Kid and I keep running into misunderstandings, so we have been trying to straighten it out by pm and decided to post it here.

Here we go:

Let's try something. I couldn't do this on the public board because other posters would have a bunch of "on the other hand" and other objections and considerations, and there would be a lot of confusion.

What I will do is run through a list of my premises and assumptions and we can find out where I am losing you.

My assumptions:

- We are talking about politics

- "Politics" means all of the relationships and interactions between people in public - other than among family and friends

- Practical politics involves power - how it is arranged, who has it and who doesn't, how it is used

- In our culture, power follows money (and vice versa of course but it revolves around wealth)

- "Wealth" means control over resources - fundamentally and ultimately food, shelter, water, heat

- A fraction of one percent of the population controls most of the wealth - that is called the ruling class. They do not need to work.

- The other 99% must work for a paycheck in order to live - the working class

- There are a few exceptions, but those in the ruling class have incomes in the millions, while the other 99% are bunched down below a household income of $150,000 or so, and of those 90% are below $70,000 and half are below $35,000.

OK that is the first tier of assumptions. Are we good?

OK second installment. 8)

So, politics is the general overview of all of our social interactions and how they are organized; that means power, who has it and how it is used; power follows wealth; wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few; the rest of us suffer to varying degrees as a result.

Now, we have identified two classes - the haves and the have-nots, the ruling class and the working class.

- The people in the working class create all of the value in society - and that is the original and only source of wealth.

- Among the working class are those who work as writers, designers, speakers, thinkers, organizers - the people I call "intellectuals."

- Those people deal in words and ideas - that is their product.

- Those intellectuals are compensated more than those who work with their hands and are granted more prestige and status.

- The ideas, the words, the writing and speaking - those are the most powerful and useful products of any in a society.

- Just as a farmer grows food for certain people - produces a product that supports certain people - intellectuals come up with rhetoric and ideas that support certain people, peak and write on behalf of the interests of certain people.

- If intellectuals were able to eat - or even live in peace - without being carefully trained and indocrinated into irrelevance, and assuming a certain role and ststus and position in society, this would become a danger to the ruling class.

- Intellectuals are punished and punished severely if they leave the reservation and put their skills into the service of their fellow working class people - by social and economic pressure, and if they persist by being imprisoned or killed.

This is getting a little more complicated, so I will leave it at that for now.

Still good?

Continuing...

- Intellectuals provide an essential and critical service to the ruling class of promoting the message of the ruling class.

- The pen is mightier than the sword, and ruling class power is mainly kept in place by words, not arms.

- Words and ideas matter, they don't just drop out of the sky (might be paraphrasing anax there).

- All of our thinking and speaking and writing - every day in every encounter with people - is heavily corrupted by nonsensical and illogical constructs to keep us from questioning ruling class power and our role in defending it.

- That is what blocks progress and action

- Since the problem is about words and ideas, so is the solution.

- Blue collar people are physically more oppressed, but are more free mentally and less brainwashed; white collar people are more comfortable physically, but are much more restricted and regulated mentally and are more brainwashed.

- A key aspect of our brainwashing it that we think they - blue collar people - are the brainwsahed ones, and we are not.

- The full context of our imprisonment is what I call "white suburban privilege" or the "house Negroes" social position - status, credentials, rewards, physical comfort, security, perks, trinkets - all doled out in precise measure according to our efforts at promoting, defending and apologizing for the interests of the ruling class.

I am thinking that we are probably still on the same page at this point Kid. What else is there between this agreement and understanding we have reached, and the confusion and miscommunication we keep running into?

I posted this over at RI just now - probably kicked over another beehive - that continues from were we are now.

Yep. Flatter us by telling us we are smarter and better and we will follow the rulers anywhere.

We are smarter - that is, we have degrees.

We are physically healthier - that is, we make the "right choices."

We are mentally healthier - that is, we believe in the cult of psychology.

We are winners - that is, we make more money and make clever financial decisions.

We are spiritually better - that is, we are "open to" any sort of mumbo jumbo and committed to none.

We are socially a cut above - that is, we don't need anyone and are well-adjusted to society.

We are culturally superior - we have better taste in fashion and make better consumer choices.

We are politically better - that is, we can "see" outside of "the matrix."

We are practically fucking perfect.

I am thinking that we are probably still on the same page at this point Kid. What else is there between this agreement and understanding we have reached, and the confusion and miscommunication we keep running into?

I'm thinking about that

I'm thinking about that

Speaking of thinking, I just heard Parenti on FSTV say this:

"Don't for one minute believe that they don't care what you think. What you think is the ONLY thing they care about."

Get it?

That is our blindspot. We are the yeoman in the work of controlling what the population thinks. Yet look at the resistance to discussing this, let alone challenging it - the complicity, the false concepts, the clever wordy disguises of the ruling class agenda, the unexamined role we play every day in everything we say and think.

We are the fucked up ones, we are the ones missing in action, we are the ones asleep, we are the ones most responsible for the criminal regime in Washington, and it is what we are thinking and saying that is fucked up.

I can talk about class struggle in theoretical terms, and as it applies to someone else over there, but any time we try to turn that lens back on ourselves, there is either bitter and angry resistance and rejection, or confusion and miscommunication.

Keeping oneself insulated from the fray - that is the whole problem right there. Many are willing to allow some discussion about class struggle, call themselves "socialists," so long as they are observers and never participants. So long as we are not required to do anything but change our own minds, improve our own little selves. The only way we can see ourselves participating is in rote ways - join a march, mail a check - that do not use our most valuable and powerful skills, and do not require us to challenge our own complicity.

We need to be willing to see the way we are already participating - on behalf of the ruling class - and start putting our existing participation into the service of our own class.

We may think that words and ideas are not "doing something." The ruling class doesn't think that. All of our words and ideas are doing a great job of promoting their agenda.

By the way, most of the discussions we engage in are discussions with upscale white sububurban educated folks, yet we pretend that there is no bias implicit in that.

We don't need to convince most of the white professional class, we just need a few - but we do need a few, just as the civil rights organizers did in the 50's and 60's. 10% would be more than adequate.

Why to this day are we still talking mostly to people from the same demographic, spinning around and around in the same circles of futility, and still convinced that until and unless we can convice all of the white professionals we are "losing?"

Why?

Our minds are like cats thrown on a hot tin roof - we frantically skitter away from looking at our own complicity.

"Yeahyeahyeah white privilege. White suburban privilege. Good rant, Mike. I see it, boy can I ever see it. Yep. Those stupid liberals whatareyagoingtodo? I am ready for the exam. Really, I get it. I don't know what else you want. Now let's get back to the dry pedantic academic political discussion. Hey, don't get me wrong. You have some interesting insights there."

If I express it in detail, it gets mistaken as an academic lecture. If I simplify it and put it into everyday talk, it gets mistaken as something not worthy of study.

We are trapped, and all of the good stuff, all of the things we should be exploring and discussing are on the other side of a gate that we will not go through.

I am not trying to write a doctoral thesis and submit it for fucking peer review when I post. I am trying to start a discussion - about US not about our brilliant observations from afar.

We have two truly spectacular recent examples here of what things look like from one side of the gate compared to the other, in those by Russell and anax on the immigration debate, and in those by Slad and Wolf on Washington state politics. In both cases, Wolf and anax are giving us a mere glimpse - a mere starting point - as to what is on the other side of that gate we won't go through.

At RI this morning I posted that the only thing we need to do to go through that gate is to recognize the Leave it to Beaver illusion - not in those stupid other people, we are so good at that, but in ourselves - and let go of it.

The college lecture hall is Leave it to Beaver. "Speaking truth to power" is Leave it to Beaver. The liberal activist organizations are Leave it to Beaver. Academic socialism is Leave it to Beaver. The anti-war movement is Leave it to Beaver. The corporate career is Leave it to Beaver. Code Pink is Leave it to Beaver.

Medea Benjamin is June fucking Cleaver.

And - Eddie Haskell - otherwise know as George Bush - is not the cause of the problems.

Wally is the fucking problem - "gee, Dad, I can see how Negroes are mistreated and all that like my teacher says, but gosh, I just don't know what any of us can actually do about it."

June: "Well, gee Wally, you could always invite that nice boy Tyrone from the other side of town over to dinner. Would that be all right do you think, Ward?"

Ward: "Hmmmmm. I guess there wouldn't be any harm in that, dear. The neighbors might get a little upset, but these are the challenges we face living in the suburbs. No one said it would be easy being white."

Now don't be a Beaver, Kid.

I've been sick as a dog all day, so this'll have to wait for tomorrow.

I never "believed in " Leave it to Beaver. It was too far from my reality."Where did people live like that?" Fuck, I didn't know.

By the way, most of the discussions we engage in are discussions with upscale white sububurban educated folks, yet we pretend that there is no bias implicit in that.

We don't need to convince most of the white professional class, we just need a few - but we do need a few, just as the civil rights organizers did in the 50's and 60's. 10% would be more than adequate.

Why to this day are we still talking mostly to people from the same demographic, spinning around and around in the same circles of futility, and still convinced that until and unless we can convice all of the white professionals we are "losing?"

Why?

You answered yourself, in part, above, Mike:

"We are the fucked up ones, we are the ones missing in action, we are the ones asleep, we are the ones most responsible for the criminal regime in Washington, and it is what we are thinking and saying that is fucked up."

to paraphrase St. Augustine "knowledge not used is a sin", where is the application of all this wonderful knowledge here, what can the recipient do with it (namely me for one)? and who is reading this site more than those who espouse leftist doctrines?? and who is applying this knowledge in ways not intended by the writers? where do the spindoctors get their best spin?

