McClintock’s challenge loomed large in Schwarzegger’s otherwise vacuous 10-minute speech. While trying to be Reaganesque, making big promises and evoking sunny memories of California’s golden years, Schwarzenegger managed to sound more like James Brown singing “Please, Please, Please” than the breezily confident Reagan. He virtually begged undecided voters and his legion of young fans to show up at the polls for him. “If you’re Democrats, Independents or Republicans, I need your help,” he pleaded. “If you’ve never voted before, register. I need your help. Go out and vote. I need your help!”

As the speech ended, the pumped-up crowd of almost 2,000 swayed to Twisted Sister’s obnoxious butt-rock anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore,” which blared through the P.A. system three times in a row. Just whom they weren’t going to take it from anymore was left unstated as the internal Republican rift over social issues widened. Beside the stage a huge banner reading “McClintock — It’s Time to Join Arnold” was unveiled while Schwarzenegger lunged into the crowd, pressing flesh until he was whisked away to deliver a plea for party unity at a luncheon later inside the hotel.

The Republican-initiated recall, which started off as a deft stroke of electoral manipulation, has now opened old wounds within the party, which is historically divided between cultural-conservative purists and moderate pragmatists who view party unity as the only means of Republican survival in overwhelmingly Democratic California. As Schwarzenegger avoids debates and policy discussion, hoping that personality alone will guide him into the governor’s mansion, McClintock’s well-honed message of fiscal and social conservatism has resonated with the purists. And recent polls show him closing the gap on Schwarzenegger, who has been paralyzed behind the Democratic front-runner, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, since Bustamante announced his candidacy in August. Monday’s decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to delay the election not only gives Gov. Gray Davis much-needed time to raise money and rally support against the Republicans, it is also likely to embolden McClintock while Schwarzenegger will be forced into the open and exposed to attacks on everything from his private life to his shallow understanding of public policy.

The spectacle of Schwarzenegger’s well-heeled consultants left inside a fenced-off press area behind the crowd after his convention speech, delegated with the task of painting a bright picture of a darkening scenario, will probably become a common sight in days to come. When a reporter asked campaign spokesman Rob Stutzman if Schwarzenegger was scared of McClintock, Stutzman snapped: “I haven’t seen Arnold scared of anybody,” as if the upcoming Sept. 24 gubernatorial debate was going to be replaced with a dead-lift competition.

Meanwhile, the conservative politicians and party activists who crafted and propelled the recall milled around the periphery of the convention, conceding that they may have unleashed a storm they cannot harness. Some of those who planned the recall are desperately trying to salvage their scheme to topple Democrat Davis by convincing fellow true believers to withdraw support for McClintock before the recall backfires, ensuring the governorship stays in Democratic hands for generations while the already fractured Republican Party spirals into total disarray.

But nothing short of a complete erosion of support for McClintock will sway him to drop out according to his deputy campaign manager, John Stoos. Stoos is encouraged by a Sept. 9 Los Angeles Times poll showing McClintock surging to 18 percent, just seven points behind Schwarzenegger and 12 behind Bustamante. Peering over his shoulder toward the parking lot where Schwarzenegger’s strategists were parrying questions, Stoos remarked: “They have to figure out what they’re going to do with Tom [McClintock]. Arnold came into the race at 25 percent and after spending 3 to 5 million in TV ads, he’s still stuck there. They’re stalled.”

Down in the press area, Stutzman sought to spin the Times poll’s credibility by citing some numbers of his own. “We’ve conducted our own polls and we’re leading overall,” he maintained. “We’re truly very comfortable and confident with our polling.”

As was apparent in Schwarzenegger’s speech, the support of swing voters like Latinos is essential to thrust him ahead of Bustamante. His Latino-issues specialist, Juan Botero, told me that despite the central role played in the campaign by former Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican whom many Latinos loathe for his support of anti-immigrant legislation, he is counting on a huge groundswell of Latino support on Election Day. I asked Botero to sum up Schwarzenegger’s message to Latinos. “Viva Arnold,” he replied with a chuckle. After a pause, he added, “Dot-com.”

Inside the hotel lobby, a small group of Latino Schwarzenegger delegates sat around a coffee table discussing the race. Jim Lopez, a stocky, middle-aged man from rural Kern County, asserted that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, many Mexican-Americans side with conservatives on immigration issues. “My parents came in this country the right way,” Lopez said. “The Mexicans now are coming in wanting to take over this country. What do you want to become? A Third World country?” As his friends nodded in agreement, he continued with a joke: “You know why Mexico doesn’t field an Olympic team? Because anybody who can run, jump or swim is already in the U.S.”

While Schwarzenegger and McClintock are in apparent agreement on immigration, many of McClintock’s most ardent supporters at the convention were driven by their opposition to abortion and gay rights. They demonstrated little patience for Schwarzenegger’s appeals for party unity. “The first thing I look at is if a candidate’s pro-life,” remarked Bob Liepert, a 50-year-old McClintock delegate from suburban Torrance. “If any pro-lifer knew the facts about Arnold, they wouldn’t vote for him.” Earlier in the parking lot, two anti-abortion protesters carrying a huge poster of an aborted fetus that looked like a baby lathered in marinara sauce heckled Schwarzegger supporters, leaving his speech shouting, “Arnold Schwarzenegger supports the butchering of human beings!”

The likelihood that McClintock and his devoted band of zealots will wage their struggle to the bitter end worries the party insiders who manufactured the recall, and it was apparent in the grim faces they wore throughout the day. Among them at the convention was state Sen. Jim Brulte, who features on his Web site a quote by top White House advisor Karl Rove calling him the White House’s “political brains and insightful wizard in California.” In July, before the recall had qualified as a ballot measure, Brulte was accused by Democrats of wielding his power in Sacramento to stall a compromise on Davis’ budget proposal at Rove’s behest, a tactic designed to humiliate the governor and ratchet up support for the recall. During the day at the convention, Brulte was dogged by reporters about White House involvement in the recall.

“The president speaks for the White House and it’s up to the people of California to decide,” he told a small group of reporters — not exactly a denial. But Brulte displayed unusual candor when asked if he was concerned that the recall would fail for the Republicans, replying: “In the days leading up to the qualification, I was concerned that the people that began the recall didn’t plan it out carefully enough.”

By early afternoon, most of the people Brulte was referring to had gathered on the convention floor in the hotel’s dank basement. Many of them were close to arch-conservative U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, who bankrolled the recall push with $1.7 million of his personal fortune to open the door for his gubernatorial campaign. When Schwarzenegger unexpectedly declared his candidacy in August, Issa’s aspirations were crushed and he tearfully pulled out of the race. But despite this apparent back stab, according to James Lacy, a council member from Dana Point in staunchly Republican Orange County who served as treasurer during Issa’s abbreviated gubernatorial campaign, Issa “would like one of the candidates to drop out” and is willing to back Schwarzenegger in such an event.

Standing in a nearby corridor was Assembly member Ray Haynes, the minority whip whose influence over his Republican colleagues in Sacramento and stalwart cultural conservatism have cast him as California’s version of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who keeps an iron grip over the House. In March, long before the recall was known to the public, Haynes met with Issa and convinced him to fund the effort. Before going to Issa, though, Haynes sought the help of Schwarzenegger, who brushed him off. This prompted Haynes to tell online news magazine CNSNews.com: “I will be blunt: If Arnold wanted to run for governor through the recall, Arnold should have helped the recall.”

But now Haynes, who is a close friend of McClintock’s, is forced to swallow his pride and marshal support for Schwarzenegger among party activists. “Arnold will be a benign governor,” Haynes told me. “But Gray Davis is a warrior against us [conservatives]. At least Arnold will give us time to regroup.

“Tom’s a great man but I’m not sure he can do it,” Haynes added, citing McClintock’s relative shortage of funding. “Tom is convinced he can win. With that knowledge, it would be my job to convince the conservatives that they should get the governor’s office first … If Tom costs Republicans the race it will be a blow for conservatives like me that will be hard to recover from.”

Moments before Schwarzenegger’s luncheon address, a harried-looking Issa and a group of his operatives rushed past a long line of delegates waiting for the address and slipped behind a phalanx of security guards, disappearing into a backroom.

Certainly it’s possible that Monday’s appellate court decision could help the GOP. Perhaps, if the vote is delayed until March, McClintock would drop out for lack of funds, or perhaps Schwarzenegger will fade and McClintock will emerge as the most credible Republican candidate. More likely, though, the worst is yet to come for California Republicans. If the fight drags on, the GOP’s divisive factionalism will likely be compounded and agonizingly prolonged. If current opinion trends continue, anti-recall forces could close the gap; voters might simply weary of the contest. It seems that the Republicans, through their clever manipulation, have created their very own doomsday machine.

Within a month, Simcox claims, an untold number of Tombstone residents and others signed up to join his militia, called Civil Homeland Defense. Militia rules mandate that each member carry a pistol, for which a background check is required, and he or she must also wear a baseball cap emblazoned with an American flag. The group patrols along the Cochise County chaparral between Tombstone and Mexico, searching for people who look like illegal immigrants. When suspected illegals are caught, Simcox says, they are “humanely” placed under citizen’s arrest and turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol.

There are those in Tombstone who say that the 41-year-old former teacher is an eccentric, an egomaniac and a threat to the local tourism industry. While Simcox says his militia has 600 members, others here say the number is far smaller. “Chris can only get a three-man patrol going,” says Jeff, a bartender at the Crystal Bar on Main Street. “Basically, the kind of people who want to join his group can’t even pass a background check.”

However quixotic his character, Simcox is a leading figure in a loose but committed alliance of anti-immigrant forces that have turned Cochise County into a national flash point for escalating tensions over illegal immigration. The alliance includes not only local ranchers, landowners and law enforcement officials, but also former high-ranking Border Patrol agents and U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican. Quietly backing their efforts is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a controversial anti-immigration group that in the 1980s and 1990s received more than $1 million from a shadowy group accused of white-supremacist leanings.

