NewsTaco

By Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer

It’s early April and Catholic priest Alejandro Solalinde, 68, arrives in McAllen where he will be the keynote speaker at a migrant smuggling and human trafficking conference. He shoulders a worn Amnesty International bag stuffed with paperwork, his Bible, and his passport. Solalinde is accompanied by a quiet, watchful man with dark eyes. He is just one of the priest’s four bodyguards. The rest wait in Mexico where Solalinde has received a series of death threats.

Father Solalinde is not well known in the United States. But when he visited neighboring Matamoros— a Mexican border city wracked by gun battles and kidnappings—a day earlier, people rushed to hug and touch the humble priest as if he were a talisman. They jockey for position in the crowd to snap photos with him. In Mexico, he is recognized for his bravery. He dares to speak out about corrupt government officials, organized crime and even the Catholic Church, which Solalinde argues hasn’t done enough to fight poverty and violence, which are at the root of the massive migration north—a great outpouring of the poor and brutalized, which he calls a “humanitarian disaster.”

Solalinde founded his migrant shelter Hermanos en el Camino (Brothers on the Road) near a busy railway junction used by migrants in 2007 in Ixtepec, Oaxaca.  It was a precipitous moment. President Felipe Calderon had launched the drug war in 2006, sending military troops into cities and towns to battle the drug cartels. Trafficking organizations were branching out becoming multi-billion-dollar global corporations. The brutal Los Zetas and other gangsters began to refer to the mostly Central and South American migrants who sought refuge in Solalinde’s shelter as their merchandise.

The world turned upside down. Priests began to fear for their lives and the criminals flaunted their power. The first death threat came shortly after he opened the shelter, says Solalinde.  “It was a Zeta kidnapping migrants. We started protecting the migrants at the shelter. One of my assistants took a picture of the kidnapper. He said ‘you take a picture again and I am going to shoot you here,’” Solalinde points at his forehead.

The well-worn pathways north to the American Dream are fiercely divided and protected. Organized crime and corrupt officials demand their cut from anyone passing through their territories. Every step of the migrants’ route has a price.  It is a feudal arrangement. A migrant must pay corrupt transit cops and organized crime $100 for the right to cling to the top of a dilapidated freight car as it rolls through their territory. When the migrants arrive at the next station they pay another cop $100. “God help you if you can’t pay, because then the criminals take you,” says Solalinde. “They violate the women. The migrants are kidnapped, held for ransom.”

At his shelter, Solalinde provides food, shelter and medical care. “It’s as if they were programmed and nothing can convince them that they should change their path,” he says of the people who come to his shelter. “ I tell them ‘don’t go. They’re going to kidnap you.’ And they tell me, ‘we’ll make it with the help of God.’ And I say, ‘Yes, but God can’t stop kidnappings, so what are you going to do?’”

What propels the Central Americans forward is their collective, brutal past. “Countries like Guatemala have suffered genocides over many years,” says Solalinde. “The extermination of entire towns. When you treat a town or a person that way, there have to be lingering social effects. But there’s also countries like El Salvador, that experienced a civil war for many years. Those wounds still haven’t healed. Society remains paralyzed in a way, it still hasn’t been able to take off economically and in this case, again, the Catholic church has not been able to help the people to heal those wounds.”

In the new world order, he says, money is overvalued and human beings are merely vessels to be exploited. “Crossing Mexico has become a very dangerous venture. Most of the young men and women are just looking for work, for an opportunity. But sometimes they are used to transport drugs or forced to work for organized crime.”

Solalinde has not been shy speaking publicly about the collusion between government officials and organized crime in the growing brutality against the migrants who come to his shelter. After denouncing corrupt officials in 2012, the priest received death threats which compelled him to leave the country for several weeks. “It’s unthinkable that in Mexico there would be this growth in organized crime in all sectors without thinking about the complicity of public officials,” Solalinde told a crowded auditorium during his keynote address in McAllen, which was organized by UT Brownsville and South Texas College. “The cartels aren’t alone. They’ve always infiltrated the inner circles of all institutions, or almost all institutions, and have been able to operate that way. Mexico has become uncertain; Mexico has become unsafe, no matter how much the previous government tried to deny the facts.”

After fleeing Mexico in May 2012, Solalinde was suddenly a man without a country. The priest traveled to North America and Europe to meet with human rights and religious organizations. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent agency of the Organization of American States, had already pressured the Mexican government in 2010 to provide him with bodyguards after he’d been detained and held at gunpoint by the Federal Police. At the time, he had been pressuring the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Oaxaca state to investigate the murders of three migrants.

In June 2012, he flew to Geneva to meet with Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Pillay sent a team of security experts to Ixtepec to design a protective wall around the migrant shelter and reinforce Solalinde’s sleeping quarters so that he could return to Mexico.

“We now have four state police who guard the shelter, and I have four federal agents as bodyguards,” says the priest, who is still uneasy with the idea of traveling with bodyguards. “I am a servant of Christ and that’s all,” he says. “I don’t want anyone holding the door for me or stopping traffic so that I can pass.”

Javier Hernández Valencia, the Representative in Mexico of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, says his agency and other human rights advocates had to convince Solalinde to keep the bodyguards. “He was very uncomfortable with the idea of the bodyguards,” says Hernandez. “But the very sad perspective of having him wounded or killed was enough for us to insist he accept these measures at least for the time.”

The supreme irony has not been lost on Solalinde that his body guards and the guards at the shelter come from the same law enforcement agencies that are often corrupted by organized crime. The priest says he has worked hard to gain their trust and win them over to the cause of defending human rights. “They were baptized, and all four of them are Catholic,” he says of his bodyguards. “ I told them if you were baptized, you can’t just be a cop, you have to turn your police service into a mission. You are not protecting me or defending me, you’re protecting the cause that I work for. I try to raise their awareness and remind them of their love for Mexico. But the real key to a police officer’s heart is to care about him as a person. I care about them, and about their families.”

But the priest says that his guards are largely symbolic. “It doesn’t matter if you have eight bodyguards,” he says. “Don’t you remember what they did to that retired general in Nuevo Laredo? If they really want to kill you, they will.”

Sadly, Father Solalinde’s predicament is not unique, says Daniel Zapico, a spokesperson in Mexico for the human rights group Amnesty International. Other priests who run migrant shelters such as Fray Tomas Gonzalez in the state of Tabasco and Father Pedro Pantoja in the state of Coahuila have also received death threats because of their work, he says. “Organized crime is trying to attack the migrants and these priests are trying to prevent it,” Zapico says.  “But the biggest problem is not just the threats but the impunity from the local to the federal level,” he says. “The government refuses to acknowledge that civil servants linked to organized crime are often behind the threats. They want to characterize it as just a few bad actors instead of a systemic problem.”

And the threats aren’t just limited to priests.  “The threats against human rights defenders, journalists and those who are working with the most vulnerable populations such as women and migrants are increasing and getting worse,” Zapico says. “Human rights defenders deserve recognition and they deserve protection.”

