by Jacqueline Baylon

No offenses this time: After an exchange of offenses they get together at the Americas Summit.Could they be friends?

Next year’s April 1 Decennial Census kickoff is already attracting lots of interest and some apprehension in the Hispanic community. As Latino organizations pledge to work with the Census Bureau this time around, they’re expressing concern that the federal government could, among other worries, miss counting well over a million Hispanics, as it admitted to doing in 2000.

Several Hispanic organizations have joined­ forces to helpthe Census Bureau by launching the campaign Ya es hora, ¡Hágase Contar (It’s Time, Make Yourself Count!).

The project is led by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, which promotes participation of Latinos in the U.S. political process.

In 2006, the Ya es Hora ¡Ciudadanía! drive was geared to encourage eligible permanent residents to apply for U.S. citizenship. In 2008, a second phase, Ya es Hora jVe y Vota!, rallied Latinos to participate in that year’s presidential election.

Now, with the partnership of Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, NALEO’s Educational Fund, along with the National Council of La Raza, League of United Latin American Citizens, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other ethnic and union groups, the civic action continues with a focus on obtaining a full Census count.

Involved also are several Spanish-language media companies, among them Azteca America, Entravisión Communications, ImpreMedia, Univision Communications and Telemundo.

On April 1 the latter cable channel, which is directed at bilingual Latinos, kicked off its public service campaign “Hazle Contar!” (Be Counted). Organizations partnering with Telemundo include LULAC, the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute and MANA, a National Latina Organization.

The 2010 Census is expected to cost the government $14 billion. The U.S~ Constitution requires the Census Bureau to count everyone residing in the United States and its territories every ten years regardless of immigration status.

Angelo Falcón, president of the New York-based National Institute for Latino Policy, says to ensure a valid tally, the bureau must hire trained bilingual enumerators, including a sufficient number to reach growing immigrant populations who speak indigenous languages Falcon, who serves as a member of the Census Bureau’s Hispanic advisory committee and chairs the watchdog Latino Census Network, a collaborative of some 30 organizations focused on census issues, mentions workplace raids by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a potentially serious turn-off to communities whose cooperation is essential.

Gabriela Lemus, president of Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, told Weekly Report her organization has already gone on record asking ICE to discontinue its aggressive actions that breed distrust of our government and disrupt families. I CE should direct its enforcement attention to employers who are breaking the law.

If the 3 percent Hispanic undercount of 2000 Census is repeated in 2010, 1.4 million Latinos will be missed, by the bureau’s own admission.

That, advocates point congressional districts.

“The census is the foundation of our democracy and we cannot have fair representation as Latinos in Congress and state legislatures without a full census,” says Arturo Vargas, NALEO executive director.

Raúl Cisneros, Decennial’s media relations branch chief at the U.S. Department of Commerce, explains, “The count is used to determine how many seats each state will have in the U. S. House of Representatives.”

More than $300 billion in federal funds is awarded based of census data to states and communities to support a variety of programs and public services.

More than 15 percent of the nation’s population is Hispanic. Between 2010 and 2050 the Hispanic population is projected to triple, raising its proportion to 25 percent.

The Census Bureau projects Hispanics’ economic muscle will rise from $662 billion in 2007 to more than $1.2 trillion in 2012, accounting for 9.7 percent of all U.S. buying power. Hispanic Link.­

­U.S. indicts most wanted Cuban

Luis Posada Carriles

On April 8 a US federal grand jury in El Paso, Texas accused a Cuban-born Venezuelan, Luis Posada Carriles (81), a former CIA employee and confessed terrorist, of lying about his involvement in a string of 1997 bombings against tourist spots in Havana, Cuba. The latest ruling is the first time Posada Carriles has been accused in the US of involvement in the bombings. The US judicial case against the exile, driven by the Justice Department, is slowly gathering momentum. In theory, the latest ruling could eventually pave the way towards his extradition. That could represent a significant political gesture on the part of the US, which has previously refused to extradite him on the grounds that he could face torture in the petitioning state (Venezuela). For the new US president, Barack Obama, who is facing pressure to alter US-Cuba policy, the ruling is nicely timed.

Can Cuba cope with an onslaught of Americans?

