Our hearts and support go out to the Alvarez family in Oaxaca, Mexico.  It has been one year since Marcos De Jesus Alvarez was murdered by the deputy in Albany, NY.  The only crime that Marcos Alvarez committed was being brown at sun down.  The “Media” slandered this hard-working man, by painting him to be aggressive and furthermore, illegal, as if this somehow validates his murder.  The official story is laughable; Marcos was asked for his papers, to which he ignored the deputy, then when asked again, he became aggressive and charged the policeman.  Marcos had been deported before, so he knew very well that any interaction with the police would result in another deportation.  This would explain why Marcos initially ignored the cop; that, or Marcos could only speak his indigenous language of Triqui and did not understand the deputy.  Then he reportedly charged the cop and was shot twice in the torso.  First of all, were lethal shots required to stop a 5′4” unarmed man?  Certainly not.  Also, what is the likelihood that Marcos actually charged the deputy, instead of taking the more likely option: running away.  I am not surprised that there was no thorough investigation of this murder.  Our people can never expect justice in this racially-rigged court system.  As Brother Malcolm so succinctly put it, “a chicken can’t lay a duck egg,” that is, we can never expect anything from this corrupt, racist society.  However, in the interim, that shouldn’t stop us from demanding reparations for the injustices we have endured and building a movement to challenge it.  We know any awards given to the Alvarez family will never replace their father and husband, nevertheless they are entitled to it.  Here is a video of the News Report of Marcos Alvarez’s killing. (Note the racist comments by YouTube commentators)

http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Family-of-dead-man-sues-deputy-Albany-County-1402774.php#photo-2

The family of a Mexican man shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy is suing Albany County, the sheriff’s office and the deputy.

Marcos DeJesus Alvarez was shot at 12:30 a.m. March 20, 2010, as he walked along Watervliet Shaker Road near Albany International Airport.

Deputy Vincent Igoe maintained that Alvarez threw a chunk of concrete at him and refused to stop when ordered to do so. In the lawsuit, Alvarez’s family contends Alvarez was doing nothing illegal at the time of the shooting and Igoe had no right to approach him. The family also contends he posed no threat to Igoe.

The suit also alleges the Albany County sheriff’s department failed to properly train Igoe in the use of a firearm and ignored the deputy’s history when promoting him.

The case was taken to a grand jury, which declined to indict Igoe.

Tests show Alvarez did not have drugs or alcohol in his system at the time of his death.

Alvarez, who was in the United States illegally, is survived by his wife Augustine Cruz Garcia and six children ranging in age from 5 to 17. In the five years prior to his death, he had been caught and deported three times trying to cross the border into the United States. A 36-year-old farmer, he lived in an impoverished village mountain village in the state of Oaxaca.

The suit was filed by attorney Donald Boyajian on behalf of attorney Gaspar Castillo, who is administrator of Alvarez’s estate. It does not specify the amount of damages being sought.

9-year-old Brisenia Flores pleaded for her life but was murdered by Minutemen affiliates.

Gina Gonzalez says her 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, pleaded for her life. Opening arguments begin in the trial of Shawna Forde of the Minutemen movement, who is accused in the killing of the girl and her father.

more at:

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/25/nation/la-na-minutemen-murder-20110126

Obama signs $600M border security bill into law

Now 2 More Notorious Predator Drones Will Patrol The Border Along With An Additional 1,000 Agents

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gcleiR1IASV53QPzaSsB8LhaCjgwD9HIQBJG2

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1223789920100812

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Friday signed a bill directing $600 million more to securing the U.S.-Mexico border…

The new law will pay for the hiring of 1,000 more Border Patrol agents to be deployed at critical areas, as well as more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. It provides for new communications equipment and greater use of unmanned surveillance drones…

Racist Jingo: Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/08/11/2010-08-11_governor_hopeful_bill_mccollum_wants_florida_to_copy_arizona_law_but_be_harsher.html

A Republican running for governor in Florida wants the state to follow in Arizona’s footsteps … then go “one step” further.

Bill McCollum, the Sunshine State’s attorney general, has proposed legislation that would mimic the Grand Canyon State’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law but also grant more powers to judges in punishing illegal aliens.

“This legislation will provide new enforcement tools for protecting our citizens and will help our state fight the ongoing problems created by illegal immigration,” McCollum said in a statement Wednesday.

“Florida will not be a sanctuary state for illegal aliens,” he said.

The bill, drafted with the help of fellow Republican Rep. William Snyder, would require “aliens to carry immigration documentation” or face up to 20 days in jail. Illegal immigrants also would be barred from seeking work in the state.