In Cochise County alone, self-styled vigilante groups in recent years have harassed and detained hundreds, perhaps thousands, of migrants suspected of entering the country illegally. They claim they are only enforcing U.S. laws too often ignored by law enforcement officials. But human rights advocates are worried about a climate here and through much of southern Arizona that seems increasingly primed for violence.

In 2000 Miguel Angel Palafox, a 20-year-old migrant, was shot in the neck by two horsemen dressed in black who attacked him near the border town of Sasabe, about 50 miles east of Cochise County. Palafox crawled back to Mexico with a T-shirt wrapped around his wound and lived to tell the tale, though the riders remain unknown.

Last October, in the small town of Red Rock, between Tucson and Phoenix, two undocumented immigrants were found shot to death by a roadside. Manuel Ortega, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in Tucson, says the two victims were part of a group of 12 migrants resting around a pond south of the town. While most of the group slumbered, one of the migrants told the consulate staff, two masked men dressed in camouflage and armed with machine guns appeared from the woods, firing upon the group and killing the two before the others scattered. The Pinal County sheriff’s office is treating the killings as a dispute between rival people smugglers, or coyotes, but Ortega says his office has never seen a killing like that involving coyotes.

As co-director of the Tucson human rights group Derechos Humanos, attorney Isabel Garcia has campaigned to bring anti-immigrant vigilantes and brutal coyotes to justice for more than 25 years, and she sees good reason to question the focus of the sheriff’s investigation of the Red Rock murders. “It seems highly unlikely that coyotes would use camouflage clothes and highly unlikely that they would kill people who would bring in more money,” she said. “We’ve never seen that.”

No one has suggested that Simcox’s group is involved in the deadly violence. But critics say he is the embodiment of a troubling climate of intolerance and impatience that poses a vivid threat to Mexicans and other illegal migrants near the border. Local officials have condemned the vigilante activity. U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva of Tucson, a Democrat, has called for an investigation of the growing militia movement there.

But the office of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has not yet replied, and in the meantime, Simcox has grown bolder.

“I dare the president of the United States to arrest Americans who are protecting their own country,” Simcox said, in comments carried by the Washington Times earlier this year. “We will no longer tolerate the ineptness of the government in dealing with these criminals and drug dealers. It is a monumental disgrace that our government is letting the American people down, turning us into the expendable casualties of the war on terrorism.”

When White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was asked whether President Bush approved of Simcox’s militia, his response was carefully ambiguous: “The president believes that the laws of the land need to be observed and the laws need to be enforced.” Which might mean one of two things. Perhaps it was a warning that militia groups should stay within the law. Or perhaps it was an acknowledgment that federal agencies have failed at the border — and a careful way of cheering on the vigilantes.

The U.S.-Mexican War ended after two years, in 1848, costing Mexico nearly half its territory and giving the United States incredible riches that came with the land spanning from Texas to California. At many points along the border, tension between Anglos and Mexicans has simmered ever since. Some would argue that the U.S. border policy with Mexico has been dysfunctional for nearly as long.

On the one hand, the U.S. agriculture industry and other sectors of the economy rely heavily on migrant Mexican workers and offer lucrative reasons to cross the border illegally; on the other, U.S. law subjects those who are caught crossing to arrest and deportation. With such a contradictory border policy, and with enforcement stretched impossibly thin along the desert frontier ranging from Texas to the Pacific, people can interpret the law in whatever way suits their interests.

But in the expanse of Cochise County, which abuts the vast and treacherous beauty of the Sonoran desert, the failure of such policy has become vivid in the past decade.

The vigilante culture here is, in many ways, just a side effect of Operation Gatekeeper, a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service campaign that literally walled off U.S. border cities like San Diego and El Paso from Mexico. Migrants on their way north to jobs in the fields or to reunite with families were forced either to stay home or to venture into more remote, rugged terrain along the border with Arizona. Hundreds of them have been found dead over the years, having succumbed to thirst, hunger or overexposure. For many Cochise County property owners, Gatekeeper meant daily encounters with dozens of immigrants crossing their land, often leaving trash in their wake while accompanied by the ruthless and violent coyotes who were hired as their guides and safekeepers.

The resulting anger gave rise to vigilante efforts led by part-time rancher Roger Barnett — who has placed thousands of undocumented migrants under so-called citizen’s arrest — and refined by Glenn Spencer, who last year founded the high-tech militia American Border Patrol. Simcox is the latest to take up the cause, but clearly, all three men and many of their followers have taken inspiration and aid from John Tanton, a man known as the godfather of the modern anti-immigration movement.

Before founding the Federation for American Immigration Reform — better known as FAIR — in 1979, Tanton was best known for his environmental work as national director for the Sierra Club’s population committee. His belief that population growth posed a dire risk to the environment led into the realm of anti-immigration activism; in Tanton’s mind, poor immigrants reproduce at a greater rate than citizens of the United States and other Western countries who are more affluent and more highly educated. The Southern Poverty Law Center has extensively researched Tanton’s connections to the anti-immigration movement and white supremacist groups, and in an investigative report last year, the center published a Tanton quote from 1975 that still provides critical insight into his thinking. “Their [Third World] ‘huddled masses’ cast longing eyes on the apparent riches of the industrial West,” Tanton wrote then. “The developed countries lie directly in the path of a great storm.”

That same year, French novelist Jean Raspail’s racist “Camp of the Saints” was published in English, and it quickly became one of Tanton’s favorite books. Raspail’s polemic novel portrays the invasion of Europe by hordes of sex-crazed Africans, dirty Arabs, and “Hindus” who enslave white women on sex farms. Raspail urges the reader to “repulse the invasion and destroy the invader. Assuming, that is, that we are willing to murder — with or without regret — a million helpless wretches.”

Today Tanton’s publishing company, the Social Contract Press, is the sole publisher of “Camp of the Saints,” billed as “the controversial, politically incorrect novel” on its Web site. Compared with most of Tanton’s other creations, the Social Contract Press is probably the most stridently nativist. Other Tanton-founded groups like U.S. English, which mobilized opposition to bilingual education programs, and the Center for Immigration Studies, a pseudo-think tank that claims impartiality, have employed respected figureheads like former Reagan aide Linda Chavez to project a moderate, rational tone for their arguments against immigration.

When discussing immigration as a phenomenon, Tanton’s style is usually dry and pedantic. But on a few occasions, he has openly expressed his contempt. In 1988, when Tanton’s private “Council of Wise Men” memos were leaked to the press, a bitter white-nationalist philosophy cracked through the façade. “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night?” Tanton wrote. “Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva if borders aren’t controlled? … Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down.” This revelation prompted the resignations of Chavez as U.S. English’s president and Walter Cronkite from its board.

After the scandal, Tanton resigned as FAIR’s executive director and focused on developing another project, US Inc., which is essentially a financial umbrella group for his network. He remained on FAIR’s board of directors, and the group continued to court controversy. According to Form 990 returns filed with the IRS for 1988 to 1994, FAIR received nearly $1.3 million from the Pioneer Fund, which issues grants for research to prove Hitlerian notions of the biological superiority of the white race. And in 2001, Tanton-founded groups like the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, US Inc., and FAIR were granted a total of $220,000 by eccentric rightist billionaire Cordelia Scaife-May of the Scaife Family Foundation.

Tanton did not respond to a message requesting an interview. FAIR’s assistant director, David Ray, in an interview with Salon, bristled at questions about the Pioneer Fund, describing the donations as “insignificant.” He also called “insignificant” any “financial or strategic information” FAIR has provided to Simcox, Spencer and Barnett. According to Form 990 returns, FAIR and Tanton’s US Inc. donated $50,050 between 1998 and 2001 to Spencer’s American Patrol and Voices of Citizens Together (American Border Patrol’s political wings).

Were the Red Rock murders were committed by vigilantes? That’s “just speculation,” Ray replied. But don’t Simcox, Barnett and Spencer raise the risk of anti-immigrant violence when they act independent of the law to mete out justice? “The onus is simply on the federal government to regain control of the borders,” Ray said. “If they fail to do that and it goes on year after year, what we’re going to see is increasing numbers of citizens speaking out against out-of-control immigration and defending their property.”

Most days, Roger Barnett commutes from his home outside Douglas to his towing and propane companies in downtown Sierra Vista, a city between Tombstone and Douglas that is home to a large community of military retirees. In his spare time, Barnett likes to graze cattle on his 22,000-acre property just outside Douglas. He owns 7,000 acres of his land but the rest is leased from the state, a spread that puts his official rancher credentials about on par with those of President Bush and Robert Redford. With a ruddy face, husky physique, Wrangler jeans and a gravelly voice, he at least looks the part.

Almost immediately after Operation Gatekeeper started in 1995, Barnett says, he began to notice an explosion of migrants crossing his land on their way up from Mexico. The migrants left piles of trash and human excrement, he says; they frightened wildlife and cut fences on his cattle pens. In 1996, he says, he became fed up and started placing them under citizen’s arrest and turning them over to Border Patrol agents. On March 10, 1999, while the problem festered, Barnett and 20 fellow landowners signed a proclamation of revolt: “If the government refuses to provide security, then the only recourse is to provide it ourselves.” Barnett’s bold statement grabbed the media’s attention. By 2000, he had been featured on ABC’s World News Tonight, in the New York Times and elsewhere.

“I’m prepared to take a life if I have to,” he told USA Today.

Tanton was apparently among those to take notice of Barnett’s down-home appeal and his penchant for grabbing headlines. In 1999, FAIR brought Barnett to Capitol Hill for “Immigration Awareness Week” to describe his hardships to concerned members of Congress. The following year, Tanton’s US Inc. hired Barnett to spearhead its “Border Defense Coalition.” According to the September 2000 edition of the Oltman Report, by FAIR’s Western Regional Director Rick Oltman, the project consisted of hoisting freeway billboards advocating a U.S. Army deployment along the border with messages like “If this was Scottsdale [a wealthy suburb of Phoenix], the troops would be here now.” Barnett was assisted by former U.S. Border Patrol agent Bob Park, a friend of Tanton’s.

