The unsolved murders this April of two undocumented immigrants near Eloy, Ariz., coupled with four remarkably similar 2007 killings in the same area, have again raised the specter of a possible campaign by U.S. vigilantes to murder Latino border crossers. One recently retired police detective warns of “a lot of angry, militant white men on the border sitting like hunters waiting for these people to come across.”
The Feb. 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin inflamed extremists of many stripes, as groups on both sides of the racial divide threatened armed protests and radical black separatist leaders suggested vigilante justice for the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot the unarmed 17-year-old in Sanford, Fla.
The murderous attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin this past Sunday by neo-Nazi skinhead Wade Michael Page was just the latest in a series of terrorist incidents and plots by the radical right in recent months and years. It comes in the midst of explosive growth on the radical right – growth fueled by America’s increasing diversity, its economic problems and the election of the nation’s first black president.
