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Friday, November 25, 2005 · Last updated 2:51 p.m. PT

Tijuana residents ignore call for boycott

By JUAN ARTURO SALINAS
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Tijuana residents ignored calls to boycott U.S. stores in protest over American volunteer patrols along the California-Mexico border and poured into San Diego to take advantage of Friday's Thanksgiving Day sales.

Motorists waited for up to three hours at the San Ysidro bridge to head northward on one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the United States. Lines of up to 200 people snaked into stores on the U.S. side.

The boycott was urged by a Tijuana group calling themselves the Zapatista Front, borrowing from the name of the rebel movement in Mexico's southernmost state, Chiapas.

The Zapatista Front objects to the Minutemen project, in which volunteers from across the United States have converged on California and other border states to watch for migrants trying to sneak into the United States.

The Minutemen say they are trying to uphold U.S. law and are akin to a neighborhood watch. Some migrant advocate groups accuse them of being vigilantes who intimidate and attack undocumented workers, while the U.S. Border Patrol says the Minutemen are making its job more difficult.

"We don't cross the border or buy in the United States because of our disgust at the Minutemen and racism," said a Zapatista Front member, Carmen Valadez, who stood at the international bridge protesting with about a dozen others.

Most people paid the demonstrators little attention.

"There were some beautiful promotions. I liked it very much," Eden Perez, a Tijuana resident, said as she came back into Mexico.