by Adolfo Flores

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a national civil rights organization founded in 1971, has branded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national organization that supports immigration reduction, as a hate group for alleged connections with white supremacist and hate groups.

The Center claimed in a teleconference and in its quarterly “Intelligence Report’’ on Dec. 11 that FAIR 5has accepted $1.2 million between 1985 and 1994 from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation which has supported ­and funded studies that attempt to prove a connection between race and IQ.

“What we are hoping very much to accomplish is to marginalize FAIR,” said Mark Potok, the Center’s director of the intelligence project. “We don’t think they should be a part of the mainstream media.”

In 2006 SPLC counted 844 hate groups in the United States.

Clarissa Martínez, campaign manager for the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, told Weekly Report, “It is unacceptable for members of Congress and the media to legitimize a hate group bent on manipulating Americans’ concerns over our broken immigration system to advance its own goals and derail real solutions to this issue.”

Since 2000 FAIR officials have been asked to testify on immigration by Congress 30 times. This year, FAIR has been quoted in mainstream media nearly 500 times and been on CN N’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” at least 12 times in the same period.

“I think (the SPLC’s) statements are fraudulent and misleading,” said FAIR President Dan Stein’ who has been working for the organization as its executive director since 1988. “I think they owe us an apology.”

Stein told Weekly Report that at the moment they were not planning any legal action, but were expecting a retraction.

FAIR, claims the SPLC, was grounded on racism since its beginnings in 1979. Its founder’ John Tanton, runs The Social Contract Press’ another group listed by the center as racist for white supremacist end anti-Latino writings. Tanton is currently a member of FAIR’s board.

The article, “The Teflon Nativist,” also claims that several key FAIR members have ties to white supremacist groups’ like Western field representative Joseph Turner’ who created Save Our State’ a nativist hate group, according to the SPLC. It was in one of the Save Our State electronic forums that Turner wrote, “l can make the argument that just because one believes in white separatism that that does not make them a racist.”

According to the SPLC, Turner’s predecesson Rick Oltman, was part of the hate group Council of Conservative Citizens, a direct descendent from the segregationist White Citizens Council.

“Nobody working for FAIR has ever been a member of the CCC that I’m aware of end they certainly haven’t been people in key positions,” claimed Stein.

FAIR’s Eastern regional coordinator, Jim Stadenraus participated in an anti-immigrant conference in September 2002 with Jared Taylor, a CCC member and founder of American Renaissance, a racist eugenics publication, the article claims.

“Our charitable mission is education. We go where we’re invited,” Stein said.

“Does that mean you can impute to the FAIR staffers an agreement with all the principles of the organization we’re on a panel of?”

The report claims Stein held a meeting with members of Vlaams Belang, a Belgian political party’ to “seek advice” in February.

The group was renamed after it was banned as a racist political body by the Belgium Supreme Court.

Stein denied he met with the group, stating he had never heard of it.

“(The SPLC’s) assertions about a meeting with Belgium activists are fraudulent, their assertions about the staff are fraudulent’ their assertions about ­virtually everything else are fraudulent,” Stein said.

However FAIR’s Director of Special Projects’ John Martin, said he himself met with the group, but that it was Vleams Belang that was seeking advice because of the current “civil war” in Belgium due to immigration. Martin said he regularly briefs foreign visitors.

“They insisted when I asked specifically about that’ they did not have a racist policy~~ Martin said.

Having been e member of an organization that is attacked as being racist, which I know isn’t true’ I’m willing to believe people when they say that is not true in their case “Potok wrote in a blog that identifying FAIR as a hate group is important because more than any other group it has contributed to the nasty turn the immigration debate has taken.

“(FAIR) is en organization that clearly has an agenda’” said Cristina López, deputy executive director of the Center for Community Change. “There’s no difference between putting a member of FAIR on TV to talk about immigration and putting a member of the Ku Klux Klan to talk about race relations.”

by Juliet Blalack

Machete creator nominated John Santos’ Quintet Papá Mambo, plays at the DeYoung Museum, while children enjoy his music. (photo by Jennifer Salgado)

The story behind The John Santos Quintet is much like their music: many different elements making perfect sense together.

The band’s roots are in percussion jams at the Mission’s Dolores Park, where John Calloway and John Santos first met. Calloway, who plays flute and some percussion, started playing with Santos regularly in 1976.

Santos met fellow percussionist Orestes Vilato on a visit, strolling down a New York street. He had heard of Vilato and asked his friend to introduce them. Vilato has worked with Carlos Santana and Gloria Estefan. As piano player Marco Diaz puts it, Santos and Vilato are “legends in their own right.”

The three of them played in The Machete Ensemble, a dynamic and well-respected group that worked in both Cuba and the United States. The band was forced to split up last year, after 21 years of music.

