Antimulticulture
2005-08-30 12:42:01 UTC
Borders = Ethnic Cleansing?
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19314
By John Perazzo
August 30, 2005
At a time when most of the nation realizes our
porous southern border needs increased policing,
at least one organization is working to erase that
boundary completely.
La Tierra Es De Todos (henceforth, La Tierra) is
an open-borders advocacy organization whose name
means The Earth Is For All. Operating from the
axiom that No Human Is Illegal, La Tierra
characterizes as racist all U.S. efforts
however meager to stem the tide of illegal
immigrants flooding across the nation's border
with Mexico. Founded on these principles, La
Tierra easily dismisses every American concerned
that some 11 to 20 million illegals (estimates
vary from source to source) currently reside in
the United States as racists. Some 57 percent of
these hail from Mexico, a24 percent from other
Latin American nations, and the number continues
to grow rapidly. More than 700,000 additional
illegals enter the U.S. each year.
In La Tierra's estimation, any measures aimed at
reversing this trend are blatant racial prejudice.
To combat this alleged bigotry, La Tierra busies
itself with the task of organizing protest rallies
against groups seeking to preserve the integrity
of America's borders via the enforcement of
existing immigration laws.
The Minuteman Project recently found itself in La
Tierras crosshairs. The Minutemen are a
nonviolent, volunteer, grassroots group initiated
in April 2005 by private American citizens helping
to enforce immigration law. Minuteman volunteers
have monitored sections of the Arizona-Mexico
border in an effort to assist the undermanned
Border Patrol (which stations an average of
scarcely five officers per linear mile along the
nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border). La Tierra
has staged numerous rallies denouncing the
activities and objectives of the Minuteman Project
and other border-control groups, portraying them,
in characteristic fashion, as bands of racists.
La Tierra publicizes its events on its website.
All this month, it has hyped a meeting taking
place today under the headline, Join in the
Organizing for Immigrant Rights and Against the
Racist Minutemen.
Similarly tarring border-control advocates as
hate-mongers, an August 16, 2005, headline on the
La Tierra website read, Border Bigot to Run for
Congressional Seat. The referenced bigot was
Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project.
The text below this headline read:
Right wing extremist and not so closeted racist
Jim Gilchrist has declared his Congressional
candidacy for Orange County District 48. Still
trying to justify his bigoted vigilante
organization by evoking 9/11 [You've lost
patience with politicians who do nothing
meaningful to mend our broken borders, especially
since 9/11], he is attempting to raise funds and
garner support for a congressional run. Although
many suspected the leaders of these various white
supremacist groups couched in rhetoric of border
security have had political aspirations all along,
Gilchrist is the first to fulfill this prediction.
All those concerned with preventing this
hate-filled reactionary from making a serious run
at congress need to mobilize. While Gilchrist and
others like him are responsible for shootings and
various other human right violations at the
border, the corporate media and reactionary
extremist California Governor have done their very
best to make heroes out of them. These jingoistic
individuals have spent so much of their lives in a
culture of overt racism, they make racist
statements while maintaining they aren't
racists Making it clear that running for office on
supremacist ideology will not be tolerated is
critical. Stopping Gilchrist will prevent his
fellow hate mongers from following suit in the future.
La Tierra neither addresses nor acknowledges the
fact that illegal immigration has created a
massive law-enforcement crisis in the United
States. Heather MacDonald notes in the Winter 2004
issue of City Journal some startling facts about
illegal immigration and crime in southern
California (the state where 24 percent of all
illegals reside):
(a) In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all
outstanding warrants for homicide (which total
1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens, as do up to
two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000);
(b) At least 60 percent of the members of
southern California's 20,000-member 18th Street
Gang are illegal, and police officers say the
proportion is actually much greater. This brutal
organization not only collaborates with the
Mexican Mafia on drug-distribution schemes,
extortion, and drive-by assassinations, but also
commits an average of one assault or robbery per
day in Los Angeles County. The gang has
experienced dramatic growth over the past 20
years, recruiting primarily illegals from Central
America and Mexico; and
(c) The leadership of the Columbia Lil Cycos
gang, which uses murder and racketeering to
control the Los Angeles drug market, was
approximately 60 percent illegal in 2002.
