Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Required Articles on Immigration/Latin America/US
Please read all of the following articles. You might have a quiz on these.
washingtonpost.com, front page
America's Population Set to Top 300 Million
Immigration Fuels Much of Growth
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 12, 2006; A01
Clicking upward at a rate of one person every 11 seconds, the U.S. population will officially surpass 300 million in the next week or so.
The milestone is a reminder that the United States remains a remarkable demographic specimen, 230 years old (since the Declaration of Independence) and still in a growth spurt.
Behind only China and India, it is the planet's third most populous nation. For a rich, highly developed country, it is anomalously fertile, with a population that is increasing briskly, in sharp contrast to anemic growth or decline in Western Europe and Japan. Some demographers say this continued growth is essential to support an aging population in retirement and a sign of the continued allure of the United States even at a time when its image around the world has been sullied by the war in Iraq.
Yet, how will the momentous 300-million marker be celebrated in Washington?
"Those plans, believe it or not, are still being finalized," said Robert B. Bernstein, a Census Bureau spokesman. "I don't yet know what, if anything, we are going to do in the way of an event."
When the U.S. population surpassed 200 million on a census clock in 1967, cheers rang through the lobby of the Commerce Department, and applause interrupted President Lyndon B. Johnson's celebratory speech.
Four decades later, however, 300 million seems to be greeted more with hand-wringing ambivalence than chest-thumping pride.
"When we hit 100 million, it was a celebration of America's might in the world," said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California. "When we hit 200 million, we were solidifying our position. But at 300 million, we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."
One reason for anxiety may be that U.S. population growth is fueled in large measure by immigrants and their children, a circumstance that increasingly worries native-born Americans and makes politicians jumpy, especially four weeks before an election.
Immigrants, legal and illegal, account for about 40 percent of population growth. Immigration is also an important reason the "natural increase" in the population -- excess of births over deaths -- is significantly higher in the United States compared with Europe or Japan. Hispanics from Latin America, by far the largest share of recent immigrants, are driving the natural increase here. On average, Hispanic women have one more child than non-Hispanic white women.
Three hundred million is also a discomfiting reminder of a nation that, on its east and west coasts, at least, is running noticeably low on elbow room. More humanity is stirring up more traffic, more sprawl, more rules against growth, more protests against anti-growth rules, and more of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. A surging population in the arid Southwest is also straining the supply of water. The growth is adding to a country that represents 4 percent of the world's population but consumes 25 percent of the planet's oil.
"We are not the wide-open spaces anymore," said Martha Farnsworth Riche, who headed the Census Bureau in the mid-1990s and is now a research demographer at Cornell University. "Our choices are constrained."
In Los Angeles, the nation's most densely populated metropolitan region and its most heavily Latino area, 300 million will be yet another confirmation that congestion is out of control, Myers predicted.
"I don't think people view population growth as a plus anymore," he said, noting that Angelenos are punished by it "every single day" when they go out in freeway traffic.
The 300-million milestone, it should be noted, is an educated guess by the Census Bureau, not an actual people count. It emerges from a formula that crunches births and new immigrants against deaths. The 300-millionth person, therefore, will never win a trip to Disneyland because he or she will not be identified.
The 100-million markers are also coming more quickly. From the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it took the country 139 years to get to 100 million in 1915, then 52 more years to reach 200 million in 1967 and 39 more years to hit 300 million. The 400 million mark, according to census projections, will be reached in about 37 years. That, of course, could change if the current anxiety about immigration were to result in the closing of the country's borders. Without immigration, the U.S. population could go into a European-style stall.
It was a change in immigration law in 1965, when Congress abolished a national-origins quota system, that unintentionally reignited immigrant-led population growth, according to William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. "It made family reunification an important criteria for immigration and it led to a chain reaction of higher fertility," he said.
The relative presence of immigrants, about 12 percent of the total population, is more than double what it was when the population topped 200 million. Immigrants are also more visible than ever, having fanned out from gateway cities such as New York and Los Angeles to parts of the rural South and Midwest where they had not been seen in substantial numbers before. Still, the foreign-born share of the population remains lower than between the melting-pot years of 1860 and 1920, when it was about 14 percent.
Many demographers believe it is shortsighted to be anxious about the 300-million marker. They regard it as a symbol of an economically dynamic democracy that remains popular in much of the world.
"As almost nothing else can, immigration-led growth signals the attractiveness of the American economy and polity," said Kenneth Prewitt, a former head of the Census Bureau and now professor of public affairs at Columbia University. "You don't see large numbers of immigrants clamoring to move to China."
Indeed, lots of good news is embodied in the lives of the 300 million. Longevity has jumped from 55 years in 1915, to 71 years in 1967, to 78 years now. Over that time frame, the percentage of the adult population with a high-school diploma has jumped from 14 percent to 85 percent. Homeownership has risen from 46 to 69 percent. The death rate from tuberculosis has fallen from 140 to 0.2 per 100,000 people. While houses are 4.5 times as expensive (in constant dollars) as they were in 1915 and twice as expensive as in 1967, a gallon of milk in 2006 costs less than half what it went for in 1915 and in 1967.
After this year's election rhetoric cools, Frey hopes that Americans will see a silver lining in immigration: Foreign-born residents and their children will surge into the workforce, and their payroll taxes will help reduce funding shortfalls for Social Security and other social programs that benefit older people.
"So many middle-aged baby boomers who oppose immigration may be biting the hand that could feed them," Frey said.
This assumes, though, that immigrant children, especially Hispanics and blacks, will be educated well enough in American schools to find competitive jobs in the global economy.
Poverty rates for children have exceeded poverty rates for the elderly for more than 40 years, according to Linda A. Jacobsen, director of domestic programs at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group.
Hispanic and black children are between three and four times as likely to live in poverty as whites, so their growing numbers may not translate into growing national wealth. In addition, the divide between aging baby boomers in retirement and the younger workers who are supporting them with payroll taxes will have a racial, as well as a generational, dimension.
"Unless we can reduce age, racial and ethnic disparities in poverty," Jacobsen warns, "children from minority groups may be less able and less willing, as they grow up, to support the predominantly white elderly population."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Another look at the fine priint.
Front page, Washington Post
In Border Fence's Path, Congressional Roadblocks
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 6, 2006; A01
No sooner did Congress authorize construction of a 700-mile fence on the U.S.-Mexico border last week than lawmakers rushed to approve separate legislation that ensures it will never be built, at least not as advertised, according to Republican lawmakers and immigration experts.
GOP leaders have singled out the fence as one of the primary accomplishments of the recently completed session. Many lawmakers plan to highlight their $1.2 billion down payment on its construction as they campaign in the weeks before the midterm elections.
But shortly before recessing late Friday, the House and Senate gave the Bush administration leeway to distribute the money to a combination of projects -- not just the physical barrier along the southern border. The funds may also be spent on roads, technology and "tactical infrastructure" to support the Department of Homeland Security's preferred option of a "virtual fence."
