Friday, October 24, 2014

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Guerrero Governor Angel Aguirre Resigns

Posted: 23 Oct 2014 09:46 PM PDT

Chivis Martinez for Borderland Beat

Guerrero Governor Angel Aguirre has resigned.

Pressure had been building since the events of September 26th became an international story and outrage.
On September 26th and the early hours of September 27th students studying at the Normal School, (teacher college) in hopes of becoming elementary school teachers, came under attack in the Guerrero city of Iguala. Buses carrying the students and a futbol team bus came under gunfire killing 8, in three separate attacks, attributed to municipal police allegedly under the direction of Guerreros Unidos cartel, the Iguala mayor and the mayor's wife. 43 of the students called normalistas were kidnapped at the time of the last attack and are still missing.

Governor Aguirre's name has also been highlighted as if not directly involved with the attacks, perhaps has been complicit in other crimes, or at best case allowed criminality to prevail with impunity.  The accusations have gained in strength and opinion, something Aguirre could not overcome.

Since Wednesday Aguirre has been in negotiations for his resignation, and since then he has negotiated demands for replacements in key state government positions of responsibility.  It has not been announced as yet what was finally decided upon.  


On October 8th in three points of the city of Acapulco, mantas (banners) were hung:

The three were found; Next to Los Cruces Church, a bridge at Vicente Guerrero Blvd and in the Juarez sector.

The message is addressed to Mexico president Enrique Peña Nieto;
Mr President Enrique Peña Nieto, we are fed up with the massive crime in this town, because of Victor Aguirre, aka "El Feo",  with help and support of his cousin, the Governor Ángel Aguirre Rivero"
Victor Hugo Aguirre Garzón, is first cousin of the governor of Guerrero,rumors say the governor's  campaign was financed by Beltran Leyva, and he has ties to Guerrero Unidos and their allies.  

His cousin Victor is the leader of the Independent Cartel of Acapulco, an ally of Guerreros Unidos.

Kill The Messenger; The Gary Webb Story

Posted: 23 Oct 2014 05:59 PM PDT

The real Gary Webb and the actor Jeremy Renner playing him in Kill the Messenger
By DD for Borderland Beat
In the 1990's Gary Webb was a Pulitzer Prize  investigative journalist working for a regional newspaper in northern California.  In the summer of 1996 the San Jose Mercury News published Gary's investigative series called Dark Alliance about CIA/cocaine trafficking resulting in a crack cocaine epidemic on he streets of LA .  (full text Dark Alliance at link below)

By the end of 2004 Gary had been attacked and discredited as a journalist by the MSM, and was considered unemployable after his applications for employment had been turned down by over 20 newspapers.  He reportedly committed suicide on Dec. 10, 2004.

.MOVIE The Story of Gary Webb

Gary's story and his message has been resurrected in a movie released last week (Oct.10), KILL THE MESSENGER.
Kill the Messenger  hit the cinemas on October 10 and tells the true story of Gary Webb's saga that others tried so hard to make disappear. There is Oscar buzz over Jeremy Renner's portrayal of Webb (Renner, 43, has twice been nominated by the Academy: best supporting actor for Our Town in 2010, and best actor for The Hurt Locker in 2008; and through the Avengers, Mission Impossibleand Bourne franchises, Renner is one of the world's biggest box office draws.)  

Kill the Messenger is based on the book by the same name by Nicholas Schou and on Webb's own book, Dark Alliance. Michael Cuesta (Homeland, Dexter) is the director. Investigative journalist Peter Landesman is the screenwriter. 

This is no boring documentary. It's an action-packed full-scale Hollywood epic with a star-studded supporting cast: Michael Sheen, Paz Vega, Andy Garcia, Michael Kenneth Williams, Ray Liotta, Oliver Platt and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, among others, join Renner in the ensemble.

  Gary Webb - the messenger - will not be with us to see this movie about him.  Gary's message, however, is here to stay.

BACK GROUND

The CIA involvement in drug trafficking was not a new story.  Ten years prior, first-term US Senator John Kerry had held hearings and issued a 1,100-page report that had reached the same conclusion. The nation's major news outlets gave the Kerry Committee Report scant attention, but the record had been established. It was an airtight case.
The Central Intelligence Agency had broken US law by brokering planeloads of cocaine into the United States, and millions of dollars in those drug profits were used to fund the Contra army seeking the violent overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. The CIA did so to get around the US Congress, which had voted to ban US funds going to that terrorist organization. 

The Reagan administration, even as it ramped up the "Just Say No to Drugs" campaign at home, entered the cocaine business through private contractors coordinated by the CIA.
Webb"s investigation  came across from the other end of that officially-sanctioned cocaine trail while reporting on a drug case in California, and followed the trail in reverse: from the crack-plagued neighborhoods of Los Angeles to the federal courtroom where lower level traffickers were prosecuted, to a Nicaraguan prison to interview the Contra army's banker, to the real drug kingpins behind it all: decision makers in Washington DC. Webb documented what had happened to that cocaine when it entered California. 

