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       #Post#: 846--------------------------------------------------
       Cops Busted for Conspiracy to Steal Cars from Poor Hispanics
       By: AGelbert Date: March 1, 2014, 4:58 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       California town shaken as police officers arrested
       The misgivings had been building for some time. Investigators
       heard people — many unable to speak English — complain that
       police were taking their cars and money, and there was nothing
       they could do about it.
       "I'm not at all surprised by the arrests, I'm just surprised
       there weren't more charges," restaurateur Vivian Villa said
       Wednesday in Spanish while sizzling a pan of beef in preparation
       for the lunch rush. "Now maybe some of them are going to feel
       what we feel when they target us."
       Later in the day, Villa held a meeting in her little restaurant
       where about a dozen community members spoke out against police
       abuse and corruption.
       Latinos account for nearly 90 percent of the community of 13,000
       people tucked among fields of tomatoes, strawberries and lettuce
       along the Salinas River, 150 miles southeast of San Francisco.
       Farm mechanics Francisco Mendez and Alfonso Perez, stopping at a
       taco stand before heading into work, both described being
       stopped frequently by police for having tinted windows or broken
       tail lights.
       "It seems like they just want a reason to pull you over," Mendez
       said.
       Tuesday's arrests, which also included a former police chief,
       came after a six-month probe of the police department launched
       in September when a visiting investigator — there to check out a
       homicide — heard from numerous sources that the community didn't
       trust its police department.
       By this week, authorities said they had enough evidence to
       arrest a total of six people linked to the department for a
       variety of crimes ranging from bribery to making criminal
       threats. They were all quickly released on bail.
       "Ordinary citizens, again and again, told us they didn't trust
       the police," said acting chief assistant Monterey County
       District Attorney Terry Spitz. "There are more investigations
       underway."
       Tow shop owner Brian Miller, his brother acting police chief
       Bruce Miller and Sgt. Bobby Carillo were scheduled to be
       arraigned Monday on bribery charges after authorities said
       vehicles impounded from Hispanic immigrants were funneled to the
       tow yard then sold or given away.
       Prosecutors said an undetermined number of vehicles were sold or
       given away for free when the owners couldn't pay fees to reclaim
       them. Two people at Miller's Towing in King City refused
       comment.
       Former Chief Dominic David Baldiviez and Mario Alonso Mottu Sr.
       were set to be arraigned March 6 for embezzlement of a
       city-owned Crown Victoria. Officer Jaime Andrade, accused of
       possession of an assault weapon and illegal storage of a
       firearm, and officer Mark Allen Baker, accused of making
       criminal threats, are also slated for a March 6 arraignment.
       Bruce Miller said the charges were baseless, and his family had
       received death threats since prosecutors disclosed details of
       the case. Messages for Baldiviez and Brian Miller were not
       immediately returned. A man who answered the phone at a listing
       for Baker hung up when asked about the case.
       Andrade said he had not obtained an attorney. He said hopefully,
       the truth would come out soon and "things will be cleared up."
       City Manager Michael Powers said all but Mottu had been placed
       on paid leave during the investigation prior to their arrests,
       and that he hopes to announce a new, interim police chief on
       Thursday.
       Fixing King City's sense of well-being is a bigger challenge.
       "Obviously no one should be targeted because of race, but recent
       immigrants are at something of a disadvantage," Powers said.
       "They already fear the police. It makes them easy prey."
       Powers said a community meeting would be held in two weeks to
       try to resolve concerns of angry citizens and those worried
       about the depleted police force, where 10 of the 17 sworn
       positions were held by Latinos.
       State Sen. Bill Monning, whose district includes King City, said
       he was "incensed and outraged," and thanked the FBI and local
       authorities for their ongoing pressure.
       "While I hope this is an isolated incident, I fear it is not,"
       he said. "There continues to be situations throughout the state
       where the immigrant workforce is subjugated to tyranny of those
       abusing their authority."
       County Supervisor Simon Salinas said it's going to take
       community oriented policing to get the town to trust authorities
       again.
       "It's certainly going to be a black eye for King City," Salinas
       said.
