPO: Marcos
by Hermann Bellinghausen

Chihuahua, Chihuahua It his first public act in this city, Subcomandante Marcos showed the EZLN's and The Other Campiagn's complete support for the people of Oaxaca and "its most dignified representative, the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO),"

In the Parque Revolucion of Chihuahua, Marcos denounced the PFP, saying "Up to today the federal (police) have killed at least three people, among them a minor, leaving dozens of people injured, including several Oaxacan women, and dozens of people detained who were illegally transfered to military prisons.

"Add to this all of the dead, detained and disappeared since the beginning of the mobilization that has demanded that [Oaxacan Gov.] Ulises Ruiz step down," he continued.

Marcos announced the closing of roads and highways in Chiapas and called for The Other Campaign and partner organizations to put up blockades, even on the international border with the United States, to show solidarity withthe popular movement in Oaxaca.

The federal attack, he argued, "has no other objective" than to keep the governor in power and to destroy the popular organization of the people on the bottom. "The people of Oaxaca resist. No honest person can remain silent and inactive while such a majority indigenous people is murdered, beaten and thrown in jail."

The EZLN announced that “for the entire day on November 1, 2006, the highways and roads that cross territories where the EZLN are present in the Southeast of Chiapas will be closed."

Also through the Sixth Comission, "the EZLN has initiated contacts and consulations with other political and social organizations, collectives, groups and persons with The Other Campaign to start Days of solidarity with Oaxaca and to announce, together as one coalition, a nationwide strike ("paro nacional") for November 20, 2006."

Furthermore, the EZLN "is calling The Other Campaign in Mexico and North of the Rio Grande to mobilize wherever possible, closing completely, partially, intermittantly, symbolically or actually, the streets, roads, highways, tollbooths, stations, airports or any other means of travel (comunicacion).

"The message of the Zapatistas that we are sending and will send to the people of Oaxaca is that they are not alone."

Chronicle of the Battle of Oaxaca

2006-10-31T03:12:00.000+08:00

James Daria has a good first hand account of the Battle of Oaxaca in English with some killer pictures by John Gibler on NarcoNews. I am also still updating Oaxaca Burns on a regular basis as of Monday evening.

Oaxaca Burns: PFP invasion right now

2006-10-29T05:49:00.000+08:00

Author's Note: The situation in Oaxaca has been changing rapidly, this post has been updated some 20 times since it was first published, look for updates under the OCT 30: UPDATE heading and in the indented sections under each heading. The Zapatistas have just announced something BIG, go to the RESPONSES section for more.

What began as an article about the murders of Oaxacan protesters and a New York journalist changed as La Jornada is reporting that the invasion of Oaxaca by Mexican Federal Preventative Police (PFP) is happening RIGHT NOW. According to Radio Universidad, (reporting live over the internet) PFP have advanced to area around the Oaxaca City center and PFP elements wearing balaclavas over their faces are invading private houses and arresting protest leaders.

At 3:53 Oaxaca time, La Jornada reported that PFP elements have reached the Historic Center of Oaxaca City, while all day Oaxacans have been reporting confrontations with police and "gangs loyal to (Vicente Fox)."

At 4:10, Radio Universidad was asking for people in Central Oaxaca to report whether the town center was occupied by Federal Police. They were also asking people at the barricades not to fall into violent provocations, and to move any non-strategic barricades around Radio Universidad to "defend the voice of the people."

They also said that anyone who is willing to risk it could put sugar in the gas tank of the PFP tanks taking down the barricades. They also said that the tires could be slashed on the cars carrying people, whether uniformed or not, who come to attack barricades and protest centers.

At 6:25 Eastern Daylight Savings Time, Radio Universidad is reporting the the Canal 9 television station, currently run by protesters, is under attack.

At 6:36 EDST, Radio Universidad reported that protesters in some places have reported live rounds fired by PFP elements.

At 6:46 they announced that an ambulence has been seen transporting PFP forces.

Radio University reported that armed groups dressed as civilians were heading towards the "University City" neighbhorhood where the Radio is to attack the radio station. An announcer responded "We are ready to die here... fighting for our children... in defense of our autonomy... in defense of liberty and justice." They also reported that around forty people are being detained and taken away by helicopter. Others have reportedly been kidnapped by people who have not clearly identified themselves as police. Radio Universidad warned Oaxacans not to move around Oaxaca alone, but in organized groups. The wife of one disappeared man says that a truck with the Televisa logo were in communication with the kidnappers, though it wasn't clear to her whether they had been police.

A time line for the events in Oaxaca are available on Oaxaca Indymedia.

OCT 30 UPDATE: The Aftermath

La Jornada is reporting three deaths in the invasion of Oaxaca, nurse Jorge Alberto López Bernal, professor Fidel García y a still unidentified (at press time) fourteen year old. Lopez Bernal was killed, just like Angel Benhumea in Atenco, with a direct hit from a tear gas granade fired by a PFP officer. Fidel Garcia was stabbed to death, and the state government is saying that this was just an argument gone bad, though that seems very unlikely. The APPO spokesperson, Florentino López, is reporting some 50 APPO members have been taken to the 28th Military Zone as prisoners of the state, some of them arrested in house to house raids as reported on Radio Universidad last night.

Ruben Aguilar, the spokesperson for President Vicente Fox, has denied anyone was killed in the police operation, saying from Mexico City "the PFP did not cause any deaths."

While PFP elements easily entered the Zocalo at the Oaxaca town center, they faced fierce resistance around the TV station Canal 9, and at the Tecnologico bridge. There the "tanquetas" (reinforced tank-like trucks) faced fierce resistance, according to Radio Vulgocracia, a person threw a board with nails in it underneath one of these tanquetas to stop its advance. At seeing this action, a PFP officer is said to have shot the person, whose outcome is unknown. At least one police officer is reported to have been hospitalized with burns from a molotov cocktail.

Radio Vulgocracia is also reporting that others have simply been "disappeared," and that Radio Universidad went offline because the power was cut (presumably by the police) to their neighborhood.

The PFP tanquetas arrived in the Zocalo at 11 PM. La Jornada reminds that this deadly repression comes after the Minister of the Interior Carlos Abascal had sworn to god in front of the legislator that there would be no repression in Oaxaca.

Another Jornada article reports that the University City neighborhood that houses the Autonomous Benito Juarez University of Oaxaca is the last bastion of resistance in the city. The home of Radio Universidad, the university campus is called autonomous because it is supposed to be off-limits to government forces, to ensure independence from government manipulation. The university rector announced that the university administration is strongly opposed to incursions by the federal police and think all diplomatic routes possible should be taken to secure the primary goal that no lives be lost on the university campus. It seems that the federal police have so far respected this autonomous tradition in the last 24 hours. However, it is important to remember that the 1968 massacre of UNAM students in Mexico City, and more recently the use of the police to break a student strke at the UNAM show that this respect for university freedom can easily be ignored by those in power.

Sources are telling Greg Berger and Amy Goodman that, while the PFP control the city center and several other strategic points, "they are surrounded by protesters," "the fight is far from over," and the PFP "still does not control the city." Gustavo Esteva, founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca and a columnist for La Jornada, is also saying that prisoners are reporting torture in Military Zone 28 where the military has "illegally" involved itself in the operation.

The Secretary of Public Security, Eduardo Medina Mora, has said that seven federal police have been injured, three of them seriously (son de gravedad). He also confirm that one has serious burns from a molotov cocktail.

UPDATE: Oaxacans have begun to rebuild the barricade at the Oaxacan Technological Institute, where several of the fatalities are reported to have occurred on Sunday night.

RESPONSES

El Enemigo Comun has a list of protest in actions in response to the invasion of Oaxaca.

