Metro San Juan’s Jean Michel Fiedler won an Overseas Press Club Award during the press organization’s 40^th annual gala, held at the El San Juan Hotel in Isla Verde on Aug. 29.

Fiedler’s cartoons for the Metro feature “Heaven and Hell at the San Juan Star,” nabbed the Best Cartoon prize, giving Metro its first OPC win. He received the award from famed photographer and teacher Alina Luciano. Fiedler’s work, published in Metro’s December/ January 2009 issue, illustrated former San Juan Star editor John Marino’s piece on the demise of the English-language daily.

Prior to Metro, Fiedler illustrated stories and covers for San Juan Magazine. He has also won numerous art awards in Puerto Rico, stateside and abroad. The artist also taught art at the Liga de Arte, Sacred Heart University and the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in San Juan. He studied art at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA and the Pratt Institute in New York.

–Valerie López

The Overseas Press Club of Puerto Rico recently honored Metro San Juan with three OPC Award nominations. The journalism organization presented the finalists during a press conference and cocktail held at the Museo del Deporte de Puerto Rico in Guaynabo on Aug 7.

Metro’s Editor and Publisher Philipe Schoene received a nod in the Best Sports Reporting category for his story “How Posada Got His Groove” (APR 08). In an exclusive interview with Schoene, the New York Yankees catcher discussed his career with the team and his crusade to raise awareness on craniosynostosis, a rare condition that afflicted his son Jorge, Jr. Well-known for his coverage of local and stateside politics, Schoene has earned seven OPC Awards in several categories, including Best In-Depth Reporting and Best News Interview.

Associate Editor Valerie López landed her fourth OPC nomination in the Best Arts, Culture and Entertainment Reporting category with her story “A Show of Force”(NOV 08). The piece showcases Academy Award-winning actor Benicio del Toro as he made press rounds for his latest film project “Che.” López won an OPC Award in the Arts and Culture category in 2004 for her story “The Big Picture,” in which she spotlighted the state of Puerto Rico’s film industry.

Award-winning graphic artist and illustrator Jean Michel Fiedler was nominated in the Best Cartoon category for his illustration “Heaven and Hell at the San Juan Star” (DEC/JAN 09). The cartoon illustrates former San Juan Star Editor John Marino’s chronicle of the English-language daily’s demise last year. This is Fiedler’s first OPC nomination.

The Overseas Press Club will reveal the winners during its Annual Awards Gala on Aug. 29 at the El San Juan Hotel in Isla Verde.

–Valerie López

If you’re waiting for a mortgage modification to make your home affordable in order to stave off default and possible foreclosure because of economic hardship, don’t hold your breathe, especially in Puerto Rico.

RG Mortgage Corporation is the only mortgage servicer on the island that is signed up to participate in the U.S. Treasury’s Making Home Affordable Program, which was launched by the Obama Administration in March 2009 to give relief to struggling homeowners.

The program’s 38 participating institutions nationwide recently got their first report card from Treasury and their performance was judged to be slow at best. Only 9 percent of eligible borrowers have received trial modifications under the plan, according to data released by Treasury.

“I think it’s safe to say we’re disappointed in the performance of some of the servicers,” Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Michael Barr told reporters in a conference call. “We expect them to do more.”

A major component of the plan devotes $75 billion of financial-rescue funds to pay incentives to mortgage servicers, borrowers and investors that agree to modify loans according to certain standards.
The Treasury defines eligible borrowers as those who are 60 or more days behind on their mortgage payments. Out of a current pool of 2.7 million such borrowers, only 15 percent have been offered a trial modification. Under the program, borrowers must complete a three-month trial period with the modified loan before any incentives are paid out.

In the case of RG Mortgage, the incentive is valued at $57 million. RG estimates that it has 3,309 eligible borrowers who are 60 plus days delinquent and it has extended 72 offers of modification, according to Treasury’s report card as of the end of July 2009. Thus far, it has started no trial modifications.

