Los Algodones, Baja California; Mexico

This is not the End of the World, but you can see it from here!



Saturday, April 19, 2014

Deportations Harm U.S. Citizen Children

Border issues: Migrants in the US feel the squeeze

Losers: Women are often left to fend for their young children when the breadwinner of the family is deported, often without any notification to the family.
About two million undocumented migrants in the United States have been deported under President Barack Obama.

The rainforests around Forks, a small town in Washington state, have long attracted hunters and fishermen, but beginning in 2008, this lush, remote landscape acquired a new breed of pursuer and prey.
That year, Border Patrol agents started targeting undocumented Latinos who lived in the town and worked in the woods, collecting mushrooms and salal, a shrub used by florists.
The agents set up roadblocks, tailed vehicles and trekked through the forests, sometimes disguising themselves as hunters, in a tense – and, eventually, lethal – game of cat-and-mouse.
Not all the Latinos living in Forks at the time were undocumented, but dread still gripped much of the community, which represented about a third of Forks’ population of 3,500. To avoid “la migra”, they kept watch for patrols, shopped at night and minimised contact with schools, police or anything official.
On May 14, 2011, a Forest Service officer stopped Benjamin Roldan Salinas and his partner, Crisanta Ramos, in their truck after a day collecting salal. They showed their permit. But minutes later, to their horror, a Border Patrol vehicle arrived.
Ostensibly the agents had come to help translate, but according to activists, it was a familiar case of the Border Patrol using local enforcement agencies as extra sets of eyes and ears.
The couple bolted into the woods. One agent ran down Ramos and handcuffed her. Salinas vanished into the Sol Duc river. Every day for three weeks, neighbours and friends searched for him. On June 5, they found his body, snagged on an object in the river.
“He died in the water. My husband died in the water,” said Ramos, cradling the youngest of her three children and sobbing as she recalled the day. “He ran because he knew what would happen.”
If he had been caught, Roldan Salinas would have been detained with hundreds of other undocumented Latinos, before being sent to Mexico to become one of the estimated two million people deported under Barack Obama. Who claims he is the Mexicans friend.
That two million milestone, which activist groups say was hit in recent weeks, is a figure that far outstrips what was done under previous administrations, and it has stoked anger in the Latino community.
Last year alone, 369,000 undocumented migrants were deported, a nine-fold increase from 20 years ago.
The journey from south to north, a migration which changed the face of the United States, is being reversed. The backward trek begins in the rainy mists of Washington state, passes through detention centres and deportation transports, and ends in the baked concrete of Tijuana.
The flow does not discriminate between people who crossed the border only recently and those who came over decades ago, raised families here and consider themselves American.
Forks, a depressed logging town near the tip of the Olympic peninsula, is an unlikely magnet for Hispanics. A four-hour car and ferry ride from Seattle, bounded on the west by the Pacific, it tends to be cold and wet. Logging’s decline made property cheap, however, and in the 1990s, Mexicans and Guatemalans began moving here to work in the woods.
“They’re good workers. Do the work white people aren’t willing to do anymore,” said Hop Dhooghe, 75, who sells salal and other forest products. “If you didn’t have Latinos here your grocery store wouldn’t have an apple in it.” He has joined an organisation called the Forks Human Rights Group to oppose deportations.

Smugglers
Estanislao Matias, 24, from Guatemala, paid smugglers US$3,500 that he had borrowed – an enormous sum for him – to join siblings here in 2009. “In our imagination we think of the marvels awaiting us,” he said. “That’s why we risk everything to come. Then I saw how hard it was, that I’d be working in rain and hail.”
Worse, he encountered a sense of siege. “It was like a horror movie. People peeking out of windows, afraid to go out.”
Back in 1994, the nationwide force had 4,000 agents. To deter the influx from Mexico, it increased to 8,500 by 2001. After 9/11 it was folded into US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The number of agents in green, who have distinct uniforms and roles from other CBP colleagues, expanded to 23,000, one of the biggest federal forces.
A Senate Bill last year proposed expanding it further, to 40,000.
With this surge, huge resources were directed to the sleepy northern border, and the Border Patrol’s green uniformed agents were sent into rural communities across Montana, Minnesota, North Dakota and New York, where they had seldom been seen before.
“There were Border Patrol vehicles everywhere, following each other around like little herds,” said the mayor, Bryon Monohon. “They were just pulling people off the street.”
A study by the Forks Human Rights Group documented intimidation and harassment in hundreds of encounters.
Roldan Salinas, who drowned, left Ramos, now 30, to bring up three young children. The children are US citizens, under Current law,  after the tragedy Ramos was granted provisional permission to stay.
The outcry over Roldan Salinas’s death – it made news in Mexico – appeared to chasten the Border Patrol. Intimidation and arrests have dwindled over the past year, said activists.
About half of the Latino community has fled south, beyond the Border Patrol’s reach, draining money and vibrancy from agriculture, trailer parks, schools and stores.
“It’s hurt my business. Most of my workers are gone,” lamented Dhooghe, who now fills just 100 boxes of salal daily, down from 500.
Apart from Ramos, a widow, the biggest losers are the dozens of families who had members – typically male, adult breadwinners – deported, often with no notification to family, said mayor Monohon, who also teaches at the local high school. “We had kids in school saying: ‘Daddy didn’t come home last night’.” –