Now 61, Barnett says he says that in the past two years, he has turned almost 5,000 migrants over to Border Patrol agents. “It needs to be done,” he rumbles. “They [the Mexicans] are gonna take over our country … Do you remember what the Iraqis did with our pilots in Desert Storm? They took them hostage. It’s the same deal here.”

Since Barnett views Mexican immigrants as an invading army, it is only natural that he seeks apprehensions away from his property. In the past three years, rumors have floated around Douglas that he was randomly pulling over drivers on Highway 80 northeast of Douglas whom he profiled as Mexican. While most witnesses to the pull-overs have disappeared into the woodwork or demanded anonymity, a recent incident confirmed by the Mexican consul general in Douglas, Miguel Escobar Valdez, suggests Barnett as a possible suspect in a brutal and unprovoked attack along the highway.

On January 19, Escobar was called in to Douglas Hospital to interview Rodrigo Quiroz Acosta, a 37-year-old Mexican national hospitalized with bruises to his head and ribs. Quiroz told Escobar that he had entered the U.S. illegally, became stranded and fatigued, and ventured out to Highway 80 to search for Border Patrol agents to pick him up. Suddenly a white pickup truck barreled off the highway, nearly hitting him. Out stepped a man described by Quiroz as close to 60 years old and accompanied by a dog. The man began shouting angrily, kicking him in the head and pummeling him with a flashlight. Eventually, Quiroz was able to escape and was later apprehended by Border Patrol agents. Quiroz said his attacker was about 6 foot 3 and in his late 50s — a description that could fit Barnett. A Border Patrol supervisor told Escobar that Roger Barnett — who has a dog and drives a white pickup — had detained a group of migrants an hour beforehand in the same area where Quiroz was attacked and that he was probably the attacker.

Before Quiroz was able to press charges against Barnett, he was deported. And the rancher angrily denies the allegation by Escobar that he assaulted Quiroz. “Oh, that son of a bitch,” Barnett said of the Mexican diplomat, “… he lies out of both sides of his mouth.” Though Barnett has never been formally accused of any crime, many in Cochise County’s human rights community allege that he never will be because he is a former sheriff’s deputy and his brother, Don, is the former Cochise County sheriff. The Barnetts, they say, have forged close ties with current Sheriff Larry Dever and U.S. Border Patrol officials, giving them an air of impunity.

“These guys, the Barnetts and Larry Dever, they’re part of an old-boys’ network,” says the Rev. Robert Carney, a Roman Catholic priest who spent eight years as pastor at St. Luke’s Parish in Douglas, 30 miles east of Tombstone, before moving to a Tucson church. “They grew up together, they hang together, and they work together.”

Barnett acknowledges a friendship with Dever, but says the sheriff has backed off some for political reasons. Barnett claims to work directly with Border Patrol agents to profile and arrest illegal immigrants. When a person whom Barnett suspects is an undocumented migrant comes to retrieve a towed car at his office, he stalls them and calls Border Patrol. When agents arrive, they question the suspect, enter the name in a computer, and occasionally make an arrest.

When questioned him about the legality of the arrests in his office and the traffic stops on Highway 80, Barnett became infuriated.

“You a lawyer?” he asked with a sneer. “You’re full of shit. I can stop ‘em out on the road if I want. Didn’t you hear what Bush said? Everybody needs to be vigilant and help the homeland security. I can do whatever I want.”

Glenn Spencer was living in California’s San Fernando Valley when he founded his for-profit anti-immigration group Voices of Citizens Together. Starting in 2000, Spencer was making fact-finding trips to southern Arizona, where he met in Sierra Vista with disgruntled local residents and explained his plan to launch a militia called American Border Patrol.

But it was only last year, during a California tax-fraud investigation focused on the Voices group, that Spencer decided on a move to Sierra Vista, a town 20 minutes east of Tombstone that is an outpost of conservatism in mostly Latino Cochise County. Barnett, as the anchor in the county’s growing vigilante movement, served as a liaison to help Spencer acquaint himself with the local scene and get his border militia concept off the ground.

Today, Spencer tells people he lives at a secret location where he develops content for his three Web sites and broadcasts his syndicated AM radio show. A reporter, invited to the home on the condition that its location remain confidential, finds a prefabricated Spanish colonial model nestled in a luxury housing development. He works in a study surrounded by monitors, VCRs and computer gear; his bookshelves are filled with titles ranging from “Bordering on Chaos,” Andres Oppenheimer’s journalistic meditation on Mexico, to “The Bell Curve,” a controversial book that concluded that blacks and Latinos historically have lower IQs than whites and Asians.

A portly, silver-haired man of 65 who could blend in at a bingo tournament, Spencer fancies his group more sophisticated than the gun-toting members of Simcox’s upstart group. His American Border Patrol is guided by his pet conspiracy theory, “la Reconquista,” or “the re-conquest.” According to Spencer, the chief actors of la Reconquista include the Mexican government, the Roman Catholic Church, the Ford Foundation and “corporate globalists.” Their goal, he claims, is to exploit the freedoms of liberal democracy in order to seize control over the United States, sending waves of Mexicans to break into the country and “recolonialize” land that Mexico lost in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War.

“This gang is here to subvert our immigration laws,” Spencer booms. “They are a fifth column.”

To prove his point, he swivels around to his computer and with the click of a mouse, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo appears on the screen speaking before the National Council of La Raza in 1997. “I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and the Mexican migrant is an important part of that,” Zedillo says in halting English. To a sober viewer, Zedillo’s statement could be taken as a demonstration of his government’s solidarity with Mexicans working in the United States. For Spencer, Zedillo’s tacit advocacy for dual citizenship for Mexican-Americans is a declaration of war on American culture with a potentially apocalyptic ending.

“If we lose the United States to that cesspool of a culture,” Spencer roars, “how would you like to give 15,000 nuclear weapons to Mexico? It will be the death of this country when hot-blooded, Latin-American macho people bomb the crap out of China or whomever gets in their way — Grijalva [southern Arizona's outspoken vigilante critic in Congress] back in there with his finger on the nuclear weapon screaming, Let’s get those cucarachas!”

In contrast to his bellicose rhetoric and pronounced hostility to anything remotely to do with Mexico, Spencer maintains that his new American Border Patrol is an apolitical nonprofit group — totally separate from his American Patrol — that will make the border a safer place by monitoring illegal traffic into the United States and by “broadcasting the invasion live on the internet.”

To underscore the group’s credibility, Spencer points to the support of local law enforcement officials like his assistant director, Ron Sanders, the former Tucson sector chief for the U.S. Border Patrol. Another member of the militia’s board of directors, Bill King, is also a former U.S. Border Patrol chief for the Tucson sector. Board member Iris Lynch is the wife of a judge in Douglas. According to Barnett, federal border agents share intelligence with Spencer’s militia, but that’s a sensitive issue. Border Patrol officials in Tucson declined to comment on whether they cooperate with the local militias. Spencer, however, says Barnett’s not quite right.

“It’s not intelligence we’re sharing — it’s experience,” he explains. “As a member of our board of directors, Ron Sanders provides us with overall comments and guidance, based on his experience, as to the general direction of American Border Patrol. For example, he might say, ‘You really need more people along the less-populated areas, not just around the major population centers’ — that kind of thing.”

Spencer has announced ambitious plans to develop unmanned aircraft and special ground sensors that will “solve this border problem once and for all.” To do this, Spencer claims to need all of $30 million. Whether he can raise the money is unclear, but Spencer does say he has solicited John Tanton, who sits on American Patrol’s advisory board, as well as “various foundations.”

Spencer’s characterization of American Border Patrol as a viable solution to the border crisis is all the more unlikely after a look at his history, which demonstrates that wherever he goes, he has more success causing problems than solving them. In 1998, one man was arrested for burning a Mexican flag after Spencer gave a speech in Alabama before the avowedly white nationalist group Council of Conservative Citizens. In 2000, a member of the hard-line anti-immigrant group Sachem Quality of Life in Farmingville, N.Y., was arrested for threatening a local Latino family after Spencer gave a speech there.

And in December 2001, Spencer and a group from the California Coalition for Immigration Reform demonstrated in front of city hall in Anaheim, Calif., against the Anaheim Police Department’s newly adopted policy of accepting Mexican government-issued identification cards as proper I.D. for illegal immigrants. According to an eyewitness account in the Orange County Weekly, Spencer’s crowd was met by counter-protesters from the Communist Party and a group of Latino students who largely stayed out of the fray. Members of Spencer’s group began shouting racial epithets at the counter-protesters and ripped down a red Communist Party flag, provoking a bloody, full-scale brawl.

Recently Spencer has curtailed his speaking engagements to focus on the American Border Patrol, but he apparently still finds time to deliver his trademark brand of anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican vitriol on American Patrol’s Web site. There, he has tailored a section specifically to target liberal Latino politicians and activists. One of his favorite targets is Pima County legal defender and Derechos Humanos co-director Isabel Garcia, whom he has dubbed the “Reconquista Communista.”

When Garcia was scheduled to speak at a solidarity rally in Tucson for migrants who had died in the desert, Spencer posted directions to the rally on the American Patrol site along with an “X” to mark where Garcia was to stand during her speech. Garcia says she was notified by FBI agents that day of impending threats to her safety and attended the rally with police escort.

Asked if she fears for her life, Garcia said: “I’m not too scared. I’m scared for the unknown Juan and Juana in the desert that aren’t U.S. citizens like I am, that aren’t protected like I am. That’s who I’m scared for.”

U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Republican, represents a district 1,000 miles from the Arizona border — a Colorado district that includes Littleton, home to Columbine High School. But last February Tancredo traveled south and embarked on a four-day tour of the Arizona border. On the first day of his trip, Tancredo visited Organ Pipe National Monument, a desert wildlife sanctuary west of Cochise County where six months prior a young park ranger named Kris Eggle was shot dead while chasing suspected Mexican drug smugglers. As Tancredo has done before in press conferences on Capitol Hill, he displayed a photo of the handsome, bespectacled Eggle while pressing his case for the deployment of U.S. Army troops along the border.