But both the United States and Mexico have failed to fully acknowledge the growing human rights crisis in Mexico, which has grown exponentially since the drug war began in 2006. A year after Calderon’s war was launched, the United States pledged $1.9 billion to help combat organized crime in Mexico through a multi-year agreement called the Merida Initiative. According to the initiative, 15 percent of that aid can be disbursed only if Mexico is meeting four human rights requirements: ensuring that federal police and military officials who commit human rights abuses are investigated and prosecuted by civilian prosecutors in civilian courts, that Mexican civil society organizations are consulted  regularly on the implementation of Merida Initiative measures, the prohibition of testimony obtained through torture and improving the transparency and  accountability of law enforcement.

The Mexican government hasn’t fully complied with any of these measures, according to human rights organizations. There were 7,441 human rights complaints filed against Mexico’s military from 2006 through 2012, according to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH). None of these complaints have led to a conviction in Mexico’s civilian court system. In military court during the same period of time, only 38 military personnel have been charged with human rights violations out of the 5,000 cases opened by the military, according to the nonprofit Human Rights Watch.

The United States continues to provide Merida funding despite Mexico’s failure to meet the human rights requirements stipulated in the agreement. “The Mexican government is not working fast enough to implement measures that would prevent attacks against journalists and human rights defenders,” says Zapico. Already, 62 journalists and media workers have been killed in Mexico since 2000, according to the nonprofit press freedom organization Committee to Protect Journalists.

On May 2, President Obama will arrive in Mexico for talks with President Enrique Peña Nieto who took office in December. A U.S. State Department report released last week on the human rights situation in Mexico paints a troubling picture of “significant human rights-related problems included police and military involvement in serious abuses including unlawful killings, physical abuse, torture and disappearances.”

During the meeting with Obama, Peña Nieto will undoubtedly be anxious to discuss economic development. Since taking office in December he has tried to turn the international and national conversation away from his country’s human rights and security crisis. But ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away, says Solalinde.

“Enrique Peña Nieto’s new government is trying to show a different image…As if with the change of party, we were already a better Mexico: a peaceful Mexico, a Mexico that respects human rights, a safer Mexico, not only for migrants but for capital – for investments. This is not true,” the priest told the audience in McAllen.  “Mexico’s situation isn’t going to get better because the press puts out less information about the violence. It’s also not going to be resolved by trying to make the people believe through speeches and rhetoric that the migrants’ situation has changed. The truth is it hasn’t. A real, practical and effective change hasn’t been attainable in human rights.”

And until the change comes, the 68-year old priest with the Bible and the bodyguards will keep advocating for the men, women and children seeking shelter along the way.

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Photo by Melissa del Bosque]

By Forrest Wilder, Texas Observer

[Photo by CBP Photography]

By Saul Elbein, Texas Observer

Every morning, while her girls are still in bed, Irma Rosales makes tortillas for breakfast. She prepares the masa, pats it into little cakes, places them on a flat pan over a charcoal grill.

It’s a scene that’s been repeated in millions of households for hundreds of years, all across Mexico and Central America. But look closely at the tortillas on Irma’s comal and you’ll see something new: little white seeds. They’re amaranth, a crop native to the central valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, where Irma lives. Once, amaranth was a staple of Mesoamerican civilization. Now a Oaxacan nonprofit is trying to bring it back.

The organization is called Puente a la Salud, or Bridge to Health. Irma went to one of its workshops after a doctor diagnosed her daughter Ashly with chronic malnutrition. The doctor was a young man from the city, just out of medical school, doing his nationally mandated year of service in Mazaltepec, Irma’s small town.

“She’s underweight,” he said. “Your daughter is showing symptoms of chronic malnutrition.”

Irma listened as the doctor rattled off the signs: listlessness, depression. And if it wasn’t corrected, long-term brain damage. That hit hard.

Her family wasn’t wealthy, but Irma had thought her girls were okay. Like many people in Oaxaca State—one of Mexico’s poorest—she and her husband are subsistence corn farmers. They eat a typical rural Mexican diet of corn and beans. They are well-off enough to have a chicken, so they have eggs. Every now and then they even have meat.

Everything Irma had done, she had done to make life better for Ashly and her other three children. Like many Oaxacans, she had made a long and difficult illegal journey to the U.S. in hopes of making money to send home. She’d spent five years in Los Angeles with her husband, making jeans in a clothing factory for crappy pay. As often as she could, Irma talked on the phone to her daughter back in Mazaltepec with her husband’s family. Every time they talked, Ashly cried. She’d say, “Mama, when are you coming back?”

Eventually Irma and her husband had enough. The job wasn’t worth splitting the family. They returned home to Ashly and malnutrition.

As she left the clinic where her daughter was diagnosed, Irma saw a flyer for Puente a la Salud, inviting her to a workshop about a grain called amaranth. She decided to give it a shot.

Today, amaranth is rare and expensive, the sort of thing one buys in small bags at American natural-foods stores. Most Mexicans no longer eat it. But before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, amaranth was eaten throughout the highlands of central Mexico and south into the high valleys of Oaxaca State.

Amaranth’s leaves are edible and full of vitamins. The combination of corn, beans and amaranth, whose grain-like seeds can be ground into flour, provides a complete protein, meaning it delivers all the amino acids the body can’t make for itself. The combination is as nutritionally complete as meat.

In the Aztec culture—unfortunately for the history of the Mexican diet—amaranth also had religious significance. It was a favorite food of Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird-visaged God of War who, legend had it, led the Aztecs out of the country’s northern wastelands to become lords of central Mexico. Amaranth flowers are bright and sweet; hummingbirds love them. Huitzilopochtli, like all the gods of old Mexico, also loved the taste of human blood. A regular diet of sacrifices sustained him and kept the world from falling into darkness.

Every year during Huitzilopochtli’s sacred month, which corresponds roughly with December, Aztec families built little statues of the god in their homes out of puffed amaranth and honey. According to some accounts, they also included blood from human sacrifices. At the end of the month, the statue was carved up and eaten. The people would take the god into them, like Catholics with the host.

To arriving Spanish priests, the practice looked like intolerable paganism. And while not every Mexican used amaranth this way, the Spanish took no chances. Everywhere they went in Mexico, the Spanish tried to eradicate worship of the old gods. Because the amaranth service seemed like a demon mass—and because the Spanish god preferred wheat—the priests did everything possible to end the cultivation and consumption of amaranth.

It’s not clear if anyone missed it. Today, subsistence farms across the country that once grew corn, beans and amaranth now grow only corn and beans.

Amaranth was all but forgotten, surviving only in the highest, most isolated mountain valleys, places the Spanish language and the Catholic faith never penetrated.

The religious purge of amaranth succeeded, but the priests and farmers who banished it wrecked the rural Mexican diet along the way. Without amaranth, it was no longer possible for farming families—too poor to own animals—to get all the protein they needed.

The Texas woman who made it her goal to reintroduce amaranth to rural Oaxaca stumbled on the crop almost by accident.

