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For the past few months I’ve been following the plight of Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, a lawyer and human rights advocate in Juarez. I was astounded to read of his detention on October 15 after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers forced political asylum on him as he was attempting to cross into El Paso.

I’ve heard of people requesting political asylum at an international port of entry but I’ve never heard of ICE forcing political asylum on to someone and then taking him into detention. What kind of signal does it send to imprison a 63-year old man who is very visibly trying to root out military corruption in Juarez? In recent weeks he’s had death threats. One of his bodyguards was beaten and another had his house burned down.

Hickerson has been the chief investigator for the Chihuahua State Commission on Human Rights looking into military abuses and corruption in Juarez. He has documented  numerous cases of abuse, according to news reports. On October 1, Hickerson held a press conference in Juarez announcing that Jose Luis Armendariz, president of the Chihuahua State Commission of Human Rights, had removed him as investigator. Hickerson said that he and his family had received death threats. Armendariz wanted him to reveal who was threatening him. This is basically a death sentence for Hickerson.

So Hickerson is staying in El Paso for his own protection and trying to negotiate with his former boss to receive better security and more bodyguards for his family. “My mistake is that I took my job seriously,” he told the media.

I spoke with Sandra Spector, wife of Carlos Spector who is de la Rosa’s lawyer in El Paso. She said Hickerson was released from detention yesterday after being held for 6 days. After being released he crossed into Juarez then turned around and came back into El Paso as any normal visitor would which is what should have happened in the first place. Hickerson has a border crossing card which allows him to cross back and forth freely.

Spector said Hickerson has received an outpouring of support from around the world. Amnesty International has also been rallying for his cause. The hope is that Mexican officials will give him the security he needs to do such a dangerous job. He doesn’t want to leave his home. His courage to stand up for justice is a bright spot among the bleak and sad news coming out of Juarez these days.

If Hickerson’s negotiations with Mexican officials fail, he will undoubtedly think twice about seeking political asylum in the United States.

 

 

“It’s interesting that you’re worried about what the lakes are going to look like down there and the pressure that you’re going to have to endure, and the front page of the paper showing what used to be lakes and are ultimately rivers now. I can certainly appreciate that.

“But, what about these small rural communities, where you drive down Main Street and the lights are all turned off, because there’s no economy left?” -Rice farmer Joe Crane, as quoted by News 8 Austin

“Let’s say you’re a marina owner, and you know rice farmers have two complete crops, and for them it’s business as usual. You might have some hard feelings, whether they’re reasonable or not. They haven’t suffered one single bit out of this.”-Cole Rowland, president of the Highland Lakes Group, as quoted in the Austin American-Statesman

These two recent quotes from individuals on opposite ends of the Colorado River Basin, each with a very different stake in the river, points to growing conflicts over water in Texas, between cities and rural areas, farmers and city-dwellers, people and wildlife, and among different regions of the state.

We keep hearing that a water crisis is imminent. Well, no, it’s here already.

A complex tug-of-war is well underway in the Colorado River Basin. The most visible division is between rice farmers along the coast, who require massive quantities of river water to flood their fields, and affluent homeowners around Lakes Travis and Buchanan who’ve watched the lake levels plummet.

Yesterday, the Lower Colorado River Authority was poised to make a decision on whether to declare the current drought an emergency topping the drought of record in the ’50s. If they had done so, it would have triggered an immediate halt to the release of water downstream to rice farms on the coast.

Instead, LCRA postponed the decision.

This drought, by some measures worse than the “drought of record” in the ’50s, is forcing water suppliers to make tough decisions now while giving us a taste of what lies ahead. Texas is booming but our supply of water is more or less fixed. In fact, if you believe a growing body of research that looks at regional impacts of climate change, we can expect the supply of surface water in this state to shrink considerably over the coming decades. “Drought” may become the new normal.

LCRA postponed their decision but the issue is not going away.

Despite the sustained rainfall in Central Texas, the LCRA-managed Highland Lakes, which provide drinking water for cities such as Austin, are still at a dismal 830,000 890,0000 acre-feet, about 40 42 percent capacity. The lakes have been lower before but not by much. [I wrote this post last night. Overnight rainfall has helped fill the lakes some, thus the revised figures.]

Click for larger image

And the long-term view is that rapid population growth in Central Texas will trump the rice farmers. The Statesman:

In the long run, the cities and industries along the river basin are likely to win out. Projections in the state water plan forecast that between 2010 and 2060, partly because of water-saving technology, water use for irrigation will drop from 589,705 acre-feet per year to 468,743. During the same period, municipal use is estimated to increase from 226,437 acre-feet to 442,110 acre-feet.

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There’s another upper vs. lower river basin controversy erupting in East Texas too. The issue is whether to allocate more water rights to a lower Neches River water authority for a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant on the coast. Interests on the upper Neches River are none too happy about the idea. From the Cherokeean Herald:

“Basically, the Lower Neches Valley Authority is trying to take our water,” said [Cherokee County Judge Chris] Davis. “They want our fresh drinking water to warm the liquefied natural gas, and then they are just going to dump it into the gulf. This is not a good use of our fresh water.”

Just when I was ready to accept that Congress would never include a so-called public option in the final health care reform plan, The Washington Post released a poll today showing that a majority of Americans support the idea.

The poll found that 57 percent of Americans want some version of a government-run plan.

