The Minutemen promised their supporters a high-tech border barrier. Instead, they got a five-strand barbed-wire fence and a bunch of radical splinter groups.
David Neiwert | September 22, 2008
Jim Campbell was a contractor before he became an Arizona retiree, so he happens to know a little about getting construction projects completed. He also happens to be avidly involved in efforts to stem what he and thousands of others see as an unholy tide of illegal immigrants streaming over the U.S.?Mexico border. So when the Minutemen--those "citizen watchdogs" who have been setting up vigilante border patrols throughout the Southwest--announced plans to build a fence along a section of the Arizona-Mexico border, it seemed to Campbell like a good time to step up and make a difference.
A couple of years later and $100,000 lighter, Campbell's not so sure it was a good idea. In fact, he calls the people running the Minutemen's border-fence project "a bunch of felons."
When he first contacted the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC)--the most prominent of the two major Minutemen organizations and the sponsors of the fence project--in early May 2006, he was enthusiastic about his vision: "miles and miles of steel!" Campbell offered to donate $100,000 immediately so the Minutemen could buy steel posts--the first step in building an "Israeli style" security fence--and install them in time for the groundbreaking ceremony. He took out a loan on his home and wired the money to the MCDC's parent organization, the Washington, D.C.?based Declaration Alliance. Campbell was told his was the largest single donation out of the thousands that were pouring in for the fence project.
But when Campbell attended the MCDC's big groundbreaking event a few weeks later, the five-strand barbed-wire fence being erected by volunteers was a far cry from what he thought he had funded. After a flurry of negotiations with the MCDC's president, Chris Simcox, Campbell agreed to spend another $63,000 of his own money on steel posts for a "serious" fence at another site--believing the MCDC would later repay him.
A year later, with nothing more to show for his money either in fence construction or reimbursement, he filed a lawsuit for $1.2 million seeking reimbursement and damages. In a letter to his lawyer, he observes that his donation "will have been squandered in a seemingly well-intentioned but short-lived ?monument to deceit' on the border. It is clear to me now that this fence project was conceived as a grand facade--a scheme--to attract endless streams of donations from the public who placed blind faith (as I did) in both the sincerity and trustworthiness of its promoters."
Welcome to the world of the Minutemen, where all-American values provide a nice storefront for a financial black hole that vacuums up hundreds of thousands of donors' dollars. The group fits into a long tradition of right-wing political organizing that runs from the resurrected Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s to the tax-protest movement of the 1980s and the militias of the 1990s. In the end, these efforts are mostly scams: They serve up a heady concoction of jingoistic fervor, bigoted xenophobia, and paranoid conspiracy theories as a means to salve all that ails the patriotic soul--but largely they have the mysterious effect of separating their fellow right-wingers from their money. And as these groups dissolve into scandal and infighting, they leave far more radical splinter groups in their wake.
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