To pressure servicers to improve their performance, the administration recently announced that Freddie Mac (FRE) will audit the applications of borrowers turned down from the program to see whether they slipped through the cracks. Meanwhile, the Treasury will continue to report the performance of servicers on a monthly basis.

Boomerang this: With mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures running high, all local banks have initiated loss mitigation programs geared to assist borrowers. We’d like to report on your experiences in this area, pro and con. Email us at www.metrosanjuan.com.

— Robert P. Schoene

photo by Milad Avazbeigi

As violence escalates in Tehran, the clergy and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei battle to quell protesters. Amateur videos show Iranian security forces raiding the streets and attacking civilians as they march through those streets, challenging the June 12 elections. Supporters of the opposition leader Mir Hussein Musavi decry violations of their civil rights on what is the 13th day of protests.
According to human rights activists, more than 2,000 people have been detained, including Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Also, according to Iranian state sources, at least 17 people have died and hundreds have been wounded.

It’s an event far from the Puerto Rican imagination. However, there is a Muslim community in Puerto Rico and they are following closely how the revolt unfolds.

Jonathan Mohammed is one of them. Born to a Puerto Rican mother and Iranian father, the 20-year-old accounting student lived in Iran for 11 years before relocating to Puerto Rico with his mother, sister and stepfather. He is a religious Muslim who upholds Islamic rule, while still respecting other ideologies. As the war is waged on the streets of his country, Mohammed shares with MSJ his account of the events. He argues that the media has blown the demonstrations out of proportion and denies that the Islamic Republic corrupted the election process. He doesn’t foresee a reformist government in the near future and believes his country is far more progressive than what people are led to believe.

How long have you been in Puerto Rico?

My mother lived in Illinois. My dad was on a politics-related trip from Iran. They met and were together for two years; then they separated. My mom had the option to relocate to Iran but being a Puerto Rican native, she decided not to.

Do you see your father often?

Yes, I just visited my father this summer; I went to Iran, then Peru. However, if I do want to see him it has to be in Iran or a country not associated with the U.S. I lived in Iran for 11 years, I moved there with my father when I was three because he had sole custody. When I turned fourteen, I decided to move to Puerto Rico with my mother and stepfather.

So you speak Farsi fluently?

Yes, Farsi Phusto, a folkloric language of the ancient Persia, where Afghanistan is now.

Where do you practice Islam?

I go to the Río Piedras mosque. There’s one in Montehiedra but it’s too far from me.

How is your relationship with other Muslims here?

They’re a bit more conservative. We meet at Ramadan and participate in several events together. I know other brothers, Boricua Muslims, with whom I like to hang out with the most. I think it’s commendable that they are so interested in Islam that they would learn Arabic, which is a difficult language. It makes me feel proud.

How does your mom feel about your religion?

My mom and my sister respect it. Christians, Muslims and Jews respect one another; we come from the same idiosyncrasy, from the region of Judea and Palestine.

How does it feel to be a bicultural person in Puerto Rico?

The typical Muslim might tend to be a fanatic or see the world from a different perspective. But having lived here, I now perceive different points of view. I can see how Puerto Ricans think as opposed to how Iranians think. In Iran, women are treated differently. Women in Iran that don’t cover themselves are considered bad people. Here in Puerto Rico, it is normal to see a woman that is not covered completely and I don’t condemn it; it’s part of the tradition.
I understand things that people from my country probably couldn’t understand.

In addition to your dad, do you have more family in Iran?

Yes, my grandfather, grandmother, sister and step mother.

When you see those violent images on television, what do you feel?

My family lives in Tabriz, not in Tehran, but my dad has an apartment in Tehran for his work. I asked my father and he explained that [the images] are just sensationalist propaganda. There are some protests, but not with the magnitude that the media has implied.