As the PFP marched on the Oaxaca town center, a march was organizing in "University City" neighborhood to reinforce the defenses of Radio Universidad and march toward the town center to defend it. At 4:55 police were heard attacking the march, causing a panicked cry to ring out on live on Radio Universidad, where announcers asked people not to physically touch the PFP to avoid violent physical confrontations.

Protesters have organized a demonstration at the Mexican Embassy (1911 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW,Washington, DC) on Monday, October 30, 5:00 PM. In New York City protests are being held continualy at the Mexican Consulate.

Oaxacans are calling people who can make it to come to Oaxaca, a march is organized in Mexico City, and people around the world are called to protest in front of Mexican Embassies and Consulates at 6:00 PM on Monday, October 30. Zapatistas have also issued a call urging solidarity with the movement in Oaxaca.

Radio Universidad is reminding listeners that people at the barricades need water, food, and blankets to remain in "peaceful popular resistance." They are also asking for diesel fuel for their ambulance that is running out of case with a injured reporter from the newspaper Excelsior inside.

Mountain Rebel is also announcing an "electronic blockade" of Mexican Consulates and Embassies.

UPDATE: The Zapatistas have announced, through the voice of Marcos, that “for the entire day on November 1, 2006, the highways and roads that cross territories where the EZLN are present in the Southeast of Chiapas will be closed." They also called for all adherent organizations to The Other Campaign to take solidarity actions with the APPO in Oaxaca, including closing international border-crossings with the United States.

Marcos also announced that“the EZLN has initiated contacts and consulations with other political and social organizations, collectives, groups and persons with The Other Campaign to start Days of solidarity with Oaxaca and to announce, together as one coalition, a nationwide strike ("paro nacional") for November 20, 2006."

Furthermore, the EZLN "is calling The Other Campaign in Mexico and North of the Rio Grande to mobilize wherever possible, closing completely, partially, intermittantly, symbolically or actually, the streets, roads, highways, tollbooths, stations, airports or any commercial communications media.

"The message of the Zapatistas that we are sending and will send to the people of Oaxaca is that they are not alone."

Notimex, the Mexican news service, published an announcement by the national Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE) in its Spanish initials of a work stoppage in 7 Mexican states. The CNTE is the independent labor union of education workers, and has a strong presence in the states of Guerrero, Michoacán, Tlaxcala, Morelos, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, and in Mexico City. This labor strike is in response to the violent incursion of the PFP.

Greg Berger writes

allies of the APPO took control of the government radio station yesterday in Guelatao, the small town in the mountains two hours from Oaxaca where Benito Juarez was born. From the word on the street, one suspects that today we will learn of many such small victories.

October 30th at 7 AM, students of the UNAM and other youth in Mexico City blocked the main Mexican roads: Avenida Insurgentes, Periferico Sur, and Paseo del Pedregal. Riot police have been clearing these streets, arresting at least 11 participants according to Juan Trujillo.

UPDATE As of 1:00 PM Oaxacan time on October 30, three marches lead by the APPO headed toward the Oaxaca City Zocalo from 1) the barricades in front of Canal 9, 2) the Oaxacan Public Education headquarters, and 3) and La Experimental neighborhood. No reports yet from the protests. La Jornada is reporting that at least 23 prisoners of the PFP have been presented to the Ministerio Publico for processing after being held first at a military base (Zona Militar 28).

Also, surprisingly enough, the head of the PRI party block of legislators, Emilio Gamboa Patrón, is calling for Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz of Oaxaca (also a member of the PRI) to "take an act of conscience" and consider stepping down from his position as governor. Uliese has responded that this is not up for negotiation.

UPDATE FROM NEW YORK According to brownfemipower of the Women of Color Blog, a friend of Brad Will, Dyan Neary, who just returned from Hawaii and who I believe was interviewed Monday on DemocracyNow was arrested at the Mexican Consulate in New York. See New York Indymedia for updates.

BEFORE THE PFP INVASION

Friday October 27th was the bloodiest day in the ongoing uprising in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Nancy Davies writes for NarcoNews

The dead have now been identified as Emilio Alonso Fabián, Bradley Will and Eudocia Olivera Díaz. The fourth reported death, of Esteban Zurita López, is at the center of accusations by both sides of the conflict, with each blaming the other.

Brad Will was a filmmaker from New York Indymedia killed while his camera recorded by "police or paramilitaries according to locals." Diego Enrique Osorno, writing for Narco News, identifies Emilio Alonso Fabián as a teacher from the Los Loxicha region and Esteban López Zurita a resident of Santa Maria Coyotepec where one of the paramilitary attacks occurred.

Update: These murders occured as part of a massive coordinated attack by armed, often masked, individuals reportedly working for state political parties. Calling themselves "neighbors" they "acted with impunity" attacking protesters with firearms. Mexican Press has identified as active participants in the murder of Brad Will, the cheif of police (Seguridad Publica) of Santa Lucia del Camino, Avel (sic) Santiago Zárate, the chief of personel of the PRI affiliated City Council, Manuel Aguilar, and a local elected Delegate of the PRI, David Aguilar Robles.

Mexican Press is also reporting that planes full of Federal Preventative Police (PFP) are being sent from Mexico City, supposedly to quell this violence. However, the whole time that the violence against the protesters built up into "low-intensity warfare," the federal government threatened to send forces, which locals interpreted as a way to repress the Oaxacan people as the PFP had done in Atecno (where the Federal Preventative Police killed two young people, beat many others, deported foreigners, raped female prisoners, and hold more than 30 political prisoners to this date).

The PFP had not come until now for several reasons. One has to do with the fact that Oaxacan Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz is from the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) and President Vicente Fox is from the National Action Party (PAN). Fox and the PAN were unwilling to dirty their hands on behalf of an opposing political party, especially before elections or while Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Party for Democratic Revolution (PRD) contested the victory of PAN candidate Felipe Calderon. The accusations that Calderon won the election fraudulently also explain why the federal government and the PAN will not pressure Ulises to step down. If Ulises, whose election victory has been contested as fraudulent, is thrown out of power by a popular uprising, then a dangerous precedent has been set for all of Mexican society as far as the political parties are concerned.

Al Giordano of Narco News also points out that the mathematics of a police repression in Oaxaca are different than Atenco. While the PFP sent about 3,000 agents into Atenco, a town of several hundred, the city of Oaxaca is inhabited by half of a million people, several thousand of which appear to be ready to fight at the barricades. The only thing worse than not sending in federal forces would be sending the forces in only to see them get chased out.

ORIGINS OF THE CONFLICT

This all started as a routine labor strike by Section 22 of the Mexican teachers union (often referred to in Spanish language press as "el magisterio") and escalated into a state-wide revolt after state police tried to violently evict the encampment of striking teachers on June 14.

The teachers union and the newly formed Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca made the ouster of unpopular governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, widely considered to have won the election by fraud, their primary demand. As violence by police, paramilitaries and mercenaries escalated, the protesters began barricading their neighborhoods in self-defense. For example, after the Radio Universidad radio station used by the teachers union was attacked, protesters responded with a wave of radio station takeovers. But the protesters also began organizing to put their demand into action, declaring Gov. Ulises "banned" from Oaxaca, seizing government buildings and chasing out politicians from the local and state governments.

Violent attacks had for months been escalating against protesters, in what protesters said was part of Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz's repressive Operation Iron ("Plan Hierro"). Brad Will himself documented this with an article a week ago called "Death in Oaxaca". With the murder of the indigenous teacher Panfilo Hernandez, the death toll was at 9 for the protesters. Meanwhile, political parties and the commerical Mexican media were reporting that the protesters were killing people, often without saying the name of the supposed victim or the time and place of the supposed killing. The killing of dissident teacher Jaime René Calvo Aragón, (who argued for the teachers to return to classes) was blamed by the government on protesters, while protesters blamed the government or paramilitary mercenaries of the PRI of killing the teacher as a pretext to repress the protestors, as reported by La Jornada.

