LOS ANGELES: The Cheryl Green case ends

The last defendant in the killing of Cheryl Green, the 14-year-old black girl gunned down by Latino street gang members, was sentenced today to 238 years to life in prison.

Ernesto Alcarez, now 25, had been convicted last month. He was the lookout that after on December 15, 2006 when 204th Street gang member Jonathan Fajardo, pictured here, went looking for blacks to shoot and found Green and some friends talking on a street nearby.

The case was one of the most remarkable of my career. First, it showed how Latino street gangs had become the region’s foremost race-hate criminals, much of this stemming from orders from the Mexican Mafia in prison, and the general apartheid culture that reins in the institutions, which had by 2006 made its way out onto the street and was causing great havoc.

The killing of Green, followed by the slaying of Christopher Ash, a 204th Street associated whom the gang believed to be an informant, left a trail of pointless destruction. Two families had loved ones killed. Five families have loved ones doing life in prison.

Amazingly, Alcarez and Fajardo barely knew each other when Fajardo set out that day, with Alcarez has his somewhat reluctant lookout.The way a gang member explained it to me, Alcarez was a kind of wannabe member of 204th Street whose commitment the gang wanted to test by sending him along with Fajardo, a dedicated 204th Streeter and serious methamphetamine user.

Their fate was entwined forever when Fajardo opened fire, killing Green.

Alcarez’s mother once told me that she’d moved from the neighborhood to get her son away from 204th Street, but he kept returning. A story like so many others I’ve heard, speaking to the brainwashing that goes on in many of these street gangs.

Strangely, Fajardo was himself half black, though he identified as a Latino. He’s now on Death Row.

I wrote a story of how the Harbor Gateway area Cheryl Green had grown up in had been changed by lenient zoning laws from a single-family neighborhood into one crammed with apartment buildings that led to the problems of race it experienced beginning in the late 1990s. The story was also about the hollowing out of the LA economy, and the departure of union jobs that had held neighborhoods like the Gateway together for so long.

Gretchen Ford, the prosecutor in the case, prosecuted five defendants in three separate trials, one of them a death penalty case for the shooter, Jonathan Fajardo. A tip of my hat to her.

It feels like the end of an era, she told me the day Alcarez was sentenced. I bet. Feels that way to me, too.

Photos: Cheryl Green and Jonathan Fajardo

 

 

 

 

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TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Huffington Post

The Huffington Post has re-posted one of the stories that I put up earlier this year on my storytelling site, Tell Your True Tale.

It’s by convicted bank robber, Jeffrey Scott Hunter. My First Bank Robbery is the title of the tale.

You can see more cool stories at Tell Your True Tale.

Read ’em, share ’em, send in one of your own. I’m always looking for good stories.

 

 

 

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MEXICO: Televisa paid to promote EPN, smear AMLO

Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui interviews Laura Barranco about the money reportedly paid by presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto (of the PRI) to Televisa, the country’s television and entertainment conglomerate, to promote his image and campaign.

Barranco is a former Televisa employee. The interview is in Spanish.

Added to that is a story by Jo Tuckman of the Guardian, who has reviewed documents, contracts apparently, that seem to show that Televisa sold time on entertainment and news shows to promote the candidacy of Pena Nieto, and smear the campaign and image of leftist candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. AMLO has called on EPN and Televisa to release the contracts.

“We’re watching a presidential candidate constructed openly, or sometimes not so openly, by the most important television network of the country,” Aristegui says during the interview.

Televisa has denied the claim.

 

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WRITING: Ray Bradbury, an appreciation

There’s a great appreciation of Ray Bradbury, who died yesterday at 91, by Scott Timberg in Zocalo.

In it, among other things, Timberg wonders why it was California where science fiction writers flourished. He concludes that it was because there was no literary elite or hierarchy to disapprove of the genre.

Reminds me of Tijuana in the 1950s through the 1980s, where lots of poor people could join the middle class because there was no wealthy class controlling opportunity as there was in the long-established cities of Mexico’s interior.

Timberg sees a California vibe in Bradbury’s stories about Martians, and notes the author was a young autograph hound, with no college education, who wrote his first stuff on butcher paper, and Fahrenheit 451 on a UCLA library typewriter into which he had to keep pumping dimes.

“Libraries raised me,” Bradbury is quoted as saying. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.”

Timberg writes the MisreadCity blog.

