Governor Brewer of Arizona keeps being defended as a person who is willing to be forthright, speak the truth, defend her state, and in no way be biased or use stereotypes. But, as I have pointed out before, Latinos are worried about what she (and others) say because we see them as not only re-building old stereotypes, but also as justifying the setting aside of civil rights for certain categories of people for the sake of public security. Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesotta said of Arizona that they should do, “…whatever they have to do to keep their people safe.” The drumbeat that justifies the violation of civil rights in the name of security has been historically kept up by the citing of false facts. Unfortunately, Gov. Brewer has chosen this path over the last several months. Just last Sunday on interviews she said, “Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried of just lying out there that have been beheaded . . .”
But here is what the newspaper the Arizona Guardian (among several others) wrote:
But officials with six county medical examiners offices in the state, including four from counties that border Mexico, say they have never heard of such attacks.
The Arizona Guardian contacted the coroners’ offices in Yuma, Pima, Pinal, Maricopa, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties. All of them said they’d never investigated an immigration-related crime in which someone’s head had been head cut off.
Plenty of immigrants have died after entering the country illegally, officials with the medical examiners offices said. Some died for lack of water crossing the Arizona desert. Others were killed in violent confrontations with drug cartels that smuggle narcotics and humans.
Their statements are significant because their offices would have investigated and known about any violent deaths.
Janice Fields, who works for a private company that acts as the corner’s office for Cochise County, said police have brought in two human skulls found in the desert during the past four years.
But none of them, Fields said, were the result of a beheading. Investigators identified one of the victims as a U.S. citizen, she said. The other human head remains unidentified.
Governor Brewer, as pointed out in a previous post also claimed that illegal immigrants were being used as drug mules. In fact, she also claimed that 87% of illegal border crossers had prior criminal records. But, that figure was also debunked in the same article (and others).
Federal immigration authorities were unable to confirm the statistic and Brewer’s administration could not cite where they got the number.
Farther into the show the following exchange took place:
Brewer appeared on Channel 12’s “Sunday Square Off” last weekend. During the show, Brewer said people in Arizona were living in fear. She said that in some cases parents were scared to send their children to school.
I am sure that there are some very frightened people in Arizona. Most of them are Latinos and people who look like Latinos. As I commented earlier, one of the classic historical techniques to justify the violation of civil rights is to scare the populace enough to allow the passage of restrictive laws or to allow the police to begin the unequal enforcement of laws. Gov. Brewer is following this classic pattern. But, Latinos, like African-Americans, also remember what the other eventual result is of ginning up the fear. Eventually the violence begins. Eventually comes kristallnacht. Eventually it is justified to take 110,000 Japanese-Americans into War Relocation Camps for the sake of security. As a side note, in 2007 the United States Census Bureau formally admitted that it helped the federal government by providing racial information to ensure that no one was missed, so that for the sake of security, even the “assured” neutrality of the Census Bureau was compromised. Eventually has come more than once in this country. That is what Latinos (and Arabs and African-Americans) fear. We fear the return of “eventually.”
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