Iran agrees to exchange of nuclear material

Tehran would send the bulk of its nuclear material to Turkey as part of a deal that could ease international tensions.

By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times

May 17, 2010

Reporting from Beirut

In what could be a stunning breakthrough in the years-long diplomatic deadlock over Iran's nuclear program, Tehran has agreed to send the bulk of its nuclear material to Turkey as part of an exchange meant to ease international concerns about the Islamic Republic's aims and provide fuel for an ailing medical reactor, the spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry told state television Monday morning.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told state television that a letter describing the deal would be sent to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency within a week.

"After a final agreement is signed between Iran and the Vienna group, our fuel will be shipped to Turkey under the supervision of Iran and the IAEA," he told journalists on the sidelines of a conference of developing nations. "Then we will dispatch 1,200 kilograms [2,640 pounds] of 3.5% enriched uranium to Turkey to be exchanged for 120 kilograms [264 pounds] of 20% enriched uranium from the Vienna group."

The Vienna group refers to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council -- the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China -- and Germany, which engaged in talks with Iran last October. FOR THE RECORD: This article says "the Vienna group" consists of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany. In fact, the Vienna group is Russia, France, the U.S. and the IAEA.

The deal was brokered during an 18-hour session Sunday by leaders of Brazil and Turkey during a visit to Tehran. A joint statement was signed by the foreign ministers of all three countries and witnessed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, state radio reported.

Afterward, Ahmadinejad called on the West to return to talks.

"Following the signing of the nuclear fuel swap deal, it is time ... to enter talks with Iran based on honesty, justice and mutual respect," Ahmadinejad said, according to Reuters.

The deal appears to build upon an IAEA proposal last year that was endorsed by the Obama administration and Western powers.

Iran was to send around 2,640 pounds of its low-enriched uranium to Russia to be further refined and afterward to France to be converted into 20%-enriched fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor. The compromise was to serve as a way of drawing Iran's supply of nuclear material below the threshold for building a bomb and to create an atmosphere for a broader deal between the West and Iran.

That deal faltered when Iran appeared to back away, with political factions in Tehran accusing the West of trying to swindle Iran out of its stockpile. A few months ago, upping tensions with the West, Iran began producing its own 20% enriched uranium, a move that diplomats and nonproliferation experts worried could bring Iran closer to the highly enriched uranium needed to fuel an atom bomb.

If a deal comes to fruition it would mark yet another milestone in the rise of new powers challenging the domination of the West. Brazil and Turkey are both rapidly emerging regional and global economic powers seeking to enhance their stature with diplomatic triumphs.

But many questions remain about the new deal. Only a handful of countries, including France and Argentina, are said to have the capacity to create the specialized fuel plates for the Tehran medical reactor, built by the United States before Iran's 1979 revolution.

The deal could also fall prey to factional battles within Iran's domestic politics, where any sign of weakness in the face of Western powers is viewed as selling out the nation. And it could also be rejected by the Obama administration, which has shifted its tactics from diplomatic outreach to Iran toward a push for isolating the country by tightening sanctions.

Obama is also under pressure by conservatives in Washington to take a tougher line on Iran.

Turkey does not enrich uranium. Though Mehmanparast said Turkey has agreed to serve as the venue for the fuel exchange, it remains unclear whether it would serve as a guarantor for the low-enriched uranium or whether the material would be shipped to a nation with refinement capacity such as Russia, Brazil or France.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-nuclear-20100517,0,4884367,print.story

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Monterrey, Mexico, finally feeling the effects of the drug war

The wealthy city is perhaps paying the price for tolerating the presence of drug traffickers for so many years. Now, 'security is collapsing,' an official says.

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

May 16, 2010

Reporting from Monterrey, Mexico

With its superhighways, gleaming skyscrapers, fancy art museums and leafy plazas, Monterrey has always been safe — so safe, in fact, that drug lords chose to park their families here.

Life in Monterrey represented another Mexico, cozily above the national fray of violence and disintegration.

No scruffy border city or remote, drug-infested outpost, Monterrey is Mexico's wealthiest city, its economic engine, the center of textile, food-processing, beer and construction industries — a modern, sophisticated metropolis where per-capita GDP is twice the national average.

The drug lords' families took advantage of the country's best schools and top-of-the-line hospitals, the establishment turned a blind eye, and the wealth made it an easy place to launder money.

Now, however, as drug-trafficking syndicates expand their reach across Mexico, they have brought even Monterrey to its knees.

And as authorities lose control, the business elite is worried, ordinary residents panicked.

"The tradition of a tranquil Monterrey has ended," said Gilberto Marcos, a textile manufacturer who belongs to a citizens board that advises the state on security issues.

"And if Monterrey is lost, everything is lost."

