by Juliana Birnbaum Fox

About 100 North American activists from No Borders Camp succesfully established itself on the U.S./Mexico border, while about 25 counter parts in Mexico encamped in the Mexican side on Nov. 7, 2007.(photo by Indybay)

Berkeley City Council unanimously passed a resolution last week condemning the federal government’s 1.2 billion dollar U.S.- Mexico border wall, stating that “billions of federal dollars intended for the border wall should be invested in health care, housing, education, job training, and infrastructure that will provide visible and tangible return to the country…” The resolution continued the Berkeley Council’s strong anti-military stance that created controversy last month regarding the Marine recruiting center there. “The border wall will have a destructive effect on the environment, economy and on human lives,” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who introduced the resolution to the Berkeley City Council.

For those living along the international boundary zone, the wall could have a devastating impact, both environmentally and economically.

Lipan Apache activist and South Texas Land Grant community member Margo Tamez stated that a number of fragile plant and animal species are being affected by the clearing of the area to make it easier to track illegal migrants. Free Trade agreements have already forced indigenous peoples into exile from their homelands in the south.

The resolution also points out the devastating economic impact the border wall will have on South Texas, where residents on both sides of the border shop and carry out commerce in the neighboring countries.

President Bush signs the border bill. Witnesses, from left, a­re Janet Napolitano, J.D. Hayworth, Rick Renzi, Jon Kyl and Trent Franks.(photo by the El Reportero Wire Services)

“It is our ancestors who worked these lands prior to the first contact between the Spanish and the indigenous,” Tamez said in a prepared statement, thanking the Berkeley City Council.

“And since that time, for the last four centuries, our ancestors have suffered much and they and the memories of our hardships are buried in these lands. It is only fi tting that the indigenous now stand up in a call for unity and justice….We are honored on this day by your resolution to stop the “wall of death.”

“Among the many issues about the wall that Homeland Security is lawlessly constructing through the International Boundary Zone between the US and Mexico, perhaps the least known issue is the continuous militarization of the indigenous communities who have been and still are terrorized bi-national peoples ever since the lines were drawn,” activist Wendy Kenin told the council at the February 26 meeting.

Homeland Security filed suit in January against Eloisa Garcia Tamez, who has been leading the resistance to the seizures of private lands in Texas. The Berkeley resolution points out that Homeland Security is waiving numerous laws, including the Endangered Species Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Coastal Zone Management Act, Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act among others, in order to construct the wall.

“There is clear documentation that shows militarizing a boundary zone between nation-states increases the likelihood that people will die. Many local jurisdictions are facing fi nancial crisis and could use additional monies to offset the loss of revenues from the housing market slump, the impending recession, and the cost of the war in Iraq,” stated Gabriel Hernandez, a long-time human rights activist who drafted the resolution.

The Berkeley No-Border Wall Resolution follows a number of other jurisdictions, including several Texas-Mexico border towns, and is being considered for adoption by government bodies and institutions from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas.

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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.)