But the problem, of course, extends far beyond
southern California. According to the Center for
Immigration Studies, approximately 30 percent of
all inmates currently in U.S. prisons are illegal
aliens. Recently the governors of Arizona and New
Mexico two of the states most heavily affected
by illegal immigration declared a state of
emergency because of the high crime levels that
illegals have brought to those states.
Such facts do nothing to sway La Tierra from its
firmly held conviction that all attempts to curb
illegal immigration are rooted in blatant racism
and jingoism. Neither is La Tierras position
influenced by such harsh economic realities as:
(a) California's nearly 3 million
illegal immigrants cost taxpayers almost $9
billion annually (source: Federation for American
Immigration Reform);
(b) Illegal aliens cost the federal
government $10 billion more each year than they
pay in taxes (source: Center for Immigration
Studies); or
(c) It costs taxpayers $750 million
annually to house the 18,000 illegal aliens in
California prisons (source: U.S. Government
Accounting Office).
Nor does La Tierra give even the barest shred of
credence to speculation that America's borders
constitute an open invitation for aspiring
terrorists. A September 2004 Washington Times
report stated, A top al-Qaeda lieutenant has met
with leaders of a violent Salvadoran criminal gang
with roots in Mexico and the United States
including a stronghold in the Washington area in
an effort by the terrorist network to seek help
infiltrating the U.S.-Mexico border, law
enforcement authorities said. This report was
buttressed in even more ominous tones by the July
2005 issue of Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, which
revealed:
[T]op U.S. government officials are contemplating
what they consider to be an inevitable and much
bigger assault on America one likely to kill
millions, destroy the economy and fundamentally
alter the course of history According to captured
al-Qaida leaders and documents, the plan is called
the 'American Hiroshima' and involves the multiple
detonation of nuclear weapons already smuggled
into the U.S. over the Mexican border with the
help of the MS-13 street gang and other organized
crime groups.
But for La Tierra and its fellow open-borders
advocates, all of this amounts to nothing more
than mean-spirited, jingoistic rhetoric. In La
Tierra's final analysis, everything can be
distilled to a simple, one-size-fits-all
explanation for any efforts to monitor the traffic
flow across U.S. borders: racism. On August 19,
2005, for example, the La Tierra website featured
a denunciation of Supremacist James Chase an
original member of the Minuteman Project and the
founder of the southern California-based United
States Border Patrol Auxiliary (USBPA), an
offshoot of the Minuteman Project. Excoriating the
USBPA's Neighborhood Watch program that was
instituted along California's border with Mexico,
La Tierra mocked the program's stated mission (to
reduce the chance that criminals and terrorists
will enter the U.S. by violating immigration laws)
as nothing more than a contrived pretext for
ethnic cleansing. Chase is already advertising
his next racist foray, said La Tierra, and
trying to tie it to Bush's war on ter... uh...
global struggle against global extr... er, uh,
anyway here's a quote from his [Chase's] post: 'NO
MORE AL QAEDA ATTACKS.' In short, La Tierra quite
literally laughs off contentions that unrestrained
illegal immigration could facilitate future
terrorist threats.
Also on August 19, 2005, the La Tierra website
featured a story titled Poetic Justice for
Minuteman Racists a tale of two illegal
border-crossers (Edwin Alfredo Mancía Gonzáles and
Fátima del Socorro Leiva Medina, both of El
Salvador) who were awarded a 70-acre ranch by
virtue of their civil lawsuit victory against
Texas landowner Casey Nethercott, who they accused
of having used vigilante tactics against them. The
plaintiffs, who were taken into custody by
Nethercott and other members of the anti-illegal
immigration group Ranch Rescue in March 2003,
accused Nethercott of threatening them and of
hitting Mr. Gonzáles with a pistol, charges that
Nethercott denied. The plaintiffs, incidentally,
acknowledged that the group gave them cookies,
water, and a blanket before releasing them after
about one hour. Gonzáles and Medina, who were
represented in their lawsuit by the Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC), testified that during
their hour of detention they feared for their
lives and consequently suffered post-traumatic
stress. According to their attorney, the pair
plans to sell the ranch they were awarded rather
than live there. Commenting on the case, SPLC
co-founder Morris Dees said, Certainly it's
poetic justice that these undocumented workers own
this land, adding that the loss of the ranch
would send a pretty important message to those
[opponents of illegal immigration] who come to the
border to use violence. Dees did not say what
message the court's verdict would send to aspiring
illegal immigrants.
