Would you want to be the president of El Salvador?

First Civil, Now Gang Wars. Who Would Want To Be President of El Salvador?

By Tim Padgett

Here’s something you probably didn’t know: Salvadorans are poised to pass Cubans as the third-largest Latino group in the United States, behind Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.

There are 2 million Salvadorans in the U.S. That’s almost a third of the entire population of El Salvador itself, Central America’s smallest country. Many were born in the U.S., but most are migrants – and that inordinate exodus suggests some serious things are wrong with El Salvador.

A civil war tore El Salvador apart in the 1980s – and today violent drug-gang crime is tearing it down. About 40 percent of the population live in poverty while a tiny elite lives in luxury. The economy’s long been in the cellar, and the country still seems as politically polarized as it did when right-wing death squads terrorized the place a generation ago.

If you needed a reminder of that split, consider the results of the March 10 presidential election: Vice President Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the leftist FMLN party defeated Norman Quijano of the right-wing ARENA party by a miniscule 50.11 percent to 49.89 percent. Sánchez, 69, who was a guerrilla during the civil war, was declared the winner this week, but Quijano and ARENA reject that official ruling and are crying fraud. Quijano even summoned cold-war demons last week by urging the military to intervene.

In fact, compared to really dysfunctional neighbors like Honduras – which has the world’s highest murder rate today – El Salvador looks relatively stable. After returning from El Salvador to gauge post-election tensions, Cruz told me this week that for all its problems, “El Salvador is one of the few countries in Central America where democratic institutions are seen to be working.”

El Salvador is one of the few countries in Central America where democratic institutions are seen to be working. -- Jose Miguel Cruz.

The question is whether Sánchez’s election signals more difficult relations between Washington – which backed a brutal Salvadoran military during the civil war – and San Salvador.

This marks the second consecutive presidential victory for the FMLN, the party of the rebels that fought the military until the 1992 peace pact. But Sánchez is considered more left-wing than current President Mauricio Funes, who is not a former guerrilla; and conservatives fear he wants to align his country more closely with anti-U.S. regimes like oil-rich Venezuela’s.

Would you want to be president of El Salvador?

Paraguay group turns garbage into sweet melodies

AFP

Updated 2014-03-18 12:21:48

 

ASUNCION: Parents all over the world often complain about their children's music being garbage.
For one group of poor kids in Paraguay, however, who have found international fame by forming an orchestra which uses instruments built from trash, it is quite literally true.
The Orchestra of Recycled Instruments of Cateura will mark another notable chapter in their history this week when they will be the opening act for US heavy metal band Metallica on a six-nation South American tour.

“It was a surprise for us,” said orchestra director Favio Chavez.
“We were not expecting that such a famous rock band would show interest in having us as the opening act for their concerts.”

The orchestra is made up of 40 teenage boys and girls born and raised near Cateura, the main garbage dump serving Paraguay's capital Asuncion.
Their violins, flutes, saxophones, and other instruments are assembled from bits and pieces of detritus scavenged from the dump.

The kids are based in a modest school in a shanty town called “Southern Bath of the Paraguay River,” a slum that gets its name from the river's constant flooding.
The town has a population of some 25,000, but since it is a squatter settlement and has no official recognition, there is no government investment -- no electricity, no paved roads, no drinking water.
Paraguay is one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere.
Forty percent of its 6.7 million inhabitants live below the poverty line, and of those half live in extreme poverty, according to government figures.

The orchestra was organized in 2006 by Chavez, who came to the area as the garbage dump's environmental technician.
His current task is to train the 22 youths chosen to open for Metallica, and prepare the 18 others that will travel either as substitutes or support personnel.

It all started when Chavez, who plays the guitar, brought his group from his hometown of Carapegua, located 90 kilometers (55 miles) southeast of Asuncion, to the school for daily meetings with the garbage scavengers.
“Many of the children had never seen an instrument or experienced music up close,” he said.
Since then they built guitars from large cans, and “cellos and saxophones made from the remains of oil cans and used wood,” said Thomas Lecourt, a French instrument maker from Strasbourg who has been helping the group for the past two years.
“Nobody charges anyone a cent,” Lecourt said.

Andres Riveros, 17, says that he is enamored with his junkyard saxophone.
“This is proof that it is possible to get ahead despite adversities,” he said.
His instrument is made from a rooftop rain drainage pipe, with keys fashioned from bits cut from cans and local coins.

Ada Rios, 15, is a violin player.
The top of her instrument is part of an old paint can, while the body is an aluminum tray once used to bake bread.
A fork holds down the chords, and the neck is fashioned from scavenged wooden crate parts. The only thing new are the chords.