Baja tax hike screwed Mexican border City businesses

Baja tax hike screwed businesses over

Economist says sales down 20% in TJ; inflation rate up 7%

Following a rancorous debate in Mexico City late last year, federal legislators voted to increase the sales tax from 11 percent to 16 percent, effective the first of the year. Baja California business leaders have since challenged the action in court, where a ruling is pending.
Speaking earlier this week at a breakfast meeting of the civic organization Grupo 21 in Tijuana, José Luis Contreras Valenzuela, president of the Baja California College of Economists, reported that between January 1 and March 31, business owners suffered a 20 percent fall in sales, while their counterparts across the border saw a 14 percent increase.
Contreras attributed the disparity to the sales-tax increase, which caused Baja Californians with a visa to head for stores in the U.S. to shop, while those without a visa shopped less in Baja because of across-the-board price increases.
A package of fiscal reforms that included the sales-tax hike “has generated negative results in the first three months of 2014,” Contreras was quoted as saying in an account of the Grupo 21 meeting published in the daily newspaper El Mexicano. “Border commerce has lost its competitiveness and the flight of consumers has increased.”
Adding to the economic hardship was a 7 percent increase in inflation, Contreras said, which further explains rising prices for products and services.
By the end of 2014, Contreras predicted, the average Baja California family will have spent $10,000 pesos (about $764) more than in 2013 to keep pace with inflation.

Mexican Train Robbery 4 dead 3 wounded Oaxaca state

Gunmen Attack Train in Mexico, Killing 3 Migrants

Gunmen Attack Train in Mexico, Killing 3 Migrants
Four migrants were killed and three others wounded when gunmen attacked a train in southeastern Mexico, the National Migration Institute, or INM, said Thursday.
“A group of suspected criminals attacked the migrants, who were traveling on the train that covers the Arriaga, Chiapas-Ixtepec, Oaxaca route, causing the deaths of four people and wounding three others,” the INM said in a statement.
The attack occurred in a remote region of Oaxaca state and “the group of criminals tried to take advantage of this to steal belongings and money from the migrants,” the INM said.
“Some migrants refused to hand over their belongings to the suspected criminals, who shot them,” the INM said.
One of the migrants died when he jumped from the moving train “to try to avoid being robbed, dying instantly,” the INM said.
Officials have not released the identities or nationalities of the victims.
An estimated 300,000 Central Americans undertake the hazardous journey across Mexico each year on their way to the United States.
The trek is a dangerous one, with criminals and corrupt Mexican officials preying on the migrants.
Gangs kidnap, rob and murder migrants, who are often targeted in extortion schemes, Mexican officials say.
At least 100 migrants were robbed by armed men aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” the freight train Central American migrants headed for the United States often ride on their journey across Mexico, on Dec. 2.
The incident occurred in Chahuite, a town in Oaxaca state near the border with Chiapas state.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Crossing from Mexico to America so Jewish children can go to school

Tijuana to Tefilah

Crossing from Mexico to America with Jewish children who do it every day

Fernando Sur, whose father drives him from Tijuana to Southern California Yeshiva High School in San Diego, wraps tefillin at his all-boys school.
As I stepped out of the van into the chilly, pre-dawn Tijuana air, I could just barely make out the shadows of the pedestrians nearby, all of them stepping over puddles and street trash, walking in the same direction.
I watched as two girls, Chaya Leibkinker, 16, and her sister, Tali, 11, grabbed their backpacks from the trunk of their SUV, quickly said goodbye to their father, Israel, then, along with their mother, Sandra, melted into the crowd approaching the Tijuana-San Ysidro pedestrian border crossing into the United States.
Every weekday, about 30,000 people cross this border into the United States, the vast majority of them Mexican citizens who work in metropolitan San Diego.
Among the crowd are seven Jewish children from Tijuana, who, five days a week, make the multihour cross-border trek to day schools in northeast San Diego so they can receive a Jewish education. There are no Jewish schools in Tijuana, and the community there can’t offer them a viable religious education. So each day, they cross northbound through U.S. Customs and Border Protection and then return southward each evening into Mexico.
It wasn’t always like this. From 1997 to 2004, Tijuana had a very small Jewish day school, run by Rabbi Mendel Polichenco, who leads the city’s only traditional Jewish synagogue, a Chabad.
But with only about 25 students per year, the school’s small budget made it too difficult to provide a great level of education, and there was not enough demand to continue making a go of it. Plus, there was the problem of turnover; many of the children’s families immigrated to the United States as soon as they were able, Polichenco said.
Bottom line: A dollar spent on transporting children to San Diego every day goes further than a dollar spent schooling them in Tijuana.
Judaism, though, is not the only reason parents and their kids spend so much time and energy crossing the border every weekday.
After all, throughout the United States, many observant families in small Jewish communities lacking a serious educational infrastructure supplement their children’s education by enrolling them in online classes with experts in Torah, Talmud, Hebrew and other foundational elements of a comprehensive Jewish education.
One of Sandra Leibkinker’s main motivations: She believes access to Southern California’s Jewish community could very well impact whether her daughters marry Jewish men and build  Jewish homes for their own families.
“This is a small community,” Sandra said of Tijuana, as Tali made a face while her mom untangled the girl’s knotted locks. “I want that she will marry with a Jew.”
For Rabbi Josef Fradkin, head of school at the Chabad Hebrew Academy in San Diego, where a handful of the Tijuana students learn, the young Mexican Jews lucky enough to obtain student visas to go to a Jewish day school in America — as opposed to a public education in Tijuana — simply have better odds of growing economically as well as religiously.
“That’s why their parents send them every morning across an international border — to give them a chance to succeed,” Fradkin said.