Can anyone here give me some practical applications? Or am I just the idiot who posts here once in awhile that is "kindly" tolerated? ignored? Who here, besides Mike, is out there talking to the people?

Parenti said "Don't for one minute believe that they don't care what you think. What you think is the ONLY thing they care about." Keep feeding their fires without any intention of building your own firewalls...

I've actually sacrificed my art, to search for actions, practical actions, can anyone here point me to some of that? What the fuck, I see so little common sense here...of course the world can be supplied with all its energy, food, shelter needs... but who, what, when, where, or how are the people who are without going to get their needs met without the knowledge being applied? Theorizing is all good, but it ain't gonna feed the masses, and it ain't gonna subvert the ruling regime, is it?

...to paraphrase St. Augustine "knowledge not used is a sin", where is the application of all this wonderful knowledge here, what can the recipient do with it (namely me for one)? and who is reading this site more than those who espouse leftist doctrines?? and who is applying this knowledge in ways not intended by the writers? where do the spindoctors get their best spin?

Can anyone here give me some practical applications? Or am I just the idiot who posts here once in awhile that is "kindly" tolerated? ignored? Who here, besides Mike, is out there talking to the people?

Parenti said "Don't for one minute believe that they don't care what you think. What you think is the ONLY thing they care about." Keep feeding their fires without any intention of building your own firewalls...

I've actually sacrificed my art, to search for actions, practical actions, can anyone here point me to some of that? What the fuck, I see so little common sense here...of course the world can be supplied with all its energy, food, shelter needs... but who, what, when, where, or how are the people who are without going to get their needs met without the knowledge being applied? Theorizing is all good, but it ain't gonna feed the masses, and it ain't gonna subvert the ruling regime, is it?

Hi Mary. Happy new year.

There is no interest anywhere. Not sure why.

I have been down deathly sick for a week - another story - and I had this remarkable insight. I worked for a few years selling produce for farmers, and now that I am out of work I have some perspective on it. I thought back on the frustrations and I realized that the clients didn't want to succeed. That is so against the grain and counter-intuitive that it doesn't seem possible. Everyone acts as though they want to succeed, talks as though they do. I had one client for whom I generated several million dollars in sales over a year's time, and he just got more and more nervous, dismantled the sales plan and made life so miserable for me that I finally walked away.

People cannot see cause and effect, and they have no sense of do A and get B - no concept of how anything could be accomplished. To do so would require looking at reality closely, and that people will not do. If people won't look at reality, they can't move from point A to point B. They cannot even imagine it. They will not be dragged kicking and screaming to the result they say they want.

I've actually sacrificed my art, to search for actions, practical actions, can anyone here point me to some of that? What the fuck, I see so little common sense here...of course the world can be supplied with all its energy, food, shelter needs... but who, what, when, where, or how are the people who are without going to get their needs met without the knowledge being applied? Theorizing is all good, but it ain't gonna feed the masses, and it ain't gonna subvert the ruling regime, is it?

There are none. Nada, zip, zilch... There are NO practical actions that are going to "feed the masses", as you say. Worse, there is no level of protests, actions, wildcats, demonstrations, love-ins, sit-ins, boycotts, or spontaneous revolts that are going to "feed the masses", either. From a historical standpoint, those are entirely doomed. The only thing that has ever suceeded are political movements. That is what leads to "theorizing" in the first place and why "theorizing" almost always produces near instant hostility to contrasting "thinking" with "doing". What you have repeated is an advertising slogan, similar to "squeezably soft Charmin". That is part of the problem too, though it is easy to solve.

As far people on the board who talk to people, or engage in actions, or have "common sense", it's a mixed bag as in all other aspects of life. I've fought the battles all throughout my life, have paid a significantly greater "price" than my "art", and will match my "common sense" against anyone you know. I have absolutely no advice and no "hope" (trademark Barak Obama) to give you. Sink yourself into your union, fight like crazy, and study as hard as you can so that you can "theorize" and figure out what makes a "difference". You might start with asking why I might think that what is obvious to you is crazy to me and why what seems crazy to you may also be obviously true to me. What could yield such an astonishing difference of perspective?
.

By the way, most of the discussions we engage in are discussions with upscale white sububurban educated folks, yet we pretend that there is no bias implicit in that.

We don't need to convince most of the white professional class, we just need a few - but we do need a few, just as the civil rights organizers did in the 50's and 60's. 10% would be more than adequate.

Why to this day are we still talking mostly to people from the same demographic, spinning around and around in the same circles of futility, and still convinced that until and unless we can convice all of the white professionals we are "losing?"

Why?

You answered yourself, in part, above, Mike:

"We are the fucked up ones, we are the ones missing in action, we are the ones asleep, we are the ones most responsible for the criminal regime in Washington, and it is what we are thinking and saying that is fucked up."

to paraphrase St. Augustine "knowledge not used is a sin", where is the application of all this wonderful knowledge here, what can the recipient do with it (namely me for one)? and who is reading this site more than those who espouse leftist doctrines?? and who is applying this knowledge in ways not intended by the writers? where do the spindoctors get their best spin?

Can anyone here give me some practical applications? Or am I just the idiot who posts here once in awhile that is "kindly" tolerated? ignored? Who here, besides Mike, is out there talking to the people?

Parenti said "Don't for one minute believe that they don't care what you think. What you think is the ONLY thing they care about." Keep feeding their fires without any intention of building your own firewalls...

I've actually sacrificed my art, to search for actions, practical actions, can anyone here point me to some of that? What the fuck, I see so little common sense here...of course the world can be supplied with all its energy, food, shelter needs... but who, what, when, where, or how are the people who are without going to get their needs met without the knowledge being applied? Theorizing is all good, but it ain't gonna feed the masses, and it ain't gonna subvert the ruling regime, is it?

No socialist movement is going to be won on the basis of only those who call themselves socialists. That is because the movement is much vaster than a few oddballs like us. It is of course a latent "movement" right now that has yet to be won over to a certain way of thinking.

This is the taks of socialists inside the United States, a task that (obviously) requires a united, cohesive organization.

Expanding on the theme, it seems to me what you are asking Mary, is how we transform the societal struggle into a class struggle. And class struggle is by definition political since it is the class in motion trying to seize control for itself. Hence, a political party.

Personally I think we have not even "placed" ourselves, either in history or in the world today. Class struggle is not a generic or a neat ideological compartment and it is certainly not static or unchanging.

It is not so easy to say this next article describes the direct consequences of "imperialism for instance. Or, rather, it IS easy to say that. But a statement to that effect is so empty as to be devoid of any significance for our own considerations

http://www.newspapertree.com/features/1 ... ico-border (http://www.newspapertree.com/features/1976-making-a-killing-land-deals-and-girl-deaths-on-the-u-s-mexico-border)

Something every bit as bad as the feminicides is occurring in Juarez, yet few people in the U.S., or even El Paso, know or care. At Lomas del Poleo, an entire community is being tossed for basically the same reasons the area's females have been blotted out. The people are considered disposable.

Posted on January 4, 2008

Lots of Americans have heard about the Mexican city Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, Texas, and the 400 or so female murders that have happened there since the 1990s. Many who've heard have flown to the border to hold press conferences and make movies or put on plays and offer help. Especially women – including famous ones. Jane Fonda, J. Lo, Sally Fields, Minnie Driver, Eve Ensler – all know of the killings, or at least those involving long-haired adolescents who worked in maquiladoras and went to church and were good daughters before they ended up in places like Lomas del Poleo as anal-raped corpses and maybe a tattered bra.


Lomas del Poleo. Some Godforsaken desert spot on the Juarez fringe where at least a dozen bodies were found in the sand from 1996 to 2003. Most never identified, but one was Veronica Castro, a teen working at a big, foreign-owned assembly plant when she disappeared. The corpse of another girl, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez, was found elsewhere, but at the time she was killed she lived in Lomas. Her mom, Paula Flores, is the first person who thought of blanketing Juarez utility poles with pink crosses to draw attention to the murders. As a result of such activism, the murders have come, internationally, to be known as feminicide. Embedded in that term is the idea that women are dying violently in Juarez precisely because they're women. It's a political concept, a theory, and thus awful but in its abstraction oddly comfortable.


The killing fields at Lomas del Poleo, on the other hand, are a hundred percent real, and straight-out scary to even think about. Don't go there, the zeitgeist whispers: it's isolated, desolated, gritty, a place only for cloak-and-dagger journalists, while the rest of us can just read about it and maybe march downtown with the stars, or sign Amnesty International petitions.


But now, something every bit as bad as the feminicides is occurring in Juarez, in the same area where Veronica et al were dumped. Yet few people in the US, or even El Paso, know or care about this new horror. And because they don't, the murdered women of Juarez are being buried from consciousness.


How can they be resurrected?


By digging into current events at Lomas del Poleo, where an entire community is being tossed for basically the same reasons the area's females have been blotted out. The people are considered disposable.