Reporting on this situation has been non-existent on BBC and CNN, though BBC ran a story on the killing of Brad Will, mis-identifying him as William Bradley. This line by the AP is typical of English language press "Fox, who leaves office December 1, resisted repeated calls to send federal forces to Oaxaca until Saturday, a day after gunfire killed a U.S. activist-journalist and two residents."

Of course, they fail to mention the fact that the shooters have been identified and linked to local politicians and police officials, according to the Mexican commercial press. This intentional lack of reporting shows how they want to show the story that the troops are returning to roses by residents who are sick of protesters. If the facts contradict that analysis, then those facts are left out of the article.

Now that the repression has arrived, the question remains how Oaxacans, Mexicans and people of the world will respond, with apathy or action.

UPDATE: At 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time on October 29, I was unable to access Radio Universidad over the internet, but it is back up.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: If you are bilingual (in any two languages) please help get this information out. Go to NarcoNews and volunteer to translate news and information for those less blessed linguistically.
_________________
Simon Fitzgerald just returned from Mexico where he reported on The Other Campaign for NarcoNews. He also writes the blog La Luchita

Subcomandante with a can of spray paint

2006-10-21T06:45:00.000+08:00

I´m back in Mexico City. I have been working a lot, and have a couple of stories up on narconews.com, as does Kristin. I don´t have the ganas to link them all, or go more into my revelations on the "new form of politics" being created by the other campaign, but I will leave my friends with a picture of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos spray painting a wall of the MultiKulti Theatre in downtown Tijuana with his signature caricature of himself smoking a pipe and the words "Kapital daña la salud" translated as "Kapital(ism) is harmful to your health."

Cuba From the Other Campaign

2006-10-11T23:11:00.000+08:00

With today´s news that the US government is creating "A new task force ... to police the sanctions [against Cuba] and [charge} those breaking them [with] large fines, the economic war against Cuba is escalating again.

Coincindentally, from the tour of the Other campaign in Northwest Mexico, I just published a piece looking at Cuba from The Other Campaign,
"In Tepic, Nayarit, the Other Campaign Marks 39 Years Since the Death of “Che” Guevara"

Unsettling contradictions certainly exist within Cuban society, as they must exist in the Zapatista communities and within any collective, organization, or community. It is important to recognize rather than idealize these contradictions. Indeed, it is the duty of every community, be they Cuban or Zapatista, to confront and overcome their own contractions. For outsiders to criticize the imperfections of a people who fight for their very survival is to provide ammunition to the enemy in a war against oblivion.

Article for NarcoNews

2006-10-05T05:13:00.000+08:00

The Ghosts of Tlatelolco 1968 March in Defense of Oaxaca and Atenco in 2006

The Words of Subcomandante Marcons on "The Other Healthcare"

2006-09-28T01:26:00.000+08:00

The words of Delegate Zero (Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos) presenting the inauguration of “The Other Health” sector, April 30th, 2006

Transcription taken without modification directly from audio recording. The translator has made all attempts to be loyal to the content and the style of the original Spanish Version. Where words have been added to explain concepts foreign to the English language, they appear [in brackets]. Original Spanish Version appears on the website of "la otra salud."
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Alright, compañeros and compañeras, well, all of this about “The Other Campaign,” all of this going out to listen to others, has allowed us to discover that the people themselves are organizing in things that we hadn’t even imagined.

In Jalapa, we found, well, a group of scientists of various specialties that were worried about how capitalism is taking over science and making it produce death, when as a scientist, one supposes that s/he is not involved in science for destruction, but rather for preservation and construction. They said that science, and above all medicine, was in a “proceso de maquila” [a process driving medicine to resemble “maquila” or “maquiladora” sweatshop factories, especially those along the Mexican border with the United States]. So, in the universities and research centers, instead of equipping one single project that could really uncover the nature of the “system of death” being studied by the project, they divide it up in universities or in other research centers through the work of corrupt officials or, well, even scientists who put themselves up for sale. With that compartmentalization of knowledge and then compartmentalization within one research center… how secretive this becomes. And the result is that what seemed innocuous or what seemed neutral becomes a bomb. And I don’t mean a bomb that explodes; I mean something that causes harm. And it is probably just like this, as it is in our own universities and research centers, in institutions around the world. They have come to produce many of the sicknesses and ills that are in our country and around the world.

I see two important points with their position. One is how capitalism turns healthcare into a merchandise, and, as administrators of this healthcare, doctors, nurses, and the whole apparatus of hospitalization and the distribution of healthcare, also become a sort of foremen of this business. And they convert the patient, as they used to say here, into a client, a client from whom they have to get as much money as possible without this necessarily meaning that he or she will have better health.

We confronted this problem in the indigenous communities first out of necessity. We aren’t saying that we choose traditional medicine, but that there wasn’t any other medicine. And traditional medicine allowed us to develop on the one hand, but we could not confront the rate of mortality, above all infant mortality, with just our own development as indigenous communities, which is limited by… well… what nature gives us in the way of traditional medicine. Rather there was always that expectation that this medicine didn’t cure; it relieved or controlled the symptoms… and that it is the other medicine, the one in the hospital, the one given by a doctor, man or woman, with that image of being dressed in white… and which in some cases should be dressed in black… that this is the medicine that cures.

When the uprising occurred and we found ourselves with you all, with the men and women in Mexico and across the world that expressed solidarity with our cause, we began to receive help not as if it were just charity or alms, but rather understanding that it was support for a different political project. And we began to meet the other doctors, men and women, and the other nurses, male and female, that helped us to go about constructing within Zapatista indigenous communities so that, according to their own logic, the communities would break with this dependency… So, for example, when we formed our health committees, we didn’t make train them only in herbal remedies or traditional medicine, but also in the application of vaccinations and other medications. But once we are working in this we confront the capitalist healthcare market. It is not possible… We are insisting everywhere that it is not possible to create an self-contained compartment of liberty, justice and democracy. That is why our struggle is national. As much as we advance as Zapatista communities, we are always scraping up against the edges, and this system of exploitation, of exclusion, of racism, and… well… what we are confronting keeps smacking up against us. There are better conditions now than before the uprising. In some zones that lacked land, like Los Altos [the highlands] of Chiapas, medicine is free - the attention and the medicine - and we are trying to address sickness with prevention instead of all going out to attack the sicknesses. And, in this sense, this is one of the few advantages of the structure of the EZLN within the communities, that it permits the efficient implementation of health campaigns in the communities, such as the construction of latrines, their care… There are commissions that ensure that the latrines are supplied with lime, and the person that doesn’t do his/her job is, well, put before the assembly and criticized. They ensure that the children really complete their vaccinations, and that these are administered and obtained by the same community structure, not by the government structure.

Well, alright, there we are, happy that the doctors, men and women, and nurses, male and female, are arriving and that this contact, which is support for a political cause, begins to tell us about what is going on here.

I am going to go slowly to make sure I catch my breath because in a moment they will take me running off to The Other, right? The other meeting, I mean.