Here’s the key graph in the Post story:

On the issue that has been perhaps the most pronounced flash point in the national debate, 57 percent of all Americans now favor a public insurance option, while 40 percent oppose it. Support has risen since mid-August, when a bare majority, 52 percent, said they favored it. (In a June Post-ABC poll, support was 62 percent.)

The trend line is interesting: from overwhelming support for a public option in June, to barely a majority during the summer of angry townhall meetings, and now back near 60 percent.

Amazing what happens when the government-takeover-of-health-care rhetoric subsides a bit.

It’s still highly unlikely that a public option could garner the 60 votes needed to clear a filibuster in the Senate.

But a few more poll results like this might give the beleaguered public option a little life.

Paul Burka at the Monthly wrote a post late yesterday about the governor’s race and the controversial case of Cameron Todd Willingham.

(As you probably know, Willingham was a likely innocent man executed in 2004.)

Most of the post is standard political fare. But half way through, Burka writes this rather amazing sentence (italics are mine):

Perry’s tendency to pour gasoline on the fire — a poor metaphor, I realize, given the nature of the crime Willingham committed — keeps getting him into trouble.

When I first read this, I assumed — given that the forensic evidence in the case has been debunked, and the leading fire experts in the country believe the fire was accidental — that Burka had simply slipped up and used poor wording (which we’ve all done too many times.)

But when he was called out in the comments section, Burka stood his ground about Willingham:

Willingham was convicted of capital murder for committing arson. There is clearly room for doubt, but the record says that he committed arson.

I’m sorry, Paul, but this is intellectual cowardice.

It not only parrots Gov. Rick Perry’s argument about Willingham, but ignores the overwhelming evidence that there was never any arson in the first place (no arson, no crime).

Has Burka read the New Yorker story? Or the original Chicago Tribune story from five years ago (the headline of which is: “Man Executed on Disproved Forensics”)?

There’s a reason this has become a media firestorm, and it’s not because of gripes from anti-death penalty activists.

Unfortunately this case has become politicized, as Grits rightly noted a few weeks ago. It’s unfortunate that the most important part of the Willingham case — the problems with forensic arson evidence — is getting lost amid the screams of Culture Warriors on both sides. I suspect Burka now views the Willingham case that way — as a “left” and “right” issue. So he chooses to sidestep it by hiding behind the “record.” Willingham was convicted, so that means he did it.

Burka seems to think that just because someone is convicted of a crime, that means they committed the crime.

That simply isn’t the case. The majority of people convicted in Texas are probably guilty as sin. But there are, sadly, quite a few people who have been wrongly convicted.

If Paul Burka doubts that, he should call any of the nearly two dozen convicts exonerated by DNA evidence in Dallas County alone. Or he should talk to Tim Cole’s family.

Again, this is intellectual cowardice, and it reveals the kind of thinking that has resisted reforms to the criminal justice system.

Of course, there is no DNA in the Willingham case. But the flawed forensic evidence is nearly as good. The Willingham case should show us that our criminal justice system is making too many mistakes, that reforms are needed. Instead it’s become the same tired debate about the death penalty, and that’s a shame.

Because I suspect that a lot of people in Texas think just as Burka does on this issue. You hear it from people all the time: “Well, he was convicted in a court of law.”

Until we change that mindset, until more Texans realize that some innocent people are convicted, I doubt we will ever fix the flaws in the system.

I got a sinking feeling in my stomach when I read today that El Paso’s online Newspaper Tree is taking a hiatus. I’ve always enjoyed checking out NPT’s coverage of the news in El Paso  – their original analysis, their coverage of public corruption and their willingess to allow different perspectives on the page. If you want to know what’s really going on in El Paso you go to NPT and read the articles, then you read the comments. Sure, there are a few loony, crank commenters like always, but overall readers are much more thoughtful and engaged and often they contribute to understanding the story better.

The NPT became even better last year when it hired veteran investigative reporter David Crowder who had worked for three decades at the El Paso Times. Both Negron and Crowder were calling public officials to account on a weekly basis and illustrating to readers why public policy matters.

The economy took a beating on the news journal’s owner El Paso Media Group. As a result the media group’s publisher is not funding the NPT anymore. I called up Sito Negron, the editor of NPT, to find out what’s in store for the online newspaper. Negron has a very positive attitude. “What we’ve been doing has been very well received in the community and since we made the announcement we were going on hiatus, we’ve been contacted with some interesting options to keep NPT going.”

Negron said that NPT has never made money, despite their attempts to do so. El Paso doesn’t have a large Internet advertising market. To make money off of advertising NPT would have to get millions of hits everyday on its Web site. NPT has a healthy circulation but it’s by no means in the millions.

The most viable option will be to become a nonprofit, he said. This seems to be the tactic being taken by many newspapers and magazines these days. There’s plenty of stories and plenty of reporters to write them — now if we could just find a way to make a living doing it.  That’s what every media organization is struggling to figure out at the moment.

Negron, 42, has been in the journalism business for at least two decades “and just about done it all,” he said.  Instead of taking the gloomy path — he has two kids to feed and no salary coming in afterall — he sees great things ahead for journaiism, which I think is admirable.

“Journalism is super healthy,” he said. “We used to bitch about the corporate media and then there was an explosion of alternative weeklies and there’s magazines like the Texas Observer and Mother Jones,” he said. “There are multiple threads of journalism now.”

Multiple threads — unfortunately none of them are made out of gold. I, for one, am hoping that NPT survives and thrives in the coming years.