A professor took me to Lomas years ago, when the feminicides were still fresh news. She was studying the concept of border women as waste matter, in concert with the generalized phenomenon of illegal municipal dumping. Her theory included the fact that Juarez maquiladoras were organized and managed so the entire, mostly woman, workforce at the average plant would quit or be fired from their jobs – or "turn over," the industry calls it — in less than a year. Massive turnover would quickly and efficiently dispense with labor once it was deemed worn out, or too expensive because of employers' legal obligation after several months to give workers perks like health insurance and end-of-year bonuses. The professor felt that the maquiladora economy of female worker disposability was affecting the entire culture and that more and more in Juarez, all women were being defined as throwaways.


That attitude, she said, was fueling the murders, and not just of dozens of long-haired, stranger-raped teens, who are the only victims the press and Hollywood ever pay attention to. In fact, however, many hundreds more women and girls have been fatally beaten, shot, beheaded, raped, incinerated and dumped not by unknowns, but by their husbands, boyfriends, and neighbors. The violence is unprecedented in its frequency and brutality. In Juarez until the early 1990s, it was exceedingly rare for a woman to be murdered in any way, by anyone. Then suddenly, right around the advent of NAFTA in 1994, female corpses were everywhere.


And the professor had ideas about why so many of the bodies were ending up in the desert. She did not think it reflected some serial killer's unique MO. Because municipal sanitation services are so lacking in Juarez, she said, everything unwanted – from household trash to human beings — gets thrown, sub rosa, in the outskirts. We poked with our eyes and some sticks in this parched, garbage-strewn place called Lomas del Poleo, where corpses had recently been discovered. We found only withered shoes, soiled Pampers, and bleached baby dolls. Not unexpected, the professor said. But what surprised me – I still remember after all this time – was the old man who ambled from behind a hill on a burro, herding goats and smilingly doffing his hat to wish us buenas tardes. "Where on earth did he come from?" I thought. Heretofore I'd assumed Lomas del Poleo was just some vacant hell hole. Now I wondered if it was more inviting. Then I forgot the man, and Lomas. I moved away to the US interior.


But last month I was visiting El Paso. Another friend, a border community activist, took me to a meeting in a sparsely furnished green building across the river with no heat and everyone huddled in jackets and soberly talking in turn. Some were students from downtownish Juarez who had nice glasses and OK wardrobes. Others were "colonos" – the flea-market dressed residents of Lomas, many of who have lived there over 30 years. They'd walked a mile down from a mesa to reach the cold green building, because they are not allowed to hold public gatherings in their own neighborhood. Nor can they bring in friends or guests, for meetings or anything else resembling politics. To enter their own community for whatever reason, they must pass a guard house staffed by snickering male thugs with guns.


The thug checkpoint and all the rest of Lomas are enclosed by concrete posts, barbed wire and trained dogs. People cannot pass unless they live inside. Trucks supplying basics such as tortillas,
water and milk, are also disallowed. At the meeting in the green building, I talked with two women who appeared in their seventies. One was stringy and gnarled; the other squat, with white, lusterless hair like cheap twine. They both lurched slightly with old age or fatigue. They said there used to be many stores up in Lomas, but now hardly any remain. To get groceries each day, they must walk the mile downhill, then make their way back to the armed punks and wire and canines.


Sometimes when people leave the area to get food, or to work in maquiladoras, they return and find their houses razed to rubble by bulldozers. One of the women said this happened to her middle-aged son, and it made him so apoplectic and heartbroken that he died. She described such things and wouldn't let me take her photo or use her name. She and her neighbor were terrified of reprisals. Their fear sickened me.


This is all going on a few miles from El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, and the bikini waxing spas of upper Mesa Street. What is happening in Lomas del Poleo is not unlike the logistics and doings of a concentration camp. Yet practically no one in the US – even those who've marched for and donated to and worried about the murdered women – seems to know or care.


The reason, perhaps, is that the barbed wire and dogs have not to do with how the feminicides are presented: as crazy, titillating speculations about serial killer conspiracies, rich-boy mafias, narco orgies, Satanic rituals and the black market vending of kidneys. Rather, the current disaster is connected to much greyer, more tedious speculation: the kind involving real estate. Deeds and mortgages are not quite the stuff of Who-Done-Its. They turn even more arcane when combined with Mexican tenancy statutes. But these topics - land and law — are the underpinnings of the border's little modern-day terrordrome. To understand the awful things I heard and saw at that community meeting last month, I've explored the web, talked with people including Lomas residents and organizers, and watched documentaries on Youtube. This is what I've learned.


It goes back to 1945. That's when the Mexican government seized thousands of acres of desert from a mining company just south of the border, not far from the West Side of El Paso and what is now the town Sunland Park, New Mexico. Shortly after this expropriation, corrupt, profiteering Mexican bureaucrats sold the property to private owners, though doing so was illegal. These owners sold to others. One eventual purchaser was a prominent Juarez businessman, Pedro Zaragoza, Sr.


Years later, in 1975, Mexico's President Luis Echeverria declared part of this vast acreage to be federal land. Now things were really confused, because the boundaries of the national holdings were not surveyed: they were still mixed with areas that private buyers – including Zaragoza – considered their property. Even so, the problem seemed inconsequential. President Echeverria notified the private purchasers that if they wanted to argue he'd wrongly designated their holdings as federal land, they should file legal claims. No claims ensued. Apparently the buyers didn't care one way or the other because the land was considered scrubby, remote, and of little worth.


But not all felt this way. In the early 1970s, fifty or sixty poor families came to a mesa they named Granjas Lomas del Poleo – Poleo Hills Farms — in search of somewhere to settle. Most had earlier immigrated to Juarez from destitute rural areas farther south. They wanted to escape urban chaos and raise goats, pigs and chickens. Word got out about Lomas and one man appointed himself community leader. He helped new settlers pick out five-acre plots, where they built houses, grazed animals and tilled the land.


Eventually Lomas boasted about a thousand inhabitants, a small church, a kindergarten, a grade school, and some ten stores. The community was still parched and desertified, and many homes were little more than hodge-podges of wood pallets, with rusted box springs for front yard fences. But the view was gorgeous: to the east a long range of mountains; on the west the Rio de Janeiran majesty of a peak topped with a giant statue of Christ. Residents knew there was an issue about exactly which land in the area was federal and which was already privately owned, but they weren't much concerned. According to Mexican law since the Revolution, if land is unoccupied and undeveloped, poor people can gain title just by living on it a few years, as long as the owner does not dispute their tenancy. This is par for the course in Mexico. Indeed, according to those familiar with Lomas, many residents went to government agencies and courts and got papers recognizing them as owners of their tiny plots.


The affable man on the burro whom I ran into way back when was one of these Lomas people.


But in the late 1990s, big, private owners like Pedro Zaragoza's widow and sons – one of them also named Pedro — realized Lomas was getting valuable. Real estate interests on both sides of the border were hatching grand plans for a new international port of entry and a NAFTA-esque, binational community. It would straddle the international line at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and include extensive manufacturing parks, as well as passage for cargo trucks and lots of brand new housing and stores.


As Juarez attorney Carlos Avitia has since explained to the Paso Del Sur community activist organization in El Paso, Mexican entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas decided their city's growth would take place on outskirts that include Lomas del Poleo. "These are huge investors," notes Avitia. "They plan to turn this into a suburb… All of a sudden they're very interested in every last sand dune."


Indeed, since the 1990s a highway has been built linking the Mexican state of Chihuahua west of Juarez to New Mexico's Santa Teresa, where all that transborder development is set to take place. So far, very few people live in Santa Teresa, but its port of entry has been operating for years now. And in late 2007, part of yet another big road opened in northwest Juarez. Called the Camino Real – The Royal Road in English -- it has so far cost almost a million US dollars, and when it is done it will connect downtown Juarez to Santa Teresa. Right across from Santa Teresa will be a Mexican twin town called Jeronimo. The two will be foreign trade zones with people living in them. The spanking new development is currently almost uninhabited. But it's projected to grow to 100,000 residents in the next decade or so.


The two main developers of Jeronimo and Santa Teresa are, respectively, Eloy Vallina – one of Mexico's richest entrepreneurs — and Bill Sanders, a major international realtor who heads a controversial redevelopment plan for downtown El Paso. It aims to replace acres of historic but run-down buildings, mom-and-pop shlock shops and poor residents with big box stores, mall-type businesses, and mixed-income housing that will not provide public rental subsidies for the many undocumented immigrants who currently live in the area.


Vallina is a member of Sanders' development group for Santa Teresa. His son, Eloy Jr., sits on the board of a private consortium which sprang the redevelopment plan on El Paso two years ago and has since provoked great controversy there. Vallina Sr.'s plans for the foreign trade zone Jeronimo are as strongly contested in Juarez as Sanders' designs for El Paso are on the north side of the border.


Jeronimo opponents note that because the development is so dependent on massive infrastrucure – like the Camino Real highway — public taxes and resources are improperly being diverted from Juarez to one man's private suburb. A major concern is the future of municipal water. The bolson that supplies Juarez is running out, and the only way to recharge it is from another aquifer, which sits beneath Jeronimo. But if that water is pumped by Vallina's project, Juarez won't get it and the city could go dry.


Also troubling is that anticipation about Jeronimo and Santa Teresa has led to fevered land speculation in Juarez, according to New Mexico State University's Frontera News Service. Tiny lots not far from Lomas del Poleo have lately increased by 26 times their original price, with buyers offering as much as $39,000 for each parcel. The Juarez real estate explosion really took off when Bill Sanders bought 21,000 acres in Santa Teresa and announced his binational development project. This happened in 2003.


