­by El Reportero

Cristina Fernández de Kirchnerschools

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner gave her second nationally televised speech of the week on March 4. This speech, and its predecessor, show that the president, and Néstor Kirchner, her husband, predecessor and, he hopes, successor, believe that they have a better chance of intimidating their opponents in congress than trying to fix up alliances with them. The initial signs are that this confrontational strategy may be successful.

HEIRS APPARENT FIGHT FOR COLOMBIA’S TOP JOB AS COURT BARS URIBE’S RE-ELECTION

President Alvaro Uribe will not be able to stand for an unprecedented second re-election on 30 May. The question that has dominated Colombian politics for over a year was answered emphatically by the constitutional court (CC) on Feb. 26 when it voted against the legitimacy of a referendum on whether the country’s most popular head of state should be permitted to seek re-election once again. With Uribe out of the running, the presidential race is suddenly wide open. While Uribe was still in the contest, it was difficult for opinion polls to gauge the support of potential surrogates: the favourite is his former defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, but the former agriculture minister, Felipe Arias, also lays claim to his legacy. Chávez and Uribe pay lip service to mediation by ‘group of friends’ Colombia and Venezuela have accepted an initiative of the joint Latin American and Caribbean summit to form a ‘group of friends’ to facilitate a rapprochement. This came after another round of escalating acrimony, which at one point threatened to derail the summit. Signs are that little will happen until after Colombia’s impending president elections.

U.S. WILL RESTORE AID TO HONDURAS

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday the United States will restore aid to Honduras that was suspended after a coup and urged Latin American states to recognize new President Porfirio Lobo’s government.

CENTRAL AMERICA AND MEXICO LOOK INTO REGIONAL SECURITY

Porfirio Lobo y Hillary Clinton

Representatives of the Central American Integration System (SICA) and Mexico will meet on Monday in San Salvador to discuss the problems of security in the r­egion. According to the Secretary General of SICA, Juan Daniel Alemán, the regional bloc has the will of promoting the strategies and plans of action adopted in the meeting. Drug trafficking, organized crime, youth gangs and illicit arms trafficking are the main scourges afflicting the region. The problems have increased in the last years due to the use of the isthmus as a route for drug trafficking from the south of the continent to the United States, the world’s largest market and with the highest consumption.

TAKING A STAND AGAINST INTERVENTIONIST COLONIALISM

The Declaration of the Rio Group on the ‘Question of the Falkland Islands’ expresses the support of the heads of state of the region and “the legitimate rights” of Argentina in the dispute with the United Kingdom’s sovereignty over the archipelago. The leaders asked the governments of two countries “to resume negotiations to find as soon as possible a just, peaceful and definitive resolution in the fight for sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and their surrounding maritime areas, in accordance with the relevant resolutions and declarations of the United Nations and the Organization of American States.” (Latin News, World News Prensa Latina and Pravda contributed to this report.)

By Adriana Gómez Licón
Reprinted with permission from the El Paso Times

More than 4,600 killed in Juarez since 2008

EL PASO, Texas Hundreds of thousands of people from violence-torn Juárez are abandoning their homes, closing their businesses and moving elsewhere.

Although reliable num­bers are hard to come by, El Paso police, real estate agents and Juárez demographers note an increase in refugees from Mexico living in El Paso. The city of Juárez’s planning department said 110,000 houses have been abandoned from 2005 to the beginning of 2009. Based on average family size, about 420,000 people, or 30% of the city’s residents, have moved out of Juárez, either to other parts of Mexico or to the United States.

In addition to the violence, more than 75,000 people have lost their jobs since December of 2007 in Juárez, according to numbers from the Instituto Mexicano Seguro Social. Most of the jobs have been lost in the maquiladora industry. Restaurants, hairdressing salons, clinics and bakeries have closed. About 40%, or 10,678 businesses, were forced to close because of the fear of extortions and assaults for not paying fees, or cuotas, to criminal organizations, according to the Mexican Chamber of Commerce.

“Let people here tell how scared we are of even answering the phone,” said Julia Monárrez Fragoso, professor at the Colegio de la Frontera in Juárez, to Mexico President Felipe Calderón during his first visit to the city Feb. 11.