       Complaints of misconduct have been raised during the past few
       years in this historic, agricultural city where John Steinbeck's
       father settled in 1890s and met his wife. With wide streets,
       historic buildings and old oaks, parts of the city haven't
       changed much since Steinbeck wrote of King City in parts of Mice
       and Men and To a God Unknown.
       But some said they are now afraid in the city.
       "I'm not sure who is taking care of the town," said San Lorenzo
       Liquors store owner Myukng Hong who reopened Wednesday after
       closing early the night before after learning of the arrests.
       At Leyva's Tow Yard, which police often bypassed with impounded
       cars, George Oliveros said many people in the community were
       aware of the investigation for months.
       "In King City, a lot of people really try to stay away from the
       police," he said. "Cops aren't really helping the people, they
       focus on helping themselves."
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       #Post#: 848--------------------------------------------------
       How Conservation Efforts are Gamed bv the Rich to Fool Everyone 
       Else.
       By: AGelbert Date: March 2, 2014, 4:09 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       [center]The following thread was taken from this article
       (
  HTML http://grist.org/politics/obama-has-a-good-transportation-plan-now-we-just-need-to-raise-the-gas-tax-so-he-can-pay-for-it/#comment-1267522241).<br
       />I disagree with the premise of the article on how to generate
       funds to improve our infrastructure in order to make us a
       sustainable society. [/center]
       agelbert
       I think the solution is to eliminate the gas tax altogether and
       slap a 0.1% transaction tax on all Wall Street stock sales.
       Billions would be generated continuously, gaming the stocks with
       thousands of computer generated buys and sells would stop and,
       without the price manipulation, assets would be priced in a
       realistic manner. THEN we could get serious about overhauling
       ALL of our infrastructure.
       We need fossil fuels or the taxes they generate like a hole in
       the head.
       Don't Believe the Dirty Lie
  HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/climate-change/pollution/msg703/#msg703
       
       SticksInMyCraw > agelbert
       The financial transactions tax is such a sensible idea, I don't
       know why it doesn't get any traction here in the United States.
       Didn't the UK just adopt a stock-transactions tax?
       In any case, I know it is attracting serious attention
       throughout Europe. A modest transactions tax would have minimal
       impact on regular folks like you and me and our 401k's. But --
       as you point out -- it would slow down and/or shift some tax
       burden onto the computerized high frequency stock trading that
       adds absolutely no value to the U.S. economy.
       
       agelbert > SticksInMyCraw
       Our Senators, Congressmen, the White House AND the Supreme Court
       get hard of hearing when someone mentions taxing Wall Street. Of
       course we know who they work for (It is definitely NOT
       we-the-people).
       Even my Senators and my Rep in Vermont (who favored this tax
       about 5 years ago) have gone silent on it.
       On the plus side, more people are talking about it and a tax
       Wall Street party actually exists now and made the ballot (but
       lost the election) in New York recently.
       It's the only logical solution to our fiscal problems. But the
       1% get the heeby jeebies just thinking about it!
       Thanks for talking it up; the more people know about this
       no-brainer, the better chance we have of making our government
       enact it.
       SticksInMyCraw > agelbert
       Here you have it: The European Parliament approved such a tax
       last summer:
  HTML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
       
       agelbert > SticksInMyCraw
       The Europeans have more sense than we do.
       dreamweaverdory
       Taxes should be based on use, why the per gallon tax is workable
       the more you use the road the more you pay, and if you want to
       save taxes you pay, get a fuel efficient car you pay less and
       pollute less. In a small town, unless you live in a food desert,
       you will drive less to find a supermarket than in most cities,
       and you should have a farmers market near by ,so why would you
       drive to the city for anything but the night life.If you live
       farther than that out in the country you are probably raising at
       least some of your own food. Also , yes purple people should pay
       less in taxes and blue people should pay more.
       
       agelbert > dreamweaverdory
       Taxes based on use is regressive taxation and fosters inequality
       and strife. Taxes should be progressive and based on net worth
       and income from all sources (including capital gains).
       The present structure polarizes the population. That is wrong.
       We want a tax structure that benefits the country as a whole,
       not just the richest.
       dreamweaverdory > agelbert
       if we all paid one tax, not a bunch of different ones, i would
       agree with you. The idea that if you tax the user for polluting
       resources by the amount they use will help control use and maybe
       help undo/clean up said pollution. The poor are not the ones
       gobbling up resources, but they should be responsible for what
       they use.
