La Voz De Aztlan: Agendas, Activities, and Worldviews
By John Perazzo
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
August 2005



La Voz de Aztlán (The Voice of Aztlán) is the Internet publication, or webzine, of the Nation of Aztlán, a secessionist organization based in Whittier, California. The organization's chief objective, as reflected in La Voz de Aztlán (henceforth, La Voz), is the formation of a country named Aztlán, which would be composed of  present-day Mexico, parts of Oklahoma, and the entirety of Texas, New Mexico, California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. According to La Voz and the group that established it, "Aztlán" was the name of the Aztec homeland that supposedly existed in Mexico and the Southwestern United States prior to the Spanish conquest of 1519. The group now seeks to recapture this territory that it claims was "stolen" by white America. But in point of fact, the American Southwest was not stolen from Mexico. Following the Mexican-American War, the Mexican government legally ceded this territory to the United States in 1848. Nor has a place called "Aztlán" ever existed; it was the invention of radical Latino activists in the early 1970s.

La Voz, which launched its operations on January 1, 2000, is managed and edited by Hector Carreon, an engineer by training and a former member of the radical Brown Berets. Carreon is also the founder and current leader of the Nation of Aztlán. Other La Voz staff writers include Miroslava Flores and Ernesto Cienfuegos. The publication has earned a reputation for its virulent hatred of whites, Jews, the United States, and Israel. Its articles commonly make reference to "La Raza" ("The Race"), a broad term signifying those whose ancestry is indigenous to the area of Mexico (or "Aztlán"), so as to distinguish them from the aforementioned targets of their antipathy - whites in general (and Jews in particular).

La Voz has ties with MECha, the radical student group that supports open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens, and U.S. recognition of Spanish as an official national language. Like MECha, La Voz embraces the manifesto titled "El Plan de Aztlán," which is a blueprint for the establishment of a homeland for the "bronze race" in the former Spanish territories of the United States. To facilitate the realization of this goal, La Voz advocates a massive influx of "bronze race" members into the U.S. - not to assimilate into American society but rather to set up their own separate enclaves and incrementally drive Europeans out of the region. On its web site, La Voz once posted an excerpt from a February 7, 1997 speech by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who said that "the United States should return to Mexico huge chunks of that country's territories it acquired more than a century ago."

Denouncing what it calls "the hypocrisy of U.S. immigration policy," La Voz contends that the Statue of Liberty's famous inscription ("Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .") is merely a hackneyed cliché "not meant for immigrants of color." In La Voz's estimation, the United States is a bigoted land that seeks to prevent, for racist reasons, Mexican immigrants from coming across its borders. Pronouncing judgment against "the white industrial and agricultural complex [that] is addicted to cheap immigrant labor," La Voz asserts that "[t]he economies of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas would collapse if immigrants would stop working for one week." The publication further laments that certain U.S. government measures to stem the tide of illegal immigration have resulted in the deaths (by drowning, disease, and dehydration) of a number of illegal border-crossers. Moreover, it condemns groups like the Minuteman Project - a nonviolent, volunteer, grassroots effort initiated by private American citizens seeking to help the undermanned Border Patrol reduce illegal immigration into the United States - for allegedly "hunting" what La Voz calls "harmless Mexican migrants seeking work in the United States."

"Eventually," says La Voz, "La Raza will overcome all these injustices. At that time we may be able to built [sic] our own 'Monument to the Mexican Immigrant' as was done [with the Statue of Liberty] in New York Harbor for the Europeans. Perhaps a huge Aztec Pyramid with a statue on the top would be in order. The monument could be built in Los Angeles which has the greatest number of Mexicans next to Mexico City."

La Voz takes a particularly dim view of the U.S. criminal-justice system, which it casts as racist and discriminatory against minorities. "[L]aw enforcement," says La Voz, "is out of control throughout the country. . . . Police officers have become evil monsters of the worst kind . . . beating, torturing, robbing and killing [American] citizens. . . . There is one commonality to the worst of these crimes. It appears that the most aggrieved victims of the police are people of color! . . . It almost seems that police forces operate like military occupation forces in minority communities. Those who actually control the police appear to have hired 'occupation administrators' as the Nazis did with the 'Judenrat' in Germany. They have hired and trained 'Kapos' to police minority communities and to keep these citizens in their place."

