Jose Figueroa added to TEDxVancouver 2011 Speaker List

[EFerrari]

TEDxVancouver is excited to announce that recently noted refugee and immigration activist Jose Figueroa will be added to this year’s program.

Figueroa, who has been in Canada since 1997, was once a youth member of the University Student Union that was supportive of the FMLN political wing in El Salvador, which has recently been categorized as a “terrorist” organization. Fleeing El Salvador with his wife, Jose was a peaceful student having never taken part in any attacks or fighting between the guerrillas and oppressive government forces.

Recently many supporters of the Salvadoran refugee were outraged by a federal adjudicator’s ruling that he be deported because of his membership in what the government has only recently called a “terrorist organization”. This issue created a significant amount of media attention to not only Jose’s story, but to the larger themes surrounding his case, and those of many other innocent refugees in Canada. Among his public and most vocal supporters, noted UBC professor Jerry Spiegel, recently stated that the FMLN was emphatically not a terrorist group.

Jose’s talk will take a compelling look at the current stigmas of the “T” word and the dangerous paradox it has created within our current immigration system as the lives and admissibility of innocent refugees seeking immigration status in Canada are reviewed each year.

http://tedxvancouver.com/jose-figueroa-added-to-tedxvancouver-2011-speaker-list/

[Peace Patriot]

1. Um, the FMLN leader was elected president of El Salvador about 2 years ago.

And Canada is calling it a "terrorist" organization?

Odd.

Not only that, members of similar groups, with fighting wings during the U.S.-backed fascist juntas and slaughters, have been elected presidents of Brazil, Uruguay and Nicaragua, with the presidents of Brazil and Uruguay having been imprisoned and tortured by such juntas, and members of trade union groups allied with leftist groups, such as the former president of Brazil and the current president of Bolivia, were also imprisoned, beaten, charged with "crimes against the state."

Canada's rulers are becoming more Bushwhacky than the Bushwhacks! Obama visited the FMLN president of El Salvador!

I don't get this. Is it as nuts as it looks?

[EFerrari]

2. Yes, it is exactly at nuts as it looks.

Those terror watch lists, anther sign of creeping fascism that bear no relation to objective reality, imo.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Yeah, I know it's nuts--but even nutsier than U.S. policy in LatAm?

I mean, Obama goes and visits the FMLN president in El Salvador--and Canada is saying that the FMLN is a "terrorist" group--saying it recently?

It's like Canada's gone off a cliff. It's like Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld, and John Negroponte, were running things there. I find this...weird. Isn't Canada's political establishment usually in lockstep with whatever bullshit the U.S. is doing in LatAm--for instance, smiley facing President Funes (of the FMLN) in public and breaking his elbow in private to keep El Salvador out of ALBA?

A "terrorist" group?

Has Canada's rulers gone so far round the bend that they would consider Obama's visit with Funes consorting with "terrorists"?

[Judi Lynn]

3. Canada needs a progressive, honorable President again, like a new Trudeau.

Hard to believe how bent their recent governments have been.

Looks like the right wing hopes to consolidate its power all over the world and destroy all resistance again. That's not going to happen.