Many people in Juárez want to leave the city, where more than 4,600 people have been killed since 2008. María del Socorro Velázquez Vargas, a professor at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez said the results of a survey conducted with 1,800 people last December showed that about 47% of Juárenses want to move to the United States because of the violence.

Even though brutal attacks have scared away many residents, the weak state of the maquiladora industry also has increased the migration.

“It is the first time that population will increase less than 1 percent,” Velázquez Vargas said. “It’s historic.”

During World War II, the Bracero program allowed farmworkers from Mexico to temporarily work in the United States. During those days, Juárez had huge growth because immigrants arrived in the area to work in the program. The population grew from 49,000 to 123,000 people.

When the program ended in the 1960s, the maquiladora industry skyrocketed and attracted Mexicans from different parts of the country.

The growth in the sector continued throughout the 1990s. It peaked after 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented.

MAQUILADORA JOBS DROP

Just like the automotive industry, maquiladoras began to face competition from low-cost offshore plants in Central America and Asia. Many have shut down or laid off workers since 2000.

Maquiladoras offered jobs to 250,000 workers in Juárez at the start of 2008. The number fell to 176,700 as 2009 concluded. “It’s always recurrent that every time there is a recession in the United States, we feel the impact,” Velázquez Vargas said.

The growth from 2000 to 2008 was slow compared to the decades after 1940. The Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, the counterpart of the U.S. Census, reported 1.2 million living in Juárez in 2000, and 1.3 million in 2005. Estimates by UACJ demographers calculated that Juárez grew by 55,000 people in 2008, mostly led by births.

The natural growth, which is the difference between the number of people who are born and die, is still what drives population growth in El Paso’s sister city. More couples are giving birth than who die.

CHIEF BUYS 1,100 RIFLES

El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said that in the past two years 30,000 people have moved to El Paso after fleeing Juárez. The county’s population is about 750,000.

Allen was attempting to justify the purchase of 1,100 M4 rifles by saying his department needed to be ready for a possible spillover of violence from Juárez. He said he arrived at the 30,000 figure through comments he heard at intelligence briefings.

Sergio Ramírez, a real estate agent in El Paso, deals with clients who have come to Juárez in the past few years. He said most Mexicans fleeing Juárez are looking for rental homes and apartments.

“They are all renting because they cannot afford the expenses,” he said. “For every 50 who are renting, two or three are buying.” The latest rental vacancy rate is 2%. The rate was 9.2% in 2008, and 10.5% in 2007.

Meanwhile, some southwest neighborhoods in Juárez are virtually deserted. “That is a problem that is going off like a red light…These are a lot of homes,” Velázquez Vargas said.

Kurt Nimmo Infowars.com.

Bush signs the Patriot Act

Obama waited until Saturday night to renew the Bill of Rights busting Patriot Act. It was set to expire today. Both the Senate and the House signed off on the extension last week. So called “privacy protections” were dumped when Senate Democrats failed to raise a 60-vote supermajority to pass them. Cast aside were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government’s authority to spy on Americans and seize their records, the Associated Press reports.

Feingold told a Senate Judiciary Committee in September of 2009 that 65 percent of the cases for which sneak-and-peek warrants were used were drug investigations.

The Patriot Act was not designed to be used against supposed terrorists. “It’s not meant for intelligence, it’s for criminal cases,” Assistant Attorney General David Kris told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “So I guess it’s not surprising to me that it applies in drug cases.”

­The Patriot Act allows the government to search and seize Americans’ papers and effects without probable cause to assist “terror” (drug and other victimless crime) investigations. It prevents a right to a speedy and public trial (ask American Jose Padilla about this one). It discourages freedom of association, freedom of speech (the government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation), and the right to legal representation (the government may monitor conversations between attorneys and clients in federal prisons and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes).

The act allows the government to abduct citizens and jail them without charge or the ability to confront witnesses against them. It allows the government to hold anybody deemed an “unlawful combatant” incommunicado forever. It effectively turns America into East Germany or Stalin’s Russia.

Democrats and moonstruck liberals should be held directly responsible for turning America into a police state. After all, they bought into Obama’s “yes we can” mantra and packed Congress with Democrats who voted last week to extend the Patriot Act.

They should have voted for Ron Paul.