Sandra Leibkinker stands with daughters Tali, 11, left, and Chaya, 16, as they wait on the American side of the U.S.-Mexico border for the carpool van.
Most of these students have Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI) cards, which allow them to cross relatively quickly while riding in the carpool van. The Leibkinker girls, however, don’t have their passes yet, so each day they cross through Customs by foot, lengthening their commute by at least 30 minutes. The girls and their mother, who accompanies them into the United States each day, meet up with the rest of their group on the other side of U.S. Customs.
My own morning started early, at 5:15 a.m. Theirs began at 5 a.m., as it does every day. To get Chaya to Torah High School of San Diego and Tali to Chabad Hebrew Academy by 8 a.m., the Leibkinkers picked me up at my Tijuana hotel, the Palacio Azteca, at 5:55 a.m.
It was dark outside, and Carretera Federal No. 1, Tijuana’s main traffic artery, was still nearly empty — until, that is, we got close to the border, where dozens of other cars were dropping off some of the thousands of Tijuana residents crossing to work in California.
Inside Customs, the Leibkinkers and I split off into different lanes — they have a fast pass, but for pedestrian crossing only. On a normal Tuesday, crossing into San Ysidro in the standard lane often takes nearly an hour, according to a Web site run by UC San Diego.
Despite a border guard’s somewhat intense questioning, I got through quickly, in about 10 minutes.
Just a few feet away, in San Ysidro, the sun was rising over the horizon and the Leibkinkers had been waiting for me for a few minutes. The air was still cold, and Sandra was leading her two girls to a convenience store, where they grabbed an on-the-go breakfast — a Mrs. Fields cookie, corn nuts and a Frappuccino.
Then they waited to be picked up by the van and the rest of their schoolmates, just a few hundred yards inside the United States. This morning, as we lingered on San Ysidro Boulevard, Chaya played with her cell phone, and Sandra combed Tali’s hair.
Born and raised in Mexico City, home to a thriving, traditional Jewish community of 40,000, the Leibkinkers moved north four years ago to Tijuana, which has a Jewish community of approximately 2,000, Sandra said. She said the reason was economic, but she didn’t go into additional details.
She and Israel, a graphic designer, are hoping soon to move the family to America — like so many Mexicans who move to Tijuana, according to Polichenco, who, in addition to running the Tijuana Chabad, runs one just north of the border in Chula Vista.
“Either it [Tijuana] is a stepping stone, or they like the possibilities that the U.S. gives them,” Polichenco said. “They like being by the border.”
Polichenco, a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina, opened the Tijuana Chabad in 1993, moving into a building on Avenida 16 de Septiembre, which the Jewish community built in 1965. For the past 10 years, he has arranged for the children’s transport, paying the costs by raising most of the needed $25,000 per year from philanthropists in Mexico and California. He said the students’ families contribute what they can, but overall, their payments cover less than half of the total cost.
The same goes for tuition, which, without financial aid, runs upward of $10,000 at Chabad Hebrew Academy and $19,800 at Torah High, for example. Polichenco said that none of the Mexican families is able to afford full tuition. They pay what they can, but many of the children need full scholarships.
Like many families in Tijuana, some members of these Jewish families are U.S. citizens, while others are not, which is why the dream of moving north as a family is not yet possible. In the Leibkinkers’ case, Sandra, Chaya and Tali all are U.S. citizens, but Sandra said that because her husband is not, they won’t be able to move as a family until he finds a job in America.
I asked immigration expert Claire Bergeron of the Migration Policy Institute about the Leibkinkers’ case, as it is often relatively easy for the spouse of a U.S. citizen to receive legal permanent residence in a timely manner.
Bergeron confirmed that, yes, in many cases, a spouse can legally immigrate quite easily, often in less than 12 months. But there are loads of exceptions that can turn that wait time into years, including doubt over whether an applicant will be able to support himself or his family in the United States.

