Anti-MINUSTAH protesters peacefully marching.

Here’s a round-up of some of odds and ends that I haven’t gotten around to posting until now.

First, there’s this piece for Haiti Liberte: WikiLeaks Reveal: Expecting Civilian Deaths, US Embassy Approved of Deadly Attack on Crowded Haitian Slum. The article describes how a top Embassy official agreed with private sector leaders like Reginald Boulos, who now holds influence over Haiti’s reconstruction, that MINUSTAH should attack Cite Soleil knowing full well that innocent Haitians would be killed by the “peacekeepers” during the operation.

For more on the Port Salut abuses, there are these interviews I did with Democracy Now!, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and if you speak Spanish, this Uruguayan media outlet. The five soldiers accused of abusing Johnny Jean in the video are reported to have been jailed in Uruguay pending sentencing. 17-year-old Rose Mina Joseph, who was pregnant with a Uruguayan soldier’s child when this was published, gave birth to a healthy boy a few days ago. She told me yesterday she hasn’t been able to reach the father in Uruguay to tell him yet, but that when they last talked he said he’d seen an article about her.

Amnesty International issued an action alert that you can participate in about the eviction threat to Camp Mosaic, which I reported on a few weeks ago. And this interview with Dr. Renaud Piarroux about cholera and its origins in Haiti is well worth reading.

Finally, I’d like to shout out this heartfelt and insightful reflection from Sebastian Walker, Al Jazeera’s post-quake Haiti correspondent (check out his new film), especially this part: “I would have liked to stay in Haiti forever. If you spend any significant time there, you will believe, as I did, that Haiti deserves to be on the front page of every newspaper, every single day. It is a permanent, urgent and unjustified humanitarian tragedy.”

I feel the same way.  To me, it’s not just the humanitarian tragedy that makes Haiti worthy of front page coverage every day, but the extraordinary way that tragedy is politically and internationally maintained.  There are stark political choices (some examples) that keep Haiti mired in this state which implicate a wide range of powerful groups in Haiti and across the globe.  Sebastian’s team did a great job of exposing many of them while listening to and projecting the voices of ordinary Haitians.

This contrasts with some recently sloppy reporting by the Associated Press.  An anti-MINUSTAH protest march last Wednesday was completely peaceful from the start, when it was confronted by MINUSTAH soldiers in a jeep, very nearly until it reached its destination in Chanmas. When the march arrived near the palace, Haitian police immediately began launching tear gas canisters, to which the protesters responded by throwing rocks.  This can be observed in a video I produced.

The Associated Press team was not present at that time, to my knowledge.  I saw them walking down towards the protests hours later, after many of the demonstrators had left and only a small band of rock-throwers remained.  But the AP wrote that protesters had “fled into” the camps in Chanmas (they may have since improved the language from the original article), which I did not observe (one resident of the tent camp told me he did not blame the protesters for the tear gas).  The AP did not even mention the peaceful march.  And today, another AP article reduces all recent anti-UN protests in Haiti to “rock-throwing.”  I already pointed out some serious flaws in their initial reporting on the Port Salut abuses.

They should do better. Update: One of the AP’s photographers may have been present as the march itself reached Chanmas.

I spoke to some Haitians in displacement camps – living there since about the time of January 12, 2010 earthquake – about President Michel Martelly’s first 100 days in office. They voice their perspectives in this story for Free Speech Radio News broadcast on Friday:

Download the MP3. You can also hear an archived interview with me about Haiti and WikiLeaks from KOOP Radio’s People United program here – my part starts at the 37 minute mark.

Camp kids playing Mortal Kombat

Here’s my story for yesterday’s Free Speech Radio News newscast. Some horrific sights at both Cannape-Vert Hospital and the Doctors Without Borders Clinic in Cite Soleil.

MP3. Video probably coming later. It’s really an inefficient medium, from what I see here. Journalists go out, shoot footage, then come back mid-day to begin an hours-long editing process, when they could be out reporting. By tradition they go to the trouble of hiding cuts in interviews with b-roll, instead of doing simple, honest jump-cuts to which the YouTube generation is totally accustomed. There’s no innovation…

Update: Big thanks to the Quixotess in Seattle for transcribing! Global media collaboration FTW. Text below the jump.