Eggle is among a handful of American victims of the border chaos whom Tancredo uses to illustrate the violence and corruption that seeps in from the south. After his speech at Organ Pipe, Tancredo met with one of his favorite victims, Roger Barnett, along with a small group of Cochise landowners, to “hear their plight,” as he says. Tancredo says he “absolutely” supports Barnett’s citizen’s arrests of immigrants as well as the activities of Simcox and Spencer “to the extent that they bring about attention to the border and the invasion that is taking place there.”

In March, just days before the invasion of Iraq, Tancredo delivered a passionate address before the House of Representatives. Pointing to a photo projection of Barnett and his brother Don, who helps with apprehensions of undocumented migrants, Tancredo lauded them as “homeland heroes fighting a war on their private property.”

Neither Tancredo nor his staff notified Grijalva, the Tucson Democrat, of the pending trip, a clear breach of congressional manners. “Other than some important protocol being violated,” Grijalva told Salon, “if [Tancredo] is coming in here to further increase the crisis, to fuel the fire that is simmering here, I would make sure to point out to him that if anything would happen, he would be directly responsible for creating the situation.”

Grijalva calls the border “a complex problem that can only be explained with rational discussion.” Tancredo, however, seems to have little patience for nuance. For example, many local officials say his plan to deploy troops on the border could have costly consequences in towns like Douglas, where economies are based largely on the assembly of parts produced in Mexico’s maquiladora factories. Tancredo’s response? “The economic effect is not really my concern,” he says. “My sole concern is securing our national borders.”

Tancredo’s district would suffer no such consequences, so there would be little political fallout at home. This has given him the freedom to develop a gung-ho platform of anti-immigration legislation that energizes grassroots and white-collar activists alike. At the mention of Tancredo’s name, Chris Simcox leaps from his chair and yelps: “That’s my leader! I’d vote for him for president tomorrow!”

Tancredo also enjoys star status among the white-collar anti-immigrationists of Tanton’s network who have courted his support, donating $5,000 to his 2002 campaign through FAIR’s U.S. Immigration Reform PAC and thousands more in personal donations. Leaders in Tanton’s network have long sought a foothold on Capitol Hill and, through Tancredo, it appears their hopes have been realized.

The close working relationship between the Tanton network and Tancredo is most apparent on the Web site for the congressman’s Immigration Reform Caucus. When Salon interviewed Tancredo earlier this year, the Web site contained links to FAIR, NumbersUSA, CIS and virtually every other Tanton creation. It also contained a link to VDare, a white nationalist Web site run by British writer Peter Brimelow that is named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born in the New World. When asked about the link, Tancredo was befuddled and indignant.

“If we are connected to VDare, and I don’t think we are,” says Tancredo, “then I will take action … I do not want the support of these kinds of people and I do not need their support.” After the interview, the links had mysteriously moved from the Web site’s front page and were buried to next an essay Tancredo wrote called “Showing Immigrants Respect.”

“If he doesn’t know who he’s in bed with, he needs to sit up and turn the light on,” says Kat Rodriguez, coordinating organizer for Derechos Humanos in Tucson. “I personally hold him accountable for giving these groups added credibility and helping to promote them.”

According to Devin Burghart of the Center for New Community, an Illinois-based watchdog group that monitors hate organizations, John Tanton has lent his support to Simcox, Spencer and Barnett in part as a smokescreen to distract from nagging accusations of white nationalism stemming from his memos and involvement with the Pioneer Fund.

“The militia movement in Cochise County signals not only a success for Tanton’s group in that it has changed the political climate there,” Burghart says. “It has also has provided Tanton and his ilk some much needed diversion, so attention is directed on Cochise County instead of the state capitol where they are introducing all kinds of anti-immigrant legislation.”

The local reaction to the controversy is clearly mixed. In many quarters, there is public apathy and official foot-dragging. “The death in Red Rock and the lack of investigation and the lack of clarity to it is what we’re seeing across the board,” says Jennifer Allen, co-director of the Border Action Network, a relatively new, informal watchdog group. “None of the law-enforcement agencies are stepping up.”

But a number of public officials, led by Grijalva, have begun to mobilize in recent months. In his first act as a congressman, Grijalva sent letters to Ashcroft and U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton requesting an investigation into Cochise County’s vigilante groups. “The number of groups involved is growing and the safety of our citizens is diminishing,” he wrote to Charlton. “Investigation will establish the ties these groups have to other hate movements across the country.”

Well over three months later, neither Ashcroft nor Charlton has replied. “I don’t think the rise of vigilantes would be tolerated in any other part of the country,” Grijalva told Salon. “Unless there is something done, one would have to surmise that there are some inherent sympathies. Sometimes the support they [the vigilantes] get is the silence people have about them.”

Some local leaders in Cochise County have joined Grijalva and the Border Action Network in voicing opposition to vigilantism. The Cochise County Board of Supervisors, in concert with Tombstone Mayor Dusty Escapule and Douglas Mayor Ray Borane, passed resolutions condemning vigilantism and the creation of anti-immigrant militias.

“This town’s Hispanic,” says Borane, referring to Douglas. “One of the reasons my administration’s working to keep them [vigilantes] out of Douglas is it would take one little teeny spark to ignite somebody who might want to take one of them on themselves and we might have an ethnic battle.”

Despite the looming danger suggested by Borane and others, all sides agree that as long as the federal government remains silent and continues along the path of Operation Gatekeeper, the vigilante movement in Cochise County will not go away. With the Bush administration sharpening its domestic focus to include the “war on terror” and the economy on the brink of recession, their is power apparently growing.

And Simcox is doing what he can to mainstream the movement. He fields requests graciously, with a boyish charm and a practiced cosmopolitanism that belie the paranoid image of someone who claims to pack a pistol and wear a bulletproof vest everywhere he goes. Journalists from as far away as Germany have sought him out in Tombstone. He has barnstormed from coast to coast to speak on behalf of local anti-immigration groups and boldly challenged the federal government to try to stop him. Apparently, people are listening.

“If we’re attacked again,” Simcox says, invoking the memory of Sept. 11, “you are going to see citizens defend their borders in a patriotic way and you are going to see people get shot on that border.”

[Salon editorial fellow Mark Follman contributed to this report.]

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Stanley serves as pastor at Atlanta’s First Baptist Church, a 15,000-member congregation, and is the founder of In Touch Ministries, which claims to broadcast his sermons in 14 languages to every country in the world, and which, according to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has $40 million in assets. Since Stanley founded In Touch in 1974, he has not shied from using his ministry’s resources to bring his voice to bear in the political arena. His most recent example of activism came in February when he delivered a sermon titled “A Nation At War,” placing him among a minority of mostly Evangelical Christian leaders to endorse Bush’s plans for an attack on Iraq.

“The government is ordained by God with the right to promote good and restrain evil,” Stanley said in his sermon. “This includes wickedness that exists within the nation, as well as any wicked persons or countries that threaten foreign nations … Therefore, a government has biblical grounds to go to war in the nation’s defense or to liberate others in the world who are enslaved.” And sampling from a scattershot of biblical passages to inform his argument, Stanley warned that those who oppose or disobey the U.S. government in its drive to war “will receive condemnation upon themselves.”

Though Stanley’s bellicose sermon targets an American audience, it was almost certainly heard across the Arab world, as his sermons are translated into Arabic by In Touch and beamed from Benghazi, Libya, to Tehran, Iran, each week by satellite TV and radio. But while Saddam maintained his iron grip, In Touch could broadcast to Iraq only by shortwave radio; now that the regime has fallen, the ministry could be presented with a bevy of opportunities. The opportunity for broadcast expansion in postwar Iraq is “phenomenal,” says Don Black, vice president of communications at In Touch. “It would be one of our goals to be able to have a platform to tell the truth as we understand it, as any communicator should have the right to do.”

Even before victory has been formally declared, In Touch is just one phalanx in an army of Christian soldiers who see Muslim Iraq as an extraordinary new marketplace for their theology. Already, churches and ministries on the religious right are poised to send in missionaries and to amp up broadcasts to the region. Like advance troops before the invasion, some U.S. military officials in Iraq have already staked out the country as a natural place to spread the Christian Gospel.

Officially, the Bush administration has taken no position on the campaign for converts. But foreign policy experts — and even some moderate Christian groups — are already warning that efforts by the conservative Christians to capitalize on the fall of Saddam could inject a decidedly religious tone into Bush’s stated plan to democratize Iraq. And unless the administration takes a strong stand against that campaign, some say, the missionaries may provoke a deep, damaging backlash there and throughout the Muslim world.

Christian groups’ proselytizing in Third World countries is nothing new, but critics of In Touch allege that the ultrapatriotic nature of Stanley’s sermons render its plans to expand operations in Iraq dangerous and insensitive to the country’s complex and fragile social fabric. Many Muslims worldwide have accused the U.S. of waging a “crusade” and consider the prospect of Christians proselytizing in Iraq a revelation of the U.S.’s nefarious agenda. In the past, anti-Islamic comments made by Southern Baptists allied with Stanley, like Jerry Falwell, have stoked the rage of the Muslim world and made life dangerous for Middle Eastern Christians and Western missionaries operating in the area. But Stanley and his compatriots remain fiercely committed to winning the souls of the Iraqi people, even if it undermines the work undertaken by U.S. troops and civilian administrators to win their hearts and minds.

According to Amy Hawthorne, Middle East specialist and associate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Southern Baptists planning to proselytize in Iraq should expect to be greeted with exceptional suspicion, not only because of the presence of American troops but also because of the country’s history. “These people [Southern Baptists] are active in other parts of the region, including southern Lebanon, a heavily Shiite area, so it’s not without precedent,” she told Salon. “But Iraq is a country that’s been sealed off from the rest of the world, and even to an extent from its own region, for a long time. So these are not communities that are used to having lots of foreigners amongst them … This is a very sensitive issue throughout the Arab world, but the context of Iraq may be more sensitive because this is not a country with a long history of internal tolerance and pluralism.”