Perhaps not coincidentally, 2003 is also the year when formerly peaceful Lomas del Poleo – walking distance from the tidy, democratic United States of America - started to resemble an armed camp, a zone in the Palestinian territories, a World War II ghetto, a place of chilling violation of civil and human rights.


Two years ago, a soft-spoken, understated-looking guy named Bill Morton wrote a piece for the online newsletter of Annunciation House, a church-based refuge for undocumented migrants in downtown El Paso. Morton is a Catholic missionary and priest – thoroughly gringo – who at the time was pastoring a little church in Lomas. In his article, he describes hearing rumors there in 2003 that he at first didn't think made sense.


Just a year earlier, the government had finally – after over three decades — supplied Lomas with electricity. Posts and wires had been installed, and each house had a meter. Now, residents were telling Morton they heard that all this infrastructure was slated to be removed. Morton pooh-poohed their worries. Why would the government take out what it had so carefully put in just months ago?


But the rumors were correct. Lomas residents and the Zaragoza family were already in court disputing who owned the land. One Zaragoza, Pedro Jr., recently told former Texas Observer reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen Wellsome that he considers Lomas inhabitants nothing but illegal squatters and land speculators. To up the ante and discourage occupancy of the area, the Zaragozas had gone to a judge and obtained a ruling to remove the utilities. Government trucks came in, accompanied by police. They pulled out all the posts and wires. Lomas was left without light, refrigerators, or fans.


The Zaragozas also obtained orders forbidding more building in Lomas so that new people wouldn't there come to live, and current residents, unable to improve their homes, would feel pressured to leave. More ominously, existing housing was targeted for destruction. Soon after the electricity was removed, scores of menacing young men invaded the community. They were what Mexicans call guardias blancas, "white guards" -– privately contracted paramilitary goons. Their boss is a Catarino del Rio, who in the past has worked for the Zaragozas and is assumed to be on their payroll now. The thugs brought in heavy equipment, which residents assumed would be used to destroy their homes.


At first, people in Lomas dug ditches to block the tractors and demolition machinery. Complaints were also made to the Juarez police, who ordered the shock troops out. They left, but by spring 2004 were back, occupying a plot of land and building a camp with a watch tower, barbed wire, and a guard house. Ever since, Lomas residents have had to pass this checkpoint to enter their neighborhood – which is now completely fenced in by tall, concrete poles and wire. Many people complain that the guards have maced and kicked residents. They demolished a church and are said to have poisoned pet dogs. In the dark of electricity-less nights, they've prowled around and shone flashlights into houses. And people who leave to buy groceries or go to work come back to find their homes pulverized.


Some residents report that the guards carry AK-47s; others have seen rifles sticking out of their jackets. In Mexico it's illegal for civilians to carry arms, never mind military-grade weapons. But when the Juarez police have been called they've done nothing. A resident got into a fight with Zaragoza's thugs after a house was razed. He was fatally beaten. Not long afterward, a home caught fire. Two small children burned to death. Authorities and Pedro Zaragoza said the conflagration was due to a stove left lit when the mother went out, or to illegal electricity hookups connected to a line some distance from the house. Witnesses countered that the house had no power, and that goons had been seen walking around just before the home ignited.


Juarez's city administration does nothing about these outrages except support the Zaragozas by encouraging Lomas' shell-shocked residents to move. Many families have gone to another community downhill. Others have been relocated to a row of tiny, concrete structures that the city offers as alternative housing but which provide no land for the livestock raising and horticulture that residents practiced on their own holdings. Juarez lawyer Avitia has noted that the Juarez politicians have a stake in supporting the eviction project. They are friends and associates of real estate entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas and Eloy Vallina. (Journalist Eileen Welsome interviewed Juarez mayor Hector Murguia, who confirmed that he and Pedro Zaragoza are friends.) Eviction helps the magnates by freeing up land for development related to Jeronimo, Vallina's golden goose just south of Santa Teresa.


Lomas del Poleo, once poor but bustling, has lost three fourths of its population and almost all its stores since the goons came in. About 55 families soldier on, braving the constant threat of their houses being demolished, and the nerve-wracking sense that they and their community are being disposed of, and few care. Still they stay, insisting on their right to the land. They have lawyers and their suit against the Zaragozas. Attorney Avitia has worked extensively on the case. He says the law is on the Lomas residents' side and eventually they will win.


But in an escalating battle of one-upsmanship, the better the legal proceedings go for Lomas del Poleo inhabitants, the worse they are pressured to leave. Lately, political groups and NGO's from both sides of the border have been trying to help. Attempts to hold organizing events in the neighorhood several weeks ago were met with the paramilitaries and their weapons, dogs, pushing and shoving and threats.


At the meeting I attended in the green building downhill, I asked if someone would take me up to see things for myself. "We can't," I was told. "It's too dangerous."


Amid this state of siege, it also seems risky to discuss the one thing that has brought international human rights attention to Juarez: those murdered, thrown away women. The people I spoke with at the meeting were like everyone who's held on in Lomas — militant, determined to make a stand. But they also appear so demoralized and desperate to save their homes that they are willing to renounce the dead girls dumped on their turf.


I asked both the old women I talked with about the female corpses found in Lomas starting in the late 1990s. "Oh, no!" one demurred. "Didn't happen." "Lies!" the other added sternly. "There were no bodies here. Ever."


I recounted this conversation later with my friend the activist, who explained the old women's reaction. So many things have been done by the pro-eviction forces to discredit Lomas, he said. Depicting it as a crime-ridden slum. A dirty place that needs cleaning and vacuuming, even of its residents. What better way to bolster that claim than to talk of corpses in the sand? That's one reason Lomas inhabitants deny the fact of the female dead.


My friend also pointed out that city and state government in Juarez and Chihuahua have for long been on a campaign to make people and social organizations feel guilty for speaking up about the murdered women and trying to connect their fate with other social problems. The old women, he said, "show how this campaign has permeated all walks of life." Their silence is historically constructed, and understandable.


Understandable, but especially horrid, because to shut up about feminicide, Lomas residents must even mute their own blood. Take the white-haired lady I talked to. Early in our conversation, she said her son died after his home was demolished by Zaragoza's thugs. Later, she grew more expansive. "It wasn't just the house," she confided. "It was also that his child – my 18-year-old granddaughter — disappeared four years ago. Went out one day with her boyfriend and was never seen again. The police found her ID card in the boyfriend's pocket. But he works for the government. He was never charged or prosecuted. My son couldn't do a thing. He lost his house and his daughter. Both losses killed him."


We know what happened to the house. But how about the daughter? Like Veronica Castro, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez and so many others, was she tossed in the sand? Somewhere just a skip and a jump from Mesa Street, El Paso and Sunland Park, USA?


Please, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, J. Lo, Amnesty, and everyone who's signed petitions, put on performances and marched for the dead girls of Juarez. Come back and excavate the women by standing by their threatened neighbors – who also are being tossed and buried like garbage. Come back and dig up Lomas.

***

Debbie Nathan is a contributor to "America's Mayor, America's President? The Strange Career of Rudy Giuliani" (ed. Robert Polner with preface by Jimmy Breslin, Soft Skull Press). With Michael Snedeker she wrote Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. She can be reached at naess2@gmail.com

duplicate of below

...to paraphrase St. Augustine "knowledge not used is a sin", where is the application of all this wonderful knowledge here, what can the recipient do with it (namely me for one)? and who is reading this site more than those who espouse leftist doctrines?? and who is applying this knowledge in ways not intended by the writers? where do the spindoctors get their best spin?

Can anyone here give me some practical applications? Or am I just the idiot who posts here once in awhile that is "kindly" tolerated? ignored? Who here, besides Mike, is out there talking to the people?

Parenti said "Don't for one minute believe that they don't care what you think. What you think is the ONLY thing they care about." Keep feeding their fires without any intention of building your own firewalls...

I've actually sacrificed my art, to search for actions, practical actions, can anyone here point me to some of that? What the fuck, I see so little common sense here...of course the world can be supplied with all its energy, food, shelter needs... but who, what, when, where, or how are the people who are without going to get their needs met without the knowledge being applied? Theorizing is all good, but it ain't gonna feed the masses, and it ain't gonna subvert the ruling regime, is it?

Hi Mary. Happy new year.

There is no interest anywhere. Not sure why.

I have been down deathly sick for a week - another story - and I had this remarkable insight. I worked for a few years selling produce for farmers, and now that I am out of work I have some perspective on it. I thought back on the frustrations and I realized that the clients didn't want to succeed. That is so against the grain and counter-intuitive that it doesn't seem possible. Everyone acts as though they want to succeed, talks as though they do. I had one client for whom I generated several million dollars in sales over a year's time, and he just got more and more nervous, dismantled the sales plan and made life so miserable for me that I finally walked away.

People cannot see cause and effect, and they have no sense of do A and get B - no concept of how anything could be accomplished. To do so would require looking at reality closely, and that people will not do. If people won't look at reality, they can't move from point A to point B. They cannot even imagine it. They will not be dragged kicking and screaming to the result they say they want.

Mike, I hope you are well by now, and have some clue about a job?? you have my email if you are ever in dire need...I am so sorry about both, and sorry for being so long to get back, it is hell time for me as a teacher, all the student artshows, and my budget, which is huge and picaune, how many pink erasers, how many white. Thank you for responding, I'm thinking, when I can, honestly menopause turns a woman's brain into a collander, a sieve, and a funnel as I believe I've said here. Menopause sucks balls, and I editted this out of embarrassment due to its personal nature! apologies!