What's more, in a late-night concession to win over wavering Republicans, GOP congressional leaders pledged in writing that Native American tribes, members of Congress, governors and local leaders would get a say in "the exact placement" of any structure, and that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would have the flexibility to use alternatives "when fencing is ineffective or impractical."
The loopholes leave the Bush administration with authority to decide where, when and how long a fence will be built, except for small stretches east of San Diego and in western Arizona. Homeland Security officials have proposed a fence half as long, lawmakers said.
"It's one thing to authorize. It's another thing to actually appropriate the money and do it," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). The fine-print distinction between what Congress says it will do and what it actually pays for is a time-honored result of the checks and balances between lawmakers who oversee agencies and those who hold their purse strings.
In this case, it also reflects political calculations by GOP strategists that voters do not mind the details, and that key players -- including the administration, local leaders and the Mexican government -- oppose a fence-only approach, analysts said.
President Bush signed the $34.8 billion homeland security budget bill Wednesday in Scottsdale, Ariz., without referring to the 700-mile barrier. Instead, he highlighted the $1.2 billion that Congress provided for an unspecified blend of fencing, vehicle barriers, lighting and technology such as ground-based radar, cameras and sensors.
"That's what the people of this country want," the president said. "They want to know that we're modernizing the border so we can better secure the border."
Bush and Chertoff have said repeatedly that enforcement alone will not work and that they want limited dollars spent elsewhere, such as on a temporary-worker program to ease pressure on the border. At an estimated $3 million to $10 million per mile, the double-layered barrier will cost considerably more than $1.2 billion.
Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who chairs the Senate subcommittee that funds the Department of Homeland Security, said that before the legislation was approved, the department had planned to build 320 miles of fencing, secure 500 miles of hard-to-traverse areas by blocking roads and monitor electronically the rest of the 2,000-mile-long southern frontier.
"I think there'll be fencing where the department feels that it makes sense," Gregg said, estimating that "at least 300 to 400 miles" will be built.
Congress withheld $950 million of the $1.2 billion, pending a breakdown by Chertoff of how he plans to spend the money. It is due in early December, after the midterm elections.
Asked whether Homeland Security would build 700 miles of fence, department spokesman Russ Knocke would not say. Instead, he noted that department leaders announced last month that they will spend $67 million to test a remote-sensing "virtual fence" concept on a 28-mile, high-traffic stretch of border south of Tucson over eight months, and then adjust their plans.
"We plan to build a little and test a little. . . . Stay tuned," Knocke said. "We're optimistic that Congress is going to provide the department with flexibility."
The split between GOP leaders hungry for a sound-bite-friendly accomplishment targeting immigration and others who support a more comprehensive approach also means that the fence bill will be watered down when lawmakers return for a lame-duck session in November, according to congressional aides and lobbyists.
The office of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) yesterday released a letter from House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) promising to ensure that Chertoff has discretion over whether to build a fence or choose other options. Homeland Security officials must also consult with U.S., state and local representatives on where structures are placed.
The letter was inserted in the Congressional Record on Friday night because Congress ran out of time to reach a final deal, aides said.
"State and local officials in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas should not be excluded from decisions about how to best protect our borders with their varying topography, population and geography," Hutchison said in a statement added to the record.
Congress also hedged on when a fence would be completed. The law mandating it said Homeland Security officials should gain "operational control" of the border in 18 months. But the law funding it envisions five years. Chertoff has set a goal of two to three years, but only after completion of an immigration overhaul.
Staff writer Peter Baker contributed to this report.
Front page
latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-immig30sep30,1,5146575.story?page=2&coll=la-headlines-frontpage
Border Barrier Approved
The bill, which calls for 700 miles of fence and beefed-up enforcement, easily clears the Senate. It does not include a guest worker program.
By Nicole Gaouette
Times Staff Writer
September 30, 2006
WASHINGTON - The Senate on Friday approved and sent to President Bush a bill calling for construction of a 700-mile wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, voting overwhelmingly for a project that became the centerpiece of efforts to improve border security and stem illegal immigration.
Bush is expected to sign the measure into law.
"Most immigrants come to America with good intentions, but not all of them," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said in supporting the bill. "We need an enforcement-first approach Š [that] allows us to get full operational control of our border."
The bill, which passed 80 to 19 and is identical to legislation passed by the House last week, authorizes the building of double-layered fencing in areas near Tecate and Calexico, Calif., and border towns in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.
It also empowers the government's Homeland Security secretary to "take all actions Š necessary" to stop "all unlawful entries into the United States."
The legislation's opponents dismissed it as a costly political gimmick that would have little effect on stopping illegal immigration. They also chided Congress for failing to create a guest worker program or to address the status of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S.
The fence is "a feel-good plan that will have little effect in the real world," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Even before the bill passed, it prompted an angry condemnation from the Mexican government.
"We have indicated in a clear and unambiguous manner that the wall is unnecessary and that it is not a gesture that shows friendship between the countries of Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States," said Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez.
He said Mexico would send a note of diplomatic protest about the fence to the White House.
The debate on immigration dominated much of this year's congressional session, especially after Bush in a nationally televised speech in May called for a sweeping rewrite of current policy. He called for legislation that, in addition to increased border security, would create a path to U.S. citizenship for many illegal immigrants and a guest worker program as part of a broad effort to control entry into the U.S.
The Senate later that month passed a bill embracing the approach, but efforts to reach agreement with the House quickly reached a stalemate.
Republican House leaders objected to citizenship proposals as a form of "amnesty" for illegal immigrants and insisted that any legislation passed this year should focus on enforcement at the border. With an eye on the November midterm election, they argued that their view was in line with the sentiments of most voters.
After months of back-and-forth over the issue, the fence bill is the main result of the debate, representing a partial victory for House Republicans. Some other enforcement measures sought by the House, such as making it easier to deport illegal immigrants linked to gangs, fell by the wayside.
As part of the larger push to secure the border, the House and Senate on Friday approved and sent to Bush a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security that, among other provisions, will alter the way Americans travel to and from Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean.
The bill, which Congress made a priority to pass before recessing for the November election, will require U.S. citizens to present a passport when returning from other countries in the Western Hemisphere, ending Americans' ability to cross these international borders with simply a driver's license or other forms of identification.
The provision, recommended by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is to take effect June 1, 2009.
The $33.7-billion spending bill also significantly boosts funding for border security and enforcement of immigration laws at work sites and elsewhere.
The bill will enable the Department of Homeland Security to hire an additional 1,500 border patrol agents and buy 6,700 more beds at detention centers for illegal immigrants. In the past, the lack of enough beds at these facilities has caused authorities to release some of the illegal immigrants they apprehended.
The bill also provides $1.2 billion to pay for border fencing, vehicle barriers and improved sensor equipment at border crossings.