Katherine Lorenz was 23 when she came to Oaxaca State, in southern Mexico. Austin-born and raised, Lorenz was Texas royalty, the granddaughter of George Mitchell, planner of The Woodlands and inventor of fracking. In March 2003 Lorenz went to Oaxaca with Amigos de las Americas, an international nonprofit that sends university and high school students to Latin America on a service program. Lorenz went into the countryside to build cookstoves.

Oaxaca State is a place where it is possible for aid workers to live in the First World while commuting daily to the Third. Oaxaca City is a posh vacation and retirement destination, a UNESCO World Heritage Site filled with art galleries and expensive restaurants. It is a city devoted almost entirely to the needs of tourists.

Outside the city, though, life goes on much as it has since before the Spanish conquest. In many communities people still speak traditional languages as a matter of course; it’s not uncommon to meet old people and children who speak Spanish poorly or not at all. Many towns survive largely on subsistence farming.

Working in Oaxaca, Lorenz gradually came to understand that many of the children she interacted with on a daily basis were malnourished. Few kids in the campo were outright starving, but if you looked closely you could see that something was off. Their eyes were dull, their hair a little too wispy. Children she thought were 5 or 6 turned out to be 9 or 10.

It wasn’t that they weren’t getting enough calories; it was that they were living on a diet of primarily corn and beans, and they weren’t getting the full complement of nutrients they needed to grow. Think of a malnourished child as a skyscraper under construction. There isn’t any steel for the girders. There isn’t enough cement. There’s no copper wire for the electrical systems, no pipe for the plumbing. And yet the body forges upward, scrounging what it can.

Lorenz had studied nutrition in college; she knew enough to realize that early-childhood malnutrition is serious. If a child suffers chronic malnutrition under the age of 5, brain development may be irreversibly stunted, putting children at risk for other problems. According to the United Nations Development Program, during Lorenz’s time in Oaxaca more than half the children in the countryside suffered from chronic malnutrition.

Looking to do something about it, Lorenz met Kate Seely, an American from Vermont. Seely, too, was concerned with malnutrition in the campo—a whole range of birth defects could be prevented if only local mothers could get enough folate. An organic farmer friend back in Vermont suggested amaranth, which has plenty.

Seely and Lorenz looked into amaranth and liked what they saw. It seemed like the perfect crop. It wasn’t just folate and protein; amaranth is a nutritional powerhouse, and the leaves can be eaten as green vegetables. As luck would have it, Seely had worked with a small mill in Oaxaca that processed amaranth seeds, so supply wouldn’t be an issue. With a $20,000 loan from Lorenz’s mother, the two founded Puente a la Salud to try to reacquaint rural Oaxacans with amaranth.

At the time, Lorenz said, she found romance in the idea of helping restore a native crop that had been all but destroyed.

“A lot of the intrigue to me was that I could say, ‘I’m foreign, but this grain has been here forever, and it’s a part of your history and culture,’” Lorenz told me. “I thought people would really like that.”

She was wrong.

Seely and Lorenz weren’t the first to hit on amaranth as a possible solution to the endemic malnutrition of the campos. As a native crop suppressed by the Spanish, amaranth had a certain political appeal to patriotic Mexicans. The famed Mexican chemist Alfredo Sanchez Marroquin had devoted much of the 1970s to recovering and restoring native Mexican crops. His disciples wandered the country, trekking into isolated pueblos where people still grew amaranth, gathering seed stock.

But early reintroduction efforts focused mostly on agribusinesses or welfare. No one in southern Mexico was trying to reintroduce amaranth as a staple crop that people actually grow and eat.

After founding Puente, Lorenz and Seely started hosting workshops in the small communities of rural Oaxaca State. The workshops were often organized by local doctors. In front of mostly female audiences, Lorenz and Seely would demonstrate cooking with amaranth, showing women how to make traditional corn-based foods like tortillas and atole with added amaranth. They gave out free amaranth seed.

“We thought it was going to be about nutrition,” Lorenz told me. “We thought we were going to explain the nutritional benefits to people, and then show them how to cook with it, and they’d like it so much they’d start growing it.”

She laughed. “I learned you can’t just bulldoze your way into someone else’s culture and expect them to change.”

It turned out that few of the traits that attracted Lorenz and Seely to amaranth had much influence on the Oaxacans. They’d try the amaranth, maybe like it enough to eat it on occasion, but they weren’t integrating the seeds into their diets.

And the Oaxacans didn’t much care about the grain’s indigenous heritage. Lorenz and Seely lectured their audiences about amaranth’s role in pagan ceremonies, about its importance as a tribute to the Aztecs, its role as a native staple.

“That had zero attraction,” Lorenz said. “We had surveys at the end to see what people had learned, and that one didn’t even register. People just didn’t give a damn.”

It may be that “tradition” and “natural” are resonant only to people who are not already up to their eyeballs in tradition and nature. Lorenz was initially surprised by the disinterest. Then she was surprised she had been surprised.

“Most people in the campo want the new best thing. They want the new iPhone. Eating what your great-great-grandparents ate was not attractive.”

What turned out to work best was simple self-interest. The Oaxacans who came through Puente were mostly farmers and the children of farmers. When Lorenz and Seely gave them seeds and presented amaranth not as a heritage grain or a nutritional supplement but as something they could sell for money, suddenly people were interested.

Then came the happy accident. A few years into the program, the Kellogg Company introduced an amaranth cereal that was widely sold throughout Mexico. Amaranth came to be seen as a luxury food. It had cachet. Within two years the market price for a kilo of amaranth tripled. Farmers took notice and began planting amaranth. And once there was amaranth growing in their own fields, farmers were more likely to eat it.

Today the walls of Irma’s mud-brick house are covered in Puente-printed amaranth posters advising Un Puño Cada Día: one handful a day. After her workshop, Irma joined a Puente program called Summer of Health, in which she learned new ways to cook with amaranth. She also learned to incorporate vegetables like carrots and beets into her daily recipes.

She watched her daughter Ashly start to put on weight.

On a warm day in January, Puente volunteers prepared an organic garden for one of her neighbors. Irma’s daughters ran around with a couple of girls from the neighborhood, carrying stalks of carrizo cane and occasionally whacking each other with them. They had big smiles on their faces; their eyes were bright.

I sat with Irma in a field of alfalfa and watched the girls play. When I asked Irma about amaranth, she didn’t say anything about ancestors, or Aztecs, or food sovereignty. She just sighed and said, “Thank God my daughter is healthy.”

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

[Photo by Nikhol Esterás]

By Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer

This story was produced in partnership with the Guardian, where a version of this story also appears.

In 2010, the birth year of the popular and controversial website Blog del Narco, Mexico’s tumultuous drug war reached a turning point. Monterrey, an economic engine of the country and once famously known as the safest city in Latin America, was engulfed by narco blockades and gun battles. In the neighboring state of Tamaulipas, the leading gubernatorial candidate was assassinated, and the border cities of Camargo and Mier became ghost towns.