Monterrey is perhaps paying the price for tolerating the presence of traffickers for so many years, allowing them to fester and grow amid the shared wealth.

"For two decades, our deliberate ignorance and our indolence have made us de facto collaborators" with organized crime, said Father Rogelio Narvaez, head priest in the struggling Our Lady of the Rosary parish. "Legality and the social fabric are in crisis.... It is easier to get guns than a scholarship."

In the space of a few weeks in recent months, drug gangs repeatedly blocked off city streets, snarling traffic and preventing police and soldiers from patrolling. Regular gun battles in and around Monterrey had claimed 164 lives this year as of May 7, almost the same number as in the two previous years combined. The dead included two popular engineering students caught, apparently, in crossfire at the gates of their prestigious university.

On April 21, 50 gunmen overran the downtown Holiday Inn, a high-end hotel popular with business travelers, forced the receptionist to ID guests and yanked four men and a woman from their fifth-floor rooms. A clerk from another hotel across the street, thought to be an informant, was also seized. They have not been seen since.

Authorities later arrested seven police officers accused of helping the gunmen, who are believed to be members of a notorious drug gang known as the Zetas.

On May 2, a single gunshot at a fairgrounds during an annual cattle festival triggered a panicked stampede of people in attendance. Five people were killed and dozens injured.

Business leaders say extortion and forced payment of "protection money" to gangsters are now routine. U.S. universities have canceled exchange programs with Monterrey institutions. Foreign investment fell by 50% last year; unemployment has risen sharply.

"Security is collapsing," Chamber of Commerce President Juan Ernesto Sandoval said. "The authorities are overwhelmed."

Several business leaders stormed into the governor's office the other day to demand immediate action after traffickers blocked streets in 20 locations on a single day. It was "unpardonable" that they could stage the blockades for hours with impunity, the businessmen told the governor's top security official.

But they came away with nothing but platitudes, one participant recalled.

For all its wealth, Monterrey is also home to circles of poor and out-of-work people whom traffickers have effectively exploited. As The Times reported last year, the Zetas began moving into the rough, neglected barrio of Independencia that slopes haphazardly up from the Santa Catarina riverbed. There they recruited young men as dealers, mules, spies and disciples.

Today, the Zetas have launched a bloody battle to challenge the longtime dominance of their former patron, the Gulf cartel. It is being waged most ferociously in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas that borders Texas, in towns such as Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, and has spilled 100 miles southward to engulf Monterrey.

The city's mayor, Fernando Larrazabal, said traffickers have managed to sow panic among residents and believes their ultimate goal is to provoke citizen demands that the army be withdrawn.

"We have to regain control of Monterrey's streets and neighborhoods and restore peace," Larrazabal, who took office six months ago, said in an interview. "In recent weeks we've seen unprecedented actions in defiance of government at local, state and federal levels."

Larrazabal said he inherited a police department rife with corruption and deeply infiltrated by drug cartels. More than 20% of officers have been sacked, with a number facing criminal prosecution, he said. But experts say it would take years to clean up the statewide police force.

He said the army has begun to reinforce Nuevo Leon state's border with Tamaulipas in a bid to stop spillover violence. He acknowledged that the mayhem has hurt the local economy and stalled business recovery.

"Businesses are afraid to invest, and that is putting a brake on employment," he said. "Unemployment is going down a bit, but the rhythm of economic recovery should be greater and faster, and it's not."

Larrazabal spoke at City Hall, where hundreds of people were signing up for welfare benefits and unemployed demonstrators waved signs demanding work.

"There is a lot of anguish and people are afraid," Jorge Mirelos, a Monterrey resident who recently lost his job at a truck factory, said of the climate of insecurity. "How far is this going to go? Guns for everybody so we can defend ourselves?"

And so, as in so many other parts of Mexico, the citizens of Monterrey are changing the way they live. They don't go out at night as much. The frequent shopping trips to McAllen, Texas, have been curtailed; they drive the now-dangerous highway only at certain high-noon hours. They look over their shoulders, viewing one another with suspicion.

"Our way of being has changed," said Marcos, the textile manufacturer. "We saw this from afar — in Guadalajara, Tijuana, Sinaloa — and now the problem is catching up to us."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-monterrey-20100517,0,6492923,print.story

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Homeland Security chief's appearance at Pomona College commencement draws immigration protesters

Graffiti terrorists

An L.A. man who confronted a tagger was shot and killed in February, and people appear to have taken to heart the message that it's dangerous to confront taggers.

May 17, 2010

When Ronald Lamonte Barron confronted a tagger on Pico Boulevard and was shot and left to die for his efforts, the killer committed a small act of terrorism.

If the idea was to scare us, it's working.

