The Saturday Profile: Violence Suffocated a Father’s Poetry, but Not His Voice

As a poet, novelist and essayist, Javier Sicilia tapped a deep strain of Catholicism to obsess over “the mystery of God in a broken world,” as he put it two years ago when he was awarded Mexico’s top poetry prize.

Now that his own world had been shattered by the killing of his son in March — an innocent, the police said, caught up in a drug-trafficking attack that captivated the nation — Mr. Sicilia, 56, said he had kept his faith but had felt it sink to a “dark, deep place.” So he turned to that other mystery, poetry.

After burying his son, Juan Francisco, 24, a university student who was found bound and shot along with six friends in the city of Cuernavaca, Mr. Sicilia stood before well-wishers and read his latest work, an ode to his son:

The world is not worthy of words

they have been suffocated from the inside

as they suffocated you, as they tore apart your lungs ...

the pain does not leave me

all that remains is a world

through the silence of the righteous,

only through your silence and my silence, Juanelo.

Then, Mr. Sicilia, one of the country’s most acclaimed poets, told those who had gathered that they had just heard the last poem he would ever write.

“Poetry doesn’t exist in me anymore,” he explained later in an interview.

But that does not mean Mr. Sicilia has any intention of remaining quiet.

Since his unlikely tragedy, he has led two marches with the slogan “?Hasta la madre!” — which roughly translates as “We have had it!” — and has issued a series of public denunciations, providing an exclamation point to this country’s campaign against drug cartel violence, which has left nearly 40,000 people dead in the four years since President Felipe Calderón began a crackdown on organized crime.

“What my son did was give a name and a face to the 40,000 dead,” Mr. Sicilia said. “My pain gave a face to the pain of other families. I think a country is like a house, and the destruction of someone is the destruction of our families.”

Previous mass demonstrations here claiming to be the vanguard of a new movement against violence eventually petered out, with mixed results. Mr. Sicilia’s own call for the resignation of Mr. Calderón’s public safety director went nowhere.

But Mr. Sicilia, not a household name here but well known in political and media circles through his literature and regular columns in Proceso magazine, has achieved what others have failed to do: he has provoked serial public responses from the Calderón administration.

Mr. Calderón appeared on national television a couple of days before the most recent march, on Sunday, both to defend his policies and express sympathy for the victims, including the more than 300 whose bodies have been dug up from mass graves in two states in recent weeks.

As he left Monday on a trip to New York and Washington, Mr. Calderón issued five messages on Twitter expressing solidarity with the marchers.

“I celebrate the March for Peace, and its legitimate and just intentions to put an end to the problem of insecurity,” said one. Others called for a national dialogue to find solutions to the crisis.

Mr. Calderón also met privately with Mr. Sicilia more than a week ago, and Mr. Sicilia said he had extracted a confession of sorts from the president.

“He said, ‘I agree I made a mistake but I can’t go back now,’?” Mr. Sicilia said in an interview.

He said Mr. Calderón agreed that he should have focused more on rebuilding the nation’s social and judicial institutions than on battering the cartels with the military and federal police. A spokesman for Mr. Calderón gave a different account, though, saying he might have critiqued a policy point or two but had never expressed regret over his strategy and remained committed to it.

WHATEVER the case, Mr. Sicilia has kept up his campaign, which seeks a “pact” between citizens and political leaders to thoroughly investigate the drug war deaths, de-emphasize combat with cartels in favor of fighting corruption and impunity, and put more attention on youth and social services.

 

Report Implicates Kyrgyzstan Officials in Ethnic Violence Last Year

For a year, the Kyrgyz government has denied any complicity in the violence. That position became harder to defend on Tuesday when an international commission led by a Finnish politician issued a report implicating civilian and military officials, some still serving in government.

The report described circumstances during a period of fluidity and weak authority after the popular uprising that ousted Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian leader, Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev.

The subsequent disarray in the army created the conditions for an ethnic massacre, as what had begun as a jubilant liberation movement for the Kyrgyz majority soured after ethnic Uzbeks also demanded more rights. The report said that 470 people were killed, 1,900 injured and about 411,000 temporarily driven from their homes.

The report asserts that the violence rose to the level of a “crime against humanity” as defined by international conventions, if the evidence the commission saw were proved in court. “In many instances crowds of attackers seized firearms and ammunition from the military and police,” largely unopposed, the report said. Members of the crowd then committed “murder, rape, other forms of sexual violence, physical violence” against ethnic Uzbeks.

The report said uniformed soldiers also participated in the violence in several documented instances, and that their commanders failed to maintain discipline or investigate the loss of armored vehicles and weapons.