La Voz laments that "[t]he incarceration rate of La Raza in the southwest U.S., and specially [sic] the incarceration of Raza youths, is also having the effect of destroying the family structure of our communities. In many cases, children are being left fatherless in the critical stage of their development." But La Voz makes no mention of the fact that the governors of Arizona and New Mexico - two of the states most heavily affected by illegal immigration - recently declared a state of emergency because of the high crime levels that illegals have brought to those states; that in Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide target illegal aliens, as do up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants; that at least 60 percent of the members of southern California's brutal 20,000-member 18th Street Gang are illegal; that the leadership of the Columbia Lil' Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the Los Angeles drug market, was approximately 60 percent illegal in 2002; and that a September 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report found that "[o]f the 94 foreign-born terrorists who operated in the United States [between the early 1990s and 2004], . . . about two-thirds (59) committed immigration fraud prior to or in conjunction with taking part in terrorist activity." None of this matters at all to La Voz, which holds that Latinos are targeted by a racist justice system and herded without cause into U.S. prisons.

La Voz sees American racism wherever it looks. It condemns, for instance, "the wretched and unequal treatment that historically has been meted out against the Mexican-American soldier, marine, airman and sailor. The discrimination against Mexican-Americans in the U.S. Armed Forces is in many ways worst [sic] than that experienced in civilian life." Expanding upon this theme, La Voz charges that "the USA military has pillaged and raped the American Indians and the Mexicans in the [S]outhwest in the same way they are now doing to the Iraqis. Even today, naive Latinas who join the U.S. Armed Forces are being brutalized and raped by racist Jews and white military personnel. . . . Another 'dirty secret' of the Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz run Pentagon is the shameful 'raping' of women of color in the U.S. military that has reached 'epidemic proportions.' There are hundreds of Mexican-American and other enlisted women in the U.S. military whose lives have been totally shattered by a military they thought would never betray them. Their lives are now in total shambles after the Pentagon threw them out and blame [sic] them for the brutal rapes that took place while they were in uniform."

In La Voz's view, not even natural disasters are immune to the influence of American racism. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in September 2005, for instance, La Voz ran a series of articles supporting Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's assertion that the catastrophic flooding of certain black neighborhoods was caused, in large measure, by a white plot to eliminate black people. "Minister Louis Farrakhan says New Orleans levees may have been breached on purpose," read the title of one article. Said the piece, "The spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, has come forward to say that the levees in New Orleans may have been 'blown up' to save White areas at the expense of Black neighborhoods. During a tour of Charlotte, North Carolina . . . , Minister Farrakhan said, 'I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry.'"  Asserting that "[t]he Black population in America is still not free regardless of the pretensions of Washington D. C. and media propaganda," La Voz made its position clear: "We believe Minister Louis Farrakhan when he says that the New Orleans levees were breached on purpose."

In addition to its anti-American hatred, another hallmark of La Voz is crude, unvarnished anti-Semitism, routinely drawing negative inferences about Jews and Israel. For instance, a December 29, 2003 opinion piece noted the "synchronicity" surrounding the Feb 1, 2003 explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia, where "7 astronauts, one a Zionist Israeli, came raining down over the town of Palestine in Texas, the home state of President George Bush." "Was the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster . . . the 'mother of all omens'?" asked La Voz rhetorically. "Was it a powerful synchronicity pointing to a major future catastrophe about to fall on the USA, Israel or possibly the entire globe? . . . For the first time there was an Israeli military person on board a USA space shuttle mission conducting military-related research and experiments. That person was the Zionist Israeli Air Force Colonel Ilan Ramon. . . . As the Columbia entered the earth's atmosphere it began to disintegrate and by a great coincidence the bulk of the debris, including body parts belonging to the Israeli colonel as well as biologically contaminated junk, fell on the town of Palestine, Texas. . . . What did this synchronicity or omen portent [sic]? Did it signify that the USA's continued connection with and military aid to the Zionist State of Israel will ultimately bring destruction of the nation as the Columbia was destroyed? . . . . God has cursed the Jews from time immemorial and they have been the curse of mankind since the beginning of written history." 

Given its contempt for Israel, it is not surprising that La Voz sides decisively with Palestinian militants regarding the conflict in the Middle East. Expressing a sense of kinship with the Palestinians, La Voz says, "There are great similarities between the political and economic condition of the Palestinians in occupied Palestine and that of La Raza in the southwest United States. . . . The primary one of course is the fact that both La Raza and the Palestinians have been displaced by invaders that have utilized military means to conquer and occupy our territories. . . . Another of the most glaring similarities is the incarceration policies of youths by the dominant culture. Presently, the survival of the Palestinian people is being threaten [sic] by the selective incarceration of the bravest, strongest and most productive members of the group. Like in the southwest . . . , the number of 'incarceration centers' built by the Israeli government in occupied territories to imprison targeted youths is growing at an alarming rate."