The money "provides flexibility for smart deployment of physical infrastructure that needs to be built along the Southwest border," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Estimates of the cost of construction of 700 miles of fencing range from $2 billion to $9 billion, so Congress will need to allocate more money for the project in future years.
Fencing over about 90 miles now runs along the border with Mexico. Some secondary fencing has been installed 50 to 200 yards north of the border around San Diego and Tucson.
The Secure Fence Act specifies that fencing extend 10 miles to the east and west of Tecate, Calif., and from 10 miles west of Calexico, Calif., to five miles east of Douglas, Ariz.
In other areas, the fencing would start five miles west of Columbus, N.M., and extend to 10 miles east of El Paso; extend from five miles northwest of Del Rio, Texas, to five miles southeast of Eagle Pass, Texas; and from 15 miles northwest of Laredo, Texas, to Brownsville, Texas.
The Homeland Security spending bill also makes it a criminal offense to build tunnels under U.S. borders, and includes prison terms for landowners who allow the tunnels to be built on their property.
The measure was sponsored in the Senate by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and in the House by David Dreier (R-San Dimas).
Although Feinstein was among those voting for the fence bill, she was highly critical that it did not include a guest worker program, arguing that such a measure was vital to agriculture in California and other parts of the country.
On Friday, she joined with Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) in a failed effort to attach the program to the bill.
Labor shortages in the field are costing billions of dollars in lost produce this year.
Feinstein, noting that California produces about half of all America's fruits, vegetables and nuts, warned that harvest problems in the state would affect consumers in the other 49.
"I don't know what it takes to show that there is an emergency," she said. "I think next year we should be ready, willing and able to [create a guest worker program], but we will have lost one agricultural season. I just hope that someone will listen."
California's other senator, Democrat Barbara Boxer, also voted for the fence bill. Other prominent Democratic senators who supported it included Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois.
Overall, the bill was backed by 54 Republicans and 26 Democrats; opposing it were 17 Democrats, one Republican (Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island) and the Senate's lone independent (James M. Jeffords of Vermont).
Some of those voting for the bill said they believed it could serve as a prelude to the type of broader changes in immigration policy sought by Bush.
"Many people have told me they will support comprehensive immigration reform if we secure the border first," said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). "I hope we can use passage of this bill as a starting point toward long-term, comprehensive immigration reform."
Immigrant advocates expressed skepticism that the 700 miles of fencing would ever be completed, given how costly it may prove. They also predicted the bill would have the unintended effect of hurting the long-term prospects of the Republican Party by sparking intense opposition among Latinos.
"I'm going to go out on a limb and say we'll never see a 700-mile wall along the southern border," said Frank Sharry, executive director of National Immigration Forum. "This is about incumbent protection, not border protection."
Cecilia Muñoz, a vice president at the National Council of La Raza, characterized the fence bill as "more symbolism than substance."
She added, "It's pretty clear to me it's going to have a negative impact on Republican prospects."
nicole.gaouette@latimes.com
Times staff writer Hector Tobar contributed to this report from Mexico City.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
Front Page
washingtonpost.com
Herndon Zeroing In On Illegal Immigrants
Policies Could Affect Police, Businesses
By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006; A01
Herndon's decision Tuesday night to seek federal training for some of its police officers so they can enforce federal immigration law is part of a long-term effort by a new mayor and Town Council to aggressively curb the presence of residents who are in the country illegally.
Two proposals on the draft agenda for next week's council session would intensify the town's scrutiny of private employers. One would require anyone seeking a business license to prove legal immigration status. The other would compel contractors doing business with the town to provide evidence that their employees live in the United States legally.
The measures are likely to enlarge Herndon's role as a crucible in the national debate on immigration policy -- a position that town officials say they were forced into because of inaction by the federal government. The proposals also add fuel to charges from immigration advocates and some residents that Herndon, which has the largest proportion of foreign-born residents of any locality in the Washington area, has become implacably hostile to all immigrants, legal and illegal.
Illegal immigration has been the dominant issue in town politics since summer 2005, when the council voted, after bitter debate, to open a publicly funded center to help workers connect with employers. Before the Herndon Official Workers Center was established, laborers had gathered each morning in a 7-Eleven parking lot to find jobs -- an arrangement that neighbors and officials said was chaotic and confusing. Opponents of the center said that by opening it, the town was abetting illegal immigration.
In May, Herndon voters unseated Mayor Michael L. O'Reilly and two council members who supported the publicly funded facility and replaced them with challengers, including new Mayor Stephen J. DeBenedittis, who were highly critical of the idea.
Vice Mayor Dennis D. Husch, one of two council members who voted against the labor center last year, said that the new proposals are still "notional" at this point but that the council intends to send a message that illegal immigrants are not welcome in Herndon.
"These [proposals] may never see the light of day," Husch said. "But we need to do something."
Business licenses have traditionally served as revenue-raising instruments, with governments charging owners a set percentage of projected gross sales. But in an advisory opinion this summer, Virginia Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell said local governments can withhold licenses from applicants who are not living legally in the United States.
What the contracting measure would accomplish is less clear. Federal law already establishes penalties for employers who knowingly keep illegal workers on their payroll. Herndon's own standard contract language also forbids companies that employ the undocumented from working on major projects. Town Attorney Richard B. Kaufman said the council was interested in "beefing up" the language so that it applied to all contractors who provide services to the government.
The council's 6 to 1 vote late Tuesday authorizes town officials to contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to express interest in enrolling some officers in the agency's "287 (g)" program, a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
If the town is accepted into the program, it would negotiate an agreement covering the scope of the training officers would receive -- often in the areas of document identification and cross-cultural communication -- and what the law would empower them to do. In general, those who pass the five-week course are authorized to question or detain people they believe to be in the country illegally, according to ICE descriptions of the program.
In a hearing preceding the vote, supporters of the program said it would take criminals off the streets.
"You guys were elected because you said you would take action," Brenda Kelley, a 21-year resident of the town, told the council. "We all want safe, secure, happy, respectful neighborhoods."
"Herndon has a chance to lend a helping hand to federal immigration agents," Stacey Brooks said.
Jorge Rochac, a Salvadoran immigrant and former translator for the Herndon police department who ran unsuccessfully for a council seat this year, said adoption of the federal program "would tend to alienate the Hispanic community and makes them less apt to cooperate and trust the police."
Former council member John DeNoyer was also critical. "Would I be profiled as a suspected terrorist or illegal alien because I have a beard and often turn brown toward the end of an outdoor summer?" he asked. "Please do not glorify and nurture the xenophobic hysteria that is affecting our town."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Exhuming the Past In a Painful Quest
Victims' Families Seek Closure, Justice
By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 28, 2006; A01
NEBAJ, Guatemala -- A decade after the conclusion of the long civil war that ravaged this Central American nation, Guatemalans are literally trying to dig up their past.
Spurred by a surge of requests from victims' families this year, dozens of forensic anthropologists have been fanning out across the countryside to search for remains of the 200,000 people -- most of them Mayan Indian civilians -- who were killed or abducted during the 36-year conflict.
