Viva Carnaval SF 2007

After going through a real ordeal raising money to make it possible to have a Carnaval float for the Nicaraguan community, Dominga Gómez, and members of her Sacuanjoche Nicaraguan folklore dance school, proudly paraded along Mission Street as part of dozen other nationalities who showcased their country’s culture. Carnaval SF 2007 was one of the largest of its kind of the annual event’s history, with more floats and booths than in previous years. Carnaval SF is sponsored by the San Francisco Neighborhood Centers.

by the El Reportero’s news services

Judgment nears in landmark $6-billion-environmental trial

Quito – Chevron’s three decades of devastating toxic dumping in the Ecuadorian rainforest will be in the spotlight this week as the actress and environmentalist Daryl Hannah, tours communities ravaged by cancer and other diseases related to the contamination.

Meanwhile the Crude Reflections photo exhibit, which graphically illustrates the human toll of the disaster, will go on display in Ecuador for the first time, at Quito’s prestigious Guayasamin Museum. The opening, on Wednesday, will be attended by Ms. Hannah and Q’orianka Kilcher, who starred as Pocahontas, opposite Colin Farrell, in “The New World”. Ms. Kilcher is of mixed Peruvian indigenous descent and is Amazon Watch’s Youth Ambassador. Last year she visited Achuar communities poisoned by toxic dumping in the northern Peruvian Amazon.

The developments come as a landmark class-action lawsuit against Texaco (now Chevron), which has dragged on for years, is finally due to reach a conclusion in early 2008. The presence of Ms. Hannah and Ms. Kilcher are expected to generate huge public interest in Ecuador where Texaco operated from the 1960s to the 1990s, making billions of dollars of profit.

During that period Texaco dumped 18.5 billion gallons of formation waters, a toxic byproduct of the drilling process, directly into a vast inhabited area of the northern Ecuadorian Amazon in contravention of industry standards of the time. The 30,000 plaintiffs are demanding an environmental remediation that has been provisionally priced at $6 billion.

Uribe hopes to wrongfoot opponents with sudden prisoner release

COLOMBIA – With the parapolitical scandal threatening to turn Colombia into an international “pariah”, in the words of President Alvaro Uribe himself, the government has attempted to take the initiative by offering to release hundreds of imprisoned guerrillas. The idea has two purposes: to distract attention away from the revelations about the government’s links with paramilitary organisations and to persuade the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia to release some of its high-profile hostages, including the former presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt.

Kirchnerista Filmus second in Buenos Aires

ARGENTINA – The rightwing businessman Mauricio Macri won 3 June’s election for the Buenos Aires mayoralty with a convincing 45.6 percent of votes, but will have to face a runoff with President Néstor Kirchner’s favoured candidate, Education Minister Daniel Filmus, who got 24 percent. The polls had all predicted that Macri would win, although not by such a wide margin. The real race was for second place and between the incumbent mayor Jorge Telerman and Filmus. The Kirchner camp loudly celebrated Filmus’s second-place performance; this election was a test of the president’s own popularity and had Filmus failed to even make the runoffs it would have boded ill for the incumbent administration in October’s general elections. The turnout was surprisingly high at over 75 percent.­

El debate sigue tras el receso

by Alex Meneses Miyashita

­Cecilia Muñoz

Hispanic advocates are coming out against the bipartisan compromise immigration bill introduced in the U.S. Senate May 17 and promise they will keep pressing to improve it.

The Senate resumes debate on the bill when it returns from its Memorial Day recess June 4.

The Border Security | and Immigration Re- | form Act of 2007 includes enhanced border security and workplace measures required to be implemented to trigger a temporary worker program and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Latino and pro-immigrant organizations have listed as their main concerns in the bill cutbacks to family immigration under a proposed system based on points and a guest worker program that does not offer participants a path to citizenship.

At the same time, they view the ongoing debate as a critical opportunity to ensure a pathway to legalization for millions of undocumented residents in the country.

“Failing to act is not an option here,” said National Council of La Raza vice president Cecilia Munoz. Brent Wilkes, Washington director of the League of United Latin American citizens,said, “We are willing to compromise, but it has to be for the right reasons.”

Groups which officially declared their opposition to the bill included LULAC, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the Hispanic Federation, the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, the National Day Laborer Association and the William C. Velázquez Institute.

Other organizations, such as La Raza, Latino and civil rights groups claim the law would harm undocumented immigrants. While several of the bills listed by the NCSL in its preliminary analysis would include certain benefits to undocumented immigrants, the great majority of the legislative proposals would penalize them.

The state bills most commonly range from restricting services for undocumented immigrants, penalizing employers for hiring them, allowing state and local police to enter a federal program to enforce immigration law and requiring proof of citizenship to vote, among others.

Legislation extending benefits to undocumented immigrants commonly range from granting them driving certificates and in-state school tuition and funding English-language learning programs.

Oklahoma, Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee have introduced comprehensive proposals as defi ned by the NCSL. These address several elements and target undocumented immigrants and employers who hire them.

Most recently, the Oklahoma state Senate passed 41-6 legislation which has been reported as one of the country’s most restrictive bills against undocumented immigrants.

It penalizes employers hiring them, criminalizes harboring or sheltering them, strips public benefi ts away from them and allows local police to enter a federal program to enforce immigration law.

Sen. James William-son, the author of the bill, stated it was “a fair, even-handed approach to problems Oklahoma is facing as a result of illegal immigration.”

Opponents offer an alternative view. They call it mean in spirit.

Additional preliminary fi ndings of the NOSL report are available at www.ncsl.org. Hispanic Link.

by Alex Meneses Miyashita

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced May 2 it would extend Temporary Protected Status to more than 300,000 Central Americans for an additional 18 months.

The extension will apply to some 230,000 Salvadorians, 78,000 Hondurans end 4,000 Nicaraguans who currently live in the country under the status.

The TPS for Hondurans and Nicaraguans was set to expire in July and for Salvadorans in September.

The status, part of the Immigration Act of 1990, is granted to foreign nationals in the country who cannot return to their countries because of war or natural disasters.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which killed more than 12,000 people in Central America, thousands of undocumented Honduran end Nicaraguan immigrants became eligible for TPS.

Salvadorans gained TPS following a series of devastating earthquakes in their country in 2001 that affected 1.6 million people.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Emilio Gonzalez said, “Although Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador have made significant progress in their recovery and rebuilding efforts, each country continues to face social and economic challenges in their efforts to restore their nations to normalcy.”

Re-registration information will be posted at a later date at www.uscis.gov.

For more information, contact the USCIS National Customer Information Service Center, (80C) 375-5283.

Hispanic Link.