The wait for legal permanent residence in America for people who aren’t immediate relatives of a U.S. citizen can be very long — particularly so for Mexicans — 1.3 million of who currently have outstanding residence applications with the U.S. State Department.
To get to the front of the line can take up to two decades. Even after obtaining permanent residence, citizenship is usually another three to five years away.
At their San Ysidro carpool meeting point, Chaya sat on a bench enjoying her breakfast cookie, and again pulled out her iPhone to play Candy Crush, which she plays every morning as they wait. Looking like any other American girl waiting for a school bus, Chaya was wearing blue jeans and a white hoodie that read “Hollister California” on the front.
Tali, now fully groomed for school, didn’t say much as she snacked on her corn nuts.
About 15 minutes later, at 6:55 a.m., the mother pointed to a white van that was approaching. Ezra Torres, a 51-year-old soft-spoken Jew from Ensenada, who has driven the community’s Jewish children to and from school every day for eight years, had arrived.
Inside the van, four more students waited for the two girls and a young man with a notepad to board. Some of the kids looked exhausted. Others were playing on their phones, chatting or horsing around.
I sat shotgun next to Torres, who greeted me and then turned his attention to the road, focused on getting the van and its occupants to the next location, a Chula Vista shopping center where he picked up two of Polichenco’s children — their family lives in Chula Vista during the week and returns to Tijuana on Shabbat.
As the van headed onto the 805 Freeway, a young man sitting behind me, Fernando Sur, introduced himself. Working toward becoming a professional actor, he is 15 and a Mexican citizen. He nevertheless sounds American, looks American and dreams of one day living in La Jolla — although his father prefers Santa Monica.
Fernando summed up the 120-mile difference between the two coastal communities with a smile: “He has his dream place; I have my dream place.”
For a teen like Fernando, a Jewish education is not the only reason he puts so much time into crossing international borders. He needs regular access to the U.S. to move up the acting chain, which may allow him one day to work and live in California.
He currently has a 0-1 visa, which the U.S. government issues to a handful of people with “extraordinary ability” — in his case, acting. The visa allows him to remain in the United States for three months at a time. Fernando is one of the lucky ones.
Before he received the 0-1, he had a student visa. Polichenco told me that there are many Jewish families in Tijuana who would love to send their kids to San Diego for school, if they could — but they haven’t been able to get visas.
According to the State Department, Mexican citizens who applied before 1994 for permanent visas are only now becoming eligible, two decades later.
Fernando was born in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and is an only child; his family moved to Tijuana when he was 5, and they now live in Zona Rio, an upper-class neighborhood at the north of Tijuana, on a hill overlooking California.
“People say that the nicest part of Tijuana is actually San Diego,” Fernando joked. “There are some nice parts, but living right next to the border, you can see the difference.”
He is in 10th grade at the all-boys Southern California Yeshiva High School (SCY High), to which he has commuted for the past seven years.
He said he often stays with friends in San Diego for Shabbat and travels monthly to Los Angeles for shoots and meetings with entertainment professionals.
Fernando doesn’t usually ride to school in the van, opting instead to be driven by his father, who dedicates most of his time to helping his son climb the Hollywood ladder. A more direct commute to school, though, doesn’t buy the 15-year-old much extra sleep — he still has to wake up at around 5 a.m. — but it does give him some time to discuss sports with his dad.
“It’s good to understand that you need to start making sacrifices at this age,” Fernando said. “Once I’m older, I’m just [going to get used] to getting up early to go to work.”
Save for the fact that Fernando speaks fluent Spanish and lives in Tijuana, much of his behavior seems distinctly, well, American. Like his friends in San Diego, he cannot wait to receive his driver’s permit, which will bring him one step closer to getting a car and making the drive from Tijuana to San Diego on his own.
Behind Fernando sat Raquel Levy and Atenas Machain, both students at Torah High, an all-girls school. Now that Fernando usually rides with his father, the three students no longer see each other every day — but their years of commuting, as well as shared Shabbat meals at the Tijuana Chabad and their participation in the San Diego National Conference for Synagogue Youth, a Modern Orthodox youth group, has kept them close.
We ran into traffic at the Interstate 805 junction with Route 54, after which the van made its first stop at Chabad Hebrew Academy at 7:54 a.m., one hour after leaving San Ysidro and 90 minutes after departing the Tijuana Chabad. It was more than two hours into most of these children’s days.
Thirty minutes later, we arrived at Torah High, a large, modern school located north of San Diego, between La Jolla and University City. Raquel, Atenas and Sandra got off there.
And finally, at about 8:45 a.m., Torres made his last stop of the morning, at SCY High, where he left Fernando.
Their binational commute naturally distinguishes these students from their peers, but inside the schools’ walls, any cultural or national divisions seemed nonexistent.
At SCY High, Fernando wrapped tefillin and prayed, was the center of conversations with his friends, and seemed to be on his Torah teacher’s good side as he designed an illustration of the transition from the story of Creation to that of Noah and the flood.
Considering his commute and challenges he faces, it would seem like Fernando could complain — but he doesn’t.
“I’m learning Gemara, which I never had learned before,” he said. In Uruguay, Fernando attended what he said was a “non-religious” Jewish school. He said that his family is traditional in their home and “comes from strong Yiddish traditions.” His ancestors moved to Uruguay from Russia, Poland and Lithuania.
Fernando’s parents see the time and money they put into giving Fernando access to the United States as investment, not sacrifice.
“We are making an investment on his future, on his person, on his values. A sacrifice is something that you make with pain. That’s not pain — that’s a pleasure,” Fernando’s mother, Vivian Sur, said.
“The values of Judaism he will receive at home,” she continued, “we think it’s not sufficient at home, so he needs more than we can give him.”
The word Vivian used most often wasn’t “success” or “career,” but “mensch.” Giving Fernando the Jewish education that Tijuana doesn’t offer will, she said, help him become a mensch.
When I sat in on a 10th-grade U.S. history class at Torah High, I watched Raquel and Atenas, who seem an inseparable pair, listening to their teacher discuss integration of blacks into American society after the Civil War. The girls timidly covered their faces and giggled when I tried to take photographs of them.
Next door, in another U.S. history class, Marione Vigdarovich, also from Tijuana, jokingly asked her teacher to “not go in alphabetical order” as she returned quizzes — after spending so much of the morning in a van, the patience required to wait for her teacher to get to “Vigdarovich” was just too much for Marione to bear.
But for the most part, for Marione and the six other Tijuana kids, the time challenge is just a fact of life, despite being required to complete the same amount of schoolwork as their American peers. Often, their long commute offers the best time to complete homework, essays and take-home quizzes.
Sometimes, parents let their children stay with friends in San Diego overnight, to save time, to stay late for soccer practice or simply to do something fun.
Their challenges are not lost on the administrators. Charlene Stanley, principal of Chabad Hebrew Academy, said she sometimes wonders how much the Tijuana students can handle.
“It’s really hard to balance with our teachers and our students how much homework is appropriate for them,” Stanley said as she showed me the school’s grounds. “Can we really expect them to do the same amount of homework as a student who doesn’t have to commute that many hours?”
The answer, ultimately, has to be “yes.” The Mexican students aren’t held to lower standards than their American peers. They take the same exams, do the same homework, the same classroom work and play on the same sports teams.
Their daily three-, sometimes four-hour trips are simply the cost of learning about being Jewish for children who aren’t able to live on the U.S. side of the border.
Cognizant that children, particularly these children, get tired and lose focus as the afternoon wears on, Chabad Hebrew Academy’s administrators schedule physical education as the last class of the day.