Any doubts I might have had about that were erased one recent Saturday morning. I was jogging toward home at the end of a run along Pico, west of La Brea, just half a mile from where Barron died that February night.

When I run, I don't listen to music, and I hate company. My mind goes its own way as my body huffs and slogs around mid-city L.A. That day, I was preoccupied with how not to crush the snails on the sidewalk.

I looked up and noticed a teenager, one hand holding his baggy jeans not quite over his red plaid boxers. In the other hand he held a can of black spray paint. My first instinct, as I watched him tag a cinderblock wall, was to run across Pico and confront him. As the mother of two teenage boys, I'm accustomed to chastising them and their friends. Then I remembered the guy who got shot.

So I just watched. Jogging very slowly, and trying not to seem like I was looking. Other pedestrians appeared to be doing the same thing. There was a dad pushing a baby in a stroller, an older woman with a mesh plastic shopping bag. There was steady but not heavy car traffic.

The young man finished and ran to the corner, where he got into a dark gray sedan. I saw it had California plates, but I couldn't read the number. The driver was older, wearing glasses, respectable looking. Like a dad dropping off his son for music lessons or tutoring.

And here's what really horrified me. They didn't drive away. They drove a block or so, and the young man jumped out again and sprayed over another tagger's handiwork, adding his own. And again. Three times in maybe five blocks.

No one did a thing. No one yelled out. Or tried to stop him. Maybe, like me, they were scared.

The police don't want us to confront taggers, who could be armed, says Adam Green, the senior lead LAPD officer for my neighborhood. Get a description, get a license plate number, but keep your distance.

Tagging seems intractable and, as Green says, "out of control." Taggers, who are sometimes affiliated (such a highfalutin word in the circumstance) with gangs and sometimes just with tagging crews, are usually minors and usually work in the dark, Green says. Their handiwork gives them bragging rights with other taggers.

The language of graffiti is often opaque. Who is "Shorty?" What does "EXP" mean? But the broader meaning is more than clear.

"It brings the community down, the property values down," Green says.

By late afternoon on the Saturday I saw the tagger, his handiwork had been painted over, creating that two-tone look so prevalent all over this city.

Several businesspeople in the area say crime is down so much from a couple of decades ago that they can take the tagging in stride, though they'd rather not have to. And they all praised how quickly the city's graffiti removal services respond.

Ed Jeffers, who owns property along Pico, says he's been in the neighborhood since 1974, when he was often afraid. "I wouldn't walk around the block," he said. "I thought I wouldn't make it."

These days, he says, he might confront a tagger. "I'm 6' 4" and 300 pounds. I don't think they're going to bother me."

Nick Babila, who owns Impact Auto Body on Pico, sees things as much better too. A decade ago, tagging wouldn't turn heads. The fact that people are bothered by it is progress, he says.

It may be progress, but it's only a start. Our neighborhood is about halfway between downtown and the beach, with great economic and ethnic diversity. It's an area with a few new cafes and antique shops, but also more liquor stores than any neighborhood needs, and the streets aren't kept as clean as in Hancock Park. If it often feels like a neighborhood coming into its own, it's also easy to see what a fragile process that can be. As fragile as a stream of paint from a $8 can.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-macvean-graffiti-20100517,0,7194125,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Sign of Afghan Addiction May Also Be Its Remedy

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Hospital for Interior Ministry Addicts is both a symptom of how bad this country's drug addiction problem is, and a possible solution for one of its worst aspects.

On the one hand, its patients are all policemen. On the other hand, those policemen are no longer on the street, trying to feed heroin and opium addictions that can easily cost triple their official salaries.

Gen. Dawood Dawood, the country's drug enforcer as deputy interior minister for counternarcotics, was so proud of the three-month-old institution that he issued a personally signed letter authorizing reporters to visit Sunday. When hospital officials balked — saying they were worried the incarcerated policemen would be so angry they might throw rocks at visitors — the general's staff intervened to make sure the visit took place.

Before the tour, General Dawood said at a news conference that a systematic program that had so far administered urine tests to 95 percent of the Afghan National Police found 1,231 of them addicted to hard drugs, mostly heroin and opium — a rate of about 1.5 percent of the force. Afghanistan also has a severe shortage of trained police officers , so instead of firing them, it has begun sending them to the Hospital for Interior Ministry Addicts for three- to four-week rehabilitation programs.

Those figures were no surprise. A Government Accountability Office report for the United States Congress last March noted that 12 to 41 percent of Afghan police recruits tested positive for drug use, although that included marijuana and hashish as well as opiates. Recruits who test positive for hard drugs are dismissed, but the others are kept and given counseling. Since opiates disappear from the body quickly, however, many of the recruits could easily have avoided getting caught — apparently explaining the high number of addicts found still on the force.

