[TUCSON, Ariz. —This state has become a symbol…]

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TUCSON, Ariz. —This state has become a symbol of hatred, intolerance, bigotry, and violence—especially after the signing of the Arizona Senate Bill SB 1070 last April, which in effect authorized racial profiling. That law is now going through a lengthy process of court challenges and appeals. And harsh new laws are being prepared by the Arizona legislature—such as the denial of birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants The immigrant rights movement continues to organize and build. But the fightback against SB 1070 (and against other anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican laws and initiatives in Arizona) has not become sufficiently powerful. It is not yet supported by a big enough mass base, nor by a mobilized union movement. Most unions declined to back the boycott against SB 1070. And after the midterm elections of November 2010 it seemed as though the racist forces had been strengthened.

With the shootings in Tucson in January 2011, one wonders: Has the governmentpromoted atmosphere of hatred, violence, and dehumanization—directed mainly against Mexicans and generally against people of color—now boomeranged?

On Jan. 8, Jared Lee Loughner, a mentally unbalanced white 22-year-old from a lower middle-class suburb of Tucson killed six people and wounded at least 13 in a deliberate assassination attempt aimed at a white politician, U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a pro-corporate “Blue Dog” Democrat recently reelected to the House of Representatives. Giffords was at a shopping mall to meet with constituents, and the assassin brazenly ran up and opened fire—with a Glock 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with a high-capacity magazine holding more than 30 bullets.

Reports have attributed to Loughner highly irrational reasons for his attack on Giffords. Allegedly he was dissatisfied with her answer to a vague question about language, which he had asked her at an earlier such event when she met with constituents. But surely he saw the many, inflammatory anti-Giffords signs that Tea Party types had posted by the roadsides in the Tucson metro area where he lived.

He could hardly have been unaware of the threatening tone of Tea Party candidate Jesse Kelly, who ran against Giffords in last fall’s election campaign. Kelly, a former Marine who served in Iraq, promoted a campaign event on his web site this way: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”

Last summer Tea Party supporters demonstrated in large numbers at the office of Congressman Raúl Grijalva, who had called for a boycott of Arizona to protest SB 1070. Grijalva received death threats, and gunshots were fired at one of his offices. And the website of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin showed crosshairs targeting the Giffords electoral district. Palin also sent out an e-mail message: “Don’t Retreat—reload!”

Perhaps only on a subliminal level, Loughner must have known there was a widespread attitude of violent opposition to Giffords, a virulent atmosphere suggesting drastic measures against her. But in the background, without necessarily being aware of it, the assassin reflected in his actions the widespread messages of hatred and intolerance that have been encouraged by the U.S. federal and Arizona state governments for decades.

At the time that NAFTA was pushed through by the Clinton administration in 1993-94, backed fully by both Democrats and Republicans, the federal government began its deliberate policy of border militarization. That policy reinforced the general idea that the solution to problems is to take up the gun, use force and violence, i.e., bring in the military. One result, in the late 1990s, was the murder by U.S. Marines in Texas of a teenage Mexican American U.S. citizen, a totally innocent young man tending goats on his family’s land near the border.

The U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan carry the same message—if there’s a problem, shoot! Or send in 20,000 Marines, as was done in response to last year’s earthquake in Haiti. In April 2010 the top official of the U.S. government, Barack Obama, declared it was all right for the government to assassinate U.S. citizens. What Martin Luther King, Jr., said in 1967, is truer than ever: the U.S. government is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Isabel Garcia, a leader of the immigrant rights movement in southern Arizona as co-chair of the Derechos Humanos Coalition, pointed out that the assassination attempt and the killing of six people were directly related to the policy of border militarization: “These senseless deaths are the result of a border policy that has been building since 1994. This policy has propelled the growth of fear, hate, and violence. Over 5000 migrant deaths, shootings, and continuing violence are a direct result of this policy.”