HAVANA – A push in Congress to do away with U.S. travel bans on Cuba could set off a flood of American visitors to the long-forbidden island.

But many wonder if a country where foreigners have long complained about lousy food, sluggish service and iffy infrastructure is ready for an onslaught of Americans unseen since the days of Meyer Lansky and Al Capone.

Cuba has about as many hotel rooms as Detroit and most are already full of Canadians and Europeans.

Experts say droves of Americans could drive up prices, unleash calls for more fl ights and cruises than Cuba can handle and force the government to tighten visa restrictions to regulate the stampede.

“There is great pent-up demand,” said Bob Whitley, president of the United States Tour Operators Association, which opposes the travel ban. “It will have to be controlled by offi cials in Cuba, but also by U.S. tour operators to make sure the infrastructure is up to it.”

Obama’s first regional summit sees Cuba on the agenda

When the fifth Summit of the Americas takes place in Port of Spain on April 17-19, U.S. President Barack Obama’s first formal encounter with the region’s leaders as a group will be hallmarked by an important change in hemispheric relations: he will be the representative of one of only two countries that do not have diplomatic ties with Cuba — and the other one, El Salvador, is only a few months away from restoring diplomatic relations with the island. Behind this is another, related change: the repositioning of Cuba vis-à-vis Venezuela.

How Latin America fits into the “New World Order” and the challenges ahead

The British Prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced the creation of a “New World Order” at the conclusion of the summit of the 20 leading economies (G20) in London last week to discuss solutions for the global economic crisis. It is an overblown epithet, of course, as misleading as the headline-grabbing promise of US$1.1 trillion funding for the IMF, most of which consisted of old commitments. But, the three Latin ­American nations present Argentina, Brazil and Mexico – emerged content that IMF conditions for loans, such as deeply unpopular fiscal adjustments, would be removed, and the Fund reformed to make it more meritocratic. They also hailed (somewhat woolly) promises to clamp down on tax havens and eschew trade protectionism. (Latin news and Associated Press contributed to this report).

por David Bacon

(Labor writer David Bacon, author of the controversial 2008 book Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, wrote a lengthy commentary for New America Media providing context to the nation’s Upcoming and 200ti immigrant protest marches. For Weekly Report readers, it is condensed into two pants).

OAKLAND, Calif.— On May 1 hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of U.S. immigrants and their supporters will fill the streets across the United States. Their May Day marches will make important demands on the Obama Administration: End the draconian enforcement policies. Establish a new immigration policy based on human rights and recognition of the crucial economic and social contributions of immigrants to our society.

May Day celebrates worldwide the contributions of working people. Three years ago a million people filled the streets of Los Angeles, with hundreds of thousands more in Chicago, New York and other cities and towns throughout the United States.

Again on May Day in 2007 and 2008, immigrants and their supporters coast to coast demonstrated.

One sign prominent in almost every march said it all: “We are Workers not Criminals!”

It stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to the United States to work, some with visas, others without them. But all are contributors to our society.

The protests are a result of years of organizing, the legacy of immigrant rights pioneer Bert Corona. He taught thousands of immigrant activists the value of political in dependence. Most of the leaders of the radical wing of today’s immigrant rights movement limwere his students.

In part, the May Day protests respond to a wave of measures that have criminalized immigration status and work itself. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it a crime for the first time in U.S. history to hire people who lack papers.

Defenders argued that if people could not work legally they would leave.

Life was not so simple.

Undocumented people are part of the communities where they live. They cannot simply go, nor should they.

They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that U.5. workers have fought for historically. For most immigrants there are no jobs to return to in the countries they left.

After Congress passed The North American Free Trade Agreement, six million Mexicans came here as a result of the massive displacement the treaty caused. Free trade and free market policies have similarly displaced millions more in poor eountries around the world.

In reality, the labor of 12 million undocumented workers is indispensable to this nation’s economy. The wealth created by undocumented workers is never called illegal. No one dreams of taking that wealth from the employers who profited from it. Yet the people who produce this wealth are called exactly that—illegal.

In a country with schools lagging behind the rest of the industrialized world, with bridges that fall into rivers and people living in tent cities for lack of housing, there is clearly no shortage of work to be done. If the trillion dollars showered on banks were used instead to put people to work, there would be plenty of jobs and a better quality of life for everyone.

