CHICANO RADIO NETWORK U.S.A. Blog

Remember in the late 90’s when you stumbled across CRNLive for the first time? At the time we had studio B which became your headquarters for Chicano Rapp & Hip Hop? Well for years we have been bombarded with your requests to bring it back.

Tune in September when we once again become your only place where you can keep up with what’s happening in the underground. But what’s even more exciting is that instead of you having to record the program and play it back like in the late 90’s now technology allows you to hear us in your car, home, office, etc. Even your smart TV & Phone can get our programming to follow you wherever you go.

Feel free to share this on your sites to let everyone know what you’ll be listening to at home, the office or on the Boulevard with your top down!

Musically Yours,

Frenkie Miranda :-{>
President/CEO

To listen go to: www.CRNLive.com

1995-2016 (c) Copyright CHICANO RADIO NETWORK U.S.A.
a division of STAR SOUND MUSIC GROUP®
7119 Sunset Boulevard, Suite 850, Hollywood, California 90046
All rights reserved.

I’m still here with his Mom his Aunts nieces ODM Lil Uno Crazy Joe Jammin James and Tony I’m sitting here still tripping that My Homie won’t be able to pull through the rigors of what hapoened to our boy and from what I see his spirit and soul have left his body and he has begun his journey with the Lord I will say he looks real peaceful and the last time he was seen alive was on the corner of koval and flamingo he asked Crazy Joe to drop him off where 2PAC was shot they let him off on that corner with a 12 PAC of beer a pint of vodka and a pack of smokes He was smiling and said he would be OK there that was Friday night jul 2nd on July 7th he was found barely breathing in a coma state they resotated him brought him in as a John Doe he suffered cardiac arrest and had severe burns from hours in coma in the hot Vegas sun on further test our little buddy was already going through kidney and liver failure the neurologist told me personally that nothing can be done he is clinicaly brain dead he told me they were manipulating his breathing and now we wait with tears in my eyes for his mom to give the word to take bobby off life support I can see the pain in her eyes and I know its going to be the hardest thing she has ever done in her life this is very surreal I ain’t slept in over 24 hours but I just can’t leave like this I watch ODM now sitting next to his rhyme partner people we all matter this is something that I never thought I’d witness but I’m here asking the Lord to be with my boy and his family in their time of need.

The book, called “Mexican American Heritage” is on the list of proposed textbooks that the Texas State Board of Education is considering to use as part of instructional materials for the newly created Mexican-American studies class.

If approved, the book would be used in classrooms as early as next year, something critics are trying to prevent from happening.

They say the book is filled with inaccurate depictions of Mexican-American history and culture. They also point out that the book was written by two authors, Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle, who aren’t known in the field of Mexican-American studies.

“It is one of the most racist textbooks I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading,” said Tony Díaz, a Houston-based educator, community activist and author who spearheaded the Librotraficante movement, which transported books to Arizona that had been banned by the Tucson school district.

RELATED: ‘Nuestra Palabra’ Celebrates 18 Years Showcasing Latino Literature

Díaz was one of the educators who pressed the state board to create a Mexican-American studies class last year.

“The people who wrote it obviously have no understanding of the difference between the term Chicano, Latino, Hispanic so that any time the word is uttered in the book, it’s used incorrectly,” Diaz said of the proposed textbook. “There’s no way to edit it to fix it. The book needs to go.”

Díaz is one of the organizers of a community meeting on Tuesday night to step up the opposition to using the book.

One passage of the book links Mexican Americans to undocumented immigrants and claims that illegal immigration has “caused a number of economic and security problems in the United States,” including “poverty, non-assimilation, drugs, crime, and exploitation.”

In another passage, Chicanos in the 1960’s civil rights era are described as people who “adopted a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.”

RELATED: Tony Díaz, Librotraficante, Wins 2012 Downs Intellectual Freedom Award

The “Mexican American Heritage” textbook was published by Momentum Instruction, a company that according to Houston Chronicle appears to be owned and operated by Cynthia Dunbar, former member of the Texas State Board of Education who critics call right-wing.

Momentum Instruction did not immediately return a call or respond to an email from NBC News Latino.

