Who Cares? I Don’t

There are so many problems with your latest issue that I don’t know where to start.

“Remote Control” keeps changing locations. Why? Enough with that. Keep it in one place already.

Two people are missing from “Off the Cuff.” That is four people shy of what it should be missing. Drop that feature already. We don’t care what six people have to say about some subject. Use the space more creatively (although, I’m not sure “Say What?” works either — who cares about some slang word?).

A pop quiz? Now, your typo thing is fun. If we notice something, we win money. But a pop quiz? What is that? We aren’t in school. And when I glanced at it, I realized I knew the answer to a “Crasher” question. Then I knew another answer. I figured I’d send it in. And I see you want page numbers. Why? Why the extra work? I have to go back and see what page “Crasher” is on, just to prove I read it. You guys are nuts.

The beach booze ban stories. Who cares. These have been done to death.

Cover story on parties was great. Why not more of that?

“Club Crawler” is a nice feature. I like it better than CityBeat’s music listings for each day of the week, but why is this writer always saying things like “Steely Dan is reelin’ in the years and stowing away the time at Pala.” Okay, you know the song lyrics. We’re impressed. It doesn’t work for the piece.

On the subject of music items, why is there a “Blurt” on Cheech and Chong? They aren’t musicians.

Why is there a “Blurt” on Peter Gabriel, from a concert in the 1980s? And this Sanford, he did a great cover story about living on the street and being on drugs. Yet all these old concerts, he seemed to attend. A Cheap Trick one from a few weeks ago had him selling blood to pay for a ticket. This makes no sense. A guy with no money on the street, seeing every concert he writes about. Is it to make him the story? Or to make the story seem more relevant? Maybe an “Off the Cuff” should be done, asking six homeless people how often they go to concerts. I’m guessing they never do, but if any are like Jay, they’re begging for money — not for food or cheap wine — but for a ticket to see Cheap Trick at Canes.

Stephen Root
Clairemont

Talk To The Good Apples

Next time you do a column like this (“Beach Booze Banter,” Feature Story, August 14), you might interview a few beachgoers who have come back because of the ban and don’t need a drink to enjoy the beach. You know, the ones with families? Instead of interviewing bar owners, try a few lifeguards, cops, or paramedics. And maybe a few motel proprietors and property managers who will tell you how their problems have decreased and how their renters really like the ban. Oh, and don’t forget the Park and Rec employees who have to clean up the trash.

Is San Diego the only city in SoCal that thinks it needs booze on the beach to attract visitors? Apparently so, from your article, because all but a couple of the rest have been alcohol free for a long time, and they aren’t suffering. Did you notice how fast Del Mar and Solana Beach wised up as soon as we got the booze off the sand? Go talk to the people at Silver Strand about a “few bad apples ruining it for everyone.” What nonsense.

Bill Bradshaw
Mission Beach

The Cop Gang

Re “Greetings from Tijuana,” cover story, August 7. Thank you for exposing the corruption of the Tijuana police. I myself have experienced numerous shakedown attempts by Tijuana police, who are a criminal gang in their own right. I have traveled down there for 20 years. It is worse than ever. Americans minding their own business walking in tourists areas can expect to be searched and harassed by TJ cops. My advice to Americans, there is nothing down there worth losing your constitutional rights.

Dan Tanna
via email

Our Addicts’ Demands

This article is sensationalist and in bad taste (“Greetings from Tijuana,” Cover Story, August 7). It misleads people about Mexico. Is it possible that 19 Latin American countries (south of your border) produce drugs to satisfy the demand of your millions of addicts and “Americans” share no blame? Come on! You are the biggest drug consumers in the world, and your government has its hands deep in it. It is not fair. The end of the world is the USA. We will see it, soon! I am nothing but a normal “drug free” citizen.

Was the Reader meant for sensationalist articles?