I've actually sacrificed my art, to search for actions, practical actions, can anyone here point me to some of that? What the fuck, I see so little common sense here...of course the world can be supplied with all its energy, food, shelter needs... but who, what, when, where, or how are the people who are without going to get their needs met without the knowledge being applied? Theorizing is all good, but it ain't gonna feed the masses, and it ain't gonna subvert the ruling regime, is it?

There are none. Nada, zip, zilch... There are NO practical actions that are going to "feed the masses", as you say. Worse, there is no level of protests, actions, wildcats, demonstrations, love-ins, sit-ins, boycotts, or spontaneous revolts that are going to "feed the masses", either. From a historical standpoint, those are entirely doomed. The only thing that has ever suceeded are political movements. That is what leads to "theorizing" in the first place and why "theorizing" almost always produces near instant hostility to contrasting "thinking" with "doing". What you have repeated is an advertising slogan, similar to "squeezably soft Charmin". That is part of the problem too, though it is easy to solve.

As far people on the board who talk to people, or engage in actions, or have "common sense", it's a mixed bag as in all other aspects of life. I've fought the battles all throughout my life, have paid a significantly greater "price" than my "art", and will match my "common sense" against anyone you know. I have absolutely no advice and no "hope" (trademark Barak Obama) to give you. Sink yourself into your union, fight like crazy, and study as hard as you can so that you can "theorize" and figure out what makes a "difference". You might start with asking why I might think that what is obvious to you is crazy to me and why what seems crazy to you may also be obviously true to me. What could yield such an astonishing difference of perspective?
.

Forgive me for being so long responding, anax, I honestly think theorizing is fantastic and has huge practical applications, , and I have been involved in much in years past, I have over 200 college credits from a fairly intellectual university. Iin regards to studying, it would be heaven, there is nothing I like more, and please believe me when I say, I haven't the time, and of late the mental energy, my new principle is requiring the curriculum leaders, of which I am one, to do reading he considers pedagogical, but is really platitudes, and to write responses. We have the union on this addition to our duties, but to not comply in the interim is insubordination. I have been extremely active in the union, and am extremely unhappy with our shiny happy people local, who constantly succumb to the administrations/boards asking us to sacrifice more...nuff said there, sorry. I apologize if I was insulting, I am frustrated. I greatly appreciate your input, am not an initiator, but I am a great supporter and sustainer, now I have to read Kid's huge comment, and get to my humongous budget (not that big money wise, but supply wise)...Thank you really, I am considering your words, and feel we are not as far apart as you might surmise. I just think we won't have time to apply the theories for much longer. Peace, Mary

[quote=Mike]By the way, most of the discussions we engage in are discussions with upscale white sububurban educated folks, yet we pretend that there is no bias implicit in that.

We don't need to convince most of the white professional class, we just need a few - but we do need a few, just as the civil rights organizers did in the 50's and 60's. 10% would be more than adequate.

Why to this day are we still talking mostly to people from the same demographic, spinning around and around in the same circles of futility, and still convinced that until and unless we can convice all of the white professionals we are "losing?"

Why?

You answered yourself, in part, above, Mike:

"We are the fucked up ones, we are the ones missing in action, we are the ones asleep, we are the ones most responsible for the criminal regime in Washington, and it is what we are thinking and saying that is fucked up."

to paraphrase St. Augustine "knowledge not used is a sin", where is the application of all this wonderful knowledge here, what can the recipient do with it (namely me for one)? and who is reading this site more than those who espouse leftist doctrines?? and who is applying this knowledge in ways not intended by the writers? where do the spindoctors get their best spin?

Can anyone here give me some practical applications? Or am I just the idiot who posts here once in awhile that is "kindly" tolerated? ignored? Who here, besides Mike, is out there talking to the people?

Parenti said "Don't for one minute believe that they don't care what you think. What you think is the ONLY thing they care about." Keep feeding their fires without any intention of building your own firewalls...

I've actually sacrificed my art, to search for actions, practical actions, can anyone here point me to some of that? What the fuck, I see so little common sense here...of course the world can be supplied with all its energy, food, shelter needs... but who, what, when, where, or how are the people who are without going to get their needs met without the knowledge being applied? Theorizing is all good, but it ain't gonna feed the masses, and it ain't gonna subvert the ruling regime, is it?

No socialist movement is going to be won on the basis of only those who call themselves socialists. That is because the movement is much vaster than a few oddballs like us. It is of course a latent "movement" right now that has yet to be won over to a certain way of thinking.

This is the taks of socialists inside the United States, a task that (obviously) requires a united, cohesive organization.

Expanding on the theme, it seems to me what you are asking Mary, is how we transform the societal struggle into a class struggle. And class struggle is by definition political since it is the class in motion trying to seize control for itself. Hence, a political party.

Personally I think we have not even "placed" ourselves, either in history or in the world today. Class struggle is not a generic or a neat ideological compartment and it is certainly not static or unchanging.

It is not so easy to say this next article describes the direct consequences of "imperialism for instance. Or, rather, it IS easy to say that. But a statement to that effect is so empty as to be devoid of any significance for our own considerations

http://www.newspapertree.com/features/1 ... ico-border (http://www.newspapertree.com/features/1976-making-a-killing-land-deals-and-girl-deaths-on-the-u-s-mexico-border)

Something every bit as bad as the feminicides is occurring in Juarez, yet few people in the U.S., or even El Paso, know or care. At Lomas del Poleo, an entire community is being tossed for basically the same reasons the area's females have been blotted out. The people are considered disposable.

Posted on January 4, 2008

Lots of Americans have heard about the Mexican city Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, Texas, and the 400 or so female murders that have happened there since the 1990s. Many who've heard have flown to the border to hold press conferences and make movies or put on plays and offer help. Especially women – including famous ones. Jane Fonda, J. Lo, Sally Fields, Minnie Driver, Eve Ensler – all know of the killings, or at least those involving long-haired adolescents who worked in maquiladoras and went to church and were good daughters before they ended up in places like Lomas del Poleo as anal-raped corpses and maybe a tattered bra.


Lomas del Poleo. Some Godforsaken desert spot on the Juarez fringe where at least a dozen bodies were found in the sand from 1996 to 2003. Most never identified, but one was Veronica Castro, a teen working at a big, foreign-owned assembly plant when she disappeared. The corpse of another girl, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez, was found elsewhere, but at the time she was killed she lived in Lomas. Her mom, Paula Flores, is the first person who thought of blanketing Juarez utility poles with pink crosses to draw attention to the murders. As a result of such activism, the murders have come, internationally, to be known as feminicide. Embedded in that term is the idea that women are dying violently in Juarez precisely because they're women. It's a political concept, a theory, and thus awful but in its abstraction oddly comfortable.


The killing fields at Lomas del Poleo, on the other hand, are a hundred percent real, and straight-out scary to even think about. Don't go there, the zeitgeist whispers: it's isolated, desolated, gritty, a place only for cloak-and-dagger journalists, while the rest of us can just read about it and maybe march downtown with the stars, or sign Amnesty International petitions.


But now, something every bit as bad as the feminicides is occurring in Juarez, in the same area where Veronica et al were dumped. Yet few people in the US, or even El Paso, know or care about this new horror. And because they don't, the murdered women of Juarez are being buried from consciousness.


How can they be resurrected?


By digging into current events at Lomas del Poleo, where an entire community is being tossed for basically the same reasons the area's females have been blotted out. The people are considered disposable.


A professor took me to Lomas years ago, when the feminicides were still fresh news. She was studying the concept of border women as waste matter, in concert with the generalized phenomenon of illegal municipal dumping. Her theory included the fact that Juarez maquiladoras were organized and managed so the entire, mostly woman, workforce at the average plant would quit or be fired from their jobs – or "turn over," the industry calls it — in less than a year. Massive turnover would quickly and efficiently dispense with labor once it was deemed worn out, or too expensive because of employers' legal obligation after several months to give workers perks like health insurance and end-of-year bonuses. The professor felt that the maquiladora economy of female worker disposability was affecting the entire culture and that more and more in Juarez, all women were being defined as throwaways.


That attitude, she said, was fueling the murders, and not just of dozens of long-haired, stranger-raped teens, who are the only victims the press and Hollywood ever pay attention to. In fact, however, many hundreds more women and girls have been fatally beaten, shot, beheaded, raped, incinerated and dumped not by unknowns, but by their husbands, boyfriends, and neighbors. The violence is unprecedented in its frequency and brutality. In Juarez until the early 1990s, it was exceedingly rare for a woman to be murdered in any way, by anyone. Then suddenly, right around the advent of NAFTA in 1994, female corpses were everywhere.


And the professor had ideas about why so many of the bodies were ending up in the desert. She did not think it reflected some serial killer's unique MO. Because municipal sanitation services are so lacking in Juarez, she said, everything unwanted – from household trash to human beings — gets thrown, sub rosa, in the outskirts. We poked with our eyes and some sticks in this parched, garbage-strewn place called Lomas del Poleo, where corpses had recently been discovered. We found only withered shoes, soiled Pampers, and bleached baby dolls. Not unexpected, the professor said. But what surprised me – I still remember after all this time – was the old man who ambled from behind a hill on a burro, herding goats and smilingly doffing his hat to wish us buenas tardes. "Where on earth did he come from?" I thought. Heretofore I'd assumed Lomas del Poleo was just some vacant hell hole. Now I wondered if it was more inviting. Then I forgot the man, and Lomas. I moved away to the US interior.


