Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights

January 13, 2008

A Texas Divided


A Texas Divided Will Be Broken In Two
South Texas Residents Are Struggling, Together, Like Never Before, to Stop the Border Wall and Militarization Being Imposed from Up North
By Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

Inside the Checkpoints: Commentary from the RiĆ³ Grande
January 13, 2008o
Narco News
Excerpt:
"Not only is South Texas the poorest and most neglected and most Hispanic region of the entire State, it is the poorest and most neglected and most Hispanic region of the entire United States of America. And because of this, prosperous central and northern Texas shuns South Texas and deprives it of the prosperity and affluence enjoyed by the rest of the state. Many parts of “anti-immigrant” central and northern Texas, like Farmers Branch, Irving and Georgetown, are cities that are legendarily racist-supremacist strongholds that today profile any person that doesn’t look “Texan.” Meanwhile, South Texas has to contend with military checkpoints, the doubling of the militarized forces and now the threat of the construction of a Berlin-like border wall.
Even more sinister is an apparent assault on South Texas by northern and central Texas. Here is a recent list of just some of the corporations and institutions, many of which are Texas based companies, that are receiving federal tax dollars to vilify and victimize the part of the state they consider least desirable and that have entered into contracts related to the building of the border wall and the militarization of the Texas-Mexico border.
Lockheed MartinTexas Division of Raytheon (Network Centric Systems)L-3 Communications (Integrated Systems)Northrup Grumman (Los Angeles, CA)BAE Systems (Austin, TX)SAIC of San DiegoComputer Sciences Corp of El Segundo, CAAmerica’s Border Security Group (Ericcson Inc., Plano, TX) (NASDAQ:ERICY)Fluor Corporation (NYSEL:FLR)SYColeman Corporation (A Division of LC Communications)MTC TechnologiesCAMBER CorporationAEP Networks, Inc.Texas A&M UniversityUniversity of Texas (Austin)Boeing (Seattle, WA; Secure Border Initiative/SBInet-“Project 28”)Kellogg Brown & Root (Halliburton)Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) major partnersUnited Kingdom Home Office
A border wall must be built in order for all of these corporations and entities to receive the billions of dollars of funding. The Texas companies of central and northern Texas are positioned to exploit their fellow Texans along the border, ravage their environment and friendship. Already, they have craftily begun to destroy the border economy with all the confusion over identification and delays at the ports of entry. Mock Environmental Impact Studies are being done by the Texas firm, AEP Networks. Even universities in central Texas are complicit in the betrayal of the Texas border community.
There is one thing that the ruling elite did not count on, however. They did not factor in that the freedoms of speech, assembly, press and worship are still alive and healthy along the Texas-Mexico border. Using all the tenets of democracy, border residents are unifying their voices and saying, “Hell no! No Border Wall!” Rallies, protests and marches have been ongoing since the passage of the Secure Fence Act in October of 2006. This opposition is a historical display of solidarity. Environmentalists, economists, pro-immigration, farm workers, university students and faculty alike, historians, elected officials, human rights activists, indigenous rights activists, faith based groups, tourism experts, law enforcement agents, property owners, and grass roots of all sorts have all united their voices and resources to oppose the border wall.

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Photo: Border wall in California by Jay Johnson-Castro, Sr.

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