Guillermo Rodriguez
via email

We’re Outta Here

After having a house for 22 years down in Mexico, in between Rosarito and Ensenada, I was really appreciative of that article on Tijuana (“Greetings from Tijuana,” Cover Story, August 7). I sold my house a year and a half ago, and the reason I did was because I got hassled by the cops constantly. I’ve never been in a Mexican jail or prison or anything like that; I’m 50 years old. But between the cops and the thieving when you’re not there at your house, I’d had it. I really appreciate the story.

Chuck Cadena

Older, Wiser

I wanted to thank you and the writer of this article for getting the news out about the dangers in Mexico (“Greetings from Tijuana,” Cover Story, August 7). You hear bits and pieces of this on the lame stream media outlets, but definitely not all that should be reported. I know it’s all about one thing, money. Money from advertisers that say come to Baja, explore the museums, and enjoy the culture, etc. Thank you, thank you, thank you for revealing the ugly truth. Hopefully some tourists will have read this article and changed their plan to go down south for some cheap crap. You probably have saved some lives. Would you like 80 rounds of AK-47 with your smelly leather goods, sir? I used to go down there when I was young and stupid; now I’m so glad I wised up. Keep on reporting on things that really matter.

DS
via email

Watts Is North Of The Border

Re “Greetings from Tijuana,” by Michael Hemmingson, Cover Story, August 7.

Greetings, Michael,

December 12, 2007 — Peter Landesman wrote in the LA Weekly: “The average American has a 1-in-18,000 chance of being murdered. In this area of [South Central] Los Angeles” — two hours north of San Diego — “the chances are 1 in 250.

“On New Year’s Eve so much automatic weapons fire pours into Watts’ airspace that LAX air traffic control must divert the flight path of incoming planes. The U.S. military sends its medics to train at local trauma hospitals because the conditions in their trauma units so resemble live warfare.… LAPD Chief William Bratton declared the Jordan Downs–Nickerson Gardens area ‘the most violent community in the country. This is now the most dangerous place in America.’ ”

“The modern American gang was born here” — the Bounty Hunter Bloods and Grape Street Crips. “At last count, Los Angeles County had more than 714 gangs and 80,000 gang members. That makes one of every hundred county residents either a hardcore soldier in a gang or an ‘associate’ — the getaway drivers, lookouts, ‘cookers’ (people who know how to turn cocaine into crack) and ‘hooks’ (people who direct customers to drug houses) — or an ‘affiliate,’ a gang member with no specific duties.…

“Every yard, doorway, shop and parking lot is the fiefdom of one of Watts’ 65 gangs and their roughly 15,000 hardcore gang members. In that area alone, gang members shoot 500 people a year, and kill 90. Nearly every citizen living there is enjoined by membership or affiliation; those who try to stay out of the life incur their local gang’s wrath, sometimes with fatal consequences.” The paramedics wear Kevlar vests.

“It wasn’t always this way. Originally, L.A.’s street gangs were social and support organizations for immigrants and packs of neighborhood pals. Mostly their crimes were petty, and scores were settled with fists.… All that changed forever in the late 1980s, when crack cocaine hit Los Angeles and neighborhood affiliation became secondary to what all the gangs now really wanted: a piece of the drug business.” Does it sound familiar?

“In America’s urban ganglands, and in L.A. in particular, the ferocity of the thuggery has surged; gang members, their victims and police long on the gang beat tell me the fighting has become more codeless, more arbitrary and more brutal than ever.

“And it is everywhere. According to the Department of Justice, today America has at least 30,000 gangs, with 800,000 members, in 2,500 communities across the United States. (Gang experts at the University of Southern California claim the number of American jurisdictions with gang problems has reached 4,000.) Federal, state and local law enforcement across the country agree that street gangs connected to or mimicking the L.A. model have become a national epidemic.”

It is “spreading to formerly safe middle-class communities, or, ‘to a neighborhood near you.’… The bigger and more dangerous portion of the country’s 800,000-odd gang members are disaffected and marginalized youths looking to identify with something.”

