Almost a full week since local Arizona media and progressive and pro-migrant bloggers began covering the horrific story of Brisenia Flores and her minuteman killers, the story is finally catching the eye of the mainstream media. Turns out the point-blank murder of a little nine-year-old-girl by anti-immigration extremists is newsworthy, after all.
CNN’s Rick Sanchez reports on the extremism that led to Brisenia’s death today:
RICK SANCHEZ: Let’s talk about this. Things are not always as they seem, right? And I want to illustrate this now with a picture of a beautiful little girl- there she is. Her name is Brisenia Flores- take a close look, because it may be the only way that you’ll be able to see this little girl. […] Let me tell you who Shawn Forde is. She’s the executive director of a group that’s called Minuteman American Defense. Police say that Forde planned the killing of the little girl and her father to steal drugs and money, and make it look like it was the work of a drug cartel. The nation’s largest Minutemen group has distanced itself from Ford, we should say, and we’ve learned that within Minutemen circles, she is considered a bit of a loose cannon. But you do have to wonder and you do have to ask, how did Shawna Forde- let’s go ahead and get rid of the president’s picture there if we can- how- pardon us- how did Shawna Forde, a supposed fringe element, turn up on PBS as a player in the anti-immigration movement? This is a story that we’re going to continue to watch for you. We’ll tell you what we find. what we find.
Took them long enough.
Meanwhile bloggers have been busy exposing the links between Forde and allegedly “mainstream” anti-immigration organizations and spokespeople (who are now in overdrive attempting to delete any mention of her from their websites).
Talking Points Memo’s Zachary Roth reports, in “Accused Far-Right Killer Has Bizarre, Troubled Past:”
At a 2006 PBS-sponsored forum at which she claimed to be both a member of the Minutemen and a representative of the supposedly more mainstream anti-immigration group FAIR, Forde railed against immigrants and declared: “We will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.”
Dave Neiwert, a blogger at Crooks and Liars, posts the 911 recording of the sole survivor of the deadly attack and makes this argument about the minutemen, in “Some ‘neighborhood watch’: Forde’s Minuteman spinoff outfit was about ‘starting a revolution against the government’“:
The problem, as always, is its inherent vigilantism:
The reality-based picture of the Minutemen that’s emerging is not of a friendly “neighborhood watch” for the border, but of a chaotic collection of hatemongers who seem intent on a kind of populist mob rule fueled by angry paranoia. It becomes a cover not for law and order, but for the ugliest kind of brutal authoritarianism.