Bizarre news: Minuteman Founder says: "Send troops to Mexico to fight Drug War".

By Aurora:

From the SPLC I got this jewel of a news items. (More Nativism in the news)

It seems that the Minuteman Founder, Jim Gilchrist, in a rightwingnut radio program, called for the United States to send troops to Mexico to fight a Drug War.(Published on columbiatribune.com Thursday, July 10, 2008)

Jim Gilchrist, founder and president of the Minutemen, believes the way to control rising drug violence in Mexico is to send crack U.S. troops.

Speaking on talk radio - where else? - he says the U.S. administration should give Mexico 12 months to clean out the cartels.

"Either terminate the criminal empires that influence your nation and threaten to cripple the United States, or risk the incursion of U.S. soldiers to do the job for you."

And Gilchrist is not talking about a bunch of MPs on weekend maneuvers. "I’m talking about heavyweight U.S. Army Airborne brigades."

This is truly a gift of a news and a real jewel which allows us a glimpse into the mind of this wacko, who calls himself Patriot, and gives room to ponder on the 'state of mind' of the people who follow him in the Minuteman Project.

The idea is so bizarre that even virulent anti-immigrant sites like ALIPAC are balking at Gilchrist's suggestion and lamenting that sickos like Gilchrist makes them look bad, IMHO, they don't need any help on this; by themselves they have managed to do a good job on it.

"Most patriots would approve of the U.S. military guarding our borders and ports. This would cut off the drug traffickers supply lines and deter illegal immigration.

Unfortunately, there’s this assbag named Jim Gilchrist that makes us all look bad with bizarre ideas like invading Mexico with airborne brigades. Sorry Jim, but Mexicans can take care of their own problems."
-- ALIPAC website

The man that ALIPAC is calling an 'assbag' now, was their darling Champion not too long ago and whom they endorsed in his bid to run for a Congressional seat to replace Congressman Chris Cox in California’s special election in District 48.

ALIPAC ENDORSES "Minuteman" Jim Gilchrist for Congress in October 4 election
Posted by Charlesoakisland on Thursday September 22, 2005 at 6:30 am MDT

Link to story: http://www.alipac.us/article-742--0-0.html

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC ENDORSES "Minuteman" Jim Gilchrist for Congress in October 4 Special Election

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Americans for Legal Immigration PAC WilliamG@alipac.us Toll Free: (866) 329-3999

ALIPAC, Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, is pleased to endorse Jim Gilchrist and his campaign for Congress in California’s District 48.

On October 4, CA District 48, Orange County, has a special election to replace Congressman Chris Cox, who resigned to join the Bush administration. Jim Gilchrist is known nationally as a founder of the highly successful citizen border watch movement, the Minuteman Project.

Topics: Campaigns, Congress, laws, security, illegal immigration, Minuteman Project, ALIPAC

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is endorsing Jim Gilchrist because of his selfless dedication and successful activism addressing our national crisis of border security and illegal immigration. The Minuteman Project drew international attention in April when civilian volunteers brought illegal alien and drug smuggling traffic to a halt on the Arizona border.

"We need to elect Jim Gilchrist to Congress because he is a real leader -- the perfect messenger to send to Washington to get these problems solved. Voters across America are making the control of illegal immigration a top priority in their support of candidates, with good reason! An unprecedented number of illegal migrants are crossing our open borders each year. This flood of unknown persons directly, negatively affects public policies of top concern to the voters. Our nation’s capacity to prevent terrorist attacks, grow a strong economy, improve jobs and wages for American workers, and provide quality education and affordable healthcare are all undermined by the economic and societal burden of our dysfunctional immigration system."

But one of the saddest aspects of demagogues like Gilchrist, is that his rightwingnut beliefs' putrid vomit infect the minds of what we usually call 'our people' such as Raymond Herrera who on Thursday, July 03, 2008 posted this video where he talks about making alliances with the MinuteMen

The Mexican Revolution Starts Here!

Not difficult to imagine the effect the propaganda of people like Gilchrist has on people who start from their nativist, racist, xenophobic leanings or outright beliefs.

The rightwingnuts in the anti-immigration media (hello Low Dobbs et al) are not picking up on this story and who can blame them? They are afraid of being associated to this certifiable nut, but they are! LOL!!!

I wonder what will they do if this 'out-there' idea gets any play in the media, I'll venture a guess that they will be backtracking and backpedaling so fast from being associated with "The Minutemen" Founder, Jim Gilchrist, that their movements would provide enough power to provide some relief for our current 'energy crisis'.

Tell others about what Jim Gilchrist is proposing, will you?

"Blood Wine" Corrido de Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez by Dr. Marcos Gutiérrez.

The stories of the people are told by the people, in poems, ballads and specifically in Mexico, with Corridos.

Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez with her Prometido, left her pueblo and family in Oaxaca, up on the Sierra Madre Occidental for California, hoping to earn some money with which to support the family they hoped to have, she was two months pregnant.

They call it "The American Dream", for some, I'm told, it becomes a reality, but for the overwhelming majority, there is the rude awakening to the "American Nightmare", in a land which values machines more than human beings, all in the pursuit of the "All-Mighty Dollar" Which will make their own "American Dream" A reality, leaving in their wake, pain, misery and often death.

As it was with María Isabel, on her third day of work, she collapsed of heat exhaustion in a farm that didn't provide human working conditions for workers laboring under a head-splitting sun in the fields of Lodi California. where the summer temperatures raise above 100 degrees, just like in the fateful day of her preventable and premature death.

"Jiménez was working in vineyards owned by West Coast Grape Farming, which is owned in part by Fred Franzia of California's Bronco Wine Co – the producer of the Charles Shaw brand, also known as Two Buck Chuck.

Her fiancée told officials that the supervisors did not call for medical help after Jimenez collapsed, didn't offer her water or shade, and later told him to lie to hospital staff about his fiancee's age and whom she was working for."

Her bosses didn't care and she didn't get a sendoff as big as the one that Tim Russert got, whom they say was a great man, but her compañeros Farm Workers remembered her on a march from Lodi to Sacramento where they demonstrated their outrage at the neglect to enforce Labor Laws in the fields by authorities (Cal OSHA), we learned that the same employer had been previously cited and fined for similar violations.

Elsewhere, many of us who also heard about her story, became sad, outraged, angry...

Dr. Marcos Gutiérrez and his audience talked about it in his program, he made the trip to Sacramento where he joined the marchers, made interviews, recorded them to share with us, but he wanted to do more so her story is passed on, so we don't forget that we must not let these crimes happen anymore.

He wrote a Corrido that he sings and where he includes some of the interviews he conducted during the march.

Here it is. (Bilingual, Spa & Eng)

En Memoria De Maria Isabel Jimenez Vázquez

Corrido de, y, por Dr. Marcos Gutiérrez

"Blood Wine" ("Vino Ensangrentado") ==>

Blood Wine Corrido by "Dr. Marcos Gutierrez of ""La Grande" KIQI 1010AM SF and KATD 990AM SAC, Hecho en California", free MP3 Download!

Our gente always sings our struggles and our victories, the Farm Workers left us 'canciones de lucha'

"No Nos Moveran" == >

I Second Dr. Marcos Gutiérrez and add: "Mejor morir luchando que vivir arrollidad@s"

Video: María's fiance Florentino Bautista talks about what happened on May 14./Video: El Prometido de Maria, Florentino Bautista, habla sobre lo que pasó el 14 de mayo

There is an investigation on her death and the abuses to the Farm Workers, her mother has filed a civil suit for wrongful death.

Teen farmworker's death, probed as heat-related, stirs outcry

When Vasquez Jimenez collapsed, she had been on the job three days, pruning vines for $8 an hour in a vineyard owned by West Coast Grape Farming.

During eight hours of work beginning at 6 a.m. in heat that topped 95 degrees, Bautista said that workers were given only one water break, at 10:30 a.m. And the water was a 10-minute walk away – too far, he said, to keep up with the crew and avoid being scolded.

Vasquez Jimenez collapsed at 3:30 p.m., Bautista said, and for at least five minutes, the foreman did nothing but stare at the couple while Bautista cradled her.

Bautista said the foreman told him to place the teenager in the back seat of a van, which was hot inside, and put a wet cloth on her.

Later, Bautista said, the foreman told a driver to take the pair to a store to buy rubbing alcohol and apply it to see if it would revive Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez. When that failed, the driver took the couple to a clinic in Lodi, Bautista said, where her body temperature had reached more than 108 degrees.

"The foreman told me to say that she wasn't working for a contractor, that she got sick while exercising," Bautista said in Spanish. "He said she was underage, and it would cause a lot of problems."

Bautista and family members said that clinic staff rushed the girl to a hospital, where she was revived several times before finally succumbing two days later without ever regaining consciousness. Doctors later discovered she was two months pregnant.

The Death of a "Criminal"

Her name was Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez, she was 17-year-old and pregnant and died because her employer did not give her proper access to shade and water as she pruned grape vines in 100-degree heat.

Investigators said they found multiple violations including the illegal use of child labor, multiple workers using one timecard and employees forced to purchase their own tools and equipment to harvest crops.

Inspectors visited about 50 farms Tuesday.

The death of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez is now under investigation by Cal OSHA following allegations she was denied water, shade and other basic human rights while pruning grape vines in near triple-digit heat.

Hundreds of farm workers have been holding a march to the state capitol with the Jimenez family for the past few days.

