Choose Your Poison
Plata in Juarez or Handcuffs in El Paso?
November 13, 2009 | Political Intelligence
These days Mexicans fleeing drug-cartel violence are faced with two lousy options: the threat of death in Juarez or detention in El Paso. With more than 1,900 people having been killed this year in the ongoing battle over Juarez’ lucrative drug corridor, there is no shortage of folks in that unenviable position — including those working to improve conditions on the Mexican side.
On Oct. 15, Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, a 63-year-old lawyer who investigates the Mexican military’s homicides, kidnappings and tortures for the Chihuahua Human Rights Commission, was jailed for attempting to cross legally through an El Paso port of entry. During a routine immigration interview, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent asked de la Rosa whether he feared for his life in Juarez. The lawyer answered honestly: Yes, he did fear for his life, but he did not want to seek political asylum, which would have prevented him from continuing his work in Chihuahua. The agent responded by handcuffing de la Rosa and placing him in an El Paso detention facility.
De la Rosa, who has documented 170 cases of military abuses, has perhaps done his job too well. In early October, while he was idling at a traffic light in Juarez, a man pulled up on a motorcycle and cocked an imaginary gun at his head. One of de la Rosa’s bodyguards has been badly beaten; another had his house burned down. De la Rosa has received many death threats.
Asked about de la Rosa’s detention, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Roger Maier said he couldn’t talk about the specific case, but that the agency’s policy is to refer anyone who expresses fear of persecution to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for further questioning.
After six days in detention, de la Rosa was released, thanks to the efforts of his El Paso attorney, Carlos Spector. Spector’s wife, Sandra Spector, said that after being released the human-rights advocate crossed back into Juarez, then legally re-entered El Paso with his border-crossing card, which allows him to reside there for 30 days at a time. As he continues to advocate for prosecuting cases of military abuse in Juarez, de la Rosa is negotiating with the Chihuahua Human Rights Commission to beef up security for himself and his family.
Other Mexicans fleeing violence have spent months in detention. Emilio Gutierrez Soto, a longtime journalist from Acsension, Chihuahua, fled his hometown after his reporting on military abuses led to death threats. He spent eight months in detention in El Paso before he was released to pursue political asylum. His 15-year-old son also spent three months in detention.
Human-rights advocates in El Paso are asking Congress to look at de la Rosa’s treatment and review the Homeland Security guidelines used to detain him.
“It’s baffling that he was handcuffed and incarcerated, because he was absolutely not a danger to anyone,” says Louie Gilot, a spokesperson for the El Paso non-profit Border Network for Human Rights. “Even if he had asked for political asylum, you shouldn’t be put behind barbed wire while you pursue your case.”
Leave a Comment (0) | Permalink
No Laughing Matter
Sen. Teel Bivin's Legacy
Newspaper obituaries for Teel Bivins, who passed away on Oct. 26 at age 61 after a long bout with a rare brain disease, focused on the highlights of his political career: the 15 years he represented Amarillo as a Republican in the Texas Senate and his short stint as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Sweden. Absent from the remembrances was any mention of the policies Bivins successfully championed, which have left a lasting—and unfortunate—mark on the state. Also missing was any hint of the most memorable aspect of Bivins’ public persona: his humor.
Bivins was damn funny. He possessed a wonderful eye for irony and delivered cutting one-liners with devastating timing. In 2003, Bivins served his first, and only, term as chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. His wit was refreshing during monotonous hours of testimony about arcane state budget numbers.
Like many of the policies he advocated, Bivins’ humor had an edge. During one Finance Committee hearing, state Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, interrupted a presentation by state health officials to shamelessly grandstand. She talked at length about why meat-safety inspections were important (as if anyone disagreed). Chairman Bivins let her go on, but after a few minutes, he was clearly getting restless. Nelson finally finished by saying, “So those are important issues I’m going to be paying attention to this session.” Bivins was silent for a beat and then said in perfect deadpan, “Well, good for you.”