Many were massacred by military forces and dumped into mass graves. Others were buried hurriedly in unmarked, secret locations by relatives anxious to avoid rampaging troops.
About 40,000 victims simply disappeared after being seized by government operatives.
Nearly every day brings another grisly discovery: skulls of toddlers executed with gunshots to the head; corpses of young men whose necks are still looped with the garrotes used to strangle them. Nearly every week brings another funeral packed with weeping relatives: once-youthful widows now wrinkled and gray, children long since grown to adulthood.
Meanwhile, in a cavernous, damp warehouse in Guatemala's capital, investigators wearing protective masks and surgical gloves are combing through piles upon piles of mildewed documents from a recently discovered secret police archive, hunting for clues to the fate of the disappeared.
The current effort is hardly the first probe of wartime atrocities since peace accords ended the conflict in 1996. But its scope and pace are unprecedented in a country where those responsible have enjoyed near impunity. Only two military officials have been imprisoned for war crimes, according to human rights activists, despite findings by a U.N. commission that government and allied paramilitary forces committed nearly all of the atrocities.
Much of the bloodletting occurred in the late 1970s, when the military-backed dictatorship that had been battling leftist guerrillas expanded its targets to include anyone critical of the government -- including students, priests and union members. But the slaughter reached its peak in the early 1980s, when the military launched a scorched-earth campaign through the countryside to eliminate any potential support for the guerrillas from the long-oppressed Mayan Indians. Hundreds of villages were burned, livestock destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.
The remains of fewer than 5,000 victims have been returned to their families.
The anguish of those still searching was palpable among the two dozen Mayan Indians who attended a recent exhumation near this town in the central Guatemalan department of Quiche.
Most were subsistence farmers and manual laborers who could speak only their native Mayan language and could ill afford to take time off from work. Yet day after day they hiked to the grave site atop a mist-shrouded mountain -- the women bearing small children strapped to their backs with colorful blankets, the men shouldering shovels to help the forensic team dig for bodies.
'I Don't Think It's Her'
Jacinto Bernal, a 56-year-old with weathered skin, blinked back tears as he watched an anthropologist brush away dirt from the skeleton of a woman who appeared to be in her thirties and may or may not have been his wife, Maria Perez. She was gunned down by a military helicopter in 1985, he said, leaving him to raise their four young children on his own.
"I don't think it's her," Bernal muttered miserably. "She was struck in the back of the head, but it looks like this skull has a hole in the front."
There was little else to go on.
Like others who used the spot as a secret burial ground during the 1980s, Bernal had been forced to sneak there after dark and could no longer remember exactly where he had buried his wife's body.
A few feet away, in a different group of peasants, Petrona Bernal, 45, squatted by a grave containing the tiny bones of a young child whom she hoped would prove to be her baby boy. He was born in 1982, shortly after Bernal's village was destroyed.
"We lived on the run," she recalled. "All we had to eat was herbs and flowers."
Malnourished and weak, she had given birth to her son in the forest, only to watch the infant die of hunger days later. Ever since, Bernal said, she has ached to recover the boy's body and give him a proper Christian burial.
Until now, she had not dared to return to the secret grave site. Many members of civil defense patrols who carried out atrocities at the military's behest still live among the communities they once terrorized. Many military leaders who directed the war remain powerful -- including Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator who today heads one of the largest parties in the legislature.
Ríos Montt has repeatedly denied ordering the hundreds of massacres documented during his 1982-83 tenure and has even questioned whether they took place. Forensic workers, lawyers and activists seeking to uncover war crimes have also faced repeated threats. Several have been killed.
But thanks in part to an infusion of foreign funds, private forensic teams and grass-roots organizations dedicated to helping indigenous peoples have expanded their efforts to file claims with the state to authorize exhumations.
The campaign also received a boost in 2004 when the newly elected president, Óscar Berger, publicly apologized to the victims of wartime atrocities on behalf of the government. He has established a commission to compensate them as well as help fund some of the forensic work this year.
Back in the late 1990s, noted Fredy Peccerelli, head of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, his organization was a tiny outfit able to conduct only about 10 exhumations a year. This year his staff of 80 has already reached 120 sites. They expect to recover about 450 bodies by the end of this year, and about 1,000 per year in the near future.
Even so, at that rate it will take decades to recover even a fraction of the total number of victims.
Finding and identifying the 40,000 who went missing is an even greater challenge. Many were pulled off buses or back roads and taken to military bases far from their home provinces to be tortured by interrogators.
Of the 650 bodies Peccerelli's group has recovered from exhumations at military bases, only 220 have been identified. The rest are being stored in stacks of cardboard boxes at the foundation's headquarters, awaiting a new initiative to collect and compare DNA samples from victims and their relatives that Peccerelli hopes to begin soon.
A Massive Police Archive
Another potential source of leads is the recently discovered secret police archive. Deputies of Guatemala's human rights ombudsman stumbled upon it accidentally in July 2005 when they were investigating complaints that explosives were being unsafely stored in the area.
The documents number more than 80 million pages and date as far back as the 1880s. Stacked from floor to ceiling in room after room, they have been badly damaged by water, rats and insects, and do not include records from precincts in several regions where the worst atrocities occurred. However, buried in the mountains of paper are priceless finds like death certificates for unidentified bodies found by police. By comparing the fingerprints on the certificates with those on the national identity cards of missing victims, said Peccerelli, "you can find if there's a match and then search for the body at a specific cemetery."
Alberto Fuentes, who is overseeing the preservation and analysis of the archives, said investigators have also come across a few arrest warrants for people detained for "political crimes" who later turned up dead -- including grandmothers and babies.
But he cautioned that it would take time to find enough documents in the archives to mount a legal case against their killers. "This is a project of 20 years," he said.
The evidence generated by the recent exhumations has also failed so far to spur a rise in prosecutions.
"We still have a weak state that is scared of the military," said Frank LaRue, one of Guatemala's leading human rights advocates. "Local prosecutors are authorizing the exhumations. But when the results come in, they don't initiate criminal proceedings. So we're having all these exhumations but no trials."
Even if prosecutors were to open cases, convictions could be hard to achieve. While Guatemalan judges have sentenced some members of the civil defense patrols, suits against those who issued their orders have been tied up in legal wrangling or languished in the attorney general's office for years.
Efforts by Guatemalans to obtain justice from foreign courts have also met with obstacles. In July, Judge Santiago Pedraz of the Spanish National Court issued arrest warrants for eight former military officials, including Ríos Montt, on charges of genocide, torture, terrorism and illegal detention. Guatemalan authorities have not acted on the warrants, and Guatemalan courts blocked Pedraz from deposing the accused during a fact-finding trip in June.