Another August 2005 headline on the La Tierra
website read, Racists attempting to garner
support for bigoted ballot measure. Below the
headline was the assertion that Joseph Turner (the
founder of the anti-illegal immigration group Save
Our State, or SOS) and his little band of SOS
supremacists were joining the Minuteman Project
(MMP) and Friends of the Border Patrol (FOBT) in a
campaign to collect enough signatures to place a
California Border Police Initiative on the state
ballot in the November elections. If the measure
were to pass, the California Border Police would
be a force of sworn and trained police officers,
not volunteers, to be authorized by both the state
constitution and the Governor to patrol the
California-Mexico border and enforce all federal
immigration laws statewide.
On August 19, 2005, the La Tierra website posted
the USA Today article, Illegals Dying at Record
Rate in Arizona Desert. This piece showed
tremendous sympathy to those who had met
misfortune while in the process of breaking U.S.
immigration law, painting them as victims of both
tragedy and injustice.
With about six weeks remaining in the Border
Patrol's fiscal year and more Border Patrol
agents patrolling than ever 201 men, women, and
children have succumbed to the elements in
Arizona. In Pima County, which includes Tohono
O'odham and Tucson, so many corpses are waiting to
be identified, autopsied and returned to Mexico
that the coroner is storing 60 of them in a
refrigerator truck. The problem stems from federal
border policies dating to the late 1990s. First,
the government moved to stop illegal immigration
in California and Texas. Next, Border Patrol
agents clamped down in urban areas along the
nation's 1,951-mile border with Mexico. As a
result, smugglers and their human clients have
been funneled to a deadly passageway - Arizona's
remote desert Bruce Parks, the coroner, says
stress overtaxes the body's cooling system. As the
body temperature soars to 107 degrees, blood
pressure plummets. Vital organs fail. Victims
suffer cramps, nausea, exhaustion. Some strip or
go crazy. Ultimately, they just sit down or
collapse, Parks adds.
Also quoted in the article was Beth Sanders of No
More Deaths, a coalition of volunteers who cruise
along southwestern backroads in search of illegal
border-crossers to whom they can offer water and
medical care. Each of these individuals has
dignity, and we need to recognize that, said
Sanders.
In March 2005, Jesse Diaz, a University of
California-Riverside graduate student and a member
of the La Tierra coalition, helped organize a
call to action, in which nearly 50 protesters
picketed in front of Jim Gilchrist's Aliso Viejo,
California, home and pilloried him as a racist.
No other place is as symbolic as his
[Gilchrist's] home, said Diaz. We're here to
make noise, chant and let his neighbors know what
he's doing. Diaz also participated in an Easter
Sunday demonstration in front of the church where
Gilchrist worships. He will not go unfettered and
[un]challenged, Diaz declared. This is a
response to the Minuteman militia going to the
border to apprehend individuals at gunpoint. We
feel this is domestic terrorism. We want to expose
him [Gilchrist] for what he is a
white-supremacist racist.
The 39-year-old Diaz, who has a recorded history
of drug use and gang involvement, graduated from
Pitzer College in 2002 after developing his own
major in Chicano psychology. In 2003 he was
awarded an American Sociological Association
Minority Fellowship. Diaz is also a member of the
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC),
a race- and ethnicity-conscious civil rights
organization that seeks to expand race-preference
programs and the rights of illegal aliens in the
U.S. José Velez, who headed LULAC from 1990 to
1994, is a kindred spirit to Diaz. According to
Velez, the U.S. Border Patrol is the enemy of my
people and always will be. Several years ago Mr.
Velez reportedly submitted false papers for more
than 6,000 illegals seeking amnesty, an action
that resulted in his conviction for 10 counts of
immigration fraud. Consistent with its opposition
to measures intended to protect America from
foreign would-be terrorists, LULAC has given its
organizational endorsement to the Community
Resolution to Protect Civil Liberties campaign, a
project of the California-based Coalition for
Civil Liberties (CCL). The CCL tries to influence
city councils to pass resolutions creating Civil
Liberties Safe Zones; that is, to be non-compliant
with the provisions of the Patriot Act, a federal
law. Such are the values and ideals that Jesse
Diaz embraces as a LULAC member; and these ideals
are entirely consistent with those of La Tierra Es
De Todos.