Although those points are similar to the Arizona law, which is now mired in court battles with the federal government and other groups, McCollum’s proposal goes further to punish illegal immigrants.

Under his legislation, judges would be allowed to specifically consider a defendant’s immigration status while setting bail. The legislation also would allow judges to grant harsher prison times for illegal aliens who commit a crime in Florida.

Changes were made to the bill in the aftermath of Arizona’s legal troubles regarding SB 1070, but the bill likely still would face the same scrutiny should it be passed by the state legislature.

“Floridians want to see their elected officials provide leadership to the challenges of illegal aliens living our state,” Snyder said in the statement. “This proposal is a significant step forward in confronting illegal immigration.”

“I think Arizona is going to want this law,” McCollum said in Orlando during a press conference to announce the bill.

Florida is a major U.S. migration destination for nationals from the Caribbean and Latin America. According to the Migration Policy Institute, more than 700,000 illegal immigrants reside in the Sunshine State, and an estimated 2.7 million foreign-born residents call it home.

McCollum is locked in a primary battle with rival Rick Scott. Most polls have put Scott ahead in the race, but by how much varies.

“Today’s immigration proposal from Bill McCollum serves as just another example of why he can’t be trusted,” Scott’s campaign communications director Jennifer Baker said in a statement on Wednesday. “Besides flip-flopping on his support of Arizona’s legislation, the desperate career politician rushed to present a plan that on Monday he said would be coming in ‘a couple of weeks.’”

“It’s clear the only way to get McCollum to take any action on anything is when he’s down in the polls,” she added.

The Republican primary is Aug. 24.

Europe – France:  Police Brutalize Immigrants During Eviction

Sarkozy’s racist scapegoating

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=22045

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is using vicious scapegoating to try to distract attention from a government expenses scandal and a revolt against his pensions attacks.

He is part of a trend across Europe to spread hatred and division in an effort to blunt opposition to our rulers’ plans to make us pay for the crisis. Such manoeuvres can pave the way for open racists and fascists to prosper.

Over the last week Sarkozy called for a new “war on crime”. He said that foreign-born individuals would be stripped of their French nationality if they attacked police or public officials, cynically meshed ideas of “immigrant” and “criminal”, and lashed out at Roma people and travellers.

“We are suffering the consequences of 50 years of insufficiently regulated immigration which has led to a failure of integration,” he said.

Sarkozy is no stranger to virulent and racist scaremongering. He has repeatedly used the idea of a feral and alien “racaille” (scum) to scare voters into backing him.

He divides France into those who work hard and respect the law and those who are criminal and worthless. But his latest comments went further than ever before.

Several of the measures he called for ape the policies of Jean Marie Le Pen’s fascist National Front party. Several French commentators criticised the plan as similar to measures used against the Jews by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in the 1940s.

Sarkozy hopes to scoop up far right voters, but is more likely to strengthen and legitimise the National Front.

His tough rhetoric was followed by the interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, who warned that citizenship could also be revoked for those found guilty of other offences such as polygamy or other “serious criminal acts”.

Actions

Words lead to actions. When the president gives a lead, the state’s attack dogs know what’s required.

Police drove about 50 Roma from a squat in Montreuil, east of Paris, on Friday of last week.

Even before the “get tough” campaign, police broke up a demonstration by 150 people, mostly African immigrant women, protesting against their eviction from squats in a council tower block in a suburb of Paris.

Almost all were completely legal and had lived in France for a decade or more.

A video of the eviction (available at www.socialistworker.co.uk) shows police assaulting women, children and men. One particularly vile episode shows officers dragging off a woman with a baby on her back.

The onslaught was on the same estate where Sarkozy threatened to use an industrial hose to clean out drug gangs. The local police authority rejected charges of brutality—a spokesman said that the woman with a baby on her back had “thrown herself on the ground which meant the officers could not at first see her baby”.

The opposition Socialist Party criticised Sarkozy’s most extreme phrases. But its own representatives have demanded more spending on the police and said that Sarkozy was not doing enough to tackle criminality.

And Sarkozy would have been encouraged by the 335 to one vote in the French parliament to ban the wearing of the Islamic full-face veil.

France shows the danger of the right coming up with divisive measures to break resistance to the cuts.

Some of those victimised are already hitting back. In the small town of Saint-Aignan, in central France, a group of around 50 Roma armed with axes attacked a police station after police shot and killed a 22-year old.