Lauren Callahan, spokesperson for the Texas State Board of Education, said the book will be reviewed by a panel of educators over the summer. The panel will determine the extent to which the book meets state standards and will look for factual errors.

In September, the state board will hold a public hearing to go over the panel’s findings and to hear comments from the public. The public also has until September to visit the state board’s website and submit factual errors or comments regarding the book.

A final vote by the state board on whether to approve or reject the book will come in November.

“It is a long process, and it’s a long process for that reason – so that people have ample time to go through and review the materials,” Callahan said.

She added that even if the book is approved, school districts are not required to use it and may purchase other instructional materials for use in the Mexican American Studies class.

Diaz said he and other scholars and activists are teaming up to hold community meetings across the state to educate people about what’s in the book and what they can do to prevent it from going into Texas classrooms. The first in the series of community meetings was scheduled for Tuesday night.

There’s also an online petition calling on the state board to remove the “Mexican American Heritage” from the list of proposed textbooks and to reopen the call for textbooks used for Mexican American studies.

Diaz said Tuesday night’s community meeting is one of the first steps to getting the public “deeply involved” before the state board votes on whether or not to approve the textbook.

“We have about 20 weeks before the vote, so we’re going to start now and keep constant pressure,” he said.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/texas-latinos-mobilize-against-controversial-mexican-american-textbook-n608246

July 10, 2016 by Tia Tenopia

Forget history—let’s drink some beer!

Let’s celebrate what we don’t know…

Americans love to celebrate—even when they do not exactly know what it is they’re celebrating.

Constitutional-Convention-1787PD_300
The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776, by the Continental Congress.

The Fourth of July, for example. This holiday commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, by the Continental Congress. By that act the thirteen American colonies declared that they regarded themselves as a new nation, the United States of America, and no longer part of the British Empire.

Given its historical significance, one would expect Americans would know the basics about July 4th. Apparently they don’t.

Reporters and bloggers have done Jay Leno-type “Jay Walking” type of quizzes of everyday Americans in various cities, some on university campuses, where one would expect to find a highly educated group of folks. The responses illustrate that many Americans don’t know what the 4th of July represents.

Mexican-American-War-PD_300
In 1776, did the United States declare its independence from…Mexico?!

For example, when asked what country broke away from England to start their own country in the late 1700s, a good number of people responded with variations of “I don’t know.” Some responses were outright bizarre, viz.: Independence Day recognizes the day we “overtook” the south and declared independence from the south. When asked what country the United States declared independence from, the answers ranged from “I have no idea” to Mexico, France, Canada, and Spain.

The above anecdotal examples correlate with polls that show the stunning level of ignorance many Americans have regarding the Fourth of July. A 2011 Maris poll found that only 58% of Americans know that the United States declared its independence in 1776 and about 25% have no idea what country the U.S. declared its independence from. The poll found that 14 % of teens believe the U.S. declared independence from France, and another 5 per cent thought it was Canada.

Not to mention the racist aspects of Independence Day…

Declaration-of-Independence_tm180b
“We hold these truths to be self-evident”or so it would seem.

Just as large swaths of the American public don’t know the basics about the Fourth of July, most Americans are ignorant of the racist hypocrisy inherent in the Declaration of Independence. Probably the most famous and most quoted part of the Declaration is: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

However, many of the signers of the Declaration were slave owners and didn’t abide by the lofty principle that “all men are created equal. ”

The Declaration of Independence rested on a litany of grievances of the colonists against the British monarchy. Two of these grievances spoke to racist issues.

One was that the British offered to grant freedom to slaves who ran away from their masters and enlisted in the British army or navy. Many plantation owners, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, were upset because they lost slaves who took up this offer.

Native-Americans-Iroquois-Public-Domain_200
There was debate as to who had the right to conquer and enslave Native American “savages.”

Another grievance was that the British had encouraged the “inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages” to fight the colonists. In 1763, King George of England proclaimed that the colonies no longer had the “right of discovery”—i.e., to take over Indian lands—west of the Appalachian Mountains, reserving that right solely for the crown. Thus, the indigenous inhabitants of the country were dehumanized as less-than-human “savages” who stood in the way of westward expansion.

