Mexican-American Mother Assaulted by San Diego Cops
by
Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de Aztlan
San Diego, Alta California - 4/26/2002 - (ACN) A very disturbing video showing a vicious attack by the San Diego police on a 54 year old Mexican-American mother was released by La Raza Rights Coalition and the American Friends Service
Committee today. The video, with link below, of the April 21 assault shows clearly how Mrs. Yolanda Fajardo Perez was accosted from behind and slammed, face first, onto the ground by a 250 lbs, 6'-4" San Diego cop. Mrs. Fajardo Perez, resident of the Sherman Heights area of San Diego, suffered serious face wounds and head concussions. Yolanda Fajardo Perez is a leading member of the Chicano
Park Steering Committee that oversees historic Chicano Park serving the Logan Heights and Sherman Heights Chicano communities.
This attack on La Raza de San Diego follows another similar assault on a Mexican-American Human Rights Monitor by 13 agents of the U.S. Border Patrol on February 25, 2002. In this case, Benjamín Prado, an official of La Raza Rights Coalition was assaulted and arrested for monitoring and videotaping human rights abuses by the Border Patrol that were taking place on the San Diego Trolley.
There is a growing number of Border Patrol and police brutality incidents in San Diego and other cities along the U.S./Mexico border because of the anti-Mexican hatemongering by organized anti-immigrant bigots like Glenn Spencer of American Patrol and Jewish supremacists like Stephen Steinlight who is the former Director of National Affairs for the American Jewish Committee. It is believed that the racist agents of the Border Patrol and the San Diego Police, who take part in the brutal treatment of Chicanos and Mexican-Amercians, are sympathizers of these hate groups.
The assault on Mrs. Yolanda Fajardo Perez took place after the police answered a call concerning a youth who was suicidal. The community called for help but did not expect that the police was going to turn a crisis into something worse. The cops started being really brutal to the kid who was obviously in need of some professional help. The bad attitude that the white cops have against the Mexican-American community exhibited itself when they started roughing up the troubled youth pretty badly. This is when the members of the close knit community started protesting the youth's treatment including Mrs. Fajardo Perez. Her motherly instincts compelled her to protest the unnecessary force that was being meted out on the suicidal youth. Suddenly at one point, the video shows a cop chasing Mrs. Fajardo Perez and catching her from behind. She is not resisting but the video shows the cop brutally tripping her and slamming her into the ground. This is one of the most cowardly acts ever caught on video tape and comes close to the one showing the brutal beating by the LAPD of Rodney King. It certainly matches the one, taped with a news helicopter video mounted camera, of the savage beating of Alicia Sotero by the Riverside County Sheriffs.
This video was taken by a community member of the Human Rights Defense Committee. The committee was organized with the assistance of the La Raza Rights Coalition. La Raza Rights Coalition and the American Friends Service Committee have been training members of the Chicano and Mexican communities on how to defend their human and civil rights. Benjamín Prado of La Raza Rights Coalition and Christian Ramirez of the American Friends Service Committee issued the following statement at a news conference on April 22, "We are very concerned that this kind of force is being utilized in our community, in Sherman Heights, in the Logan Heights area. We are very concerned about the force used by officers of the San Diego Police Department. We are hopeful that these continuous press conferences will finally reach the ears of the chief of the police and the city councilmember that represents this district. We will not tolerate any more abuses by police in our community, and we are continuing our efforts to teach our community how to document human rights abuses."
