🚀 go-pugleaf

These two articles are not about Basque issues but about issues familiar to
Basques: lack of Basque interpreters in courts, and fighting the state
oppressor by peaceful means...hehehe aio Olatz A.

Extract:
NYT October 4, 1998 page 23
Mayan Immigrants Without Spanish Are in Language Limbo

(...)
But under a 197 law, many of the Mayans here and elsewhere in Southern
California will eventually face interviews that will determine whether they
can stay in the country and apply for permanent residency or be told to return
to their homeland. A little-known language gap -- most Mayans have a limited
comand of Spanish -- stands to make that process difficult at best.
About 50,000 Mayans were among 250,000 Central Americans who fled torture,
rape and murder in the 1980's during a civil war in their native Guatemala,
and some 20,000 have settled in the Pico-Union and South Central neighborhoods
of Los Angeles and in other Southern California communities.
(...)
To help the Mayans stay here, the advocates must first help them overcome a
language barrier: Mayans speak indigenous Indian languages and know only basic
Spanish, not enough to represent adequately in immigration hearings (The INS
does not routinely provide interpretation services outside the world's major
languages).

The misconception that Mayans speak fluent Spanish is frequently futhered by
Mayans themselves.  They often go into the proceedings without a lawyer or an
indigenous interpreter, in part because they do not know they can request one
and in part because they do not want to attract attention to their indigenous
heritage which can be a target for condescension from Latino peers who
ridicule them for being "Indios" or "ignorant".  As a result, advocates say,
Mayans lose the vast majority of their immigration cases.
(...)

NYT International, October 2, 1998 page A7
Dalai Lama Group Says It Got Money From C.I.A.

New Delhi, Oct 1 - The Dalai Lama's administration acknowledged today that it
received $1.7 million a year in the 1960's from the Central Intelligence
Agency, but denied reports that the Tibetan leader benefited personally from
an annual subsidy of &180,000.

The money allocated for the resistance movement was spent on training
volunteers and paying for guerrilla operations against the Chinese, the
Tibertan government-in-exile said in a statement.  It added that the subsidy
earmarked for the Dalai Lama was spent on setting up offices in Geneva and New
York and on international lobbying.

The Dalai Lama, 63, a revered spiritual leader both in his Himalayan homeland
and in Western nations fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against a
Chinese military occupation, which began in 1950.

The decade-long covert program to support the Tibetan independence movement
was part of the C.IA.'s worldwide effort to undermine Communist governments,
particularly in the Soviet Union and China.

Ends.