Just as slavery would be a major factor in the Civil War a century later, slavery factored into the Revolutionary War, as did an insistence on the “right” to commit genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the country.

Ignorance is no excuse not to spend money…

Americans invest tons of money in celebrating that which they know nothing, or very little, about. Americans spend billions of dollars on Fourth of July activities and goods. Just on beer alone, it is estimated that Americans spend about $1 billion. Billions more are spent on food and related items—hot dogs, hamburger meat, chicken, buns, condiments, watermelon, ice cream, sodas, charcoal and lighter fluid, etc.

Millions more are spent on fourth-of-July themed clothes, decorations and flags, and fireworks. And millions are spent on the ubiquitous Fourth of July mattress and furniture sales and on gasoline by those who travel on this weekend.

Truth be told, capitalism has completely taken over the Fourth of July. For sure, there are Americans who know the history and significance of the Fourth and celebrate it as a patriotic event. But I think these folks are a minority. The Fourth of July is now a vehicle for money-making hoopla.

Ditto for St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo…

San Patricio Battalion Flag
St. Patrick’s Day celebrations introduced Gaelic to Americans.

St. Patrick’s Day originated in 18th- and 19th-century Ireland as a religious celebration in honor of Ireland’s patron saint, St. Patrick, who is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century. On March 17 (the date of his death) bars throughout Ireland were closed and most people observed the day by going to church (the bars didn’t begin opening on March 17 until the mid-1960s).

In the U.S., St. Patrick’s Day became a cultural-identity anchor following the arrival in the 19th century of large numbers of Irish immigrants who were confronted by militant nativism and were characterized as drunken, violent, and diseased criminals and were subjected to all manner of discrimination. To display their civic pride and the strength of their identity, Irish Americans began publicly celebrating their Catholicism and patron saint and praising the spirit of Irish nationalism in the old country. By the end of the 19th century, the localized Irish celebrations evolved to broader public events and parades, bringing home the point that Irish Americans were a political and civic force in America.

Irish beerFU
St. Patrick’s Day became a bar promotion.

By the 20th century, St. Patrick’s Day became a capitalist marketing bonanza—greetings cards and imported Irish shamrocks on T-shirts were in stores everywhere and the food and drink that became associated with the day became bar promotions. While there are many Irish Americans who know the history of St. Patrick’s Day and celebrate it seriously, that is, who express their pride in their Irish heritage, St. Patrick’s has devolved into a capitalistic orgy during which Americans spent about $4.7 billion dollars.

Thanks to American marketing campaigns, everyone—especially those of drinking age—is Irish on March 17. St. Patrick’s is most often associated with drinking alcohol (particularly, Guinness or beer dyed green). A 2016 poll showed that about a third of those who will celebrate St. Patrick’s will do so at a party or a bar/restaurant. Many people celebrate St. Patrick’ s Day simply by buying and wearing green apparel with an Irish twist (shamrocks, a witty saying, etc.).

It’s safe to bet that the overwhelming majority of St. Patrick’s revelers know absolutely nothing of the history and significance of the day.

The same dynamics apply to Cinco de Mayo.

Cinco_de_mayo_stamp_300
Cinco de Mayo marks a Mexican victory over French invaders in 1862.

Despite popular lore, Cinco de Mayo does not commemorate Mexican independence (that’s Sept. 16). It actually marks the victory of a tiny army of untrained and poorly equipped Mexican farmers over the well-armed French military during the Battle of Puebla, during the War of French Intervention, on May 5, 1862. The unexpected victory energized the country and became emblematic of the perseverance of a nation.

Outside of Puebla, Cinco de Mayo is not a major holiday in Mexico—schools, banks, government offices, and businesses are all open and conduct business as usual. In Puebla, parades and battle reenactments fill the day, and traditional dishes are shared.

As St. Patrick’s Day was for the Irish Americans, Cinco de Mayo in the U.S. began as an anchor of ethnic identity and pride for Mexican Americans.