Nonetheless, Peccerelli remains hopeful, pointing out that it took years of activism and hundreds of exhumations just to get the government to admit that civilians had been killed. "Now it is accepted that those massacres occurred," he said. "We're just waiting for the next step, and we know that the work we're doing will contribute."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com, front page
America's Population Set to Top 300 Million
Immigration Fuels Much of Growth
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 12, 2006; A01
Clicking upward at a rate of one person every 11 seconds, the U.S. population will officially surpass 300 million in the next week or so.
The milestone is a reminder that the United States remains a remarkable demographic specimen, 230 years old (since the Declaration of Independence) and still in a growth spurt.
Behind only China and India, it is the planet's third most populous nation. For a rich, highly developed country, it is anomalously fertile, with a population that is increasing briskly, in sharp contrast to anemic growth or decline in Western Europe and Japan. Some demographers say this continued growth is essential to support an aging population in retirement and a sign of the continued allure of the United States even at a time when its image around the world has been sullied by the war in Iraq.
Yet, how will the momentous 300-million marker be celebrated in Washington?
"Those plans, believe it or not, are still being finalized," said Robert B. Bernstein, a Census Bureau spokesman. "I don't yet know what, if anything, we are going to do in the way of an event."
When the U.S. population surpassed 200 million on a census clock in 1967, cheers rang through the lobby of the Commerce Department, and applause interrupted President Lyndon B. Johnson's celebratory speech.
Four decades later, however, 300 million seems to be greeted more with hand-wringing ambivalence than chest-thumping pride.
"When we hit 100 million, it was a celebration of America's might in the world," said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California. "When we hit 200 million, we were solidifying our position. But at 300 million, we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."
One reason for anxiety may be that U.S. population growth is fueled in large measure by immigrants and their children, a circumstance that increasingly worries native-born Americans and makes politicians jumpy, especially four weeks before an election.
Immigrants, legal and illegal, account for about 40 percent of population growth. Immigration is also an important reason the "natural increase" in the population -- excess of births over deaths -- is significantly higher in the United States compared with Europe or Japan. Hispanics from Latin America, by far the largest share of recent immigrants, are driving the natural increase here. On average, Hispanic women have one more child than non-Hispanic white women.
Three hundred million is also a discomfiting reminder of a nation that, on its east and west coasts, at least, is running noticeably low on elbow room. More humanity is stirring up more traffic, more sprawl, more rules against growth, more protests against anti-growth rules, and more of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. A surging population in the arid Southwest is also straining the supply of water. The growth is adding to a country that represents 4 percent of the world's population but consumes 25 percent of the planet's oil.
"We are not the wide-open spaces anymore," said Martha Farnsworth Riche, who headed the Census Bureau in the mid-1990s and is now a research demographer at Cornell University. "Our choices are constrained."
In Los Angeles, the nation's most densely populated metropolitan region and its most heavily Latino area, 300 million will be yet another confirmation that congestion is out of control, Myers predicted.
"I don't think people view population growth as a plus anymore," he said, noting that Angelenos are punished by it "every single day" when they go out in freeway traffic.
The 300-million milestone, it should be noted, is an educated guess by the Census Bureau, not an actual people count. It emerges from a formula that crunches births and new immigrants against deaths. The 300-millionth person, therefore, will never win a trip to Disneyland because he or she will not be identified.
The 100-million markers are also coming more quickly. From the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it took the country 139 years to get to 100 million in 1915, then 52 more years to reach 200 million in 1967 and 39 more years to hit 300 million. The 400 million mark, according to census projections, will be reached in about 37 years. That, of course, could change if the current anxiety about immigration were to result in the closing of the country's borders. Without immigration, the U.S. population could go into a European-style stall.
It was a change in immigration law in 1965, when Congress abolished a national-origins quota system, that unintentionally reignited immigrant-led population growth, according to William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. "It made family reunification an important criteria for immigration and it led to a chain reaction of higher fertility," he said.
The relative presence of immigrants, about 12 percent of the total population, is more than double what it was when the population topped 200 million. Immigrants are also more visible than ever, having fanned out from gateway cities such as New York and Los Angeles to parts of the rural South and Midwest where they had not been seen in substantial numbers before. Still, the foreign-born share of the population remains lower than between the melting-pot years of 1860 and 1920, when it was about 14 percent.
Many demographers believe it is shortsighted to be anxious about the 300-million marker. They regard it as a symbol of an economically dynamic democracy that remains popular in much of the world.
"As almost nothing else can, immigration-led growth signals the attractiveness of the American economy and polity," said Kenneth Prewitt, a former head of the Census Bureau and now professor of public affairs at Columbia University. "You don't see large numbers of immigrants clamoring to move to China."
Indeed, lots of good news is embodied in the lives of the 300 million. Longevity has jumped from 55 years in 1915, to 71 years in 1967, to 78 years now. Over that time frame, the percentage of the adult population with a high-school diploma has jumped from 14 percent to 85 percent. Homeownership has risen from 46 to 69 percent. The death rate from tuberculosis has fallen from 140 to 0.2 per 100,000 people. While houses are 4.5 times as expensive (in constant dollars) as they were in 1915 and twice as expensive as in 1967, a gallon of milk in 2006 costs less than half what it went for in 1915 and in 1967.
After this year's election rhetoric cools, Frey hopes that Americans will see a silver lining in immigration: Foreign-born residents and their children will surge into the workforce, and their payroll taxes will help reduce funding shortfalls for Social Security and other social programs that benefit older people.
"So many middle-aged baby boomers who oppose immigration may be biting the hand that could feed them," Frey said.
This assumes, though, that immigrant children, especially Hispanics and blacks, will be educated well enough in American schools to find competitive jobs in the global economy.
Poverty rates for children have exceeded poverty rates for the elderly for more than 40 years, according to Linda A. Jacobsen, director of domestic programs at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group.
Hispanic and black children are between three and four times as likely to live in poverty as whites, so their growing numbers may not translate into growing national wealth. In addition, the divide between aging baby boomers in retirement and the younger workers who are supporting them with payroll taxes will have a racial, as well as a generational, dimension.
"Unless we can reduce age, racial and ethnic disparities in poverty," Jacobsen warns, "children from minority groups may be less able and less willing, as they grow up, to support the predominantly white elderly population."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Another look at the fine priint.
Front page, Washington Post
In Border Fence's Path, Congressional Roadblocks
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 6, 2006; A01
No sooner did Congress authorize construction of a 700-mile fence on the U.S.-Mexico border last week than lawmakers rushed to approve separate legislation that ensures it will never be built, at least not as advertised, according to Republican lawmakers and immigration experts.
GOP leaders have singled out the fence as one of the primary accomplishments of the recently completed session. Many lawmakers plan to highlight their $1.2 billion down payment on its construction as they campaign in the weeks before the midterm elections.
But shortly before recessing late Friday, the House and Senate gave the Bush administration leeway to distribute the money to a combination of projects -- not just the physical barrier along the southern border. The funds may also be spent on roads, technology and "tactical infrastructure" to support the Department of Homeland Security's preferred option of a "virtual fence."