       
       agelbert > dreamweaverdory
       "The poor are not the ones gobbling up resources, but they
       should be responsible for what they use."
       Well, that is exactly my point. The poor are, not only
       responsible for what they use but are being forced to shoulder
       the cost and responsibility of what they don't use (i.e. the top
       20% piggies!).
       And you want to level the piggy playing field by pounding on the
       victims of massive pollution and resource explotation first?
       That is, not just illogical (because it doesn't address the
       heart of the problem), it's immoral, vindictive, buck passing
       and irrational too.
       I don't mean to sound so harsh but you really need to understand
       how this works in human power structures. Watch this, somewhat
       slow at first (jump ahead to the 28 minute mark to) where the
       Survival International Director explains where our so-called
       "Conservation of Nature" concept came from. No, it has nothing
       to do with conserving the biosphere and everything to do with
       throwing natives off their land (first, the poor come later) and
       then using said lands for resource explotation while setting
       aside a small portion as "nature preserves" that the resource
       raping goons use as pristine "natural" areas they can hunt wild
       animals in to their corrupt hearts' content.
       These very same bastards will turn around and defend
       conservation efforts and wail and moan about how the people of
       the world are despoiling nature and more areas need to be
       "conserved" (for the rich to hunt and play in, of course).
       It's a long and sordid story. Can you handle it? We liberals
       have been manipulated big time by the rich for their benefit and
       the detriment of the rest of humanity.
       [center]
  HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RcN8PTKdNg&feature=player_embedded[/center]<br
       />
       Date: Friday, February 28
       Time: 5pm Pacific Standard Time (1am GMT on Saturday, March 1)
       Survival Director Stephen Corry is giving a hard-hitting talk on
       the impact of conservation on tribes worldwide at the University
       of Oregon's Public Interest Environmental Law Conference.
       Explaining the role of ‘conservation’ in the ongoing
       destruction of tribal peoples, he will explore how conservation
       theories grew with ‘scientific’ racism, which underpinned
       colonial genocides and the Holocaust.
       He will demonstrate that contemporary claims that tribal and
       indigenous peoples are ‘like our ancestors’, and ‘more violent’
       than us, are no less spurious, and that they too damage the
       people they purport to describe.
       [quote][font=times new roman]'First we were dispossessed in the
       name of kings and emperors,
       later in the name of state development,
       and now in the name of conservation.'[/quote]
       [font=times new roman]Indigenous Peoples' Forum [/font]
       #Post#: 985--------------------------------------------------
       Re: Mechanisms of Prejudice: Hidden and Not Hidden 
       By: AGelbert Date: April 28, 2014, 3:15 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       [center]So where is the outrage against affirmative action for
       white people?  ???  >:([/center]
       by
       Laurence Lewis
       [IMG WIDTH=640
       HEIGHT=380]
  HTML http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/ppmsca/05500/05542r.jpg[/img]
       Vivian Malone registers at the University of Alabama,
       accompanied by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach
       and federal marshals
       [img width=640
       height=280]
  HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-280414161743.png[/img]
       
       Affirmative Action continues to be under attack, and the Supreme
       Court's Schuette decision was no surprise. But if it is a moral
       and perhaps legal outrage for colleges and universities to give
       admissions preference to specific demographic groups, why aren't
       the ostensibly principled warriors against Affirmative Action
       also fighting against legacy admissions? (Agelbert NOTE: Whitey
       Bigot REACTION --->
  HTML http://www.pic4ever.com/images/237.gif
       
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       Paul Waldman
       explains:
       [quote]Meanwhile, the preferences whites enjoy remain firmly in
       place. There have yet to be any successful laws or ballot
       initiatives to ban “legacy admissions,” in which applicants who
       had a relative who attended the university are given special
       preference. No one can come up with rational grounds for
       retaining this affirmative action for wealthy white people, yet
       universities all across the country do. And there are other only
       slightly less blatant forms of favoritism; for instance, the
       reliance on standardized test scores provides a boost for
       wealthy students, most of them white, whose parents can afford
       expensive test prep courses and tutoring. Again, no serious
       person contends that SATs or ACTs are a pure measure of “merit,”
       yet they continue to play a huge role in college
       admissions.[/quote]
       Legacy admissions are blatantly racist, because at many American
       colleges and universities, minority admissions were prohibited
       or restricted until at least the latter half of the 20th
       century. Generations of white families established legacies at
       those colleges and universities, while minority families
       couldn't. The continued favoritism granted those often growing
       legacy families necessarily perpetuates the legacy of racism
       from the era of explicit minority exclusion. But about this form
       of affirmative action, those white supposed champions of equal
       opportunity are curiously silent. Perhaps they're not really
       concerned with fairness, perhaps they're really most concerned
       with protecting their historical privileges. Perhaps they fear
       that if admissions standards were truly fair and unbiased, they
       wouldn't be able to compete.
