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Frontera NorteSur

A state audit of the municipal government of Sunland Park, New Mexico, has uncovered not only sloppy accounting practices but widespread violations of New Mexico state law and city spending regulations. While some former officials implicated in wrongdoing have already been charged in related criminal cases, the audit casts a larger net that could land other individuals in and out of Sunland Park city government in a big heap of trouble. And according to State Auditor Hector Balderas, the buck should stop with the border city’s fractious city council.

“There are violations of law related to budget and inventory that fall on the authority of the governing body, which is the city council,” Balderas said. The state official told Frontera NorteSur that the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration (DFA), which took charge of Sunland Park’s municipal finances after suspending two city officials on May 14, is now looking into the roles of the different council members in allowing one of New Mexico’s most impoverished towns to run up deficits, misuse budgets and illegally expend funds, including moneys allegedly spent on sexual entertainment at a U. S-Mexico border legislators’ conference held last fall in Saltillo, Mexico. The Saltillo finding has been turned over to the FBI, Balderas said.

As the Land of Enchantment celebrates its centennial anniversary as a U. S. state, Sunland Park now has the dubious claim of fame to being the only known municipality in New Mexico history where the state stepped in, suspended officials and seized at least partial control of local government functions.

Pressed if Sunland Park’s financial scandals were the result of professional ignorance or willful law-breaking, Balderas said indications of both problems were evident to him. “There are clear signs of incompetence and negligence,” Balderas said, “but there are also signs of conspiracy and people working together to violate the law,”

In a report released this week, Balderas and his staff zeroed in on 27 separate findings related to regular budgets, special funds, travel policies, and the Open Meetings Act.

The audit contains information that had not been previously publicly reported. For example, the report found that eight Sunland Park Police Department computers and three standalone hard drives were not disposed of in a proper way, possibly exposing confidential information to identity theft schemes. According to Balderas, the State Motor Vehicle Division is now looking into the matter.

Balderas’ team was unable to verify the status of many other assets presumably owned by the city, since Sunland Park officials “failed to provide” investigators with a “complete certified listing of capital assets” for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, according to the report. Information was missing for the city’s solid waste, water, wastewater and motor vehicle fund divisions, the report said.

And the audit took the Sunland Park city government to task for hiring its attorney, prominent Santa Fe lawyer Frank Coppler, in a non-competitive manner that allegedly violated the Procurement Code. The report stated that the city paid Coppler $481,378 in fees for fiscal years 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Coppler was unavailable for comment, and his office said the lawyer would send a statement via e-mail on Tuesday, May 15. However, Frontera NorteSur still had not received the response as the evening publication deadline approached .

A major area of concern for Balderas’ team of investigators is the $12 million-plus Border Crossing Fund, established with a donation by Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino owner Stan Fulton, for the development of a new crossing between the New Mexico town and the northwestern edge of Ciudad Juarez. Balderas contended that the fund served as a “personal slush fund” for some Sunland Park officials, though certain legitimate expenditures were also documented, he was quick to add. Balderas confirmed that the remaining portion of the fund is under the control of the DFA,

New Mexico’s state auditor said he would like to see some of the money misspent in Sunland Park paid back but to the taxpayers, but did not know how likely the prospect for reimbursements was due to the city’s shaky financial situation.

Balderas recalled that he had handled tough situations, ranging from the embezzlement case in the Jemez Mountain Public School District to belligerent Public Regulation Commission officials, but had “never seen the level of abuse” and “the penetration of criminals” as in Sunland Park. The shenanigans, he said, amounted to organized crime. “Even the mob has more respect than to use tax dollars,” Balderas asserted.

In addition to Governor Susana Martinez and the DFA, which has already intervened in the border town brouhaha, Balderas’ report is being sent to New Mexico State Attorney General Gary King, the Third Judicial District, the New Mexico State Police, the Tax Fraud Investigations Division of the Taxation and Revenue Department, the FBI, the U. S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico and the Legislative Finance Committee headed by border-area Democrat John Arthur Smith of Deming.