In the first two months of 2010, eight journalists were kidnapped in the border city of Reynosa. The offices of news organizations across northern Mexico were attacked with grenades and strafed with gunfire. Only two of the kidnapped reporters survived. When the reporters returned to their newsroom at El Milenio in Mexico City, their editor Ciro Gomez Lleyva wrote what was essentially the obituary for press freedom in his country. “In more and more regions of Mexico, it is impossible to do journalism. Journalism is dead in Reynosa, and I have nothing more to say.”

As Mexico’s media outlets stopped reporting on the cartels and the government remained silent, Blog del Narco, launched in March 2010, began to fill the void (Read Rory Carroll’s exclusive interview with Blog del Narco’s founder). The blog featured raw photos and videos of executions, and gun battles uploaded by anonymous contributors. Within months Blog del Narco was one of the most visited websites in Mexico with three million monthly visitors. The blog documented the drug war in all its horror: photos of decapitated heads, mutilated torsos and other stomach-jarring acts of violence committed by organized crime to induce terror among the population.

Frightened and curious Mexicans read Blog del Narco to understand what was happening to their country “We were living in some kind of low intensity war,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who studies organized crime in her native Mexico. “We had never seen houses burnt, people massacred like this before. It was deeply frightening.”

Anonymity became the only safeguard for freedom of expression. Blog del Narco posted every grim corpse photo and every gory account of assassination without attribution. It was unclear whether the stories were ripped from other websites or were original reporting. And it seemed like no moderator existed. “The site was a mess,” Correa-Cabrera said.

But everyone read it anyway. It was gruesome, but the violence needed to be documented, because it was happening. “If anything, Blog del Narco is an account of the facts. Proof that it happened. Because if we do not acknowledge what is happening in our country, then we can never change it,” Correa-Cabrera said.

The cartels tried to dispatch Blog del Narco much like they had Mexico’s other media outlets. The blog suffered hundreds of cyber attacks. Anonymous and unsubstantiated rumors began to circulate that the site favored one cartel over another. In 2011, the website suffered a debilitating cyber attack and was offline several days before it switched servers. Then a man and woman were killed and hung from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo with a sign warning that they had been killed for working on anonymous websites like Blog del Narco. “This is what will happen to all the Internet snitches. Be warned, we are watching you, Sincerely Z [Los Zetas].”

Since the dark days of 2011 and the crippling cyber attack, Blog del Narco has redoubled its efforts. This week the website’s moderators released their first book “Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War,” published by Feral House. In the book, written in Spanish and English, the anonymous authors of the blog document the dissolution of their country in 2010 by starting with an apology, “We are well educated and don’t tend to curse, but we’re going to say this because it’s the way it is: Our country is fucked. It has been for a long time.”

The book is divided into short chapters that report month by month the bloody battle for territory by organized crime during 2010 and the first two months of 2011. The photos are as gruesome and as graphic as they are on the website. The text gives concise explanations of events, including transcriptions of narco messages left behind on the bodies.

Nothing in the book is attributed. Some of the chapters are remarkably detailed. In one chapter titled “Gubernatorial Candidate is Murdered with His Team Members,” the authors explain how Rodolfo Torre Cantú, Tamaulipas’ leading gubernatorial candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was ambushed in June 2010 by Los Zetas cartel outside the state’s capital. The chapter describes how the hit men slept in a motel near the ambush site and how the cartel’s leader at the time, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, personally supervised the massacre of Torres and his campaign team. Three graphic photographs in the book document the massacre.

Three years later, the gubernatorial candidate’s murder, like thousands of others in the last six years, has yet to be investigated by Mexican authorities. The country’s new president Enrique Peña Nieto, anxious to suppress the growing conflict, is increasingly adopting a policy of silence. Gone are the press conferences touting the deployment of more troops or the capture of a drug kingpin that were common under the previous president, Felipe Calderon. Attacks against the press are once again on the rise and recent gun battles raging across northern Mexico are scarcely reported by the media.

Someday, when the violence ends, historians won’t have much information to help explain the bloodiest era in the country’s history since the Mexican Revolution. What they will have is Blog del Narco.

This story was first published in The Texas Observer.

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Image courtesy Blog del Narco]

By Cindy Casares, Texas Observer

A fascinating video is circulating on the Internet featuring motorists who decline to answer questions at Border Patrol checkpoints miles from the border. Questions like, “Are you a U.S. citizen?” or “Where are you headed?” are met with polite refusals. In the video, one pair of motorists stopped at a Laredo checkpoint refuse to answer an agent’s question about their citizenship. When the agent becomes agitated and orders the driver to pull over to secondary inspection, the driver politely says, “No thank you.” The agent calls over his supervisor. “Unless we’re living in a police state,” the driver says. “Unless this is Mexico or Nazi Germany … this is still America and I can travel down this road without having to answer questions from federal agents.” The kicker is the motorists get away with it; the supervisor ultimately waves them through.

This was a surprise to me because I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley where travelers must pass through an internal checkpoint in Sarita or Falfurrias to reach points north. The Border Patrol operates a total of 71 permanent and tactical checkpoints on the southwest border, according to a 2008 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. (Tactical checkpoints do not have permanent buildings. They support permanent checkpoints by monitoring and inspecting traffic on secondary roads that the Border Patrol determines are likely to be used by undocumented travelers or smugglers.) As the checkpoints have proliferated, so has concern over the rights of motorists. Critics of the internal checkpoints say they violate the Fourth Amendment prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Still, it was unclear to me if you are legally obligated to answer Border Patrol agents’ questions. What, exactly, are your rights and responsibilities at these checkpoints? I put the question to a few legal experts.

Denise Gilman, co-director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, says that Border Patrol agents at internal checkpoints are allowed to ask motorists basic questions about citizenship, identity and travel itinerary, but they cannot detain you or search your vehicle without probable cause. Your refusal to answer questions would not provide probable cause to allow for such a detention or search, she added.

“So, if you refuse to answer, they can pull you out of the line and over into ‘secondary inspection’ and they can probably hold you there for about 20 minutes or so,” she said. “But they cannot do anything more if you continue to refuse to respond unless something else develops during that time period that would lead to probable cause.”

More than one motorist in the video declined to pull over into secondary inspection, yet they were allowed to go on their way without incident.

“I don’t know of any case where the person has refused to go into secondary inspection as in the YouTube video,” says Barbara Hines, a clinical professor of law at UT who co-directs the immigration clinic with Gilman. “But it is a very interesting civil disobedience idea. Because in order to arrest the person, the Border Patrol, again, would need probable cause.”

I happened to have a trip planned to the Valley last weekend. On my way back to Austin, I stopped at the checkpoint in Sarita. Rather than refuse to answer the question, “Are you a U.S. citizen?” I asked the agent whether or not I was legally obligated to answer. She was taken aback at first, asking if I was going to pull a camera on her. I told her I was doing a story for the Texas Observer, which probably ensured that I would get out of there without a hassle.

