Can't Stop Won't Stop (72 page)

In introducing
The Future 500
, a ground-breaking study of five hundred U.S. hip-hop activist and youth organizations, William “UPSKI” Wimsatt wrote, “Young people are noticing that the only thing that can't be bought sold, co-opted or marketed anymore is substantive political organizing and dissent.”
¹¹

The millennium would not open with a Y2K apocalypse or the fulfillment of an obscure prophecy, but with a very real explosion of rage against a decade of an expanding War on Youth.

In the streets of New York City, hip-hop activists took to the streets to protest Giuliani Time. Mayor Rudy Giuliani had implemented a zero-tolerance campaign focused on rooting out low-level “quality-of-life” crimes—the culmination of the Broken Windows theory—aimed at youths, the poor, the homeless and people of color. This zero-tolerance model would spread to urban centers across the country. It empowered a certain kind of lawless cop. In the summer of 1997, an innocent Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was swept up and arrested when police broke up a fight outside an Afro-Caribbean nightclub in Brooklyn, then sodomized with a broom handle in the bathroom of the 70th precinct by outlaw cops.

The shock troops of the campaign were NYPD's Street Crime Units, mobilized into the poor neighborhoods at the borders of business districts. In 1997 and 1998, they stopped and frisked 45,000 people, mostly young, male and Black or brown. They were supposed to be stopping nuisance crimes, but their presence itself was a nuisance: fewer than nine thousand arrests were made.

In February 1999, a report of a rape led four Street Crime Unit cops to a Soundview apartment building two blocks from Bronx River Houses where they found a slim, Senegalese immigrant looking at them quizzically from the vestibule. When Amadou Diallo reached into his pocket to pull out his wallet, the cops fired forty-one shots, killing him with nineteen bullets. There were many more victims: Yong Xin Huang, a sixteen-year-old Chinese American; Gidone Busch, a thirty-one-year-old Hasidic Jew; Patrick Bailey, a twenty-year-old Jamaican immigrant; Anthony Baez, a twenty-nine-year-old Puerto Rican.

Three weeks after Diallo's killer cops were acquitted, an undercover cop approached Haitian-American Patrick Dorismond to ask where he could buy drugs. Dorismond refused to answer. He was trying to turn his life around and didn't need trouble. But the cop persisted and a scuffle broke out. Dorismond was shot dead in the chest. At his funeral in Brooklyn, policemen provoked funeral marchers by arriving in riot gear, then moved in with batons to make arrests. Rocks and bottles rained down on them from apartment windows. Hip-hop activists began angry street protests the following month.

In Los Angeles, the biggest police scandal in American history broke out in the Rampart Division, the same Westlake/Pico-Union neighborhood hit hard by the police and the INS after the riots. At Rampart, the rogue CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) anti-gang unit “jumped in” new members gang-style, kept a “CRASH pad” where they brought prostitutes to screw and get high, stole and resold confiscated cocaine, planted guns and drugs on gang members, and left many of them paralyzed or dead.

Just as the brutality and murders of New York City's Street Crimes Unit had been tolerated, Rampart CRASH's lawlessness was overlooked. Politicians demanded numbers that would support their tough-on-crime, tough-on-youth bonafides—arrests, confiscations, prosecutions, anything at all. The means to these ends were less important. Zero-tolerance only worked in one direction.

This attitude culminated in a March 2000 ballot initiative in California, numbered Proposition 21. The so-called Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act made it easier to unseal confidential juvenile records, to try juveniles as young as fourteen as adults or to send them to adult prisons, severely increased punishment for a number of juvenile crimes and expanded juvenile sentencing under Three-Strikes. Youths faced three years for just $400 of vandalism, or the
death penalty for a “gang-related” homicide. Cops could wiretap young people they identified as gang members, and force them to be registered like sex offenders. Proposition 21 was counterintuitive. Juvenile crime rates were at their lowest levels since the mid-1960s. But on March 7, 2000, Proposition 21 passed with 62 percent of the vote.

