Top Minuteman Group Announces Breakup (North American Minuteman Border Legionaries, aka NAMBLA)

[Ian David]

Top Minuteman Group Announces Breakup
By Sonia Scherr

One of the most prominent nativist extremist groups in the nation disbanded this spring, five turbulent years after its birth at a highly publicized civilian border watch in Arizona.

The breakup of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), the biggest of several groups whose volunteers have conducted armed border patrols in recent years, is the latest sign of trouble within the faltering Minuteman movement. In a March 22 E-mail to supporters, then-MCDC President Carmen Mercer said the group's board had decided to dissolve MCDC in part because it did not want to take legal responsibility for the actions of its fired-up volunteers. Though the group will no longer exist as a corporation, she said that individual MCDC chapters may continue to operate and urged supporters to carry on the group's work independently. "I predict Americans, on their own, will lock, load and do what the feckless cowards in Washington refuse to do — and frankly I hope Americans do take up arms to defend this great nation," she wrote in an "urgent alert."

Indeed, an April 5 E-mail from Mercer asserted that "the death of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps is greatly exaggerated." The message named several Minuteman station and regional leaders who plan to carry on the group's mission and to set up a national umbrella group with a website.

MCDC is an offshoot of the Minuteman Project, a month-long volunteer border patrol operation held in spring 2005 that brought hundreds of anti-immigration activists to the U.S.-Mexico border, along with a few neo-Nazis from the National Alliance. During a March 2005 news conference with Mexican President Vicente Fox, then-President George W. Bush called the Minutemen "vigilantes" and said he favored "enforcing the law in a rational way." But by then a movement had taken hold; other Minuteman groups and imitators emerged from the original Minuteman Project, now a California-based organization run by founder Jim Gilchrist. Many of the Minuteman volunteers who monitor the border also subscribe to the "Aztlan" or "reconquista" conspiracy theory that the Mexican government is trying to reconquer the American Southwest by encouraging illegal immigration (and possibly ultimately resorting to force of arms).



More:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/summer/lock-and-unload