by José de la Isla

HOUSTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has attracted considerable public attention by bringing up the specter of hateful political speech, making the historical connection to violence in the San Francisco community she represents in Congress.

She did so by referring to the killings 31 years ago of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in that city at the hands of former Board of Supervisors member Dan White.

She brought it up because now is looking a lot like then.

In ’78 the Board was split 6-5 over pro-growth, pro-neighborhood positions when White resigned. Then he wanted his job back. Moscone, a liberal, would make the decision about conservative White’s political future.

White was the lone vote opposing San Francisco’s landmark gay rights ordinance which had passed that year. Time magazine referred to Milk as “the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet.” White and Milk had previously sparred over a group home that Milk favored in White’s district.

Ten days before White killed Moscone and Milk, California Congressman Leo Ryan, while on a fact-finding mission to Jonestown, Guyana, was murdered by cult members of San Francisco-based People’s Temple, led by Jim Jones. Ryan was a critic of Scientology, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and destructive cults, religious groups that cause harm to their own members and others. Nearly a thousand people committed mass suicide or were murdered in Guyana.

Jonestown was the largest loss of U.S. civilian lives in a non-natural disaster up to that time. Ryan became the only congressman ever murdered in the line of duty.

The moral lessons from the two incidents did not stay on the surface like a good tattoo. Instead, they faded away.

November 1978 was the perfect storm of political issues, polarized world views and hysteria from Armageddon-preaching pulpits.

Together they created a fever that preys on people who can barely hang on, or whose neuroses takes the form of an egomaniacal heroism.

The pulpit calls, the thin philosophies and fear-evoking, end-of-life-as-we-know-it ideologies provide the atmospherics that give license to individuals on the brink of committing some out-of-bounds act of defiance. You can feel the seething.

Exaggerated, you say? It’s really not that bad right now? Oh?

The classic example about lynch-mob blinded rage is found in Dallas, 1963. In his book Death of A President, William Manchester noted that 110 murders had occurred there the year before President Kennedy was killed. The city had led the nation in homicides. Through his meticulous research, Manchester came to believe that the political climate there had been a factor in Kennedy’s death.

On hearing the news that the President had been killed, a fourth-grade class in a wealthy Dallas suburb burst into applause. As a teenager in Houston, I witnessed

a crowd do the same. A docent at the Texas Book Depository Museum told me five years ago he understood Dan Rather had reported something similar.

The infraworld — Jonestown and 110 murders in Dallas — are underlying signs that things are getting out of control.

Another is the license many people and their political leaders are taking to permit harm to come to others, deny undocumented immigrants drivers licenses, restrict places they can live, encouraging family disunification, permitting dragnets and prohibiting access to schooling. These are signs of an unnatural national coarseness. All are about the moral code breaking down and decency escaping the body politic.

Yet, one demonstration sign the mob holds up is true, however: “They Are Taking Our Country Away!”

­The ones who seethe with anger, demean the presidency, talk smack, believe guns are good and follow slogans like sheep are taking good parts of our country away and making it look like a destructive cult.

[José de la Isla’s latest digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at joseisla3@yahoo.com.] ©2009

by Diana Washington Valdez

Chihuahua state native Arturo Chávez Chávez appears to be on his way to becoming Mexico’s federal attorney general.

His nomination by President Felipe Calderón provoked an outcry from human rights organizations, a member of the European Parliament and relatives of murdered and missing men and women in his home state.

Activists plan to conduct more protests next week when he is expected to meet with Mexico’s federal senators prior to his formal confirmation.

Chávez, who comes from a politically connected family, served in Chihuahua state as a deputy state attorney general, as the state attorney general and as a regional federal assistant attorney general. Most recently, he worked for the law firm of a powerful politician in Mexico City.

Calderón and his supporters in Chihuahua state said his previous experience makes him highly qualified for the post.

Chávez defended his record as one that addressed crime by putting people in jail, including several men suspected of killing the women.

However, critics contend Calderón should not gloss over some important and inconvenient facts about Chávez’s past performance.

For example, the notorious and brutal murders of girls and young women in Juárez began and grew under his watch. He and other Chihuahua state officials blamed the victims for their deaths: They were prostitutes, dressing provocatively and hanged out with a bad crowd.

In 1998, the Mexican National Commission for Human Rights, a federal government agency, issued a scathing report that recomended investigating and sanctioning the officials in charge of the women’s murder investigations.

Raul Romeva, a respected member of the European Parliament representing Spain, issued a statement criticizing Chávez’s nomination.

Romeva visited Mexico when he investigated the Juárez women’s murders, and continues to stay in touch with victims” relatives.

