Datelines
al., Phil Haslanger et.
A Rival to the Gangs MILWAUKEE On the one hand are the gangs—the Latin Kings and the Cobras. On the other is their rival, Ricardo Diaz, the thirty-five-year-old director of Centro de la Comunidad...
...Lucy Komisar (Lucy Komisar is a free-lance writer who reports frequently for The Progressive from abroad...
...Ten days after the initial police raid, NIH suspended IBR's grant...
...TOWER, MINNESOTA The people of northeastern Minnesota, who would prefer to be left alone with their canoe paddles and splitting mauls, are putting them aside in favor of political activism for the third time in four years...
...Federal District Judge Francis Calimari ruled that Shoreham cannot be licensed without county and state approval of its evacuation plan...
...The ruling marked the first instance of Federal acknowledgment of any state or county power over reactor licensing, and antinuclear activists regard it as a real chink in the industry's otherwise-seamless legal armor...
...A park across the street used to be a war zone...
...Diaz has made it clear that the center's turf is neutral territory...
...Others went out of fear," he says...
...by mid-July, eighty-four men and four women were still in the provincial jail in Nunoa...
...Sendero, a fanatical, secretive guerrilla group, stepped onto the scene, taking its message to remote Andean villages here about two years ago...
...We feel that the only reason they were sent to Delta was because Delta was the only primate facility that was desperate enough to take them...
...Local observers say the number of Sendero troops in the department was not large— about three columns of twenty each, armed with rifles and machine guns...
...His leadership was tested one night this June, after a murder that the grapevine said was gang-related...
...Angry meetings erupted in the three counties that intersect the ten-mile zone...
...history-exceeding the design capacity of a completed reactor...
...They say the move will bring new jobs...
...But tight-lipped National Guard officials tell an inconsistent story when they talk at all...
...A local human-rights advocate says many were beaten...
...He was convicted on six counts, but in 1983 the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed the verdict on the grounds that animal experiments funded with Federal tax dollars are exempt from state anti-cruelty laws...
...On another occasion, guerrillas took passengers off a bus and, consulting a list, killed eight people responsible for coop enterprises...
...Researchers had severed the monkeys' spinal cords, sewn eyes shut, and crippled limbs...
...They think they will achieve folk-hero status, name recognition, protection, and a sense of belonging...
...Milwaukee police report at least five incidents in recent years when gang members randomly shot at each other...
...In addition, the region is the only place in the lower forty-eight states with a sizable wolf population: It is prime habitat for the Eastern timber wolf...
...Even in this sparsely populated area, it's hard to find 200,000 acres-about 300 square miles—that nobody's using...
...They put water in their noses with hoses and put rifles in their mouths...
...A team of NRC inspectors quickly gave Perry a clean bill of health...
...Then a nonprofit animal sanctuary in San Antonio called Primarily Primates offered unsuccessfully to take over care of the animals, which was costing NIH $30,000 a year...
...A judge ruled the monkeys belonged to IBR, but a different judge ordered that the monkeys be taken to a NIH facility in Poolesville, Maryland, and the fifteen surviving monkeys were moved there...
...Governor Perpich is the only public official who admits to knowing anything about the project, and he refers all questions to the Guard...
...We cared for them because of the 1981 court order, but they still belong to IBR...
...Diaz knows something about athletics...
...The Mistake by the Lake COLUMBUS, OHIO The Perry Nuclear Power Plant sits on the Lake Erie shore, forty miles east of Cleveland...
...Sendero Luminoso—the Shining Path—began its offensive in this region near the Bolivian border on June 18, the day that Lima prison mutinies grabbed world headlines...
...He came to Wisconsin in 1970 on a basketball scholarship to Carroll College in Waukesha, a Milwaukee suburb...
...The military entered villages, pulled people out of their homes, shot up the towns, and arrested people whose names were on their lists...
...In June, NIH conceded that the monkeys are no longer suitable for research and sent them to Delta, a research facility affiliated with Tulane University in New Orleans...
...Diaz sees the center as primarily a prevention agency...
...Of the original thirty monkeys, only seventeen were still alive...
...This latest arrogation of power has yet to be challenged in court...
...Evacuation planning has been a hot topic in the nuclear debate since 1980...
...More than 150 peasants, caught in a squeeze play between the guerrillas and the army, were arrested in this Andean department in the south of Peru...
...On the other is their rival, Ricardo Diaz, the thirty-five-year-old director of Centro de la Comunidad Unida, a neighborhood center in the heart of this city's south-side Hispanic community...