Charles Kimball, a Baptist minister and director of religious studies at Wake Forest University, is more blunt: Stanley and other luminaries of the religious right who wrap God in an American flag are “whipping up a kind of Christian nationalism,” he says, and that could severely complicate America’s credibility there and in the Muslim world at large.

“Anything that prominent Christian leaders do and say that gets a lot of press attention and says ‘America’s right’ and ‘God is on our side’ or ‘Islam is evil’ is not lost on the world,” says Kimball, author of “When Religion Becomes Evil.” “All of these folks (on the religious right) in their certainty and arrogance are doing considerable harm by what they are preaching. They have to realize that these words reverberate around the world and are being used by Muslim extremists to whip up a frenzy.”

Kimball also accuses Stanley of insensitivity to the 14 million to 16 million Christians who live in the Middle East. “He’s saying, ‘If you don’t want to go to war, God will punish you, and by the way, God wants us to go to war,’” states Kimball. “If I were sitting face-to-face with Charles Stanley, I’d say: ‘You’re saying the exact opposite of what the vast majority of Christians in the world are saying. Where is your certainty coming from?’”

What Kimball calls Stanley’s brand of Christian nationalism was on vivid display in an In Touch prayer pamphlet titled “A Christian’s Duty,” which features a list of daily prayers for U.S. troops serving in Iraq and for President Bush and his advisors. Framed in luminous shades of red, white and blue, the pamphlet includes a tear-off prayer pledge that can be mailed to the president. According to Black, In Touch Ministries has distributed 850,000 of the pamphlets across the U.S. and could exceed the 1 million mark very soon. Of course, during wartime it is common for religious leaders to ask their congregations to pray for their leaders to act wisely and for the safety of their troops. But some of the daily prayers in “A Christian’s Duty” are exceptional. For instance, one reads: “Pray that the President and his advisors will be strong and courageous to do what is right regardless of critics.”

Specifically, Black claims, the pamphlet is referring to people like the journalist Peter Arnett, who was fired in midwar by NBC for telling Iraqi media sources that the U.S.’s military strategy had failed. “There’s always naysayers and every decision is countered with a criticism,” says Black. “Many people in the profession of journalism have positioned themselves as naysayers and I use Peter Arnett as an example … But the plan has moved forward and [the military has] stayed with what they felt was right and that’s an example of how that prayer would be applied.”

“A Christian’s Duty” made a splash recently when the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported that it had turned up by the thousands among U.S. Marines in Iraq. Because the ABC cited an anonymous embedded reporter, the report is almost impossible to confirm. Black denied that In Touch sent the pamphlets directly, hypothesizing that an individual member might have delivered them without In Touch’s knowledge. Centcom spokesman Col. Keith Oliver of the Marines said he is not familiar with the prayer guide, but added that he’s “not surprised at all that civilian ministries in the United States would be providing materials to our troops … It’s just as much a part of life on bases overseas as it is back in the towns and cities of America. But it’s curious to me that anyone would be alarmed. The Bible’s pretty clear about asking us to pray for our leaders.”

Oliver’s remarkable statement may be emblematic of a Christian zeal that has some support among troops in Iraq. One chaplain who may have taken In Touch’s pamphlet to heart is Josh Llano, a self-described Southern Baptist serving in the Army. An April 4 article in the Miami Herald reports that Llano has been offering baths at Camp Bushmaster in Iraq to soldiers who haven’t bathed in weeks — on the condition that he be allowed to baptize them. Like Stanley, Llano quotes from the Bible to justify war, telling the Herald that “we are called upon by our government to fight and that is giving to Caesar, as the Bible tells us.”

Whether or not In Touch sent “A Christian’s Duty” directly to Marines in Iraq, the content of the pamphlet is in keeping with Stanley’s long history of intertwining religion with politics, which at times has left him embroiled in controversy. As an original board member of Jerry Falwell’s political action group, Moral Majority, Stanley helped lobby against the Equal Rights Amendment, homosexual rights, abortion and the U.S.-Soviet SALT treaties. In 1986, a speech he made in San Francisco stirred up outrage when he said of homosexuality: “AIDS is God indicating his displeasure and his attitude toward that form of lifestyle, which we in this country are about to accept.”

Stanley backed President George Bush I in his failed 1992 reelection bid. Bush, an Episcopalian and a social moderate compared to his born-again Christian son, was polling badly among religious conservatives during the Republican primaries. So when the Georgia primary rolled around in February, Stanley invited Bush to services at First Baptist Church, and in a carefully tailored speech, Bush told the whooping crowd: “We believe America’s first so long as we put family first.” Bush’s appearance at First Baptist marked a turning point in his campaign; he swept the South, decisively crushing the insurgent candidacy of arch-conservative Patrick Buchanan.

Stanley’s activity in the political arena also includes the seat he held on the board of the Religious Roundtable, a pantheon of the religious right that assessed the Christian credentials of Republican primary candidates during the 1996 campaign. And he has joined Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as a board member of the National Religious Broadcasters Association, a lobbying powerhouse that backed Bush II’s 2000 campaign and gave him a forum to push his war plans at its annual conference in February 2003. Still, until reports surfaced of In Touch’s prayer pamphlets in Iraq, he has been content to hang in the background while Falwell, Robertson and Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, make headlines.

Graham recently caused a flash on the media radar when he announced that members of his humanitarian mission, Samaritan’s Purse, and the Southern Baptist Convention are poised to enter Iraq after the war to offer aid in the name of Jesus Christ. At In Touch Ministries, Black was skeptical about the plan. In Touch certainly wouldn’t rule out helping if the need is there, he said, but the ministry’s ultimate calling is to provide “the Truth” by cassette tapes, radio and TV.

Nevertheless, an open avenue into the Arab world is as crucial to In Touch as it is to Samaritan’s Purse. On its Web site, In Touch refers to the Middle East as the “10/40 Window … a 10-by-40 degree area north of the equator [which] houses the majority of the world’s people who have not heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ in their language. These people … are in desperate need of the Truth.” Stanley’s weekly sermons are beamed across the “10/40 Window” via satellite TV and shortwave radio by Middle East TV (METV), an American-owned Evangelical broadcast network. According to METV’s Web site, its mission is “bringing the Gospel message of hope and peace to the troubled Middle East.” Along with Stanley’s weekly “In Touch” show, METV offers a mixed fare of evangelical programming, American sports, and reruns of “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Gilligan’s Island” — all accompanied by Arabic subtitles. Since satellite dishes will probably become legal and popular in postwar Iraq, Stanley and METV’s audience there seems likely to grow.

When METV was founded in 1982 by an evangelical minister, Lester Sumrall, it started by operating out of a van in Israeli-occupied Southern Lebanon with the sanction of the Israeli government. It is now owned by LeSEA (Lester Sumrall Evangelistic Association), the Sumrall family’s umbrella group, which includes a humanitarian mission and a tourism agency that, according to its Web site, works in tandem with Israel’s Tourism Ministry. When Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon in 1999, METV was forced to relocate to Cyprus.

Charles Kimball was in Israel and Lebanon to do interfaith work with the Mid East Council of Churches when METV started broadcasting evangelical programs like Pat Robertson’s “The 700 Club” in the area. Kimball recalls that Christians from Lebanon and the Galilee region of Northern Israel bristled at Robertson’s enthusiasm for the activities of the right-wing Christian Phalangist militia and the Israeli Defense Forces in Lebanon’s bloody civil war. And he says that METV’s broadcasts inflamed tensions between Lebanon’s indigenous Christians and their Muslim countrymen, who became suspicious that their Christian neighbors might have actually agreed with Robertson’s anti-Islamic vitriol.

“The problem begins with outsiders like In Touch, Pat Robertson and METV coming in and ignoring the indigenous Christian community as if they don’t exist, thinking they’re the only people who have the message, and broadcasting whatever they want without realizing there are consequences for the people who actually live there,” says Kimball.

Black, in an interview, seemed uninformed about Iraq’s vibrant Christian community, comparing its fate to that of Christians in the Soviet Union who were forced to worship underground. Though it is beyond debate that ethnic minorities have suffered and faced brutal persecution under Saddam, Archbishop Djirbrael Kassab, leader of Basra’s Chaldean Christian community, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in October 2002 that U.N. sanctions and constant U.S. and British bombing have contributed as much to the hardship and gradual exodus of Iraq’s Christians as any of Saddam’s repressive moves. In fact, Saddam’s vice president, Tariq Aziz, is a Christian and 740,000 Iraqi Christians still maintain their ancient congregations, some of which date back to the days of the Apostles.

Kimball claims that the “Christian Nationalism” of prominent Southern Baptist ministers has not only offended the Middle East’s indigenous Christian culture; in its most extreme form, it has infuriated Muslims and provoked violent interethnic conflict. As an example, he points to Jerry Falwell’s remark in an October 2002 interview with “60 Minutes” that Muhammad is a terrorist. The remark prompted riots and clashes between Muslims and Hindus in India and Kashmir that left five dead and many injured.

The announcement by Franklin Graham and Southern Baptist Convention president Jack Graham of plans to proselytize in postwar Iraq have predictably deepened the hostility of the Muslim world to America’s invasion of Iraq. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Graham called Islam “a violent and wicked religion”; the Islamic Web site Khilafah.com characterized Graham’s plans as “enhancing the conviction among some Arabs and Muslims that the U.S.-led war of aggression on Iraq is part of a new ‘crusade campaign.’” Khilafah.com has followed by issuing a downloadable prayer pamphlet called “Destroy the Fourth Crusader War,” which reads like the antithesis of In Touch’s “A Christian’s Duty,” urging readers to pray against Bush and take up jihad against the U.S. and Britain.

