This year, there has been a rash of horrible killings of migrant workers. People are quick to blame rival smugglers for the killings, but some people, the Southern Poverty Law Center and myself included, think that there is much more to this than other smugglers.
"On Jan. 28 of this year, four heavily armed men wearing military-style berets and camouflage fatigues ambushed a pickup truck carrying 12 illegal immigrants in a farm field near Eloy, Ariz. The assailants shot and killed the driver and wounded one of the passengers. The survivors described the shooters as three white men and one Latino who spoke limited Spanish.
The attack near Eloy occurred in the midst of a month-long flurry of similar ambushes in southern Arizona, in which six victims were killed, six were shot and wounded, and 18 were robbed at gunpoint in four separate incidents.
But the Eloy ambush stood out because it lacked any characteristics of typical borderland violence committed by bandits or rival smugglers. No one was robbed in the Eloy ambush, there were no drugs in the truck, and no one was kidnapped (rival immigrant smugglers, or "coyotes," frequently steal each other's human cargo). Also, three of the men were white, which is exceedingly rare for coyotes or border bandits.
The incident remains under investigation. No arrests have been made, and there is no hard evidence the killers were acting as anti-immigration vigilantes. Even so, Jeff Schwilk, the founder of the San Diego Minutemen, a highly active and aggressive new group that targets migrant worker camps in semi-rural canyons in Southern California, openly celebrated the murders.
"In America, we call incidents like that 'cleansing the gene pool,'" Schwilk declared in an E-mail to his group's members."
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=763These guys aren't with the Border Patrol.