At a press conference on Jan. 10, two days after the shootings, Isabel Garcia also stressed that Arizona had become “an incubator of hate and violence,” especially with the state legislature “promoting an atmosphere of intolerance and cruelty.”

The government’s border militarization policy took the form of blocking off traditional crossing routes for migrants from Mexico, through populated urban areas in California and Texas, with “Operation Gatekeeper” being implemented in San Diego and a similar military-style operation in El Paso. As a result, migrants were intentionally funneled into the inhospitable and dangerous desert regions of Arizona, more than half of all border-crossers now taking the Arizona route. As Isabel Garcia stated, since 1994, more than 5000 of these migrants have died in the desert, from dehydration and exposure to the blazing sun.

These migrants are essentially “NAFTA refugees.” An estimated 6 million peasant farmers in Mexico, growers of maíz, have been driven off the land, unable to compete against U.S. government-subsidized corporate agribusiness, which under NAFTA was allowed to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn. The ruined farmers, along with numerous unemployed or drastically underpaid Mexican workers, are forced to seek their livelihood wherever they can, and large numbers attempt to migrate north to the U.S. in search of jobs.

But the U.S. government dehumanizes these miAP (Above) Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. (Below) Jared Lee Loughner.

grants, labels them “illegal aliens,” and the huge number of unnecessary and preventable deaths among them is virtually ignored by officialdom and the corporate press. Meanwhile, the public in Arizona and elsewhere is made callous and hardened, inured to the ongoing cruelty. And many are frightened by the stream of impoverished migrants coming through the Arizona desert, don’t understand how and why they have been driven to make this desperate journey, and have no compassion for them.

The government policy of ICE raids—including a major raid in Tucson involving hundreds of federal agents and local police right around the time that SB 1070 was adopted—also suggests to the public that extreme and inhumane measures are necessary. A similar dehumanizing message, though less highly publicized, is enacted every workday in Tucson, as “Operation Streamline” processes 70 or more detained migrants each day, with chains on their legs, a parody of legal action, and then turns them over to a privatized prison-for-profit outfit, the Corrections Corporation of America.

On top of that, since the 1990s many migrants, but also Mexican Americans and American Indians who live near the border, have been killed with impunity, mainly by Border Patrol agents—most recently a 17-year-old youth in Nogales, Sonora, killed on Jan. 6, 2011, by the Border Patrol. The young man had scaled the 10-foot border fence, but there he met his death.

Two years ago, in May 2009, self-appointed vigilantes, inspired by hatred of Mexicans and wearing uniforms to give the impression that their actions were officially approved, invaded the home of a Mexican American family near the border south of Tucson. The family members were U.S. citizens living in the small town of Arivaca in full legality. The vigilantes killed the father of the family and his nine-year-old daughter, and wounded the mother.

No great outpouring of grief or outrage greeted that action. There was no visit by a U.S. president to southern Arizona to protest the killings. The corporate-owned media and the capitalist Establishment actually look with tolerance, even with favor, on the vigilante types, the so-called Minutemen and others, and encourage the hysteria and hatred voiced by these racists, who include self-proclaimed Nazis and “white power” advocates. The corporate bosses are happy to divide and conquer by encouraging racial antagonism by one section of the population against another.

Rather than denouncing and opposing the racist policies of the state legislature in Arizona, Obama & Co. act in a similarly harsh anti-immigrant manner. The White House website brags that nearly 400,000 “illegal aliens” were deported in 2010, hailing that as an unprecedented achievement.

Obama even boasted that “we now have more boots on the ground on our Southwest border than ever before in our history.” Obama’s actions spoke louder (continued on page 11, in “Arizona’s long history of racism and violence T southern Arizona became part of the United States under”)

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12 Socialist Action FEBRuary 2011 Two years ago, self-appointed vigilantes invaded the home of a Mexican-American family and killed the father and his nine-year-old daughter. No great outpouring of grief greeted that action.