In the 1860s, Mexicans in northern California celebrated the Mexican resistance to France by firing off rifle shots, singing patriotic songs, and making fiery speeches. The celebration of Cinco de Mayo picked up in the 1940s, during and after WW II, when Mexican Americans were routinely discriminated against in virtually every realm of life. To combat the sense of inferiority that American society was trying to impose on them, Mexican Americans began celebrating Cinco de Mayo as a vehicle of cultural pride. In the 1960s-1970s, the Chicano Movement took Cinco de Mayo out of California and into the rest of the U.S.

Cinco de Mayo BeerFU
Beer companies compete to promote Cinco de Mayo and the purchase of their brands.

Cinco de Mayo, however, did not become a national phenomenon until the 1980s when marketers, especially beer companies, saw the profit potential in it and started promoting it. Thus, Cinco de Mayo has lost any historical and ethnic significance it may have once had. It’s now seen as an occasion to drink beer, margaritas, and shots of tequila, while eating tacos and sporting sombreros. Many revelers apply fake mustaches and adopt faker accents. It is estimated that Americans buy more than $600 million worth of beer for Cinco de Mayo, more beer than is sold for the Super Bowl or St. Patrick’s Day.

Like with St. Patrick’s Day, it’s safe to bet that the overwhelming majority of Cinco de Mayo revelers know absolutely nothing of the history and significance of the day.

The larger, underlying story here is that the U.S. insists on transmogrifying the historic roots of ethnic groups before accepting them. The price of admission into Americana, as it were, is the trivialization and commercialization of culture and history. c/s

_______________________________________________

 

 

As we at CRNLive strive to keep our community in the loop when new options are available in different illnesses including cancer we have invited Lourdes Colon from the Documentary Create Option C, my journey with cancer.

Keeping up with her postings will not only allow you to search for new way of dealing with cancer, but also how you can change your lifestyle to a more healthier outlook helping you remove some of the factors to many ailments like, Heart, Diabetes and many others. Please bookmark this page to continue to get updates and relevant information about events.

Thank you,

CRNLive Blog Staff

The United States has been — and continues to be — one of the most popular destinations for immigrants from around the world. Immigrants from Latin American countries and other Spanish-speaking people in particular have become one of the nation’s fastest growing demographics. The United States may be a good place to live compared to many other countries, but every new wave of immigrants — along with second and third generation Hispanic Americans — continues to face various levels of discrimination.

In many of the worst states for Hispanic Americans, there are opportunities to get a steady job, earn decent wages, and buy a home in a thriving community. These opportunities, however, are not uniformly accessible across racial and ethnic lines. Based on an examination of a number of socioeconomic measures, 24/7 Wall St. identified the worst states for Hispanic Americans.

Read more: The Worst States for Hispanics – 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/03/25/the-worst-states-for-hispanics/#ixzz444XhhIY2

The nation’s Hispanic population is far from homogeneous. Residents originally from Mexico, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and a number of other countries all identify as Hispanic or Latino. Mexicans are by far the largest group, making up 64% of people who identify as Hispanic or Latino. Mexicans dominate the Hispanic populations in four of the 10 states on this list, while Puerto Ricans make up the largest share in five. In Rhode Island, Dominicans are the largest population within the Hispanic community.

Nationally, Hispanics earn less, are more likely to be unemployed and to live in poverty, and are less likely to own their homes compared to whites. These disparities are especially pronounced in the 10 worst states for Hispanics.

Nationwide, the annual median income of white households exceeds that of Hispanic households by $16,874. In the 10 worst states, the income gap is almost always greater than the national disparity. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, white households earn more than double the earnings of Hispanic households. With more resources, whites are more likely to be able to purchase a home. Two-thirds or more of white homes are owned by their occupants in all but one of these states. By contrast, fewer than half of Hispanic homes are owned by their occupants, and in most of these 10 states Hispanic homeownership rates are even lower.

In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race and ethnicity at the Economic Policy Institute think tank, noted that the relative youth of America’s Hispanic population may play a role in the income gap. The median age of Hispanics is 28.4 years, well below the median age for whites of 43.1 years. Not only that, but many Hispanics and their families are relatively new to the United States.

“It takes time for people to get familiar with an area, to build a network for finding jobs, and to build their family’s security,” Wilson said. Especially for newer immigrants, language barriers can also limit access to higher-paying jobs.