Her supervisor referred me to the Border Patrol Public Affairs Office in Falfurrias and I went on my way never having revealed my citizenship.

By email later, a Border Patrol spokesman gave me the answer I was looking for: “Although motorists are not legally required to answer the questions ‘are you a U.S. citizen and where are you headed,’ they will not be allowed to proceed until the inspecting agent is satisfied that the occupants of vehicles traveling through the checkpoint are legally present in the U.S.”

Border Patrol agents are granted authority to question the occupants of vehicles traveling through an established checkpoint based on U.S. vs. Martinez-Fuerte. That was a 1976 Supreme Court decision that said permanent or fixed checkpoints set up by the U.S. Border patrol on public highways leading to or away from the Mexican border are not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Congress also gave the Department of Homeland Security authority, through the Immigration and Nationality Act, to conduct searches within a “reasonable distance” of the border, which DHS defines as 100 miles.

Hines points out, however, that federal laws and regulations are subordinate to the Constitution.

So it seems you are within your rights not to answer the Border Patrol agent at an internal checkpoint (this doesn’t go for actual borders!), but the agents are also within their rights to ask you about your citizenship. At least for a while. After that, they’d need probable cause to detain you.

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Cindy Casares is a columnist for the Texas Observer. She is also the founding Editor of Guanabee Media, an English-language, pop culture blog network about Latinos established in 2007. She has a Master’s in Mass Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter. Prior to her career in journalism, she spent ten years in New York City as an advertising copywriter. During her undergraduate career at the University of Texas she served under Governor Ann Richards as a Senate Messenger during the 72nd Texas Legislature.

By Priscila Mosqueda, Texas Observer

Lourdes Flores didn’t know she wanted to help others until someone helped her. She was born in Reynosa, Mexico, and moved to Mission, Texas, at age 12. When she graduated from high school she couldn’t legally work, so family members suggested she join a new community organization an Irish nun had founded in nearby Las Milpas. Las Milpas is one of many coloniasalong the border wracked by poverty and lacking basic necessities. At the time, the colonia didn’t have paved roads, public schools, a fire station, doctors or a pharmacy.

Flores, 42, has been with the organization, A Resource In Serving Equality (ARISE), ever since, working to improve conditions in colonias in the Rio Grande Valley. ARISE’s mission is to aid communities by helping residents identify life goals and helping them reach those goals on their own. Its guiding tenet: Don’t do anything for anybody that they can’t do for themselves. The organization’s founder, Sister Gerrie Naughton, recruited Flores early on and encouraged her to share her skills.

“I was discovering I had abilities I didn’t know I had; it made me feel really good,” Flores says. “I saw how much ARISE changed me, and I thought, ‘I can’t keep this for myself; I have to share it with other women.’”

Flores was involved in ARISE’s very first program: English lessons for women in the colonias. When ARISE was founded in 1987, the Immigration Reform and Control Act had granted legal amnesty to some immigrants living in the U.S. To qualify, the women needed to learn English. Flores was one of the few in the community who spoke English, so she started teaching other women. As more women obtained legal residency, they became eligible for driver’s licenses—so ARISE began a program to teach women how to drive.

Today ARISE has four community centers in three colonias near McAllen: Las Milpas, Muñiz and South Tower, each with a different director. Flores helped open the Muñiz center, headed the South Tower branch, and now directs the support center in South Tower.

At each center, the organization offers initiatives focusing on youth and adult leadership, and personal development. It runs three cycles of programs each year and helps about 3,800 families each cycle. ARISE members go door-to-door to ask women about their needs and encourage them to share their talents, often through teaching others.

Three of ARISE’s centers are dedicated solely to community programs, but the support center helps with training for all four centers. It also offers programs of its own: It recently opened a community garden and compost facility to teach the residents of Hidalgo County, one of Texas’ poorest counties, about sustainability, and it provides solar water heaters to South Tower families who cannot afford to have hot water in their homes.

One of Flores’ responsibilities is to create new programs and curricula to expand ARISE’s reach. Among her biggest struggles, she says, is saying no to programs the community needs but the organization doesn’t have the resources to handle.

Despite limited resources, ARISE has helped poor families living along the border and has promoted civic engagement among the Latino community in the colonias. During last year’s election, ARISE members, many of them undocumented immigrants, held a voter-engagement campaign. They knocked on doors and marched. Though they couldn’t vote, they still wanted to make a difference by informing eligible voters about the issues and candidates.

Because the group is largely composed of individuals with only basic education and limited English, Flores says public forums and other events engaging the larger community and elected officials can be a challenge.

To that end, one of ARISE’s main goals continues to be education, providing classes and tutoring services for kids and adults. The group’s other focus is immigration, to offer residents the opportunity to lead their communities and be active members of society.

“Our biggest goal is to help the community reach its dreams,” Flores says. “We want people to be informed so they know they can stand up for themselves.”

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Priscila Mosqueda is an editorial intern for the Observer and graduated with a bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. Her work has been published in the San Antonio Express-News, San Antonio Magazine, ENVY Magazine and “Forty Acres of Fun,” a book about the unique culture and traditions of the University of Texas.

[Photos by Texas Observer, University of Texas]

By Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw announced Thursday that DPS officers would no longer shoot from helicopters to disable vehicles, “unless we’re being shot at or someone else is being shot at.”

McCraw made the announcement during a the House Appropriations Committee hearing, after Houston Rep. Sylvester Turner asked McCraw to address the controversial policy.

Last October, DPS helicopter sniper Miguel Avila openedfire on a truck during a chase down a caliche road near the small Hidalgo County town of La Joya. Avila killed two men and injured a third. Texas Parks and Wildlife rangers had been pursuing the truck, thinking it was moving drugs, and called for backup from the DPS helicopter.

But the truck was not carrying drugs or weapons. Instead, nine Guatemalan nationals were hidden in the truck bed under a tarp. The driver was a 14-year-old boy.

The men had each paid $2,000 to be taken from San Martín Jilotepeque in the state of Chimaltenango, Guatemala through Mexico, and then another $3,000 each for passage into the United States. Most were headed for jobs in New Jersey, Alba Caceres, the Guatemalan Consul based in McAllen told the San Antonio Express-News after the shooting.

McCraw said DPS had reviewed its policy last Friday and decided to end it. “I’m a firm believer that they did exactly what they thought they needed to do,” he said of the DPS snipers. “And it was consistent with the Texas penal code.”

Despite McCraw’s continuing defense of the policy, the shooting was almost universally condemned by law enforcement experts and civil rights groups. ACLU of Texas Executive Director Terri Burke applauded the agency’s decision to end the policy in a statement.

“We are relieved that Texas is ending this extreme practice, which no other southwestern border states have ever allowed. We hope that this decision is a step, if only a small one, toward ending the culture of violence that pervades enforcement of border security in Texas.”