The recovering policemen in the hospital, as it turned out, made no use of the many stones in the courtyard, and instead proved eager to tell their stories.

Most, like First Lt. Juma Khan Asak, 40, a border patrolman from western Afghanistan, were long-term addicts. Lieutenant Asak said he had been smoking first opium and then heroin since he was 17, long before he joined the police. Now that the eldest of his eight children was that age, he had grown concerned that his children would follow him into addiction. He turned himself in for treatment.

“I was spending 1,000 afghanis a day,” he said, “and I could no longer do my job properly.” That amount, about $20, was approximately twice his lieutenant's salary; asked how he could afford that and support a big family, he just shrugged.

On the western border, the major concern of the police there is interdicting drug smugglers making for Iran.

Like the other patients, Lieutenant Asak was dressed in striped pajamas. At present, there are 50 of them in all, of whom 11 were lieutenants and above.

The facilities are modest, a collection of former school buildings and prefab barracks, with one television for staff members and patients and little else in the way of recreation. With no generator, there is often no running water or electricity. But the patient-to-staff ratio, at least, is the envy of almost any drug rehabilitation center: it has 12 doctors, two of them psychiatrists, as well as social workers and counselors.

So far, said Dr. Doust Mohammed, a psychiatrist and the medical director, the 100-bed hospital has treated 600 policemen; the other 600 who have tested positive nationwide are scheduled to come here in coming months. “Of those 600, only two have relapsed so far,” Dr. Mohammed said. Those who relapse are fired, he said.

Though it is too early to know how the patients do over the long term, Dr. Shafi Azim, a psychiatrist who has worked in drug rehabilitation for 13 years, said the policemen make particularly good patients. “They're military men and they're used to taking orders,” he said. “And they want to recover their pride and dignity.”

Mohammed Ishaq Rezia, 34, a police captain from Daykondi Province in central Afghanistan, blamed his opium addiction on a combination of poor education, constant warfare, easy drug availability and “bad friends.” “A few years back, the entire country was under opium, and it was easy to find it,” he said. “It was so bad that even as policemen we had the freedom to smoke opium openly. But that's over now.”

Afghanistan has succeeded in eradicating poppy cultivation from 20 of its 34 provinces in recent years, through a combination of incentives offered to local government, military intervention by Afghan forces, and large-scale international aid to programs like crop substitution. Nonetheless, record poppy harvests until recently have depressed opium prices, and the country still supplies 90 percent of the world's heroin.

This year that looks likely to change significantly, as a mysterious pestilence has been killing off the poppies, with some predictions that 70 percent of the poppy harvest will fail this year. In turn, drug control officials fear, that will drive the price for opium back up, and discourage farmers from changing to other crops.

Drug-testing programs among policemen and recruits are also new, going large-scale only in the past year. “Counternarcotics is one of the priorities of our minister,” said an Interior Ministry spokesman, Zemarai Bashary, referring to Mohammed Hanif Atmar. “In particular we are trying our best to have a sound police force, free of narcotics.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/world/asia/17afghan.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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40 Years Later, a Proper Graduation

BOSTON — The telltale clues at this weekend's festivities, 40 years late, included the tie-dye T-shirt on a woman who also wore a peace symbol necklace and a garland in her hair (“I thought everyone would be dressed like this,” she said).

When the group stood for its class picture, even those in suits and ties made the peace sign. Others raised clenched fists.

And one of them marched in the commencement processional with an antiwar poster slung around his neck.

The accouterment and spirit of their era still radiate from the class of 1970, despite the harsh and abrupt ending to their years at Boston University .

That spring was supposed to bring a flowery conclusion to their four years of academe. But President Richard M. Nixon had invaded Cambodia. National Guardsmen had gunned down students at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine. Young men still faced the draft. And this campus, like many across the country, was in turmoil, with strikes, sit-ins, building takeovers and fire-bombings.

The situation became so incendiary that, for safety's sake, university officials called off final exams, canceled graduation and sent students packing.

This weekend, on what would have been the 40th anniversary of that ceremony, the university sought to make amends with a proper graduation.

But more than pomp and circumstance, the university wanted to give the students — now in their early 60s, many of them grandparents — a chance to heal the wounds, reflect on what their time here had meant and feel better about their alma matter.

“This is not an apology,” Robert A. Brown, the president of the university, said in an interview beforehand. “We did exactly the right thing by calling off exams. It's an opportunity to reach out to this cadre of alums and say, ‘Come, be with us.' ”

About 300 of the 3,000-member class showed up, many with their grown children in tow, not to mention unfinished business.

“That was a big deal,” Dr. Marcia Wells Avery, one of three black nursing students in the class of 1970, said of her canceled graduation. “It was worse for the parents and the grandparents, many of whom are dead now and were robbed of that opportunity to see their child march across that stage.”