Anyone that turns on the television and sees that will think that there is corruption in the election process and that the right to vote is not respected. It’s not like that. There are 70 million people in Tehran; the fact that 2,000 people are protesting doesn’t say anything.

It might not be a lot of people, but the images are brutal. The police are attacking protesters; something is happening.

Yes, but these aren’t the president’s decisions. These are the supreme leader’s decisions.
He warned people that the winner [of the elections] had been announced. There was a recount and the results were verified, and I believe [President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] won by 11 million votes. [According to news sources, it was a partial recount.] There is no way that was manipulated. The election fraud accusations arose after many people weren’t able to vote because the time to vote had ended. This gave way to thinking there was corruption. And my dad says that [the government] is trying to avoid a coup d’état. There is an ongoing investigation after a car exploded. That has never been seen in Iran. It blew up and killed five people, a few homes and what not. [The government] thinks it may be people from foreign countries, maybe CIA [U.S. Central Intelligence Agency] or other outsiders that are supplying money to terrorist organizations to help demonstrators.

This is the story of Iran. [Mohammad] Mosaddeq was the first elected president by the Iranians and the United States removed him to put the Shah in power. Iran has the largest supply of oil in the world; it has a life of 250 years and United States wants it.

I’d like to retake that important subject later. I want to discuss the election fraud. The media claimed that at some voting stations the number of votes were higher than the registered voters.

That’s an exterior data; not facts from the Islamic Republic.

But would the Iranian government admit to that?

That’s information that Iran should emit.

But would they?

I’ll be honest; Iran’s politics are a bit controlled to avoid just that: a change to the theocratic government. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if they’d reveal that information because there is [control over information].

Your dad works with the defense department. Do you think the government is handling the protests well?

The defense department only works with foreign issues. The Iranian police, the Basij, which is in charge of enforcing moral codes and maintaining civil conduct, deals with internal struggles. I know it is happening but it’s not as big as what you see it on television.

Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, prohibited the protests. Here in America, that’s considered a human rights violation. What do you think? You are an American citizen who has the right to express yourself freely.

I think it’s both right and wrong. It’s right because you have to control [the situation]. Here in Puerto Rico you can insult the governor but in Iran you’d be jailed. The same thing happens in certain Latin American countries. In Iran, there is democracy and human rights are respected more than in other Arab countries. I do not get Obama’s call to restore human rights. Those rights are being violated to control the situation.

If you go to Saudi Arabia, women can’t drive or go anywhere alone. In other Arab countries women wear the hejab, but not in Iran. They wear the veil.

Do you think these protests might lead to a reformist government?

Maybe in four years. The government is already decided.

Tehran is a theocracy and it has a supreme leader who rules according to the laws of Islam, and this leader and its government are ordering the excessive use of force, and there are reports that the daughter of [Former President] Hashemi Rafsanjani was kidnapped along with other family members. Are you afraid that people will view Islam in a negative light as happened after the 911 attacks?

Yes, but I believe religion is separate from the country.

But this is a religious country?

Yes, definitely.

Have you experienced racism for being a Muslim here in Puerto Rico?

Yes. Once I returned to my home and three FBI agents and one from Customs were waiting for me. I had received a package from Egypt. They threatened me and I opened it; there were just some souvenirs. And when I travel and go through the security check, curiously they are always doing random checks and they check me.

During the elections, Facebook and other social networks as well as the cell phone messaging services were blocked. Now, these methods are the only way people can get information out of Iran.

Yes, [the government] do it to control certain things, to avoid altering the truth. For a reporter, it’s better to have a great lie than a boring truth.

But isn’t this hurting Iran’s credibility?

Yes, it really is. These are irregularities of the clergy. It was wrong to have blocked [the social networks].

From what I’ve read, there is instability with the two governing bodies, the Assembly or Experts and the Council of Guardians. What do you think will be the outcome of all this?

In a month this will all be over. There are worse problems.

Inflation, for example.