But last month I was visiting El Paso. Another friend, a border community activist, took me to a meeting in a sparsely furnished green building across the river with no heat and everyone huddled in jackets and soberly talking in turn. Some were students from downtownish Juarez who had nice glasses and OK wardrobes. Others were "colonos" – the flea-market dressed residents of Lomas, many of who have lived there over 30 years. They'd walked a mile down from a mesa to reach the cold green building, because they are not allowed to hold public gatherings in their own neighborhood. Nor can they bring in friends or guests, for meetings or anything else resembling politics. To enter their own community for whatever reason, they must pass a guard house staffed by snickering male thugs with guns.


The thug checkpoint and all the rest of Lomas are enclosed by concrete posts, barbed wire and trained dogs. People cannot pass unless they live inside. Trucks supplying basics such as tortillas,
water and milk, are also disallowed. At the meeting in the green building, I talked with two women who appeared in their seventies. One was stringy and gnarled; the other squat, with white, lusterless hair like cheap twine. They both lurched slightly with old age or fatigue. They said there used to be many stores up in Lomas, but now hardly any remain. To get groceries each day, they must walk the mile downhill, then make their way back to the armed punks and wire and canines.


Sometimes when people leave the area to get food, or to work in maquiladoras, they return and find their houses razed to rubble by bulldozers. One of the women said this happened to her middle-aged son, and it made him so apoplectic and heartbroken that he died. She described such things and wouldn't let me take her photo or use her name. She and her neighbor were terrified of reprisals. Their fear sickened me.


This is all going on a few miles from El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, and the bikini waxing spas of upper Mesa Street. What is happening in Lomas del Poleo is not unlike the logistics and doings of a concentration camp. Yet practically no one in the US – even those who've marched for and donated to and worried about the murdered women – seems to know or care.


The reason, perhaps, is that the barbed wire and dogs have not to do with how the feminicides are presented: as crazy, titillating speculations about serial killer conspiracies, rich-boy mafias, narco orgies, Satanic rituals and the black market vending of kidneys. Rather, the current disaster is connected to much greyer, more tedious speculation: the kind involving real estate. Deeds and mortgages are not quite the stuff of Who-Done-Its. They turn even more arcane when combined with Mexican tenancy statutes. But these topics - land and law — are the underpinnings of the border's little modern-day terrordrome. To understand the awful things I heard and saw at that community meeting last month, I've explored the web, talked with people including Lomas residents and organizers, and watched documentaries on Youtube. This is what I've learned.


It goes back to 1945. That's when the Mexican government seized thousands of acres of desert from a mining company just south of the border, not far from the West Side of El Paso and what is now the town Sunland Park, New Mexico. Shortly after this expropriation, corrupt, profiteering Mexican bureaucrats sold the property to private owners, though doing so was illegal. These owners sold to others. One eventual purchaser was a prominent Juarez businessman, Pedro Zaragoza, Sr.


Years later, in 1975, Mexico's President Luis Echeverria declared part of this vast acreage to be federal land. Now things were really confused, because the boundaries of the national holdings were not surveyed: they were still mixed with areas that private buyers – including Zaragoza – considered their property. Even so, the problem seemed inconsequential. President Echeverria notified the private purchasers that if they wanted to argue he'd wrongly designated their holdings as federal land, they should file legal claims. No claims ensued. Apparently the buyers didn't care one way or the other because the land was considered scrubby, remote, and of little worth.


But not all felt this way. In the early 1970s, fifty or sixty poor families came to a mesa they named Granjas Lomas del Poleo – Poleo Hills Farms — in search of somewhere to settle. Most had earlier immigrated to Juarez from destitute rural areas farther south. They wanted to escape urban chaos and raise goats, pigs and chickens. Word got out about Lomas and one man appointed himself community leader. He helped new settlers pick out five-acre plots, where they built houses, grazed animals and tilled the land.


Eventually Lomas boasted about a thousand inhabitants, a small church, a kindergarten, a grade school, and some ten stores. The community was still parched and desertified, and many homes were little more than hodge-podges of wood pallets, with rusted box springs for front yard fences. But the view was gorgeous: to the east a long range of mountains; on the west the Rio de Janeiran majesty of a peak topped with a giant statue of Christ. Residents knew there was an issue about exactly which land in the area was federal and which was already privately owned, but they weren't much concerned. According to Mexican law since the Revolution, if land is unoccupied and undeveloped, poor people can gain title just by living on it a few years, as long as the owner does not dispute their tenancy. This is par for the course in Mexico. Indeed, according to those familiar with Lomas, many residents went to government agencies and courts and got papers recognizing them as owners of their tiny plots.


The affable man on the burro whom I ran into way back when was one of these Lomas people.


But in the late 1990s, big, private owners like Pedro Zaragoza's widow and sons – one of them also named Pedro — realized Lomas was getting valuable. Real estate interests on both sides of the border were hatching grand plans for a new international port of entry and a NAFTA-esque, binational community. It would straddle the international line at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and include extensive manufacturing parks, as well as passage for cargo trucks and lots of brand new housing and stores.


As Juarez attorney Carlos Avitia has since explained to the Paso Del Sur community activist organization in El Paso, Mexican entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas decided their city's growth would take place on outskirts that include Lomas del Poleo. "These are huge investors," notes Avitia. "They plan to turn this into a suburb… All of a sudden they're very interested in every last sand dune."


Indeed, since the 1990s a highway has been built linking the Mexican state of Chihuahua west of Juarez to New Mexico's Santa Teresa, where all that transborder development is set to take place. So far, very few people live in Santa Teresa, but its port of entry has been operating for years now. And in late 2007, part of yet another big road opened in northwest Juarez. Called the Camino Real – The Royal Road in English -- it has so far cost almost a million US dollars, and when it is done it will connect downtown Juarez to Santa Teresa. Right across from Santa Teresa will be a Mexican twin town called Jeronimo. The two will be foreign trade zones with people living in them. The spanking new development is currently almost uninhabited. But it's projected to grow to 100,000 residents in the next decade or so.


The two main developers of Jeronimo and Santa Teresa are, respectively, Eloy Vallina – one of Mexico's richest entrepreneurs — and Bill Sanders, a major international realtor who heads a controversial redevelopment plan for downtown El Paso. It aims to replace acres of historic but run-down buildings, mom-and-pop shlock shops and poor residents with big box stores, mall-type businesses, and mixed-income housing that will not provide public rental subsidies for the many undocumented immigrants who currently live in the area.


Vallina is a member of Sanders' development group for Santa Teresa. His son, Eloy Jr., sits on the board of a private consortium which sprang the redevelopment plan on El Paso two years ago and has since provoked great controversy there. Vallina Sr.'s plans for the foreign trade zone Jeronimo are as strongly contested in Juarez as Sanders' designs for El Paso are on the north side of the border.


Jeronimo opponents note that because the development is so dependent on massive infrastrucure – like the Camino Real highway — public taxes and resources are improperly being diverted from Juarez to one man's private suburb. A major concern is the future of municipal water. The bolson that supplies Juarez is running out, and the only way to recharge it is from another aquifer, which sits beneath Jeronimo. But if that water is pumped by Vallina's project, Juarez won't get it and the city could go dry.


Also troubling is that anticipation about Jeronimo and Santa Teresa has led to fevered land speculation in Juarez, according to New Mexico State University's Frontera News Service. Tiny lots not far from Lomas del Poleo have lately increased by 26 times their original price, with buyers offering as much as $39,000 for each parcel. The Juarez real estate explosion really took off when Bill Sanders bought 21,000 acres in Santa Teresa and announced his binational development project. This happened in 2003.


Perhaps not coincidentally, 2003 is also the year when formerly peaceful Lomas del Poleo – walking distance from the tidy, democratic United States of America - started to resemble an armed camp, a zone in the Palestinian territories, a World War II ghetto, a place of chilling violation of civil and human rights.


Two years ago, a soft-spoken, understated-looking guy named Bill Morton wrote a piece for the online newsletter of Annunciation House, a church-based refuge for undocumented migrants in downtown El Paso. Morton is a Catholic missionary and priest – thoroughly gringo – who at the time was pastoring a little church in Lomas. In his article, he describes hearing rumors there in 2003 that he at first didn't think made sense.


Just a year earlier, the government had finally – after over three decades — supplied Lomas with electricity. Posts and wires had been installed, and each house had a meter. Now, residents were telling Morton they heard that all this infrastructure was slated to be removed. Morton pooh-poohed their worries. Why would the government take out what it had so carefully put in just months ago?


But the rumors were correct. Lomas residents and the Zaragoza family were already in court disputing who owned the land. One Zaragoza, Pedro Jr., recently told former Texas Observer reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen Wellsome that he considers Lomas inhabitants nothing but illegal squatters and land speculators. To up the ante and discourage occupancy of the area, the Zaragozas had gone to a judge and obtained a ruling to remove the utilities. Government trucks came in, accompanied by police. They pulled out all the posts and wires. Lomas was left without light, refrigerators, or fans.