“My father vowed that B.U. would never get a penny from him,” added Dr. Avery, who is now a nursing professor at Northwestern State University in Louisiana.

Still, Dr. Avery was enjoying the weekend. She decided to drop by the bookstore and “buy up all the B.U. paraphernalia” she could find. She said she would even consider making a future donation to the school.

And by the end of the ceremonies on Sunday, she was beaming. “It's O.K.,” she said. “I feel complete.”

Although officials avoided any mention of fund-raising during the weekend, many class members assumed that this was one of the university's long-term goals as it sought to strengthen its bonds with this class, many of them professionals, many on the verge of retirement.

Scott Nichols, the university's chief fund-raiser, said that “there is no plan afterward to swoop in.” However, he added: “These students had this strange moment in time. Why not treat them nicely? In a fund-raising sense, you never go wrong treating people nicely and there's always payback, but we have no solicitation strategy.”

On Saturday the class began trickling back to the urban campus. The ice-breaking social event was an extensive slide show of photographs taken by Peter Simon, a member of the class and brother of Carly Simon .

“Forty years ago I probably never would have gone to graduation because I was such a hippie,” Mr. Simon said to chuckles and applause. But now, he said, “time has mellowed me.”

Mr. Simon said that when he speaks about his photography around the country, students frequently say to him, “God, I wish I'd been alive and been part of your generation because it's really boring now.” He said he responds by saying: “But you have all this texting! You have cellphones!”

“And they say they'd give all that stuff away for the kind of experiences we had,” he said. “And I have to say, I agree.”

Many of those who came said some classmates had no interest in attending. “They felt like what's done is done and it has no relevance to their lives anymore,” said Amy Weiner Nathans, a retired foreign language teacher who lives in Ohio.

But many came just for the fun of it. George Watson, who is now chairman of the foreign language department at a local high school, said he came back “to rekindle that passion that I felt back then.”

Kit Coffey, who worked in medical sales and lives on Boston's South Shore, said she came because she thought it would be “a hoot” to remember her origins as a rebellious college student.

“How did I become a suburban housewife?” she asked. This era, she said, “is hard to explain to people, then you forget about it because you're in your everyday life. And then you look back at this time and think, wow, what was that all about?”

This would not be a gathering of baby boomers without elaborate attention paid to the music. As the class moved quietly to the pews of Marsh Chapel for a Service of Remembrance, a pianist played the soundtrack of their era: “Fire and Rain,” “The Long and Winding Road” and “Both Sides Now.” A soloist, backed by an acoustic guitar, sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

From the lectern, James Carroll, who was the Catholic chaplain of the university at the time, vividly recalled the vigil here for Kent State students, when American soldiers, dressed in combat gear and carrying rifles, encircled the students at a sit-in. “The real meaning of that trauma sank in,” he said of Kent State. “Our government, having killed legions of Vietnamese, was now prepared to kill you. Us.”

The soloist led the class in singing “Let It Be,” during which many wiped away tears.

That sharp emotional reminiscence over, the events of the weekend took a more joyful turn.

At their own convocation on Sunday morning, class members — with their gray hair tucked under their caps and lifetimes of experience under their belts — strode across the stage in their fire-engine-red gowns and received their diplomas (actually, certificates, since their real diplomas had been mailed to them at the time).

Swaying back and forth, they spontaneously sang “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.” They bopped and shimmied off the stage to “Ain't No Mountain High Enough.”

In the afternoon, they were given pride of place among 25,000 other graduates, family and friends at the sun-splashed commencement ceremonies on Nickerson Field. Younger graduates cheered them on. Several speakers paid them homage as the big video screens featured photos of their demonstrations, their love-ins and their long hair.

And the commencement speaker, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. , singled them out.

“I love you all,” he told the crowd. But gesturing to the class of 1970, sitting right in front of him, he said, “But these are my people.”

For a day, at least, the establishment was honoring them, a turnabout from 40 years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/17grads.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Gang Injunction Names Names, and Suit Follows

Lucio Gonzalez, a 33-year-old unemployed truck driver from a tough part of Fairfield, said he was scared to look out the door at night, but not because of the area's gangs. He thinks he will be a casualty of police efforts to control gang activity.

“I feel like the police are going to kick in the door,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who has a 2-year-old son. “Who is going to watch my kid if they take me away? I'm paranoid, looking out the window like, Are they out there right now? They take pictures of me, of my cars and my house. They constantly pull me over. They give me tickets for everything.”

To the Fairfield police, Mr. Gonzalez is a known member of the Norteños, a violent street gang they have sought to restrict through a court-ordered civil gang injunction.