Hester Van Nierop, a citizen of the Netherlands, is among the murdered women whose cases are unsolved. As of this month, more than 600 girls and women have been killed in Juárez. Similar murders have occurred in other parts of Mexico where the drug cartels are active.

Another significant trend began while Chávez served as Chihuahua state’s top law enforcement official: the birth and explosive growth of the Carrillo Fuentes drug cartel.

Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the cartel’s founder, lived in Juárez, where he owned several properties and his children attended schools. He was known for giving lavish parties that important business leaders and politicians attended.

During the mid-1990’s, the cartel disappeared hundreds of people (mostly men) in Juárez, including more than 50 U.S. citizens. No one was ever arrested or charged with these abductions.

El Paso businessman Jaime Hervella said Chávez gave families of the missing people misleading information about their fates. “He told them they were taken across the border and turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration,” he said. The DEA scoffed at this allegation.

Hervella and others who are familiar with the early years of the Carrillo Fuentes cartel are not surprised at the present carnage in Juárez.

Judith Galarza, a human rights activist, heard Chávez say once that his staff knew organized crime was behind many of the crimes in Juárez but that his people were afraid to take them on.

This is the same man Calderón has selected to lead the Mexican country’s war against nationwide organized crime and the drug cartels. Hispanic Link.

Diana Washington Valdez is a journalist-author based in El Paso, Texas; ­dwvaldez@gmail.com.

by Roberto Lovato

Who would have thought that CNN’s Lou Dobbs would be the person most responsible for pushing Latinos to build a civil and human rights movement for the media age?

After being attacked and beaten down day in and day out on CNN by Dobbs for so many years, Latinos across the country are starting literally to torch with their fingers and saying basta, enough is enough.

Far from abandoning the years of street actions protesting CNN’s unwillingness to heed our ongoing concerns about Dobbs’ anti-Latino fear-mongering disguised as nightly “news,” Latinos are now adding digitally-driven action to what is becoming a major online and offline political movement: thousands of English- and Spanish-language speakers have already signed our petition at www.bastadobbs.com.

Others are text messaging the words “ENOUGH” OR “BASTA” to 3-0-6-4-4 to demand that CNN dump Dobbs. Several other campaigns targeting Dobbs are growing rapidly. Armies of Twitterers are sending messages to Soledad O’Brien demanding she use her influence at CNN to take a stand against Dobbs.

Dobbs has started to feel the growing pressure coming from our movement. He fulminated and fumbled as he attacked our bastadobbs campaign and even called me a “left wing propagandist” and a “flea” during a more than 2-minute on-air rant last week. But instead of personalizing or reacting to Dobbs’ puerile ploys, we are focused to carry out an unprecedented national campaign that will bring about his media demise.

Presente.org and its partner organizations in the 25 U.S. cities with the largest Latino television audiences adding up to 75 percent of all Latino television viewing audiences are leading the charge not just against Lou Dobbs, but on CNN itself.

We hold CNN and its president, Jon Klein, ultimately responsible for keeping the media personality most committed to promoting anti-Latino hatred among millions on an almost daily basis. Using a combination of traditional and new media, we are informing ourselves about and mobilizing around the threat posed by CNN and Dobbs, whom many of us consider the Most Dangerous Man for Latinos in America.

Dobbs’ threat to Latinos and to the brand of the news organization claiming to have the “most trusted name in news” are rooted in the three pillars of Dobbs’ near-daily attacks: n obsession with Latinos and immigrants, n promotion of systematic myths about Latinos, and n immigrants and, most dangerously, providing a platform for leaders of the most radical and violent anti-Latino groups in the United States.

The media mud on the face of CNN president Jon Klein was on full display recently.

Without even blinking, Dobbs broadcast his radio show from a national lobbying conference sponsored by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), founded by a white nationalist and designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Such behavior by Dobbs has sparked Latino media activism like that found at ­www.bastadobbs.com and reported on in the Latino media.

Front page articles, spirited editorials and major television and radio reports about CNN and Dobbs are filling the Spanish-language media (all except CNN en Español, which does not translate or distribute Dobbs for its Spanish-speaking network) More than anyone else, Dobbs is helping English- and Spanish-language media and the larger Latino community make the connection in several recent reports: that there is a growing link between anti-immigrant hate speech on television and increased violence against Latinos in our hometowns. Thanks, in no small part to the threat posed by Dobbs and CNN, we are building a major civil and human rights movement of the media age. Hispanic Link.

(Roberto Lovato is a founding member of presente.org, the sponsor of the www.bastadobbs.com campaign. He also writes for New America Media, the Nation and other outlets.) ©2009