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COCHISE COUNTY, Ariz. — Crouching low, Ronald Morales and his 11-year-old daughter moved quietly and quickly, hoping to escape detection. Stealth was vital as they crept around the boulders and scrub brush that clutter the Sonora desert just north of the Mexican border.
It was Oct. 30, 2004. Morales, a 37-year-old Department of Defense employee, was deer hunting with his father, Arturo, and three little girls: his daughter, Vanese, who was then 11, her little sister Angelique, 9, and Emma English, a friend who was also 11. All were Mexican-Americans — U.S. citizens since birth.
The way Ron Morales tells the story, around 4 p.m. he and his eldest daughter left the rest of the party at his truck to stalk a buck they had spotted.
Vanese had the deer in her crosshairs when the sound of a distant ruckus in the direction of the truck alarmed her father. Morales took the rifle, slung it
over his shoulder, and they hurried back.
They arrived to find another truck parked near their own. Next to it, Morales says, an angry white man with a pistol strapped to his side paced back and forth, shouting obscenities. "You're fucking trespassing! You guys need to get the fuck out of here!"
"I have a hunter's permit, I have a map," Morales protested as he walked to his vehicle, set down his rifle, grabbed a Bureau of Land Management map, and tried to reason with the man.
Morales, a Navy veteran, says he addressed him as "sir" and asked his name.
The man reached in the cab of his truck, yanked out an AR-15 assault rifle, and gave Morales his answer.
"My fucking name is Roger Barnett! If you don't get off my property, I'm gonna shoot you and shoot you and shoot you!"
Then, Morales says, Barnett chambered a round and pointed his weapon at Morales' chest.
The victims with family members and their lawyer (from left): Ana English, Ed English, Vanese Morales, Ron Morales, Emma English, Renee Morales, attorney Jesus Romo Vejar (foreground), and Angelique Morales. |
The Clash
Two years later, Ron Morales and Roger Barnett met again, two men sitting stoically at opposite ends of Judge James Conlogue's stark courtroom in Cochise County, which ends at the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona. Outside, November winds whipped the streets with impunity.
It was to be a momentous confrontation, probably the most dramatic yet seen between anti-immigration hard-liners and those who oppose them. Closely watched by reporters and other observers from near and far, the clash would unfold at ground zero of the increasingly virulent battle over illegal immigration.
More people trudge across this ruggedly beautiful part of Sonoran Desert, which stretches from Mexico north into Arizona, than any other section of the 2,000-mile-long border. It is here that Roger Barnett brought national attention to the immigration situation with his loud and public complaints about illegal migrants who trespass on his sprawling ranch. It is also here that Barnett, a man who boasts of having personally apprehended 12,000 border-crossers, effectively sired the entire citizen's border patrol movement — a movement once characterized as "vigilante" by President Bush, a Texan intimately familiar with the borderlands.
A rancher since 1996, Barnett's a swaggering, silver-haired, ruddy-faced product of the desert sun whose militant reputation -— like the vigilante movement he inspired — stretches far beyond Cochise County.
"Humans, the greatest prey on earth," Roger Barnett told a reporter from London's Independent in May of 2000, six months after he was photographed for Time magazine brandishing an M-16 — and a full 16 months before Chris Simcox would leave his California kindergarten classroom to form the Arizona militia that would eventually become the Minutemen, now the best-known citizen group to carry weapons to the border in an effort to halt illegal immigration.
"A vigilante goes out, rounds up people, holds a trial and executes them. I haven't done that yet," Barnett told USA Today that same year. "But bloodshed could happen."
Failure to Prosecute
While there's no hard evidence Barnett has drawn blood, reports of Barnett and his brother Donald holding illegal immigrants at gunpoint, chasing them on ATVs, and using their dogs to intimidate and attack, have trickled into the Cochise County Sheriff's Office for years. Four months before the Morales incident, for instance, a group of immigrants reported that Barnett held them at gunpoint, yanked a woman by her hair and stuck a pistol in her ribs. Another member of the group said the rancher threw him over the front rack of his ATV and sicced a dog on them.
Yet Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer has repeatedly declined to file criminal charges against the wealthy, gun-toting rancher, stating that Barnett is well within his rights to use the threat of deadly force to prevent or terminate a criminal trespass. "We try to avoid getting caught in the middle of political issues," Rheinheimer said. "If Roger Barnett crosses the line and we get a prosecutable case, we won't hesitate to prosecute him."
Even if that's true, the local atmosphere is hardly conducive to such a prosecution.
"Cochise County is very conservative, one of the most conservative areas of Arizona," Morales attorney Jesus Romo Vejar told the Intelligence Report. "Barnett has a great number of people who are of like mind here. There are a lot of people who support his ideas and the way he acts."
Still, as the complaints against Barnett have mounted, so has the frustration of civil rights activists and others in Cochise County who see the lack of criminal prosecution as an official endorsement of Barnett's actions. And so Vejar and his clients finally decided to take it upon themselves to seek justice through civil litigation, hoping that a victory could become the first crack in the dam of official reluctance to take on the vigilantes. Last fall, they filed a case against Barnett with the advice and financial assistance of the Southern Poverty Law Center (which publishes the Intelligence Report), accusing him of assault, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress. They sought $200,000 in damages.
Vejar knew full well the odds were against him, even though this time, unlike others, Barnett had threatened U.S. citizens. Vejar had lost another civil case against Barnett in the same courtroom just months before, and in this trial was facing a nearly all-white jury drawn from a county that is 30% Latino.
"It's like trying a case in Mississippi in the '60s," he said with a weary smile.
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