At UC-Riverside, Jesse Diaz has been exposed to
the teachings of the radical professor Armando
Navarro, a Mexican nationalist and anti-American
activist who chairs the university's Ethnic
Studies Department and who has, like Diaz and La
Tierra Es De Todos, also denounced the Minuteman
Project. These are the critical years for us in
the Latino community, says Navarro. We're in a
state of transition. And that transformation is
called the browning of America. Latinos are now
becoming the majority. With this trend in mind,
Navarro advocates the reclamation of the
Southwestern United States by Mexico, and the
liberation of the ancestral Mexican homeland of
Aztlan.
Navarro is the head of the National Alliance for
Human Rights (NAHR), an activist organization that
promotes open borders and demands increased rights
for illegal aliens. In 2002, he was sworn in as a
new member of the State Central Committee for the
Party of Democratic Revolution, Mexico's Socialist
Party and a member organization of Socialist
International. In January 1995, speaking at the
Latino Summit Response to Proposition 187
conference at UC Riverside, Navarro declared:
You are like the generals that command armies.
We're in a state of war. This Proposition 187
[which denied illegal immigrants access to public
services but was later nullified] is a declaration
of war against the Latino/Chicano community of
this country! They know the demographics, they
know that history and time is on our side, as one
people, as one nation within a nation as the
community that we are, the Chicano/Latino
community of this nation. What that means is a
transfer of power. It means control. It means
who's going to [have] influence. And it is the
young people that are going to be in a position to
really make the promise of what the Chicano
movement was all about in terms of
self-determination, in terms of empowerment, even
in terms of the idea of an Aztlan!
Such opinions have found a receptive audience in
Jesse Diaz and his fellow La Tierra members.
La Tierra holds its place among a coalition of
organizations pushing for the passage of a bill
permitting illegals in California to obtain
driver's licenses. We put more into the economy
than we take out, said Diaz in April 2004,
failing to distinguish between legal and illegal
immigrants. There's definitely a need for it [a
measure granting licenses to illegals], Diaz
explained. They're going to drive regardless.
It's just [that] now the rules will be safer.
They're going to have insurance. There will be
driver's training. It will be great. Diaz helped
lead an April 2004 boycott aimed at making this
issue a centerpiece of public debate. The boycott
also called attention to the efforts of
anti-illegal immigration groups to get a revised
Proposition 187 on the November ballot; the
revised initiative would deny illegal aliens
access to driver's licenses and public benefits.
La Tierra Es De Todos is affiliated with Bikers
Against Borders (BAB), an organization founded in
August 2005 by a handful of La Tierra members. BAB
membership consists of motorcycle enthusiasts who
support La Tierra's open-borders goals. Says a La
Tierra spokesman, We entertained the idea of
having fellow leftists ride with us [for the
purpose of making political statements] in the
future and thought it was a great idea. An ISO
[International Socialist Organization] comrade
furnished the name, and hence 'Bikers Against
Borders' was born. BAB membership guidelines are
as follows:
Socialists, Anarchists, Peace and Justice and all
similar affiliations are welcome. No serious
rules, all riders and passengers are welcome, just
the following: (a) Have fun, but be a safe rider;
(b) Be a member of either Gente Unida [an
anti-Minuteman, pro-open borders group] or La
Tierra es de Todos coalitions; (c) Be in full
agreement with our leftist assessment of
anti-immigrant groups (SOS/MMP/FOBP, etc.); (d) Be
familiar with the La Tierra es de Todos Covenant
or similar mission statements; (e) Be serious in
realizing that confrontation is an important part
of combating the proto-fascist nature of
anti-immigrant groups; and (f) Be involved with
the work that Gente Unida or La Tierra es de Todos
coalitions are doing in order to make these
mobilizations possible.
The La Tierra website provides links to a number
of likeminded organizations, including Gente Unida
(People United), Angeles del Desierto (Desert
Angels), DeleteTheBorder.org; Socialist Worker,
and the International Socialist Organization. Thus
do radicals from all stripes of life gang up to
erase our national border and undermine our security.