Despite Graham’s announcement and the potential for a violent confrontation because of it, the Bush administration has yet to repudiate his remarks. Graham delivered the invocation at Bush’s inauguration and according to a spokesman from the Pentagon chaplain’s office, who declined to identify himself, Graham will attend Good Friday services at the Pentagon on April 18. So it is safe to say the Bush administration will not interfere with Graham and the Southern Baptist Convention’s controversial plans, and neither, apparently, will retired Gen. Jay Garner, who will lead the future Iraqi government as head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid (ORHA). Garner declined Salon’s request for an interview. When asked whether the administration would discourage or allow campaigns such as those planned by Graham and Stanley, his spokesman, Capt. Nathan Jones, said: “This is an issue for a future Iraqi government to decide.”

Sarah Eltantawi, director of communications for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, calls Graham’s presence at a Pentagon function a “provocation” to the Muslim world. And as such, the Pentagon’s evasive attitude is cause for concern. “Whether we like it or not, these people [evangelical proselytizers] are seen as representing the American government and people,” Eltantawi says. “So for the Pentagon to avoid the issue, it deflects from what the consequences are for us and our national security.”

Ironically, some of the fiercest criticism of the Southern Baptist Convention’s ministers has come from members of their own congregation who are concerned about the safety of missionaries already in the Muslim world. A January 2003 letter from a group of missionaries working through the Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board in 10 predominately Muslim countries released to the Biblical Recorder, a Baptist news journal, expresses grave concern that the anti-Islamic rhetoric of Graham, Falwell and other ministers is being broadcast widely through the Muslim world.

“These types of comments have and can further the already heightened animosity toward Christians, more so toward Evangelicals, and even more so toward Baptists,” the letter says. “We are not sure if you are aware of the ramifications that comments that malign Islam and Muhammad have not only on the message of the gospel but also on the lives of our families as we are living in the midst of already tense times.”

One example of the heightened danger faced by this group of missionaries came last December, when three members of the Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board were murdered by Islamic militants in Yemen. They had operated a hospital in the country for 35 years but had begun receiving hostile threats after Yemen joined the U.S. war on terror, allowing American military advisors to train its military in counterterror operations and sanctioning the CIA assassination of a suspected al-Qaida leader on its soil. Jack Graham, the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention, called the missionaries’ killings “a stark reminder that the war on terrorism is very real,” adding, “This is a war between Christians and the forces of evil, by whatever name they choose to use. The ultimate terrorist is Satan.”

Now that the Southern Baptist Convention is focusing on Iraq, incidents like the murders in Yemen should give Stanley, Falwell and Franklin Graham pause. But judging from the comments of Jack Graham, the “Truth” is on its way to Iraq, whether in pamphlets, boxes of food, or television signals. Given the state of anarchy that has erupted in Iraq, there is a growing sense that proselytizing there is becoming more dangerous by the day. The chaos was initially described as “jubilant” by reporters, but signs of nascent ethnic violence suggest the tune could be changing. The mob-butchering on April 9 in Najaf of two rival clerics, one a Sunni from Saddam’s regime and one a pro-Western Shiite, during a meeting arranged to take place at a holy shrine by U.S. Special Forces certainly points in that direction. The U.S. hoped the meeting would foster reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis but, like its involvement in Lebanon, it turned out to be a naive miscalculation.

In a worst-case scenario, the U.S. occupation of Iraq could resemble Lebanon’s civil war, in which the dissolution of a government allowed various ethnic groups and opportunistic outsiders to act out their long-standing rivalries. Centcom’s Col. Oliver was among Marines deployed to Lebanon in 1983 by President Reagan with the aim of restoring order to the country. As in the current war on Iraq, Oliver served as a spokesman for the Marines, eloquently explaining their noble intentions for Lebanon. Tragically, the Marines were sent packing by an Islamic radical with a fire in his heart and a truckful of deadly explosives. Oliver appears in Thomas Friedman’s book “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” standing around the rubble of the Marine barracks where 241 U.S. servicemen lost their lives. “You know,” he remarks in disbelief, “these people just aren’t playin’ with the same sheet of music.”

During the Lebanon conflict, Oliver says the Marines worked “hand-in-glove” with Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network while he broadcast his overtly pro-American, pro-Israel sermons throughout the country. Despite the Marines’ fate there and the reports of Islamic militants filtering into Iraq to wage jihad against what they view as a new “crusade,” the Bush administration has not visibly discouraged ministers like Stanley and Graham from repeating Robertson’s actions. With its credibility at stake, an American-led interim government looks likely to dig in in Iraq for a long and delicate occupation of Arab land with a group of Southern Baptist evangelicals by its side. And a battle of biblical proportions may be just beginning.

Like so many of the others, the woman whose body was found in late October had probably come to Juarez from the poverty of southern Mexico to work for about $10 a day in one of the many foreign-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras that sprouted up in Juarez after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994. And like them, too, her body was unclaimed in death and buried alone and anonymous.

Such death has become a way of life here. So, too, with the fear and paranoia that rise in such a climate. Nobody knows who is doing the killings, and the mystery only seems to deepen. Arrests made by local authorities have produced allegations of torture, witness tampering and frame-ups — but no convictions. Most here believe that the killer or killers must have enormous clout. Perhaps, some say, the killers are narcotrafficantes disposing of witnesses. Perhaps they are the sons of the wealthy and powerful indulging in sick sex. Perhaps they are cultists whose members come from the highest levels of government and finance. The theories differ, but a common assumption is that arrests made thus far are only a smokescreen for an historically opaque and corrupt government that will protect its dark secrets at any cost.

One thing seems clear: The murders arise from a social landscape that has been transformed by global economic forces. Where Ciudad Juarez was once a small, sleepy desert outpost just across the border from El Paso, Texas, the population in the past decade has exploded to 1.2 million people, many of them drawn by the lure of the maquiladoras. The tides of people have overwhelmed the ability of the city to absorb them, overwhelmed health services, social services and law enforcement. Free-trade advocates once promised that NAFTA would transform Juarez into the City of the Future — and they have been proven right in a way they never could have imagined. Today, Juarez still has the feel of the lawless Old West, but with a grim 21st century edge.

Despite promises of swift justice from Mexican President Vicente Fox and Chihuahua Gov. Patricio Martinez, they have yet to take up offers of assistance from the FBI; bureau agents in Texas have suggested that official corruption is hindering efforts to stop the murders. Chihuahua state investigators have seemingly adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards Juarez’s homicides, fostering an atmosphere of impunity and pervasive fear. Foreign corporations operating in Juarez that have employed many of the murdered women largely deny that such an atmosphere exists.

But in this postmodern urban culture, where the very concept of community has broken down, many bereaved family members and local activists have begun to take matters into their own hands, investigating the murders and speaking out even if it means threats and other reprisals.

Evangeline Arce’s daughter, Silvia, a street vendor, disappeared on Nov. 3, 1998. Since that day, she said, the authorities have done little to investigate. “Two days after my daughter disappeared, I went to the police and filed a report,” the mother says in Spanish, her face flaring with anger. “They promised me prompt action but when I checked back a week later, the missing persons report was never filed and the investigation had not even begun. When they finally got witnesses together, none of them would talk because they were too afraid.”

Even as Mexico continues to make strides toward becoming an open and democratic society, the epidemic of rape and murder here has exposed the heavy residue of its corrupt and authoritarian political legacy as well as the contradictions of its efforts at economic expansion.

To understand the magnitude of the breakdown, think of the sniper rampage in the Washington area this fall that left 10 people dead and three wounded. Imagine that Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose held a press conference and asked local citizens to catch the sniper themselves because local police were not up to the task and the federal government was not being helpful; imagine that the federal government charged that local officials in Montgomery County were complicit in the killings and impeding the investigation. Chaos would ensue, certainly. But then, multiply the number of victims by 30, by 40, by 50, or more.

That’s Juarez today.

The jumbled, exhaust-choked commercial core of this city has grown wildly in the wake of NAFTA, adding modern shopping malls, condominiums and expansive boulevards. The population is growing at twice the rate of the national average; it is expected to nearly double by 2010, to 2 million people. Many of them directly or indirectly rely on the 300 or so maquiladoras for their livelihoods.

To accommodate the new army of workers, the city has given birth to entirely new sectors. The Campestre Juarez is a luxurious conglomerate of gated communities, with a main gate that’s a life-size replica of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. Nearby, many of the maquiladoras are situated along the Avenida de la Industria. Though the assembly-line workers sometimes can be glimpsed behind a plate glass window in aqua-blue uniforms, there usually is little sign of any activity behind the maquiladoras’ featureless walls.

Most of the new residents are poor, or on the brink of poverty, and they live in Anapra or another of the grim, violent colonias populares on the outskirts of town. In those colonias, residents usually live without sanitation, running water, electricity or paved roads.

Avenida Manuel Gomez Morin is the pothole-riddled six-lane avenue that ties these varied worlds together. Sitio Colosio Valle, a medium-sized strip mall, stands on a corner of the avenue at the gateway to the industrial sector. It is fronted by a vast parking lot and inside are various clothing outlets and boutiques. By day, the lot bustles as customers scurry back and forth, hauling their purchases to their cars — a sight similar to any mall in the suburban United States. By night, however, traffic tapers off, stores lock up and the mall’s lot becomes dark and desolate. Sitio Colosio Valle was where many of the slain and missing women were last seen.

In the mall’s parking lot, Braulio Rosas, a 40-year-old security guard, leans against the door of a giant Nike outlet. Inside the store, under bright fluorescent lights, employees frantically check inventory and scramble to close up.

“A lot of girls were picked up here,” Rosas says in a voice of calm resignation. “But really, it’s the girls’ fault. It’s because even though they weren’t putas, [prostitutes] you know, they were more like faciles [easy women]. They didn’t have to get into those cars if they didn’t want to.”

Rosas sounds cynical, but blaming the victims is by no means an aberration in Juarez. Similar notions have been offered by officials like Suly Ponce, the former Chihuahua special prosecutor in charge of the murdered women’s cases. “Sometimes there are cases that a girl meets some person, he strikes up a relationship with her, they drink … and it ends violently,” she told the Washington Post in 2000, before she was promoted to a job in the governor’s office. “It’s difficult to know.”