 

 

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MEXICO: Presidential campaign photos by Keith Dannemiller

In Mexico, ace freelance photographer Keith Dannemiller has been traveling the presidential campaign trail.

He’s got many of the shots posted online. He paused long enough to add some comments on the job …

On the campaign: I have been covering these happenings for the last 24 years — this is my fifth time – as a photojournalist for various newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. I swore to myself that 2006 with Felipe Calderon (PAN), Andres Manuel López Obrador (PRD) and Roberto Madrazo (PRI) competing would be my swan song.

On weirdness: Just yesterday, ex-President Vicente Fox, he of the PAN, who so convincingly dethroned the PRI in 2000, says that he is backing the PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto for president.

Manuel Bartlett Diaz (then Secretary of the Interior and necessarily of the PRI), who infamously declared in 1988, that the vote tabulating computer system had crashed on election night, denying victory to the coalition that supported Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas for president, is now candidate for Senador in the state of Puebla from the left-center PRD party – the party of Mr. Cárdenas.

On Enrique Pena Nieto, candidate of once-ruling PRI: Everything during the trip to Queretero, three hours north of Mexico City was meticulously handled, just like it was in the good ole’ days of the PRI hegemony. Myself and the US reporter were picked up at the reporter’s Mexico City hotel and driven to the forum that Mr. Peña Nieto was leading on the aerospace industry in Mexico.

When the event was over we were led to a room by ourselves for an interview with the candidate. I was allowed to set up some small strobes with umbrellas and wander freely around the interview area. With a long lens, I could fill the frame with the candidate’s face and the images convey some of his emotional response to the questions. With the interview finished, to my surprise, Mr. Peña Nieto began to walk, surrounded by a couple of bodyguards, to his waiting SUV. I shot from the balcony of the building where we had just been and then moved down into the scrum. It took him an hour and a half to go about three hundred meters, and he was mobbed mostly by adoring female supporters, who were grabbing, kissing and posing for photos with the candidate.

On Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, candidate of the leftist PRD: If I were a Mexican, I would vote for Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This has to do with my political and philosophical beliefs, but more importantly with his style. The man can be sardonic, ironic, funny and heartfelt all in the same speech. In a word he is more human, than any of the other candidates on the stump, and this, by a long shot. In my opinion, he leaves himself open to more revealing photos. He seems to have the ability to step outside himself, distance himself from his persona as a political candidate and look back in at the situation in which he finds himself.

Check out all Keith Dannemiller’s photographs.

 

 

 

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LOS ANGELES: Ken McRoyal, Univ of Idaho football player

Today’s story on Ken McRoyal, slain University of Idaho football player, was a sad one to do. But it was also a remarkable tale, I thought as I was doing it.

The story was really about how a kid was coming into the world from real isolation of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, first, after the hurricane, to the Samoan community of Carson, then to the virtually all-white world of the school in Moscow, Idaho.

As I spoke to those who knew him well, I came to feel that even if he didn’t make it in the NFL, which, given his size, was a real longshot, he was going to find a way in life, motivated by the love for his daughter and a feeling, gained as he matured and saw new things in life, that he was capable of a lot.

It was, it seemed to me, a story about what college sports should be about, which is showing youths what they can achieve if they put in the effort — not shoe contracts, but a decent life.

 

Photo Credit: University of Idaho

 

 

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MEXICO: Democracy Interrupted by Jo Tuckman

Those interested in Mexico and its transition away from a one-party state should be glad to hear that Jo Tuckman, a former colleague, has published a book on the topic

Mexico: Democracy Interrupted is just out. I found it in my mailbox an hour ago.

Should be quite worth reading, as Tuckman has been writing from Mexico for many years. Plus the topic couldn’t be more relevant: Describing what happened to the great democratic promise of Mexico two sexenios after the country opted, peacefully, to throw off the chains of 70+ years of PRI rule.

It now finds itself in the middle of a medieval drug war. Few of the deep reforms that were hoped for, and are necessary, to transform the country into something ready for the 21st Century global economy have been achieved.

Meanwhile, the country seems run by, and according to the interests of, the leaders of the top three political parties, who remain about as unaccountable as the president was under the PRI regime.

I’m reminded of Langston Hughes’ poem, “A Dream Deferred.”

Congratulations, Jo!

 

 

 

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MEXICO: Presidential poll echoes on

Thursday’s poll in Reforma showing leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador within four points of front-running PRI candidate Enrique Pena Nieto continues to echo today.