We go now to Port-au-Prince, where medical workers are racing to treat patients. FSRN’s Ansel Herz reports.

[We can hear a man's low voice and a girl's voice raised. Throughout, we can hear people's voices in the background--a baby cooing, adults rushing about.]

Cracks run down the wall of Port-au-Prince’s central Cannape Vert hospital. Rooms and hallways are empty. There’s so little staff that for fleeting moments, even the main operating room, directly beneath a fractured skylight, looks abandoned. Then, two Haitian Red Cross volunteers rush in with another wounded person. Doctors run back in from all directions to begin their work again and again.

Florence Burreynau is a Haitian doctor who returned here from Canada just last year. She said she had difficulties setting up a practice there and wanted to live in her home country. Friends and family said she was crazy to go back. Her downtown clinic is unusable, so she came here, one of just three Haitian doctors seen at the hospital. They are helped by a team of ten French doctors who arrived here two days after the earthquake.

“I am trying my best to do some suture, giving some pills to the patient, trying to have the wounds clean.”

The doctors don’t have the materials to do much beyond treating skin wounds, of which there are many, to the head, feet, arms, and other body parts hit by falling houses. Doctors from the French team said medical supplies they were promised had not arrived yet, and they said that the French embassy had demanded that they close the interior of the hospital and return the embassy, a fifteen minute drive away, each day at 5 PM because of security concerns.

Outside the hospital, a 28 year old Haitian who asked only to be called Dr Samedi, does much of the same work, but he’s surrounded by wounded in tents, not the walls of the cramped hallway.

[We can hear a woman's voice, perhaps tense with pain. Once, she takes a ragged breath.]

He tries to soothe a woman as he pulls skin off of her gaping foot wound. “I know it hurts, girl, I know it’s bad,” he says.

Meanwhile, in Cite Soleil, the Doctors Without Borders clinic has enough supplies, but cannot use their building. They operate on three or four people at a time, while hundreds wait in tents for treatment. Many were carried in by Haitians who rescued them, and some have been waiting for more than a day. Samuel Jeanius is a 33 year old medical student.

“I want to tell the international community that we need help. Because a lot of people are suffering. We also need places for people to stay, because we are not safe here. This morning there was an aftershock, and there was panic. People ran away. I wish people would consider our need for medicine and surgeons, because we’re really trying to help people suffering.”

The doctors don’t rest for a moment, treating person after person for hours.

Later, American rescue worker Douglas Cobb arrives at the UN base with a pickup truck and several Haitian women in the back. Cobb said he was a 9/11 first responder, who tried to fly in medicine with the Peruvian military.

“Well, what really happened here, is the UN military were there. And then the US military came in and kicked them out. So they never allowed for any transition. So what they did was they just sent all the planes back, with the medicines and everything. And, right now, we’ve been driving with four people that we have rescued–including a pregnant woman, okay–who have injuries that medicine will stop them from dying, and we’ve been driving around for four hours to all these hospitals, and none of them have the medicines that we need to save their life. Because the US military turned their plane back.”

“Back to where? Where’d it go?

“Went to Santa Domingo. So then in Santa Domingo, we got a bus, and we came in with just everything we could fit in the bus. But we got a whole freakin’ planeful of the friggin’ medicine!”

Nearly a week after the earthquake, the US government says 265 medical personnel are on the ground in Haiti, while more than ten thousand armed soldiers guard the airport and embassy, and begin to distribute aid.

But at City Med Hospital down in Delmas, eight Haitian doctors struggling to maintain a maternity ward in an intact hospital said they’ve received zero assistance since the earthquake. They yelled at this reporter to go away, saying a CNN crew had already stopped by. “We need medicines and help, not journalists,” they said.

Ansel Herz, FSRN, Port-au-Prince.

Update: The Southwest Workers Union is calling for a phone blast directed at Amnesty International and the Haitian Consulate in Haiti to stop Rama Carty’s deportation (info). Also, here (MP3) are excerpts of my interview with Sarnata Reynolds, Refugee Program Director at Amnesty.