Chavez says that many people, especially foreigners, have offered to buy the unique instruments. Instead, “we give the instruments away to people who have a lot of meaning to us,” he said.
One lucky person was Queen Sofia of Spain.
“She has a violin,” said Chavez.

Paraguay group turns garbage into music

Why NPR's Steve Inskeep Says the U.S.-Mexico Border Is "Amazing"

A storefront near Mercado Juarez in downtown Matamoros, Mexico where you can purchase statues of Santa Muerte, or "Holy Death," commonly associated with the drug trade.

Listeners of NPR know Steve Inskeep from Morning Edition, which he anchors with Renée Montagne. But recently Inskeep, who has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan (for his book Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi), drove 2,428 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border to learn what's really happening there and create a series of reports called Borderland that will be heard on public radio stations across the country through March 28. We spoke to him from Denver, Colorado, just after he'd wrapped his 16-day trip.

Where exactly did you drive?
The border itself is about 1,900 miles, maybe a little more. We drove 2428 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the border crossing at Tijuana when we crossed back into the United States. We zigzagged across the border. I counted 22 different border crossings for me; my colleagues sometimes broke off and did different things so their numbers are a little different but mine was 22. And it took us about two weeks and two days.

What did you discover?
First, the scenery is awesome! I mean, it's amazing. I think about things like the Rumorosa, this highway from Mexicali, Mexico to Tijuana that goes up over these dead, desert mountains, these incredible rocky mountains, and we went over them at that magic hour at the end of the day. They were spectacular!
The desert is amazing to see, and the other thing—and we kind of knew this going in—but there's a lot of fear about crossing the border, even among many people who live immediately north of the border. But the situation in Northern Mexico is just different than it used to be. If you were crossing the border in 2010, in certain areas, that would be very creepy. Going into Juarez where there were 3,000 homicides in a year? But the murder rate has gone way down there. There's still a lot of crime, but things are calmer. You don't feel like you're going into a war zone. You feel like you're going into a big city—and it's a really interesting city.

NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep with producer
Nishant Dahiya at the start of their Borderland journey in
Boca Chica, Texas where the Rio Grande spills into the
Gulf of Mexico.

The subsiding of the violence gives you a chance as a journalist to see so many other things that are going on, having to do with immigration, having to do with trade, having to do with culture. We did this whole series of stories, and we're trying to make every story about a crossing, something that crosses from one country to the other, whether its a person or a group of people or goods or ideas or culture or music. I'd like to think—and you'll tell me if we succeed after you hear the stories—that we get at the way that these two huge countries influence each other and push and pull against each other and yank each other toward the future.

Many of us have a preconception of what it's like on the border. Were you surprised by what you found there?
I suspected that it was going to be a fuller and richer story than it seems from the outside. At first, you're tempted as a traveler not even to go there because you think you know the story: immigration, illegal immigration, drugs, so forth. Those are big stories. But when you get down into the specifics of individual stories, those tales are really amazing and really gripping, at least to me. I had an instinct that would be the case, which is why I went, but I didn't know what the details were going to be. It's the kind of place, the Borderland, that to me is a little like going to Syria or going to Pakistan. I don't mean it's nearly as dangerous—it's not nearly as dangerous—but what I mean is that you say hello to someone and the first word out of their mouth is the beginning of an incredible story.

Clockwise from top left: Pedestrians wait in line to cross
the border from Matamoros, Mexico to Brownsville, Texas.
The border fence at Hidalgo, Texas. A view of the fence in
Brownsville, Texas, seen through the back of a car window.
And the fence again at Hidalgo.

Why NPR's Steve Inskeep says the US/Mexico border is amazing. 

Spain beefs up border security after hundreds storm border

Spain beefs up African enclave security after hundreds storm border

By Juan Medina

MELILLA, Spain Wed Mar 19, 2014 7:10pm EDT

1 of 2. 25-year-old Hussein from Mali (C) walks next to support tents mounted on Tuesday, outside a refugee centre in Spain's north African enclave Melilla March 19, 2014.

Credit: Reuters/Juan Medina

(Reuters) - Spain has more than doubled the strength of security forces at its North African enclave of Melilla, after about 500 people stormed its fences in the biggest border rush for years.
Madrid sent 100 more police on Tuesday and Wednesday, raising the total to 150, a source at the Interior Ministry said, and will reinforce the rapid response unit with 20 more personnel, bringing the total to 80.