“Almost anywhere in America a migrating gangbanger lands, he is fairly sure to find a receptive supply of recruits. ‘Trying out gangs is becoming more and more popular’…‘Now gangs are fads, it’s cool to be a Crip and Blood,’ ” report experts, or, say, part of the MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha). Will those Americans have ties across the border? Sure do. Crime is not apart from globalization.

“Shootings have become so routine in parts of Los Angeles that most never make the newspapers or television, leaving much of the community oblivious to the magnitude of what is happening on the streets,” wrote Kenneth B. Noble in the New York Times.

It is outrageous the level of corruption in Mexico. Society is taken as a hostage.

I never had any problem south of the border, crossing at least twice a week for the last six years. Neither had I any when I visited Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers (or Nuestro Pueblo).

After all, it is Tijuana, Michael. It is cynical to say that the situation is very different down there. Scary, isn’t it?

J.G.
via email

The LA Weekly article can be read in English at http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/la-gangs-nine-miles-and-spreading/17861/ and in Spanish at http://www.elpais.com/articulo/paginas/infierno/angeles/elpepusoceps/20070826elpepspag_6/Tes — Editor

The Cop Gang

Your August 7 cover article on Tijuana murders (“Greetings from Tijuana”) was time-compressed from more than 20 years, making it look worse than it is, which nevertheless is pretty bad. My wife and I, both U.S. citizens and Anglos, lived in Colonia del Rio for 17 years, ending last month, and all our children grew up there. The murders got closer to home in the last few years (since Mayor Hank brought his Mexico City police friends, aka gangsters, up north). My family learned caution but was never fear-ridden. My daughter completed Tijuana high school.

The solution to this problem is trivial and obvious, and someone needs to say it. Ninety percent of the murders are drug-trade related. The issue, as in all the third world, is money. Legal dollars only come in the form of loans, imposed on an ever-poorer populace whose raw-material wealth is (except for oil) in long-term decline. The only dollars that don’t have to be paid back twice are the ones from America’s soft underbelly, its drug hunger.

All third world countries including Mexico should legalize drugs and their export, and tax them. The United States should concede this lost war and make drug trade among adults a misdemeanor, punished only by loss of any rights to get welfare or collect on insurance, including medical insurance. Income based on the drug trade will drop sharply and then stabilize, and young people in Tijuana and Afghanistan can begin to look elsewhere for hope. The members of the U.S. drug culture will either snap out of it or die, attended cheaply by trainee nurses and medical students. Chicago saw all this long ago, in Prohibition and its aftermath.

I don’t propose this because I love George Soros — much the contrary. I’m just sick of the superior legalistic attitude of Anglos, left and right, citizens of this country that kills babies day and night. Here, a paralyzed woman, Terri Schiavo, was tortured to death at the wish of her husband, with police and judges protecting the torturers. And I’m supposed to get all huffy and puffy about people illegally making themselves stupid with chemicals?

Stop the damage. Ditch the senseless laws. Open the floodgates and let the sludge roll, until it peters out and reduces to a trickle. Turn the page.

Larry Dickson
National City

The Language Of Politics

Mr. Hemmingson paints a violent and bleak portrait of our neighbor, using rapid-fire entries of compiled newsbites from cited international sources (“Greetings from Tijuana,” Cover Story, August 7). You may say he is unfairly showing us only the nefarious side of Tijuana, but you can’t say he’s missing the facts. But what’s been happening down there is nothing new. Mexican border history is replete with cycles of brutality that come with political changes and power vacuums. Remember the last one?

Back in 1994, right after Pablo Escobar’s death and the Mexican drug cartels’ growing independence from the Colombians and competition with each other, during the peso crisis and incipience of NAFTA (that illegally signed “treaty” was supposed to bring Mexico “out of the third world and into the first.” At least that’s what the Clinton administration said. Looks like Bubba fooled us again. Damn, that Willie was slick!), the DEA declared the entire border region a “high-intensity drug trafficking area,” while Mexican investors made a run for the border because the peso had fallen so low. The area was rife with violence and corruption just like we’re seeing now. Which brings me to Mr. Hemmingson’s mention of one particular event that went down that turbulent year: the Colosio assassination.