If there was an upside, it was that six years of ballot attacks in Propositions 184, 187, 209 and 227 had fueled a widespread politicization of youth. In 1994, hundreds of thousands of Latino student activists had staged a statewide school walkout to protest Proposition 187, the largest Latino student protests since the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. Under constant attack, the youth movement built a strong infrastructure for protest. By the end of the century, some of the young hip-hop activists began making connections to other emerging movements.

In late November 1999, Jasmine De La Rosa, an organizer with the Bay Area's Third Eye Movement, and a contingent of hip-hop activists attended the biggest North American demonstrations in decades, the protests in Seattle at the meeting of World Trade Organization. “There were only a small number of hiphop activists in Seattle because the World Trade Organization wasn't characterized in the words that we would understand. If motherfuckers heard, ‘The leaders of the New World Order are trying to meet in Seattle,' I think that it might have brought more people,” she said.

But Proposition 21 seemed to paint the New World Order in bold, vivid strokes. A month after the initiative passed, a bigger contingent of Californians joined hip-hop activists from Seattle, Boston and New York City at April 16, 2000, anti-corporate globalization protests at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington, D.C. They began to see connections. After returning, De La Rosa said, “Worldwide, there's a militarization of the police forces. Governments are increasingly using them to push agendas that are intimately connected to the corporations.”

Hoping to draw the links between the local and the global, hip-hop activists set their sights on the 2000 presidential election season. They had not forgotten that in the previous two elections their generation had been targeted and scapegoated. This time they would take a stand.

Few stories could illustrate the stakes for the hip-hop generation better than that of a Salvadoran ex-gangbanger in Los Angeles named Alex Sanchez.

The stocky, charismatic program director of a peace organization called Homies Unidos was a legend on the streets, working tirelessly to calm the violence between the warring Latino gangs that dominated the Pico-Union and Westlake neighborhoods, a role that won him the respect of gang members as well as some of California's leading politicians.

Nothing in life had ever come easy for Sanchez. He was working for peace in the most corrupt police precinct in the nation—LAPD's Rampart Division. And the U.S. government was trying to deport him to El Salvador, where he was certain to face execution.

Alex Sanchez was born in San Salvador in 1979. He fled with his family at the age of six to Los Angeles, a refugee of a brutal civil war which came to global attention after the Reagan-backed right-wing government assassinated six leftist opposition leaders. “When they got here, they'd already been through violence, they'd seen their fathers shot,” says Tom Hayden, the 1960s activist who, as a state senator, became close to Sanchez. “And they get here and there's Mexican gangs and Black gangs, so they form gangs to claim a space.”

During the late 1980s, Sanchez's family obtained green cards, but Sanchez had run away from home by that time. He was rolling with Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), a gang swelling with disaffected immigrant and second-generation Salvadoran youths. “It was a complete liberation, it was complete independence. I wanted to rebel against everybody,” Sanchez says.

Emerging during the mid-1980s, the quickly expanding gang was soon bumping heads on the Pico-Union streets with the largely Chicano 18th Street Gang. Sanchez became known to other gang members and to police, and spent much of his teens shuttling in and out of juvenile detention facilities. When he became an adult, he went to prison for grand theft auto. After his bid was up in 1994, prison officials discovered he had never secured his citizenship papers and handed him over to the INS for deportation.

By then, Sanchez was trying to find a way out of the gangs. He had no desire to go back to San Salvador, but hoped he might at least get a chance at a new start. But when he stepped off the plane, he stared up at a nearby hillside and saw stenciled into it four chilling letters: MS-13.

The INS was literally exporting the American gang problem. The streets of San Salvador were now divided into warring turfs the same way they had been in Los Angeles. That was not the only source of violence and instability. After the Salvadoran civil war, shadowy right-wing vigilante squads had reorganized to launch a covert terrorist ‘social cleansing' program. Mayra Gomez, El Salvador country specialist with Amnesty International USA, says the targets were “alleged criminals, prostitutes, street children and transvestites.” Now, like many others throughout the southern hemisphere, San Salvador was suddenly not only rife with highly armed, CIA-trained, right-wing-driven death squads, but highly armed, U.S. street-trained, criminal-minded street gangs.