“He's a threat to the community,” said Sgt. Matt Bloesch of Fairfield Police Department's gang unit. “He's associating with gang members, and he is an active member of a gang that's involved in drug trafficking, carrying weapons, putting up graffiti and shooting people.”

Mr. Gonzalez said this characterization was false.

Is he or isn't he? What might have been a question confined to police investigative units is now ricocheting around a far larger arena, as Fairfield and dozens of other California cities have become proving grounds for the latest legal assault on gang violence: the gang injunction.

In Fairfield, the injunction gives a judicial imprimatur to barring gang members and gang activity from large swaths of the city, the better to ensure that violence between the Norteños and their rivals, the Sureños, is curbed and the community is safer from the outbreaks of gunfire that have resulted in 10 killings since 1994.

It is no accident that the injunctions have flourished in California. There are 236,200 gang members in the state, almost one-third of the national total, according to a tracking system set up by the California Department of Justice.

But what makes someone a gang member? That is the question being posed by Mr. Gonzalez and Mario Huezo, 22.

Legally there is no single definition. To be considered a gang member under state law, a law enforcement official trained in gangs must “validate” membership by determining that a person falls under at least two criteria from a list that includes self-admission of gang affiliation, frequenting a gang area, gang dress and tattoos, and using hand signs associated with gangs.

The American Civil Liberties Union , which has intervened in numerous cases of gang injunctions, put Mr. Huezo and Mr. Gonzalez in touch with Paul Feuerwerker, a lawyer representing them without a fee. In a hearing scheduled for July, a judge will decide whether the men are in fact gang members who should be named in the injunction. The judge will also decide at that time whether to make the injunction permanent.

The issues raised by civil libertarians go well beyond the question of accurately identifying gang members. Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. have argued that civil gang injunctions violate a host of constitutional rights, including the First Amendment right of freedom of association and due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth and 14th Amendments.

“Gang injunctions function like roving warrants, and they can lead to a lot of racial profiling,” said Jory Steele, managing attorney of the Northern California chapter of the A.C.L.U.

Fairfield's injunction, which a judge preliminarily approved in July, serves as a restraining order within defined geographic boundaries — 4.19 square miles of downtown) — in which gang members have restricted rights, including a mandatory curfew of 10 p.m. and rules against associating in public.

Before filing the injunction the police department spent years assembling more than 400 pages of evidence chronicling the activities of gang members, recording tattoos, traffic violations, drive-by shootings and any misconduct dating back to 1994, the year of the first Norteño gang-related homicide in this city of 106,500.

According to law enforcement officials, Mr. Gonzalez, Mr. Huezo and an estimated 250 others in Fairfield are members of the Norteños gang, which originated in the state prison system in the 1960s.

In Spanish “Norteños” means “northerners,” a name given to prisoners from the agricultural and often rural northern parts of the state by the Mexican Mafia, a prison gang largely made up of Latino prisoners from Los Angeles and more urban parts of Southern California. Allies of the Mexican Mafia are called Sureños, or “southerners.”

Over time, the gangs moved from the prisons into the streets. Law enforcement officials say the Norteños are known for violent crime, the color red and peddling drugs like heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine within the prison system and on the street. The Sureños are involved in the same activities, but wear the color blue and have different tattoos.

The Norteños “are a violent group of individuals that terrorize the city with shootings, stabbings, graffiti, the list goes on and on, and they do these criminal acts as an entity, as a group,” said Bryan Kim, Solano County's deputy district attorney. “This injunction is an effective tool to prevent that violence before it happens.”

There is no Fairfield injunction involving the Sureños.

The first civil gang injunction was filed in 1987 by the Los Angeles city attorney against a gang known as the Playboy Gangster Crips. Since then, such injunctions have proliferated, covering parts of at least 40 cities, including five injunctions in San Francisco and one filed in February by Oakland's city attorney.

In 1997 the California Supreme Court upheld gang injunctions as a constitutional means to control street gangs. That case involved just four square blocks in San Jose, within which none of the gang members lived, but increasingly, gang injunction “safety zones” have incorporated larger swaths of cities and towns.

Just over 11 percent of Fairfield is within the safety zone. Many of the designated gang members in the injunction live within its borders.

“It's basically all of Fairfield,” Mr. Huezo said. “The rich neighborhoods around the perimeter of the city are the only place the gang injunction does not apply.”

When a county judge granted the preliminary gang injunction, Mr. Huezo immediately picked up the phone. “I was bright enough to contact the A.C.L.U.,” he said. “I'm not a gang member. I'm not who they depict me as. I'm not on parole or probation. If I was who they say I am, I'd be in prison, on probation or dead.”