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multi-culty
"Abolish Multi-Culty and String Up The Traitors!"
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19314
By John Perazzo
August 30, 2005
At a time when most of the nation realizes our
porous southern border needs increased policing,
at least one organization is working to erase that
boundary completely.
La Tierra Es De Todos (henceforth, La Tierra) is
an open-borders advocacy organization whose name
means The Earth Is For All. Operating from the
axiom that No Human Is Illegal, La Tierra
characterizes as racist all U.S. efforts
however meager to stem the tide of illegal
immigrants flooding across the nation's border
with Mexico. Founded on these principles, La
Tierra easily dismisses every American concerned
that some 11 to 20 million illegals (estimates
vary from source to source) currently reside in
the United States as racists. Some 57 percent of
these hail from Mexico, a24 percent from other
Latin American nations, and the number continues
to grow rapidly. More than 700,000 additional
illegals enter the U.S. each year.
In La Tierra's estimation, any measures aimed at
reversing this trend are blatant racial prejudice.
To combat this alleged bigotry, La Tierra busies
itself with the task of organizing protest rallies
against groups seeking to preserve the integrity
of America's borders via the enforcement of
existing immigration laws.
The Minuteman Project recently found itself in La
Tierras crosshairs. The Minutemen are a
nonviolent, volunteer, grassroots group initiated
in April 2005 by private American citizens helping
to enforce immigration law. Minuteman volunteers
have monitored sections of the Arizona-Mexico
border in an effort to assist the undermanned
Border Patrol (which stations an average of
scarcely five officers per linear mile along the
nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border). La Tierra
has staged numerous rallies denouncing the
activities and objectives of the Minuteman Project
and other border-control groups, portraying them,
in characteristic fashion, as bands of racists.
La Tierra publicizes its events on its website.
All this month, it has hyped a meeting taking
place today under the headline, Join in the
Organizing for Immigrant Rights and Against the
Racist Minutemen.
Similarly tarring border-control advocates as
hate-mongers, an August 16, 2005, headline on the
La Tierra website read, Border Bigot to Run for
Congressional Seat. The referenced bigot was
Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project.
The text below this headline read:
Right wing extremist and not so closeted racist
Jim Gilchrist has declared his Congressional
candidacy for Orange County District 48. Still
trying to justify his bigoted vigilante
organization by evoking 9/11 [You've lost
patience with politicians who do nothing
meaningful to mend our broken borders, especially
since 9/11], he is attempting to raise funds and
garner support for a congressional run. Although
many suspected the leaders of these various white
supremacist groups couched in rhetoric of border
security have had political aspirations all along,
Gilchrist is the first to fulfill this prediction.
All those concerned with preventing this
hate-filled reactionary from making a serious run
at congress need to mobilize. While Gilchrist and
others like him are responsible for shootings and
various other human right violations at the
border, the corporate media and reactionary
extremist California Governor have done their very
best to make heroes out of them. These jingoistic
individuals have spent so much of their lives in a
culture of overt racism, they make racist
statements while maintaining they aren't
racists Making it clear that running for office on
supremacist ideology will not be tolerated is
critical. Stopping Gilchrist will prevent his
fellow hate mongers from following suit in the future.
La Tierra neither addresses nor acknowledges the
fact that illegal immigration has created a
massive law-enforcement crisis in the United
States. Heather MacDonald notes in the Winter 2004
issue of City Journal some startling facts about
illegal immigration and crime in southern
California (the state where 24 percent of all
illegals reside):
(a) In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all
outstanding warrants for homicide (which total
1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens, as do up to
two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000);
(b) At least 60 percent of the members of
southern California's 20,000-member 18th Street
Gang are illegal, and police officers say the
proportion is actually much greater. This brutal
organization not only collaborates with the
Mexican Mafia on drug-distribution schemes,
extortion, and drive-by assassinations, but also
commits an average of one assault or robbery per
day in Los Angeles County. The gang has
experienced dramatic growth over the past 20
years, recruiting primarily illegals from Central
America and Mexico; and
(c) The leadership of the Columbia Lil Cycos
gang, which uses murder and racketeering to
control the Los Angeles drug market, was
approximately 60 percent illegal in 2002.
