An America for Brisenia Flores

In the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, many have focused on the death of nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green.  Born on 9/11 and killed by the random violence of a madman, Green has become a martyr for optimistic bipartisanship.  “I want us to live up to her expectations,” President Barack Obama told the mourners in Tucson.  “I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.”

Obama cautioned us against blaming the shootings on political invective.  We cannot, he said, connect the gunman to an organized racist right movement intent on death and destruction.  And he’s right.

To see how the racist right movement has resulted in such violence, we have to turn to the death of another nine-year-old girl.  Brisenia Flores was shot and killed during a home invasion in Arivaca, Arizona, just two years ago.

In court last week, Flores’s mother—also shot, and left for dead—described the horrific home invasion that ended her daughter’s life.  Two people dressed as law enforcement officers forced their way in; one said “Don’t take this personally, but this bullet has your name on it,” and then shot Flores’s father in the chest.  Brisenia Flores begged the killers not to shoot her. They promised not to hurt her, but shot her in the face anyway, at point-blank range.

Prosecutors say former Minutemen member Shawna Forde orchestrated the killings, with the help of Aryan Nations affiliate Jason Bush.  If they’re right, the organized racist right caused Flores’s death.  This rapidly growing movement is increasingly focused on the border.  There are 80 percent more anti-immigrant hate groups than there were last year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Flores lived an hour southwest of Tucson, near the most frequently crossed part of the border, the place where militarization has forced its traffic. It has become the front lines of American vigilantism, the place where groups like the Minutemen patrol. Arizona neo-Nazi J.T. Ready has made his name with strident anti-immigrant rhetoric.  Ex-Minutemen member Forde started the even more extreme Militiamen American Defense (MAD). Bush was a member of MAD, and also had connections with racist right establishment Aryan Nations.

Flores’s murder was far from an isolated incident:  the Arizona border has been a hotbed of racist right activity since the early 1970s.  These crimes, all of them motivated by the same racist violence that defined the Flores murder, have come to define the workings of the racist right nationwide.

Today’s Minutemen owe their strategy to the Klan Border Patrol, begun in 1974 by such racist right icons as David Duke and Louis Beam, neither of whom have ever been convicted of racist violence.  In 1986, the mercenary group Civilian Materiel Assistance led an armed patrol over the border near Nogales, Arizona that went more than two miles into Mexico and illegally held sixteen men, women, and children at gunpoint for ninety minutes; the victims were summarily deported, and none of the vigilantes stood trial.

Tucson also produced infamous racist right terrorists Gary Lee Yarborough.  After involvement in the prison gang Aryan Brotherhood, he joined assassination, counterfeiting, and armed robbery paramilitary group The Order, which attempted to wage war on the federal government in the mid-1980s.  While Yarborough was convicted, the leaders of that war on the state were all acquitted of seditious conspiracy in 1988, in one of the great failures of the American judicial system.

Racist right violence is a nexus of several social factors:  a burgeoning prison population that produces racist gangs, mainstream hate rhetoric about undocumented immigration, and the availability of guns and weapons like the modified AK-47 found in the Flores home following the shooting.

Throughout the history of the racist right movement, its violence and domestic terrorism has rarely been checked by criminal charges.  We can only hope that a jury does better for Bresenia Flores.  In the meantime, as we consider the America that Green imagined, let us also reflect on the America that Flores deserved.

Flores’s murder could generate a conversation about finally disbanding racist hate groups.  But it hasn’t.  Compared to the nationwide mourning for Green, the press has hardly whispered of Flores.  Perhaps this has to do with the remoteness of Arivaca, or the absence of a high-profile target.  Or perhaps it’s her Spanish surname.