Cocaine had previously been the hundred-dollars-a-gram drug of choice of yuppie bankers and lawyers. But when dealers figured out how to convert it to crack, teenagers, poor and working folks could afford it at five or ten bucks a pop. Then the problems compounded when they kept  needing more of an addictive and prohibited substance.

Gary Webb in his own words.


IT WAS OUTRAGOUS BUT IT WAS TRUE (Gary talking to a class at the School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico which he co-founded)


Gary Webb "People Realized They Had Been Lied to"
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Gary Webb "You Could Read this Story Anywhere in the World" 


 

  The CIA denied the charges, and every major newspaper in the country  took agency's word for it. Gary Webb was ruined. Which is a shame, because — as Charles Bowden revealed in this 1998 Esquire story — he was right. Borderland Beat reprinted the Esquire article by Charles Bowden, titled "The Pariah" in a thread posted by SiskiyouKid on Dec/ 30, 2013 (link below).


The Internet's First "Viral" News Story

To understand the motives of the MSM in their efforts to destroy Gary Webb as a professional journalist, you have to understand that the San Jose Mercury News was only a regional paper and only those in the immediate area could read the shocking story.  If you were in LA, or San Diego you would have hard time finding a copy of the Mercury News.  If you were in NY, D.C., Denver, Dallas, or Miami, it would be impossible.



The young staff of the new electronic media unit at the Mercury News convinced the Editor to all them to post it on the Internet, complete with the supporting documents and dossiers on the major figures in the cocaine pipeline from the Contra Army to the streets of South Central Los Angeles, 



The editor, knowing that the story directly implicating the CIA in drug trafficking was going to be hard for readers to believe, agreed to publish it on the internet because in that way all the supporting documents, interviews, and reporters notes could be included which was not possible in the printed version.



It may be hard for the Millennia generation to believe but the internet was just beginning to develop in the 90's and was not a primary source for news.  Gary's story was authentic journalism: tough, gritty, scrupulously documented and sourced at a time when the news industry was running away from that practice.


POWER GREED AND JEALOUSY

For the first few months after its publication the main stream media (print and broadcast) tried to ignore the story.  Then talk radio and alternative news weeklies spread the word about the website, and suddenly the gatekeepers of the national media could not control the story in the same way they had the previous decade when ignoring the Kerry Committee Report.

It doesn't take many to control the thinking of millions of Americans.

6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America
In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium; ]n 1987, the fifty companies
 had shrunk to twenty-nine;  In 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19
billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever.

Michael Eisner, CEO of Walt Disney Co. said in an internal memo:
    "We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective."

That was not the kind of journalism that Gary Webb lived and breathed for

. 



After the MSM realized that they could not ignore the story because it had gone viral on the internet it went on the attack, going after Gary both personally and professionally. 

The leaders of the attack on Webb were the LA Times, New York Times, and the Washington Post.  Their motives were probably all different, but the goal was the same – Kill the Messenger.

The Washington was the first out of the gate which is not surprising.  The Post has many "friends in high places in DC, including the CIA and DEA. 

The LA Times was probably motivated by embarrassment and jealousy.  They couldn't allow a little regional newspaper to scoop them on a story involving the CIA and drug trafficking that was happening in their own back yard.  Maybe a story that was heading for a Pulitzer Prize.  Rather than put a team out there that would investigate the allegations Gary had made, the fielded a team of 20 reporters to discredit the story and the reporter that wrote it.

The NY Times was probably jealous and merely acting in their usual arrogant manner that "if it is not in the Times, it is not print."

Even the Mercury News backed off of the story even though it had the documentation to back it up.  It simply didn't want to stand up to seemingly the whole national press.  While it did not write an apology for the article, it published a statement that there may have been errors in the story and the gathering of information during the investigation. 

It deleted Dark Alliances from its website and banished Webb to a small town bureau that might as well have been Siberia.  He was assigned to the city desk and given such assignments as doing a story on a police dept. horse that had mysteriously passed away.  Being the journalist that he was he did an investigation    His investigation and the resulting story won some local journalism awards even though he concluded in the article that the horse died of constipation.  He was full of shit. 

Gary had lost his reputation, his house, and the opportunity to do the only thing to him - investigative journalism.  He sank into a deep depression

The story of an investigative journalist with powerful enemies found alone in a small cheap motel room with 2 gunshot wounds to the head would be a story that Gary Webb would have jumped at.  The irony is that Webb was the deceased.  Though many question the ruling, the Sacramento coroner ruled it a suicide.  December 10, 2004 

Some words from the late Charles Bowden might best sum up this story.  Bowden had asked a former senior DEA  agent friend that he was fishing with about some of the revelations in Gary Webbs story about CIA involvement  drug trafficking;

"He tells me I've got to understand about when the big dog gets off the porch, and I'm getting confused here. He is talking to me from a fishing camp up near the Canadian border, and as he tries to tell me about the Big Dog, I can only imagine a wall of green and deep blue lakes with northern pike. But he is very patient with me. Mike Holm did his hard stints in the Middle East, the Miami station, and Los Angeles, all for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, and he is determined that I face the reality he knows. So he starts again. He repeats, "When the Big Dog gets off the porch, watch out." And by the Big Dog, he means the full might of the United States government. At that moment, he continues, you play by Big Dog rules, and that means, he explains, that there are no rules but to complete the mission."

