Death Sentence for Driving Without a License

If she were from Ireland, all green eyes and alabaster skin, you know damn well she'd be let off with a warning and a fast-tracked naturalization.

From the Courier:

A Kentucky woman who faces deportation to her native Mexico is seeking asylum, saying she fears domestic violence from her ex-partner and that Mexican authorities can’t be counted on to protect her.

Ana Lilia Alanis-Paulin entered the U.S. illegally in 1997 at age 17. She is in an Illinois jail after being arrested May 5 in Lexington, where she lives, for driving without a license. She was turned over to federal immigration authorities.

A legal brief filed on her behalf alleges the father of her youngest child has threatened to harm her if she returns to Mexico, where he now lives. Alanis-Paulin had called Lexington police three times to report abuse allegations in 2008 and 2009 when he lived there.

If you haven't been keeping up on Mexico news, our NAFTA partner is about a half-puff of pot away from being a failed narco state. There is no such thing as law enforcement outside of Mexico City. The closest thing to a shelter for victims of domestic abuse is a closet you can lock from the inside. Not that that will help when the gangs decide to just burn the whole place down.

One more time, the facts on Mexican immigration:

The "law" these people "broke" is the result of the ludicrously small number of legal immigrants from Mexico permitted to enter the U.S. each year. Increase that number to match the number of Mexican workers needed by U.S. employers, and illegal immigration disappears.

Speaking of employers, their need for millions of desperate immigrants willing to work for pennies and accept horrific conditions is what keeps the coyotes busy. They are also why the border is so porous. You got a problem with Mexican immigration? Tell it to the Chamber of Commerce.

Which is correct: "Immigrants built this nation" or "White people built this nation"? Trick question! It's both. Because unless you are 100 percent Native American, you are the descendant of immigrants.

And the only thing that separates you from Ana Lilia Alanis-Paulin is an arbitrary quota.

But don't look for compassion, logic or humanity from ICE, either. The terrorism-terrified immigration service works as far beyond the law as any drug cartel.

Protecting Mexican Workers the Only Way to Keep Them Home

Want to stop illegal immigration from Mexico? Tell President Obama to make the Mexican government stop attacking its own workers.

David Bacon in The Nation:

When the Mexican government moved to bust the three-year miners' strike in Cananea on June 6, it brought 2,000 Federal Police into the tiny mountain town in the state of Sonora—two cops for every striker. As darkness fell and helicopters clattered overhead, they charged the gate with riot shields and batons, filling the streets with tear gas. Miners retreated to the union hall with their families, and the police followed, barricading the doors and lobbing more tear gas inside.

The union's leaders were already in hiding, since the police had arrest warrants for them all. Manny Armenta, an organizer for the United Steel Workers who's probably spent more time in Cananea than at home in Arizona, helped lead women and children down fire escapes and through the basement to safety.

The same day, police moved on the widows of sixty-five miners who had died in an explosion four years ago at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine in Coahuila. Women were forcibly removed from the mine gates where they'd been camping, asking for their husbands' bodies. Grupo Mexico, the mining and railroad giant that owns both facilities, is closing the mine for good without recovering the men's remains.

Both the Cananea strike and the widows' protests highlight extremely unsafe conditions in Mexican mines. At Cananea, silicosis-causing dust from crushed copper ore rises to miners' knees inside the buildings. Grupo Mexico disconnected the dust extractors several years ago, in retaliation for earlier protests. At Pasta de Conchos, dozens of uncorrected violations for dangerous methane buildup preceded the 2006 explosion.

But the Cananea strike goes beyond health and safety issues. For three years the Mexican Union of Mine, Metal and Allied Workers, commonly known as the Mineros, has challenged the National Action Party (PAN), which has governed Mexico since 2000, and its corporate backers, especially Grupo Mexico and its owners, the Larrea family. In turn, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has systematically sought to destroy the Mineros, as well as other unions that defy him. Last fall he fired 44,000 members of the left-wing Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) and dissolved their state-owned employer, the Power and Light Company of Central Mexico.

Progressive unions believe that destroying the SME would remove another union challenge while preparing the way for privatizing electrical power generation. SME members fasted in protest and were beaten this spring at the gates to the power plants.