For the judge remove Mr. Huezo and Mr. Gonzalez from the injunction, each must prove that he has had no association with suspected gang members for three years. The police say both men have been seen in gang locales and in the company of gang members within that time.

The two men also have another option for getting off the list , using the injunction's built-in “opt-out” provision. In that case, it is the district attorney who must decide their status.

Mr. Gonzalez echoed Mr. Huezo on the effect of the injunction. “I have so much family here, cousins and aunts and uncles, and we all live in the gang zone,” he said. “Now I can't see my family. I can't be out with them because if the police see us they'll try to label them gang members and harass them, too. My family is scared to be around me.”

But Sergeant Bloesch said it was easy for the police to distinguish innocent associations. “If Mr. Gonzalez is stopped on his way to church and one of his family members who is a known gang member is in the car with him” he said, “then obviously they are not doing gang stuff.

“If he's rolling in a car at 3 o'clock in the morning, and he's with other members of the gang and some of them are drunk and they're wearing red, well now there's a problem.”

Gang injunctions are likely to get a closer look in the coming year as the Obama administration has taken a keen interest in the problem of gang violence.

During a visit to Oakland last week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said combating gang violence was “a top priority for this administration” and announced that next year the president's budget would include $12 million in new spending on gang and youth violence prevention.

While both Mr. Huezo and Mr. Gonzalez want to get off Fairfield's list of gang members, neither claim complete innocence.

In 1994, as a teenager, Mr. Gonzalez was involved in a gang shooting in a Fairfield park. He pleaded guilty, though he was not the one holding the weapon. He spent time in a juvenile jail. Since then, he has had run-ins with the police for street fights, public drunkenness, yelling gang slogans and verbally threatening police officers while drunk.

“I've made mistakes in the past,” Mr. Gonzalez said, “but I've paid for my mistakes.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16sfgangs.html?pagewanted=print

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In Trenton, Issuing IDs for Illegal Immigrants

TRENTON, N.J. — Since moving to this city from her native Guatemala a decade ago, Herlinda, an illegal immigrant, has supported her family with restaurant work, but has had no way of proving that she lives here. Without government-issued photo identification, like a driver's license or a passport, she said, she could not get treatment at most medical clinics, borrow a book from the library, pick up a package from a mail center or cash a check.

But this month she discovered a solution: a community identification card issued by a coalition of civic groups and endorsed by Trenton and Mercer County officials.

“When you don't have a proper ID, they can humiliate you,” said Herlinda, 43, as she waited in the offices of a church where the cards were being issued. “I feel I belong in Trenton.”

As a new law in Arizona makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and spurs similar proposals in other states, Trenton is one of a small but growing number of municipalities that have moved in the opposite direction — making sure that illegal immigrants have documents to make their lives easier.

At least six city governments, including San Francisco and New Haven , now endorse or issue photo identification cards to residents. The latest is Princeton, N.J., where advocates for immigrants, with the consent of both the borough and the township, will begin issuing cards on May 22; other New Jersey communities have also expressed interest. Oakland, Calif., has approved a program but has not yet started issuing cards.

In one sense, these liberal cities and Arizona's conservative lawmakers are working toward the same thing, said Maria Juega, treasurer of the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund , an advocacy group that spearheaded the ID programs in Trenton and Princeton. Both camps, she said, are trying to fill the void created by Congress's failure to fix a flawed immigration system.

“These are reactions,” Ms. Juega said. “We've had these gaping holes that everybody's been talking about for two decades and done nothing about. Everybody's scrambling.”

Calls for a nationally mandated identification card have been made for decades, particularly after 9/11, but they received a push late last month when a group of Democratic senators unveiled a blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform. The plan includes a proposal to require all workers, including citizens, to show potential employers a card with biometric data, like fingerprints — a measure meant to prevent illegal immigrants from working.

The local identity cards do not grant legal residency or the right to work. They are intended to fold illegal immigrants into the fabric of the community by giving them entree to services and places that require some sort of recognized identification. In Trenton, immigrants can use their cards to access libraries, medical centers and doctors' offices; seek help from charitable organizations and private social service agencies; and use the city's public recreation centers and pools.

In addition, law enforcement officials say, the cards give illegal immigrants who fear detection and deportation more confidence about reporting crimes, and allow officials to help immigrants who are crime victims.

“I believe that people who are here in America must be safe and must be healthy,” said Eve Sanchez Silver, the community and Latino liaison for Asbury Park, N.J., where a city-endorsed identity card program for illegal immigrants began in 2008. “If they're not safe, we're not going to be safe. If they're not going to be healthy, we're not going to be healthy.”

While the programs in Trenton, Princeton and Asbury Park are endorsed by local law enforcement officials but administered by community organizations, New Haven and San Francisco themselves issue identity cards. The cards allow access to even more services, including opening bank accounts. This allows immigrants to deposit their pay checks, rather than carrying large amounts of cash that make them prey for thieves.