It was not, however, the agency's ties to drug traffickers that Bowden found most disturbing. It was that a man can lose his livelihood, his calling, his reputation, for telling the truth.  (this statement was made prior to Gary's death).

Links
Dark Alliance Returns To The Internet
http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/

Borderland Beat link to Bowden story in Esquire;
http://borderland-beat-forum.924382.n3.nabble.com/Charles-Bowden-on-Gary-Webb-tp4061809.html

LA Times Obit:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/GaryWebbLATimes.pdf

Sources;
Narco News

La Tuta's Wife Arrested

Posted: 23 Oct 2014 10:17 AM PDT

Ana Patiño López, 46 years old and the first wife of the leader of Los Caballeros Templarios, Servando Gómez Martínez, alias "La Tuta", was arrested around 5:20 PM on Wednesday, October 23 while driving on the Occidente highway in a Volkswagen Passat without license plates.  The arrest was part of an operation by the Attorney General of Justice of Michoacán in the municipality of Álvaro Obregón (located in the north of the state, northeast of Morelia) and occurred near the international airport of Francisco J. Mújica.

Upon her arrest, she attempted to bribe the agents, offering 200,000 pesos to be let go.It is unclear if she is currently married to "La Tuta", though she is the mother of his children, including Huber Gómez Patiño, who was arrested in June of this year.

Ebola and Terrorists Aside, Our Border Is Pretty Secure

Posted: 23 Oct 2014 07:42 AM PDT

        
                    Does anyone have a fever?  Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images         
By

The U.S.-Mexican border has had quite a year. In the spring, it offered the spectacle of tens of thousands of Central American children (and some mothers) crossing, hoping to have their tickets punched for the American Dream. Now, with Ebola and Islamic State terrorists dominating our imaginations, the border features in political ads as the unhinged back door through which our nightmares enter.

Despite such earnest warnings from deeply sincere political candidates, the border is not actually so bad. Ebola and Islamic State terrorists do not appear to be crossing in overwhelming quantities. However, more than 2,400 unaccompanied minors did cross the border in September. That's about 8,000 fewer than in June, when traffic peaked. September's pace would put the U.S. on track for almost 30,000 children per year, flooding an immigration court system with a backlog of 400,000 cases. Still, it's worth noting that the greatest challenge along the U.S side of the border right now seems to be migrant children.

The border will never be sealed; if land routes ever become impassable, migrants and traffickers will arrive by sea. It will remain a problem as long as desperation exists in the south and an enormous appetite for illegal drugs (and cheap labor) rumbles up north. For the most part, however, the future is looking up. Violent crime along the U.S. side has been trending down, even if yelling about it has not. Illegal immigration has also declined significantly over the past decade. Meanwhile, more than $1 billion worth of goods and more than one million people legally cross the U.S.-Mexico border daily.

I'm not the only optimist.

Princeton professor, Douglas Massey, a sharp critic of the U.S. border crackdown, envisions a more open, free-flowing border in 25 years. "That would be rational given that Mexico's income is rising relative to that in the U.S., fertility is at parity with the U.S., and Mexico is becoming an aging society," he wrote in an e-mail.

"The boom in undocumented migration is over for good, in my opinion, and at some point the cost of massive border enforcement will exceed its symbolic political value."

Stuart Anderson, a policy advisor at the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President George W. Bush, suggested that U.S. politics will evolve to meet the challenge. "I think 25 years from now illegal entry will be much less of a concern because Congress would have passed measures to allow legal work visas for lower-skilled jobs in the U.S. and economic and demographic changes south of the border will likely mean less interest in coming to the United States to work," he wrote via e-mail. "It then will be easier for technology and border personnel to monitor the border once natural economic forces are directed into legal channels, as opposed to today, when workers from the south often enter the black market in labor and utilize human smuggling cartels because legal avenues are not considered a viable option."

In other words, improved economies south of the border, and more rational migrant labor policies north of it, will lead the way to more legal border crossings and fewer illegal ones. Simon Rosenberg, a pro-immigration advocate, points out that even with all the border's troubles, that future is already unfolding: Trade is increasing as illegal immigration declines. "It's been a policy success," he said by e-mail.

Of course, it's possible that these people don't get out much, that they live in ivory towers or gated communities or homes for the deluded and blinkered. Or it's possible that they're a little more honest about the realities of the U.S. border than the sleazy politicians trying to scare the rest of us.
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