The Zaragozas also obtained orders forbidding more building in Lomas so that new people wouldn't there come to live, and current residents, unable to improve their homes, would feel pressured to leave. More ominously, existing housing was targeted for destruction. Soon after the electricity was removed, scores of menacing young men invaded the community. They were what Mexicans call guardias blancas, "white guards" -– privately contracted paramilitary goons. Their boss is a Catarino del Rio, who in the past has worked for the Zaragozas and is assumed to be on their payroll now. The thugs brought in heavy equipment, which residents assumed would be used to destroy their homes.


At first, people in Lomas dug ditches to block the tractors and demolition machinery. Complaints were also made to the Juarez police, who ordered the shock troops out. They left, but by spring 2004 were back, occupying a plot of land and building a camp with a watch tower, barbed wire, and a guard house. Ever since, Lomas residents have had to pass this checkpoint to enter their neighborhood – which is now completely fenced in by tall, concrete poles and wire. Many people complain that the guards have maced and kicked residents. They demolished a church and are said to have poisoned pet dogs. In the dark of electricity-less nights, they've prowled around and shone flashlights into houses. And people who leave to buy groceries or go to work come back to find their homes pulverized.


Some residents report that the guards carry AK-47s; others have seen rifles sticking out of their jackets. In Mexico it's illegal for civilians to carry arms, never mind military-grade weapons. But when the Juarez police have been called they've done nothing. A resident got into a fight with Zaragoza's thugs after a house was razed. He was fatally beaten. Not long afterward, a home caught fire. Two small children burned to death. Authorities and Pedro Zaragoza said the conflagration was due to a stove left lit when the mother went out, or to illegal electricity hookups connected to a line some distance from the house. Witnesses countered that the house had no power, and that goons had been seen walking around just before the home ignited.


Juarez's city administration does nothing about these outrages except support the Zaragozas by encouraging Lomas' shell-shocked residents to move. Many families have gone to another community downhill. Others have been relocated to a row of tiny, concrete structures that the city offers as alternative housing but which provide no land for the livestock raising and horticulture that residents practiced on their own holdings. Juarez lawyer Avitia has noted that the Juarez politicians have a stake in supporting the eviction project. They are friends and associates of real estate entrepreneurs like the Zaragozas and Eloy Vallina. (Journalist Eileen Welsome interviewed Juarez mayor Hector Murguia, who confirmed that he and Pedro Zaragoza are friends.) Eviction helps the magnates by freeing up land for development related to Jeronimo, Vallina's golden goose just south of Santa Teresa.


Lomas del Poleo, once poor but bustling, has lost three fourths of its population and almost all its stores since the goons came in. About 55 families soldier on, braving the constant threat of their houses being demolished, and the nerve-wracking sense that they and their community are being disposed of, and few care. Still they stay, insisting on their right to the land. They have lawyers and their suit against the Zaragozas. Attorney Avitia has worked extensively on the case. He says the law is on the Lomas residents' side and eventually they will win.


But in an escalating battle of one-upsmanship, the better the legal proceedings go for Lomas del Poleo inhabitants, the worse they are pressured to leave. Lately, political groups and NGO's from both sides of the border have been trying to help. Attempts to hold organizing events in the neighorhood several weeks ago were met with the paramilitaries and their weapons, dogs, pushing and shoving and threats.


At the meeting I attended in the green building downhill, I asked if someone would take me up to see things for myself. "We can't," I was told. "It's too dangerous."


Amid this state of siege, it also seems risky to discuss the one thing that has brought international human rights attention to Juarez: those murdered, thrown away women. The people I spoke with at the meeting were like everyone who's held on in Lomas — militant, determined to make a stand. But they also appear so demoralized and desperate to save their homes that they are willing to renounce the dead girls dumped on their turf.


I asked both the old women I talked with about the female corpses found in Lomas starting in the late 1990s. "Oh, no!" one demurred. "Didn't happen." "Lies!" the other added sternly. "There were no bodies here. Ever."


I recounted this conversation later with my friend the activist, who explained the old women's reaction. So many things have been done by the pro-eviction forces to discredit Lomas, he said. Depicting it as a crime-ridden slum. A dirty place that needs cleaning and vacuuming, even of its residents. What better way to bolster that claim than to talk of corpses in the sand? That's one reason Lomas inhabitants deny the fact of the female dead.


My friend also pointed out that city and state government in Juarez and Chihuahua have for long been on a campaign to make people and social organizations feel guilty for speaking up about the murdered women and trying to connect their fate with other social problems. The old women, he said, "show how this campaign has permeated all walks of life." Their silence is historically constructed, and understandable.


Understandable, but especially horrid, because to shut up about feminicide, Lomas residents must even mute their own blood. Take the white-haired lady I talked to. Early in our conversation, she said her son died after his home was demolished by Zaragoza's thugs. Later, she grew more expansive. "It wasn't just the house," she confided. "It was also that his child – my 18-year-old granddaughter — disappeared four years ago. Went out one day with her boyfriend and was never seen again. The police found her ID card in the boyfriend's pocket. But he works for the government. He was never charged or prosecuted. My son couldn't do a thing. He lost his house and his daughter. Both losses killed him."


We know what happened to the house. But how about the daughter? Like Veronica Castro, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez and so many others, was she tossed in the sand? Somewhere just a skip and a jump from Mesa Street, El Paso and Sunland Park, USA?


Please, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, J. Lo, Amnesty, and everyone who's signed petitions, put on performances and marched for the dead girls of Juarez. Come back and excavate the women by standing by their threatened neighbors – who also are being tossed and buried like garbage. Come back and dig up Lomas.

***

Debbie Nathan is a contributor to "America's Mayor, America's President? The Strange Career of Rudy Giuliani" (ed. Robert Polner with preface by Jimmy Breslin, Soft Skull Press). With Michael Snedeker she wrote Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. She can be reached at naess2@gmail.com[/quote:3eag2znf]

Hi Kid, thanks, I'm working out how what you say is responding to my question but action cannot be piece miel or action du jour, as this case of horrible treatment of humanity against humanity, the slavery and mistreatment of the poverty stricken that is is growing in leaps and bounds seems to be. Were the involved celebrities called back in? Even the treatment here in this country in the "normal" world on a small scale reflects the lack of true concern, or closed eyes at least, but cold water does work at times.

Letters for one help. In very intimate ways at times. I have a student who, along with her sister, was stalked by a late middle aged man for several months, both molested, her sister raped several times, I'm not sure about my student. She has borderline intelligence, and is definitely touched, her stare can be quite creepy at times and it honestly can take an effort not to respond negatively, I am one of the few teachers who know of her situation as she chose to tell me a while back. (a case of "need to know" which our guidance dept. has chosen to take to extreme, all who deal with her should know this, they think not).

She had been complaining of late about two students in my class who she believes have been intentionally nasty to her. The two girls have exhibited female adolescent aggression which is common in 7th and 8th grade, but is usually gone by 9th grade. They have been nasty in general, typical snottiness, but I didn't think they were picking her out of the crowd, however I separated them from her as far as I could, and kept an eye out, and spoke to them. She took it one step further and wrote a very detailed letter to them about everything that has happened to her. Of course I had to get guidance involved and stuff, but the end result is the transformation of those girls, not only are they being extremely nice to her, but to me (they were pains) and actually have told me how sorry they are for her and for their actions. They are truly changed, they will probably slide back, but in a way, they have woken up. This poor little abused girl has done more by standing up and declaring herself than anyone else could do. By being touched personally, these girls may end up being very different than they might have been. Anyway, kid, I'm working on the part of the solution I can be. Maybe we need to touch everyone personally, Peace, Mary

Mary,

The example of Juarez is not atypical of anything. The question is how we take the struggle of Juarez and, again, its not an isolated thing going on there, but how do you turn that struggle into a concerted, organized class struggle.

That's what the theorizing is about right now. Yes, there's also a lot of theorizing about "knowing the enemy" too of course.

Either way, tears and a bleeding heart are not enough.

Mike, I hope you are well by now, and have some clue about a job?? you have my email if you are ever in dire need...I am so sorry about both, and sorry for being so long to get back, it is hell time for me as a teacher, all the student artshows, and my budget, which is huge and picaune, how many pink erasers, how many white. Thank you for responding, I'm thinking, when I can, honestly menopause turns a woman's brain into a collander, a sieve, and a funnel as I believe I've said here. One thing that makes it tough is that my husband has gone into a cacoon regarding reality, he knows whats happening, but prefers "the Matrix" (sorry it is the best analogy that comes to mind right now), my heart can't survive without him so my time is limited there as well...sorry to be personal, but it is reality. I am still campaigning for Kucinich as you can tell from my other post, I honestly need to have some action that may be a fantasy too. Peace, Mary

Thanks, Mary. This illness has kicked my butt pretty good. Have work waiting for me but have been too sick to get to it.

This "do something" debate - am I am the right thread? - is one I would like to smash through if we can. Both you and anax are right about it. I will say more if I can get oriented in the discussion and get my head screwed on straight.

There are things to do, but at the same time anax is right that we can't save the world by saving our green stamps and boycotting the widget maker. I think I may be able to explain my thinking on this soon.

There are so many false choices, false dichotomies - do something or theorize, settle for the lesser of two evils or be a purist blah blah.

Look at the Edwards versus Kucinich nonsense. The Edwards campaign gives us a glorious opportunity to hammer on class struggle. That is worth a million times more than anything else happening in national politics. It is not about "choosing" Edwards as a personal savior or anything else. The whole "matching up with my personal values" and cheerleading for the personality who "beat expresses what I believe" or who "has the positions on the issues I believe in" is a huge crock of shit.