Yes, but the worse problem is the embargo. We have oil and we can sell it very cheap to countries in South America but we can’t because of the embargo.

Could reformists help achieve this?

Look, even if Musavi would have won the elections, I will tell you the truth: Iranians hate the American government. Not the American people, but its government. There is a saying in Iran, ‘Americans are good, but the government is the great Satan.’ They provided the weapons to Iraq when Iraq invaded us.

Also, we are developing uranium enrichment technology for beneficial nuclear energy. It’s for pacific uses, only and Russia and China are involved. But the United States is against it. Why so much hate? The Iranian people see this. Even if Musavi would have won, that wouldn’t reconcile [with what happened in the past]. Anyway, over Musavi will be clergy and they don’t want to deal with the U.S.

And now that Obama is president?

Those are just words. My dad has made comments regarding [Obama’s willingness to talk to the Iran government]. Obama says things will change but they oppose our nuclear energy program. There is an energy program in Iran. There are black outs and we need to use more oil. This is oil we could sell, but we have to use it to generate electricity for the whole country. It’s a big country! What Iran wants to do is develop nuclear energy, sell the oil and save money.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Obama has been careful to avoid implying U.S. involvement in Iran. [Supreme Leader] Khameni blamed the situation on the West; you even said that there were speculations that the CIA was financing the revolt.

These are just speculations because there has never been a car bomb [in Iran], there aren’t the materials for that. People think it may be Israel or United States to debilitate the government.

But Obama has kept the U.S. on the sidelines and said that it was an internal problem.

Yes, it is an internal problem.

by Huáscar Robles

With all the recent hullabaloo over President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor to become the newest Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, it’s no surprise that Karl Rove recently spent a few hundred words of Wall Street Journal ink criticizing her selection as a case of reverse racism and “Mr. Obama’s” attempt to place another judicial activist on the nation’s highest court.

Neither claim has much truck with me, but considering Mr. Rove’s political leanings, neither surprised me. What did was his last-minute assertion that Judge Sotomayor was, alas, not to be the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court: that honor belongs to the late Benjamin Cardozo, appointed in 1932 by Herbert Hoover. No doubt I was a fool to believe the liberal media would get such a crucial fact right, but then I’ve been known to read a little too much Huffington Post every now and then.

Mr. Rove’s argument here is at best hastily constructed – and at worst deliberately specious. Justice Cardozo was, in fact, descended from Sephardi Jews: that’s not in dispute. Neither is the fact that the related term “Sepharad” is used in modern Hebrew to refer to Spain – though in olden days it was used for the entire Iberian Peninsula. Someone like Mr. Rove, who as far as I know isn’t Hispanic, could be forgiven for making a quick inference here, so close to the end of the article.

However, I’m not often given to forgiving people who use the nation’s largest newspapers to make petty political points, especially not when in doing so I’m called a reverse racist. Nor do I think the Journal should get a pass on failing to fact-check Mr. Rove’s article.

Justice Cardozo’s family, which had been in the States since the Revolutionary War, also included the surnames “Seixas” and “Mendes.” As any Latino would tell you, these are not common Spanish names, and the Cardozos themselves held that their ancestry was Portuguese – specifically from the marranos, the Iberian Jews forced to convert to Christianity, at least outwardly, to save their own lives and those of their families. Cardozo himself was related to the poet Emma Lazarus, whose descent from Portuguese Jews is more verifiable than his own.

Portugal is not a Hispanic country. Not politically: the Portuguese do not consider themselves Hispanic, especially not after Philip II’s armies invaded the country in 1581. Nor linguistically: the Portuguese do not speak Castilian. Nor historically: when the Romans assigned names to their Iberian provinces, they chose to name two of them Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior – Farther Spain and Nearer Spain.

The province that is now Portugal was given a different name: Lusitania – a name anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of United States history should recognize. The irony that this distinction escaped Mr. Rove, so associated with our modern party of “patriotism” and “Americanism,” is not lost on me.