While income inequality can hurt anyone, it is often the case that it manifests specifically along ethnic and racial lines. That is, white populations earn more, and non-whites earn considerably less.

Wilson explained that areas with severe ethnic and racial inequalities tend to be highly segregated. As a consequence, “access to various resources, education, jobs, and so on, will vary a lot based on where people live.”

Financial distress and extremely poor economic conditions often have a ripple effect and are closely tied with other poor outcomes. Hispanics in every state are more likely to go to prison than their white peers. Relatively impoverished, isolated, and segregated communities tend to be policed more, and the greater number of police encounters may also partially explain the higher level of incarceration.

Higher education boosts income and wealth regardless of race or ethnicity. According to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, higher education levels also help families protect their wealth and to better withstand economic shocks during recessions and downturns. However, the researchers found that these benefits are far less of an advantage to Hispanic families than they are for white and Asian families.

Wilson noted that whether or not members of Hispanic communities are documented may also play a role, although it can be difficult to pinpoint the effect since data does not often capture them. “Folks who are undocumented may be less likely to file charges or complain when they feel they’re being discriminated against, either in their pay or their employment,” Wilson said.Therefore, the disparities might be underestimated.

Read more: The Worst States for Hispanics – 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/03/25/the-worst-states-for-hispanics/#ixzz444XbTXIq

 

See Video: https://www.facebook.com/842939195743215/videos/988004131236720/

Check out the video that I shot for Bernie Sanders, featuring Wenona Benally! Vote tomorrow!
Arizona Bernie Supporter Profiles

This is Wenona B and this is why she supports Bernie Sanders for ‪#‎POTUS‬.
‪#‎AZNativesforBernie‬
‪#‎ArizonaConBernie‬ ‪#‎NativesForBernie‬ ‪#‎FeelTheBern‬ ‪#‎TataBernieCares‬ ‪#‎BernieSanders2016‬

By second gen

Tara Houska, Ojibwe, Tribal Attorney, Native American Rights Activist
Bernie has named a new Native American advisor to the campaign. Tara Houska is a tribal rights attorney, as well as an environmental activist and a contributing columnist to Indian Country Today Media Network (ICTMN)

In her new role, Houska, who is Couchiching First Nation, will field press inquiries, recruit voters – particularly Native Americans – and assist with drafting Sanders’ Native American policy.

Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, a Democrat, has said he will “work with the Native American community in preserving their heritage, and their way of life” and that he will do “everything” he can to “redress [treaty violations].”

Houska is also a National Campaigns Director with the environmental justice group, Honor The Earth, led by Native American leader and activist, Winona LaDuke. She is also founding board member of Not Your Mascots.

Houska plans on making sure that Native American issues are heard. She is a strong Native, female, environmental and human rights voice, and is a great addition to Team Bernie.

“I hope to elevate Native American issues at a high level,” she said. “Too much of America is unaware of the plights our communities face, and we are tired of hearing more of the same from politicians. I look forward to continued and expanded outreach in Indian country. Our voices and our votes matter.”

Mexico, John M. Ackerman wrote recently for Foreign Policy, “is not a functional democracy.” Instead, it’s a “repressive and corrupt” oligarchy propped up by a “blank check” from Washington.

Since 2008, that blank check has come to over $2.5 billion appropriated in security aid through the Mérida Initiative, a drug war security assistance program funded by Washington. Negotiated behind closed doors in the last years of the Bush administration, the plan was originally proposed as a three-year program. Yet Hillary Clinton’s State Department pushed aggressively to extend it, overseeing a drastic increase of the initiative that continues today.

Much of this aid goes to U.S.-based security, information, and technology contracting firms, who make millions peddling everything from helicopter training to communications equipment to night-vision goggles, surveillance aircrafts, and satellites.

This aid comes in addition to the direct sales of arms and other equipment to Mexico authorized by the State Department, as Christy Thorton pointed out in a 2014 New York Times op-ed. Those sales reached $1.2 billion in 2012 alone, the last full year of Clinton’s tenure. Indeed, as the Mérida Initiative has grown, Mexico has become one of the world’s biggest purchasers of U.S. military arms and equipment.

