How violent American vigilantes at the border led to Trump's wall (long read)

Thu 28 Feb 2019 01.00 EST

From the 80s onwards, the borderlands were rife with paramilitary cruelty and racism. But the president’s rhetoric has thrown fuel on the fire.
By Greg Grandin

No myth in American history has been more powerful, more invoked by more presidents, than that of pioneers advancing across the frontier – a word that in the United States came to mean less a place than a state of mind, an imagined gateway into the future. No writer is more associated with the idea of the frontier than Frederick Jackson Turner, who, in the late 1800s, argued that the expansion of settlement across a frontier of “free land” created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism. Onward, and then onward again. There were lulls, doubts, dissents and counter-movements. But the expansionist imperative has remained constant, in one version or another, for centuries. As Woodrow Wilson, who before he was president was a colleague of Turner, said: “A frontier people always in our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national history. There was no thought,” Wilson said, “of drawing back.”

So far. The poetry stopped on 16 June 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign by standing Turner on his head. “I will build a great wall,” Trump said.

The border before Trump was no idyll. Conflict grew especially acute in California in the early 1970s. As San Diego’s sprawl began to push against agricultural fields, racist attacks on migrants increased. Vigilantes drove around the back roads of the greater San Diego area, shooting at Mexicans from the flatbeds of their pickups; dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves. Anti-migrant violence was fuelled by angry veterans returning from Vietnam, who carried out what they called “beaner raids” to break up migrant camps. Snipers took aim at Mexicans coming over the border. Led by a 27-year-old David Duke, the KKK set up a “border watch” in 1977 at California’s San Ysidro point of entry, finding much support among border patrol agents. Other KKK groups set up similar patrols in south Texas, placing leaflets with a printed skull and crossbones on the doorsteps of Latino residents, warning “aliens” and the federal government to fear the klan. Around this time, agents reported finding pitfall traps, modelled on the punji traps Vietnamese troops would set for US soldiers, in the swampy Tijuana estuary, an area of the border vigilantes began calling Little ’Nam.

Between 1988 and 1990, 100 migrants had been murdered in San Diego County. Hilario Castañeda, who was 22, and Matilde Macedo, 19, were walking along a back road when the teenage Kenneth Kovzelove, dressed in black, popped up from the bed of a passing pickup. “Die, die, die,” Kovzelove, who had just enlisted in the military because he believed that the US was about to go to war with Mexico, yelled, firing his semiautomatic rifle and killing Castañeda and Macedo. Both victims were legal residents, farmworkers with visas. “So you guys were out specifically looking for Mexicans to kill?” Kovzelove was asked in interrogation. “Yes, sir,” he replied.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/28/how-violent-american-vigilantes-at-the-border-led-to-trumps-wall