“The arts programs are drying up,” said Santos. He explained that touring with eleven people was complicated and expensive. Practicalities aside, Santos does see the smaller group as an opportunity for him to “dig down inside and become a better player.”

“I think the people just absorb the music better than with big arrangements,” said Vilato.

Diaz’s piano playing style caught Santos’ attention when he was putting together a post-Machete band. Diaz splits his time between the quintet, his other band, Vission Latina, recording with side projects, and participating in the San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music program.

“They make you tap into a different part of your creativity,” said Diaz of his many musical endeavors. Diaz said he uses studio time to convey ideas as quickly and efficiently as possible, but when he plays live is “trying to capture a dancing audience.”

Santos also recruited Saul Sierra, who plays the baby bass with a steady ease. Sierra arrived in the bay area in 1999, after a Boston college career that won him an Outstanding Performer Award and a U.S. Scholarship tour.

So far, The John Santos Quintet has traveled to Wisconsin, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

“The group is a very young group, so we’re just starting to go different ­places,” said Vilato. Last month, the group treated San Francisco to their talent during the De Young Museum’s extended hours.

“They used to bring us on fi eld trips here to the De Young. It’s nice to be back,” Santos told the audience before beginning.

Among the band’s percussion palette was a chekere and a guiro. The chekere sounds like a lower-pitched maraca and resembles a large gourd encased in netting and beads. The guiro is an egg-shaped wood piece with ridges carved into it.

Brushing a stick over its edges emits a sharp rapping sound.

The group launched their set with Equinox by John Coltrane. Children began hopping around near the front of the stage, with Santos’ daughter among the first dancers.

After an upbeat tune that rose with a crash of timbales, the band switched to a slow, sensual piece with distinct piano and pattering maracas.

While playing a piece by Diaz, the musicians were so synergized it was difficult to discern any one instrument.

The music became feisty, yet not overpowering. It was more rhythmic than jazz, yet borrowed the extemporaneous style.

“All of those pieces are vehicles for improvisation,” said Santos.

During the second half of the concert, the dance fl oor steadily fi lled up with people of all ages dancing tango, salsa, and anything they could make up. The energy built up throughout the night, and felt sadly cut short when the band stopped playing. It isn’t surprising that the band has been nominated for an award from Latin Jazz Corner.

“If it doesn’t hit them the fi rst time, it hits them the second time. It’s contagious, it’s an epidemic,” said Vilato.

by the El Reportero news service

Cristina Fernández

On 10 December the prefects of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni, Cochabamba and Pando announced that they did not recognise the new constitution and declared their departments autonomous.

The prefects’ move was inevitable, given the way the new constitution was drafted and the constituent assembly’s refusal to conform to their wishes on regional autonomy.

The key issue is whether the prefects will get political and international support for their stance. So far they have not. The main opposition party, Podemos, criticized their demands for being unconstitutional. Internationally, those presidents who mustered in Buenos Aires for President Cristina Fernández’s inauguration gave unequivocal backing to President Evo Morales and his new constitution.

Abstention costs Chávez referendum; moderate opposition triumphs

President Hugo Chávez suffered his first defeat in 12 national votes since he took office in 1998, when his constitutional reform proposals were narrowly rejected in a referendum on 2 December. He was undone by an abstention rate of some 44.1%. The defeat could, however, strengthen him: several Latin American heads of state praised his quick acceptance of the outcome as providing irrefutable proof of his democratic credentials. Dictators do not admit defeats.

FMI asks Nicaragua for complementary measures to support growth

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (Thomson Financial) – The International Monetary Fund (FMI) asked to Nicaragua ‘ to realize without delay ‘ a series of measures in the field of energy, fiscal, and financier, to support macroeconomic stability and to consolidate the climate of investment,’ according to a bulletin of this entity issued on Tuesday.

“To support growth in half term it ­will be necessary to carry out an agenda of complementary measures in the sectors of energy, fiscal, and financier,” the IMF assistant director, the Brazilian Murilo Portugal, proposed to the Nicaraguan authorities at the end of a visit to Nicaragua.

The official made a two-day visit to the country and held interviews with the government economic team and President Daniel Ortega to value the agreed economic program with this organism.

According to Portugal the measures in the field of energy, fiscal and financier, which were not detailed, will have to be carried out ‘ without delay ‘ to forge consensuses and to develop capacity of implementation.

During conversations with the economic team, there was coincidence in the importance of supporting macroeconomic stability and of consolidating the climate of investment to promote growth and social results, Portugal said.

Also he considered as encouraging ‘ the advances in the energy field ‘ that te government develops, and other actions that will be pushed in the next months to face the ‘endemic’ energy fraud problem.

Nicaragua has maintained growth and has improved social indicators, ‘ even if the level of poverty stays high ‘, admitted the official.

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