A handful of the women found murdered since 1993 were indeed confirmed as prostitutes. But the truth is that a large majority of the missing or murdered women were hardworking, young, poor and for the most part socially conservative. Most had migrated to Juarez from Mexico’s depressed south to work in the maquiladoras , sometimes arriving alone and with little means of contacting their families back home.

The maquiladoras , run by companies like Delphi and RCA Thomson, prefer to hire young women for assembly-line jobs. An entry-level assembly-line worker makes minimum wage, about $2 an hour. With experience, pay can rise to as much as $2.50 an hour — and compared to wages in Guerrero or Chiapas, that’s good money. But in Juarez, the women are caught in an economic trap: Since the cost of living here is only slighter lower than in El Paso, the wages that seem so high to new maquiladora workers actually ensure poverty. The workers can be hired and fired on the spot, with little pretext and no legal protection. And union activities are prohibited.

Even for those who accept the conditions, security is elusive. More often now, the global companies that own maquiladoras are closing up shop and transferring operations to China to take advantage of lower taxes, investment subsidies and outrageously cheap labor. On June 29, Royal Philips Electronics announced it was moving its P.C. monitor manufacturing operations, at a cost of 900 jobs. On July 1, Scientific Atlanta fired 1,300 workers after shutting its plant down. According to the Nov. 5 New York Times, this trend has cost Juarez 287,000 jobs in the maquiladoras since their peak in October 2000.

Not only does this slash and burn the economic base. There are brutal social reverberations, too. The city’s health system, Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, has reported 200,000 people falling from its list of insured after losing their company policies, according to a July article in La Prensa. Esther Chavez Cano, director of Juarez’s only battered-women’s shelter, Casa Amiga, said in a speech this summer that domestic violence cases had risen by 50 percent in July alone.

The combination of poverty and a lack of social connections renders women on the assembly line powerless and virtually invisible. And that has made them easy prey. According to the El Paso Times, about a third of the approximately 325 slain women were employed by maquiladoras at the time of their murder.

Given that few of the maquiladoras provide shuttle service to and from the colonias, the female workers often are preyed upon while walking through perilous places like Sitio Colosio Valle in the darkness of the early morning. At such an hour, the only nearby activity is that of bars and nightclubs closing up as male patrons filter into the street after a long night of drinking.

Besides China’s attractive economic climate, an intangible cause of maquiladora flight is Juarez’s chronic violence. The effect is difficult to measure. Two companies in the city’s industrial sector — including TDK, the audio tape maker — have posted banners on their factories reading: “STOP THE VIOLENCE. To Better Our City, Let’s Unite.” But most foreign companies are purely economic organisms governed entirely, it seems, by the dictates of efficiency. They have maintained a stunning silence even as their female workers are slaughtered.

Consider the case of 17-year-old Claudia Ivette Gonzalez. Her body was found in November 2001 along with seven others in an overgrown cotton field on Avenida Technologico, just blocks from Sitio Colosio Valle mall and across the street from the offices of the Association of Maquiladoras. She had worked on the assembly line for the Lear Corp., a Detroit-based auto-interior supplier. Lear has declined to publicly address Gonzalez’s murder.

Greg Bloom, editor of the Frontera Norte Sur — an Internet news service that focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border — recalled a conversation with Gonzalez’s mother, Josefina, in which she recounted her daughter’s last day. In the darkness of the early morning, Gonzalez told him, Claudia set out for her job at Lear. When she arrived at work a few minutes late after missing her bus, Claudia Ivette was promptly sent away under a policy barring tardy assembly-line workers from their shifts. A half-hour past when she usually would have returned home, her mother knew something was gravely wrong. Her worst fear — the same nagging fear shared by so many Juarez mothers — would soon be realized.

Andrea Puchalsky, Lear’s director of communications, acknowledged that the company has not made any public statements regarding Gonzalez’s murder, nor has it enacted any proactive measures to protect employees from another wave of violence. “Adding security is not a question that relates to Lear,” she said. “[Gonzalez's murder] did not happen on Lear property.”

When questioned about the murder and Lear policies, Puchalsky mentioned that a company memo was prepared for her with responses to possible questions. As to Lear’s worker-lockout policy, which apparently put Gonzalez in a precarious situation the day of her abduction, Puchalsky declined to comment on whether Gonzalez was locked out or sent home from Lear’s plant on her last day.

“We have a policy for tardiness and she was tardy many times,” Puchalsky said. “When she had arrived late to work her shift, she was not there in time to work her shift.”

When asked whether Lear’s offices in the U.S. have a similar policy in which late employees are barred from working their shifts, Puchalsky reversed her earlier statement, vehemently denying that such a policy existed anywhere within Lear’s operations. “There is not a policy to send a worker home after X number of tardy arrivals,” she said. “Typically what we do is if there is someone arriving late on kind of a warning system, there might be a notification that ‘the next time you arrive late, you have to take a day off …’ It’s not a policy, though. There is no written policy like that throughout Lear Corp.”

The body of 17-year-old Lilia Alejandra Garcia was found mutilated just 300 feet from her maquiladora in February 2001, and since then her case has come to embody the incompetence and corruption of police and prosecutors from Ciudad Juarez to the state capital in Chihuahua City and south all the way to Mexico City.

Garcia, the mother of a 5-month-old baby and a 2-year-old child, apparently was kidnapped just after she left work. She was held in captivity for a week, repeatedly beaten and raped, and then strangled. Then-prosecutor Suly Ponce told the Juarez newspaper El Diario that Garcia was the first woman of the year to be murdered and raped in this area of the city — even though two days before, the body of an unidentified woman was found naked just blocks away.

When an FBI leak revealed witness testimony linking Lilia Garcia’s killers to drug dealers, Suly Ponce dismissed it, calling it erroneous. She instead blamed workers in a circus across the street from the strip mall where Garcia was last seen. When circus managers claimed that Ponce offered them money to blame co-workers, she dropped the investigation.

According to a July article in the El Paso Times, former Chihuahua state forensic chief Oscar Maynez Grijalva said Garcia was killed in a similar manner as three of the eight women found in the cotton field with Claudia Ivette Gonzalez in November 2001. Curiously, local authorities behaved just as evasively in that investigation as in Garcia’s.

When Gonzalez and the seven other women’s bodies were found in November 2001, ex-Chihuahua Attorney General Arturo Gonzalez Rascon immediately fingered two local bus drivers as the culprits. Yet doubts about their guilt arose, especially after Grijalva — who was Rascon’s evidence expert at the time — resigned from his post, citing pressure to fabricate evidence against them. And the head of a local prison was forced from office when he documented signs of torture on the accused men after they had returned from Rascon’s office.

Four months later, in February 2002, a search-and-rescue team combing the cotton field found Claudia Ivette Gonzalez’s overalls in a plastic bag, along with strands of hair and other crucial pieces of evidence that Rascon’s investigators had failed to discover. In response, Rascon offered his opinion to the El Paso Times: “The state police have done a thoroughly professional job. I have no doubt about that.” But on Oct. 28, DNA results revealed that Rascon’s investigators had properly identified only one of the eight dead women — Gonzalez.

Stuck with a far more dubious task than catching one madman or replacing one feeble leader, Juarez’s fractured civil society has been paralyzed. A cynical mood is palpable just by speaking to citizens on the street, who unanimously express fear and distrust of law-enforcement and government officials. Some local cops are just as cynical.

“We can’t just sit around in deserted places waiting for someone to drive up and dump bodies off,” said one municipal police officer seated in an idling paddy wagon who refused to give his name for security reasons. “There are too few of us and the city’s too big … We don’t get much support from the federal government. Judicially, we are not protected like cops in the U.S. Plus, the arms they give us are weak and the bulletproof vests don’t really stop bullets. It’s not just that, though. I have a young woman in my home so I can put myself in the place of the parents who have lost their daughters. But it’s a question of society. We need their support and they need them to be more conscious if it is going to get any better here.”

The scope of the crime is so enormous, and there has been so little success in stopping it, that suspicion breeds on itself. The litany of theories as to who the killers are and what their motive might be suggests that Juarez has become a breeding ground for every imaginable predator. And yet, nobody knows. Nothing is certain. And that feeds the climate of paranoia.

Garcia and Gonzalez’s murders are rumored to be the work of a serial killer with possible ties to drug dealers. Yet Garcia was found with marks on her wrists that, according to local forensics experts, were identical to those made by police handcuffs. And upon the discovery of her daughter’s overalls, Josefina Gonzalez told the El Paso Times that someone powerful was undoubtedly responsible for the murder.

Many in Mexico’s law enforcement community agree that a ring of rich men are behind some of the killings, but they have no evidence to support the theory. Some suggest that some young men from the local aristocracy are responsible, but are being protected by their parents. A persistent theory holds that the murders — or a significant subset of them — are linked to powerful narcotraficantes who have co-opted segments of the local ruling class.

And the cynicism has been exacerbated by the fact that of the 17 men and one woman accused as serial killer masterminds of the murders, only one has been convicted, Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, an Egyptian chemist and resident of Texas at the time of his extradition to Mexico in 1995. Currently, Sharif is awaiting sentencing for allegedly paying a drug trafficker named Victor Manuel Rivera Moreno to carry out about a dozen murders. However, evidence against Sharif is suspect and charges against him have been changed repeatedly. Once he was even charged with killing a woman, Elizabeth Ontiveros, who showed up later at police offices to prove she was alive.

In 1996, Sharif was accused of paying the gang Los Rebeldes to kill 17 women. Then, in 1999, he was charged with hiring five bus drivers and an El Paso man from his jail cell to kill seven women. Officials claimed Sharif hired the killers to deflect blame from himself. By 1999, judges had cleared him of all charges, citing an absence of concrete evidence and the possibility of witness intimidation by prosecutors.