Yaakov Levy, a Tijuana resident and seventh-grader at Chabad Hebrew Academy, plays a hybrid game of flag football and Frisbee during P.E. class. 
At 3:30 p.m. — the end of the school day, Tali and Yaakov Levy, Raquel’s cousin, a seventh-grader who is also from Tijuana, played a hybrid game of flag football and Frisbee. “Sometimes you can tell that they are tired; that their day has been long,” Stanley said. It wasn’t showing on this day, as Yaakov sped past as his friends who were trying, in vain, to grab his flags.
Occasionally, but not often, the students encounter legal and paperwork issues at the border, said Chabad Hebrew Academy executive administrator Cindee Sutton. Vivian Sur said that when Fernando was a student at Chabad Hebrew Academy, the school made their lives much easier by assisting with the annual paperwork that the U.S. government required for Fernando to renew his student visa.
When there are legal issues at the border, the fix is usually simple  — a call to Polichenco tends to patch things up with the authorities — but it’s the students who suffer academically when things like immigration law get in the way.
“If they can’t come for a couple [days], we are going to make accommodations,” Stanley said. “Maybe have them sit out of P.E. or an elective to meet with their teacher.”
And as much as these students’ parents sacrifice to give their children a Jewish education, Stanley wishes she could meet with the parents more often. But the distance, and the border, makes that tough.
As P.E. wrapped up and the school day neared its end, Torres, the driver, waited at the front of the school.
At the end of the day, leaving Chabad Hebrew Academy, we stopped back at Torah High to collect the final three students. As everyone settled in, and Fernando, Raquel and Atenas discussed typical high school topics — namely, other boys and girls — Rezi, the youngest Polichenco, was ecstatic when a bag of lollipops was passed her way.
Then, as Torres turned the key in the ignition, something went wrong — a strange clunking sound was coming from under the van’s hood. After trying without luck to start the car, Torres spent the next 90 minutes on the phone with Polichenco, GEICO and a local Russian mechanic Polichenco knows.
As the kids waited for the mechanics, they chatted, laughed, complained and walked around in the chilly dusk air. Eventually, Polichenco sorted out that a tow truck would drive the broken van to the Russian mechanic, while another van from a San Diego Chabad would be dropped off so Torres could drive the group back across the border, hopefully in time for the community’s celebration of little Elimelech Polichenco’s third birthday.
When the replacement van finally pulled up, the irony was palpable — after a day spent in the country where most of these children and their families hope to one day live and work, there was nothing but relief when our ride out of America and into Mexico arrived.
Arrival time back in Tijuana? Around 7:30 p.m.

Mexican Cult Accused of Brainwashing

Cult in Mexico Accused of Illegally Adopting and Brainwashing Children

4/16/2014

The Mexican cult Iglesia Christiana Restaurada (Restored Christian Church) is accused of kidnapping and brainwashing 15 children. The Christian sect runs Casitas del Sur (Little Houses of the South) shelters across Mexico and overseas.
The children went missing from the Mexico City branch of the shelter in 2008; 12 of the children were located in the beginning of April reports The Christian Post. Iglesia Christiana Restaurada is reportedly responsible for allowing children to be illegally adopted, then brainwashed by members of the sect. The shelters took on a persona of a charitable ministry in front of the Mexican government.
Religion expert Bernardo Barranco said, “The Casitas del Sur were just a facade for an ambitious indoctrination project...to take children who were defenseless, trusting, blank slates, who would believe everything the sect told them.”
“When authorities had raided the shelter they encountered terrified children. [They found] kids didn’t want to come out, they didn’t want to see the daylight or have contact with people, because the world was full of perversion, it was bad, they were afraid.”
Children’s rights activist Margarita Griesbach said that little has been done by the Mexican government to prevent something like this from happening again.
 

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Bus truck collision Mexico highway in Veracruz, Mexico

Bus hits truck on Mexico highway; 36 reported dead


    VERACRUZ, Mexico A passenger bus slammed into a broken-down truck and burst into flames, killing at least 36 people Sunday in southern Mexico, the Veracruz state government reported.Both state and federal officials said that four people survived the crash, which occurred shortly after midnight in the southeastern state of Veracruz.A communique from the state civil defense agency said the victims were business people from the region who were travelling from the Tabasco state capital of Villahermosa to Mexico City. The agency's emergency director, Ricardo Maza Limon, said the victims apparently burned to death inside the bus, which was so badly charred that the tires melted and the markings on its sides were unreadable.
    The federal highway department, which earlier gave the death toll as 34, said the three-axle bus was on a highway in the area of Acayucan when it struck a five-axle tractor-trailer owned by a milk protein company that had broken down and was parked along the roadside.
    Via Twitter, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto sent a message of condolences to the families of those who died.
    The state government of Tabasco said it was setting up an attention center for the families of the victims, some of whom were suffering from nervous crises. The center's operations coordinator, Dr. Teresa Hernandez Marin, said the center will provide social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists to help people.
    Hernandez said experts will start identifying the bodies overnight, using DNA tests when necessary.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Border Crossing Story BBC