But while sales have boomed for U.S.-based contractors, the situation in Mexico has badly deteriorated. The escalation of U.S. counter-drug assistance in the country has paralleled a drastic increase in violence, fueling a drug war that’s killed more than 100,000 people since 2006.

State Complicity

High-profile human rights cases — such as the kidnapping and disappearance of the 43 students from the teacher-training college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero in September 2014 — sparked renewed attention to the devastating effects of the U.S.-funded drug war in Mexico. Yet, they didn’t come out of nowhere.

Forced disappearances like these were ballooning even as Clinton was pushing Mérida Initiative programs forward, with official records reaching upwards of 3,000 to 4,000 people a year in 2011 and 2012. According to the United Nations, these widespread kidnappings and disappearances often involve state authorities, and the problem is worsened by the government’s failure to investigate.

U.S. laws explicitly prohibit the delivery of aid to foreign individuals and units implicated in systematic human rights violations. But files released by WikiLeaks revealed that Clinton’s State Department regularly received information on widespread “official corruption“ in Mexico, even as they were bolstering the flow of equipment, assistance, and training that ended up in the hands of abusive and compromised security forces.

Indeed, in 2009 and 2010 — the middle years of Clinton’s tenure at State — U.S. embassy cables boasted that intelligence and military cooperation between the two countries had never been better. Such cables, and the full archival orbit of declassified and leaked U.S. and Mexican records, demonstrate that Clinton’s State Department repeatedly cleared the delivery of U.S. assistance training and equipment to security forces implicated in corruption or abuse.

One document from June 2011 recorded a visit of U.S. officials to the northern state of Tamaulipas in May 2011 to assess training needs for state security forces. The visit came as Mexico’s federal authorities were trying to cover up the discovery of mass graves from the recent San Fernando massacres in the region. Even as U.S. officials were reporting on the Mexican government’s complicity and cover-up of the massacres, the U.S. embassy recommended further training for Tamaulipas security forces.

The same document also reports that Mexican immigration agents had been fired for kidnapping migrants. Yet the delivery of biometric data equipment to the same agency continued unimpeded.

In the southern state of Guerrero, meanwhile, records from 2009 to 2010 show that the U.S. embassy cleared local and federal police, military officials, and investigative agents for training and assistance from units implicated in human rights violations. Even then, the U.S. embassy — and not to mention reputable human rights groups — knew about the direct involvement of government officials in abuses there.

Human Rights Watch reported in 2011, for example, on widespread cases of torture in Guerrero going back to 1994. The group noted regular abuses by police and military forces, including “cases of homicide, torture, and extortion” overseen by the judicial police chief in the northern part of the state. The same report highlighted strong evidence of the involvement of military officials from Chilpancingo in cases of kidnapping and disappearances in 2010, as the U.S. embassy was clearing officials for training from the same military base.

After government security forces killed two students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school during a protest in December 2011, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Earl Anthony Wayne sent a cable reporting that “the evidence of heavy-handed police tactics is strong and disconcerting.” It was the same school where, less than three years later, 43 students would be disappeared — and six others killed — after being attacked by local police forces.

The Beneficiaries

In addition to training Mexico’s security forces, Clinton’s State Department bolstered Mexico’s wiretap capabilities, provided communications systems and computers, and installed information sharing software, biometric databases, and radar systems. It also peddled Blackhawk helicopters, surveillance aircrafts, satellites, and all-terrain vehicles, and built joint-intelligence fusion centers for targeting high-value cartel leaders.

The implementation and delivery of this equipment took place hand-in-hand with private contractors. Major players like General Electric, Honeywell, Motorola, Sharp, IBM, and Dell appear throughout records of these transactions, along with scores of others — including Science Applications International, Rapiscan, American Science and Engineering, RCA, and many more.

Several contractors benefited significantly from helicopter deliveries and services in particular. These played a prominent role in both the conduct and the promotion of the broader drug war effort.