Suly Ponce, who supervised the case, has yet to make a compelling case against him. In a 1999 radio interview, rather than presenting hard evidence, she claimed Sharif was aggressively hostile toward women because of his Egyptian background. Now she says that the case against Sharif hinges on Moreno’s declaration that Sharif paid him to carry out the killings with money he earned from 13 patents he developed for Benchmark Research and Technology. But according to an article in the El Paso Times, Benchmark has never paid employees for patent development. In a telephone interview last week with Salon, Ponce said she hadn’t known this. Angela Palaveras, the current special prosecutor, declined to discuss Sharif’s case or any aspect of the investigations.

Many local residents scoff at the notion that the killers have been caught. “We don’t believe that the guys they have arrested are the killers,” says Miguel Angel Jaramillo, a mid-level manager for the Lear Corp. “It’s obvious that they’re just scapegoats.”

Yet Ponce remains ardent in her belief that Sharif is at the center of the murders. “Today the killings continue because there are many imitators,” she told Salon last week. “But after Sharif was caught, there were almost no homicides for a year.” But according to the Juarez daily El Diario, the year immediately after Sharif was jailed — a period spanning from October 1995 to October 1996 — 28 young women were found murdered.

Meanwhile, the theories flourish and become more and more paranoid, reflecting a breakdown in public trust. By one popular theory, the women are being murdered at blood rituals for a cabal of wealthy, powerful men. Another theory posits a financial motive for murder. “We’re finding a lot of girls that are mutilated in the same way,” says a young municipal police officer who declined to give his name. “Someone’s probably killing them to take their organs to sell them for a lot of money in the U.S.” When asked if there was any evidence to support the theory, the officer replied that it was only a hunch.

Such a climate sends a message to the killers every day: You can get away with anything, even a crime on this scale. But where such a climate breeds cynicism and hopelessness among people who live and work here, it has also provoked an incipient revolt.

On her radio show “Grueso Calibre” (“Large Caliber”), popular host Samira Izaguirre frequently aired the views of guests who were critical of how authorities handled the murders. When Attorney General Rascon accused the two bus drivers of the cotton field murders in November 2001, Izaguirre hosted the drivers’ wives on her show. After that interview, advertisements began appearing in local newspapers smearing Izaguirre with claims that she frequented strip clubs and was romantically involved with one of the bus drivers. News media on both sides of the border have reported that the receipt for the ad was signed by government officials who paid for it.

Then, in February, when Izaguirre started organizing a vigil and announced a hunger strike on her show on Radio Canon, she was fired. Fearing for her safety, she moved across the border to El Paso.

Others, too, have discovered that pressing the complaint too forcefully brings reprisal. Marisela Ortiz, co-director of Nuestras Hijas Regreso a Casa (Our Daughters Back Home), a legal support group for victims’ parents, was a frequent guest on “Grueso Calibre.” Like Izaguirre, Ortiz has focused her resources on drawing attention to government and police incompetence in the slain women’s cases. And she says that, like Izaguirre, she has faced ever-increasing danger.

In Nuestras Hijas’ office in central Juarez, located inside a small one-story row house with a “For Rent” sign out front, Ortiz described the shadow of terror that has stalked her since she began pressuring the authorities.

She claims she was threatened by ex-Chihuahua District Attorney Arturo Gonzalez Rascon. “Rascon came all the way to Juarez [from Chihuahua City] to tell me not to involve myself in all the cases,” she tells Salon. “Then I got a message on my phone saying: ‘You have daughters that are alive. Take care of them.’” Rascon, in an earlier story by the Associated Press, denied the allegation.

Last May, Ortiz says, she was pursued by men in a black pickup truck who tried to kidnap her. She believes the attempt was orchestrated by Rascon’s office since it occurred only a day before she had planned to travel to El Paso for a meeting with the FBI and Texas state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, who is calling for a bi-national investigation into the murders.

Victims’ parents who came to Nuestras Hijas for help in finding their missing daughters also say they have been threatened. Mario Lee Lopez and his wife, Soledad Aguilar, lost their daughter, Cecilia Covarrubias. She was kidnapped in 1995 along with their granddaughter, who was two months old. By now their granddaughter would be 7, and Lopez and Aguilar’s own investigation has led them to believe that she is alive and living in the custody of a well-connected local family.

To an outsider it is a desperate story, all but impossible to prove. Lopez accuses Ponce of coordinating the coverup of the kidnappings and murder; again, Ponce denies the charge. And she was adamant that government officials have harassed no one. “I didn’t have any knowledge of threats against anybody,” she said. “On the contrary, we support the families and they are encouraged to be intimately involved in the investigations.”

Lopez recalls an incident in which he had gone to Juarez’s judicial building to press his granddaughter’s case and did not exactly find the kind of support Ponce mentioned. While leaving the court, Lopez says, he was confronted by a high-ranking minister who warned that if he didn’t drop the investigation, he would be tortured with electric shock devices.

“But it’s too late to stop now,” Lopez adds with a wistful smile.

Despite the campaign against Izaguirre, or perhaps because of it, the vigil took place as scheduled in March. It was an unprecedented show of solidarity, with thousands of people gathered in the cotton field where Gonzalez and the seven others were found in an irrigation ditch. There are still tatters of yellow police tape there, and candleholders left from the vigil are strewn over the site. Eight red crosses mark the spot where the bodies were found.

However, city officials have no plans to memorialize the site as Juarez’s residents have. In fact, according to a Sept. 4 article in El Diario, the site is now being used as a dumping ground for Juarez’s Department of Parks and Gardens.

Near downtown Juarez there is a monument to Abraham Lincoln, honoring him for “establishing North American industries, today the most important in the world.” Not far away is a simple gallery where the Collectiva Antigona [Antigone Collective], a group of local artists, has organized a series of public performances, installations and conferences focused on Juarez’s crisis of violence.

Each week, the artists gather to collaborate and discuss strategy. At a table with 12 other artists and writers, in an expansive room filled with cubist-inspired paintings, Antonio Munoz Ortega, a 51-year-old writer, describes the Collectiva’s goals and the problems confronting the group. “Our government is authoritarian, and authoritarian governments are principally concerned with the manipulation of life,” he says. “The victims’ families feel manipulated by the authorities’ insensitivity and this has manifested a greater and greater cynicism here that’s really dangerous. The struggle, then, is for reparation and simply regaining our daily lives.”

Ortega says he was moved to action by Samira Izaguirre’s candlelight vigil in March. He describes the building of an impromptu church in front of the Association of Maquiladoras office as an effort to “communicate through a different language, one that’s symbolic.” This decision, he says, helped lead to the formation of the Collectiva.

The rallying cry for Collectiva Antigona, as evidenced by the name, has been Sophocles’ Greek tragedy, “Antigone,” which tells the tale of a girl’s persecution at the hands of a cruel dictator for burying her brother. The Collectiva has organized readings of the play around the state of Chihuahua and plans a public performance in the future.

The Collectiva also has begun to establish a visual presence around central Juarez, most noticeably by painting a wall spanning an entire block with poetry written by participants in a recent writer’s conference on violence against women. On Nov. 1 and 2, the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos, the collective filled a room with traditional altars honoring the victims along with a giant cross in the center of the room covered with masks, intended to symbolize the anonymity of the victims. An estimated 1,500 people viewed the exhibit. A week later, working with Nuestras Hijas, the collective placed a coffin and flowers and had a bonfire in the cotton field ditch where Claudia Ivette Gonzalez and seven others were found.

“It is absolutely necessary to affect civil society with the intention of shaking the indolence and to provoke some sort of reaction from the people,” says Mariela Paniagua, a 41-year-old painter. “People are no longer affected by what is happening in this city. They have lost the capacity for outrage in the face of these acts.”

While Collectiva Antigona meets, another group gathers a few miles away to combat Juarez’s violence by drastically different means. Past the seemingly endless rows of cardboard hovels in the desperately poor Colonia Morelos, beyond the municipal dump, on a rocky desert mesa in the shadow of Mount Indio, members of a search-and-rescue group called Banda Civil spread out through the hills to search for more murder victims.

Luz Elena Guerrero Guerra, a strong-looking woman in her late 50s with an intense gaze, serves as president of one of Banda Civil’s six divisions. Guerra tells of how it began as a search-and-rescue group in 1985 to assist during a massive earthquake in Mexico City and evolved to respond to Juarez’s crisis. She herself found the first slain women’s bodies in 1989, before investigators had even identified the deadly trend. Today, Banda Civil’s members still lend their help during natural disasters but the bulk of their work comes in the search for bodies, monitoring of schools and a citywide crime-awareness campaign.

Ever-present terror, coupled with the impotence of Juarez’s authorities, forced Banda Civil’s transformation, Guerra says. “I’ve narrowly escaped violence many times,” she explains. “Sometimes it is just pure luck that a bus or a taxi happens to come by in time when someone is chasing me … All of us, we’re uncertain of what the authorities are telling us. That’s our indignation. If they [the authorities] aren’t interested in helping, we’ll pressure them.”

Because the group is required by law to cooperate with police, some view it with suspicion. Yet they have had success where most other activist groups have failed. It was Banda Civil members who made the crucial discovery of Claudia Ivette Gonzalez’s overalls in February, humiliating Attorney General Rascon and breathing new life into the investigation. And Banda Civil has continued to find more evidence during their weekly searches of Juarez’s human dumping grounds.

Besides its role as a search-and-rescue/quasi-vigilante group, Banda Civil has the feel of a support group, providing members with an outlet from the daily fear that comes with life in Juarez. According to Guerra, over 300 people have accompanied the group on searches and many of them are family members of missing women. And indeed, the searches are a family activity.

On one recent Saturday, the search was joined by about 60 participants of all ages and from all sectors of Juarez society, including a middle manager from the Lear Corp. There were no terrible discoveries that day, and yet afterward, as people stood around talked and listened to norteño music blaring from a car stereo, it was evident just how deeply the murders are ingrained into life here — and how some people are fighting back with whatever tools they have at hand. Perhaps the quiet optimism is derived from the age-old Mexican axiom that death brings about rebirth.

“Instead of spending our time criticizing the authorities, we’re trying to find some solutions,” says Santos. “We all have sisters and daughters here and we all feel the same. My daughter is in danger. I can’t let her live like this.”