While Balderas’ staff found plenty of grist for law enforcement authorities and lawmakers to mull over, the state auditor emphasized that the probe is far from over. “We’ve spent thousands of hours on this report and we’re beginning a second audit,” Balderas said.

In an election year, the thickening smoke from the Sunland Park scandal could drift far and wide.

Meantime, political uncertainties continue to grip the town of about 14,000 people. Twice within the past week, the city council has failed to name a new mayor. The seat has stayed vacant for months, and the winner of last March’s election, Daniel Salinas, remains jailed in Dona Ana County on charges of extortion, bribery and fraud stemming from many of the situations outlined in New Mexico State Auditor Balderas’ report.

The former mayor-elect and ex-city councilor has entered not-guilty pleas to the numerous felony counts against him.

Last month, city councilors elected a young newcomer to the political scene as mayor. But 24-year-old New Mexico State University graduate Javier Perea resigned his post only days later after New Mexico State Attorney General King advised the city government that Perea’s election might have occurred in violation of the Open Meetings Act. The next city council meeting is scheduled for Friday, May 18, at 6 p. m. in the courtyard outside municipal government offices. Like other council sessions in recent months, the next meeting promises to be anything but dull.

-Kent Paterson

Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S. -Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico

For a free electronic subscription: e-mail fnsnews@nmsu.edu

Commentary

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_the_asylum_20120430/
Posted on Apr 30, 2012

By Chris Hedges

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.

When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.

The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.

Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.

Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.

Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation. Descartes argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes, became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”

The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”

The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.

In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster” Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.

The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. … Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”

All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.

Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together.

Local

Santa Fe, NM – April 13, 2012 – Old computers, printers and cell phones can be properly disposed of at E-Waste Recycling and Drop Off Day, April 14 at 1142 Siler Road beginning at 9:00 a.m. and ending at 1:00 p.m.

“E-Waste Recycling and Drop Off Day is a very good deal for Santa Fe residents.  Most items can be recycled for free.  There will be charge for televisions ($20 per unit) and for “CRT” computer monitors ($10 per unit).”  said Keep Santa Fe Beautiful Coordinator Gilda Montano.

Items that will be accepted for free include:

Video cameras
Stereo equipment and radios
VCR’s and CD players
Computer equipment and peripherals including:
central processing units, laptops, printers, scanners, flat screen monitors,
keyboards, wire, cables, computer mice, computer games, computer battery backups
Fax machines
Television satellite equipment
Hand-held electronic devices including Palm Pilots
Telephones and cell phones

The following items will not be accepted:

Microwave ovens
Bread machines
Vacuum cleaners
Appliances
Coffee makers
Alkaline batteries
Hair dryers
Light bulbs

Household hazardous waste, cardboard and paper products will not be accepted.   However, the Buckman Transfer Stations is open 7 days each week and accepts cardboard and paper products

E-Waste Recycling and Drop Off Day is sponsored by Keep Santa Fe Beautiful, the city of Santa Fe and Albuquerque Recycling Inc.

Keep Santa Fe Beautiful is a not-for-profit educational organization that sponsors environmental awareness and education programs, including the twice-a-year community clean up days, the Adopt-a-Median program, the Keep Santa Fe Beautiful Golf Classic, the Waste-in-Place teacher resource and training program, Otra Vez: Trash to Treasures, and the school recycling program.

For more information, contact Gilda Montaño by phone at 955-2215, or by email at Sfbeautiful@santafenm.gov. Visit Keep Santa Fe Beautiful at http://www.keepsantafebeautiful.org/ and on Facebook online.

Border

The following review appeared in the July 25th issue of High Country News

 http://www.hcn.org/issues/43.12/building-a-bridge-to-love-a-review-of-randy-lopez-goes-home?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email

By Chérie Newman

Randy Lopez Goes Home: A Novel
Rudolfo Anaya
168 pages, hardcover: $19.95.
University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.