From my story in today’s Free Speech Radio News headlines (listen here):

An update to a story FSRN has been following about a hunger strike at a Texas Immigration detention center… Human rights groups say they are concerned about an immigrant detainee who was suddenly moved to Louisiana for deportation yesterday. His tranfer comes after he spoke with representatives of Amnesty International at the Texas detention center where he was leading the hunger strike. FSRN’s Ansel Herz reports.

39-year-old Rama Carty has lived in the United States since he was 15-months-old. He was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has never been to Haiti, where his parents are from, but he is scheduled to be deported there in about one week. For the past month Carty has helped lead a hunger strike at the Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville, Texas. After speaking with Amnesty International staff earlier this week, Carty was woken up Wednesday by prison guards and informed he was going to be transferred. Sarnata Reynolds, the Refugee Program Director at Amnesty International USA, describes what followed.

“We were told by other immigrants in the detention facility that an altercation took place and that there was a use of force by the immigration guards. His early morning transfer after he had spoken to us seemed to have a chilling effect on the immigrants that we spoke to that day. There was a lot of fear that he had been moved and transferred quickly because he had spoken to us.”

Community activists who spoke to detainees in the facility say Rama Carty was threatened, beaten and removed for speaking out about the conditions inside. Anayanse Garza with the Southwest Workers Union told FSRN she is worried about escalating repression of other protesting detainees inside the Port Isabel Detention Center. Ansel Herz, FSRN, Austin.

Listen to the excerpts of my interview with Anayanse Garza below (MP3).

I’ll try to upload my interview with Sarnata Reynolds from Amnesty Intl soon. Garza says individuals and groups around the country need to put pressure on Homeland Security, particularly Special Advisor on ICE and Detention & Removal Dora Schriro, to stop Rama Carty from being deported to Haiti. Get on it, folks!

• Previously on Mediahacker: Activists hold vigil for immigrant detainees on hunger strike
• Listen to Renee Feltz’ interview with Rama Carty from April here.
• For more information, see the Southwest Workers’ Union press release from earlier today here.

My first second-ever feature story for Free Speech Radio News looks back at the 81st Texas legislative session, which ends today. What’s “chubbing?” You can Google it if you want, or you can listen here.

On the night of November 2, 2004, I was standing outside a polling station with Mark Strama, handing flyers to citizens rushing in to vote before the election ended. I was a 16-year-old intern for Strama’s campaign for State Representative in the 50th District – my district. I won’t forget the moment when Strama got a text message on his Blackberry saying John Kerry was projected to win the presidency. We each let out a few whoops and cheers of joy. Bush’s apparent victory, of course, was all the more disappointing when I got home and saw the news. Strama, at least, beat the Republican incumbent by just 550 votes.

I saw Strama yesterday for the first time since 2004. He spoke with me for nearly a half hour in a Capitol corridor just outside the House chamber, but I couldn’t use more than a few seconds of the interview in my story. So I’m posting the nearly-complete interview below (MP3 here).

I imagine it’s of interest to Texas politics junkies and Strama’s constituents in the 50th District in Austin. For me, now an intense skeptic of government’s contribution to social justice no matter who’s in power, the interview was a useful window into the ongoing work of someone who has put all his energy, talent and passion into electoral politics. I think under other circumstances I would have been more rigorous in my questioning. Here’s his Wikipedia page and a breakdown of campaign contributions.

Also, I highly recommend Marc Becker’s story on an indigenous continental summit from today’s FSRN newscast.

I have a short story on Father Jean-Juste’s passing in yesterday’s Free Speech Radio News headlines.

Listen to a longer version of that piece below. Includes comments from Brian Concannon Jr., Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Ira Kurzban, a Miami-based attorney – both friends of Father Jean-Juste who worked closely with him on several legal cases – as well as audio from an older interview with Father Jean-Juste himself.

Rest In Power, Father Jean-Juste. MP3 here. Transcript and full-length interviews below.