The La Voz website features a lengthy tribute to eight female Palestinian suicide bombers who killed many innocent Jewish civilians. Here are the honorific words with which La Voz describes what one of these women, Reem Salih al-Rayasha, did with the final moments of her life: "On the morning of January 14, 2004, a freedom fighter of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a 21 year old mother of two children, detonated a bomb at the Erez border check point between Israel and the Gaza Strip, killing four Israeli soldiers. The female Palestinian martyr, Reem Salih al-Rayasha of Gaza City, was a university student with two children, ages 1 and 4 whom she loved dearly. She made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom and independence of the Palestinian people." Just as La Voz supports suicide bombings, it beatifies the father of Palestinian terrorism, the late Yasser Arafat, characterizing him as an "extraordinary courageous leader." 

Notwithstanding the many suicide bombings for which such organizations as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad have proudly taken credit, La Voz has accused Israeli agents themselves of detonating some of the bombs that kill Israeli civilians - and then blaming Palestinians for those deadly deeds. Says a July 2004 La Voz piece, "Killing and terrorizing its own citizens to justify government policies in the eyes of its own people and in the eyes of international public opinion is a very common practice by Likud Party operatives, the MOSSAD and the Israeli security service called the Shin Bet. This is not the first time that these government agents have carried out terrorist attacks against their own people which they than blame on the Palestinians. These vile and evil acts perpetuate the notion of 'Jews as victims' and justifies [sic] the continued slaughter and massacre of Palestinians by the Israeli army."

Expressing its solidarity with Palestinian militants, the La Voz website features a petition, addressed to President George W. Bush, demanding an end to U.S. aid for Israel. The petition reads, in part, "We, the undersigned, are appalled by the human rights abuses against Palestinians by the Israeli government, the continued military occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory by Israeli armed forces and settlers, the forcible eviction of the inhabitants from, and the demolition of, Palestinians homes, towns, and cities. . . . We find it reprehensible that U.S. tax dollars, in the form of U.S. military aid to Israel, are being used to fund Israel's oppressive policy towards the Palestinians. . . . We demand the immediate cessation of all U.S. military aid to Israel until Israel honors United Nations authority and abides by the rules of international law."

La Voz is wholly intolerant of Latinos who hold views that conflict with its own. It casts the vilest of aspersions upon those who do not walk in lockstep ideologically; those who do not share its anti-white, anti-American hatred; and those who do not consider themselves victims of an oppressive American culture. To La Voz, such Latinos are loathsome traitors to their "race." One such individual is Linda Chavez-Gersten, President George W. Bush's original nominee for Secretary of Labor and an outspoken opponent of racial and ethnic preferences for minorities. "It is no secret," wrote La Voz on January 3, 2001, "that La Raza despises Linda Chavez-Gersten! No woman, other than perhaps Gloria Matta Tuchman, generates so much disgust in our community than [sic] this extraordinary malinchista [traitor]. Like the brutish Jewish female Kapos at Auschwitz who received special favors for sleeping with their Nazi masters, Mrs. Chavez-Gersten will now be unleashed [as Labor Secretary] to squash any legitimate calls for better working conditions for our hard working Latino labor force." (Chavez-Gersten eventually withdrew her nomination.)

"As La Raza," continued La Voz, "we can expect nothing but betrayal from Linda Chavez-Gersten! Her entire history in public life has been one of treason against the ethnic group she professes to belong [sic]. She was chosen by powerful bigots to head a group called US English that pushed to dismantle Spanish/English bilingual programs in public education and to eliminate bilingual ballots and voting instructions. She was vehemently anti-affirmative action while a Ronald Reagan appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and has opposed civil rights for ethnic and racial minorities at every turn during her career. As Labor Secretary she will move steadfastly to relegate Latinos as working slaves for corporate America and the large agricultural and industrial conglomerates and at the same time she will work to maintain the economic privileges of whites."

To convey the idea that Chavez-Gersten was selfishly aligning herself with the (white) enemy of her people, La Voz likened her to black "'Uncle Toms' like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas" and "'House Niggers' like UC Regent Ward Connerly" - a reference to a pair of prominent black conservatives who openly oppose racial preferences. "The appointment of token 'Uncle Toms' and 'Aunt Jemimas' like Colin Powell and Congoleeza [sic] Rice," said La Voz on another occasion, "is just a ruse to give the impression that there is real opportunity for Blacks."  La Voz has referred to Chavez-Gersten as a "coconut" (brown on the outside, white on the inside) and disparaged her for having said: "George Washington is my hero. The fact that my father's family was off in New Mexico and their allegiance was, at that time, to Spain, not to England and they didn't fight in the Revolutionary War, should not in any way diminish the fact that George Washington is my forefather."