But the problem, of course, extends far beyond
southern California. According to the Center for
Immigration Studies, approximately 30 percent of
all inmates currently in U.S. prisons are illegal
aliens. Recently the governors of Arizona and New
Mexico two of the states most heavily affected
by illegal immigration declared a state of
emergency because of the high crime levels that
illegals have brought to those states.
Such facts do nothing to sway La Tierra from its
firmly held conviction that all attempts to curb
illegal immigration are rooted in blatant racism
and jingoism. Neither is La Tierras position
influenced by such harsh economic realities as:
(a) California's nearly 3 million
illegal immigrants cost taxpayers almost $9
billion annually (source: Federation for American
Immigration Reform);
(b) Illegal aliens cost the federal
government $10 billion more each year than they
pay in taxes (source: Center for Immigration
Studies); or
(c) It costs taxpayers $750 million
annually to house the 18,000 illegal aliens in
California prisons (source: U.S. Government
Accounting Office).
Nor does La Tierra give even the barest shred of
credence to speculation that America's borders
constitute an open invitation for aspiring
terrorists. A September 2004 Washington Times
report stated, A top al-Qaeda lieutenant has met
with leaders of a violent Salvadoran criminal gang
with roots in Mexico and the United States
including a stronghold in the Washington area in
an effort by the terrorist network to seek help
infiltrating the U.S.-Mexico border, law
enforcement authorities said. This report was
buttressed in even more ominous tones by the July
2005 issue of Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, which
revealed:
[T]op U.S. government officials are contemplating
what they consider to be an inevitable and much
bigger assault on America one likely to kill
millions, destroy the economy and fundamentally
alter the course of history According to captured
al-Qaida leaders and documents, the plan is called
the 'American Hiroshima' and involves the multiple
detonation of nuclear weapons already smuggled
into the U.S. over the Mexican border with the
help of the MS-13 street gang and other organized
crime groups.
But for La Tierra and its fellow open-borders
advocates, all of this amounts to nothing more
than mean-spirited, jingoistic rhetoric. In La
Tierra's final analysis, everything can be
distilled to a simple, one-size-fits-all
explanation for any efforts to monitor the traffic
flow across U.S. borders: racism. On August 19,
2005, for example, the La Tierra website featured
a denunciation of Supremacist James Chase an
original member of the Minuteman Project and the
founder of the southern California-based United
States Border Patrol Auxiliary (USBPA), an
offshoot of the Minuteman Project. Excoriating the
USBPA's Neighborhood Watch program that was
instituted along California's border with Mexico,
La Tierra mocked the program's stated mission (to
reduce the chance that criminals and terrorists
will enter the U.S. by violating immigration laws)
as nothing more than a contrived pretext for
ethnic cleansing. Chase is already advertising
his next racist foray, said La Tierra, and
trying to tie it to Bush's war on ter... uh...
global struggle against global extr... er, uh,
anyway here's a quote from his [Chase's] post: 'NO
MORE AL QAEDA ATTACKS.' In short, La Tierra quite
literally laughs off contentions that unrestrained
illegal immigration could facilitate future
terrorist threats.
Also on August 19, 2005, the La Tierra website
featured a story titled Poetic Justice for
Minuteman Racists a tale of two illegal
border-crossers (Edwin Alfredo Mancía Gonzáles and
Fátima del Socorro Leiva Medina, both of El
Salvador) who were awarded a 70-acre ranch by
virtue of their civil lawsuit victory against
Texas landowner Casey Nethercott, who they accused
of having used vigilante tactics against them. The
plaintiffs, who were taken into custody by
Nethercott and other members of the anti-illegal
immigration group Ranch Rescue in March 2003,
accused Nethercott of threatening them and of
hitting Mr. Gonzáles with a pistol, charges that
Nethercott denied. The plaintiffs, incidentally,
acknowledged that the group gave them cookies,
water, and a blanket before releasing them after
about one hour. Gonzáles and Medina, who were
represented in their lawsuit by the Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC), testified that during
their hour of detention they feared for their
lives and consequently suffered post-traumatic
stress. According to their attorney, the pair
plans to sell the ranch they were awarded rather
than live there. Commenting on the case, SPLC
co-founder Morris Dees said, Certainly it's
poetic justice that these undocumented workers own
this land, adding that the loss of the ranch
would send a pretty important message to those
[opponents of illegal immigration] who come to the
border to use violence. Dees did not say what
message the court's verdict would send to aspiring
illegal immigrants.