This is a Mediahacker.org podcast published on May 28, 2009. Noted Haitian civil rights leader and former political prisoner Father Gerard Jean-Juste died Wednesday at the age of 62.

Jean-Juste was a Haitian Catholic priest often compared the Martin Luther King Jr. for his non-violent human rights activism. He died in a Miami hospital from stroke and lung problems, but just three years earlier he languished in a Haitian jail suffering from leukemia. The interim government of Haiti imprisoned him following the 2004 U.S.-backed coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, for whom Jean-Juste was a prominent supporter.

Amnesty International designated the priest a “prisoner of conscience” and Jean-Juste was released after 18 months in prison. All charges against him were dropped in 2008, but he continued to receive medical treatment in Miami.

“He was one of the top leaders of the resistance to Duvalier, he was also one of the top leaders to the resistance to the 1991-94 military regime, and again was a top leader of the resistance to the 2004-2006 dictatorship in Haiti.”

Brian Concannon is the director of the Institute for justice and Democracy in Haiti and has worked closely with Father Jean-Juste.

“So every time there’ s been a dictatorship in Haiti in the last twenty years he was one of top people out there resisting it. He was also a leader in the United States where we’ve got a problem of treating Haitian immigrants discriminatorily. He’s not only achieved results including ending all three of those dictatorships, but what’s probably important was how he achieved those results – because he was a steadfast proponent of nonviolent tactics including sit-ins, demonstrations, popular education, those kind of things. He was very effectively able to channel the Haitian people’s desire for justice into concrete activities.”

Father Gerry, as he was known, was raised in Les Cayes, in southeastern Haiti. He became the first Haitian priest ordained by the U.S. Catholic Church in 1971. With Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Jean-Juste helped lead the “Ti Legliz” or “little church” movement in poor parishes that eventually toppled the second Duvalier dictatorship in 1981.

Despite his work for the poor of Haiti, or perhaps because of it, Jean-Juste had a rocky relationship with the official church. In 2006 The Catholic Church of Haiti suspended him, while he was still jailed by the Latortue interim regime, when supporters tried to register his candidacy in Haiti’s presidential election.

“Well I think ultimately he would have been president of Haiti, quite frankly, in a fair and full election – if there was a fair election.”

Ira Kurzban, a Miami attorney, who has represented Jean-Juste and the former Aristide government, says Jean-Juste’s legacy is important to poor people everywhere.

“But just like Father Jean Bertrand Aristide, he represented the poor. I mean, his parish was the parish of the poor. And the poor of course are 95% of the people in Haiti. So they knew whose side he was on, who he stood for, they knew that he wanted to change their economic condition. So he was deprived of that opportunity by Latortue, by the U.S., French and Canadian governments, who really have conspired, I think fairly consistently over the years, to diminish democracy in Haiti and not promote it.

But I think his legacy is really still an incredibly legacy of creating, really, a Haitian community in South Florida and significantly changing the law for all refugees. I mean, we have countless examples where through the grassroots work that he did and the organizing, and going out in the street, and our bringing lawsuits, we for example developed the right that asylum seekers and get work authorization while their cases are pending. That didn’t exist before we brought one of the lawsuits here. The grassroots work he did let ultimately called “The Haitian Refugee Center versus McNiery” that went ultimately to the United States Supreme Court – and protected the rights of over 200,000 farmworkers.

And I think the last mark of what he did, politically, is the work he did everyday as a person, as a priest, as a human being who always had his heart and his mind and his whole being open to ministering for the least well-off, here and in Haiti, has an impact on all of those people.”

In a 2007 interview with Global X, Father Jean-Juste spoke about the miracles he witnessed at a soup kitchen he founded in Haiti.

“I was receiving some friends in Haiti once. They asked me, “What can I do to help?” They visited my parish. And I remember the cry of a young child, a five-year-old boy, who said, “Father, I’m hungry.” That cry, really stays into deeply into my heart. I went to the alter and cried to God, What can I help. This child belonged to a family of ten children – mother ill and father passed away. And then suddenly, this group who visited me with Margeurite Frost, they offer help. And since 2000, we have started a canteen, a soup kitchen and we are feeding thousands and thousands of people, to help so many people.