That finding is an embarrassment to President Roza Otunbayeva, who blamed Bakiyev loyalists and Islamic extremists. The report found no evidence of either.

Kyrgyz authorities, in an addendum, argued that the report’s authors gave too much credence to accounts by Uzbeks and that the research was incomplete.

Analysts said that while the report was useful in drawing international attention to the severity of the events in southern Kyrgyzstan a year ago, it could also undermine the tenuous authority of Ms. Otunbayeva.

Government officials, most of them ethnic Kyrgyz, are likely to blame her for authorizing the investigation, Mars Sariyev, a political analyst at the Institute of Social Policy in Bishkek, said in a telephone interview. “It will initiate an explosion of nationalism in Kyrgyzstan,” he said.

After the April 7, 2010, uprising that overthrew Mr. Bakiyev, the new leaders first aligned themselves with ethnic Uzbek groups in the south that had set about ousting mayors and other local officials. But as the southern revolution escalated, the central government shifted its support to the old political establishment and security services.

The report concluded that officers and soldiers garrisoned in Osh, the capital of the southern region of the country, which has a mixed Uzbek and Kyrgyz population, abetted the violence, which began June 10.

The police, mostly ethnic Kyrgyz, detained a disproportionate number of Uzbeks and accused them of instigating the unrest. The report notes ethnic Kyrgyz also suffered, though in lesser numbers.

Soldiers distributed weapons, including automatic rifles and machine guns, to crowds of ethnic Kyrgyz young men, who then used them to kill Uzbeks. The young men rampaged in armored personnel carriers. The report singled out one general in particular, Ismail Isakov, then commandant of the south, for failing to use his soldiers to protect civilians. It also implicated a security force commander in the city of Jalalabad, Kubatbek Baibolov, who was prosecutor general of Kyrgyzstan until late March.

The report supports a narrative of the violence in June widely reported by foreign journalists and conveyed by witnesses in the ethnic Uzbek neighborhoods of Osh, known as mahallas.

“We thoroughly analyzed the scale of the violence,” Kimmo Kiljunen, the chairman of the commission and a former member of the Finnish Parliament, said in a telephone interview from Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital. “It is not genocide, it is not war crime, but the attacks on the mahallas in June of last year were a crime against humanity.”

Because Kyrgyzstan is not a member of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Mr. Kiljunen said, the government is not obliged to cooperate in international prosecution. The designation of the violence as a crime against humanity, he said, was important all the same to elevate international pressure on the Kyrgyz authorities to impartially apply domestic law.

So far, Mr. Kiljunen said, 80 percent of those arrested for the violence have been ethnic Uzbeks while 74 percent of the victims were also Uzbeks.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe helped coordinate the work of the independent commission but was not responsible for its conclusions. Scandinavian governments, the European Union and the United States financed the $1.4 million report.

 

Chicago News Cooperative: Escaping Violence via the Drill Team, but Not Completely

 

They had done everything he had asked. They had worked hard in practice for months and were ready to win the color guard world championship if they could complete one more task: block out the violence and struggle back home.

It would not be easy. There were 62 teams chasing the same dream, and the ghosts and hardships of the city had followed the Chicago squad on the road. The team barely had enough money for food and gas. Hotels were out of the question.

In Dayton, a lucky few slept on air mattresses scattered across the gym of a Boys and Girls Club. But most of the team, including the coach, Michael Borum, 32, had only sheets and blankets, which they spread on the floor.

“I was right down there with them,” Mr. Borum said.

One of the team’s hardest-working and oldest members, Jeffrey Lovett, 20, who had been with the team since he was 9, did not make the trip. He was at home in the South suburbs nursing a gunshot wound to the stomach that he sustained while trying to break up a fight at a party a few weeks before.

“The doctors said two more inches and I could have been dead,” he said. “But I ain’t a street guy, so God spared my life.”

The experience rattled his teammates.

“People only see the performances,” Mr. Borum said. “They don’t see what we go through to keep the kids off the street. They don’t see what the kids go through to stay off the streets.”

In its 31-year history, the South Shore Drill Team has never really been about winning titles or glory. It has been about keeping at-risk youth out of harm’s way. On April 8 it accomplished both.

For the second time in 19 years, the team from Chicago hoisted the championship trophy toward the roof of University of Dayton Arena. The teenagers were giddy, including Rodney Nelson, 18, who wept “tears of joy.”

“Holding that trophy up was amazing,” he said.

Moments later, Rodney’s sister, Ahliya, 16, a member of the girls’ drill team, weaved through the celebration and stood in front of her big brother. Ahliya also was crying.