Altar: The town where migrants shop for a perilous journey

Sonoran Desert

In a Mexican border town, the shops are stocked for one thing - to equip migrants for the last leg of a long and sometimes fatal journey.
From early morning, people start to congregate in the main plaza in Altar.
Under a grey sky, the sun not yet high enough to warm their backs, pockets of men and women gather to share a coffee, a quesadilla or a cigarette.
At first glance they seem like any other rural workers in northern Mexico.
The men wear caps and jeans, beaten-looking trainers and boots.
The women are dressed like the men. But Altar is unlike anywhere else in Mexico.
Amid the furtive looks and conspiratorial chats, these people are on the move, plotting their route north.
Trying on the special slippers that some migrants use when attempting to breach the US border
They have arrived from across Mexico and Central America, often enduring tremendous hardship to get this far.

Now they stand, huddled in small groups, barely 100 kilometres (62 miles) from their ultimate destination - the border with the United States.
Some are looking for a coyote, a guide who will take them on the most dangerous leg through the desert.
The first man I spoke to looked bewildered - days earlier he had been deported from the US where he had lived for 20 years, thrown out for driving without a licence.
Inside the church at the centre of the square, there is a "Prayer to the Migrant Brothers" on the wall.
"Jesus, take pity on them and protect them" it reads, "as they are mistreated and humiliated on their path."
A young man and his sister are on their knees beneath those words, offering a few prayers of their own to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint.
Inside the church
Migrants often carry her image to protect them through the Sonoran Desert.
"Altar has become a reference point for crossing migrants. We can't stand by with our arms folded in the face of such suffering," says Padre Prisciliano Peraza, the local parish priest.
Wearing a stetson hat and cowboy boots rather than a dog collar, he doesn't look much like your average Mexican man of the cloth.
An outspoken advocate for migrant rights, he once crossed the desert himself in solidarity with his undocumented flock.
Padre Prisciliano Peraza Staunch defender of migrants' rights, Padre Prisciliano Peraza does not look like a typical Mexican priest
Rucksacks and woolly hats at an outdoor goods store in Altar, Mexico 
 The economy of Altar depends on selling trekking goods to migrants heading to the US
"We should be very thankful for the migrants, we should protect them," he says stabbing a finger in the air.
"We should embrace and celebrate them because 90% of our economy depends on what our migrant brothers spend here," he adds.
A short walk around the town is enough to see what he means.
Shops line the square selling everything the prospective border-crosser could need.

Some of those who attempt the crossing never make it. The job of identifying bodies found in the desert can be painstakingly difficult. Anthropologist Robin Reineke describes how she pieces together the sad jigsaw puzzle of personal attributes and belongings.
There are T-shirts, trousers and long-sleeved hooded tops, all in desert camouflage to try to fool the border patrols.
There are rucksacks, again camouflaged, in which they can carry their thin blankets and meagre supplies of tinned food.
There are water bottles, painted black so they don't reflect the sun when the border patrol guards look through their binoculars.
And, strangely enough, there are carpet slippers.
The shop owner, Victor, demonstrates how the elasticised slippers fit over the migrant's shoes so they don't leave tracks in the sand.
Not exactly the most practical footwear for a five-day trek through the desert, but this journey is about stealth rather than comfort.
"The rucksacks and the carpet slippers are my best sellers," Victor confides.
The next morning, still dark outside, the padre took us to the border fence.
It's a three-hour journey along dirt roads through territory run - we are reliably informed by graffiti on a burnt-out shack - by the Sinaloa drug cartel.
"Imagine doing this trip in those vans," the padre yells above the clatter of his truck, referring to lines of mini-vans we'd seen back in Altar, their seats ripped out and replaced with thin metal benches to cram in more migrants.
A migrant covers his face
We passed a number of shady checkpoints.
They are run by men with guns. Cartel members - or people traffickers - or some hybrid of the two.
Fortunately the padre's fame in these parts meant our passage was waved through without question.
At the border itself, we climbed a small ridge, and there the migrants were, waiting to cross.

The BBC's Will Grant travels to Tucson to meet the team tracing the families of the undocumented migrants who die in the Arizona desert after crossing the US border illegally.
 
 
Resting in makeshift shelters of plastic sheeting and cactus to protect themselves from the punishing heat and fierce desert winds, the same men and women from the plaza in Altar were now dressed from head-to-toe in camouflage wear.
"You can see Jesus Christ walking among us," says the padre before quoting Matthew verse 35: "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink."
Everyone had a similar story - life was too tough in Guatemala or Honduras or rural Mexico to make ends meet. Or they were trying to get back to their families in the US after having been deported.
One woman had her three-year-old child on her hip. Another carried a baby.
We stood looking into the US, the land of opportunity tantalisingly close, the migrants already thirsty, dirty and exhausted.
Staring at the inhospitable desert shimmering in front of them, they knew the hardest part of their journey was yet to come.

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Cartel Recruits Children

It has long been known that the Drug Cartels in Mexico recruit very young children.