I wanted to put in practice Jesus’ command, “Feed the hungry.” And a boy came, and I found him. I didn’t know how I was going to do the miracle – it reminds me the embarassment of Philip when Jesus ordered him to feed the crowd! Philip didn’t know what to do…[laughing, unintelligible] “What are we to do, look at this crowd, we have nothing!” And the miracle has been done. This is the type of miracle that really keeps me at work and ready to sacrifice myself, all the way, for these people that we are getting out of hunger.”

The Archdiocese of Miami released a statement saying, “He is to be remembered for his never-ending work with and for the poor both here in Miami and in Haiti.” This has been a Mediahacker.org podcast, I’m Ansel Herz in Austin.

• Cross-posted to Youtube
• Full interview with Ira Kurzban MP3
• Full interview with Brian Concannon Jr. MP3
• Father Gerard Jean-Juste’s interview with Global X video
• Jean Juste of Haiti – Cause of Death: Indefinite Detention

I finished assembling a new WordPress theme for brownfemipower’s Flip Flopping Joy! last night. Now it’s live at her site!

I feel fortunate to have been given the chance to design her blog. bfp is a creative, prolific, and eclectic radical woman of color blogger based near Detroit. She’s a key organizer with the Allied Media Conference, which I had a blast attending last year. I’ve learned a lot from her writing, on everything from what “feminism” stands for, to community health, to media justice, to coalition work, to radical movement-making in general…

I tried to create a clean, earthy, and uplifting design that reflected some of the themes of her blog. The header image was made by Tumis for Incite!’s 2004 Sisterfire tour. If you haven’t been reading her, why not start now?

I have a piece about Haiti in today’s Daily Texan. Check it out.

The Texan editors messed with my piece a little and I wanted to add a few things, so I’ve produced a podcast to accompany the piece. It runs just under 7 minutes. Enjoy the music!

Download the MP3 here. Transcript with links to sources below.

That’s Sak Rase by the Welfare Poets – and this is a podcast about the need for democracy in Haiti.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood on the floor of a textile factory in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti earlier this month and talked about America’s commitment to Haiti’s impoverished democracy

Sounds good, right? But when Clinton finished her speech and smiled the applause was muted. Many of the workers could not understand her speech because it was not translated into Kreyòl, the language spoken by the vast majority of Haitians. Clinton’s obliviousness typifies the mindset of policymakers who are ignoring a deeply flawed democratic process in Haiti, while pushing anti-poverty schemes on Haiti from afar.

Clinton, along with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, are touting a plan devised by Oxford economist Paul Collier to expand tariff-free export zones around Haiti. Their plan calls for Haiti to lift urban slum-dwellers out of poverty through jobs in textile factories, like the Inter-American Garment Factory at which Clinton spoke.

There is little popular demand in Haiti for this maquiladora-style development. Workers at the factory assembling clothes for American companies like Levi’s are paid twice Haiti’s minimum wage, but they complained to Al Jazeera English that the wages are still so low that they cannot escape poverty.

The former President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose Lavalas party has enjoyed overwhelming support among Haitians in election after election, tried during the 1990s to triple the minimum wage. But under pressure from US officials and people like Andy Apaid, Aristide was forced to drastically scale back the wage increase. Apaid is a rich Haitian who owns numerous sweatshops and the garment factory that hosted Hillary Clinton two weeks ago.

In 2004, Apaid and other members of the tiny Haitian elite successfully conspired to overthrow President Aristide with the help of the U.S. government. Aristide was flown out of the country on a U.S. jet surrounded by Marines and dumped in the Central African Republic. Aristide says he was kidnapped and still has not returned to Haiti.

Aristide and Lavalas represents a grassroots threat to the centuries-old status quo in Haiti and the international interests that have sought to exploit it. Aristide raised taxes on the rich, launched highly effective literacy and anti-AIDS programs, and built schools and hospitals across the country during his two presidential terms, each cut short by U.S.-backed coups. Journalist Kevin Pina reported on March 13 12 for Flashpoints radio on mass demonstrations demanding the return of Aristide.