Deciding there was no future for him there and determined to get back to his newborn son, Sanchez again embarked on the long trek through Guatemala and Mexico back to
El Norte
. Near starvation, Sanchez crossed back across the border into Texas and made his way back to his old Los Angeles ‘hood.

He reconciled with his family and tried to avoid his old gang hangouts, and he met Magdaleno Rose-Avila, the founder of Homies Unidos, who steered him toward peace work. Inspired by Rose-Avila's mentoring and hoping to do better for his newborn son, Sanchez joined Homies as a volunteer, removed many of his old gang tattoos, and began to turn his life around. He was a natural leader, and people knew he was no snitch. He won youths' respect. At one point, he prevented a bloody war with a simple three-way phone call.

“He took the kids out of the street, and took them to a church and showed them the different kinds of opportunities they could have. They went camping, they went to parks, they did theater,” says Oscar Sanchez, Alex's brother. “They were getting an alternative to the traditional gang life of violence.”

Alex also began to politicize the youths. In workshops and meetings he held at the Immanuel Presbyterian church, he brought in civil rights attorneys to educate the youths on their rights with police stops. Homies Unidos' efforts were bearing fruit in moving gang members off the streets. They partnered with a powerful new network of gang peacemakers across the city that included many veterans of the post-rebellion peace work.

So in 1999, Rampart CRASH cops began regularly harrassing Sanchez and his youths. Police called Homies' peace efforts a front for the creation of a “super-gang,” and increased their surveillance. “They would target everyone who came to the meetings,” says Silvia Beltran, then a legislative aide to Tom Hayden. They
followed Homies members and beat them. “At one point they came and asked the church leaders if they could come and spy on the meetings that the group had,” Beltran says. “The pastor said no.”

The cops tried to falsely pin an MS drive-by murder of an 18th Streeter on a fourteen-year-old who had been at a Homies meeting, and Sanchez agreed to testify on behalf of the teen. “At that point,” Oscar says, “the cops really started targeting him, telling him that they were gonna arrest him, that they were gonna finish Homies Unidos one by one.”

When Hayden came to the Immanuel Presbyterian to chair a State Senate investigation into police harassment and brutality, with Sanchez as the star witness, CRASH cops stormed in and searched the crowd for Sanchez. As it happened, Alex was late, walking in after Hayden had dispensed with the cops. He stepped forward to give his testimony to a shocked panel and audience. “I told them that they saw firsthand what we go through every day,” Alex says. Before long, he understood how high the stakes were. The cops put a message on the street for him: Homies Unidos had six months to die.

There was also the threat of INS deportation hanging over him. Special Order 40, a Los Angeles executive order, had forbidden police intervention in immigration cases. But as the riots had demonstrated, police suspended the law at will. Police and immigration officials knew that if Homies leaders were deported, they would certainly end up dead in San Salvador, either at the hands of the right-wing death squads or the gang leadership. The death squads were known to eliminate criminal deportees, peacemaker or not, and the transnational gangs were directly threatened by Homies Unidos' peace efforts in Los Angeles and San Salvador. Five members of Homies Unidos had been deported to El Salvador—and all five were murdered, under mysterious circumstances.

Hayden brought Homies Unidos leaders to meet with INS officials and Salvadoran government officials, including San Salvador's mayor and police chief, to seek permanent visas, so that they could organize without fear of being deported. “[The INS] gives visas to undocumented people who are informants and spies for the police, so why not a peacemaker?” says Hayden. The San Salvador police chief confirmed that Sanchez's life would be in grave danger if he was deported. But the INS refused.

In January 2000, CRASH officers arrested Sanchez and turned him over to the INS, in blatant disregard of Special Order 40. Sanchez says that the police had no charges; he was arrested, simply to be handed to the INS. “I still have the pink slip [given to him at the police station] that says, ‘Deportation proceedings,' ” Sanchez says.

When hip-hop activists came to Los Angeles to demonstrate at the Democratic Party Convention in the middle of August 2000, Sanchez—who had spent so much of his life behind bars and was now trying now to do something positive with his life for the sake of so many others—was locked in an acrid, overheated, filthy INS Detention Facility at Terminal Island, awaiting his deportation hearing.