New Mexico Mercury

The Coming Water Wars in Mexico – Part 2

Mexican farmers and indigenous group join forces to protest illegal wells and tourism encroachment in northern Mexico.

A tsunami of peeping toms

Whatever else happens in this degrading age of universal surveillance, let us as New Mexicans make sure that if we’re stopped in a speed trap for going ten miles an hour too fast that our entire genetic identity isn’t taken from us by some guy with a swab, blue gloves, and a gun.

It’s bad enough that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion last week declared that seizure of DNA is a “reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure” in serious crime arrests. But then the AP reported that New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez was considering proposing to the Legislature next year a bill to make DNA a reasonable search in misdemeanors as well as felonies...

Immigration Update: Arizona border deaths detailed

As the hottest time of year descends on the borderland, a new report sheds fresh light on the mass deaths of migrants crossing the deadly Sonora-Arizona desert. Co-authored by the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute and the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME), the study examines the deaths of 2,238 migrants in the Tucson area between 1990 and 2012.

The researchers document the dramatic rise in border crossing deaths beginning in 1990, when the bodies of 8 undocumented migrants were recovered, and culminating in 2012, when 171 migrant deaths were recorded...

Vietnam: A Country, Not a War

A journey through trauma, reconciliation and lessons still unlearned.

Deconstructing the media

When I went to work as a copy editor for the Baltimore Sun in the 1960s, I was informed of its explicit policy of crime coverage. If a crime occurred in the black ghetto of West Baltimore, we ignored it unless at least two people died, but any serious crime in the middle-class or wealthy areas of North Baltimore rated a full story, sometimes on the front page.

This kind of media bias, which used to be accepted with little more than a cynical shrug, has become the focus of a social movement called media literacy.

A small but notable Albuquerque organization, the Media Literacy Project, has been pursuing such issues for 20 years during which it has spun a widespread web that has taken executor director Andrea Quijada to such far-flung outposts as Venezuela, Tunisia and, most recently, Uganda...

Caught Spying

El Machete

New Mexico uranium and mini-reactors

Mention nuclear energy in New Mexico, and many of us get a cold shiver. Despite all the claims that nuclear energy is clean and safe, what it means to New Mexico is a long history of dirty – very dirty -- uranium mining and processing and the cancer that it brings.

So the thought of the federal government subsidizing the development of hundreds of mini-reactors to stimulate a new American nuclear industry that could generate thousands of portable nuclear power plants for export around the world, and use in our own backyard, has unnerving reverberations here...

Disaster’s false dichotomy

We differentiate between human-made disasters and those caused by nature. I believe this is a false, and ultimately misleading, distinction.

If a building housing sweatshops collapses in Savar, Bangladesh, killing more than a thousand workers, we assess blame to the architect who approved the plans (undoubtedly for monetary gain), a government that cannot establish building codes or, if it has them, refuses to enforce them (plenty of kickbacks there as well). We can blame the clothing brands in the US and other Western countries, which reap exaggerated profit and have never been serious about improving the facilities where their clothing is made...

Texas Sues New Mexico Over Rio Grande Deliveries

The Utton Center at UNM has prepared a report on the Texas vs. New Mexico water dispute.

Border Environmental Controversies Considered

Border region air quality summit discusses proposed gas-fired power plant, environmental injustice and toxic release levels.