No one in the village of Agua Bendita, N.M., remembers Randy Lopez when he returns — not even his own godparents. Did he stay away too long, seeking wisdom among the gringos? Has he lost his identity? Is Sofia, his true love, still waiting for him? These questions, and a swarm of others, trouble the protagonist of Randy Lopez Goes Home, an allegorical novel by Rudolfo Anaya, who is often described as “the godfather of Chicano literature.”

On the Day of the Dead, Randy returns, riding an old swaybacked horse into the village. He meets a parade of characters, including Lilith, Death, and the Devil, who offer him advice and distraction. Unica, an old medicine woman, tells him there are “galaxies of souls out there, all being recycled,” and says that the “purpose of living (is) to expand the soul.” The old Catholic priest from Randy’s childhood church tells him, “Time is like a worm. It eats everything.” Several alluring women try to tempt him, but Randy refuses to give up his dream of re-uniting with Sofia, although he wonders if she, too, has forgotten him. And he can’t find out — because Sofia lives on the other side of a torrential river that has no bridge across it.

Eventually, Randy encounters his old first-grade teacher, Miss Libriana, who gives him a helpful book entitled How to Build a Bridge. The villagers think he is crazy to try to build a bridge across the wild river. “The gringos in the cantina agreed. A Mexican boy could never build a bridge. Hadn’t he failed high school? Didn’t get his diploma. Still had a noticeable accent when he spoke English. Would never get ahead.” But while they sit and drink beer, Randy works, cutting trees with a band of migrant workers who have agreed to help him build the bridge.

Randy Lopez may be Chicano, but his yearning for community, recognition and love are universal. Anaya manages to weave large and complex issues like wisdom, spirituality and the clash of cultures into a simple story — one that celebrates creative imagination, a sense of purpose, and the blessings of life.

Environment

La Mancha Wetland Project Making Progress

The Southwest Environmental Center’s La Mancha Wetland Restoration Project is coming along nicely. The tons of excess dirt that were stockpiled on the site when it was donated to SWEC have been hauled away. A berm around the property has been constructed, and the 4-acre pond has been excavated to 80 percent completion. It is becoming much easier to envision the wildlife oasis it will soon become. Learn more and see photos at www.wildmesquite.org.

Is That a Coyote or a Mountain Lion?

There are still a few spaces left in SWEC’s Wildlife Tracking Workshop on May 11 and 12. Join us to learn basic wildlife tracking skills. The workshop takes place at SWEC  for a classroom session on Friday, 5/11, 6-9 pm (including pizza) and an outdoor session on Saturday, 5/12, 7:45 am at the Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park.
Register now for Raft the Rio 2012

Start building your rafts! The Southwest Environmental Center’s 15th annual Raft the Rio will be held on June 9th. This year, we are pairing the race with a riverside festival filled with music, food, vendors and maybe a designated beer tent. Registration materials are now available, as are opportunities to win prizes, sponsor the event or participate in the festival.

Trip to Rio Bosque Wetland and the Border Wall–Sat. 5/12

There’s still room on SWEC’s next Back by Noon outing on Saturday, 5/12. Wildlife biologist John Sproul will lead us on an easy walking tour of Rio Bosque in El Paso, one of the largest wetland restoration projects in the region. We’ll also have a chance to get close to the 18’ foot tall border fence adjoining the park. Call (575) 522-5552 to register. This is the last Back by Noon outing for the spring.

Buy Mother’s Day Flowers and Help Mother Earth

Don’t forget your mother on May 13th – Mother Earth, that is!  When you order flowers or any number of other on-line gifts for mother’s day, don’t forget to shop using iGive or GoodShop.  Both will donate a portion of your proceeds to us, as your designated charity of choice. Or even better, choose to shop locally at Las Cruces Florist (575 522-7848) with the code swec2012 for a percentage donation from each sale.  Have questions about how to use iGive or GoodShop? Don’t hesitate to call us at (575) 522-5552 for tips and instructions.

Work for the Environment

SWEC is hiring door-to-door canvassers to do outreach and fundraise for Mexican wolves and our other conservation campaigns. Great job for individuals who care about the planet and like to talk to people. We will train you. Contact Erica at (575) 522-5552 or Erica@wildmesquite.org for more information.