It may be a small step toward sanity in border security policy, but Texas still has a long way to go. A tragedy forced DPS to ponder its lethal force policies regarding helicopter snipers but not a word has been said about use of force policies regarding DPS’ armored gunboats now patrolling the Rio Grande.

During his remarks, McCraw mentioned that officers needed to reserve the right to shoot back. He said officers had been shot at more than 77 times from the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, but didn’t specify the time frame or where that statistic came from. He also didn’t say whether any officers had been wounded or killed in those shootings.

Bullets are flying from the U.S. side of the river, too. DPS has just begun its armed patrols on the river, while Border Patrol has been patrolling for years with some controversy. In September, a Border Patrol agent on a boat fired on a group of people on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande in Nuevo Laredo, killing a man at a barbecue. In the last three years, U.S. agents have fatally shot four other unarmed Mexicans as they stood on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

Between the Border Patrol and DPS, that makes two law enforcement agencies enthusiastically patrolling the border—and DPS’s new armored gunboats make the Border Patrol boats look like toys. Hopefully, it won’t take another tragedy before legislators look into the firepower behind DPS’s new “marine tactical unit.”

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Photo by Paul Garland]

By Patrick Michels, Texas Observer

Outside the Senate chamber Tuesday afternoon, advocates for minority students laid out their priorities for public education this session—and wondered why so few Latino experts have been invited to help shape this session’s biggest school reform bills.

The press conference, heralding a new Latino Coalition for Educational Equality, fell midway through a long day of hearings on bills that would scale back school testing and rework Texas’ graduation plans. Texas HOPE director Joey Cardenas worried that lawmakers are sidelining Latino voices as they rush ahead with those plans.

“I’m just amazed by the lack of participation of Latino experts in the process,” said Cardenas. “I think you’re leaving a significant part of the equation out.”

He said it’s time lawmakers include Latino leaders “not as an afterthought, but as decision-makers in that process.”

MALDEF attorney Luis Figueroa chimed in that there are, for instance, no Latino members on the House Appropriations subcommittee that handles public school funding.

As the fastest-growing demographic in Texas schools, Figueroa said, Latino students need a system that serves their needs—including schools that are better funded, measured by more than test scores, and support students still learning English. He said Latino students need schools that put them on a track to college, and keep expectations high.

Patricia Lopez, associate director of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project, confronted the “tracking” issue more directly, worrying that lawmakers could set schools up a system that prematurely decides which students are college-bound and which are workforce-bound. Lawmakers insist the current plans won’t create a tracking system, but in committee meetings so far there’s been little more than a low rumble of doubt.

Issues like tracking are why Cardenas said lawmakers need to invite Latino experts to participate early in the process. It’s “fine”, he said, to have Latino leaders testify when bills are already drafted, “but we do so as an afterthought.”

“I think that’s part of the political process that needs to change.”

This Article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Patrick Michels is a reporter for the Texas Observer and a former legislative intern. He has been a staff writer and web editor at theDallas Observer, and a former editor of the Texas Independent. He has a bachelor’s in journalism from Northwestern University, a master’s in photojournalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and is a competitive eating enthusiast.

[Photo courtesy The Texas Observer]

By Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Photo by Eugenio del Bosque]

By Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer

“I’m an honest-to-God conservative. I even have a dog named W,” said Brad Bailey by way of introduction. In his mid-30s, with close-cropped, sandy blond hair and dressed in a suit and tie, Bailey looked like one of the dozens of newly elected Republican state officials milling around the lobby of the downtown Austin Hilton during a conference for conservative policymakers in early January.

But Bailey, who runs a chain of family-owned catfish and seafood restaurants near Houston, said he felt like an outsider. “I’m not a politico. I’m in the hospitality business,” he said. The Texas Republican Party could learn a thing or two from the hospitality business. “At one of my restaurants, if I were to turn my back on my customers or treat them rudely, they wouldn’t come back,” he said. “That’s how the Republican Party treats Hispanics.”

Bailey had never felt a calling to get involved in Republican state politics until last year, he said. His “aha moment,” as he called it, was when a longtime employee, who is Hispanic, came to him one day at the restaurant and asked whether it was true that Republicans hated Hispanics. “This guy had worked for me for 10 years,” Bailey said. “He’d seen the Republican bumper stickers on my car and he said, ‘You and your family seem like good people. So why do you hate Hispanics?’

“There wasn’t anything I could say to convince him otherwise,” Bailey said. Alarmed, he went to his local representative, who advised him to get involved in the next Republican state convention. So last June, the restaurateur found himself in Fort Worth among the state’s most die-hard Republicans, trying to convince them to endorse a guest worker program as part of the state GOP’s immigration platform. After that, Bailey went to the Republican National Convention in Tampa. His lobbying of delegates there proved successful; the platform called for a guest worker program.

Bailey said he’s worked mostly with Hispanic conservatives to convince the party to soften its divisive rhetoric toward Latinos. Hispanic conservatives recruited Bailey to speak to his fellow Anglo Republicans about their immigration hang-ups. “They said, ‘It’s going to take a white guy like you appealing to other white guys to get the GOP to turn around.’ It’s unfortunate but true,” he said. “There’s Hispanic outreach and then what I do—we call it ‘gringo inreach.’”

Bailey said he’d already spoken to 30 Republican clubs across Texas. On this day, he was in Austin to take part in an immigration panel at the conservative conference held by the Texas Public Policy Foundation.Republicans know they need to appeal to Hispanics if the party wants to remain in the majority, but that doesn’t make Bailey’s gringo inreach any easier. “I had a guy tell me the other day that there were 30 million illegal aliens living in the United States,” he said. “There’s just no way that’s true, but it was hard to convince him otherwise.

“We need to change, and I think Texas can be a leader for the nation,” he said. Then Bailey excused himself, eyeing a group of legislators across the lobby. “Better go,” he said. “I’ve got work to do.”

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Photo by photographerglen]

By Cindy Casares, Texas Observer

Ever since Gov. Rick Perry tasked the Texas Department of Public Safety with tighter border security during the 2006 election cycle, trigger-happy bureaucrats have been given carte blanche to turn the state into their own personal theater of war. In October, DPS made headlines when a state trooper in a helicopter shot at unarmed Guatemalan immigrants riding in the back of a truck in Hidalgo County. Two of the Guatemalan men were killed. Last week, the Austin American-Statesman reported that DPS officers have fired from helicopters while pursuing vehicles five times over the past two years. In only one instance was the DPS successful in stopping a vehicle without causing fatalities. Two of the instances required the additional use of spikes in the road to ultimately stop the vehicles, and two instances resulted in the suspects fleeing the scene for Mexico.

“We’re really not apologetic about it,” DPS Director Steve McCraw said of the policy of allowing armed troopers to fire from helicopters. His remarks came before the Guatemalan killings. “We’ve got an obligation to protect our men and women when we’re trying to protect Texas.”

That DPS allows its officers to fire from helicopters when apparently no other American law enforcement agency does so says something about the agency’s sense of mission. McCraw is fond of painting the Texas border region as a war zone, and he’s got the paperwork to prove it. Funny thing, though: A private firm that stands to profit from the continued militarization of the Texas border region generated that proof.