While it may be true that there was a PRI-led conspiracy involving another gunman, what is known and officially documented is that the gun found on Mario Aburto Martínez upon his arrest immediately after the shooting was a Brazilian-made .38 revolver that was traced back to a 1977 purchase from a now-defunct gun store in Northern California.

The previous year, in ’93, a drug raid in Baja netted 179 weapons from their good neighbor to the north, including four M60 U.S. military machine guns. The year before that, there were over 5000 guns identified by Mexican authorities as from the U.S. and in Mexico illegally. These facts are real. I uncovered them while researching old newspaper clippings and DEA reports for another project. And I found (as Mr. Hemmingson alludes) that nearly all of the weapons in Mexico are smuggled in from the United States. Very rarely will you find private individuals who own a gun legally. It’s nearly impossible there. You see the great irony here? Why doesn’t Lou Dobbs, or better yet, Duncan Hunter?

Lax U.S. gun laws on dealers and purchases have contributed a great deal to the bloodshed down south. The gangs know that. They know where to go shopping for their hardware. And it’s pretty easy for them to sneak contraband into Mexico. Many Mexicans I’ve spoken with have expressed frustration with the U.S. government for allowing this to continue. When I explain to them that our government is too busy being worried about their countrymen and women coming into the U.S. illegally, they laugh at the irony. Like, we export our workers that prop up your economy, and in return you allow our thugs to import guns to kill us. It’s a never-ending conquest.

That brings me to my second point, Mexico’s other big export: drugs. Until recently, the U.S. was the world’s most coveted drug market. (With the falling dollar, the bulk of that market has shifted to Europe via trampoline countries like Guinea-Bissau.) We, in the land of the free, have more people on something than anyone else, yet some of the world’s most draconian drug laws. Despite repeated studies and evidence that show treatment to be far more effective than incarceration for assuaging addiction, we continue to have the world’s largest prison population and incarceration rate. Meanwhile, the market for drugs has not shrunk. And as long as it exists, there will be suppliers. You see, here we let the market decide.

I’m not suggesting that the U.S. is to blame for all of the woes illustrated in Mr. Hemmingson’s article. No. It’s a much more layered and complex issue than that. It involves the massive restructuring of the entire global economic model, reinventing international relationships rooted in histories of aggression, and the old question of personal freedoms versus governance. These are topics we won’t hear about during this election. We’ll only hear meaningless babble about walls and guest-worker programs. Until the language of politics in this hemisphere quits pandering to lobbyists and ephemeral demographics and gets to substantive dialogue involving genuine long-term solutions to the preposterous economic disparity that makes second-class citizens out of neighbors, things will not change. The violence will continue.

Bryan Varela
via email

The Mess We Created

It tears me up to hear what is happening to our neighbors across our border (“Greetings from Tijuana,” Cover Story, August 7), and I lay a large part of the blame on decades-old policies that began right here in America and have spread all over the world. Mayor Jerry Sanders’ quote, “What affects one side affects the other,” bears this out, whether he realized it or not at the time.

What we need are tougher drug laws.

What I mean by this is that we need to toughen the penalties for crimes committed while under the influence of drugs. This can include anything from injuring someone else or their property while operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol, to stepping off the sidewalk and into traffic while strung out on heroin and getting run over by someone on a bicycle, to getting into an altercation with someone else while under the influence of methamphetamines, and so on.

What we don’t need are laws that criminalize the substances in question. This only creates black markets that drastically increase the prices for drugs, most of which come from easily grown plants. With this huge profit potential, it’s no wonder that gangs on both sides of the border are flourishing in the streets. It’s not just the estimated 15 percent of Mexican police that have been corrupted by these policies; the incentive is so high that U.S. DEA agents are routinely found guilty of dealing in the very substances that they are supposed to be fighting against.