Another August 2005 headline on the La Tierra
website read, Racists attempting to garner
support for bigoted ballot measure. Below the
headline was the assertion that Joseph Turner (the
founder of the anti-illegal immigration group Save
Our State, or SOS) and his little band of SOS
supremacists were joining the Minuteman Project
(MMP) and Friends of the Border Patrol (FOBT) in a
campaign to collect enough signatures to place a
California Border Police Initiative on the state
ballot in the November elections. If the measure
were to pass, the California Border Police would
be a force of sworn and trained police officers,
not volunteers, to be authorized by both the state
constitution and the Governor to patrol the
California-Mexico border and enforce all federal
immigration laws statewide.
On August 19, 2005, the La Tierra website posted
the USA Today article, Illegals Dying at Record
Rate in Arizona Desert. This piece showed
tremendous sympathy to those who had met
misfortune while in the process of breaking U.S.
immigration law, painting them as victims of both
tragedy and injustice.
With about six weeks remaining in the Border
Patrol's fiscal year and more Border Patrol
agents patrolling than ever 201 men, women, and
children have succumbed to the elements in
Arizona. In Pima County, which includes Tohono
O'odham and Tucson, so many corpses are waiting to
be identified, autopsied and returned to Mexico
that the coroner is storing 60 of them in a
refrigerator truck. The problem stems from federal
border policies dating to the late 1990s. First,
the government moved to stop illegal immigration
in California and Texas. Next, Border Patrol
agents clamped down in urban areas along the
nation's 1,951-mile border with Mexico. As a
result, smugglers and their human clients have
been funneled to a deadly passageway - Arizona's
remote desert Bruce Parks, the coroner, says
stress overtaxes the body's cooling system. As the
body temperature soars to 107 degrees, blood
pressure plummets. Vital organs fail. Victims
suffer cramps, nausea, exhaustion. Some strip or
go crazy. Ultimately, they just sit down or
collapse, Parks adds.
Also quoted in the article was Beth Sanders of No
More Deaths, a coalition of volunteers who cruise
along southwestern backroads in search of illegal
border-crossers to whom they can offer water and
medical care. Each of these individuals has
dignity, and we need to recognize that, said
Sanders.
In March 2005, Jesse Diaz, a University of
California-Riverside graduate student and a member
of the La Tierra coalition, helped organize a
call to action, in which nearly 50 protesters
picketed in front of Jim Gilchrist's Aliso Viejo,
California, home and pilloried him as a racist.
No other place is as symbolic as his
[Gilchrist's] home, said Diaz. We're here to
make noise, chant and let his neighbors know what
he's doing. Diaz also participated in an Easter
Sunday demonstration in front of the church where
Gilchrist worships. He will not go unfettered and
[un]challenged, Diaz declared. This is a
response to the Minuteman militia going to the
border to apprehend individuals at gunpoint. We
feel this is domestic terrorism. We want to expose
him [Gilchrist] for what he is a
white-supremacist racist.
The 39-year-old Diaz, who has a recorded history
of drug use and gang involvement, graduated from
Pitzer College in 2002 after developing his own
major in Chicano psychology. In 2003 he was
awarded an American Sociological Association
Minority Fellowship. Diaz is also a member of the
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC),
a race- and ethnicity-conscious civil rights
organization that seeks to expand race-preference
programs and the rights of illegal aliens in the
U.S. José Velez, who headed LULAC from 1990 to
1994, is a kindred spirit to Diaz. According to
Velez, the U.S. Border Patrol is the enemy of my
people and always will be. Several years ago Mr.
Velez reportedly submitted false papers for more
than 6,000 illegals seeking amnesty, an action
that resulted in his conviction for 10 counts of
immigration fraud. Consistent with its opposition
to measures intended to protect America from
foreign would-be terrorists, LULAC has given its
organizational endorsement to the Community
Resolution to Protect Civil Liberties campaign, a
project of the California-based Coalition for
Civil Liberties (CCL). The CCL tries to influence
city councils to pass resolutions creating Civil
Liberties Safe Zones; that is, to be non-compliant
with the provisions of the Patriot Act, a federal
law. Such are the values and ideals that Jesse
Diaz embraces as a LULAC member; and these ideals
are entirely consistent with those of La Tierra Es
De Todos.