In March, the independent news site Alternet exposed the controversial relationship between DPS and Abrams Learning & Information Systems (ALIS), owned by retired U.S. Army Gen. John Abrams. DPS has paid ALIS millions since 2007 to not only create the state’s border security strategy, but execute a P.R. campaign to create the perception that Mexican drug violence threatens the lives of Texas civilians on an ever-increasing basis.

Even more alarming is the fact that ALIS has been awarded millions in contracts with virtually no public discussion or scrutiny. The Texas Public Safety Commission, which oversees DPS, has allowed McCraw and DPS to run the state’s border security operations, dubbed Operation Border Star, with little oversight. In fact, a follow-up investigation by theStatesman turned up very few state officials outside of law enforcement who had ever heard of the small Virginia firm despite the fact that it received $22.7 million from DPS and the Governor’s Office for border-security operations from FY 2007 to FY 2011.

What’s more, the DPS and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott have refused to release details of Operation Border Star to the Center for International Policy, claiming it would put law enforcement officers at risk. The same documents, however, were released to for-profit security consultants contracted by Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples, who’s been waging his own little border war.

Is this what conservatives mean by small government? Leaving public safety to private defense companies founded by former military brass with little to no border experience looking to cash in on America’s fervor for “secure borders?”

Although state Sen. Jose Rodriguez (D-El Paso) called for an investigation of the contracts between the DPS and ALIS in March of this year, and Comptroller Susan Combs responded in April that her office would “focus on, but not limit the audit scope” to DPS’s contract with ALIS, I cannot find any public report of such an investigation eight months later. An earlier review by the Compliance and Oversight Division of the governor’s office obtained by the Statesman revealed that DPS has a history of improperly diverting federal stimulus funds to pay ALIS, as well as other shoddy accounting practices.

A DPS spokesperson told KRGV News in the Rio Grande Valley that she couldn’t explain why DPS decided to circumvent the state competitive bidding process in 2006 when they began their special relationship with ALIS. The governor’s office declined to comment.

We can’t continue to let private firms profit, using our tax dollars, from this reckless and sometimes deadly militarization. It’s time for the Legislature to launch a full-scale investigation into DPS, McCraw and Perry’s handling of Operation Border Star.

Corrected on Jan. 3, 2013: The original story stated that DPS Director Steve McCraw had been “downright cruel in his reaction to the October killings” of two Guatemalan men and cited a San Antonio Express-News article in which McCraw is quoted as saying he’s “really not apologetic about it.”

However, as the Express-News article made clear, McCraw’s quote was drawn from an interview prior to the Guatemalan fatalities. He was speaking about DPS’ policy of allowing armed troopers to fire from helicopters. We have corrected the story and apologize for the error.

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Cindy Casares is a columnist for the Texas Observer. She is also the founding Editor of Guanabee Media, an English-language, pop culture blog network about Latinos established in 2007. She has a Master’s in Mass Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter. Prior to her career in journalism, she spent ten years in New York City as an advertising copywriter. During her undergraduate career at the University of Texas she served under Governor Ann Richards as a Senate Messenger during the 72nd Texas Legislature.

[Photo by Paul Garland]

By Cincdy Casares, Texas Observer

Earlier this year, when San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, many Hispanic Texans felt they had finally arrived. When Latinos overwhelmingly helped re-elect President Obama in November, Tejanos continued to celebrate this apparent rise to power. But Hispanic Texans will never take their rightful place at the table until they succeed economically. Nowhere is this tension between rising political power and lagging economic status more apparent than the Texas border. Sixteen of the 100 poorest counties in America are found along or near the Texas-Mexico border. This isn’t surprising when you consider that Hispanic Texans generally receive inferior educations and experience higher unemployment than their Anglo counterparts. So, what’s to be done?

Some border-based entrepreneurs are trying to address these inequities by giving Latinos access to the rarefied world of venture capital.

Rodolfo Sanchez lives in the Rio Grande Valley, and earlier this year, his company, Plasma2Energy, got a contract from the city of McAllen to build a waste-to-energy plant—a cutting-edge, green-energy technology. Developed by Monterrey, Mexico-based ABA Research, the 27-megawatt plant converts municipal trash into electricity, 25 percent of which would be used by the city.

“This technology offers savings in the long term for the city, which is very attractive,” Sanchez says. “It’s also very clean, and that is very attractive too.”

Sanchez offered to deploy the first commercial-sized facility in the U.S. for ABA Research. He just needed the capital, about $15 million for the first phase.

But raising the money took longer than Sanchez’s Monterrey investor was expecting. ABA got nervous and pulled out, leaving Sanchez to bootstrap Plasma2Energy while he searched for funds—funds he still hasn’t acquired. Ultimately, ABA decided to build a plant in Mexico instead. He hopes that Plasma2Energy will build a plant in McAllen in the future, though that’s uncertain.

Sanchez says the McAllen Economic Development Corporation didn’t understand the technology enough to offer more than standard city incentives—a blow that not only cost him much-needed money, but deprived his company of an endorsement that could have generated interest from venture capitalists.

Sanchez’s experience is all too common for Hispanic entrepreneurs. A 2011 Venture Capital Census of nearly 600 venture capitalists found that 87 percent of all respondents identified as white, with fewer than 2 percent identifying as Latino. Eighty-nine percent were men.

This nearly all-white, all-male demographic adversely affects high-tech entrepreneurs who don’t fit the “white guy” tech mold.

“Most people rely on their relationships with wealthy people to get venture capital,” says Teo Tijerina, co-founder and executive director of Austin-based EDCO Ventures, a nonprofit focused on economic development in poorer areas of Texas, including the border region. EDCO has a goal of raising $50 million to $100 million in venture capital for business investment in Texas. So far it’s amassed $3.5 million from the federal government, private investors and national banks.

“If you can do a semiconductor plant in Taiwan with far less infrastructure, you can do one in the Valley,” says Tijerina, who was raised in McAllen, as was the company’s co-founder Leo Ramirez. “The border region just needs the know-how and the access to capital and technology.

Of course, there’s a whole historical basis for why they don’t have it.”

The state of Texas runs an Emerging Technology Fund to help promising start-ups. Recipients must show that they can also raise capital locally. That can be a challenge for entrepreneurs along the border. Few subsidies from the Tech Fund flow south.

“Perhaps regions like Austin, Dallas and Houston don’t need state funding, but the border, East Texas, and other parts of the state do,” Tijerina says.

Tijerina also says that Texas’ leading research universities don’t do enough to aid poor communities. At a meeting with the University of Texas at Austin’s Office of Technology Commercialization, Tijerina says, an official told him the office prefers to work with entrepreneurs who headquarter in Austin.

“It would make sense that the office show a preference toward entrepreneurs in Texas versus an entrepreneur in Michigan, but it shouldn’t matter whether it’s Austin or San Antonio or Brownsville,” Tijerina said.