The PRI has redirected its focus at AMLO, according to Animal Politico, even as they discount the poll’s importance. To be sure, other polls

Meanwhile, the party’s corrupt past is once again on display with the scandal surrounding former Tamaulipas governor Tomas Yarrington, suspected of laundering narco-money.

The peso fell in value and stocks were off late Thursday, in part due to the poll and the apparent fear among investors and the business class that a leftist would become president of Mexico — though the European economic crisis is also a big player in this.

More later on who Enrique Pena Nieto is and the political clan he represents.

 

 

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MEXICO: Presidential race tightens

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate of the leftist PRD, has drawn within four percentage points of frontrunner Enrique Pena Nieto, candidate for the once-ruling PRI, according to a poll in Reforma in Mexico City.

Josefina Vasquez Mota, of the rightist PAN, the party of President Felipe Calderon, remains in the low 20s.

AMLO has been aided by student protests against Pena Nieto, who is viewed widely as a member of the PRI’s dinosaur element, young though he may be.

Pena Nieto is always widely viewed as being a creation of Mexico’s media elite, particularly the vast Televisa news and entertainment conglomerate, which many people charge has devoted enormous amounts of air time to promoting his candidacy and campaign over the last few years.

This makes the Reforma poll marking AMLO’s resurgence all the more interesting. One key force in EPN’s fall-off would seem to be the student-based Yo Soy 132, an Occupy-like movement that has held marches critical of the PRI candidate and the media promoting his campaign.

Animal Politico’s El Palenque debates whether AMLO can catch EPN, with discussions about which candidate will benefit from the large number of undecideds.

By the afternoon, EPN tells Reforma that the poll figures leave him “really animated” to campaign and that the real poll takes place July 1, when Mexican elect the new president.

By end of day, investors used the poll — fear of an AMLO presidency — to stage a big sell off in stocks and a fall in value for the Mexican peso.

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STORYTELLING: C.M. Mayo’s blog

One thing I’ve learned is that you can always count on something hip at the blog written by C.M. Mayo.

Here, she talks about writing an essay on the legends surrounding Maximilian, the Austrian emperor that Mexico imported to rule it for a few years in the 1800s — which has to be itself one of the weirdest chapters in the history of any country.

Then they set him before a firing squad and that was that. Except that his body was embalmed and put on display for a while. His wife, Carlotta, died many decades later.

I’m hoping C.M. writes that essay, since in the duel between legend and fact, legend is usually more interesting. In another life, she was an economist who wrote a lot about informal methods of savings/finance. Now she does other stuff.

Meanwhile, check out the C.M. Mayo blog.

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MEXICO: Fake uniform factory discovered

Sounds like cartels have entered the maquiladora business.

The Mexican Navy has discovered a factory where cartels apparently made fake military uniforms, according to the BBC and other media outlets.

The factory was in Piedras Negras, a border town in the state of Coahuila, where maquiladoras — assembly plants — are the mainstay of the economy.

The Navy seized military pants, shirts, body armor, presumably to be used by cartel hitmen and commando squads.

 

 

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TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Help Needed

A new story is up now on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale.

Check out Help Needed by Kansas writer and poet Rachel Kimbrough. She’s a great writer.

And feel free to send in stories of your own. There’s usually a bit of a backlog, but I’m always eager to look at new submissions.

 

 

 

 

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VIRGIN: The Virgin of Nadeau Street

Much of the sweetness of the Virgin of Guadalupe, I believe, lies in her eyes, which are cast down, and the humility that implies.

Always an oasis in LA, whenever I see her.

 

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LOS ANGELES: Carwasheros and the immigrant economy

Covered this story yesterday, about carwash workers suing a family that owns three car washes in the area.

There’s been several of these lawsuits lately, all alleging the same practices at different car washes: non-payment of overtime, breaks denied, pay records falsified, etc.

The story again showed how much of the LA economic ecosystem is made up so entirely of immigrants. Immigrant business owners; immigrant workers. Often the customers are immigrants. Such a major change in only a few decades.

Also, many of the Westside carwash workers come from one town — Libres, in the state of Puebla, Mexico. In occasionally covering this issue over the last few months, I’ve run into many from that town. They assure me that hundreds of men and women from Libres work in the carwash industry, particularly in Santa Monica, Palos Verdes, Malibu, Venice, and similar areas.

The guy I spoke to for the story, Marcial Hernandez, was one of them.

 

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LOS ANGELES: Westlake street

This is on a street in Westlake, just west of downtown L.A.

 

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