Racist Killer-Vigilante, Anti-Immigrant Minuteman(Woman), Shawna Forde — Convicted Of Killing 9 Year Old Girl (Brisenia Flores) And Her Father (Raul ‘Junior’ Flores) in ‘Apartheid’ Arizona

On May 30, 2009, Raul “Junior” Flores, 29, and his daughter, Brisenia, 9, of Arivaca, Arizona, were murdered during a “home-invasion,” — or more precisely by racist, white, blood-thirsty, immigrant and Latino loathing Republicans, accompanied an idiot Latino Uncle-Tom.

   Raul ‘Junior’ Flores and Beautiful Daughter — Brisenia
Gina Marie Gonzalez, 31, Junior’s wife, was in the home during the attack. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said the attackers hoped to rob the Flores-Gonzales family. Gonzalez called 911 when the assailants left the home for a few moments. While Gonzalez was on the phone, the assailants reentered the home and Gonzalez fired a handgun of her husband’s, wounding one of the assailants.

Shawna Forde, of Buena Vista, Arizona, who formed and was the self styled Executive Director of the anti-illegal immigration group, Minutemen Civil Defense Corps (which patrols the southern border vigilante-style to detect illegal entry into the country) even though she exhibited “unstable” behavior, later formed a splinter group (Minutemen American Defense or M.A.D.) to pursue her political goals.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik alleged Forde to have planned and ordered the murders of Flores.

A Chilling Video of Shawna Forde — Patrolling with the border with a gun down her pants

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On Monday (02/14/11) — Shawna Forde was convicted of killing the two. Although the shootings were never classified as a hate crime, Latino groups argue the murders reflect growing anti-immigrant sentiment within the United States. The details are chilling: Forde and two others entered the Flores home, allegedly looking for a million-dollar drug stash that never materialized, and shot both of Brisenia Flores’ parents before turning the gun on the child.

Shawna Forde listens during opening arguments in her trial for killing Raul and Brisenia Flores.

As her mother played dead, Brisenia Flores said, “Please don’t shoot me,” before being shot twice in the head.

A jury convicted Forde of planning and executing the raid that led to the deaths of Raul and Brisenia Flores, and of the attempted murder of Gina Gonzales, the child’s mother (she survived the attack). Forde was also convicted on two counts of aggravated assault and counts of burglary, armed robbery and aggravated robbery.

The jury will announce Forde’s sentence on Thursday; her alleged accomplices, Albert Robert Gaxiola and Jason Eugene Bush, still await trial.

Joaquin Guerra, campaign director for Latino activism group Presente.org, told the HuffPost the conviction is “justice for a little girl whose death was ignored by the mainstream media.” The case largely escaped the notice of major news outlets until a few weeks ago, when a number of national news sources covered Forde’s trial.

Few politicians spoke out against the murders, which occurred in a state that later passed the hotly-contested SB1070 immigration law and is now considering a bill that would deny citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants.

Latinos organized to bring attention to the Flores killings, including a campaign by Presente.org to shed light on the case.

“What we have shown is that Latinos are watching, and if people and parties want the Latino vote, they will have to speak out against things like this,” Guerra said. “We hope her death wasn’t in vain and that it serves as an example of what can happen when the types of conditions that are in Arizona are allowed to go unchecked and are legitimated as serious policy issues.”

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Previous Vigilante Attacks and Killings By Racist White Xenophobes
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A. The killing of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, on Long Island. An assault by a gang of white boys who made it a hobby to HUNT Latinos.
B. LYNCHED: Luis Ramirez, a Latino Immigrant in Pennsylvania. Latino immigrants are prime targets for White Racists emboldened by the now five year old Republican campaign of HATE and XENOPHOBIA.
C: Joe Horn — A cold-blooded “Vigilante Murderer” cleared by Texas Grand Jury

References:

1. Arizona vigilante leader Shawna Forde convicted of murder, home invasion
2. Website: Accused Nativist Killer Set Up By Hispanic Guards

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The relentlessly harsh Republican campaign against immigrants has always hidden a streak of racialist extremism. Now after several high-water years, the Republican tide has gone out, leaving exposed the nativism of fringe right-wingers clinging to what they hope will be a wedge issue.

Last week at the National Press Club in Washington, a group seeking to speak for the future of the Republican Party declared that its November defeats in Congressional races stemmed not from having been too hard on foreigners, but too soft.

The group, the American Cause, released a report arguing that anti-immigration absolutism was still the solution for the party’s deep electoral woes, actual voting results notwithstanding. Rather than “pander to pro-amnesty Hispanics and swing voters,” as President Bush and Karl Rove once tried to do, the report’s author, Marcus Epstein, urged Republicans to double down on their efforts to run on schemes to seal the border and drive immigrants out.

This is nonsense, of course. For years Americans have rejected the cruelty of enforcement-only regimes and Latino-bashing, in opinion surveys and at the polls. In House and Senate races in 2008 and 2006, “anti-amnesty” hard-liners consistently lost to candidates who proposed comprehensive reform solutions. The wedge did not work for single-issue xenophobes like Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pa., or the former Arizona Congressman J. D. Hayworth. Nor did it help any of the Republican presidential candidates trying to defeat the party’s best-known voice of immigration moderation, John McCain, for the nomination.

Americans want immigration solved, and they realize that mass deportations will not do that. When you add the unprecedented engagement of growing numbers of Latino voters in 2008, it becomes clear that the nativist path is the path to permanent political irrelevance. Unless you can find a way to get rid of all the Latinos.

What was perhaps more notable than the report itself was the team that delivered it. It included Bay Buchanan, former adviser to Representative Tom Tancredo and sister of Pat, who founded the American Cause and wrote “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.” She was joined by James Pinkerton, an essayist and Fox News contributor who, as an aide to the first President Bush, took credit for the racist Willie Horton ads run against Michael Dukakis.