So then they begin to tell us about the working conditions in Seguro Social [the Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social is in charge of, among other things, public healthcare services and care for the elderly and disabled] and in private medicine… Someone from the group of people that were arriving there told us that, when you choose healthcare as a profession, whatever level you are at, you are choosing the profession of life. Its not just a matter of life, but also of fighting against pain. And this person told us that it is a matter of having a special sensibility to pain that keeps one from becoming cynical. And what is happening with the capitalist system is that there are doctors and nurses that are cynics, that can face a person who is dying or suffering a lot and treat that person as if s/he were asking for a pass to see a movie, as if they were working at a ticket counter handing out tickets and could say, “wait for a minute while I drink my coffee” and all that; So we are told that all of this is destroying not just what was the vocation of healthcare or the vocation of medicine but also the image that the population had had of doctors and nurses, (both male and female). And so the doctor or nurse was turning, in effect, into a foreman more all the time, or better yet into a shopkeeper of healthcare, into the person who receives the money, and who gives you the box and says “take one of these.” And one could see that the racist relationship that had earlier been taken to the indigenous communities was moving more all the time into the relationship with the rest of the population. It wasn’t just a matter of if you were indigenous, but that if you were going to a health center and you were already poor, well, you wouldn’t even be there in the Seguro [public hospital) or in that pharmacy, a “popular pharmacy” [this is a reference to a chain of pharmacies in Mexico that sell generic medicine called “farmacias similares”] or whatever they had constructed. And that meant that you were classified as a sick poor person, in other words a poor person that could not pay for the healthcare that you needed, but for whatever healthcare you could afford… enough get you an aspirin or a Tylenol or whatever you want to call it. And that is what the system of healthcare will give you; it will not make you better. And that is how the system was before, yes, in another epoch of capitalism. Medicine – healthcare - was a business. Now with the new era, sickness is again becoming a business. When there are more sick people or more sickness, more medicine is necessary. So then there is the pharmaceutical industry, the shameless or the fraudulent just like the case with this little old man… What’s his name? Dr. Simi, candidate for the President of the Republic, … if there were ever a need for some ridiculousness, there is Dr. Simi to complete the panorama

[Dr. Simi is another recent candidate for President, real name Victor Gonzalez Torres, who owns pharmacies of generic medications called Farmacias Similares and the Laboratios Best that supply the stores with generic medicine. He has also founded discount health clinics and an alternative public health system called SimiSeguro and attacked the Seguro Social public health system with an anti-corruption campaign. After being eliminated from the race for president, he spent large amounts of money to support the PAN candidate Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. Some Mexican media outlets, most notably the magazine Proceso have pointed out that this financial support violated Mexican campaign finance laws. Dr. Simi is also known for sometimes ridiculous promotional gimmicks which add to his reputation for the bizarre].

It was the business of death and pain, the business of healthcare had now been turned into a business of death and of pain, and this was affecting not just health - that people would die or suffer from more sicknesses - but it was also shaping healthcare professionals, or healthcare workers as you all say. This system was shaping them in such a way that what was thought to be good wasn’t to cure a person, but rather to get as much out of someone in the greatest possible amount of time. So it turns out that when you decide to study medicine, if you are going to have a future, you are not thinking about going out to tackle pain and death, but instead about having a good business. Because if there is someone who is going to live comfortably, well, it is a doctor. Who would have said that now we have and will have doctors and nurses and all, as they were saying, acting like taxi drivers or as if they were selling tacos.

This destruction, not only of the healthcare system but also of its labor market, is something that we have to denounce in The Other Campaign, because there is not one serious program about this within the political parties there up above.

Healthcare is just as important as putting up a poster or paying for a television commercial. We know this well… that they make up healthcare programs in such a way that it is really about promoting a political position, and not about tackling a problem. For this reason there aren’t these businesses, the politically-for-rent business of health systems, in isolated communities, because no one goes out there; not the radio, not the television, not Comercial Mexicana Supermarkets, not Sams Club, and so it serves no political purpose. That is why these health services are concentrated in large population centers, and the rest of the population is abandoned. Only when some president or some political candidate takes a trip, then they will inaugurate something. And this is ridiculous if you follow it up, which is what the press doesn’t do, stay there after the government official leaves so you can see that it was just the stone, that there lies the inaugurating stone or that they made the shell of the building, but the doctors never arrived, and neither did the medicine.

There is one, well, documented case of such an occurrence, the Guadalupe Tepeyac Hospital in the Las Margaritas Zone, now the autonomous municipality of San Pedro de Michoacan. Salinas arrived and inaugurated the hospital with a great song and dance and it turns out that the doctors never came. Nor was there any medicine. It was a white elephant, the pure structure, well painted, well adorned with a sign on it that said “Solidarity,” but it never worked and it only really began to function when it was taken over by Zapatista troops. There they began to care, at first, for casualties of war and, later, to offer healthcare to the population until the army showed up and took it over from the International Red Cross.

So we say, if these different sectors are appearing, well, good for the Sixth [Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle] and for The Other [Campaign]. That means that these people are saying, “This is my place. From here we can lay a foundation and here I can find other people that think like me.”

For this reason the spoken word is very important here, to say it, and not just get carried away “off to the races”… which is bad, in addition, because it gives me tachycardia.

Their words are very important, very important, because others are going to hear their words in other parts and are going to say “I am thinking the same thing.” Just as this person heard the compañero from The Other [Campaign] in Hidalgo, there will be others in The Other Campaign in the rest of the country who say “Alright, that’s it!”

Because maybe the workers’ movement doesn’t draw my attention, and neither does the student movement, nor the women’s movement, nor others beyond that, because there are also conditions of concern in my work, and I am in this place, and I think something else is possible, and I feel alone in the face of the general effort. This suggests that The Other Campaign has to unite these voices in the whole country, and, well, even begin to build relationships with other movements in other parts of the world that are suggesting something similar.

If we manage to accomplish this, we begin to discover,… we are going to begin to discover resistances and efforts that we are not familiar with. First because it seems that in “The Other Campaign” … it seems to us that they should continue with their efforts, with what they are doing… complete it… Maybe I am unfair because they have just given me a document, an order for a procedure; maybe it is written out there somewhere. An X-Ray must be done on what healthcare means within capitalism. This process of transformation of the business of healthcare and curing into a business of pain and death… in order to put it up for rent… and along with that… I think that they are going to find even more listening ears, not just in their field, but in the entire population, because they are going to find many more that want to get involved in this,… Alright, it is possible to raise up “the other healthcare” just as they talk about the other economy, the other politics, the other culture, and other information and to make it to a meeting or to a couple of meetings, and make something where they expose these problems and be able to say to all of these people, to all of these men and women in the field, to say to them… to respond better to the question “is this the right place for them?” YES The Other Campaign is the place for all of those from below, all of those who are anti-capitalists.

One of the very important parts of what you are able to put forward is the ability to dissect the current discourse among the political class and specify what is the real purpose with respect to the health of the population,… doesn’t matter which political party. If it is true, as we think it is, that in capitalism healthcare is a business that, furthermore, is fed by the business of pain and death, then in what way are the programs of the various political parties confronting this problem, or are they not? We think they are not dealing with the problem, but if you manage to dissect the arguments, you will pull down the skeleton of supposed political options of this discourse there up above, and not just for the population at large, but also for the healthcare workers.

So then, we think that what you all have to do is,… whatever…. That is the flaw of The Other Campaign, that when somebody says something, its up to speaker to do what s/he says.

I’m wondering around here just to blabber away.

That is what they see from up above when they look at The Other Campaign, in their easychairs, saying that The Other Campaign is a bad option for the left. They look at this as if it were a complaints box. They forget that as soon as someone says that this is the problem, they are committing themselves to saying that there exists an “other” solution, that we are also going to build “the other” solution… This necessarily means that it will be built below among the people, and NOT that we present a list of demands to the candidate that is going to win or is going to lose knowing that there is not going to be any solution, but that in anycase we would have a chat, drink our coffee, have a meeting and take our picture, but not ever get any solution for the people below.

As far as what The Other Campaign is doing now,.. it is better to listen as long as another is speaking, … but once this person has asked for a hand… well, the person who goes around asking people to talk has brought it on themselves,… now you have to go about building something new. Because once one listens to another’s words, and says “Alright, well, let’s do it this way,” well, the other person says “Alright, let’s go, what are we going to do?” This is the problem of The Other Campaign that is resolving itself.

