This post has been added to the… California In Transition- Must read Threads! 
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Posted on 10/13/2003 6:40:59 AM PDT by boris
no. I have read in several places that the law takes effect on January 1. That doesn't mean that what I read was true. If it is wrong, please let me know.
You're right in that the law does go into effect Jan 1, 2004 unless the referendum is certified before that.
I've been trying to find an official cite for the 90-day deadline for certification. I've seen several seemingly-reliable references to it but have found nothing official yet. Maybe www.saveourlicense.com has the straight scoop.
We only have until December 7th to collect roughly 375,000 valid signatures, and we’re mailing out petitions as fast as we can afford to.
While it's not an official cite of a specific law, I can only presume that they know what they're talking about. That date would correspond to 90 days after a Setember 7th signing.
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In almost all countries, including the most backward, third-world of them, Americans must have legal sponsorship to obtain a drivers license in country. You must also be able to produce a current, valid US drivers license. You can get an International Drivers License that is valid in many industrial countries, but again, you must have legal sponsorship in order to get one and use it.
The US may very well be the only nation in the world where criminal aliens can get drivers licenses.
It better hurry:
Mexican army deserters start war for control of border city
By Mark Stevenson / Associated Press
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico -- Members of an elite Mexican army unit have deserted and formed a drug gang, using their military training to launch a violent battle for control of this border city, Mexico's top anti-drug prosecutor said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The war for Nuevo Laredo is unlike other recent drug conflicts -- it's a turf war involving most of Mexico's major cartels in broad alliances not seen in a decade. It has the Mexican army fighting an organized unit of former comrades, and it has cost American lives.
"They are extremely violent, and they are very much feared in the region because of the bloodshed they unleash," Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico's top anti-drug prosecutor, told AP.
The battles, which have taken 87 lives since 2002, have involved unprecedented alliances among Mexico's drug cartels, according to Nuevo Laredo police commander Martin Landa Herrera.
"I don't think anything like this has happened before in Mexico," he said in an interview. "I have never heard of this many cartels fighting for one piece of territory."
Known as the "Zetas" or "Z"s, the new drug gang -- which appears to have won control of the city -- is led by former members of an elite paratroop and intelligence battalion that was posted to the border state of Tamaulipas in the 1990s to fight drug traffickers.
Vasconcelos said about 31 of the estimated 350 members of the Special Air Mobile Force Group, posted to the border state of Tamaulipas in the 1990s, had deserted and joined the drug turf war.
"They have high-powered weapons, training and intelligence capabilities," Landa Herrera said of the Zetas, whose name comes from the radio code word designating a police commander. "They have even tapped our radio communications. They listen in on us."
The Defense Department has refused to confirm any of its soldiers formed the Zetas. But the army recently began posting wanted posters across the country offering rewards for the deserters, some still pictured in army uniforms. That led to speculation the soldiers were behind the Zetas.
The skirmishing began in 2001 as a dispute among local drug gangs that operated with the permission of reputed Gulf drug cartel leader Osiel Cardenas. By early 2002, the battle had heated up enough that the Zetas appeared, working as hit men for Cardenas in a bid to restore order.
But Cardenas' arrest March 14 during a shootout in the nearby border city of Matamoros opened the floodgates for a wider conflict. With Cardenas in jail, cartels across Mexico -- Michoacan, Ciudad Juarez, Sinaloa and possibly Tijuana -- sensed weakness and tried to move in on the territory.
Escaped Sinaloa drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman reportedly allied himself with the Juarez cartel, sending in gunmen to take over Nuevo Laredo. At the same time, another local trafficker tried to form an alliance with the Valencia cartel, based in the western state of Michoacan. And police even arrested a midlevel operator for the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix cartel in Nuevo Laredo.
Such alliances -- and an all-out war between multiple cartels -- haven't been seen since the wars between Mexican gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
"We're seeing these alliances, but this is just proof of the crisis these gangs are in," Vasconcelos said. "There is no one single group strong enough anymore to dominate the territory."
The Zetas do appear to have the upper hand and are still linked to Cardenas, city police say. While dozens of hired gunslingers from other cartels have died, Vasconcelos said only a few Zetas have been killed and only one or two have been captured.
The Zetas have killed dozens of rival traffickers, trading shots from passing sport utility vehicles on the streets of Nuevo Laredo. In one attack, they engaged in a shootout in broad daylight just yards from where the city's mayor was attending a flag-raising ceremony.
The Zetas sometimes leave their victims' bodies packed in car trunks. In one massacre, they wrote information about a rival gang on a wall above a pile of victims, encouraging police to dismantle the other group.
Nobody has to tell Houston resident Noe Villarreal how vicious the war has become. On Sept. 27, a commando of at least 30 masked men carrying assault rifles kidnapped his brother -- Hayward, Calif., businessman Juan Villarreal Garcia -- from his Mexico home in Sabinas Hidalgo, a town south of Nuevo Laredo.
The gunmen had fanned out across the town in search of a rival. They killed two policemen, kidnapped seven people, burst into Villarreal's home -- in a possible case of mistaken identity -- and dragged the 78-year-old tortilla-store owner away.
The other hostages were released soon afterward, but Villarreal remains missing and is presumed dead. The area is so violent that nobody is sure who kidnapped him or why.
"I don't know if it was the Zetas," said Noe Villarreal, "because the Zetas have never released anyone alive. That's not their style."
It wouldn't be the first time that Americans have died in the conflict.
A wild pre-dawn battle on Aug. 1 in Nuevo Laredo left at least three dead -- one of them a man from Laredo, Texas -- and six wounded. Police and army troops exchanged fire with cars believed to be carrying drug traffickers.
The three were killed when their SUV exploded after police bullets hit the vehicle's gas tank.
And in June 2001, a couple from Laredo, Texas, -- Sylvia Solis and Juan Villagomez -- were kidnapped by drug traffickers, although it is unclear why. She was raped and strangled. He was beaten and buried alive.
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