To keep the cards from becoming “scarlet letters” that mark illegal immigrants, they are offered to all residents, though they are mainly used by immigrants and the homeless.

A few states, including New Mexico and Washington, allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, but the number has fallen as more states require proof of lawful presence in the country.

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform , which opposes illegal immigrants and proposals to give them legal status, described the local ID card programs as “attempts by the leadership of those communities to thwart enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.”

He added, “It encourages people to stay in those communities, when in fact the policies ought to be discouraging those people.”

But Ms. Juega said she and her fellow advocates in Trenton were motivated by a desire to “allow this population that is increasingly marginalized to have some semblance of a normal life.”

About 23 percent of Trenton's 83,000 residents are immigrants, mostly Latinos, according to the 2008 American Community Survey . Many do not have legal immigration documents, advocates say.

Trenton's ID program, which began in May 2009, met with minimal resistance among city officials, said Detective Bob Russo of the Office of Community Affairs in the Trenton Police Department, who has been a major proponent. “I've had a few colleagues who were against it,” he said. “But we stressed that you're not giving this person any pass or anything like that, you're just accepting that person as a member of the community.” City and police officials are under orders not to ask residents about their immigration status, unless it is in connection with a felony.

Still, only about 1,300 people in Trenton have stepped forward to get the cards. Some immigrants have been wary, despite promises that the information they provided would remain confidential.

Two days after New Haven lawmakers approved the nation's first plan to offer cards in 2007, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement began a series of arrests in the area that sent 32 immigrants to detention centers around New England — a move that the mayor, John DeStefano Jr., described as retaliation. By the time city officials issued the first IDs, called Elm City Resident Cards, many residents were afraid to come forward.

Some other communities waited to see if there were legal challenges to the New Haven program, but none surfaced. Opponents of the program filed suit seeking the participants' names and addresses. The city's refusal was upheld by the state, said Michael J. Wishnie, a Yale law professor who helped develop the program and was retained by the city to help defend it in the event of lawsuits.

Like most community identification cards, the cards in Trenton have no currency outside the city. Detective Russo said that some police departments in neighboring communities had confiscated them, thinking they were fake.

Yet organizers say their program has been a success, drawing interest from other municipalities and praise from charitable agencies around the city. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, director of the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton , which runs a food pantry, said a growing number of clients were using the cards to receive services.

Mario, 26, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, said he used the card to collect his paychecks at the commercial cleaning company where he works, and to enter the guarded buildings he cleans. Last week, he accompanied his friend Augustin, 19, to St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic Church in Trenton, where advocates issue the documents one evening each week. Augustin, a baby-faced immigrant from Mexico, said finding an employer prepared to hire him had not been a problem — the trouble was proving he was not under age.

As Augustin registered for a card, Mario revealed that his had been useful in some unexpected ways.

Early one recent morning as he was driving to work, he was pulled over by a Trenton police officer for driving with a broken tail light. The officer, he said, asked for his insurance card and registration as well as his driver's license. While Mario had the car documents, he had no license; instead, he offered his local identity card.

The police officer, Mario said, let him go with a warning about the tail light. There was no mention of the lack of a driver's license, a punishable offense.

Mario, an observant Catholic, smiled as he recalled his stroke of good fortune. “La obra de Dios,” he said. “The work of God.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/nyregion/17idcard.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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The Right to, and Need for, Counsel

New York State's highest court has affirmed the state's constitutional duty to provide effective legal counsel to poor criminal defendants. It comes at a moment when public defender offices across the country are perilously short on financing and struggling with overwhelming caseloads.

The 4-to-3 ruling , written by the chief judge of the State Court of Appeals, Jonathan Lippman, pointed to glaring dysfunction in the state's county-by-county indigent defense system, and it said that a broad class-action lawsuit challenging the adequacy of the system could proceed. It noted that in many New York counties indigent defendants are routinely arraigned without a lawyer. At these initial court appearances, bail is also set and many defendants are sent to jail.

In allowing the case to go forward, the court rightly rejected the state's argument that consideration of the adequacy of legal representation should be confined to individual, postconviction appeals. That has now set the stage for a trial or a settlement with the state to improve defender services.

Earlier this month Judge Lippman delivered a Law Day speech in Albany arguing for an even broader vision of justice, one that includes guaranteeing a lawyer for poor people in civil disputes where basic needs are at stake, like evictions and foreclosures. He plans to hold hearings around the state before unveiling a detailed plan next year. We applaud Judge Lippman's new initiative. Equal justice demands adequate legal representation for all. That is especially important in tough times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17mon4.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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