The Lavalas party has tried to carry on amidst continuing repression. A heavily armed UN peacekeeping force has repeatedly shelled and occupied Cite Soleil, a slum outside the capitol and one of Lavalas’ strongest bases of support. Many of the party’s leaders, like former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and singer So Anne, were imprisoned on bogus charges by the post-coup regime, and without Aristide the party is less united than it once was. Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, a leading human rights and Lavalas activist who was abducted in 2007 after announcing his bid for Senate office, is still missing.

Lavalas was banned from last week’s Haitian Senate elections by the government’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) because of a technical problem with the list of candidates they submitted. A judge who ruled that the CEP’s decision was illegal was promptly stripped of his post by the Haitian government. Here is Haitian journalist E. Pierre Louis talking to the radio program Haiti: The Struggle Continues about Lavalas’ response – he’s translated by the host.

Like the rebel force of slaves that defeated Napoleon’s armies and founded Haiti, however, Lavalas and its agenda of social uplift have not been easily marginalized. The organization called for a boycott of the Senate elections from which it was banned, and Haitians duly heeded the call – voter turnout on April 19th was estimated at less than ten percent.

Popular Haitian demands include revitalization of local peasant economies, debt cancelation, temporary protected status for immigrants in the United States, and the return of Aristide. The Obama administration has already pledged $20 million to pay off part of Haiti’s illegitimate debt to the World Bank. That’s a start.

The notion that poor Haitians should become a cheap labor force for American corporations, on the other hand, is more of the same. The mentality that the “international community” knows what is best for Haiti’s poor has been discredited by decades of worsening poverty. Strong support from the Obama administration for democracy in Haiti, including the participation of Lavalas, would represent change Haitians can believe in and so desperately need.

Re-published at HaitiAnalysis.com

My short story on this for FSRN is here. Image from the Associated Press.

I spoke earlier today by phone to Dr. Eloisa Tamez, who owns a tract of property on the Texas-Mexico border and has been fighting the government’s attempt to construct a wall on it for over a year. She is a member of the Lipan Apache tribe and her family has owned the land for several centuries. Federal judge Andrew Hanen ruled in March that the Department of Homeland Security must negotiate with landowners before property can be seized, but yesterday he ordered Tamez to allow DHS to start construction on her land.

Dr. Tamez told me that she is disappointed with the ruling and will continue speaking out. She said she has seen nothing to indicate President Obama will change the border wall policy – especially since wall construction is providing jobs in the area. Tamez believes she can still appeal the ruling, but says Homeland Security contractors have already been trespassing on areas of her land.

Here’s a complete transcript of my interview with her (I’ve added emphasis in certain places).

Mediahacker: Dr. Tamez, could you just share with me your reaction to the ruling yesterday?

Tamez: Well, of course I was very saddened by it but my lawyers worked very hard to respond to every motion that was set forth by the government. And we worked hard at finding out a different result, so I guess in that respect we had exhausted all possible answers to whatever the goverment was claiming. So I have a lot of respect for Judge Hanen. I think that he has given us, here in South Texas the landowners here in El Calaboz, many opportunities to be heard. And for that I am grateful, to see that there are some judges and especially Judge Hanen, who uphold the Constitution. So I’m proud of that.

Other than that I think that the whole situation started out as a political thing, and it’s still a political thing. Because currently if President Obama and Secretary Napolitano were to put a stop to this, that would mean canceling contracts, jobs for those who are working with the contractors, and that would that wouldn’t be [inaudible] for President Obama, who is claiming to want to create jobs – that’s one of his priorities. So again, some of us have to suffer continually for corporations and also at the hands of our own government for political reasons.

Mediahacker: So do you have any appeals left available to you in the process, or not at this point?

Tamez: I believe that there is an opportunity for appeal. We have not been told that there is not one. I don’t know at this point. We’re talking about our options, I don’t know which direction we’re going to go. I know that we will concentrate on using our energies to think about what we will discuss when we sit down and negotiate, because Judge Hanen has presented us with a very nicely written paragraph an opportunity to sit down and discuss various factors that are of importance, before the government comes in and takes my land. So we want to work on that and make sure that we have a good chance to be heard as we sit down through that process.