...The move will delay Perry's opening for at least several months...
...So the Kings have a team in the center's regular basketball league...
...The guerrillas entered a cooperative in Pa-cauta and, checking a list, killed seven peasants, including two officials of the governing Apra Party...
...Then last spring, the NRC moved to patch it up, ruling four-to-one that its licensing boards need not consider a local government's wishes in evacuation planning...
...Last summer, when tension heated up, the center organized a special four-team basketball league for the Kings and arranged field trips for the less athletically inclined Cobras...
...But pressures from the cooperatives were strong, and Garcia stalled despite protests by peasants...
...And Delta has a very bad reputation, not only in the humane community but also among the scientists...
...NOrth Guard has stirred up enough trouble to make the idea a political hot potato for Perpich, who faces a primary-election challenge against St...
...At least one gang member has been murdered by a rival in each of the last three years...
...But at least one NRC official has conceded Celeste's actions will almost certainly delay the Perry licensing and the Davis-Besse restart...
...People appeared on horses, threatened them, and ordered them to go get the livestock...
...Paul Mayor George Latimer, an opponent of the proposal...
...We work with kids at the earliest ages possible," he says...
...Diaz makes them follow the rules: Don't bring weapons, help take care of the building, be part of life at the center...
...The priest says he is having trouble finding people willing to participate in a human-rights committee...
...Five scientists who observed Taub's work at IBR filed affidavits, and Taub was arrested on seventeen counts of cruelty to animals...
...What Pacheco stumbled on were brutal conditions, lazy caretakers, and horrifying levels of abuse and neglect...
...I have not been that scared in my life...
...I'll tell you, I was scared," he recalls...
...But observing them on their own turf is night and day...
...And both gangs engage in drug-dealing and burglary...
...Wallace Swett, director of the Texas group, recently renewed the offer...
...one of the jailed men says his fifty-year-old wife died after one of the soldiers stuck a rifle down her throat...
...But, as Commissioner Tim Hagan puts it, "Cleveland is closer to Perry than Kiev is to Chernobyl...
...At the time, the Commission apparently intended to rubber-stamp whatever plans were submitted to it by the licensed utilities...
...People didn't go to take but to receive...
...In the houses, they say, 'Everybody down,' and start kicking them with boots...
...Fifteen years ago, the army that ruled the country appropriated most of the big haciendas and gave the land to the peasants working it...
...But the war for recruits goes on...
...On Guard in the North Woods...
...NIH director James B. Wyngaarden disagrees...
...After the election," Noyes says, "the whole thing is going to be thrown back at us...
...Diaz came to Carroll College as a physical-education major, but working with Hispanic children in Waukesha turned him on to the possibilities of social work...
...Two of the monkeys had mutilated themselves, one chewing off eight fingers, the other five...
...Harvey Wasserman (Harvey Wasserman, a co-founder of the Clamshell Alliance, lives in Columbus...
...It represents an unprecedented blow to the nuclear industry, which may affect the licensing of numerous plants around the United States...
...As it turned out, Diaz emerged from that night as the winner...
...Sendero provoked two weeks of military incursions into the area, although there was no formal decree giving the army the right to act...
...And the military, unable to catch Sendero, turns on the peasantry...
...Five years later, they too came to the United States and then moved the family to Puerto Rico, where he finished high school...
...A citizens' group called NOrth Guard has been formed to oppose the Guard's plan, primarily by informing neighbors of the project's details...
...PETA was founded by Alex Pacheco...
...But the aftershock destroyed area roads and bridges and fed growing skepticism about the possibility of evacuating during an accident...
...It sought to take advantage of a peasant demand for land in this cold, inhospitable stretch of the Andes Mountains that is the poorest in Peru...
...Delta has no experience treating and rehabilitating primates," says Adele Jacobs, the group's spokeswoman...
...Darkness on the Shining Path PUNO, PERU The men inside the concrete jail enclosure sit silent and sad-eyed, bundled against the chill in faded sweaters and shabby pants...
...The Kings and the Cobras are not just quiet social clubs, however...
...But PETA is not satisfied...
...the peasant was an innocent, says Jose Bustamente of the Puno Committee for Human Rights...
...It was without, eyes, teeth, and tongue, and had been castrated...
...PETA wants the macaques moved, and the group has Congressional support...
...They shot seven people for being officers of the state or of Apra...
...He is co-author of "Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, " published by Delacorte/ Delta...
