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SAN YGNACIO, TEXAS
NAFTA
History lives on at restored ranch Brett Gundlock / Bloomberg
Demonstrators hold a banner and flags during a protest against the North American Free Trade Agreement in Mexico City.
Wage gap is actually widening By Eric Martin and Nacha Cattan BL OOMBERG NEWS
Billy Calzada / San Antonio Express-News file
The Treviño-Uribe Ranch fort was built in 1830 in San Ygnacio and has survived largely intact as a rare example of Mexican vernacular architecture. It will be open to the public to tour on Dec. 3.
Treviño-Uribe fort set to open as museum By Julia Wallace LA R ED O MORNI NG T IME S
Those who visit the Treviño-Uribe Rancho fort in San Ygnacio have many tiny details to catalog. It’s a seemingly simple sandstone structure. There’s a couple of kitchens, two bedrooms, a parlor room, a courtyard. Dirt floors, dusty walls, empty rooms. But this home’s oldest parts were finished in 1830, and it was continuously inhabited until the last person who lived there died more than 160 years later. So there are signatures of life if you know where to look. In one of the bedrooms, a mason carved into the sandstone an equilateral triangle split into four. And a ceiling beam in the old parlor room is dated: Dec. 3, 1871. This has turned out to be an important date for the fort, not just because it is inscribed, but because on Dec. 3, 2017, this gem of historic Mexican
NAFTA continues on A5
ABORTION LEGISLATION
Billy Calzada / San Antonio Express-News file
Restoration expert Frank Briscoe examines a door at the Treviño-Uribe Ranch fort in this Sept. 15, 2016 file photo.
Ranch vernacular architecture will open to the public as a museum for the first time. The River Pierce Foundation In the ‘80s, an acclaimed contempo-
rary artist named Michael Tracy took up a long residency in San Ygnacio to work in quiet isolation. In 1989, he founded the River Pierce Foundation. Tracy’s idea was to bring artists to
The Air Force acknowledged Tuesday that it failed to report at least dozens of service members charged or convicted of serious assault to a federal gun background-check database, negligence that allowed Texas church gunman Devin Kelley to purchase weapons used in killings inside a Texas church this month. Kelley should have been barred from purchasing firearms and body armor because of his domestic-violence conviction in 2014 while serving at Holloman Air Force Base in New
chase a rifle and another firearm he used to kill more than two dozen churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Tex., on Nov. 5. Air Force spokesman Ann Stefanek said Tuesday that the failure to follow Pentagon guidelines to report Kelley’s crimes to the FBI was “not an isolated incident and similar reporting lapses occurred at other locations.” It is unclear how many installations beyond Holloman have experienced problems with submitting criminal information to civilian authorities, she said. The Air Force’s disclosure comes the same day Joe and Claryce Hol-
By Chuck Lindell COX NEWSPAPERS
Mexico. But his crimes were not properly documented in the FBI National Crime Information Center database. The lapse allowed Kelley to purShooting continues on A5
Abortion continues on A8
Museum continues on A8
Air Force failed to report violent service members WA S H INGT ON P O ST
State of Texas is ground zero in legal battles AUSTIN — The Texas Legislature is among the most aggressive in the nation when it comes to regulating the practice of abortion, churning out a steady stream of laws since 2011 that have been met with an equally aggressive legal response by abortion providers. The result is a well-worn path between the Capitol and the federal courts, leading most recently to U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel’s decision last week to strike down a Texas law limiting the most common second-trimester procedure. It was the seventh time this decade that a federal judge has blocked an abortion-related law or regulation that had been championed by the state’s Republican leaders, putting Texas in a familiar position — ground zero in the abortion wars. “Texas is certainly one of the most active states when it comes to anti-abortion legislation,” said Molly Duane, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, which has filed five lawsuits against Texas this decade, including the challenge to the second-trimester law. “It’s fair to characterize Texas as one of the most restrictive states when it comes to regulating abortion out of existence,” Duane said. State Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, has been a leading advocate for tighter restrictions on abortion since he entered the Texas House in 2003. The success in passing laws this decade was the result of strong Republican majorities in the Legislature and committed opposition to abortion by
TEXAS CHURCH SHOOTING
By Alex Horton
What’s the opposite of a growth miracle? Whatever the term, it applies in spades to Mexico in the NAFTA era. Poor countries are expected to grow faster than rich ones, and they need to. Trade agreements are supposed to help. Yet by almost any benchmark — certainly the ones trumpeted by the deal’s architects a quarter-century ago — the Mexican economy’s performance has been dismal. Growth of 2.5 percent a year since 1994 is less than half the developing-world average. It’s pretty much the same as the U.S. and Canada. But even that’s misleading. Because Mexico’s population expands much faster, the economic pie has to be divided among more and more people. So the average Mexican earns less today, relative to U.S. and Canadian peers, than before NAFTA. “The main idea was to promote convergence in wages and standards of living,’’ said Gerardo Esquivel, an economics professor at the Colegio de Mexico. “That has not been achieved.’’ And what meager growth there’s been, says Esquivel, has mostly gone to “the upper part of the distribution.’’
File photos / AFP/Getty Images
These two photos show 26-year-old Devin Kelley who walked into the church in Sutherland Springs with an assault rifle on November 5, killing 26 people and wounding 20 more. The US Air Force said on Tuesday it has found several dozen cases where it failed to report military convictions to civilian police.