Nativo López, president of the Mexican American Political Association and the Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, says, “Washington legislators and lobbyists fear a new civil rights movement in the streets, because it rejects their compromises and makes demands that go beyond what they have defined as ‘politically possible.”’

­The price of trying to push out people who have coma here for survival is increased vulnerability for undocumented workers. This ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone. Under Bush, that was the government’s goal—cheap labor for large employers, enforced by deportations, firings and guest worker programs. This is what millions of people want to change. The Obama administration was elected because it promised “change we can believe in.”

In past May Day marches many participants have put forward an alternative set of demands, which include tying legalization for 12 million undocumented people with jobs programs for communities with high unemployment.

All workers need the right to organize to raise wages and gain workplace rights, including the 12 million people for whom work is a crime. More green cards, especially visas based on family reunification, would enable people to cross the border legally, instead of dying in the desert.

Ending guest worker programs would help stop the use of our immigration system as a supply of cheap labor for employers. And on the border, communities want human rights, not more guns, walls, soldiers and prisons for immigrants.

This May Day, immigrants will again send this powerful message. Their marches have already rescued from obscurity our own holiday, which began in the struggle for the eight-hour day in Chicago over a century ago. Today they are giving May Day a new meaning, putting forward ideas that will not only benefit immigrant communities, but all working families. Hispanic Link.

(Next: The failed United States response.)

­by Marvin Ramírez

­MUSIC IS MOURNING: Friends of Guillermo Guillén who saw him arrive to San Francisco sevaral decades ago, today they say good-bye. From left to right: Marvin Ramírez, editor de El Reportero; los congueros Emilio Pérez, Humberto López; singers Manuel Ernesto Guadamuz, Edgar ‘Gato’ Aguilar; percussionist and bassist Jaime Vanegas, (raw below) percussionist Donaldo Mantilla, bassist Danilo Murillo, persucionist Bayardo Rocha, and singerTomás Gutiérrez.

The current economic crisis affecting the U.S. and the rest of the world was not an impediment for approximately 40 Bay Area women from building hope for themselves by creating the business of their dream. They all graduated on May 4 amid a grand fiesta at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Some had their own exhibition booth on display for business.

Armed with a business card, a business plan, and the energy and skills they learned, they were ready to conquest the world of commerce.

It took them months to achieve their effort. From setting up a restaurant to many other type of business plans, the women worked hard and with dedication, determined not to let their family daily obligations to interfere in their goal.

Every year, the non-profit organization, ALAS or Women’s Initiative graduates dozens of new students, and helps build the entrepreneurial capacity of women to overcome economic and social barriers and achieve self-sufficiency.

Through out the years, the Mission District-based organization has help hundreds of women create jobs for themselves, access the mainstream economy, and increase their economic self-sufficiency when they are given business planning and financing support, according to their program description.

Many of them never had the opportunity to attend school or improve their working skills over their lifetime, either because they were busy raising a family or simply because they were unaware of their potentials and did not know from where to start.

However, as many women lose their life partners or the bread-maker in the home, they fi nd themselves unable to survive on their own, or because of lack of work skills fi nd it hard to fi nd jobs.

But ALAS (Alternativas para Latinas en Autosuficiencia) program, which boasts culturally competent services and extensive net­works that propel Latina entrepreneurs into business success, has become the perfect solution for these women.

The program targets low-income women of traditionally underserved groups including minorities, immigrants, and welfare recipients. Over half of the Women’s Initiative community participates in our classes offered in Spanish through ALAS.

by Edward Helmore

Carlos Slim

Carlos Slim, the Mexican banking and telecoms tycoon sometimes ranked as the world’s richest man, has said his £12m-£14m stake in the Independent was a mistaken investment — “a bad one”.

The comments come in a wide-ranging profile in the New Yorker, designed to investigate the 69-year-old’s plans for the New York Times Company, the troubled media group he provided with a $250m (£157m) credit lifeline this year.

Slim’s comments over his 2008 investment in Sir Anthony O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media – long thought to be orchestrated by O’Reilly’s arch rival Denis O’Brien – come soon after the troubled media group agreed a “standstill deal” with creditors that will end on 26 June.