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  HTML http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/23/1294100/-So-where-it-the-outrage-against-affirmative-action-for-white-people
       #Post#: 1008--------------------------------------------------
       Re: Mechanisms of Prejudice: Hidden and Not Hidden 
       By: AGelbert Date: April 30, 2014, 3:04 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       [img width=640
       height=740]
  HTML http://images.dailykos.com/images/80695/lightbox/racistidiotPR720.png?1398744913[/img]
       #Post#: 1063--------------------------------------------------
       Re: Mechanisms of Prejudice: Hidden and Not Hidden 
       By: AGelbert Date: May 5, 2014, 11:44 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
  HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w&list=PLZmceXcb7hZ2YF7hpnOqdwKq2Q1_p2E2M&feature=player_embedded
       #Post#: 1114--------------------------------------------------
       Re: Mechanisms of Prejudice: Hidden and Not Hidden 
       By: AGelbert Date: May 13, 2014, 12:03 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       [img width=640
       height=580]
  HTML http://images.dailykos.com/images/83455/lightbox/TMW2014-05-14color.png[/img]
       #Post#: 1116--------------------------------------------------
       Re: Mechanisms of Prejudice: Hidden and Not Hidden 
       By: Surly1 Date: May 13, 2014, 4:27 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       [quote author=AGelbert link=topic=67.msg1114#msg1114
       date=1399957436]
       [img width=640
       height=580]
  HTML http://images.dailykos.com/images/83455/lightbox/TMW2014-05-14color.png[/img]
       [/quote]
       Pitch-perfect, AG.
       Conservatives went running from Cliven Bundy like he had rabies,
       didn't they?
       As Charlie Pierce often says, "It's not about race, because in
       America, NOTHING is ever about race."  :o
       #Post#: 1120--------------------------------------------------
       Re: Mechanisms of Prejudice: Hidden and Not Hidden 
       By: AGelbert Date: May 13, 2014, 8:51 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Surly said,
       [quote]Conservatives went running from Cliven Bundy like he had
       rabies, didn't they?
       As Charlie Pierce often says, "It's not about race, because in
       America, NOTHING is ever about race."   :o[/quote]
       [img width=40
       height=40]
  HTML http://www.clker.com/cliparts/c/8/f/8/11949865511933397169thumbs_up_nathan_eady_01.svg.hi.png[/img]<br
       />  [img width=40
       height=40]
  HTML http://www.clker.com/cliparts/c/8/f/8/11949865511933397169thumbs_up_nathan_eady_01.svg.hi.png[/img]<br
       />  [img width=40
       height=40]
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       />
       #Post#: 1235--------------------------------------------------
       Re: Mechanisms of Prejudice: Hidden and Not Hidden 
       By: AGelbert Date: May 27, 2014, 2:10 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Before repairing the climate, we’ll have to repair the impacts
       of racism
       By Brentin Mock
       Protesters rallied in December to oppose the construction of a
       garbage incinerator in one of the most polluted parts of
       Baltimore.   :P >:(
       Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 18-page cover story for The Atlantic making a
       case for reparations for African Americans is a must-read, even
       if you’re not into all that hopey, changey racial justice stuff.
