by the El Reportero news services

Evo Morales

On 28 February Bolivia’s congress set the dates for two referendums on the new constitution and land reform and passed a law giving congress the power to call departmental referendums.

This is a triumph for President Evo Morales and his ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and another step forward in approving the new draft constitution while blocking the opposition prefects’ demands for autonomy.

The problem for the government is the way congress approved the legislation. The proposal was approved in under an hour with almost no formal debate, in a joint session of both house of congress by a two thirds majority of those present.

Many opposition legislators were reportedly blocked from entering the congressional building by flag-waving Morales supporters and miners in hardhats.

Venezuelan oil buying votes?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rode to the rescue of his Nicaraguan counterpart by providing discounted oil has raised concerns among U.S. and Salvadoran officials that he will do the same in El Salvador, reported AFE.

A report from the director of U.S. national intelligence suggests Mr. Chavez will bankroll a Marxist presidential candidate there.

SANTA CRUZ, El Salvador — Officials in the United States and El Salvador fear that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez plans to use his nation’s oil wealth to back the presidential candidate from the Marxist FMLN, which waged an armed insurgency during the 1980s.

The concern stems from recent gains by the Sandinista front in Nicaragua, where party leader Daniel Ortega won the presidency in 2006 after 16 years in the opposition.

Local press reports claim the widespread availability of discounted oil supplied by Mr. Chavez’s government prior to Nicaragua’s election contributed to Mr. Ortega’s win.

U.S. officials fear Mr. Chavez will do the same in El Salvador.

“We foresee that Chavez will provide generous financing to the campaign of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front [FMLN] in El Salvador in an attempt to secure the presidential elections of 2009,” said a report presented to Congress this month by National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell.

Mexico impinges on US elections

In a crucial TV debate on Feb. 26 the two leading Democrat candidates for the party’s presidential nomination threatened to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). Neither candidate appeared to have thought through the implications of the proposal, which could further destabilize Mexico.

The market turns Latin America’s way

Fidel Castro, one of the rare revolutionary leaderssecure enough to announce his retirement, has been lauded for the wrong reasons. Cuba had the best health and education indices in Latin America when Fidel’s revolution succeeded in 1959. So maintaining them was not a tremendous achievement, despite the US embargo.

Fidel’s greater achievement, in the eyes of many Latin American nationalists, was withstanding 49 years of almost constant pressure from the US. The price Cubans had to pay for this, in human rights, lack of foreign investment and, perversely, a growing gap between rich and poor, is high.

The assessment submitted by Mr. McConnell, who oversees and coordinates the work of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, warned that Mr. Chavez seeks to “expand the activities of Venezuela in Central America,” where he already counts Mr. Ortega as an “unconditionally.”

Speaking on his weekly TV show, “Hello President,” Mr. Chavez called the reports a “lie” and insisted that the FMLN “doesn’t need” his help.

­by Marc Heller

Fidel Castro

While Fidel Castro announced Feb. 19 that he is resigning the Cuban presidency, not everyone this lawside of the Florida Straits is buying the idea that he’s giving up power.

Cuban-American lawmakers in Florida have a lukewarm response. A MiamiDade College expert on Cuba says the pace of change still depends mostly on Fidel, not on his brother Raúl, to whom he is passing the presidency.

If Castro is gravely ill and incapacitated, as some evidence suggests, the transfer of power will be genuine enough to permit a loosening of economic policies and possibly more freedom to travel outside the country, says Miami-Dade College sociology professor Juan Clark.

But if Fidel is well enough, it’s unlikely he will fully surrender control, says Clark, author of Cuba: Myth and Reality.

Clark’s analysis is part of the educatedguessing game after nearly five decades of one-man rule. “If he’s totally incapacitated and Raúl really takes over, we should see action to help the economic condition,” Clark said in a telephone interview.

An obvious indication, he suggests, will be if Fidel shows up in public, something he has not done in some time. Clark is not alone in his skepticism. Florida Cubans serving in Congress, all Republicans, give a subdued welcome to the news. “There has been no change in totalitarian Cuba,” Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart maintains.

“Fidel Castro has been critically ill and immobile for over a year and a half, but the dictator’s written declarations have the effect of totalitarian decrees, whether signed with the title Commander in Chief or Comrade, or simply with his name.”

Díaz-Balart’s brother Mario, also a House member, offers a similar statement. “He is still the dictator and in control. True change will not begin until all political prisoners are released, political parties, labor unions and free press are legalized, and the process of free, supervised, multi-party elections begins.”

U.S. Sen. Mel Martínez says cautiously the announcement may lead to progress. But in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, 104 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, embrace the idea that real power is shifting. No representatives from Florida signed.

“For five decades, U.S. policy has tried economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation,” the lawmakers wrote. “Our policy leaves us without influence at this critical moment, and this serves neither the U.S. national interest nor average Cubans, the intended beneficiaries.”

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who like Mel Martínez fled Cuba as a child, took the opportunity to call for Castro’s trial in the United States on murder charges related to the 1996 downing of airplanes carrying four anti-Castro activists whom Cuba claimed were violating its air space.

