6:09 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · crime|Drugs|Latin America|mexico|society · 7 Comments
10 Mar 2009
It seems that with each passing day, Mexico’s war on drug lords seems more and more hopeless, and the country is gripped with a seemingly endless chain of violent acts that have already left hundreds dead this year and nearly 6,000 deaths last year. The latest chapter in this bloody story is striking in its violence: this morning, 5 decapitated heads were found in an ice chests on the side of the road in rural Jalisco, Mexico. Mexico City’s La Jornada reports:
Inside styrofoam ice chests 5 male heads were found in the early morning on Tuesday in the town of fueron encontradas la madrugada de este martes cinco cabezas Ixtlahuacán del Río, some 50 kilometers north of Guadalajara, with a “narcomessage”. The macabre discovery coincides with today’s visit to Jalisco by president Felipe Calderón.
Reports we called in around 2:00 a.m. via an anonymous caller to the municipal police, who after corroborating the news alerted the state police and state judicial authorities.
Each head was found in an ice chest with packing tape wrapped around the eyes. The five containers were placed in a line alongside the the highway, very close to entrance into the town.
Heads in ice chests? Can it really get much worse than this? Savage.
Calderón had better act quickly before his country falls further into the hands of these assassins. This is not the Mexico I know and love.
Via / La Jornada
Imaga via El Informador
12:21 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Health|Money · Comments Off
10 Mar 2009
Latinos and blacks are less likely to seek out medical care throughout their lives, leading to increased costs at the end of life which far outweigh what is spent by white patients, according to a new report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Dying Hispanics and black Americans have much higher treatment costs than whites, because they get more costly, intensive treatments as they near death, say researchers who analyzed data from the last six months of life of almost 160,000 Medicare patients.The average cost for Hispanic patients in those final months of life was $31,702, compared with $26,704 for blacks and $20,166 for whites. Compared to white patients, costs were about 30 percent higher for blacks and almost 60 percent more for Hispanics, the Associated Press reported.
According to U.S. News & World Report, researchers have concluded that the reason for this is the lack of medical care received by black and Latino patients throughout life who, upon becoming terminally ill, receive “more treatment when there’s little chance of improving or extending their lives.”
Via / U.S. News & World Report
9:46 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Brazil|children|Health|Religion|Women · 3 Comments
10 Mar 2009
Last week the horrific news of a 9 year old girl being raped by her stepfather and subsequently having a life saving abortion put the Catholic Church in the spotlight after the local church excommunicated the girl’s mother. Responses here included people disturbed not just by what happened to the girl initially but also the second victimization of the girl and her family, and people stating that cases such as this were one of the reasons so many were leaving the Catholic Church. One person was who commented was willing to sacrifice the life and mental well being of the child so that she could carry and give birth to twins. Even President Lula of Brazil commented on the case, taking sides against the church.
The Vatican made an official statement on the case and not surprisingly supported the decision of the local Brazilian Church to excommunicate the mother and the doctors who performed the abortion. The church then went even further and attacked the girl as being more sinful than the step-father who raped her.
From the Latin Americanist:
“It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated,” said Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re to a local daily. Re- who is the head of the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for Bishops- acknowledged that “life must always be protected” yet did not say anything over the girl’s life being in danger by her pregnancy.
Aside from excommunicating the girl’s mother, Sobrinho also had the gall to disparage the raped child:
The stepfather was not excommunicated because the church said that his action, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending the life of an unborn child.
“It is clear that he committed a very serious sin, but worse than this is the abortion,” Sobrinho said.
That’s right mujeres, abortion, even to save the life of a nine year girl is worse than child rape according the the Roman Catholic Church.
Excommunicate my ass now.
8:11 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · economy|Immigration|Labor · 3 Comments
10 Mar 2009
Despite the fact the Center for Immigration Studies has proven itself to be less than unbiased with it’s ties to hate groups, that hasn’t stopped mainstream news sources from citing them and fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment this time using the Obama stimulus program as it’s jumping off point.
CIS latest rallying cry is that 300,000 undocumented workers will “steal” jobs created under President Obama’s stimulus plan. See how they connect the dots:
CIS asserts that the stimulus bill will create two million new construction jobs based on a 2007 estimate by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) on how many “construction- oriented” jobs are directly created by each $1 billion of “federal highway expenditures. ” Yet “construction- oriented” jobs include technical and management positions for which undocumented immigrants, who tend to be less-skilled, are unlikely to qualify.
CIS then claims that 15% of these two million new construction jobs (roughly 300,000) will go to undocumented workers because an estimated 15% of construction workers were undocumented in 2005-before the economic collapse and before the huge job losses in construction.
See! So if undocumented workers were working in construction before, you know that they will now. Right? Never mind that the stats used are old stats and don’t take into account CIS’s own stats on how undocumented workers are leaving the country. So que? They are all going to run back over the border to take the new jobs?
This build of fear serves one purpose, to stir hate in tough economic times, to distract our vision from why the economy is failing and the why has nothing to do with the undocumented.
7:28 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Bolivia|Politics · Comments Off
10 Mar 2009
Hopes for improved relationships between Latin America and the United States seem to be fading fast as Bolivia kicked out a senior U.S. diplomat on grounds that the diplomat is part of a conspiracy against the Evo Morales government.
Francisco Martinez, the second secretary of the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, was “persona non grata,” Morales said in a public address at his official palace.
Martinez, he said, “was in permanent contact with opposition groups during the entire period of the conspiracy,” which he said caused anti-government unrest that rocked much of the country in September 2008.
Via / The Latin Americanist
VivirLatino is a daily publication published by Mamita Mala Media, dedicated to featuring all the latest politics, culture, entertainment of interest to the diverse Latin@ diaspora.
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