“Quintin’s been shot,” she said, sobbing. “He’s dead.”

Childhood Friends

Quintin Turner, 17, and Rodney Nelson grew up together in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. As boys they did everything together. They played basketball, walked to the lakefront, traveled downtown, dreamed of flying airplanes across oceans.

“I knew Quintin all my life,” Rodney said. “He was a great kid. Funny. Friendly. Full of energy.”

As they got older, Rodney said, he started “hanging with the wrong people, getting into trouble, which is easy to do where I come from.” Then he saw the South Shore Drill Team marching in a parade five years ago, throwing mock rifles high into the air and deftly catching them as the crowd, especially the girls, cheered.

“To be honest, I mainly joined the drill team for the females at first,” Rodney said. “Then I started getting out of the neighborhood and it got to be a habit.”

Rodney said he had tried to recruit Quintin too, but he had his own interests, his own plan for staying off the corner and alive.

“Me trying to do something positive with my life with the drill team — Quintin was doing the same thing playing football,” Rodney said.

Before leaving for Ohio, Rodney called Quintin and told him he was going to return home “a world champion.” Rodney was glad they had talked. He had not seen much of his old friend in recent months because he had been busy practicing with the drill team.

When the team arrived in Dayton at 4 a.m., the Boys and Girls Club where they were to stay was closed.

The team had to sleep in its two rented vans for three hours, until the club opened.

At the Friday night finals of the Winter Guard International Class A division, the team performed a skit called “Mind Heist,” based on a scene from the movie “Inception.”

 

Nigerian Human Rights Group: At Least 500 Killed in Post-Election Violence

。 Scott Stearns | Dakar ?April 24, 2011

A soldier searches a car in Kaduna, Nigeria, April 21, 2011

A Nigerian human rights group announced Sunday that at least 500 people were killed in violence that followed last week's election of President Goodluck Jonathan. Relief officials say more than 65,000 people have been displaced.

The Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria says most of the deaths occurred in northern states where Muslim supporters of defeated presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari attacked churches, homes and police stations, sparking reprisal attacks by Christians.

Nigerian authorities are refusing to release details of the violence, fearing that it could lead to more rioting ahead of gubernatorial elections this week.

Nigeria's Emergency Management Agency says Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi, Adamawa, Niger and Katsina states were the hardest hit.? Director General Mohammed Sani Sidi says his agency is helping more than 21,000 displaced civilians in Kano and nearly 10,000 displaced civilians in Zaria as well as people at more than 100 camps for displaced civilians in Kaduna.

"The intervention is continuing.? We are not going to stop until we get this relief material across to all the victims that have been affected.? We are doing everything possible in collaboration with the Nigerian army who have been very, very active and supportive in providing us with security cover," he said.

Sidi says the distribution of relief supplies has been slowed by the difficulty of finding drivers who are willing to enter areas where there has been violence.

In addition to displaced civilians in the north, Sidi says there are people who are originally from the north and are now living in the south who have taken refugee with security forces following the violence. "Most especially in Anambra and Imo, we have people from northern origin who, out of panic, on their own have decided to move to either military barracks or police barracks for safety for fear of reprisal attacks.? Those people also we have been able to reach out to them and provide some kind of relief material to them," he said.

With more than 65,000 civilians displaced nationwide, Sidi says the only real answer is finishing this series of elections with peaceful state-wide voting to restore order. "What we are trying to achieve is to make sure that peace is maintained and restored in all these places so that people can go back to their various houses and the continue with their normal lives," he said.

Twenty-six of Nigeria's 36 states are scheduled to hold state-wide elections on Tuesday.? Voting in Kaduna and Bauchi has been delayed until Thursday.? Electoral commission chief Attahiru Jega says he hopes that will allow for the "further cooling of tempers and for the security situation in those states to continue to improve."

 

The Texas Tribune: Cartel Violence Complicates Tick Eradication Plan

At a temporary inspection site in the industrial sector of Laredo, home to the country’s largest inland port, the lowing of cows has been heard not far from the purring of the tractor-trailers that haul millions of dollars worth of goods from Mexico each day. For about the last year, Mexican cattle have been examined here before being cleared for shipment to the rest of Texas and beyond — part of an effort to eradicate a fever tick infestation that has plagued ranchers along the border for more than a century.

The tick carries an anemia-causing parasite that preys on cattle blood cells and spreads bovine babesiosis, which causes fever, paralysis and often leads to death if left untreated. Until last year, the inspections took place in Mexico, and ticked cattle were kept from the United States. But a ruthless battle between the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas forced those inspection sites to close in March 2010.