The problem with the campaigns from above, is that when someone asks “What are we going to do?” They answer “Wait, wait, I will do it”… and The Other Campaign has to answer that “WE are going to do it, to go about building that.” And its not about waiting for the moment in which we will all rise up and over throw the government, and so then we are going to start to work in “The Other Healthcare.” Nowhere else are they suggesting this, not even in the indigenous communities with their own problems, not in the workers’ struggle, not with the students, nor with the teachers. We have to go about starting to build this already. And we would respectfully like to ask you that when you are in contact with the scientific research community, “the others,” those that are not swallowing all this that they are going to increase the investment in research, and all of that on the DVD which says who is Lopez [Andres Manual Lopez Obrador, recent presidential candidate for the Party of Democratic Revolution] and that he is a good guy and that he is for real. It is necessary to go about building the “Other Scientific Research” because, they explained all of this to us there in Jalapa about how the maquila (sweatshop) works, and its chilling. This would mean that the research centers of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), or of the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) or of the National Pedagogic University (UPN), that they are building models of the annihilation of the human being, … and I don’t just mean the physical annihilation but of its essence as a human being… and maybe there we have to start to investigating how scientific research itself is carried out and discover all of these core values. And I am not taking advantage of the fact that all of you are here, but actually because I see Manuel [Lopez Obrador] over here on this side… And maybe some of us, without wanting to, without knowing it, or maybe we are just lying to ourselves and we do know it, we are contributing to what we think is good, what is noble, what is honest, but in reality we are contributing to the war that is, well, building up…

And when “The Other Campaign” says, what we this is all about here is to take away from all of those at the top and to take it all into our own hands. And the production of knowledge is right now also in the hands of officials, or even worse, not even in the hands of officials, but in the hands of individuals who have simply lent their names to the large companies that are grabbing up this jigsaw puzzle that they have made of scientific knowledge and equipping the other side with it. And the figure of what they are constructing is really cadaverous for millions of people.

We think it is necessary to build this, to build this space. I am sure that the advance of “The Other Campaign” will satisfy everyone that most dislikes meetings in general. I am imagining people who think in some meetings “what is this slimy string of drivel saying? Yes I listen because, I don’t care who told me to be an adherent to La Sexta (The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle), I don’t care who told me to come, but I have my problem or I see where I can do this, I have to find others and we must build this space without waiting for the commission of the Sexta or the EZLN but we most take advantage of this first meeting to listen and start to put ourselves into contact with one another.

Well, we ask you, this stage right now is fitting, to look for contact with the scientific research community in the large centers of higher learning to begin to bring up this very real problem.

And lastly, that scientific production – science - also has an element of classism, it also has a relationship of exploitation, of overexploitation depending on who is taking ownership of it.

This myth of neutral science was brought down by the atomic bomb, even before then it was known to be false. We think that scientists from all of the sciences are going to find their place. That all of the sciences, each one is going to find its own place, and then they will be able to say if the world that they are building in “The Other Campaign” is really “Another World.” Its not a question of that we are going to throw everyone under one single flag, but that each person will be building their own space.

Thank you compañeros

The Popular Assembly and the Teachers Take Gov. Ulises’ Place at the “Grito” Independence Day Celebration, Publish Manifesto

2006-09-20T07:44:00.000+08:00

Perhaps the longest title for an article that I have ever translated, but the title in Spanish "Asamblea popular y mentores desplazan a Ulises en el Grito; publican manifiesto" is pretty long and has some references that are not as clear in English as they are in Spanish.

"The Popular Assembly and the Teachers Take Gov. Ulises’ Place at the “Grito” Independence Day Celebration, Publish Manifesto" is available at NarcoNews.

an excerpt:

Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE) suspended the handover of 25 public buses that had been seized from the urban transportation authorities in the face of opposition and rebellion from their own bases of support. The handover had been agreed upon at the negotiation table with the Mexican Interior Minister Carlos Abascal Carranza.

The secretary of press and propaganda of the local union council, Daniel Rosas Romero, tried to begin the withdrawal of the encampments located in front of the State´s Attorney General´s Office (PGJE in its Spanish initials), but he was practically run off by his compañeros. “Who is he to be deciding? It is the movement who decides,” remarked one female teacher.

Mayambichos: Being Careful in San Cristobal

2006-09-18T02:36:00.000+08:00

San Cristobal de Las Casas is one of the homes away from home for many foreigners who come to the mountains of the Mexican South East to work with Zapatista communities, who participate in community projects or who cover Zapatismo for the media. The city is also a popular backpacker stop and ends up hosting many long-term tourists who study Spanish, relax or otherwise enjoy a small Mexican town filled with a mix of local indigenous and mestizo "coletos" as well as youth from all over Mexico who come to work and enjoy themselves.

With such a transient environment, one has to be very careful with health and hygiene. In my stays here I have had to leave two hostels because of the sight of bedbugs or "chinches." Other hostels and homes can cause serious respiratory problems because of the prevalence of black mold that takes hold in many of the dank rooms in the often cold and wet San Cristobal.

The Magic Hostel was one of the "chincheros" I had the misfortune of noticing. The other is known as Mayambé. Their restaurant is one of the most expensive locations to eat in San Cristobal and advertises Arabic, Thai and Indian food. The middle eastern dishes are tastey, but they have a reputation of bad sanitation, and on one occasion gave the author a case of acute food poisoning.

The hostel is even worse, though it is important to note that the hostel is owned by different persons, apparently Canadians. Though the staff is friendly, there is no care for the cleanliness. Old filled sacks seem to serve as matresses on some of the beds, including one that was crawling with bed bugs. When staff was informed that we were leaving because we wouldn´t sleep with bugs, the response was a shrug and "that makes sense."

Others that I know had experiences where a staff member (since fired) sexually molested them in their sleep. In short, its worth asking around to find a place with a good reputation, and closely inspecting the cleanliness of the beds, kitchens and bathrooms before laying down in any San Cristobal hostels.

Deslindar para Avanzar: Clarifying in Order to Move Forward

2006-09-14T00:51:00.000+08:00

In our third translation since arriving in Mexico, I helped Kristin Bricker translate the philosophical polemic by noted professor Alberto Hijar,
"Deslindar para Avanzar."

The original does not seem to be on the internet anymore, but the translation is
"Clarifying in Order to Move Forward: Those that understimate the strength of the popular opposition don´t know what they are talking about."

an excerpt...

One hundred days into the Oaxaca Commune, a successful assault on power is possible. The Paris Commune lasted fifty days in 1871, the same number that the St. Petersburg Soviet lasted in 1905. Eurocentric revolutionaries offer these events as the example to follow. Today its time to reclaim the 100 days of resistance in Oaxaca as the exemplary point of departure for the constructive history and geography of the new richly complex and inclusive nation. The great historical obstacle of the nation-state, still maintaining the power of conviction, has begun its definitive collapse, though not without demonstrating the danger of its last recourse: military and police power along with disinformation broadcasted on the televisions, radios, and newspapers. It is necessary to act accordingly, opposing the sermon of the informe [the Mexican president’s state-of-the-union speech] with the information of a people in struggle.

Blockades

2006-09-09T03:08:00.000+08:00

I have translated another Jornada article for Narco News, with tremendous help from Kristin Bricker and Dan Feder.

The original article "Bloqueos" can be found online at the Jornada site.

And our translation "Blockades: Those that underestimate the popular opposition don´t know what they are talking about."

First Translation in Mexico

2006-09-07T00:19:00.000+08:00

Kristin and I have completed our first translation for Narco News and The Other Journalism.

The Hermann Belinghausen article for La Jornada "Se cancela el traslado de poderes a Juchitán", about the expanding rebellion in the state of Oaxaca, is now available in English.

"Oaxaca State Government´s Transfer to Juchitán Cancelled"

Lebanon, Mexico and the New Left Turn

2006-09-05T13:04:00.000+08:00

According to Max from IdeasForAction
"The fall issue of Left Turn magazine (#22) will be getting shipped out on Tuesday and be available at your local bookstore by early next week. Please forward far & wide, and if you do not have a subscription please consider supporting the project and taking one out for you or a friend!"