Later in the same hearing, Eduardo Sanchez, then head of the Department of Health, pleaded with the budget-writers not to cut funding for a state program supplying AIDS patients with anti-retroviral drugs. Why not? Bivins asked. The AIDS patients still had a terminal disease even with the drugs, right? The room was quiet for a moment while the comment sunk in. Bivins seemed to be saying that the AIDS patients were going to die anyway; why should the state spend money on them? Sanchez explained that the anti-retrovirals were saving lives and making AIDS a chronic disease, not a terminal one.
In the end, the program survived, but Bivins’ comment had underscored the kind of thinking that produced the austere 2003 budget. The state faced a $10 billion shortfall that year, and Bivins and other Republicans used the budget gap to cut to the bone. It was the 2003 budget, partially crafted by Bivins, that famously cut hundreds of thousands of Texans off Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, not to mention trimming nearly every state agency. Texas is still recovering.
But Bivins’ longest-lasting legacy will be the nuclear waste dump outside the West Texas town of Andrews. The Dallas-based company Waste Control Specialists had tried to pass a bill allowing the dump for three straight sessions before Bivins ascended to the Finance Committee chairmanship. In 2003, Bivins, whose district bordered the proposed site, muscled it through. In the years since, Waste Control has built one of the nation’s largest and most controversial nuclear dumps. (See “Waste Texas,” March 6).
Teel Bivins is gone, but the nuclear waste he helped bring to West Texas will be around for hundreds of years. And that, in the end, isn’t very funny.
Leave a Comment (0) | Permalink
Patches of Terror
Unraveling a Four-Year-Old Legend
Back in 2005, right-wing media seized on a sketchy account of “terrorist garb” found near the small town of Hebbronville in South Texas. Border Patrol agents had found a ski jacket with three unusual patches attached: One featured a lion’s head, a parachute and Arabic script, another an airplane flying toward a tower and the words “Midnight Mission.” The third patch read “Daiwa.”
One of the most ardent spreaders of the story, Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez, told the Cybercast News Service that these “military badges in Arabic” were proof that “Arabic-speaking individuals are learning Spanish and integrating into Mexican culture before paying smugglers to sneak them into the United States.”
The “terror patch” story bolstered the case for building a border wall and ratcheting up “border security” funding as essential to homeland security. But was there anything to it?
Agent Mark Qualia, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told the Observer in a recent email message that it was highly probable that an “illegal alien” wore the coat and left it behind. “We see a lot of clothing that is procured at the ‘pulgas’ [flea markets] just before crossing before the border,” Qualia wrote. “Though we can’t speculate on the individual’s nationality or intent, we have not seen any threat or other concern arise from this incident.”
But wait: What did the Arabic script say? What country did that patch come from?
In a second email, Qualia was more expansive: “Agents called a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) translator,” he wrote of the patches’ discovery. “During contact with the translator via phone and facsimile transmission, the investigation concluded that the Arabic script patch read, ‘Defense Center,’ ‘Ministry of Defense,’ or ‘Defense Headquarters.’ The bottom of the patch read ‘Martyr,’ ‘Way to Eternal Life,’ or “Way to Immortality.’ ”
As for Daiwa, that’s a well-known international sport fishing company.
The “Midnight Mission” patch was inside the jacket. While the logo appears to show an airplane flying over a building and headed toward a tower—9-11 all over again—a closer look reveals the airplane is flying over an airport with terminal ramps and airplanes on taxiways.
Qualia said that the jacket was determined to have been manufactured in Mexico.
“No link was established to Al Qaida,” he wrote.
Still not satisfied, the Observer reached out to Leah Caldwell, a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The patch came from a branch of the Syrian Armed Forces, she wrote after consulting friends in Syria. The Syrian Armed Forces was established by former President Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifa’t al-Assad. The literal translation, she said, is “Defense Brigades/Martyrdom is the Path to Immortality.”
Rifa’t’s defense brigades took a leading role in a 1982 massacre of Hamas partisans in Syria—making the “terrorist” claims attached to the patches ironic as well as overblown.