“It’s become too dangerous for the veterinarians to conduct their inspections on the cattle that are going to be imported into Texas from Mexico,” said Roland Garcia, a Texas Ranger commissioned by the Department of Public Safety and the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. “That’s why these temporary pens in Laredo and Pharr have been established. I don’t know how long ‘temporary’ could be. It depends on how things settle out in Mexico.”

The inspection site is not the only modification being made because of cartel violence.

The United States government takes the lead on regulating cattle in the “buffer,” or permanent quarantine, zone, where fever ticks thrive. It stretches more than 500 miles across the Texas border from Del Rio to Brownsville, an area of about 550,000 acres. Temporary zones are also established if an outbreak spreads beyond that. Ed Bowers, the United States Department of Agriculture’s director of field operations for the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program, said the zone is currently 1.5 million acres, including a large swath of Dimmit and Starr counties.

Mr. Bowers and his 97-member staff compose the U.S.D.A.’s fever tick riders, who patrol hundreds of miles of Texas border on horseback searching for infested stray Mexican cattle. Recent floods that have destroyed natural barriers and man-made fences have enabled their migration past the border, potentially aiding in the spread of the tick. And the tick riders have been forced to adjust their routes farther away from the border.

“We don’t do our patrol like we did a year ago, which was visible to Mexico and riding right down the riverbank,” Mr. Bowers said. “We don’t make a target of ourselves, but we still have to patrol that permanent quarantine zone and make sure there aren’t any Mexican strays.”

The economic consequences of an extended outbreak in Texas could be dire. An infestation outside the current quarantine zones — even one considered relatively small by industry experts — would still cost $123 million in the first year alone, according to a study conducted in 2010 by the Agricultural & Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University. An outbreak spreading to the historic range that includes Texas, a portion of California and 12 Southern states east to Florida and north to Virginia would cost about $1.2 billion in the first year, according to the study.

Texas would have the most to lose, as it currently has more than 13.3 million head of cattle, including 5.14 million beef cows, representing 16.4 percent of the nation’s total. The value of the livestock is about $11.7 billion. Todd Staples, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, estimates that Texas imported about 512,000 feeder cattle from Mexico in 2010, or about half of the 1.2 million the country imported..

The economic potential of the industry explains the activity level at the inspection site in Laredo. Dr. Beall Barbee, the port veterinarian with the U.S.D.A.’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and his crew of six go through painstaking procedures to inspect every head of cattle imported from Mexico. A herd of six to eight feeder cattle, each weighing between 300 and 500 pounds, is corralled into a pen, and their heads, ears, bellies, rears and topsides are manually inspected. Then, one by one, they are forced into a dipping vat of pesticide, herded in to a pen to dry and shipped off to their buyers.

“It’s poisonous enough that you don’t want any on you,” Dr. Barbee said last week of the pesticide. “But there’s not a lot to the process. We just need to make sure they don’t have any ticks on them. The goal is not to find any, and some days we don’t.”

Adding to the safety concerns are the looming budget woes in Austin and Washington, which could affect the program.

“You know how Washington is,” Mr. Bowers said. “Even with the best minds hoping, that doesn’t mean that Congress might not cut,” he said. “But I would say that all indications are that they would support us as much as they could.”

If financing levels remain close to the current $13 million allocated annually for the project, that should allow what Mr. Bowers characterizes as the continued success of the program to proceed with release of almost two-thirds of the temporary zone.

His confidence is not matched in Austin. As budget writers there grapple with a projected shortfall that could exceed $25 billion, the state’s contribution to the fever tick eradication efforts could be scaled back significantly. The Texas Animal Health Commission plays a lesser role, but it assists the U.S.D.A. on the riverbanks and throughout the infested areas in South Texas. Preliminary budget recommendations show the agency facing a cut of about $2.6 million of its current budget, but the financing mechanism is changing from entirely general-revenue funds to a partial fee-based model, which puts the onus on the agency to sustain its own financing.

“We took the position that we weren’t going to question the politics or the budgetary considerations and just try and solve the problem,” said Dr. Dee Ellis, the state veterinarian. “If we are unsuccessful, if we had to accept the proposed budget cuts of about 50 percent of our agency, it would absolutely impact the fever tick program.”

 

The Texas Tribune: Cartel Violence Complicates Tick Eradication Plan

At a temporary inspection site in the industrial sector of Laredo, home to the country’s largest inland port, the lowing of cows has been heard not far from the purring of the tractor-trailers that haul millions of dollars worth of goods from Mexico each day. For about the last year, Mexican cattle have been examined here before being cleared for shipment to the rest of Texas and beyond — part of an effort to eradicate a fever tick infestation that has plagued ranchers along the border for more than a century.

