Thread: Macarena Hernandez Blames O'Reilly for Deaths

This article can be found at www.dallasnews.com

Macarena Hernández:
America, stand up for justice and decency

05:02 PM CDT on Saturday, October 15, 2005




On the last night of September, while they slept after a long day of work in the fields, six men were beaten to death with aluminum bats. One was shot in the head. Among the victims, a father and son killed in the same battered trailer.

The killers demanded money as they broke their bones.

The victims were all Mexican farm workers living in rundown trailer parks spread across two counties in southern Georgia. They had earned the money the killers were after by sweating their days on cotton and peanut farms or building chicken coops – the kind of jobs you couldn't pay Americans enough to do.

In a few hours, the killers hit four trailers. In one, they raped a woman and shot her husband in the head, traumatizing their three small children, who were present. In others, they left at least a half-dozen men wounded. Some are still in the hospital with shattered bones, including broken wrists from trying to protect their faces from the bats.

The news of the killings in Georgia reverberated outside Tift and Colquitt counties, but it didn't cling to national headlines like you would expect with such a bloodbath. Two weeks later, residents are still afraid the attackers will come back, even though the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has arrested six suspects and charged them with the slayings.

Across the country, assaults on immigrants are common and happen at a much higher rate than reported. Two years ago in Grand Prairie, a pushcart ice cream vendor was shot to death and robbed. Seven months later, another one met the same fate in west Oak Cliff. In March, at a Far North Dallas apartment complex, two thieves raped and killed a 20-year-old woman. They slit her husband's throat.

In Dallas, attacks against immigrants are one reason individual robberies have gone up in the last five years. Authorities call undocumented immigrants "ready-made victims." Without proper documentation to open bank accounts, many resort to stashing their sweat-soaked earnings under mattresses, in kitchen cabinets, in their socks or boots. If they are robbed, many don't call police for fear of deportation or because, back home, cops aren't trusted, anyway.

Some solutions are simple and concrete, such as making it easier for immigrants to establish bank accounts. Wells Fargo and Bank of America are among the banks that require only a Mexican consulate-issued ID card to open an account; others require documentation many immigrants lack. If there was ever a reason for adopting the more lenient policy, this is it.

More globally, horrors like these demand that a nation descended from immigrants take a hard look at the ways we think and speak about these most recent arrivals.

When Paul Johnson, the mayor of Tifton, where three of the four attacks took place, responded by flying the Mexican flag at City Hall, some residents complained. "I did that as an expression of sorrow for the Hispanic community," he told reporters. "For those who were offended, I apologize, but I think it was the right thing to do."

Were the complainers angrier about the red, white and green Mexican flag fluttering in the Georgia air than they were about the horrific murders? Do they watch Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, where the anchor and the callers constantly point to the southern border as the birth of all America's ills? (Sample comment: "Each one of those people is a biological weapon.")

It is one thing to want to secure the borders and another to preach hate, to talk of human beings as ailments. Taken literally, such rhetoric gives criminals like those in southern Georgia license to kill; it gives others permission to look the other way. In this heightened anti-immigrant climate, what Mr. Johnson did was not only a welcome gesture, but a brave one, too.

There are those who will want to gloss over the deaths of these six men because they are "criminals" and "lawbreakers," in this country illegally. But regardless of where you stand on the immigration reform debate, you can't stand for the senseless death of the vulnerable.

We should all be outraged. We must demand justice. Or else the real criminals here will win.


Macarena Hernández is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. Her e-mail address is mhernandez@ dallasnews.com.

Originally Posted by Bootsie

Were the complainers angrier about the red, white and green Mexican flag fluttering in the Georgia air than they were about the horrific murders?

That about sums it up

Wells Fargo and Bank of America are among the banks that require only a Mexican consulate-issued ID card to open an account;

Okay, thanks Macarena ("heyyyy Macarena - aiight!"). Now I know where I won't be taking my banking business.

What she fails to mention is that most of these crimes are committed by other "undocumented workers" who prey on their own kind. She'd rather blame the racist, imperialist empire builders.

As for the "Nation Descended From Immigrants" horsecrap I have this: unless you are a sub-Saharan African you are descended from immigrants. All humanity started in sub-Saharan Africa. That means that all indigenous peoples in all other continents (including North America) actually came from somewhere else. I see no reason why that should be used to justify the unreasonable and PREVENTABLE strain that these undocumented criminals put on our country. We're a nation of immigrants? I was born here and I don't plan on leaving! How about you, Macarena?

"heyyyyy Macarena - aiight!"

Sorry, I just can't get that bad 90's song out of my head.

I had forgotten all about that song!!!

That woman has PROBLEMS and she would NOT apologize to Bill even after THOUSANDS of his viewers emailed the Dallas News. She wrote ANOTHER article that was not nice. I wasn't able to get it because it wanted me to register and I kept trying to register but it kept coming up saying it needed my email address WHICH I PUT IN EVERY TIME. I HATE those sites! I emailed and complained!

These PEOPLE ARE CLUELESS. They just don't GET IT.