The mess it has created south of our border is likely much worse than those of us who don’t travel there even know. With the falsely inflated financial incentive to grow marijuana, coca, poppies, etc., more and more farmers are either giving up food crops in favor of drug crops or are being forced out of farming altogether by the cartels and the forces behind the “global economy.” What was once a flourishing agricultural society is now being overrun by drug lords, multinational food-producing conglomerates backed by companies like Monsanto, and — ironically enough — proponents of the North American Superhighway, which will connect Mexico, the USA, and Canada and provide a streamlined path for the drugs to reach their destination. Is it any wonder that illegal immigration is so rampant? People are being forced out of their own country just to escape this situation.

Evidence of the failures of these policies is so overwhelming and their reasoning so flawed as to be nearly laughable to anyone willing to look into the facts. “Criminalization” has done exactly what it implies — created criminals. It has been no more effective than alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s. The DEA employs nearly 11,000 people, with a budget that is over $2.4 billion. Would it not make more sense to use those resources to regulate legal drug trade to help keep drugs out of young people’s hands, treat those who are unfortunate enough to become addicted, and prosecute those who are guilty of real crimes?

Another piece of the puzzle is in the answer to the question “Who or what is trying to be controlled?” As adults, do we not own our own bodies? Do we not have the right to choose what goes into them, and into our children’s bodies as well, as long as we are not willfully harming them? A recent New York Times article pointed out that prescription drugs may cause as many as three times as many deaths as illicit drugs. The FDA turns a blind eye to the side effects of many of these drugs. Big pharmaceutical companies literally get away with murder every day, and yet someone smoking a little marijuana can be thrown in jail for doing something that harms nobody else? What is wrong with this picture? It’s obvious that some of our elected officials not only don’t have our best interests in mind but are out to control us. This has to change.

Vincent Mross
via email

Twice An Hour Nonsense

I read with interest the “Blurt” story on the concert from years past (“Defiling Jack’s Place,” August 7). I wasn’t sure why a story would run on an event so long ago but read it with curiosity. I was even more interested when it mentioned the station I worked at. It stated that this station (101 KGB-FM) played the Pat Travers song “Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights)” “at least twice per hour.”

This statement is a complete fabrication. That song was played often. Just as I imagine, since their format is still “classic rock,” it gets airplay often. At no time did our station play a song twice in an hour. Unless it was a comedic song used in a morning show bit, that was/is unheard of. Maybe Alan Freed would do it if he got a kickback. Maybe another 50 DJs would do it if there weren’t many new releases, so the new Buddy Holly track was in heavy rotation. Although I doubt that would warrant twice-an-hour airplay.

I have a feeling this was a journalist trying to make the story more interesting. If it’s a journalist remembering facts wrong, well, maybe stories need to be written more accurately. Or contact someone at KGB and ask about old playlists and rotation of songs. Just a thought.

Dean Goss
San Francisco

Jay Allen Sanford responds: I was just winging a memory, not intending it to be taken as documented or gospel. Perhaps I should have said “seemed to play at least twice per hour.” Mea culpa.

Contradictions

There are so many contradictions in your August 7 column on your friend’s birthday (“Play Date,” “Diary of a Diva”). You mention that you don’t buy gifts for birthdays or baby showers because you shouldn’t be told when to buy someone something but that you should do those things “just because.” Why in your video do you sing “Happy Birthday”?

And why is this all taking place a few weeks after this woman’s birthday? Why didn’t you take her to the big day (wow…doughnuts for breakfast and In-N-Out for lunch) six months earlier?

The other problem is that you lie. You said in a number of columns that you would never marry David. You didn’t believe in marriage. And then you got married. So as much as you claim to hate birthday celebrations, I bet you are one of those people that relish the attention on your birthday. Oh, wait, according to you, there would be no birthday celebration on your big day.

Now you claim you don’t believe in birthdays as a gift-giving occasion, yet you are taking this woman out for her birthday. Basically, you make no sense.

It’s just an excuse for you to write and video about what great people you and David are for doing something for this woman. Yes, it is nice. But you did it for her birthday. And you did it for other motives.

Susan Carter
Encinitas