At UC-Riverside, Jesse Diaz has been exposed to
the teachings of the radical professor Armando
Navarro, a Mexican nationalist and anti-American
activist who chairs the university's Ethnic
Studies Department and who has, like Diaz and La
Tierra Es De Todos, also denounced the Minuteman
Project. These are the critical years for us in
the Latino community, says Navarro. We're in a
state of transition. And that transformation is
called the browning of America. Latinos are now
becoming the majority. With this trend in mind,
Navarro advocates the reclamation of the
Southwestern United States by Mexico, and the
liberation of the ancestral Mexican homeland of
Aztlan.
Navarro is the head of the National Alliance for
Human Rights (NAHR), an activist organization that
promotes open borders and demands increased rights
for illegal aliens. In 2002, he was sworn in as a
new member of the State Central Committee for the
Party of Democratic Revolution, Mexico's Socialist
Party and a member organization of Socialist
International. In January 1995, speaking at the
Latino Summit Response to Proposition 187
conference at UC Riverside, Navarro declared:
You are like the generals that command armies.
We're in a state of war. This Proposition 187
[which denied illegal immigrants access to public
services but was later nullified] is a declaration
of war against the Latino/Chicano community of
this country! They know the demographics, they
know that history and time is on our side, as one
people, as one nation within a nation as the
community that we are, the Chicano/Latino
community of this nation. What that means is a
transfer of power. It means control. It means
who's going to [have] influence. And it is the
young people that are going to be in a position to
really make the promise of what the Chicano
movement was all about in terms of
self-determination, in terms of empowerment, even
in terms of the idea of an Aztlan!
Such opinions have found a receptive audience in
Jesse Diaz and his fellow La Tierra members.
La Tierra holds its place among a coalition of
organizations pushing for the passage of a bill
permitting illegals in California to obtain
driver's licenses. We put more into the economy
than we take out, said Diaz in April 2004,
failing to distinguish between legal and illegal
immigrants. There's definitely a need for it [a
measure granting licenses to illegals], Diaz
explained. They're going to drive regardless.
It's just [that] now the rules will be safer.
They're going to have insurance. There will be
driver's training. It will be great. Diaz helped
lead an April 2004 boycott aimed at making this
issue a centerpiece of public debate. The boycott
also called attention to the efforts of
anti-illegal immigration groups to get a revised
Proposition 187 on the November ballot; the
revised initiative would deny illegal aliens
access to driver's licenses and public benefits.
La Tierra Es De Todos is affiliated with Bikers
Against Borders (BAB), an organization founded in
August 2005 by a handful of La Tierra members. BAB
membership consists of motorcycle enthusiasts who
support La Tierra's open-borders goals. Says a La
Tierra spokesman, We entertained the idea of
having fellow leftists ride with us [for the
purpose of making political statements] in the
future and thought it was a great idea. An ISO
[International Socialist Organization] comrade
furnished the name, and hence 'Bikers Against
Borders' was born. BAB membership guidelines are
as follows:
Socialists, Anarchists, Peace and Justice and all
similar affiliations are welcome. No serious
rules, all riders and passengers are welcome, just
the following: (a) Have fun, but be a safe rider;
(b) Be a member of either Gente Unida [an
anti-Minuteman, pro-open borders group] or La
Tierra es de Todos coalitions; (c) Be in full
agreement with our leftist assessment of
anti-immigrant groups (SOS/MMP/FOBP, etc.); (d) Be
familiar with the La Tierra es de Todos Covenant
or similar mission statements; (e) Be serious in
realizing that confrontation is an important part
of combating the proto-fascist nature of
anti-immigrant groups; and (f) Be involved with
the work that Gente Unida or La Tierra es de Todos
coalitions are doing in order to make these
mobilizations possible.
The La Tierra website provides links to a number
of likeminded organizations, including Gente Unida
(People United), Angeles del Desierto (Desert
Angels), DeleteTheBorder.org; Socialist Worker,
and the International Socialist Organization. Thus
do radicals from all stripes of life gang up to
erase our national border and undermine our security.
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multi-culty
"Abolish Multi-Culty and String Up The Traitors!"