...Most of the 1,500 peasants fled, leaving a ghost town of less than a hundred people...
...For Perry, the political turning point came on January 31, when an earthquake reading 5.0 on the Richter scale hit ten miles from the plant, astonishing residents and—for the first time in U.S...
...On June 20, a group of sixty guerrillas arrived in the town of Macari and forced peasants to steal the goods and animals of a cooperative...
...Opponents of nuclear power here call Perry "the mistake by the Lake," but for a decade it has been steam-rolling its way toward full power, obtaining a test license last spring...
...Primates Get the Shaft BETHESDA, MARYLAND Vigil 'til Victory: Day 110 reads a sign across the street from the National Institutes of Health (NIH...
...NIH doesn't own the monkeys and never did...
...Long Islanders who live with epic traffic jams in and out of Manhattan laughed incredulously over Long Island Lighting Company's assurances that the area could be evacuated in the face of a meltdown...
...Starting in mid-June, Sendero attacked sixteen cooperatives and private farms, sometimes killing managers and other employees and inviting or forcing local peasants to take cattle, sheep, and alpacas...
...Marshall Helmberger (Marshall Helmberger, a member of NOrth Guard, lives in Tower, Minnesota...
...The state's Pollution Control Agency has charged Honeywell with chemical contamination of a former weapons-testing area just north of Minneapolis, which led to the closure of several private and municipal wells...
...Though it drew little national media attention, Celeste's action is the most aggressive yet taken by a governor against the reactor industry...
...Local opinion, as usual, would be considered irrelevant...
...Besides the economic and environmental impacts, those who don't want the National Guard in the neighborhood point to the human costs...
...The teachers had been among the Sen-deristas the day before...
...I knew 90 per cent of the kids...
...In April, 145 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to the director of NIH, asking that the monkeys be sent to Texas...
...Tourism has been the major growth industry of northeastern Minnesota in recent years, and the local people fear the changes would drive off visitors...
...Mark G. Judge (Mark G. Judge is a writer in Potomac, Maryland...
...Demands for a redistribution of land grew, and President Alan Garcia, who came to power a year ago, promised to carry it out...
...The protesters have no intention of giving up the vigil until the monkeys are safe at last in San Antonio...
...Phil Haslanger (Phil Haslanger is associate editor of The Capital Times, Madison's afternoon newspaper...
...And Delta is fully accredited, whereas Primarily Primates is not...
...With the disaster at Chernobyl, the scattered local opposition turned into a full-scale grass-roots movement...
...Gang members let it be known they appreciated that he cared enough to show up...
...Younger kids have an incredible attraction to wanting to participate in gangs," he says...
...Their goal is to force the militarization of the region, counting on government abuses to polarize the people...
...He has baseball programs in the summer, basketball and volleyball in the winter, and the largest youth boxing program in the state, with three national champions among its alumni...
...Tears stream down the face of Savino Machaca Sanchez as he tells how he and other peasants were detained by the army for accepting livestock seized from nearby haciendas by the Sendero Lu-minoso guerrillas...
...The monkeys were forced to use disabled limbs in an attempt to determine whether stroke victims could regain use of impaired arms and legs...
...The next day, the military arrived and killed two teachers and a peasant...
...Residents also worry about an interest in weapons-testing on the site, as expressed by executives of the Honeywell Corporation...
...The new cooperatives formed by the hacienda peasants were unproductive and often corrupt...
...Under Congressional pressure in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island disaster, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) adopted licensing regulations requiring blueprints for rapidly removing the people living within ten miles of an active reactor...
...It really opened my eyes, seeing the tension...
...First, in an impressive display of militancy, they fought off a plan for a hazardous-waste dump...
...Of special interest to Diaz are the gangs' recruiting efforts...
...His enemies are not only the gangs but also alcohol and drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and the school dropout rate...
...Early in 1986, it began acts of sabotage and assaults on police posts...
...Governor Rudy Perpich and the Minnesota National Guard envision training, maneuvers, war games at the division level (12,000 to 15,000 troops), and a 5,000-acre artillery range...
...We view athletics as a bait to get kids in the door...
...That's not good enough for Becky Noyes of NOrth Guard...
...Pacheco went to the police...
...But political warfare erupted at Shoreham, on Long Island, where irate local residents—public-opinion polls show 80 per cent opposition to Shoreham's opening—made it clear they felt the plans were a sham...