The tick carries an anemia-causing parasite that preys on cattle blood cells and spreads bovine babesiosis, which causes fever, paralysis and often leads to death if left untreated. Until last year, the inspections took place in Mexico, and ticked cattle were kept from the United States. But a ruthless battle between the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas forced those inspection sites to close in March 2010.

“It’s become too dangerous for the veterinarians to conduct their inspections on the cattle that are going to be imported into Texas from Mexico,” said Roland Garcia, a Texas Ranger commissioned by the Department of Public Safety and the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. “That’s why these temporary pens in Laredo and Pharr have been established. I don’t know how long ‘temporary’ could be. It depends on how things settle out in Mexico.”

The inspection site is not the only modification being made because of cartel violence.

The United States government takes the lead on regulating cattle in the “buffer,” or permanent quarantine, zone, where fever ticks thrive. It stretches more than 500 miles across the Texas border from Del Rio to Brownsville, an area of about 550,000 acres. Temporary zones are also established if an outbreak spreads beyond that. Ed Bowers, the United States Department of Agriculture’s director of field operations for the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program, said the zone is currently 1.5 million acres, including a large swath of Dimmit and Starr counties.

Mr. Bowers and his 97-member staff compose the U.S.D.A.’s fever tick riders, who patrol hundreds of miles of Texas border on horseback searching for infested stray Mexican cattle. Recent floods that have destroyed natural barriers and man-made fences have enabled their migration past the border, potentially aiding in the spread of the tick. And the tick riders have been forced to adjust their routes farther away from the border.

“We don’t do our patrol like we did a year ago, which was visible to Mexico and riding right down the riverbank,” Mr. Bowers said. “We don’t make a target of ourselves, but we still have to patrol that permanent quarantine zone and make sure there aren’t any Mexican strays.”

The economic consequences of an extended outbreak in Texas could be dire. An infestation outside the current quarantine zones — even one considered relatively small by industry experts — would still cost $123 million in the first year alone, according to a study conducted in 2010 by the Agricultural & Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University. An outbreak spreading to the historic range that includes Texas, a portion of California and 12 Southern states east to Florida and north to Virginia would cost about $1.2 billion in the first year, according to the study.

Texas would have the most to lose, as it currently has more than 13.3 million head of cattle, including 5.14 million beef cows, representing 16.4 percent of the nation’s total. The value of the livestock is about $11.7 billion. Todd Staples, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, estimates that Texas imported about 512,000 feeder cattle from Mexico in 2010, or about half of the 1.2 million the country imported..

The economic potential of the industry explains the activity level at the inspection site in Laredo. Dr. Beall Barbee, the port veterinarian with the U.S.D.A.’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and his crew of six go through painstaking procedures to inspect every head of cattle imported from Mexico. A herd of six to eight feeder cattle, each weighing between 300 and 500 pounds, is corralled into a pen, and their heads, ears, bellies, rears and topsides are manually inspected. Then, one by one, they are forced into a dipping vat of pesticide, herded in to a pen to dry and shipped off to their buyers.

“It’s poisonous enough that you don’t want any on you,” Dr. Barbee said last week of the pesticide. “But there’s not a lot to the process. We just need to make sure they don’t have any ticks on them. The goal is not to find any, and some days we don’t.”

Adding to the safety concerns are the looming budget woes in Austin and Washington, which could affect the program.

“You know how Washington is,” Mr. Bowers said. “Even with the best minds hoping, that doesn’t mean that Congress might not cut,” he said. “But I would say that all indications are that they would support us as much as they could.”

If financing levels remain close to the current $13 million allocated annually for the project, that should allow what Mr. Bowers characterizes as the continued success of the program to proceed with release of almost two-thirds of the temporary zone.

His confidence is not matched in Austin. As budget writers there grapple with a projected shortfall that could exceed $25 billion, the state’s contribution to the fever tick eradication efforts could be scaled back significantly. The Texas Animal Health Commission plays a lesser role, but it assists the U.S.D.A. on the riverbanks and throughout the infested areas in South Texas. Preliminary budget recommendations show the agency facing a cut of about $2.6 million of its current budget, but the financing mechanism is changing from entirely general-revenue funds to a partial fee-based model, which puts the onus on the agency to sustain its own financing.

“We took the position that we weren’t going to question the politics or the budgetary considerations and just try and solve the problem,” said Dr. Dee Ellis, the state veterinarian. “If we are unsuccessful, if we had to accept the proposed budget cuts of about 50 percent of our agency, it would absolutely impact the fever tick program.”