There has to be clear resistance to racism and Islamophobia, and a class alternative to the idea that workers must pay for the crisis.

Millions of French workers are set to take part in strikes and protests on 7 September against pension “reform”. That unity, combined with political arguments against racism and the cuts, can defeat Sarkozy’s strategy.

Che Guevara and Juan Almeida, 2 leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/international-i/20may-Statement.html

ON April 23, Jan Brewer, governor of the state of Arizona, United States, publicly announced Law SB1070.
This law, of a profoundly racist and xenophobic nature, allows the police to use racial profiling to detain any person if they have “reasonable suspicion” that the person concerned is an illegal, thus criminalizing undocumented immigrants and creating an atmosphere of generalized persecution of all immigrants who, in the near future, will be constantly subjected to arbitrary detention, searches and humiliation, including deportation to their countries of origin. This is occurring in a state in which one third of the population is made up of Latino immigrants and in which 300,000-plus undocumented workers, in the main Mexicans, have taken on the hardest jobs in long and interminable days of agricultural harvests in return for miserable wages.
From the moment at which this legislation started being drafted, broad sectors within the United States have been exposing its selective and discriminatory nature.
Last May Day, more than 70 U.S. cities were the scenario of mass demonstrations by immigrants, workers, students and human rights defenders who, under the slogan “We are all Arizona” demanded a general migration reform and the annulment of that monstrous legislation imposed on Arizona.
Bearing in mind the implications of this law for millions of human beings from our region who are obliged to travel to the United States in search of better living conditions for themselves and their families, and given the definite possibility of similar legislation propagating like a plague in U.S. territory, the International Relations Commission of the National Assembly of People’s Power of Cuba proclaims its solidarity with those who are confronting this brutal violation of their human rights.
We feel bound to draw attention to the fact that, while walls are being constructed and laws like this being passed in an attempt to close the door on immigrants to territory stolen by force from the noble Mexican people, the Cuban Adjustment Act, a constant incitement to disorderly emigration and desertion by any means possible and which has cost the lives of hundreds of our people over many years, remains in full force.

Here is a pic of the uprising at Reeves County Detention Center in Texas. These immigrant prisons are often worse than regular prisons and the inmates often have no other recourse than to rise up.

Prisoner Uprising, Retaliation at CCA’s Eden Detention Center

http://www.texasprisonbidness.org/prisoner-uprising-retaliation-ccas-eden-detention-center

San Angelo Standard-Times (“Eden Detention Center locked down after riot,” April 12) is reporting that CCA’s Eden Detention Center is on lock-down following a prisoner uprising over the weekend:

The Eden Detention Center was in lockdown status late Monday after a riot was contained Sunday night, a release from the detention center stated. Inmates in Dormitory B at the detention center refused to go to their bunks Sunday night, according to the release.

“Facility staff used approved chemical agents to enforce lawful orders and successfully resolved the situation, with only minor injuries reported,” said Lee McDaniel, the public information officer for the detention center. The nature of the chemical agents was not specified, and the company did not say what caused the unrest.

The facility is locked down — inmates are confined to their cells — while staff investigate what caused the riot, the release states…

Ricky Thomas, the assistant police chief of Eden, said the city police were called out to control the area outside the center. “We were out in the front, but they handled everything themselves,” Thomas said. “We don’t go inside the prison when anything like that happens.” Riots at the detention center happen “very seldom,” he said.

As far as I can find, no press release or statement has been given by the Bureau of Prisons, the government agency that contracts with CCA for the Eden facility.  Eden is a BOP facility where immigrant prisoners are segregated because of their immigration status under the agency’s Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) contracting system. 

Another CAR-contract facility, GEO’s Reeves County Detention Center, has been the site of nine deaths in the past four years, two major prisoner uprisings, state and national media scrutiny, and protest by the ACLU of Texas and Grassroots Leadership, my organization, amongst others.  We’ll have to wait to see if conditions at Eden get as bad as they reportedly have at Reeves.  If readers know more about the situation, please feel free to contact me through the contact section of the website. 

RIP Marcelo Lucero, murdered for being a Latino by white supremacists in Long Island, NY.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/nyregion/08patchogue.html

…Mr. Conroy described himself as a white supremacist and told jail personnel that he had been “raised in a home where his parents held racist beliefs,” Justice Doyle said from the bench. Mr. Conroy’s lawyer, William Keahon, did not want the report admitted as evidence, but the judge allowed it. Mr. Keahon said Mr. Conroy never made those statements.

