Letters from Our Readers

This Week in the Americas

Bad Blood on the Border
By Laura Carlsen

Guillermo Martinez was only 20 years old when he was shot in the back at close range by an agent of the U.S. Border Patrol in the state of California.

Scores of migrants have been shot by U.S. immigration enforcement officers. Mexican human rights organizations count four cases just in the past six months and warn that the number is on the rise. Most fail to make the headlines. But Martinez's death comes at the same time as a series of measures to further criminalize migrants, measures that are likely to increase the chances that more young men and women lose their lives on what has become the world's most contradictory border.

Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program of the International Relations Center (online at www.irc-online.org) based in Mexico City.

Tom Tancredo: Leader of the Anti-Immigrant Populist Revolt
By Tom Barry

Rep. Tom Tancredo, who has represented Colorado's Sixth District since 1999, has in the last six years succeeded in rallying an anti-immigrant populist revolt that brings together the nativists, religious right, cultural supremacists, militia movement, and anti-immigration policy institutes with a new anti-immigration wing of the Republican Party. Describing himself as a “devotee” of Samuel Huntington and the thesis of his Clash of Civilizations treatise, Tancredo, like many on the right—from social conservatives to neoconservatives—bases his restrictionism less on economic reasons than on cultural and racial ones. “I believe that what we are fighting here is not just a small group of people who have hijacked a religion, but it is a civilization bent on destroying us.”

Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center, online at www.irc-online.org.

Indigenous Communities Set Border Environment Agenda
By Talli Nauman

Representatives of the first peoples of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States have issued a joint communiqué they hope will set the new year's agenda for protection of the environment they have shared since long before a national border separated them. Negotiators for 26 Mexican indigenous communities and U.S. tribes, who felt their concerns were sidelined in a 2005 binational declaration on border environment, released their own statement in response. Last year marked the first time the Indian populations participated in the U.S.-Mexico Border 2012 National Coordinators Meeting, where they had a voice in the cross-boundary programs sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency. Yet they deemed it necessary to distinguish their priorities from those outlined at the meeting by the representatives of other jurisdictions in the 2,000-mile-long border area. The Native American leaders put forward recommendations for conservation of land, air, and water. Some of the counsel differs from that given by non-Indian citizens, while some of it reflects worries held in common.

This article originally appeared in The Herald Mexico / El Universal on Jan. 8, 2006. Talli Nauman is the IRC Americas Program Associate and editor at large (online at http://americas.irc-online.org).

Another World is Possible: The Ceramics of Zanon
By Raúl Zibechi

On some occasions, rare though they are, the slogan “Another world is possible” becomes reality. The workers of a ceramics factory who took control of the company and have been functioning as a cooperative for four years now, demonstrate that even working for a large, high-tech business it is possible to create another life.

Zanon is Argentina's most important ceramics factory, covering almost 20 acres (80,000 square meters) or 9 hectares, and utilizing the latest technology: mobile production lines for transporting the tiles, mechanical Caterpillars and robotic cars that slide along rails, robots that impress different patterns into the clay, gigantic funnels for mixing, and automatic kilns. The large machines are run, nevertheless, through cooperative rather than hierarchical structures.

Raúl Zibechi, a member of the editorial board of the weekly Brecha de Montevideo, is a professor and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina and adviser to several grassroots organizations. He is a monthly contributor to the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org ).

Letters from our Readers

Re: Bad Blood on the Border

As I was reading the e-mail I was remembering the video tape of Guillermo when he got shot, but I do wonder do they see us, the immigrants, as animals that they need to be hunting? Because if I'm not wrong the U.S. government stole this land from the Indians from Mexico, Guatemala, and Canada and Europe. So can you tell me who stole who? And who is the real immigrant in this land?

-Maria Lopez

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