If Raúl Castro gains real power, economic liberalization could come quickly, Clark says. He calls Raúl more of a “normal person” than his brother and suggests he could free some political prisoners if he believes their main beef is with Fidel.
Hispanic Link.

by José de la Isla

D’Vera Cohn and Jeffery Passel authored a new Pew Hispanic Center study projecting U.S. population growth for the next four decades. At the end of their press conference announcing their findings, they declined to draw conclusions from their report.

That is not a constraint here.

However, they did slip in a suggestion that high intermarriage rates among Latinos and other ethnic groups may find Latinos no longer identifying as such.

Cohen and Passel project the total U.S. population will increase nearly 50 percent by 2050, from 300 million today to 438 million in the next two and a half generations. They estimate that newly arriving immigrants will account for 47 percent of the growth, while their children and grandchildren will be responsible for 35 percent.

Latinos, now 14 percent of the national total, and already the largest so-called “minority” group, will increase to 29 percent.

Blacks are expected to remain at 13 percent and whites, at 47 percent, will also become a minority.

While today immigrants are one in eight of the nation’s population, the ratio will decrease to one in five.

Cohn and Passel’s findings are in line with projections made since 1990 about the expected fast : Hispanic demographic growth. However, more significant might be the social and cultural changes coming to the general population.

A 2003 study by Roberto Suro and Passel reported that first generation Latinos, like other immigrants; tend to marry within their ethnic/racial group. Only about 8 percent of foreign-born Hispanics marry outside the group. But not so with the generations that follow: 32 percent of the second-generation and 57 percent of the third-plus generations are projected to intermarry.

The greatest change as we morph into 2050 may not be in ethnic, racial or other groupings. Instead, the biggest changes may come from how popular thinking is tweaked. Racial stigma, evident since the 1920s, are now on their death throes.

Most prejudicial racial and ethnocentric attitudes will not survive the trip to 2050.

The reason? Negative attitudes against ethnic groups will increasingly apply to one’s own family or circle of friends. Racists (overt and covert) are the dinosaurs of the current age.

A broader notion about national identity will probably emerge. Since the 1920s, which defined the United States as a unique club possessing the national values, a more open society, even an international one, will become the predominant ideology. We talk that way now, but we will become it in the next period.

To get some perspective on the road ahead, it’s helpful to imagine what 2050 will look like. Imagine today is 1960. Then think about each and every milestone and setback from 1960 to today. Then multiple that by two or three to account for the wind-sheer acceleration events get from knowledge and experience. Welcome to 2050.

(Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service.)

by David McClymonds

San Francisco’s educational pride: Left-right: San Francisco City College Trustees Dr. Natalie Berg, John Rizzo, Julio Ramos, Diana Munoz-Villanueva, SF Mayor Gavin Newsom, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and City College President Lawrence Wong. ( photo by David Mcclymonds )

Hundreds gathered to hear remarks from Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Mayor Gavin Newsom and other officials during the Grand Opening and Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony of City College of San Francisco’s Mission Campus Wednesday Feb. 20.

The ceremony took place in the Campus Theatre and lobby of City College’s newest satellite campus located at 1125 Valencia St in the Mission District.  The new campus replaces the temporary City College Mission Campus on Alabama Street.

“It’s fabulous to have this in the Mission District, a place where our community began and where diversity is the order of the day,” House Speaker Pelosi told approximately 500 people during her ten-minute speech. “Just think of the possibilities.”

City College Chancellor Philip R. Day, Jr. welcomed the attending officials who included, besides House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and mayor Gavin Newsom, City College Board of Trustees President Lawrence Wong, Supervisor Tom Ammiano and Mission Campus Dean Carlota del Portillo.

“Today we celebrate the reality of a dream that we have pursued for 34 years–a permanent home for the Mission Campus,” Dr. del Portillo said.  “The future is ours as our children and grandchildren will proudly say, ‘Si se pudo–Yes we could and we did.’”

A night view of City College of SF

“It’s not just young people that need the skills, that need the education,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said in his brief speech, “it’s all of us in this changing environment with so much uncertainty.”

The speeches of about 10 elected officials and members of City College’s administration took just under an hour and was immediately followed by a ribbon-cutting, taking place in the school’s lobby which stands back from the school’s main entrance on Valencia Street.  A mariachi band played soon after the ribbon was cut by several of the speakers.

San Francisco voters approved bond funds in 1995, 2001 and 2005 needed to construct the new campus.  Construction of the campus was financed by proposition A, educational facilities improvement bonds, and included a state contribution of $30 million.

The new four-story school complex took $75.6 million and two years to build.  The two buildings which make up the satellite campus at 22nd and Valencia streets is just under 200,000 square feet. Classes at the Mission Campus started in August 2007, but enrollment grew to approximately 11,000 credit and noncredit students this Spring semester.

The new campus houses a child development center, a career placement and development center, graphic communications, administration of justice and business programs, science and computer labs, a bookstore, a cafe, a theater and a library.

Approximately 150 credit classes are offered at the new Mission Campus which include evening and Saturday classes.  Tuition at City College is $20 per unit for California residents. Noncredit classes such as English as a Second Language and computer technology classes are offered to the public free and without required proof of citizenship.

City College of San Francisco was founded in 1935 and is the largest, single-administration community college in California. The school offers courses in more than 50 academic programs and over 100 occupational disciplines at the main campus in Ingleside and at its 10 neighborhood satellite locations. City College employs 728 full-time and 1,371 part-time faculty, teaching approximately 100,000 credit and noncredit students annually.

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