What does the Kucinich campaign give us an opportunity to do? To express our true inner New Age vegan hippy-ness, feel good about ourselves and be completely irrelevant and ineffective.

Mike, I hope you are well by now, and have some clue about a job?? you have my email if you are ever in dire need...I am so sorry about both, and sorry for being so long to get back, it is hell time for me as a teacher, all the student artshows, and my budget, which is huge and picaune, how many pink erasers, how many white. Thank you for responding, I'm thinking, when I can, honestly menopause turns a woman's brain into a collander, a sieve, and a funnel as I believe I've said here. One thing that makes it tough is that my husband has gone into a cacoon regarding reality, he knows whats happening, but prefers "the Matrix" (sorry it is the best analogy that comes to mind right now), my heart can't survive without him so my time is limited there as well...sorry to be personal, but it is reality. I am still campaigning for Kucinich as you can tell from my other post, I honestly need to have some action that may be a fantasy too. Peace, Mary

Thanks, Mary. This illness has kicked my butt pretty good. Have work waiting for me but have been too sick to get to it.

This "do something" debate - am I am the right thread? - is one I would like to smash through if we can. Both you and anax are right about it. I will say more if I can get oriented in the discussion and get my head screwed on straight.

There are things to do, but at the same time anax is right that we can't save the world by saving our green stamps and boycotting the widget maker. I think I may be able to explain my thinking on this soon.

There are so many false choices, false dichotomies - do something or theorize, settle for the lesser of two evils or be a purist blah blah.

Look at the Edwards versus Kucinich nonsense. The Edwards campaign gives us a glorious opportunity to hammer on class struggle. That is worth a million times more than anything else happening in national politics. It is not about "choosing" Edwards as a personal savior or anything else. The whole "matching up with my personal values" and cheerleading for the personality who "beat expresses what I believe" or who "has the positions on the issues I believe in" is a huge crock of shit.

What does the Kucinich campaign give us an opportunity to do? To express our true inner New Age vegan hippy-ness, feel good about ourselves and be completely irrelevant and ineffective.

Hi Mike, I am very glad to see from other posts you are still amongst the living, anyway the part of Kucinich I hate the most is the unrealistic, new age, vegan tripe (you have griped about it since I "met" you!); its his genuine anti-corporate and pro-constitution stances that kept me with him, in early December (November?) I saw him speak, and it was all about the fascism road we are on and how to stop it and so on, very down to earth and caustic in fact, liked it. I could never get past Edwards' 28,000 square foot house as trivial as that may seem, or his hedge funds replete with insurance companies, or the fact that his father was in management in that mill..., all moot now, and what do I know, anyway! take it easy, Mary

There are things to do, but at the same time anax is right that we can't save the world by saving our green stamps and boycotting the widget maker. I think I may be able to explain my thinking on this soon.

There are so many false choices, false dichotomies - do something or theorize, settle for the lesser of two evils or be a purist blah blah.




Just to address the above, I just started reading Waging Peace by Scott Ritter. I kinda like the philosophy so far, we'll see how it holds up. Anyway he calls out the "peace movement" as being weakened by the numbers of connected issues ie: environment, labor, sustainability, et al, and implies the anti-war movement needs to streamline to that issue alone to involve a far greater numbers of supporters ... This brings up another dichotomy the holistic vs. the specific when considering movements; I think in regards to the anti-war movement his suggestions may make the better sense, especially as he calls for using the constitution as the base. my two cents...

There are things to do, but at the same time anax is right that we can't save the world by saving our green stamps and boycotting the widget maker. I think I may be able to explain my thinking on this soon.

There are so many false choices, false dichotomies - do something or theorize, settle for the lesser of two evils or be a purist blah blah.




Just to address the above, I just started reading Waging Peace by Scott Ritter. I kinda like the philosophy so far, we'll see how it holds up. Anyway he calls out the "peace movement" as being weakened by the numbers of connected issues ie: environment, labor, sustainability, et al, and implies the anti-war movement needs to streamline to that issue alone to involve a far greater numbers of supporters ... This brings up another dichotomy the holistic vs. the specific when considering movements; I think in regards to the anti-war movement his suggestions may make the better sense, especially as he calls for using the constitution as the base. my two cents...

Mary you've got to find some better literature..

..Cosmo magazine?

Anyway, you've reminded me of a song

Don't worry its not about you :)

mary was a girl with a cause she was simply fed up mary moved out to berkeley and stuck pins her face as a sort of statement against oppression of her sex mary took a walk in the park with a sign in her hand mary threw a rock at a cop and man she felt like a man and you know the ugliness became her but now she's gone she couldn't take it anymore and what's she won she won a husband who embodies everything she hated and all her friends from years ago are selling stocks in ibm right on mary finally saw she couldn't change the world but mary often fondly looks back and pats herself on the back for a convenient romanticized version of the facts of what she'd done but she didn't change a goddamn single on of the oppressive pigs who made her what she was and the empowerment she felt was just a crumb compared to all the butts of jokes that she'd become and now she's at the kitchen table all alone and she ended up exactly like her mom

A blob of text doesn't really do it justice though..

[quote]There are things to do, but at the same time anax is right that we can't save the world by saving our green stamps and boycotting the widget maker. I think I may be able to explain my thinking on this soon.

There are so many false choices, false dichotomies - do something or theorize, settle for the lesser of two evils or be a purist blah blah.




Just to address the above, I just started reading Waging Peace by Scott Ritter. I kinda like the philosophy so far, we'll see how it holds up. Anyway he calls out the "peace movement" as being weakened by the numbers of connected issues ie: environment, labor, sustainability, et al, and implies the anti-war movement needs to streamline to that issue alone to involve a far greater numbers of supporters ... This brings up another dichotomy the holistic vs. the specific when considering movements; I think in regards to the anti-war movement his suggestions may make the better sense, especially as he calls for using the constitution as the base. my two cents...

Mary you've got to find some better literature..

..Cosmo magazine?

Anyway, you've reminded me of a song

Don't worry its not about you :)

mary was a girl with a cause she was simply fed up mary moved out to berkeley and stuck pins her face as a sort of statement against oppression of her sex mary took a walk in the park with a sign in her hand mary threw a rock at a cop and man she felt like a man and you know the ugliness became her but now she's gone she couldn't take it anymore and what's she won she won a husband who embodies everything she hated and all her friends from years ago are selling stocks in ibm right on mary finally saw she couldn't change the world but mary often fondly looks back and pats herself on the back for a convenient romanticized version of the facts of what she'd done but she didn't change a goddamn single on of the oppressive pigs who made her what she was and the empowerment she felt was just a crumb compared to all the butts of jokes that she'd become and now she's at the kitchen table all alone and she ended up exactly like her mom

A blob of text doesn't really do it justice though..[/quote:s1bm3kne]

I am just like my mother! but my mother is pretty damn amazing, really. Where can I hear the song, reminds me of Jane's addiction? I picked up the book discount, but do think all the movements need some organization and honing and the guy really has to be granted some respect to take a 180 degree turn in his life. He did a radio show with a group of kids from my school that I got to attend, and he was pretty harsh against the regime here. the Cosmo comment was pretty below the belt, kid, are you trying to send me away?? just kidding...

..Cosmo magazine?




Nope playing catch up, Terkel's Hard Times, thought it might be a good how to book. When my students criticize other students for their work, thoughts, whatever, I ask them to make a suggestion for improvement. May I ask what you would suggest for reading material? Sincerely suggest.

ps: I apologize for my last post, parts were very passive aggressive, if one can be intentionally so, if not, I was just a bitch.

..Cosmo magazine?




Nope playing catch up, Terkel's Hard Times, thought it might be a good how to book. When my students criticize other students for their work, thoughts, whatever, I ask them to make a suggestion for improvement. May I ask what you would suggest for reading material? Sincerely suggest.

ps: I apologize for my last post, parts were very passive aggressive, I'm letting it stand though, it was not totally unwarranted.

It was a dig at Ritter, not you :) Better ask somebody else what to read, I'm a shit-against-the-wall-see-what-sticks kinda guy. Anax tells me that's bad..puking up all over strangers leaves a bad first impression I guess :)

PS You might try The Future Is Up To Us by Nelson Peery

[quote]

..Cosmo magazine?




Nope playing catch up, Terkel's Hard Times, thought it might be a good how to book. When my students criticize other students for their work, thoughts, whatever, I ask them to make a suggestion for improvement. May I ask what you would suggest for reading material? Sincerely suggest.

ps: I apologize for my last post, parts were very passive aggressive, I'm letting it stand though, it was not totally unwarranted.

It was a dig at Ritter, not you :) Better ask somebody else what to read, I'm a shit-against-the-wall-see-what-sticks kinda guy. Anax tells me that's bad..puking up all over strangers leaves a bad first impression I guess :)

PS You might try The Future Is Up To Us by Nelson Peery[/quote:7hb2kui7]
a
Thanks Kid, you must have been posting when I was editing the last post!!, you can see the difference! (I am a bitch at times, you see!) BTW, like the title! I'll see if I can find it. I'm going to be reading Klein's Shock doctrine when one friend is done, and a friend just sent me, unsolicited, a book by Larouche, and I've got a Krishna Murti book for bedtime reading (just put that in for Mike, I like to hear people scream! :D , actually KM said meditation just makes the brain numb, or the chanting kind anyway, I liked that, he was pretty brutal about things at times).