What's more, in a late-night concession to win over wavering Republicans, GOP congressional leaders pledged in writing that Native American tribes, members of Congress, governors and local leaders would get a say in "the exact placement" of any structure, and that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would have the flexibility to use alternatives "when fencing is ineffective or impractical."
The loopholes leave the Bush administration with authority to decide where, when and how long a fence will be built, except for small stretches east of San Diego and in western Arizona. Homeland Security officials have proposed a fence half as long, lawmakers said.
"It's one thing to authorize. It's another thing to actually appropriate the money and do it," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). The fine-print distinction between what Congress says it will do and what it actually pays for is a time-honored result of the checks and balances between lawmakers who oversee agencies and those who hold their purse strings.
In this case, it also reflects political calculations by GOP strategists that voters do not mind the details, and that key players -- including the administration, local leaders and the Mexican government -- oppose a fence-only approach, analysts said.
President Bush signed the $34.8 billion homeland security budget bill Wednesday in Scottsdale, Ariz., without referring to the 700-mile barrier. Instead, he highlighted the $1.2 billion that Congress provided for an unspecified blend of fencing, vehicle barriers, lighting and technology such as ground-based radar, cameras and sensors.
"That's what the people of this country want," the president said. "They want to know that we're modernizing the border so we can better secure the border."
Bush and Chertoff have said repeatedly that enforcement alone will not work and that they want limited dollars spent elsewhere, such as on a temporary-worker program to ease pressure on the border. At an estimated $3 million to $10 million per mile, the double-layered barrier will cost considerably more than $1.2 billion.
Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who chairs the Senate subcommittee that funds the Department of Homeland Security, said that before the legislation was approved, the department had planned to build 320 miles of fencing, secure 500 miles of hard-to-traverse areas by blocking roads and monitor electronically the rest of the 2,000-mile-long southern frontier.
"I think there'll be fencing where the department feels that it makes sense," Gregg said, estimating that "at least 300 to 400 miles" will be built.
Congress withheld $950 million of the $1.2 billion, pending a breakdown by Chertoff of how he plans to spend the money. It is due in early December, after the midterm elections.
Asked whether Homeland Security would build 700 miles of fence, department spokesman Russ Knocke would not say. Instead, he noted that department leaders announced last month that they will spend $67 million to test a remote-sensing "virtual fence" concept on a 28-mile, high-traffic stretch of border south of Tucson over eight months, and then adjust their plans.
"We plan to build a little and test a little. . . . Stay tuned," Knocke said. "We're optimistic that Congress is going to provide the department with flexibility."
The split between GOP leaders hungry for a sound-bite-friendly accomplishment targeting immigration and others who support a more comprehensive approach also means that the fence bill will be watered down when lawmakers return for a lame-duck session in November, according to congressional aides and lobbyists.
The office of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) yesterday released a letter from House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) promising to ensure that Chertoff has discretion over whether to build a fence or choose other options. Homeland Security officials must also consult with U.S., state and local representatives on where structures are placed.
The letter was inserted in the Congressional Record on Friday night because Congress ran out of time to reach a final deal, aides said.
"State and local officials in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas should not be excluded from decisions about how to best protect our borders with their varying topography, population and geography," Hutchison said in a statement added to the record.
Congress also hedged on when a fence would be completed. The law mandating it said Homeland Security officials should gain "operational control" of the border in 18 months. But the law funding it envisions five years. Chertoff has set a goal of two to three years, but only after completion of an immigration overhaul.
Staff writer Peter Baker contributed to this report.
Front page
latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-immig30sep30,1,5146575.story?page=2&coll=la-headlines-frontpage
Border Barrier Approved
The bill, which calls for 700 miles of fence and beefed-up enforcement, easily clears the Senate. It does not include a guest worker program.
By Nicole Gaouette
Times Staff Writer
September 30, 2006
WASHINGTON - The Senate on Friday approved and sent to President Bush a bill calling for construction of a 700-mile wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, voting overwhelmingly for a project that became the centerpiece of efforts to improve border security and stem illegal immigration.
Bush is expected to sign the measure into law.
"Most immigrants come to America with good intentions, but not all of them," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said in supporting the bill. "We need an enforcement-first approach Š [that] allows us to get full operational control of our border."
The bill, which passed 80 to 19 and is identical to legislation passed by the House last week, authorizes the building of double-layered fencing in areas near Tecate and Calexico, Calif., and border towns in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.
It also empowers the government's Homeland Security secretary to "take all actions Š necessary" to stop "all unlawful entries into the United States."
The legislation's opponents dismissed it as a costly political gimmick that would have little effect on stopping illegal immigration. They also chided Congress for failing to create a guest worker program or to address the status of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S.
The fence is "a feel-good plan that will have little effect in the real world," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Even before the bill passed, it prompted an angry condemnation from the Mexican government.
"We have indicated in a clear and unambiguous manner that the wall is unnecessary and that it is not a gesture that shows friendship between the countries of Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States," said Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez.
He said Mexico would send a note of diplomatic protest about the fence to the White House.
The debate on immigration dominated much of this year's congressional session, especially after Bush in a nationally televised speech in May called for a sweeping rewrite of current policy. He called for legislation that, in addition to increased border security, would create a path to U.S. citizenship for many illegal immigrants and a guest worker program as part of a broad effort to control entry into the U.S.
The Senate later that month passed a bill embracing the approach, but efforts to reach agreement with the House quickly reached a stalemate.
Republican House leaders objected to citizenship proposals as a form of "amnesty" for illegal immigrants and insisted that any legislation passed this year should focus on enforcement at the border. With an eye on the November midterm election, they argued that their view was in line with the sentiments of most voters.
After months of back-and-forth over the issue, the fence bill is the main result of the debate, representing a partial victory for House Republicans. Some other enforcement measures sought by the House, such as making it easier to deport illegal immigrants linked to gangs, fell by the wayside.
As part of the larger push to secure the border, the House and Senate on Friday approved and sent to Bush a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security that, among other provisions, will alter the way Americans travel to and from Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean.
The bill, which Congress made a priority to pass before recessing for the November election, will require U.S. citizens to present a passport when returning from other countries in the Western Hemisphere, ending Americans' ability to cross these international borders with simply a driver's license or other forms of identification.
The provision, recommended by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is to take effect June 1, 2009.
The $33.7-billion spending bill also significantly boosts funding for border security and enforcement of immigration laws at work sites and elsewhere.
The bill will enable the Department of Homeland Security to hire an additional 1,500 border patrol agents and buy 6,700 more beds at detention centers for illegal immigrants. In the past, the lack of enough beds at these facilities has caused authorities to release some of the illegal immigrants they apprehended.
The bill also provides $1.2 billion to pay for border fencing, vehicle barriers and improved sensor equipment at border crossings.
The money "provides flexibility for smart deployment of physical infrastructure that needs to be built along the Southwest border," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Estimates of the cost of construction of 700 miles of fencing range from $2 billion to $9 billion, so Congress will need to allocate more money for the project in future years.