The issue features an interview with one Lebanese-American founder of Left Turn, Bilal El-Amine who moved to Lebanon a year ago and served as a news correspondent throughout the recent bombardment, giving nightly interviews for a while to Flashpoints radio.
quoted here

Many people on the left in the US make the mistake that any time they see a movement that has Islam as part of the way it expresses its politics, they immediately put it into one category that some go as far as calling Islamic fascism and others call reactionary. There’s often very little distinction made between the various trends in Islamism that exist now. These trends are so varied at certain points that Islamism almost ceases to be a useful term. For example, if you look at secular groups, it is very hard to put all secular groups in one political category. The fascists were secular and the republicans are technically a secular group; and then there are Marxists and anarchists on the left. You have to look at Islamism in the same way. There are many different groups that exist under that umbrella and they’re quite varied and have different histories. This is particularly true with Hezbollah because there is such a profound difference between Hezbollah and some of the other Islamist groups that it is very difficult to even talk about them as being part of the same movement.

I´m in Mexico now. I have been out of service to complete errands that needed completing in the USA, but will soon be posting links to articles I am translating to English for NarcoNews among other organizations.

In other news, Mos Def was arrested for performing an unpermitted concert from a back of a flatbed truck in New York City outside of the MTV music awards. According to reports, the police finally moved in when he tried to perform "Katrina Clap."

Sabra and Shatila 2006

2006-08-12T00:18:00.000+08:00

The Telegraph of London is reporting that Israel is asking for the collaboration of Gen Anton Lahad of the Christian militia the South Lebanon Army. The SLA was "implicated in the massascre of up to several thousand Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Now he [Gen Lahad] says that Israel is tapping into his expertise in secret meetings."

Lahad fled to Israel with many of his 2000 Israeli-paid SLA soldiers when Israel ended its occupation of Southern Lebanon.

Israeli Airstrike Kills 4 at UN Compound and the "Grapes of Wrath"

2006-07-26T19:20:00.000+08:00

BBC reports that "Israeli Bombs Kill UN Observers", quoting Kofi Annan as calling the attack "apparently deliberate." The BBC does not include Israeli officials statements about the matter that "'We do not have yet confirmation what caused these deaths. It could be (Israel Defense Forces). It could be Hezbollah,' he said." Of course Danny Ayalon, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. was not there and cannot really know what happened.

CNN took up the story as a he-said-she-said headline "Accusations Fly After UN Observer Killed."

I am a little curious to why BBC did not include statements like the one in CNN, but I trust they have good reason to believe UN representatives. Indeed, it seems clear that Israel, rather than Hezbollah, hit the UN compound with an airstrike. The only question is whether the UN is the deliberate target.

Perhaps Israel thought they saw rockets being loaded into UN ambulances, though it "might have been a stretcher rather than a rocket." Kofi Annan called the claim "malicious propaganda" before Israel retracted it. So perhaps Kofi Annan and the IDF have some bad blood already.

The real curiosity is that the media does not mention that Israel has bombed UN outposts in Lebanon before, in the 1996 bombing campaign nicknamed after a John Steinbeck novel, the "Grapes of Wrath Campaign" in which 100 civilian refugees were killed at a UN compound that was targeted in Qana. That mass killing is described by Robert Fisk here.

That bombing might have been the reason the UN has turned away refugees this time around, some of whom were killed in Israeli airstrikes on their fleeing convoy.

A LA Times story carried the statement by Daniel Ayalon that "accused Hezbollah militants of positioning rocket launchers beside U.N. sites, a practice reported by U.N. officials in recent days." Though the syntax made it unclear if the paper confirmed that U.N. officials had reported this practice.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu Calls for End to Israeli Apartheid

2006-07-24T04:43:00.000+08:00

Archbishop Desmond Tutu joined a growing list of South Africans who have called for an end to Israeli aprtheid in peice called "Against Israeli Apartheid."

Quoting That Article:
"Divestment from apartheid South Africa was fought by ordinary people at the grassroots... Eventually, institutions pulled the financial plug, and the South African government thought twice about its policies.

Similar moral and financial pressures on Israel are being mustered one person at a time.

These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the occupied territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.

Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the antiapartheid struggle, recently published a letter titled "Not in My Name." Signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies. Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also pointed out the relevance of the South African experience. "

Veteran South African journalist Allister Sparks also recently compared Israeli Apartheid to the South African struggle.

An Open Letter to Hillel

2006-07-22T09:03:00.000+08:00

Dear Hillel representatives at U of MD,
I was very disturbed to receive an email from the University of Maryland Hillel. The email urged students to sign a petition to Kofi Annan of the UN available online. The petition asked the UN to "join us in clearly and immediately reaffirming the right of Israel to defend its citizen."

Though apparently benevolent language in itself, this letter came in the context of an Israeli invasion and bombardment of Lebanon that has disproportionately affected civilians. Furthermore, as Kofi Annan and other UN representatives have been pushing for an immediate ceasefire, this petition can only be seen as a lobbying effort against the ceasefire to allow the Israeli military to continue the bombing and invasion of Lebanon.

While we no doubt agree about the immorality of Hizbollah's attacks on civilians., Israeli attacks targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon (including civilian convoys, ambulance convoys, pharmaceutical factories, dairy facilities, apartment buildings, entire neighborhoods, and power plants) have killed 20 times as many civilians as Hizbollah has.

From all evidence, it appears that the Israeli military is purposefully targeting civilians in order to scare them out of Southern Lebanon. They are terrorizing the civilian population. This is terrorism. Bombing a civilian convoy, an ambulance or a hospital from tanks and plans is just as morally repugnant as strapping a pack of explosives on to bomb a bus, or launching an unguided missile into an Israeli city. Despite what the US representative to the UN John Bolton says, the killing of Lebanese civilians is every bit as immoral as the killing of Americans or Israelis.

This is not Tikkun Olum, this is not Tzedekah, this is not Mitzvot.

This does not represent Judaism, and I think it undermines the credibility of our religious leaders when they support the murder of God's children.

For photographic evidence of the carnage in Lebanon, please visit
http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

Please ask, or better yet demand, that Hillel stand for peace, rather than war. Justice rather than vengeance.

Sincerely,
Simon Fitzgerald
of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation
U of MD class of 2005

Is this for real?

2006-07-19T11:55:00.000+08:00

Sabbah's blog shows photos credited to the Associated Press with the caption

Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006.(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Is this for real?

Rally For Immediate Cease-Fire in the Holy Land

2006-07-18T11:42:00.000+08:00

Join the Rally for Peace to Protest Ongoing Violence

Washington, DC | July 14, 2006 | The American Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee (ADC) will be holding a rally for peace to protest Israeli
military action in Lebanon and Gaza on Tuesday, July18, from 5-7pm in front
of the White House.

We invite you to join ADC and other organizations as we call for an
immediate ceasefire and for peace in the region. This rally is open to all
peace loving persons and organizations. Contact ADC to add your organization
to the list of participants.

WHAT: Peaceful Rally to Protest
Ongoing Israeli Violence in Gaza and Lebanon

WHEN: July 18, 2006 from 5-7pm

WHERE: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW --in front of the White House
Take Metro to McPherson Square

HOW: To add your organization to the list of participating
organizations, contact media@adc.org

Israel, Palestine, a Fence and "The Wall"

2006-06-26T06:17:00.000+08:00

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd is in Israel this week. He had been scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv, but moved to the "Peace Village" Neve Shalom after criticism by British anti-apartheid activists. Neve Shalom is highlighted as an example of Jewish and Arab integration in contrast to much of the rest of Israel and Palestine.

This Reuters article (reprinted by Ynet) shows how the mainstream media often gives in to politicized terminology that favor the imperialist mythology of the Israeli government.

For example,

"Pink Floyd front-man Roger Waters, who inspired the rock band's iconic album "The Wall," has scrawled "tear down the wall" on the concrete panels of Israel's security fence on Wednesday."