La Familia, Gulf Cartel, Jalisco Cartel, Juarez Cartel,  Knights Templar, La Generacion Nueva, Matazetas, Sinaloa Federation, Tijuana Cartel, the Zetas.


The 'Matazetas,' a product of criminal fragmentation
It is tempting to separate Mexico's drug cartels into six hierarchical groups, each competing for trafficking turf. The reality, however, is that the Sinaloa Federation, the Gulf Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the Zetas and La Familia, not to mention several new offshoot organizations, are fluid, dynamic, for-profit syndicates that sometimes operate under the umbrella of what are effectively conglomerates but more often than not operate as independent, smaller-scale franchises.
This article examines the current state of the Sinaloa Federation, the Zetas, and other Mexican cartels. It finds that due to law enforcement pressure in recent years, Mexico's drug trafficking organizations have increasingly splintered, and may well end up consolidated under the influence of the last cartel standing. That cartel would likely be the Sinaloa Federation, which remains the most powerful cartel in Mexico today. The Sinaloa Federation
The Sinaloa Federation is the most powerful Mexican drug trafficking organization with the largest presence nationwide and globally. Based in the state of Sinaloa in northwestern Mexico, it has operatives in at least 17 Mexican states. In recent years, its members are known to have operated in cities throughout the United States. At the helm of the cartel is Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, and he is accompanied by several other key figures, among them Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and Juan Jose Esparragoza "El Azul" Moreno. These three figures, in their 50s and 60s, have run the Sinaloa Federation through a hands-off, top-down management style since the 1990s. While the cartel itself may employ as many as 100,000 operatives, the leadership is believed to rarely communicate directly with them, preferring instead to issue wide-ranging orders and allow the plaza chiefs -- those in charge of specific trafficking zones -- to run their operations like franchises. For this reason, the Sinaloa cartel has long been known as the Federation.
In 2008 and 2009, however, the Sinaloa Federation suffered its first major ruptures when the Beltran Leyva brothers and Edgar Valdez Villareal (also known as "La Barbie") split off from Sinaloa to form their own independent outfits, the Beltran Leyva Organization and the Cartel del Pacifico Sur. As a result, one of the Beltran Leyva brothers and Villareal were arrested in 2008 and 2010 respectively, while another brother was killed in 2009. It is unclear whether Sinaloa leader Guzman and his inner circle informed the authorities of the three's locations as payback over the split, or whether they simply proved unable to run operations on their own. The Sinaloa Federation, however, would never be the same. While it would expand in size -- domestically and internationally -- it would suffer setbacks and lose clout near its home turf of Sinaloa and Durango, as well as in southwestern Mexico.
Since 2008, dozens of high-level Sinaloa cartel lieutenants have been brought down by authorities, including Guzman's father-in-law and longtime associate, Ignacio Coronel Villareal (also known as Nacho Coronel), who was killed in a shootout in the central city of Guadalajara in July 2010, and Ismael Zambada's son Vicente Zambada Niebla, who is currently on trial in Chicago. The Sinaloa cartel has continued to expand in Mexico and globally, but has faced increasing pressure from rival groups, the Zetas in particular. While it is no longer as effective as it once was, the Sinaloa Federation remains the most expansive, organized cartel operating in Mexico today.
The Zetas
The Zetas are Mexico's most lethal drug trafficking organization. Originally a tight-knit group of approximately 30 former members of a Mexican Special Forces unit who operated as the paramilitary wing for the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas have grown exponentially since the early 2000s. True to their Special Forces origins, some of the recruits have received advanced weapons and communications training, which is what originally distinguished the group from other cartels in Mexico.
Nevertheless, today many Zetas members have had little training at all; since 2008, small groups of "thugs" sporting crew cuts and purporting to be members of the Zetas have appeared in small towns in Mexico, quickly claiming the turf as their own. The Zetas members have been involved in turf battles in Sinaloa cartel strongholds like the city of Culiacan and have been spotted as far south as Guatemala and Honduras. Yet aside from a few apparent attempts to consolidate the multitudes of groups calling themselves Zetas, the Zetas have remained splintered.
The authorities have continually hampered the Zetas' ability to use technology to communicate. In August 2012, for example, the military seized 15 communications installations, including a 50-foot telecom tower, in the northern state of Tamaulipas. In the past year, the authorities have also had success in arresting or killing some of the top Zetas leaders. On October 7, 2012, the Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, known as "El Lazca" or "Z-3" (indicating his high-rank within the original Zeta unit), was killed by the Mexican Navy. On July 15, 2013, Lazcano's successor, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales ("Z-40"), was arrested in Tamaulipas without a shot being fired and reportedly with the help of US intelligence. Law enforcement pressure during the majority of the Calderon administration was focused on the Zetas and La Familia, in large part because these two groups were the most intent on executing indiscriminate acts of violence.
SEE ALSO: Zetas Profile
Without these leaders, the Zetas will likely remain a ragtag operation, intent on violence and willing to engage in almost any illicit activity for profit, but increasingly disorganized and, as a result, less in control of drug trafficking and less capable of undermining the authorities and the state. It is also likely that the Sinaloa Federation will repeat a move from its 2004 playbook and try to take control of the lucrative Nuevo Laredo trafficking corridor given the corner in which the Zetas find themselves.
Mexico's Other Cartels
There are more than a handful of other cartels operating in Mexico, but none on the level of the Sinaloa Federation or the Zetas. There are already indications that the Sinaloa Federation may try to strike an alliance with the remnants of the Gulf Cartel, which, since the extradition of Osiel Cardenas Guillen in 2007 (he received a 25-year sentence in Houston in 2010), has been considerably weakened. Its members have been in constant conflict with the Zetas, from Tamaulipas all the way to Guatemala. Once the most powerful drug trafficking organization on Mexico's East Coast, the Gulf Cartel's current level of influence is unclear. It is reasonable to assume it still controls the majority of drug trafficking operations in Tamaulipas, but it is impossible to be completely confident of the Gulf Cartel's current condition given the fog that surrounds the criminal underworld in Tamaulipas.
Of the other groups, the Tijuana Cartel is perhaps the least menacing. Since the fall of the last of the group's long-time leaders, the Arellano Felix brothers in 2008, the group has stayed largely off the radar. It is believed that a sister of the Arellano Felix brothers, Enedina, may be trying to run operations, but there are indications that the Sinaloa Federation has moved in on their territory. A similar situation exists in Ciudad Juarez, where just one of the original Carrillo Fuentes brothers, Vicente, remains in charge of what used to be the powerful Juarez Cartel but is now an increasingly fluid operation that resembles gang-on-gang warfare more than intra-cartel violence, with the high-level drug trafficking operations apparently conducted by members of the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels. In some ways, Sinaloa has always had a foot in Juarez: in the 1990s, Esparragoza Moreno was considered the "number three" for the Sinaloa Federation as well as the "number two" for the Juarez Cartel, even though the two organizations were officially rivals.
What remains in the rest of Mexico is a hodgepodge of offshoot groups that are increasingly staking their claim to disputed turf from Veracruz to Guadalajara to Acapulco. La Familia, a pseudo-religious group based in the central state of Michoacan which preached wholesome values all the while peddling methamphetamine on the side, has all but shattered under law enforcement pressure, but the so-called Knights Templar has risen in its place. The Knights Templar, like La Familia, operates behind a facade of pseudo-religiosity, calling into question just how separate it is from what was once La Familia. Given La Familia's growth during the early years of the Felipe Calderon administration, it is unlikely the organization simply disappeared entirely.
Groups such as Jalisco Cartel - New Generation (CJNG), based in Guadalajara, and the Matazetas (the "Zeta Killers" who are purportedly an offshoot of the aforementioned Jalisco organization now based largely in Veracruz) have appeared on the scene in the last two or three years, attracting attention with beheadings, other violent killings and narcomantas (banners) laying claim to their turf. Yet a closer examination reveals that these may not actually be new organizations at all: the New Generation was a name commonly thrown around Guadalajara in association with Sinaloa Federation kingpin Coronel Villareal as early as 2008, while the name Matazetas appeared as early as 2004 in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo when Sinaloa Federation operatives challenged the Zetas for their turf. It is nearly impossible to confirm whether the new organizations are offshoots of the major cartels or not. Although many disgruntled operatives are often tempted to try to form their own organizations, sometimes even with their leadership's blessing, it is rarely clear whether they operate independently or under an umbrella.
Conclusion
If there is one certainty that has emerged from roughly six years of fighting the cartels in Mexico, it is that the country's drug trafficking organizations are more fragmented than ever, and now lack the leadership of organized, business-oriented kingpins.
There are several scenarios for the future. If offshoots like La Generacion Nueva, the Zetas and the Matazetas -- which have shown a propensity for wanton violence that is unparalleled in Mexican history -- continue to gain a foothold, Mexico may become such difficult terrain through which to move drugs that the traffickers shift back to the Caribbean, which they abandoned in the 1990s after increased US law enforcement pressure around the islands. Traffickers also may opt to use Central America as a hub, given its lack of strong institutions.
There is also the possibility that the Sinaloa Federation and Gulf Cartel will seek to consolidate control over the various offshoots and incorporate them into their larger organizations. If this happens, violence would likely diminish, but drug trafficking would flourish, and both US and Mexican law enforcement along the border would be put under increasing pressure.