Fencing over about 90 miles now runs along the border with Mexico. Some secondary fencing has been installed 50 to 200 yards north of the border around San Diego and Tucson.
The Secure Fence Act specifies that fencing extend 10 miles to the east and west of Tecate, Calif., and from 10 miles west of Calexico, Calif., to five miles east of Douglas, Ariz.
In other areas, the fencing would start five miles west of Columbus, N.M., and extend to 10 miles east of El Paso; extend from five miles northwest of Del Rio, Texas, to five miles southeast of Eagle Pass, Texas; and from 15 miles northwest of Laredo, Texas, to Brownsville, Texas.
The Homeland Security spending bill also makes it a criminal offense to build tunnels under U.S. borders, and includes prison terms for landowners who allow the tunnels to be built on their property.
The measure was sponsored in the Senate by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and in the House by David Dreier (R-San Dimas).
Although Feinstein was among those voting for the fence bill, she was highly critical that it did not include a guest worker program, arguing that such a measure was vital to agriculture in California and other parts of the country.
On Friday, she joined with Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) in a failed effort to attach the program to the bill.
Labor shortages in the field are costing billions of dollars in lost produce this year.
Feinstein, noting that California produces about half of all America's fruits, vegetables and nuts, warned that harvest problems in the state would affect consumers in the other 49.
"I don't know what it takes to show that there is an emergency," she said. "I think next year we should be ready, willing and able to [create a guest worker program], but we will have lost one agricultural season. I just hope that someone will listen."
California's other senator, Democrat Barbara Boxer, also voted for the fence bill. Other prominent Democratic senators who supported it included Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois.
Overall, the bill was backed by 54 Republicans and 26 Democrats; opposing it were 17 Democrats, one Republican (Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island) and the Senate's lone independent (James M. Jeffords of Vermont).
Some of those voting for the bill said they believed it could serve as a prelude to the type of broader changes in immigration policy sought by Bush.
"Many people have told me they will support comprehensive immigration reform if we secure the border first," said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). "I hope we can use passage of this bill as a starting point toward long-term, comprehensive immigration reform."
Immigrant advocates expressed skepticism that the 700 miles of fencing would ever be completed, given how costly it may prove. They also predicted the bill would have the unintended effect of hurting the long-term prospects of the Republican Party by sparking intense opposition among Latinos.
"I'm going to go out on a limb and say we'll never see a 700-mile wall along the southern border," said Frank Sharry, executive director of National Immigration Forum. "This is about incumbent protection, not border protection."
Cecilia Muñoz, a vice president at the National Council of La Raza, characterized the fence bill as "more symbolism than substance."
She added, "It's pretty clear to me it's going to have a negative impact on Republican prospects."
nicole.gaouette@latimes.com
Times staff writer Hector Tobar contributed to this report from Mexico City.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
Front Page
washingtonpost.com
Herndon Zeroing In On Illegal Immigrants
Policies Could Affect Police, Businesses
By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006; A01
Herndon's decision Tuesday night to seek federal training for some of its police officers so they can enforce federal immigration law is part of a long-term effort by a new mayor and Town Council to aggressively curb the presence of residents who are in the country illegally.
Two proposals on the draft agenda for next week's council session would intensify the town's scrutiny of private employers. One would require anyone seeking a business license to prove legal immigration status. The other would compel contractors doing business with the town to provide evidence that their employees live in the United States legally.
The measures are likely to enlarge Herndon's role as a crucible in the national debate on immigration policy -- a position that town officials say they were forced into because of inaction by the federal government. The proposals also add fuel to charges from immigration advocates and some residents that Herndon, which has the largest proportion of foreign-born residents of any locality in the Washington area, has become implacably hostile to all immigrants, legal and illegal.
Illegal immigration has been the dominant issue in town politics since summer 2005, when the council voted, after bitter debate, to open a publicly funded center to help workers connect with employers. Before the Herndon Official Workers Center was established, laborers had gathered each morning in a 7-Eleven parking lot to find jobs -- an arrangement that neighbors and officials said was chaotic and confusing. Opponents of the center said that by opening it, the town was abetting illegal immigration.
In May, Herndon voters unseated Mayor Michael L. O'Reilly and two council members who supported the publicly funded facility and replaced them with challengers, including new Mayor Stephen J. DeBenedittis, who were highly critical of the idea.
Vice Mayor Dennis D. Husch, one of two council members who voted against the labor center last year, said that the new proposals are still "notional" at this point but that the council intends to send a message that illegal immigrants are not welcome in Herndon.
"These [proposals] may never see the light of day," Husch said. "But we need to do something."
Business licenses have traditionally served as revenue-raising instruments, with governments charging owners a set percentage of projected gross sales. But in an advisory opinion this summer, Virginia Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell said local governments can withhold licenses from applicants who are not living legally in the United States.
What the contracting measure would accomplish is less clear. Federal law already establishes penalties for employers who knowingly keep illegal workers on their payroll. Herndon's own standard contract language also forbids companies that employ the undocumented from working on major projects. Town Attorney Richard B. Kaufman said the council was interested in "beefing up" the language so that it applied to all contractors who provide services to the government.
The council's 6 to 1 vote late Tuesday authorizes town officials to contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to express interest in enrolling some officers in the agency's "287 (g)" program, a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
If the town is accepted into the program, it would negotiate an agreement covering the scope of the training officers would receive -- often in the areas of document identification and cross-cultural communication -- and what the law would empower them to do. In general, those who pass the five-week course are authorized to question or detain people they believe to be in the country illegally, according to ICE descriptions of the program.
In a hearing preceding the vote, supporters of the program said it would take criminals off the streets.
"You guys were elected because you said you would take action," Brenda Kelley, a 21-year resident of the town, told the council. "We all want safe, secure, happy, respectful neighborhoods."
"Herndon has a chance to lend a helping hand to federal immigration agents," Stacey Brooks said.
Jorge Rochac, a Salvadoran immigrant and former translator for the Herndon police department who ran unsuccessfully for a council seat this year, said adoption of the federal program "would tend to alienate the Hispanic community and makes them less apt to cooperate and trust the police."
Former council member John DeNoyer was also critical. "Would I be profiled as a suspected terrorist or illegal alien because I have a beard and often turn brown toward the end of an outdoor summer?" he asked. "Please do not glorify and nurture the xenophobic hysteria that is affecting our town."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Exhuming the Past In a Painful Quest
Victims' Families Seek Closure, Justice
By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 28, 2006; A01
NEBAJ, Guatemala -- A decade after the conclusion of the long civil war that ravaged this Central American nation, Guatemalans are literally trying to dig up their past.
Spurred by a surge of requests from victims' families this year, dozens of forensic anthropologists have been fanning out across the countryside to search for remains of the 200,000 people -- most of them Mayan Indian civilians -- who were killed or abducted during the 36-year conflict.