Three Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters, for example, were sent to Mexico’s federal police in November 2010. Just two weeks after their handover, they were deployed in the largest aerial operation conducted to date against the La Familia de Michoacán drug cartel. The U.S. embassy boasted in a secret cable that the operation — which reportedly led to the killing of drug kingpin Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, or “El Chayo” — was a “needed win“ for then-president Felipe Calderón in his increasingly unpopular war against the cartels.

El Chayo’s killing was the first clear evidence the State Department could highlight to show Congress that Calderón’s strategy — and the U.S. intelligence and security aid behind it — was leading to results. Yet the operation, which also caused large-scale civilian deaths, appeared to be in vain: The Mexican government reported that El Chayo was killed again, years later, in an operation carried out against the cartel in March 2014.

Nonetheless, the 2010 operation provided the justification to further ratchet up U.S. support. In May 2011, embassy staff accompanied Mexican federal police representatives to review an aircraft project in North Carolina and receive presentations from the AMCOM missile command and industry representatives. More aircrafts were subsequently delivered.

Sikorsky, along with other companies such as General Electric, continued to reap the benefits of the drug war in Mexico even after Clinton left the State Department. In March 2015, the department approved the sale of three Black Hawk helicopters to the Mexican military for $110 million. This followed a larger deal in April 2014 for 18 Black Hawks at $680 million.

Notably, several of the contractors that profited from U.S. security assistance in Mexico — such as General Electric, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies Corporation, which owns Sikorsky — reportedly contributed to the Clinton Foundation. And according to the transparency group Open Secrets, Clinton currently tops the list of all 2016 presidential candidates in campaign contributions from the military contracting industry.

Back to Business as Usual

Naturally, Clinton herself was aware of how her department’s support for the Mexican drug war would look in light of the revelations about corruption and human rights abuses.

In January 2011, shortly after the release of a huge tranche of leaked diplomatic cables, Secretary Clinton apologized to her Mexican counterpart Patricia Espinosa for any “embarrassment” caused by the WikiLeaks documents, announcing her intention to get

“beyond WikiLeaks” and reaffirm the U.S.-Mexico relationship. Clinton expressed optimism that they could create a better “narrative” than the waste, fraud, and abuse revealed in the cables and regular media accounts and “explain to Congress why foreign assistance money under ‘Beyond Merida’ should continue.”

Getting beyond WikiLeaks, of course, meant getting back to business as usual — and back behind closed doors.

While thousands of Clinton’s own emails have since been released, the secrecy continues — with much of the important information still heavily redacted. For example, the emails contain potentially important documents, such as a memo to President Obama with a report on Clinton’s trip to Mexico City and Monterrey. This document, however, is completely redacted, except for one line.

In his piece for Foreign Policy, John Ackerman argued that Clinton’s defense of the status quo in Mexico is “grounded in a vicious cycle of complicities between economic and political elites on both sides of the border.” Indeed, the record available for public scrutiny shows that Clinton’s State Department — rather than addressing human rights concerns over the Mérida funding — focused on ensuring that security assistance continued in the face of abuse, cover-ups, and ongoing impunity.

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus.

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/03/a-dark-legacy-hillarys-clintons-role-in-the-mexican-drug-war/

Science and technology, combined with the arts has a great young advocate with Juan, who got inspired on his career choice by the role the arts had depicting science discoveries in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
“I saw Leonardo da Vinci’s science drawings and the work of the cartographers, and how scientists observed and recreated with art the science of their times”, he said.
Juan is an accomplished senior at Metro Tech, where he, with a help of a fellow student, organized the first STEAM fair at his school which presented demos and activities in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math and the Arts (STEAM). He also is a Chief Science Officer (CSO) a program initiated by Arizona SciTech Festival where students are selected by their peers to represent and advocate STEM and STEAM fields, voicing the interest and opportunities students have to interact with Science and Technology fields in their schools.
“As a Chief Science Officer (CSO) we had this new and unique opportunity to learn and explain the sciences in a better way. We have the task of advocate for STEAM, talk about the importance of innovation to students, teachers, education commissioners and governing board members,” Juan said.
His efforts promoting STEAM education and his good grades made him scholarship recipient to Colgate University in New York, where he plans to study a double mayor in computer science and art.
“STEAM really is about learning and experiencing exciting technical knowledge, he said.