Mr. Conroy has a tattoo of a swastika on his right thigh; the jury was shown a picture of it earlier in the trial. Prosecutors have told jurors that Mr. Conroy espoused white supremacy in his tattoos and in the statements he made to others.

In a previous interview, Mr. Conroy’s father, Robert Conroy, 49, said that neither he nor his son believed in white supremacy. “I don’t see color or skin,” he said. “Neither do my kids.”

On Wednesday, after calling about two dozen witnesses since March 18, the prosecution rested its case. While there were difficulties, Suffolk County prosecutors presented a straightforward case against Mr. Conroy, now 19.

More than three hours after Mr. Lucero and a friend were attacked near the train station in Patchogue shortly before midnight, on Nov. 8, 2008, Mr. Conroy sat in a 9-by-9-foot interview room at a police precinct and helped a homicide detective write the statement. “I continued to run towards him and stabbed him once in either his shoulder or chest,” the statement read.

Bloodstains on the blade of a knife that a police officer found on Mr. Conroy matched Mr. Lucero’s DNA. Nicholas Hausch, one of the teenagers with Mr. Conroy that night, testified against Mr. Conroy, telling the court that Mr. Conroy said, as they were fleeing, that he had stabbed a Hispanic man.

Mr. Conroy faces charges including second-degree murder as a hate crime and first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime…

[Continued]

The November 29th Elections in Honduras are a total fraud of democracy.  Held under a coup government – regardless of if Micheletti stands down for a few days during the election – these elections will only cement the right wing’s hold of Honduras if they are legitamized.

The United States’ government has a sordid history of anti-democratic and anti-socialist military and political involvement in Latin America.  The Obama administration’s continued support of the elections in Honduras are a continuation of the coup-supporting politics that has always been common of every administration.

The National Resistance Front in Honduras has called for a boycott of the elections, and this Front (which is composed of Zelaya liberals, union organizations, campesino organizations and others) can – in my view – accurately be said to represent the broadest layers of the masses and workers at this point.  The National Resistance Front has called on everyone both inside Honduras and out to reject any recognition of these elections as legitimate.  We agree, and cannot support this election process whatsoever, as the right wing desperately tries to maintain its dwindling foothold in Latin America and the hemisphere.

The call for a constituent assembly has been raised by the Front as the only way to set up fair elections.  Elections, as the prime institution of so-called “democracy” in capitalist society, need to be recognized as legitimate or the system falls apart and is revealed more starkly as it truly is:  dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The issue at hand is the legitamacy of these elections, will the right wing win the day and rewrite history so that it was the right-wing heroes who stopped the renegade Chavista President Zelaya from ruining the country and had free and democratic elections… Or will the left win the day and forever let the world know that it was a coup d’etat when paramilitaries ran up in the presidential palace in the middle of the night and kidnapped the president.

How will these deep division in Honduras be settled?  Can they be settled?  A constituent assembly could also be manipulated by the right-wing, there is an entire struggle before the constituent assembly is even formed about how it will be formed.  Will the consituent assembly be just another organization of bourgeois capitalist power and machinations, or will it be one where the Honduran masses have a strong and undismissable voice.

All of the questions in Honduras these days would obviously lead to more favorable conclusions if the masses stay mobilized and organized to the highest degree possible.  When the facade of rotten capitalist democracy falls away, who could blame the Hondurans from stepping away from it?!  Today more than ever they must be supported in their struggle however far they may take it.

The organic leaders of these movements are people that have survived in a society that has always been dominated by the right-wing.  They are seasoned veterans whatever their age.  The capitalists of the world would love to keep Honduran labor at rock-bottom prices, and they don’t care if even their own institution of bourgeois democracy gets in the way.  Go and search on the internet about investment opportunities in Honduras, see for yourself what they offer to be its greatest selling point.  Hence they will not hesitate to aid and abett a coup, an assassination, an imprisonment, whatever it is.

The Honduran people have stood up and said enough is enough, they snatched the President in his sleep and put him on a plane to Costa Rica in the middle of the night.  Its ridiculous, its surreal, its 2009!  But when we see that capitalism itselt is not going to fundementally change, that it will remain opposed to a system of governance that truly represents the majority of society, then it isn’t so unbelievable that this can happen these days.

Please support the Honduras resistance to the coup d’etat as much as you can.  You can hold educational forums and events where you can show video of the protests and have speakers talk about the struggle and history.  You can go to any protests and demonstations that are held.  You can hold fundraisers for Honduran Human Rights organizations.  There are many different ways you can help out, hopefully you will.