$4,000: the price of a Mexican life

By Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez

Aug. 31— A friend of ours over for breakfast started sobbing when we told her that a South Texas rancher who shot an unarmed Mexican from behind was fined $4,000, put on probation and set free. “No valemos nadaaaaa,” she said. Her tearful words need no translation.

Her reaction moved us. Actually, it shook us. We stopped to say a prayer for the slain Eusebio de Haro and his family. It was no hyperbole when we recently wrote that in the US, a dog’s life is worth more than that of a Mexican.

The Sam Blackwood trial in Brackettville, along with the countless murders and needless deaths that have been occurring all along the US/Mexico border (since before we were born) illustrates this. The only difference is that nowadays, they’re also occurring elsewhere in the southern United States — where 3 million Mexicans/Central Americans live — a place not normally associated with anti-Mexicanism.

It’s a wonder that this May 2000 murder and recent outrageous court decision is even news. It’s right out of a ’50s western in which the gunslinger brags about the number of cowboys he’s killed — “not counting Mexicans.” The fact is, for killing a Mexican, Blackwood was convicted simply of a misdemeanor “dangerous conduct” charge.

The context no doubt will help explain this travesty. As reported in the San Antonio Express-News, a rancher friend of Blackwood, testifying about encounters other ranchers have with migrants, said: “We usually tell each other about our woes, about our wetback problems.”

One can sincerely empathize with these woeful ranchers: $4,000 is a hefty sum to be paying for helping to exterminate wetbacks. That’s the message many of us, including ranchers, hear daily, don’t we? — from billboards to talk radio hosts; from draconian propositions to vigilantism. After years and years of dehumanizing Mexicans, of a vicious anti-immigrant campaign by people in and out of government, we see the result. This killing came at the same time that Arizona ranchers were recruiting vigilantes nationwide to help do the work of the “migra,” or US border patrol.

Despite the completely unprovoked nature of the shooting, Blackwood didn’t even stand trial for murder. According to testimony by de Haro’s friend, Javier Sanchez, they had stopped at Blackwood’s ranch for a drink of water. The rancher refused; then after they left, he tracked them down and shot de Haro from behind. De Haro, bleeding to death, asked the rancher: “Why did you do that? I didn’t do nothing.”

The dehumanization of Mexicans is so ingrained here that when migrants are killed or found dead — which is often — they are rarely referred to as Mexicans. They are called illegal aliens, or illegals or even wetbacks. (If they’re wearing suits, regardless of nationality, they’re often upgraded to Hispanics.) Usually, they aren’t named. And when it involves an unjustified killing, especially by a law enforcement officer, forget about it. If it’s vigilantes, it’s usually “self-defense,” and aggravated assault is about the most serious charge one can expect. Often, they’re cheered on by like-minded demagogues.

Bob Rivard, editor of the Express-News, pondered in a column recently about what would have happened if de Haro had killed Blackwood? That’s a rhetorical question in Texas, the death penalty capital of the world.

That’s why the dog reference. Just recently, in a road-rage incident, a northern California man was appropriately given a three-year sentence for killing a dog. But for rage against a Mexican? Less than the price of a used car.

For those who often ask why we use the word “dehumanization,” rather than “racism,” this case provides the answer. To dehumanize (including, but not limited to reasons of race) is to degrade, stereotype, caricaturize, trivialize, devalue, humiliate, invisibilize, alienize, scapegoat, criminalize and demonize. In effect, it’s to make one less than human, not simply in society and the media, but also inside of a courtroom.

That’s why Blackwood isn’t the sole culprit. Like a “Los Tigres Del Norte” song, which proclaims that migrants die twice unless buried in their homeland, de Haro was killed twice. The second time was when the grand jury charged Blackwood with a misdemeanor.

Adding insult, the jury could have given the rancher a year. But apparently he was needed in the free world.

To Blackwood, we ask: Why did you kill him? He didn’t do nothin’ but walk through “your” land. To the jury: Why did you even bother fining him? He was just taking care of our wetback problem. To the Justice Department: Any chance of prosecuting Blackwood on federal civil rights violations?

Source: Universal Press Syndicate

MEDIA WATCH

The CIA goes primetime on CBS

By Jeff Cohen

In a country where separation of media and state is so valued, should a TV network allow a government agency to have an editorial role in how that agency is portrayed on the air?