United Farm Worker official Arturo Rodriguez said Jimenez's death was the 10th from heat exhaustion in the past four years.

"Maria Isabel was the youngest of the farmworkers," said Rodriguez. "She was the first woman that died as a result of this...and she was the first person who died being pregnant at the time."

Steven J. Ybarra, JD from the California Progress Report in his editorial "In Memory of Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez...." writes:

"Here is the question of the day - why is it that the Mexican worker is suddenly the devil incarnate in the United States?"

Many Americans today are buying the right “wingnut” lie that Mexican workers are destroying the economy. They buy off on the xenophobia put out by the wingnuts who blame the war, gas shortages, and deaths in Iraq on workers who come here to pick fruit and clean toilets at your friendly neighborhood motel.

Steven is right in both, in the question and in the answer, the minds of many people have been poisoned with a daily barrage of anti-immigrant hate speech by a large number of RightWingNuts with access to microphones and tv cameras who continuously spew hate and blame toward 'undocumented immigrants (They call them 'illegals'), prominent amongst them are, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, et al - One of the most vicious and whose tirades of hate reflect his name, is Michael Savage, who warned U.S. politicians not to "take to the streets" to support illegal immigrant "vermin" and routinely calls these immigrant workers, criminals.

Listen to Savage's Comments

Vermin?

To what extent the RightWingNut onslaught of hate and demeaning speech against immigrants contributes to the way these humans are viewed and treated?, or in this case, mistreated, yes, they are humans beings just like you and me, in spite of what these hatemongers say and despite how employers abuse and exploit these workers.

Dr. Marcos Gutierrez in his weekdays radio program "Made in California" Regularly points out, that much as in Hitler's Germany of the 1930s, with it's dehumanizing speech against the Jews, made possible the atrocities that were to follow, so it is in these United States, that the anti-immigrant sentiment sowed in the minds of people by the media hatemongers, makes it also possible to view immigrants as less than human and thus fertilize the political ground, so draconian legislative measures can be implemented and barbaric raids conducted in a brutal manner be carried out, destroying lives, separating families, incarcerating children with their mothers, and on, and on, and on... ad infinitum.

But who was this criminal? Who was this 'lawbreaker illegal immigrant named Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez?

LODI, Calif. — They fell for one another in junior high school, in a village deep in Mexico's Sierra Madre range.

Within a few years, the young couple had crossed the border and found jobs pruning grapes in a California vineyard.

Maria and her friend, Florentino, had made plans: To work in this country for perhaps three years, save some money and then return to Oaxaca, get married and make a home and family there.

It wasn't long after that, that Florentino Bautista, 19, lost his pregnant fiancée when she fainted in his arms following hours of work in 100-degree heat. This week, Bautista is leading a poignant march to Sacramento to call for safer labor conditions on farms.

Two teenagers in love who traveled thousands of miles, surviving the deadly journey from the impoverished village to the fields in California in search of a better future, for them and for their families, in the case of Maria Isabel, to also help her widowed mother.

Criminals?

No, quite the contrary, Juan Hernandez makes a case that today's immigrants exhibit the traits and character which Americans admire in his book "New American Pioneers: Why Are We Afraid of Mexican Immigrants?", yes indeed, why?

Geraldo Rivera, in his book "His Panic: Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S." and in his tv appearances on the subject, makes a connection between the demonizing of immigrants and the RightWingNuts in the media's antagonistic and hateful demeaning pronunciations against these workers.

No, not criminals, just workers with families to take care of.

Audio slideshow from Wednesday's funeral

United Farm Workers march to the Capitol - photo slide show

Video: Maria's fiance Florentino Bautista talks about what happened on May 14.
Video: El prometido de Maria, Florentino Bautista, habla sobre lo que paso el 14 de mayo

ARTICLES

In Memory of Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez and Her Unborn Child and All Farm Workers Who Have Died to Make our American Life Easier

The Short Life and Preventable Death of Maria Isabel Vasquez

Employer of farmworker who died had been fined for violations in 2006

Farm Worker Death Sparks March To Capitol

Source: NBC 11 Bay Area, CA (KNTV)

UFW March Honors Pregnant Farmworker Who Died In Vineyard

Source: NBC 4 Los Angeles (KNBC)

Farmers must share in keeping workers safe

Source: Modesto Bee

March begins to honor fallen farmworker

Source: San Jose Mercury News

Editorial: A tragedy in the farm fields is all too familiar

Source: Sacramento Bee

After worker death, state may revoke contractor's license

Source: San Jose Mercury News

March For Farm Worker Approaches Capitol

Source: NBC 3 Sacramento (KCRA)

LODI / Farmworker's on-job death spurs march to improve working conditions

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Labor contractor in farmworker death case may lose license

Source: Sacramento Bee