It shouldn’t matter, but it always has, and only educated and motivated border entrepreneurs are going to change that.

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Cindy Casares is a columnist for the Texas Observer. She is also the founding Editor of Guanabee Media, an English-language, pop culture blog network about Latinos established in 2007. She has a Master’s in Mass Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter. Prior to her career in journalism, she spent ten years in New York City as an advertising copywriter. During her undergraduate career at the University of Texas she served under Governor Ann Richards as a Senate Messenger during the 72nd Texas Legislature.

[Photo by city-data.com]

By Cindy Casares, Texas Observer

Every so often, the GOP is beaten badly enough that some Republicans realize that appearing to support immigrants might be their ticket to relevancy with Latinos. That time has come again for retiring U.S. Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Jon Kyl (R-Arizona). The pair recently filed an alternative to the DREAM Act called the ACHIEVE Act. As the title suggests, they are not letting immigrants get away with any idle dreaming. They must ACHIEVE to stay in America legally.

The ACHIEVE Act is similar to the DREAM Act in that it requires young immigrants brought here illegally when they were minors to obtain academic or military achievement before earning a pathway to legal status. The important difference, however, is that the DREAM Act ultimately provides a path to citizenship while the ACHIEVE Act only provides a path to permanent residency. If you want to know how the ACHIEVE Act works in detail, you can read about it here.

This isn’t the first time in 2012 that the GOP has flirted with immigration reform. In June, the Texas Republican Party, at its convention, replaced a zealously xenophobic plank on immigration with something called “the Texas Solution,” a Texas-based guest worker program that would provide cheap labor to business owners while offering no path to citizenship for workers. So, what’s new? Well, the Texas Solution calls for workers’ private health insurance to be provided by employers or the workers themselves. (Ha.) It also demands that the federal government limit birthright citizenship to those born to a citizen of the United States “with no exceptions.” Republicans try to pander to Latino voters, but they always end up going off a cliff.

What both Republican plans have in common is that they don’t help immigrants. They help the Republican party win Latino votes. They’re the sort of desperate act that comes of realizing your political party will die if you don’t appeal to the country’s largest growing demographic, no matter how much you wish they would just go back to Mexico.

In reality, both the ACHIEVE Act and the Texas Solution are unfeasible. The Texas Solution is essentially the Bracero Program of the mid-twentieth century all over again. Back then, employers realized that the provisions of the program increased their costs and thus began hiring under-the-table workers again. The ACHIEVE Act not only doesn’t provide a path to citizenship, but would only be applicable for a fraction of the current young immigrant population. A study by the Migration Policy Institute found that less than 5 percent of the country’s 2.1 million immigrants who currently meet all the requirements for the DREAM Act, which are similar to the ACHIEVE Act, have the academic credentials to begin the six-year waiting period required before they can apply to adjust to permanent status. The rest of the undocumented youth and young adults must overcome steep financial burdens, high drop-out rates, and a language barrier in hopes that they will even make it out of high school, much less college.

In short, all the immigration plans discussed here, including the DREAM Act, are a band-aid. What’s needed urgently is comprehensive immigration reform that deals realistically and fairly with the 12 million undocumented people living in this nation. Broaden political asylum to include those fleeing cartel-related violence, beginning with Mexico. Going forward, give all immigrants the same chance we give Cubans. If we don’t catch them entering our border, then they are free to stay and allowed to apply for expedited legal permanent resident status and, eventually, U.S. citizenship.

Whether out of fear for their own political future or because Republicans have truly come to embrace immigrants, maybe it doesn’t matter so much. Just get it done.

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Cindy Casares is a columnist for the Texas Observer. She is also the founding Editor of Guanabee Media, an English-language, pop culture blog network about Latinos established in 2007. She has a Master’s in Mass Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter. Prior to her career in journalism, she spent ten years in New York City as an advertising copywriter. During her undergraduate career at the University of Texas she served under Governor Ann Richards as a Senate Messenger during the 72nd Texas Legislature.

[Photo by Secretary of Defense]

By Melissa del bosque, Texas Observer

A day after the presidential election, even Republican strategists agree that Mitt Romney blew it with Latino voters and that the GOP has some serious soul searching ahead of it. Deep in the heart of red Texas, Republicans should also see the writing on the wall.

“Clearly, when you look at African-American and Latino voters, they went overwhelmingly for the president,” John Stineman, a Republican strategist from Iowa told Fox News Latino. “And that’s certainly a gap that’s going to require a lot of attention from Republicans.”

Overwhelming is right.  Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote while Romney won a piddly 27 percent, according to national exit polls. Obama did even better than in 2008 with Latino turnout, when he took 67 percent to Republican John McCain’s 31 percent.

Remember more than a decade ago when George W. Bush won about 40 percent of the Latino vote nationally? The Texas Republican Party and groups like the Hispanic Republicans of Texas, co-founded by George W.’s nephew George P. Bush, want to prove it wasn’t an anomaly.

Republican state Chair Steve Munisteri admitted it was crucial to the party’s survival during a 2011 Observer interview: “The Republican Party is living on borrowed time. If every Latino were to vote today in Texas, the Republican Party would lose all of its statewide seats.”

George P. Bush and others were feeling confident after the 2010 election, with six Hispanic Republicans, including Aaron Peña who switched parties, in the Texas House and two in U.S. Congress.

But last night those numbers plummeted. Republicans may still hold the majority of seats in Texas, but Tuesday’s election showed the party has serious problems for relevancy with the growing Hispanic electorate in Texas.

Of the seven Hispanic Republicans elected in 2010, only two remain: State Rep. Larry Gonzalez of Round Rock and U.S. Rep. Bill Flores.

Sure, there were some wins last night for Hispanic Republicans: State Rep. Jason Villalba in Dallas beat his Democratic opponent; Democrat-turned-Republican J.M. Lozano won his Coastal Bend district; and Ted Cruz trounced his democratic opponent for a U.S. Senate seat.

But there were more bruising defeats than triumphs. The biggest was the loss of Congressional District 23, a rural district that spans from San Antonio to El Paso County. Nationally, both parties see the majority Hispanic district as a bellwether that signals which party can best appeal to the growing number of Latino voters. Both sides combined to pour more than $10 million into the race, making it one of the nation’s most expensive per capita.

Last night, Democratic challenger Pete Gallego won the district with 50.3 percent to Republican Francisco “Quico” Canseco’s 45.3 percent. (Canseco has filed a complaint with the Secretary of State, claiming voting irregularities). It was a resounding loss for Republicans who poured millions into the race.

The 2012 election has forced the national Republican Party to acknowledge reality—America is more diverse than it used to be. In fact, it’s starting to look a lot like Texas. So as the national Republican Party engages in some soul searching, Texas’s GOP should do the same. The GOP’s significant losses do not bode well for the party’s future.

This article was first published in The Texas Oberver.

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Photo courtesy Pete Gallego Facebook page]