–Mario Morales (Photo by JD Giovanni)

Once again, Puerto Rico is receiving international attention as the island’s El Yunque National Rainforest joins 261 international nature sites chosen to participate in the New 7 Wonders of Nature worldwide campaign. This project lets the global community vote on which locations should become one of the premiere sites on this list. Voting for the semi-finals is entering the final stretch.

The competition is stiff with sites like the Amazon, the Black Forest and the Tree of Life in the running and the island is quite a ways from reaching the finishing line.

El Yunque, though has a few things in its favor such as an ecosystem so complex that it was named one of the original Biosphere Reserves by the United Nations in 1976, more biodiversity than other forest in the United States and it houses five different forests including the rare Dwarf Forest. Of the rainforest’s 240 native tree species, 23 of these species only exist in El Yunque.

And of course, the rainforest houses 13 of the Island’s 17 native tree frog (coquí) species including the “dwarf coquí” one of the smallest frogs on earth.

The polls are officially open and if you’d like to see our rainforest among the 77 semi finalists be sure to cast your vote at www.new7wonders.com before July 7.

watch?v=pBkk9R0T6Xg

–Alberto Ramos Cordero

In stirring testimony on the ninth day of former Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá’s trial for conspiracy to violate federal campaign law, lying to federal authorities, honest services wire fraud and money laundering, Noemí Díaz, former chief financial officer and partner of the ad agency Lopito, Ileana & Howie (LIH) alleged that the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) had received money from illegal fund-raising schemes dating as far back as 1993. The PDP campaigns in the 1993 and 1998 plebiscites and in elections for Eduardo Bhatia and Sila Calderón were some mentioned by Díaz on the stand.

According to the witness, campaigns for the 1993 status plebiscite, Calderón’s 1998 run for San Juan Mayor, Bhatia’s run in the 1999 primaries and Acevedo Vilá’s run for resident commissioner and governor benefited from illegal fund raising schemes.

The ad agency handled political campaigns for the PDP in the past; Díaz managed the finances of its political accounts. Prosecutor María Domíguez accuses LIH of illegally generating funds to pay campaign debt for Acevedo Vilá’s campaigns from 2000 and 2004. Díaz admitted to producing invoices for services not provided as requested by her superiors.

Díaz was not charged after agreeing to cooperate with the prosecution. The ad agency comptroller detailed how she tracked the “fake” invoices with dates, “wording” and amounts. Her contact at the Acevedo Vilá campaign was Ramón Velasco, former assistant treasurer for Acevedo Vilá’s 2000 campaign.

The prosecution claims that $182,000 were received from 16 collaborators. Domínguez asked Díaz where the money raised went. “To a miscellaneous account,” she responded and added that the way in which the bank account was set up helped mask the purpose of the account. Those accounts “were not entered in the company’s record,” she added.

After a brief break, Domínguez produced the list of 16 alleged contributors for whom false invoices were issued. The list included private individual and corporations. Further documents served as evidence for amounts paid by some of the people on the list. Domínguez noted that at one point in the alleged scheme, $40,000 were donated by José Enríque Fernández and also by Miguel Vázquez Deynes from the Triple S company. The other fourteen on the list were: García Malavé, Atilano Cordero Badillo, Tito Meléndez, Metro Island Mortgage, American Petroleum, H.C. Development, Nutri Best, Habibe Computer, Custodio & Associates, Plaza Universidad, Joaquín Visó, Waste Management, Eric Jove, Luis Garratón, International Development, Art Com Global and Rod Van Development.

Domínguez’s interrogation continued with several binders of evidence pointing to services rendered by LIH to Acevedo Vilá’s campaigns. In the afternoon, Díaz stated Acevedo Vila had attended a meeting on January 4, 2000 where he allegedly authorized mitigation of debt through the agency.

- Huáscar Robles