In the post-9/11 era, La Voz has been unyielding in its excoriation of U.S. policies and American society generally. For example, immediately after September 11 La Voz did not denounce the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but rather condemned the "round'em up" and "string'em up" mentality with which Americans and their political leaders were allegedly reacting. Moreover, the publication blamed the United States itself for having provoked the attacks, in large measure through its close alliance with Israel. "Make no mistake about it," said La Voz, ". . . what you have witnessed on television and the Internet concerning the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is actually a total failure of our U.S. foreign policy. . . . Why does the world hate us so? We must look into our own policies towards other cultures, religions, and national groups for an answer. . . . There is no doubt that our foreign policy in the Middle East has contributed to the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Is not our support of Zionism too high a price to pay? Why are we supporting an Israeli apartheid policy that has made all of Islam our mortal enemy?"

Repudiating in advance any government effort to derail future terrorist plots, La Voz wrote: "As minorities in the U.S. seeking an equitable voice, let us braise [sic] ourselves for a wave of repression against our civil rights unprecedented in contemporary history [sic]."

As a logical extension of its view that the United States is a land of iniquity, La Voz impugned Americans' allegedly "racist attitudes against the Arab peoples," depicting those attitudes as the manifestations "of national policy and of what we are learning through curriculums in schools systems throughout the country and through the mainstream media. The Arabs and Muslims have been demonized [through] years of mental programming through biased education and media propaganda." Claiming that American racism had not declined at all in recent decades, La Voz said, "This kind of [anti-Arab] mentality is the same as when us Mexicans are called 'spics,' 'beaners,' and 'wetbacks' and Black Americans are called 'niggers,' 'koons,' or 'mayates.' The kind of hateful racial frenzy being presently agitated against American Muslims and Arabs is no different than the one that was whipped up against Mexicans in 1930 Texas and against Blacks in the post-slavery South that culminated in lynches and in 'stringing them up.'"

La Voz laments the "demonization of Islam" by "perverse racists," "religious bigots with a well defined political and economic agenda," "Anglocentric xenophobes," "right wing Fundamentalist Christians," and "International Zionists" who, according to La Voz, "have launched a well funded global campaign to destroy the legacy of Islam and its contributions to world culture." "Leading the effort to demonize Islam are, of course, the International Zionists," adds La Voz. "Because of their immense influence and control of the mainstream media and the curricula of public and private education in the USA and other countries, these Zionists have had a major impact on the attitudes of non-Muslim youths towards Islam."

La Voz derides Americans' current angst over threats of additional Islamist terrorism, ascribing their concerns to the effectiveness of a deceitful government propaganda campaign aimed at stirring up widespread fear so as to gain popular support for American military incursions and empire-building ventures across the globe. In the final analysis, La Voz considers present fears of terrorism to be founded in an admixture of ignorance and bigotry - much as it views, in retrospect, Americans' fears of Communism during the Cold War era. Says La Voz:

"Many of you are too young to remember the incredible 'fear' that was part and parcel of American life in the middle 1950's, which generated a building frenzy of 'nuclear bomb shelters' under every home. The 'fear' was instigated by not only the military-industrial complex but also by a host of corporations and businesses that made fabulous fortunes capitalizing on the 'fear' of countless gullible Americans. Back then the 'boogie man' was [Soviet President] Nikita Khrushchev and Russian Communism, and today it's Osama bin Laden and Islamic Fundamentalism. It turned out that the U.S.S.R was only a 'paper tiger.' Today's new boogie man has so far only been a picture of a bearded Saudi . . . This new 'Terrorism War' smells a little too much like the old 'Cold War' and it looks like it is being pushed by the very same elements that have in the past benefited from the lucrative arms industry and by the politicians that they are able to purchase. . . . Everyone here benefits from the perpetuation of 'wars.' If there are none, they will create some. . . . This military-industrial complex works closely with the Zionist dominated media and specially [sic] with Israel and their Israeli Defense Forces. It is a historical fact that these elements often create a 'crisis' on purpose in order to justify not only their existence but also to scare the American public thus allowing them to create the 'environment' in which they can profit immensely and at the same time 'crush' any criticisms concerning their evil machinations."

In the Iraq War, La Voz unequivocally supports America's terrorist enemies. Consider its view of the infamous 2004 video showing the decapitation of American contractor Nicholas Berg by Iraqi terrorists. According to La Voz, the video was filmed not by the killers but by U.S. authorities, for propaganda purposes, at the Abu Ghraib prison: "The principal purpose of the fraudulent video was to defray world attention from the heinous sexual abuses and torture of Iraqi POWs and rape of Iraqi women detainees at the same prison where the Berg decapitation video was filmed. A secondary purpose was to 'frame' Al queda [sic] and especially one of their leaders by the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."