       Even if you believe that the only thing we need to repair right
       now are the practices that are leading to surplus greenhouse gas
       emissions and resultant climate change, you need to read it — in
       fact, you are the ideal audience for it. Coates makes the case
       that after two-and-a-half centuries of slavery, and another
       century-plus of Jim Crow, segregation, and racial terror,
       African Americans deserve redress. Financial redress? Yes.
       To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s
       origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
  HTML http://www.desismileys.com/smileys/desismileys_0293.gif
       Perhaps
       no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our
       country’s shameful history of treating black people as
       sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.
       Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the
       creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every
       aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
       If you wonder why more black people aren’t so quick to fight
       against the Keystone XL pipeline, it’s because we’re too busy
       fighting the school-to-prison pipeline — or in places like
       California, the pollution-to-school-to-prison pipeline. Not to
       mention all of the other racial ills making our lives hectic,
       before we can even think about something like climate. As
       Anthony Giancatarino of the Center for Social Inclusion recently
       wrote, “to truly address climate change, we need to understand
       how our past and current policies have reinforced climate change
       and inequity and the implications for our work.”
       Bold and italics are mine, to show this is not an either-or nor
       zero-sum equation. And it’s gonna take more than some green jobs
       programs to insert equity in the equation. For years, Rep. John
       Conyers of Michigan has been trying to pass House Resolution 40
       to get Congress to just study the reparations issue so we can
       have a greater understanding of how U.S. policies have
       reinforced inequities. Writes Coates:
       Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR
       40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay
       African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves
       in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The
       idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might
       lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens
       something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing
       in the world.
       I’d submit that what scares us in the reparations conversation
       is similar to what most scares us in the climate change
       conversation: Taking either subject seriously would mean
       considerable discomfort in our lives and radical changes in our
       behavior. I would also submit that what has led us to these
       points — alarming levels of inequality along with alarming
       levels of greenhouse gas emissions — are also virtually the same
       in nature: The urge to criminally devalue both people and nature
       in the quest to live as comfortably as possible.
       To get to the bottom of these things, we’re going to have to pay
       for the women and men and land and air that have been devalued
       for far too long. There is no way around it.
       Allow me to highlight a few passages from Coates’ article to
       illustrate what I mean:
       1. “In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part
       investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back
       to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims
       and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars.
       The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to
       terrorism. ‘Some of the land taken from black families has
       become a country club in Virginia,’ the AP reported, as well as
       ‘oil fields in Mississippi’ and ‘a baseball spring training
       facility in Florida.’”  >:(
       Here is the AP article Coates is referencing. The oil fields are
       a reference to Jasper County, Miss., where according to AP’s
       investigation, the Ku Klux Klan drove black farmers off of the
       land they owned in the 1930s and burned the courthouses where
       the land records were stored. The lumber and paper company
       Masonite later came in and claimed ownership of some 9,851 acres
       in that same area, even though at least 204 of those acres
       belong to black farmers, according to the land records that
       survived the fires. Since claiming that land, Masonite “has
       since yielded millions of dollars in natural gas, timber, and
       oil, according to state records.”
       Not only that, Masonite’s deforestation for paper and wood
       products made its Mississippi operations the lumber commerce
       center of the nation, if not the world. It also helped Masonite
       destroy basically all of the healthy forests in Mississippi.
       Pretty much everyone in America — and our parents and
       grandparents — have bought or used Masonite paper products
       produced on land that was stolen from African Americans.
       Talk about ‘there will be blood’: “ At least 850,000 barrels of
       oil have been pumped from this property, according to state
       records,” reported AP. But last year, a pipeline leak led to
       over 100 gallons of crude oil spilled into the county’s wetlands
       costing some $5 million to clean up. The black landowners driven
       out of Jasper by the Klan, I’m sure, reaped none of Masonite’s
       profits. Meanwhile, the African Americans who live in the area
       now will likely have to pay for the oil cleanup through their
       tax dollars.
       2. “Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might
       make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the
       country was built. … Perhaps no number can fully capture the
       multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the
       number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone
       calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly
       with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the
       specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks
       what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and
       humane.”