Mediahacker: In March Judge Hanen ruled that DHS needed to negotiate with you and other landowners. I guess I’m wondering, is it his position or his ruling that those negotiations effectively took place already or is that still going to happen?

Tamez: We still have some things to work out, for example the fair market value of the land they want. And so the hearing is still set for that to take place in October. It’s been rolled up to October because we were not able to find appraisers for our land. We couldn’t hire anybody, the government had apparently contracted all the ones available in the valley. So it was difficult to come up with some answers when we couldn’t get an appraiser to do the job for us. When the hearing, the trial that takes place in October, is to look at the compensation, from what I understand from the document from the judge.

Mediahacker: What are your plans in the near-term? This ruling allows DHS to start building effective immediately, I guess. What are you going to do from here? I know that you have been trying to resist this for a long time.

Tamez: I’m going to continue to speak out and tell the story. And continue to be the voice of the people in the El Calaboz area. Because even some of those people who signed the waiver are talking about the process and from their stories they were pretty much forced into making a decision and threatened to turn over their property to the government. There were varying amounts of compensation given to them for what appear to be equal amounts of land. So the story will continue. And we will continue to talk about it so that more and more people will learn about the injustices that low-income people face as opposed to those on the path of the wall that didn’t even have a wall built because they just happen to be [inaudible], a resort or maybe a plantation owner or [inaudible]. Those who are fortunate enough to have those kinds of resources don’t get a wall as opposed to low-income Mexican Americans living in communities – yeah, we get the wall. So I will continue to talk about that. They ain’t gonna stop me. They can build this wall but they’re not going to take my voice away.

Mediahacker: And can you real briefly summarize what this is physically going to do your tract of property in terms of the environment and vegetation, and also your quality of life?

Tamez: That’s really what’s interesting is that we still don’t have the very specific answers from the government on where they plan to build it or what’s going to look like or anything like that. They have failed in their explanations, even though they were ordered by the court, they have failed. So that’s what needs to be clarified. As for [inaudible] plant life and animal life? Yes! I’ve been going there where they’re building the wall all around me and I see some of the wildlife escaping from the area. I see a lot of the plant life just totally crushed and scooped out. And many of the plants in those grounds are plants that we use for medicinal purposes. And so they’re completely scraped away…

Mediahacker: I know that you met Barack Obama while he was campaigning. Have you seen any changes in terms of DHS policy since his taking office and do you hold out any hope that him and the new Homeland Security Secretary will change plans at all?

Tamez: I see no change. I’ve seen no comment on it. I don’t know what the plans are, because, well, they haven’t said much. So I’m still wondering what we’re going to see. And I still remember that he voted for the wall when he was a Senator. He voted for it. And I also know that all the counties except two, along the river, went Democrat. Now, if the Democrats want to see Texas become blue, they had better pay attention to the political power that we can have when we start mobilizing.

Mediahacker: As a member of the Lipan Apache tribe, how do you feel, again, to have the federal government encroaching on your land?

Tamez: Well once again, it’s losing land to the government but this time it’s even more distressing because some of the plant life that we depend on for medicinal purposes is being eviscerated from the property. You know, DHS said they have no interest in the south part of my property, but you should see what they’ve done to it. If they have no interest then why are they trespassing?

The Texas 13th Court of Appeals upheld a judgment today to award $42.5 million in damages to the family of a prisoner murdered a private prison  The man was beaten to death in 2001 at GEO Group’s (then called Wackenhut) Willacy County jail by two inmates as prison officials, including the warden, stood by and laughed.  Video evidence of the beating was either lost or destroyed.

I interviewed Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership for the story.  He’s optimistic that this strongly-worded ruling, on top of increasingly frequent and well-documented abuses and scandals at private prisons around the state, will help push the Texas Legislature towards re-regulating corporate-run facilities in important ways.  Real justice, i.e. the abolition of private jails and detention centers in Texas, is probably still a ways off.  But this is progress.  (Image from texasprisionbidness.org.)