Friday, April 4, 2014

Kiliwa Grupo Danza CBTA-41

Centro Bachillerato Tecnologico Agropecuatio  # 41; Mexicali, B.C., Mexico

 Seven of the Dancers Seated in front of Gator Dental Group, while all the others  are off cameral to the right.

Below is the Logo Marked escort for the groupe.

This Group has many credits and lot's of Internet Postings.



GRUPO DE DANZA KILIWA :) CBTA 41 INTERCBTAS 2011 ...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtdqUT62a...
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Apr 13, 2011 - Uploaded by Elizabeth ROMAN RODRIGUEZ
GRUPO DE DANZA KILIWA :) CBTA 41 INTERCBTAS 2011 ♥ ... Ventana a mi Comunidad /Kiliwas -Pérdida ...


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    Jul 5, 2012 - Ventana a mi Comunidad /Kiliwas -Pérdida de a lengua 1 de 2. 2007/06/08 .... GRUPO DE DANZA KILIWA :) CBTA 41 INTERCBTAS 2011 ♥.
  7. InterCBTA's 2010 San Quintin BC - Danza (CBTa 41 ... - وين

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    Google   The Group for more information, And Translate pages as needed.

    We Tip our hats, to the  Kids, Educators and Families, they were extremely well mannered and courteous during their time, at the Eastern Edge of the State.
     
    Good Luck to Kiliwa Grupo Danza CBTA - 41

     Keep up the Good work, and keep up those grades, Your Mexico's Future!