  HTML http://www.desismileys.com/smileys/desismileys_0293.gif
       Right, and let’s not forget that America knows how to do these
       formulas. We’ve not only done them for Japanese Americans and
       for Native Americans, but we’ve also done them for plants and
       animals. Case in point: The Natural Resource Damage Assessment,
       which is a process where, after a disaster like an oil spill,
       scientists study all of the non-human victims affected — trees,
       wetlands, waters, fish, fauna, coral reefs, beach sands — to
       place a financial value on each thing, the costs of the damage,
       and how much it would cost to restore them whole.  It happened
       after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and there is one happening
       right now for the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. When
       the total is tallied, a bill is given to the company that
       created the disaster and it is expected to pay up.
       America has not developed a similar process for African
       Americans. This means right now a patch of wetlands is more
       entitled to reparations than a black human being is.
       3. “The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the
       progressive legislation of the 1960s.”
       This can’t be emphasized enough. Whatever gains this country
       made to begin approximate compensation and reconciliation for
       past wrongs against African Americans, began getting dialed back
       almost immediately after they were passed. The Civil Rights Act?
       I just wrote about this in my last post. It used to be that
       African Americans could file lawsuits against companies under
       Title VI of that Act if it was found that companies were dumping
       waste and pollution on their neighborhoods discriminately. But
       that private right to sue was curtailed in 2001 and now people
       of color must rely on the EPA to make such findings   :(  >:(—
       their record for which has been wanting. Financial redress for
       toxic exposures is even less unlikely under current terms.
       Combine that with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act last
       year, the recent depleting of affirmative action policies, a
       near-knifing of fair housing protections, and energy apartheid
       in the former slave-holding states, and any argument that
       America is already paying its dues goes out the window.
       Again, to reconcile all of this, it’s gonna require some
       discomfort. If that’s not something we can live with, then I
       don’t expect people will change much to deal with climate change
       adequately, either.
  HTML http://www.desismileys.com/smileys/desismileys_0293.gif
       
       Brentin Mock is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who writes
       regularly for Grist about environmental justice issues and the
       connections between environmental policy, race, and politics.
       Follow him on Twitter at @brentinmock.
  HTML http://grist.org/climate-energy/before-repairing-the-climate-well-have-to-repair-the-impacts-of-racism/
       #Post#: 1278--------------------------------------------------
       Breaking news: Brazilian Indian leader assaulted ten days before
        World Cup
       By: AGelbert Date: June 4, 2014, 6:11 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       [move][font=courier]Breaking news: Brazilian Indian leader
       assaulted ten days before World Cup[/font][/move]
       [img width=640
       height=430]
  HTML http://assets.survivalinternational.org/pictures/5709/braz-gua-ss-2013-32_screen.jpg[/img]
       Valmir Guarani was kidnapped, tied to a tree in a forest,
       blindfolded, and tortured.
       © Sarah Shenker/Survival
       A young Brazilian Indian leader was assaulted on Monday by four
       armed men, despite being under the care of a government
       protection program since he witnessed the murder of his
       father-in-law.
       Valmir Guarani Kaiowá, of the Guarani tribe, was kidnapped, tied
       to a tree in a forest, blindfolded, and tortured. He managed to
       escape and said, ‘They tied me up and told me that I was going
       to die and that no one would ever find me. They put a bitter
       liquid in my mouth and told me to swallow it. Then, they fired
       several shots by my ears and I couldn’t hear any more…  >:( then
       they left in their car.’ Valmir’s late father-in-law, Nísio
       Gomes, was killed by masked gunmen in 2011, having led his
       community back to part of their ancestral land which had been
       stolen from the Indians and occupied by a cattle ranch.
       In 2012, 18 men were arrested in connection with the murder,
       including the owner of a ‘private militia’ security firm which
       has since been closed down. Some of the men are believed to have
       been released.
       Valmir is a key witness, and continues to push for the murder
       investigation to be completed and for the land to be returned to
       his tribe.
       He told a Survival researcher last year, ‘Nísio told me to be
       strong and fight for our land. All we need is for it to be
       protected for us.’
       In the run up to the FIFA World Cup, Survival is highlighting
       ‘The dark side of Brazil’.  :( Click here to find out more about
       the situation of Brazilian Indians and the government’s attacks
       on their rights to their land.
       Read this online:
  HTML http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10267
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