It has become something of a politicized battle over the name of the "apartheid wall" or "separation fence." Once it became clear that apartheid meant separation, "security fence" has become the dominant terminology. Now I know some of the "barrier" is more like a fence and some is more like a wall, but have you ever heard of a concrete fence? Seriously, can we just be honest and call it whatever word in the English language best describes it.

By the way, as if Gaza hadn't exploded enough already, after some 20 Palestinian non-combatants including many children were killed in the last two weeks, militants claiming to be part of Hamas attacked a checkpoint and took an Israeli soldier hostage. Hamas representatives are saying, at least in Hebrew, that they are not responsible and that the soldier must be treated well by his captors.

This is bound to cause increased attacks by Israel and retaliation by Palestinian militants.

HUD to New Orleans Poor: Go F(ind) Yourself (Housing)!

2006-06-18T10:06:00.000+08:00

Bill Quigley, that Human Rights Lawyer and professor at Loyola New Orleans is at it again. For years he has been a steady, courageous voice of solidarity with the Haitian victims of political persecution since the ouster of Aristide. Since Katrina, where he suvrived for a week in Charity Hospital while his wife tended to dying patients, he has been a strong legal ally and editorial advocate of the marginalized people of New Orleans.

His new piece, a must read as always, is his most cleverly named.

HUD to New Orleans Poor: Go F(ind) Yourself (Housing)!

Gaza Explodes

2006-06-15T00:19:00.000+08:00

While I haven't commented on it here, a recent wave of civilians killed in Gaza has caused a firestorm that threatens to become high intensity warfare in the Holy Land. An entire family including 5 children were killed on a beach in Gaza by what witnesses described as incoming artillery fire.

Their deaths have ignited the passions of the nation. Their funeral was attended by thousands in Beit Lahiya, and the one survivor, 7 year-old Huda Ghalia, has been "symbolically adopted" by Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas.

The killing also prompted Hamas to end its 16 month ceasefire, and renew missile attacks on Israel.

An Israeli airstrike on a van carrying militants and rocket launchers killed 2 militants, and a second Israeli missile killed civilian bystanders including "an ambulance worker and two children. On the same day, Israeli officials were able to bump that ugly news from the headlines by releasing the findings of an Israeli army report that argues that Israel was not responsible for the deaths, arguing that Hamas landmines likely caused the killing. Immediately doubts are being raised on the Israeli government position. Human Rights Watch argues that their investigation comes to the opposite conclusion with regard to every piece of evidence.

Chris McGeal of the London Guardian spoke today on Democracy Now refuting entirely the Israeli army report, saying that this is cover being laid down for Olmert and other Israeli politicians currently in Europe.

The Israeli military has made such false statements before for propaganda purposes. For example, in October 2004, the Israeli military announced in a press conference that they had irrefutable evidence that UN ambulances were being used to ferry heavy weapons in Palestinian Occupied Territories. They later admitted that the image "might be a stretcher rather than a rocket."

The International Solidarity Movement also reports "A claim circulated by The Associated Press... that Kalashnikovs had been found in an ISM office was completely retracted by AP and ...the Israeli army itself when it emerged that it was totally false."

McGeal also describes evidence that Israeli shelling was responsible, citing eye-witness reports and the discovery of shrapnel reading "155 mm" the type of artillery shell Israel was using nearby. The Isreali army report's own findings that 5 of 6 shells fired nearby were accounted for, and many of them exploded on the Gaza shore nearby, while the 6 one (presumably that struck the family) was "not accounted for" in the Israeli report.

Israeli officials have used the army report as a full exoneration of guilt, and Amir Peretz and Olmert are arguing that the exoneration gives Israel more right to increase attacks on Hamas militants and others.

As usual Remember These Children, memorializes the recent deaths of Palestinian and Israeli children. For those keeping count, 26 Palestinian children have been killed this year as has one Israeli child. Ironically, the Isreali child Khalid Salaam Ziadin, 16, was an Israeli Arab killed by Isreali ordinance in the Western Negev desert.

Atenco: Romper el Cero

2006-06-07T09:30:00.000+08:00

Salón Chingón has a new video on the uprising and police repression in San Salvador Atenco and Texcoco in the state of Mexico. It is available here in Spanish. A version with Ensligh subtitles is "coming soon."

This comes by way of Narco News, and its powerful first hand footage, clips from Mexican mainstream media, and interviews with survivors (who suffered sexual violation and the death of family in some cases).

Mark Hiew at the UN, ItsLateAgain

2006-06-01T23:34:00.000+08:00

A good friend Mark Hiew, University of Maryland graduate and an activist with Student Global Aids Campaign blogs this week from the UN's High Level Meetings on HIV/AIDS in New York City. Message to Mark: write it hard-hitting. Make it compelling and worth our time every time. His best previous post (in my opinion) is on the complex race relations of Malaysia.

More on Duke rape case

2006-06-01T03:20:00.000+08:00

The Washington Post has an article citing Justice Department figures that 13 out of 14 black female rape survivors do not report their crime. In comparison, %42 of the U.S. rape survivors report the crime.

This statistic is staggering, but it reflects the experience and work of others. Aishah Shahidah Simmons talks about the invisibility of rape in the black community in NO! The Rape Documentary.

An interview with her about the Duke rape case is available online. It should be required reading. (Watch out anonymous, it was written by a feminist).

I also found it interesting that the feministing site where that interview was published contained very strongly worded statements about how the "stripper" made the whole thing up, citing a very detailed history (likely fictional)of the accuser. The statement, in fact, suggested that the accuser was once arrested for attempting to kill a police officer.

I found this interesting, because these posts seem to be under every blog entry about the Duke case without any citations. In fact, these "facts" are not published anywhere by a reputable source. My own site received such posts by someone in Hawaii who blogsearches "duke rape" almost daily and cut-and-pastes these posts to my site.

It seems that there is an organized online campaign to discredit the survivor (organized campaigns by the rapists friends are typical in which the morals and the credibility of the survivor are attacked as a "lying slut"). I wonder, who these internet attack artists are? Are they college republicans? Are they friends of the accused? Are they connected to the law firm of the accused? Are they just sexually aggressive boys with too much internet time to waste?

Zapatista Music and the Cancionero Zapatista

2006-05-30T02:53:00.000+08:00

Thanks to the hard work of, let's call him Compañero Rogelio, the music of the Zapatistas is now widely available for musicians young and old to learn, play and teach to others. While CDs of the songs featured in the songbook, prepared by Rogelio using the songs played and recorded by Zapatista music groups in the Mexican state of Chiapas like Nuevo Amanecer, these disks are not widely available in the United States.

With the permission of the Junta of Buen Gobierno, the songs themselves are now available north of the border in the "Canciones Zapatistas" inspired by the "Little Red Songbook" of the IWW.

Schools for Chiapas are rumored to be bringing down many copies to be distributed to Zapatista schools for the benefit of the students there.

The Indypendent Reader Release Party

2006-05-18T01:47:00.000+08:00

The Indypendent Reader, a new publication by Baltimore Indymedia and Camp Baltimore, is having a release party this Thursday at the Contemporary Museum in Mt. Vernon. Though somewhat narrow in focus, the first issue was very deep in its analysis of the creation of the ghetto and gentrification in East Baltimore.

Interpreter Times: The Patient and Their "Comañeros"

2006-05-17T10:55:00.000+08:00

My colleague Roig and I started a new interpreters' trade blog, Interpreter Times
An excerpt from my first piece on the new site:

For example, what if a patient is asked by hospital staff where he works and, instead of answering, looks deferentially toward a "compañero del trabajo" who advises him to say he is unemployed? Is this not a sign that the patient's "friend" may have a conflict of interest, violate the patient's confidentiality and compromise his/her care? The interpreter obviously cannot tell the compañero not to accompany the patient to the consultation, but should s/he inform a nurse or physician of the potential problem? Should the interpreter or some other hospital staff be prepared to share information with the patient about his/her rights in this situation?