The question is raised by the input and support CBS has accepted from the Central Intelligence Agency in producing its new weekly drama about the CIA, “The Agency,” which premieres this month.

One wonders if CBS executives remember “The FBI,” the dramatic series starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. that was one of the great feats in propaganda history. Week after week for nine years, it presented an unvaryingly upbeat — and largely distorted — portrait of a highly ethical, non-politicized institution keeping America safe from internal and external enemies. It was a portrait jointly shaped by ABC, a private network, and the FBI, a secretive government agency that had say over scripts and story lines.

Each episode displayed the FBI seal and thanked director J. Edgar Hoover for his cooperation. As far back as the newsreels of John Dillinger’s capture, Hoover knew that polishing the Bureau’s image through the mass media was a key to ever more power and more funding.

After “The FBI” went off the air in 1973, Congressional hearings and Freedom of Information lawsuits revealed that — during the nine years of sanitized hero-worship on ABC — the Bureau was systematically abusing the First Amendment rights of countless civil rights and peace advocates, from grass roots activists to John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. “The FBI” offered no episodes about that FBI.

Zimbalist and his TV cohorts waged war against organized crime, but in the real world, the FBI’s efforts were half-hearted at best. In 1968, for example, when activist/comedian Dick Gregory made a speech denouncing the Mafia as “snakes” for importing drugs into the inner city, J. Edgar Hoover reacted by trying to provoke the mob into retaliating against the comedian. Hoover wrote that the FBI should develop “a counterintelligence operation to alert La Cosa Nostra to Gregory’s attack on LCN.”

Those dozen words shed more accurate light on the character and activities of the Bureau than all the weekly ABC episodes that year.

Apparently unconcerned with this history, CBS’s “The Agency” has invited the participation of the CIA, an institution with a history at least as controversial as the FBI’s. The CBS project readily won the support of the CIA and its public liaison officer with Hollywood, Chase Brandon, whose job is CIA image-enhancement.

A decade after the collapse of our Soviet enemy (which the CIA largely failed to predict), positive media presentations can help sell the public on the need for the CIA and its estimated $30 billion price tag. Each week “The Agency” will glorify CIA officers who save the world from Arab terrorists, drug-runners, kidnappers and assorted cutthroats.

A new ABC spy series, “Alias,” has also received some CIA assistance, but Brandon refused requests to help two forthcoming CIA-related movies — one starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, another starring Matt Damon — because he deemed them insufficiently positive: “If someone wants to slander us,” Brandon told the Washington Post, “it’s not in our interest to cooperate.” Echoes of J. Edgar.

After meeting the creator of “The Agency” and reviewing scripts, Brandon granted unprecedented CIA support for the CBS series because “it would show our spirit, patriotism and dedication.” As the New York Times described, CBS was even allowed to shoot parts of its pilot at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, using off-duty CIA employees as extras. For interior sets in Los Angeles, the CIA has provided agency seals. “Much to the delight of the agency,” the Times reported, “CBS clearly has become an agency booster.”

Series creator Michael Beckner explained CIA involvement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “[The series] is not going to demonize them…What attracted them to cooperating with us is the fact that we want to tell stories about the lives of the people that work there.”

Producers say the CIA will have input on scripts but not script “approval.” Executive Producer Shaun Cassidy commented on the CIA’s script involvement : “Their support is a strictly case-by-case basis. If they don’t like the script, we won’t have their support that week.”

But should network TV producers be showing scripts to a government agency in hopes of getting its support? And if a series is that cozy with its subject, how much integrity can the program have?

In recent years, the CIA has worked hand-in-hand with brutal regimes and armies. It has helped overthrow elected governments. CBS knows it will abruptly lose its access and support if “The Agency” focuses on the CIA’s less savory activities.

As long as CBS and the CIA remain wedded, don’t expect a hard-hitting episode on the agency’s alliance with the corrupt, often-brutal military in Colombia. Or on the CIA’s past links to terrorists like Osama bin Laden now protected by the Afghan government. Or on the agency’s role in the bombings of the Chinese embassy in Serbia and the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

In other words, expect far more fiction than fact.

Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, a national media watch group based in New York. www.fair.org