...On August 15, however, in the face of public protest, Ohio Governor Richard Celeste revoked his approval of the Perry evacuation plan, appointing a three-member commission to restudy it...
...Perpich recently announced that all plans for the project are "on the back burner...
...The neighborhood was tense., The center quickly set the summer basketball league in motion, and Diaz went down for opening night...
...In June 1981, Pa-checo, a student at George Washington University, volunteered for a job with the Institute for Behavioral Research (IBR), a Silver Spring, Maryland, facility which had a $60,000 NIH grant to perform tests on thirty highly intelligent macaque monkeys...
...Others say Honk to Save the Monkeys and Stop Killing the Monkeys...
...Father Hilario Huanca of Ayaviri says that in some cases the peasants were deceived...
...We tell them if somebody fouls them in a basketball game, it's not right to wait for them later outside," says Diaz...
...The army came the next day with lists of names provided by the co-op managers, wrecked the peasants' houses, and beat and seized people who had accepted Sendero's division of land...
...The Commissioners later canceled scheduled hearings on the earthquake...
...In some cases, he admits, "We're not able to compete...
...Delta is a well-recognized primate center...
...When Celeste, a native of Cleveland, withdrew his support of the evacuation plan, he also threatened "to take all steps necessary and appropriate" should the NRC try to license Perry before the state's restudy is complete...
...Sendero told many of them to go to such a property because today they will give the livestock and land that has been announced...
...It bore the sign: That is how we will finish with you peasants...
...Davis-Besse has been consistently rated one of America's worst...
...In Cuyahoga County, Ohio's largest with 1.5 million residents, county commissioners unanimously called for a halt in the licensing process until the evacuation plan can be restudied...
...The guerrillas cut off their dead victims' fingers, ears, and tongues, and gouged out their eyes...
...Father Huanca says two peasant women reported that in the second week of July, the body of Fernando Cala was found on a hill...
...Army, and the northerners fear a repeat performance on a much grander scale...
...One of the three sites under consideration stands within five miles of the million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and the noise from weapons-testing and artillery fire won't mix with the setting...
...They stepped on us like frogs," he says...
...One of the proposed sites includes several small communities, and its selection would displace more than 500 families...
...Diaz looks for ways to give youngsters alternatives to the violence on the street...
...now it is off-limits to gang activity, and the center staff tries to keep the park accessible to everyone...
...One of his strategies is to bring the gangs into the center's activities...
...Last winter, they resisted an Energy Department scheme for placing nuclear waste in their midst...
...Now it's a proposal to put a National Guard training site on a 200,000-acre plot in this area that is reeling from the death-throes of the iron-mining industry...
...Sendero's goal is not to achieve even a temporary redistribution of livestock, which reverts to the owners as soon as the military arrives, or to take over haciendas: The guerrillas burn the farms and destroy the equipment...
...Suffolk County spent some $10 million in court battles with the NRC and Lilco, and last year won its case...
...While the employment potential is significant, many residents of the area worry that such development is out of step in this quiet, isolated region...
...Celeste also withdrew state approval of plans for the troubled Davis-Besse reactor near Toledo, which has been shut for repairs since June 1985...
...The full legal ramifications are not yet clear...
...Diaz uses his unorthodox approach to make what goes on inside the neighborhood center "more attractive than what's out on the street...
...NIH had been telling Congress and the courts that they were unable to move the monkeys because of an impending lawsuit, and then in the middle of the night they put them in a truck and move them to Louisiana...
...It's just a game...
...The war is fought over recruits: The gangs look for new members...
...the group believes most people will be against the idea once they've heard the full story...
...Thirty women and 126 men were detained...
...He has recently emerged as a leader of Milwaukee's Hispanic community...
...The county, which includes Cleveland, is too far away to be officially included in the NRC plans...
...Honeywell has refused to pay the clean-up costs, blaming the problem on the U.S...
...Edward Taub of IBR was experimenting on the macaques to develop new therapy for human stroke victims...
...Born in Cuba, he was sent to live with relatives in New Jersey when he was ten because his parents were afraid he'd be inducted into the army when he turned thirteen...
...Most of the peasants, who eked out a living growing potatoes and grain outside the haciendas, did not benefit, although the land had belonged to their ancestors before it was stolen by big landlords...
...The sign-bearers are members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and for more than 100 days they have been demonstrating against NIH for holding fifteen monkeys that were mutilated and psychologically damaged beyond hope of further use in research...
...Bustamente says the arrests were accompanied by abuses...
Vol. 50 • October 1986 • No. 10