In the face of these attacks, the Obama administration has been silent. Armenta believes the attack on Cananea's miners is the consequence not just of Calderón's antilabor policies but also of tacit US support for them. "Our government continues to give the Mexican government millions and millions of dollars, saying it will be used to fight drugs," says Armenta. "But we see here clearly that this money is going to fight workers and progressive people."

SNIP

Smashing the Cananea strike will lead to the same massive firings that followed an earlier lost strike in 1998, and the destruction of the union in Nacozari in 2006. When that happened, waves of desperate miners, unable to find other employment, crossed the border into the United States as undocumented workers.

"Especially here in Arizona with the new law, all we hear about is illegal immigrants," Armenta says. "But our own government is creating this problem. I condemn the Mexican government, and Grupo Mexico. But I also condemn the US government for allowing this to happen, for not taking any action. What do they think will happen here? Where do they think all the miners will have to go?"

Read the whole thing.

Then email or call President Obama and tell him to stop Mexico from creating more illegal immigrants.

This Time, Ignoring Mexico's Crisis Will Be Fatal

I think it was former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who said that living next to the United States was like sleeping next to a bear - you notice every twitch.

For Mexico, it's been more like getting regularly crushed by that bear.

In the Nation, Jeff Faux examines how the perverted incentives of NAFTA and Wall Street have exacerbated Mexico's political weaknesses to create a narco state on the verge of revolution.

Another infusion of cash to the Mexican economy, unacknowledged in the official statistics, is the roughly $25 billion in illegal drug exports to the States. Today, with remittances, oil prices and tourism depressed, the narco trade is probably Mexico's largest single earner of hard currency.

NAFTA and the neoliberal ideology it represents are certainly not the root causes of narco-trafficking. But they have been major factors in its recent monstrous growth.

For starters, the trade agreement created a two-way overland superhighway for contraband; the Mexican drug lords use the dollars they have earned from their exports to import guns, aircraft and sophisticated military equipment from the United States to fight their territorial wars. By wiping out small Mexican farms that could not compete with heavily subsidized US agribusiness, NAFTA also expanded the pool of unemployed young people that provides the narco-traffickers with recruits. And banking integration under NAFTA made money laundering much easier.

Perhaps most important, NAFTA has helped maintain the corrupt network of Mexican oligarchs. The 1988 presidential election--which the then-ruling PRI had to steal from the PRD to win--shocked the establishment on both sides of the border. By opening up Mexico to US money and influence, NAFTA was a way, as the US Trade Representative said to me at the time, "to keep the Mexican left out of power."

Until the 1980s, Mexican drug (mostly marijuana) smuggling to the north was modest in scale and generally tolerated by successive PRI governments. Their message was: we don't care what you sell to the gringos, but no rough stuff here, keep it away from our kids and of course share a little of the profit under the table. But the US-backed neoliberals who took over the PRI in the 1980s had closer ties with the Mexican cartels. The brother and father of president and NAFTA champion Carlos Salinas--hailed in Washington as a good-government reformer--were widely accused of being connected to the drug business. In Salinas's first year in office his national police chief was found with $2.4 million in drug money in the trunk of his car.

SNIP

The entire relationship must be rethought. In this regard, Obama's abandonment of his campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA was a missed opportunity. A renewed debate over the trade deal could have spurred public discussion of the failure of neoliberal economics, the "war on drugs" and an immigration policy that ignores conditions in Mexico that drive people across the border. It could have been a forum to think through the question of how continental integration can work for working people rather than just investors. For example, what kind of cooperative transportation, energy and green industrial policies would make the people of three nations--now bound together in one market--globally competitive?

Obama's Wall Street advisers have no more interest in this sort of change than did Bush's. And without a new economic direction, life for the average Mexican will surely worsen and social tensions rise. Some Mexican friends point out that the revolution against Spain erupted in 1810 and the one against the US-backed dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1910. And in 2010... ?

In any event, Mexico's growing troubles will not stay conveniently on the other side of the Rio Grande. Build a ten-foot wall, and desperate people will find twelve-foot ladders. Free trade will, of course, continue to flourish; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano estimates that Mexican drug cartels are now operating in 230 US cities.

So, thanks to the people who brought you the subprime mortgage disaster, the credit freeze and the Great Recession, the next Mexican revolution may come closer to home than you think.

Read the whole thing.