Many were massacred by military forces and dumped into mass graves. Others were buried hurriedly in unmarked, secret locations by relatives anxious to avoid rampaging troops.
About 40,000 victims simply disappeared after being seized by government operatives.
Nearly every day brings another grisly discovery: skulls of toddlers executed with gunshots to the head; corpses of young men whose necks are still looped with the garrotes used to strangle them. Nearly every week brings another funeral packed with weeping relatives: once-youthful widows now wrinkled and gray, children long since grown to adulthood.
Meanwhile, in a cavernous, damp warehouse in Guatemala's capital, investigators wearing protective masks and surgical gloves are combing through piles upon piles of mildewed documents from a recently discovered secret police archive, hunting for clues to the fate of the disappeared.
The current effort is hardly the first probe of wartime atrocities since peace accords ended the conflict in 1996. But its scope and pace are unprecedented in a country where those responsible have enjoyed near impunity. Only two military officials have been imprisoned for war crimes, according to human rights activists, despite findings by a U.N. commission that government and allied paramilitary forces committed nearly all of the atrocities.
Much of the bloodletting occurred in the late 1970s, when the military-backed dictatorship that had been battling leftist guerrillas expanded its targets to include anyone critical of the government -- including students, priests and union members. But the slaughter reached its peak in the early 1980s, when the military launched a scorched-earth campaign through the countryside to eliminate any potential support for the guerrillas from the long-oppressed Mayan Indians. Hundreds of villages were burned, livestock destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.
The remains of fewer than 5,000 victims have been returned to their families.
The anguish of those still searching was palpable among the two dozen Mayan Indians who attended a recent exhumation near this town in the central Guatemalan department of Quiche.
Most were subsistence farmers and manual laborers who could speak only their native Mayan language and could ill afford to take time off from work. Yet day after day they hiked to the grave site atop a mist-shrouded mountain -- the women bearing small children strapped to their backs with colorful blankets, the men shouldering shovels to help the forensic team dig for bodies.
'I Don't Think It's Her'
Jacinto Bernal, a 56-year-old with weathered skin, blinked back tears as he watched an anthropologist brush away dirt from the skeleton of a woman who appeared to be in her thirties and may or may not have been his wife, Maria Perez. She was gunned down by a military helicopter in 1985, he said, leaving him to raise their four young children on his own.
"I don't think it's her," Bernal muttered miserably. "She was struck in the back of the head, but it looks like this skull has a hole in the front."
There was little else to go on.
Like others who used the spot as a secret burial ground during the 1980s, Bernal had been forced to sneak there after dark and could no longer remember exactly where he had buried his wife's body.
A few feet away, in a different group of peasants, Petrona Bernal, 45, squatted by a grave containing the tiny bones of a young child whom she hoped would prove to be her baby boy. He was born in 1982, shortly after Bernal's village was destroyed.
"We lived on the run," she recalled. "All we had to eat was herbs and flowers."
Malnourished and weak, she had given birth to her son in the forest, only to watch the infant die of hunger days later. Ever since, Bernal said, she has ached to recover the boy's body and give him a proper Christian burial.
Until now, she had not dared to return to the secret grave site. Many members of civil defense patrols who carried out atrocities at the military's behest still live among the communities they once terrorized. Many military leaders who directed the war remain powerful -- including Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator who today heads one of the largest parties in the legislature.
Ríos Montt has repeatedly denied ordering the hundreds of massacres documented during his 1982-83 tenure and has even questioned whether they took place. Forensic workers, lawyers and activists seeking to uncover war crimes have also faced repeated threats. Several have been killed.
But thanks in part to an infusion of foreign funds, private forensic teams and grass-roots organizations dedicated to helping indigenous peoples have expanded their efforts to file claims with the state to authorize exhumations.
The campaign also received a boost in 2004 when the newly elected president, Óscar Berger, publicly apologized to the victims of wartime atrocities on behalf of the government. He has established a commission to compensate them as well as help fund some of the forensic work this year.
Back in the late 1990s, noted Fredy Peccerelli, head of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, his organization was a tiny outfit able to conduct only about 10 exhumations a year. This year his staff of 80 has already reached 120 sites. They expect to recover about 450 bodies by the end of this year, and about 1,000 per year in the near future.
Even so, at that rate it will take decades to recover even a fraction of the total number of victims.
Finding and identifying the 40,000 who went missing is an even greater challenge. Many were pulled off buses or back roads and taken to military bases far from their home provinces to be tortured by interrogators.
Of the 650 bodies Peccerelli's group has recovered from exhumations at military bases, only 220 have been identified. The rest are being stored in stacks of cardboard boxes at the foundation's headquarters, awaiting a new initiative to collect and compare DNA samples from victims and their relatives that Peccerelli hopes to begin soon.
A Massive Police Archive
Another potential source of leads is the recently discovered secret police archive. Deputies of Guatemala's human rights ombudsman stumbled upon it accidentally in July 2005 when they were investigating complaints that explosives were being unsafely stored in the area.
The documents number more than 80 million pages and date as far back as the 1880s. Stacked from floor to ceiling in room after room, they have been badly damaged by water, rats and insects, and do not include records from precincts in several regions where the worst atrocities occurred. However, buried in the mountains of paper are priceless finds like death certificates for unidentified bodies found by police. By comparing the fingerprints on the certificates with those on the national identity cards of missing victims, said Peccerelli, "you can find if there's a match and then search for the body at a specific cemetery."
Alberto Fuentes, who is overseeing the preservation and analysis of the archives, said investigators have also come across a few arrest warrants for people detained for "political crimes" who later turned up dead -- including grandmothers and babies.
But he cautioned that it would take time to find enough documents in the archives to mount a legal case against their killers. "This is a project of 20 years," he said.
The evidence generated by the recent exhumations has also failed so far to spur a rise in prosecutions.
"We still have a weak state that is scared of the military," said Frank LaRue, one of Guatemala's leading human rights advocates. "Local prosecutors are authorizing the exhumations. But when the results come in, they don't initiate criminal proceedings. So we're having all these exhumations but no trials."
Even if prosecutors were to open cases, convictions could be hard to achieve. While Guatemalan judges have sentenced some members of the civil defense patrols, suits against those who issued their orders have been tied up in legal wrangling or languished in the attorney general's office for years.
Efforts by Guatemalans to obtain justice from foreign courts have also met with obstacles. In July, Judge Santiago Pedraz of the Spanish National Court issued arrest warrants for eight former military officials, including Ríos Montt, on charges of genocide, torture, terrorism and illegal detention. Guatemalan authorities have not acted on the warrants, and Guatemalan courts blocked Pedraz from deposing the accused during a fact-finding trip in June.
Nonetheless, Peccerelli remains hopeful, pointing out that it took years of activism and hundreds of exhumations just to get the government to admit that civilians had been killed. "Now it is accepted that those massacres occurred," he said. "We're just waiting for the next step, and we know that the work we're doing will contribute."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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