And so, finally, a mystery is apparently solved. All that fuss was over a military patch from a defunct air brigade in Syria that was anti-Islamist, and another advertising a popular fishing company. But what a fine story it was.
Leave a Comment (0) | Permalink
Electric Debt
How The TXU Buyout Went Bust
The biggest leveraged buyout in history is beginning to look like a bust. In 2007, two private equity firms purchased Dallas-based TXU, the state’s largest utility, in a debt-ridden $45 billion deal.
At the time, consumer advocates and some legislators warned that the transaction was too risky and could end up being a bad deal for ratepayers. They pointed out that similar private equity takeovers had been rejected by regulators in Arizona and Oregon.
“The biggest red flag in the buyout was this enormous debt they were taking on,” says Tim Morstad, a consumer advocate for AARP.
The Public Utility Commission blessed the deal anyway. Its chairman, Barry Smitherman, mocked AARP for “crying wolf” about the risks of the buyout.
Now, TXU, blandly rebranded as Energy Future Holdings, is struggling under a mountain of debt and financial analysts are predicting that the company will eventually have to sell off its assets. “This was foreseeable,” said Geoffrey Gay, an Austin utility attorney who represents groups of cities in rate cases. “The buyout partners were putting a higher value on the company than the company officials themselves.”
Gay says the buyout was essentially a giant gamble on natural gas prices staying high. The deregulated electricity market in Texas is structured so that natural gas almost always sets the price of power. Two years ago, TXU’s fleet of nuclear and coal-fired power plants looked like a mint. But gas prices have taken a tumble and so has the company’s profitability. In the third quarter, Energy Future Holdings posted a net loss of $80 million compared to $3.6 billion—yes, with a “B”— income for the third quarter of 2008.
As part of the buyout deal, the regulated portion of the company—Oncor, which oversees the electric grid—is supposed to be protected from the risky retail and power-generation components of Energy Future Holdings. But consumer advocates worry that executives could move to drain Oncor of its assets, putting the electric system in danger. “It’s clear that the wires company is the cash cow,” said Gay, “and it funnels money up to the company, its owners.” In a recent rate case, Gay says the PUC awarded Oncor suspiciously high rates, perhaps in a bid to prop up the parent company. “There’s part of me that believes that the financial loads of the parent were a motivating factor in Oncor getting as much relief as they did,” he says.
Whatever the fallout for TXU’s customers, Wall Street will probably do OK. The New York Post reported in October that the two private equity firms, along with investment giant Goldman Sachs, stand to pocket $13.5 million in fees for a debt restructuring bid.
Leave a Comment (0) | Permalink
The Unhealthiest Among Us
Texas Women Need Health-Care Reform — Now
There are nearly 3 million low-income women in Texas, and more than half of them lack health insurance.
That’s the finding of a recent study of women’s health insurance coverage by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the California-based nonprofit that specializes in health care policy studies. The report includes a state-by-state breakdown, and the numbers for Texas aren’t pretty.
It’s no secret that many Texans lack health insurance. For years, the state has had the nation’s highest percentage of uninsured citizens. But the Kaiser figures are especially alarming. Women in Texas are much more likely than men to be uninsured. Twenty-eight percent of women in Texas lack health insurance—far above the national average of 18 percent, and the highest in the country.
For poor women, the prospects are even worse. In Texas, 52 percent of low-income women have no health coverage. Again, that’s the highest rate in the country. No other state even tops 45 percent.
Uninsured women lead less healthy lives. They are much less likely to received preventive care such as mammograms and Pap tests. The Kaiser report also notes that rising medical costs have disproportionately affected women, who earn less money than men and are more likely to need more expensive health-care procedures, especially during pregnancy and childbirth.
National health care reform could drastically alter these numbers. Under the plans that Congress was still debating at press time, nearly all low-income women would be covered by Medicaid. Many other women would receive government subsidies to help them buy insurance. No state would benefit more than Texas. And nobody would benefit more than Texas women.