Immigrants from all over Africa regularly dare the razor-wire fences of Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla, which are surrounded by Moroccan territory and sea. The numbers have multiplied as increased naval patrols discourage attempts to get to Europe by boat.
Some 1,074 people breached the 12-kilometre-long fences around Melilla in the whole of 2013, according to the source, and more than 1,600 have done so since the beginning of 2014.
Once in Melilla or Ceuta, the immigrants are fed and given clothes and beds in special centers.
Many end up in continental Spain and either stay there or travel elsewhere in Europe.

Young men gathered at the center in Melilla said on Wednesday they were happy to have come down from the mountains surrounding the enclave, where many had spent months living rough waiting for a chance to rush the border.
"We've made it! We've passed into Europe," said one of a group of men from countries including Guinea, Mali, the Ivory Coast and Togo.

The internment center where immigrants await processing has been overwhelmed, prompting the army to put up tents around it.
There are now around 1,800 people housed in a facility with an official capacity of 480.
In February, the European Union asked Spain to explain why police had fired rubber bullets in warning when a group of African migrants tried to wade and swim to Ceuta. Fifteen died drowning and the shots could have caused panic among the migrants, according to Cecilia Malmstrom, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs.

In October more than 360 people drowned within sight of Lampedusa, an Italian island off Tunisia that has long been a magnet for migrants.
Italian naval and coastguard vessels have rescued more than 2,000 migrants travelling in boats from North Africa over the past 48 hours, authorities said on Wednesday.
Talks on a more coordinated, EU-wide solution have made little progress, despite attempts by countries like Spain and Italy to persuade northern neighbors to share the burden of the immigrant tide.

Spain beefs up African security after border run

AZ: Court requires citizenship proof for new voters

Court requires citizenship proof for new voters

Howard Fischer Capitol Media Services

PHOENIX — A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Election Assistance Commission to require would-be Arizona voters to provide proof of citizenship when they register.
Judge Eric Melgren ruled that Alice Miller, the federal commission’s acting director, acted illegally in refusing to amend its own voter registration forms to comply with Proposition 200, a 2004 voter-approved Arizona law linking citizenship proof to voting. He said Miller cannot substitute her own judgment of what is necessary to prove citizenship for what the state, through its elected leaders and voters, has decided.

Wednesday’s ruling is a setback for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which had argued on behalf of several groups that the Arizona requirement undermines their voter-registration drives. Unless overturned, it could complicate the ability to register new voters who may not be carrying or have access to the kind of proof Arizona requires.
MALDEF attorney Nina Perales promised an appeal.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has already spoken on this issue and ruled that state laws like Prop 200 must yield to federal law,” she said.

But Attorney General Tom Horne called it a key victory in preventing voter registration fraud.
“This order compels action immediately,” he said of Melgren’s direction to the EAC. “So we’re going to make sure that only citizens vote in the 2014 election.”
And Horne said there is no conflict between Wednesday’s ruling and prior Supreme Court rulings.
He also claimed that there really is a problem in Arizona.

“There’s been a cover-up by the media of the extent to which voter fraud is a problem in Arizona,” he said. He said some reporters — he would not say who — have ignored the original findings of U.S. District Court Judge Roslyn Silver, which he said “concluded voter fraud is a significant problem in Arizona.”
Silver’s 2009 ruling upholding the proof-of-citizenship requirement, however, says only that the state “demonstrated instances of voter fraud in Arizona.” She did say though that Proposition 200, the 2004 measure, “enhances the accuracy of Arizona’s voter rolls and ensures that the rights of lawful voters are not debased by unlawfully cast ballots.”

AZ court requires citizenship proof for new voters

El menu de CHS: Homework for 19/3/2014

Hola chicos, 

Our homework tonight is utilizing our new vocabulary for food, specifically breakfast and lunch foods.

Remember, your menu is for Cordova High School's cafeteria. You need to have 5 options for:

• breakfast (el desayuno)
• lunch (el almuerzo)
• bebidas (drinks)

• Make lists, don't write in complete sentences.
• Make meals or "platos", not just one food item per option. For example, please don't just write "el jamon." What goes with the ham? Add a vegetable or other food item in the meal.

Then...

Using your menu that you created, write a few sentences in Spanish.

• 3 complete Spanish sentences using YO. Tell what YOU eat when you're hungry, for breakfast or lunch. Tell what YOU drink when you're thirsty.
• 3 complete Spanish sentences using ELLOS/ELLAS. Tell what OTHER CHS STUDENTS eat for breakfast and lunch. Tell what CHS students drink in the cafeteria, too!

 
Here is an example from class today of a new CHS cafeteria menu:

Memphis Fun!

Hola a todos,

This video doesn't have any Spanish in it, but it made me so Happy! Sometimes, the world around us and our beautiful city can be such an inspiration!  Make it a great day, eruditos ;)

Happy by Pharrell in Memphis

-Srta Shannon