There's an extensive cover story in the current issue of the Phoenix New Times about Sherrif Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Attorney who are "teaching the rest of the nation how to terrorize illegal immigrants." I'd been hearing about Sheriff Joe's career of opressive and racist "policing" (a better word would be persecution) since I moved to Arizona, and in special detail lately from the excellent blog of a fellow Arizona Indymedia volunteer in Phoenix. But this article should be a great primer for anyone from out of state and/or is not familiar with what's going on in Maricopa county, and Arizona in general....
Basically for immigrants Arizona is really really sucking. And it's true, the worse it gets here, the more the national debate and resulting national policy gets dragged along the spectrum to the right.
The article is actually really intense and I couldn't even read it all. Some of the personal focus reads like the Diary of Anne Frank or something. It's just sick what people are doing to migrants who come to this state and this country.
Daniela has very few friends — there's no one she can trust not to report her, especially now that the county sheriff has an illegal immigration hotline.She can't leave her house to buy groceries; she's heard that the sheriff stations deputies at Food City....
...She's learned how to walk quietly, to stay in the shadows. The only place Daniela allows herself to go is her children's elementary school. She volunteers there six hours a day. She says it's her responsibility to be active in her children's education. But when she walks to school (she won't drive, ever) she makes sure to go with one of her few friends or her kids.
How can we stop this? Can it be? In 50 years or so (given that total industrial collapse hasn't taken out everything anyway), will we look back at this time as a dark period of history where things went astray, like Germany in the 1930s, that we've recovered from?
Or will it be even worse?
On our way down to the beach in Mexico for xmas, we saw hundreds of cars loaded down with cargo, everything from bikes to mattresses to TVs to wrapped presents, driven by Mexicans returning south to their families from Arizona, California, and even further away. To some extent this happens every year, the now-good-wage earners bringing back gifts and necessities for their relatives, but I've heard that many many of these folks are going back for good this time. They're giving up. Those mattresses aren't Christmas gifts, they're their own beds.
They're going back, for good, because it's too hard, but what will they do? They're now rich by comparison to their family members who stayed behind, but for how long will their savings last when it has to support all their hermanas and hermanos and tias and abuelas?
In a way it's great that they will be reunited with these loved ones. But they came north because they had to. They and theirs had no other recourse, except for joining the ranks of the narcotraffickers. NAFTA had stripped them of their livelihood and dignity. Now Sheriff Joe and his ilk have stripped them of their last chance.
What will they do now? And what of the masses of others whose lives are about to be destroyed by the next phase of NAFTA, and those further south soon to be devasted by CAFTA?
And on a related note, what a refreshing surprise to see this article come out of the Phoenix New Times, which is part of a corporate chain that publishes cookie-cutter alt-weeklies around the country. The issue also covers the recent fiasco in which the New Times editors were jailed for a night for publishing news of the grand jury subpoena which demanded they turn over to the County Attorney all records of any stories they published about Sheriff Joe and anyone who looked at their website for the last 5 years.
This fascist bullshit didn't stand for long, and there was national outrage that caused the county to drop the charges immediately and fire the deputy attorney who was running the case.
Anyway, it's just great to see these journalists standing up for what's right and taking a progressive stance in Phoenix when here in Tucson, which is supposedly the most progressive big city in Arizona, we have this racist hate-rag the Tucson Weekly which regularly publishes the insulting drivel of assholes like Tom Danehy and Leo Banks.
An infuriating look back at 2007. Sigh.
Posted by steev at Enero 2, 2008 12:15 PM