This may not seem important, but what if the patient's friends informs him that work will only pay for the most basic hospital services or that subsequent visits could get him/her in trouble with immigration? The patient may not come to follow-up appointments or may skip/avoid therapy because the patient cannot afford it him/herself. In this sense, the health care professionals could very well be failing the patient if they allow a representative/friend/compañero from work to be present during all communication with the injured worker.... read more

The Baltimore Examiner

2006-05-16T23:18:00.000+08:00

I am not an avid reader of the Baltimore Examiner daily tabloid newspaper. The paper does not go far into depth, the politics of the editorial staff are atrocious and its another cog in the syndicated Examiner machine. I first became aware of the Examiner's politics when they published advertisements for the San Francisco version showing a picture of a young white girl in school and a young Arab girl with an AK-47 with the words "PTA to PLO / No Local Newspaper Has Ever Delivered News Of This Scope." The original ad and an analysis are published here.

This ad caused quite a reaction, with local Arab groups pointing out that this undated, unsigned photo was likely taken in refugee camps decades ago. An anonymous photo with no context and strong comment amounted to a racist stereotype of Palestinians, in the eyes of San Franciscans. Since the photo was not new, it was hardly "news" as the ad claimed. The Examiner pulled the ad from the Bay area market, but republished it in DC when the Washington Examiner was started. If the ad was racist in San Francisco, it should have been racist in DC. But the Examiner was only interested in its PR campaign rather than questions about journalistic integrity of a newspaper. This was the reputation that the Examiner carried with it to Baltimore.

However, my grandmother points out that the paper scooped up some reporters from The Sun since its parent, the Tribune Company, has been increasingly using its syndicated columnists and reporters over local voices. The length of the paper also make it good bus and toilet reading material.

So I picked up a copy on my way to work on May 9th, and was not surprised to find an editorial calling for health care reforms based on suggestions from the American Enterprise Institute, without any mention of the neo-conservative ideology of the organization. The column, written by the editor of the Capitol Hill publication Roll Call Morton Kondracke is available here.

I wrote a response published, which was way too long for the 150 word max. I will publish it in full at the bottom of this post.

Most of my edited response was published by the Examiner here.

Though the following two key sentences were deleted.
"[Kondracke's] analysis is at best poor journalism, at worst rightist propaganda and it reflects poorly on the journalistic credibility of the Examiner."

I think those were crucial sentences. While its always good to have a second paper in a market like Baltimore, I am not confident that the presence of one of the Examiner's many tentacles will make up for the declining quality of the Baltimore Sun. A better sign (however humble) is the introduction of the Indypendent Reader, a project of the Baltimore Indypendent Center and Camp Baltimore. The first quarterly issue focuses on the creation of the ghetto, gentrification, and community power. One highlight is an interview with McElderry Park community association president (and green party candidate for city council) Glen Ross.

Landon graduate from Bethesda indicted in Duke rape case

2006-05-16T01:50:00.000+08:00

David Evans, a 23-year-old senior and team co-captain from Bethesda, Md., was indicted on charges of first-degree forcible rape, sexual offense and kidnapping.

He was a renter at the house where the party took place where an exotic dancer says she was beaten, berated and raped.

Evans, from Bethesda, is a graduate of the prestigious all-male Landon School in that Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C.

This new indictment comes in the face of increasing media appeals calling this a political prosecution by the DA Nifong, attacking the credibility of the rape survivor, and other assertions in support of the accused.

Though the Duke lacrosse coach quit and had the lacrosse season canceled because of the behavior (some of it documented through emails) of his players, Sports Illustrated is reporting that some graduating seniors Duke wore the accused lacrosse jersey numbers on their morterboards at graduation ceremonies.

Madness in Atenco

2006-05-12T03:53:00.000+08:00

Despite little press attention north of the Rio Grande, the simmering tensions around the Mexican election campaign and the Zapatistas "Other Campaign" exploded in the small towns of Texcoco and San Salvador Atenco on the outskirts of the Mexican Capital (or Distrito Federal).

A massive police round up of unlicensed vendors in Texcoco caused a dramatic reaction in Texcoco.

Locals, armed with machetes, detained the police that had been holding the unlicensed vendors, though the captive police were later handed to the Red Cross. A massive police operation to retake the town resulted in 200 arrests, and up to 50 police injuries, according to official statements.

The people of San Salvador Atenco suffered an even greater loss. Javier Cortés Santiago, a 14 year old youth, was killed. According to the BBC, "Television images of police beating bound demonstrators caused a national outcry after the riots." While others are still reported as "disappeared," human rights groups have documented 16 rapes of women in police custody and sexual assaults (including the introduction of foreign objects into the bodies of both men and women).

A Chilean film maker told the BBC "They insulted me, groped me, anything they wanted. Whenn they jailed me that was when I saw the girls with their pants and underwear torn, sobbing." Her full letter is available on NarcoNews here

This seems like an insane escalation overvunlicensed vendors. The obvious question is, Why in San Salvador Atenco?

The populace of the area had already been radicalized and organized in 2002 when the local, state and federal governments wanted to confiscate the farmlands of Atenco in order to build a new airport for Mexico City. During that fight, the people waged a popular campaign of struggle when it became clear that all three levels of government were colluding against them. Their marches, yielding machetes as symbols of their rural labor, were met with police violence. After police detained, beat and arrested marchers, one slipped into a coma and died from lack of treatment in police custody.

Narco News has a two part series on the 2002 confrontations here and here. There is also a video at Salon Chingon.

Furthermore, activists from Atenco had been participating in the Zapatista's "Other Campaign," the attack on the vendors (who are becoming an important yet marginalized part of the new "post-Fordist" economy and have been important in other political organizing such as the Bolivian uprising that swept Evo Morales into power) came as Marcos was arriving in Mexico City.

While the Zapatistas' spokesperson Marcos (or Delegate Zero) is promising to remain in Mexico, D.F. until the detained people of Atenco are freed (even if it keeps him there through the elections). Meanwhile mass media like the BBC are forecasting more election violence based on the Atenco experience.

While perhaps attempting to marginalize the "Other Campaign," the Mexican government may be giving it legitimacy. As the Zapatistas call for all of its supporters to open a campaign of non violent resistance on behalf of the people of Atenco, their actions may be winning them alliances and earning them relevance beyond the indigenous enclaves of rural Chiapas.

Systematic Torture on Chicago's South Side

2006-05-10T03:31:00.000+08:00

Democracy Now breaks a story that I am shocked not to have heard before.

For nearly two decades a part of the city’s jails known as Area 2 was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags places over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions. ...[W]ith the abuse of detainees in US custody are getting renewed attention at the United Nations this week, where the UN Committee Against Torture is holding hearings on U.S. compliance with its international obligations. But there is one name expected to arise this week that few people in this country will have heard about – and it’s the one that’s closest to home. It’s called Area 2... Read More

Broken Arm, Death Squads and the Salvador Option

2006-05-09T06:25:00.000+08:00

Though I would write more on this, perhaps, if I didn´t have a broken arm,

John Pilger is arguing that the increase in militia and death squad activity is the effect of the so-called "Salvador Option" in Iraq in a piece in the New Statesman.

BBC reported at the beginning of the year that "US officials [have been] talking about a "Salvador Option" in Iraq, not only for democracy-building, but also for a more aggressive campaign to eliminate Iraqi insurgents and their supporters."

With so many executed bodies appearing everymorning, the newspaper al-Hayat refers to "the war of corpses," (qtd. juancole.com) the recent arrest of Iraqi Interior Ministry officials for running a "death squad" makes one wonder what roll the Department of Defense, the CIA and (former ambassador of Iraq last year and Honduras during the Salvadoran war and now current head of US intelligence) John Negroponte had in creating these reincarnated death squads.