But Slim showed no similar regret over his stake in the New York Times.

“We think it’s the best newspaper,” he said. “The best brand … We believe in media content. We think the paper will disappear, but not the content. The content will be more important.”

Slim indicated that he does not view his non-voting stake as a precursor to making a bid for outright ownership.

“Our business is to be the carriers,” Slim said, referring to his business as one of Latin and South America’s largest cellphone and broadband providers. “If I wanted to buy a newspaper, I would have done that fifty years ago…”

But there are fears the Times could file for bankruptcy within a year and, unless a new business model can found soon, that the entire industry may be on the brink of rapid contraction. Slim indicated that he was confident that major news brands will survive.

While many within the Times expressed concern that the controlling Sulzberger family preferred to make a deal with reputed monopolist Slim over a similar offer from former US record mogul David Geffen, Slim offered the New Yorker a glimpse into his thinking.

Investing in a downturn – a trick he has repeatedly used to build his empire – will give him an advantage over rivals who are hunkering down or do not have the liquidity to exploit the situation, the magazine said. In this context, Slim’s investment in the Times is a bet on the long-term value of journalism. “I think content and information are important for our new civilization”, he said. (The ­Guardian.co.uk).

by Cindy Von Quednow

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Of the 40,000 Salvadorans living outside this nation of seven million who were eligible to vote in its presidential election March 15, only 221 did so, according to El Salvador’s Supreme Tribunal Electorate.

Of those, 122 cast ballots for former CNN newsman Mauricio Funes, the candidate for the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), while 99 went to the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) candidate, Rodrigo Avila.

Funes won, 51 percent-49 percent.

The preference of those living abroad reflected the rest of the electorate in the first FMLN victory in history, which ended the 20year rule of its right-wing government Unlike Mexico and Peru, the Salvadoran government requires nationals who live outside the country to obtain an identification card and vote in person.

While ARENA’s Avila had opposed allowing those Salvadorans living abroad to vote as too difficult and costly, FMLN Vice President-elect Salvador Sanchez Cerén argued they should not be denied that right. He promised to “work hard…with initiative” to allow them to participate in choosing the country’s elected officials in the future.

There are now an estimated 2.5-to-3 million Salvadorans living in the United States, most from refugee families who fled its civil war during the’80s and ‘9Os.

Gisela Edith Bustamante, who flew “home” to cast her ballot this month, agrees: “In a moment such as this, we have an opportunity to change the country’s history.” The San Salvador native has lived for eight years in Washington, D.C.

By Census count, 200,000 Salvadorans reside in the capital and surrounding suburbs, making it the second largest U S. conclave of Salvadoran immigrants after Los Angeles, which has 350,000.

Like other Salvadorans living in the exterior, Bustamante was assigned to vote in San Salvador’s Mágico Gonzalez Stadium.

To cast his vote, Benito Garcia, dressed in the red, white and blue colors of the ARENA party, had traveled from Bethesda, Md., where he has lived for 25 years. “If we could vote from there, we wouldn’t lose time off from work,” he said.

This was also the feeling in Ana Gladys Rubio’s family. She flew in from Los Angeles.

Her husband stayed home. “Someone had to work,” said Rubio, who lived in Arlington, Va. for 18 years before moving West.

A survey conducted at the Central American Research and Policy Institute at California State University – Northridge showed that 87% of the Salvadorans living in the Los Angeles area would have liked to have voted from their U.S. city of residence Some 300 people participated in a March 8 symbolic election in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, a haven for Central American immigrants.

CARPI director Douglas Carranza noted that the results of El Salvador’s election clearly mimicked those of the survey, which showed that while there was a will to vote, most people could not do so because of immigration status, cost or time constraints.

TSE president Walter Araujo, who visited the stadium on election-day morning, emphasized the importance of being able to vote outside the country, stating, “Salvadorans want to participate in their democracy, even when they are far away. The state should revise the Constitution, and that can be done by the national assembly.”

(Cindy Von Quednow traveled to San Salvador to cover the election for Hispanic Link and El Nuevo Sol elnuevosol.net Email her at: ­vonquizu@gmail.com).