So far, so foul. But even more telling was the presence of Peter Brimelow, a former Forbes editor and founder of Vdare.com, an extremist anti-immigration Web site. It is named for Virginia Dare, the first white baby born in the English colonies, which tells you most of what you need to know. The site is worth a visit. There you can read Mr. Brimelow’s and Mr. Buchanan’s musings about racial dilution and the perils facing white people, and gems like this from Mr. Epstein:

“Diversity can be good in moderation – if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers – as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.”

It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out. The country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance.

It is all around us. Much was made of the Republican mailing of the parody song “Barack the Magic Negro,” but the same notorious CD included “The Star Spanglish Banner,” a puerile bit of Latino-baiting. It is easily found on YouTube. Google the words “Bill O’Reilly” and “white, Christian male power structure” for another YouTube taste of the Fox News host assailing the immigration views of “the far left” (including The Times) as racially traitorous.

White-Supremacists on TV — Sanctioned Immigrant Hate-Mongering on Cable

And it takes only a cursory look at a worsening economic climate and grim national mood to realize that history is always threatening to repeat itself. Last week on Long Island, the authorities in Suffolk County unsealed new indictments against a group of teenage boys accused in a murderous attack against an Ecuadorean immigrant, Marcelo Lucero. Since that crime last year, many more victims have come forward with stories of assaults in or near the same town, Patchogue. The police in that suburb seem to have made a habit of ignoring a long and escalating trail of attacks against immigrant men, until the hatred rose up and spilled over one night, fatally. | Originally posted in NYTimes.com |

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A few hundred people on Sunday marched in Brooklyn to protest last week’s fatal beating of a 31-year-old Ecuadorean man — an incident authorities say may have been a hate crime.

The demonstrators — holding signs reading “No more hate crimes” — walked a half-mile in the neighborhood where police say Jose Sucuzhanay was hit in the head with a bottle and beaten with an aluminum baseball bat on December 7.

Sucuzhanay died of his injuries Friday at Elmhurst Hospital, hours before his mother arrived in New York from Ecuador, his family said. Read full article »

Brooklyn Hate-Crime March | White Racists Targeting Latinos

| Hate Crime Index — CNN |

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SANCTIONED IMMIGRANT HATE — VIA CABLE NEWS

A New York Times Editorial

A Catastrophic Silence

   Suffolk County executive
   - Steve Levy [Enlarge]
The killing of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, on Long Island this month brought with it a cruel blessing. From a shocking crime — an assault by a gang of boys accused of making a hobby of hunting Latinos — came a chance for a stricken, divided community to bind old wounds and to bury anger.

Instead, the moment is collapsing into the same old shouting. Advocates for immigrants are condemning the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, as somehow complicit in the killing for his rigid devotion to immigration enforcement. Mr. Levy is lashing back and trying to distribute blame fairly. He wonders, for example, how a gang out of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ could have run free for so long, firing BB’s and hateful slurs at random victims, jumping and punching them for sport.

Why, he asks, were their friends and acquaintances silent? It’s a fair question, but there is another silence Mr. Levy should focus on.

The silence that echoes most painfully is that of the Latino victims of these and other hidden crimes. Mr. Lucero’s death has set loose a flood of stories of abuse and harassment. A police precinct commander lost his job over his handling of two other attacks against Latino men that fatal day, an acknowledgment that in Suffolk, equal protection may not always apply to everyone.

Mourners Grieve for Slain Immigrant

Suffolk is not the only place with hate crimes or fearful immigrants. The same silence ruled in Postville, Iowa, where children worked brutal hours on a slaughterhouse killing floor. It hung over a factory in New Bedford, Mass., that systematically cheated workers of wages and the Louisiana shipyards where legal guest workers were held in modern-day indentured servitude.

The Racist ‘Republican’ Killers Jeffrey Conroy, 17, foreground, and other teens arrested in a hate crime murder, are led out of the Fifth Precinct in Patchogue, N.Y., for arraignment on gang assault charges in connection with the death of a 37-year old immigrant. Police said the seven high school students looking “to beat up some Mexicans” attacked the immigrant from Ecuador who worked in a dry cleaners shop. According to police, Conroy fatally plunged a knife into the man’s chest him during the brawl.

The silence of undocumented immigrants is the catastrophic silence of people taught by legislative harassment and relentless stereotyping to live mute and afraid.

Mr. Levy sees no role for himself in this drama.

‘Since when is enforcing the law seen as something negative and inflammatory?’ he asked his critics this week.

Here is an attempt to explain. — [ READ MORE ]

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References:

1. Grand Jury Indicts 7 Teens in Immigrant Killing — Seven teenagers learned Friday that they had been indicted in the fatal stabbing of an Ecuadorean immigrant who police say was targeted because he was Hispanic, but they must wait to hear the specific charges.

2. Teen Crime Suspect to Face Murder Charges — Police say man was targeted in the killing because he was Hispanic.

3. Welcome to the Action Center for Justice for Marcelo Lucero

4. Key Findings In New Report: Immigrants Contribute $10.6 Billion to Long Island — Long Island WINS released a new report yesterday entitled “Strengthening Long Island: The Economic Contributions of Immigrants to Nassau and Suffolk.”

5. News about Marcelo Lucero — including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

6. Related Content from NYDailyNews.com — Marcelo Lucero

7. Fear & Loathing in Prime Time: Immigration Myths and Cable News — “Number one, the illegal aliens shouldn’t be here. And number two, the culture from which they come is a lot more violent than the USA.” — The O’Reilly Factor, January 15, 2007