“The Obama administration wanted to extend the measure because of provisions it says are important in tracking suspected terrorists, including roving wiretaps to track multiple communications devices,” Reuters reported on Thursday.

“Disappointingly, the government’s dangerously broad authority to conduct roving wiretaps of unspecified or ‘John Doe’ targets, to secretly wiretap of persons without any connection to terrorists or spies under the so-called ‘lone wolf’ provision, and to secretly access a wide range of private business records without warrants under PATRIOT Section 215 were all renewed without any new checks and balances to prevent abuse,” Kevin Bankston wrote last week after the act sailed through Congress.

Instead of tracking terrorists, the bill has been used to track the American people. In 2008, for instance, the Justice Department made 763 requests for “sneak-and-peek” warrants, but only three of those had to do with terrorism investigations, according to senator Russ Feingold. This article was first Infowars.com.

by the University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Mich.-— Conventional wisdom among many ecologists is that industrial-scale agriculture is the best way to produce lots of food while preserving biodiversity in the world’s remaining tropical forests. But two University of Michigan researchers reject that idea and argue that small, family-owned farms may provide a better way to meet both goals.

In many tropical zones around the world, small family farms can match or exceed the productivity of industrial-scale operations, according to U-M researchers Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer. At the same time, smaller diversified farms are more likely to help preserve biodiversity in tropical regions undergoing massive amounts of deforestation, Perfecto and Vandermeer conclude in a paper to be published online Feb. 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Most of the tropical forest that’s left is fragmented, and what you have are patches of forest surrounded by agriculture,” said Perfecto, a professor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

“If you want to maintain biodiversity in those patches of forest, then the key is to allow organisms to migrate between the patches. And small-scale family farms that adopt sustainable agricultural technologies are more likely to favor migration of species than a huge, monocultural plantation of soybeans or sugar cane or some other crop.”

Some ecologists have suggested that the history of eastern North American forests provides a preview of what’s likely to happen in the tropics. European colonization of eastern North America led to massive deforestation that accompanied the expansion of agriculture. Later, industrialization drew people to cities from the rural areas, and the forests recovered.

This scenario is known as the forest transition model. It has been argued that if a similar progression occurs in the tropics, then the decline in rural populations would make more land potentially available for conservation. A corollary of the forest transition model states that if you consolidate agriculture into large, high-tech farms, productivity increases and more land is freed up for conservation. But after reviewing case studies from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, Perfecto and Vandermeer conclude “there is little to suggest that the forest transition model is useful for the tropics” ­and that it “projects an overly optimistic vision.” Instead, the U-M researchers propose an alternative model, which they call the matrix quality model. They say it provides a solid foundation for conservation planning in tropical regions.

If you think of the fragments of remaining tropical forest as islands in an ocean of agriculture, the ocean is what Perfecto and Vandermeer call the matrix—it’s the area between the patches of undisturbed natural habitat. A high-quality matrix is one that enables plants and animals to migrate between the remaining patches of forest,increasing the likelihood that a given species will be able to survive, helping to preserve biodiversity.

Small, family-owned farms that use agroecological techniques come closest to mimicking natural forest habitat, thereby creating corridors that allow plants and animals to migrate between forest fragments. Agroecological techniques can include the use of biological controls instead of pesticides, the use of compost or other organic matter instead of chemical fertilizers, and the use of agroforestry methods, which involve growing crops beneath a canopy of trees or growing crops mixed with fruit trees such as mangoes or avocados.

“If you’re really interested in conserving species, you should not just concentrate on preserving the fragments of natural habitat that remain, even though that’s where many species are,” said Vandermeer, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a professor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment. “You also need to concentrate on the areas between the fragments, because those are the places that species have to migrate through.”

Vandermeer said he advocates the break-up of large-scale farms in the tropics, as well as incentives to encourage “a large number of small-scale farmers, each managing the land to the best of his or her ability, using agroecological techniques.” Perfecto said these goals are in line with the findings of the 2009 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development synthesis report. The report concluded that small-scale, sustainable farms are the best way to alleviate world hunger while promoting sustainable development. Perfecto was one of the report’s authors.

The PNAS article by Perfecto and Vandermeer is part of a special report in the journal about solutions to the world food crisis. Perfecto, Vandermeer and Angus Wright discuss the links between agricult