Aztlan and Amalgamation: the Mexican government, radical Chicano separatists, and even the Bush administration are all seeking to open the U.S.-Mexican border. (Cover Story: Regional Government).

Mexico is a friend of America. Mexico is our neighbor. And we want our neighbors to succeed. We want our neighbors to do well.... And that's why it's so important for us to tear down barriers and walls that might separate Mexico from the United States.

President George W. Bush, address to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Albuquerque, New Mexico, August 15, 2001

While American troops engage al-Qaeda terrorist cells in far-flung battlefields across Asia and our military leadership prepares for a Gulf War encore against Iraq, our "friend" and "neighbor" to the South is relentlessly invading our homeland. The Mexican government and radical "Chicano" groups in this country are pursuing the dream of La Reconquista -- the "re-conquest" of the southwestern United States.

"More than a century after the U.S. invasion of Mexico that resulted in the annexation of Texas, Mexicans are 'reoccupying' the territory, but through less violent means and for different reasons," reported Monica Mendel of TheNewsMexico.com news service on March 25th. "Most of these immigrants live in border states like California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, the same ones Mexico lost when President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna signed an agreement to end the U.S. invasion in 1848 by ceding 2.5 million square kilometers of Mexican territory to the United States."

The provocative term "reoccupation" was not coined by an anti-immigration activist. Rather, it was used in an official study published by the Mexican government's National Council on Population (Conapo). Mendel writes: "The 'reoccupation' of this territory has been slow but steady, and the number of immigrants is growing every year." Citing Conapo's findings, Mendel predicts that during the six-year reign of incumbent Mexican President Vicente Fox, ending in 2006, "two million Mexicans will enter the United States at the rate of approximately 380,000 per year."

By publishing the Conapo study, the Mexican government has formally embraced the concept of "demographic warfare" -- re-conquering the southwestern United States through unchecked illegal immigration. But it has long been an open secret that Mexico takes advantage of our porous southern border to export its "surplus poverty" and re-impose control over our southwest.

Last July Fourth, Mexico's EWE news service published an interview with the celebrated Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska in which she noted: "Mexico is at this moment recovering territories it lost in the past to the United States thanks to emigration." "The common people -- the poor, the dirty, the lice ridden, the cockroaches are advancing on the United States, a country that needs to speak Spanish because it has 33.5 million Hispanics who are imposing their culture," observed Poniatowska. "Mexico is recovering the territories yielded to the United States by means of migratory tactics."

But columnist Carlos Loret de Mola most clearly explained Mexico's "demographic warfare" strategy 20 years ago in Excelsior (the Mexican equivalent of the New York Times). In an essay entitled "The Great Invasion: Mexico Recovers Its Own," Loret described the strategy in brutally candid terms:

A peaceful mass of people ... carries out slowly and patiently an unstoppable invasion, the most important in human history. You cannot give me a similar example of such a large migratory wave by an ant-like multitude, stubborn, unarmed, and carried on in the face of the most powerful and best-armed nation on earth....[Neither] barbed-wire fences, nor aggressive border guards, nor campaigns, nor laws, nor police raids against the undocumented, have stopped this movement of the masses that is unprecedented in any part of the world.

This migrant invasion, continues Loret, "seems to be slowly returning [the southwestern United States] to the jurisdiction of Mexico without the firing of a single shot, nor requiring the least diplomatic action, by means of a steady, spontaneous, and uninterrupted occupation." The effects of Mexico's immigration invasion were even then visible in Los Angeles, which Loret archly referred to as "the second largest Mexican city in the world."

Charles Truxillo, a professor of "Chicano Studies" at the University of New Mexico, believes that Los Angeles will one day be the capital of "La Republica del Norte" -- a Hispanic nation straddling the border between the southwest United States and northern Mexico. The envisioned "Chicano homeland" would absorb the existing U.S. states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and southern Colorado, as well as "the northern tier of current Mexican states: Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas," reported the March 10th Albuquerque News.

The envisioned "Chicano homeland" is also referred to as "Aztlan." The geographical boundaries for the proposed homeland have not been precisely defined; in addition to the U.S. states cited by the Albuquerque News, Nevada and Utah have also been mentioned.

The new polity won't appear "within the next 20 years but within 80 years," predicts Truxillo. "I may not live to see the Hispanic homeland, but by the end of the century my students will live in it, sovereign and free." While Truxillo maintains that the new country should be created "by any means necessary," he insists that it is "unlikely" that it will be born out of a civil war. Instead, he foresees that "La Republica del Norte" will be created "by political process, by the 'electoral pressure' of the future majority Hispanic population," observes the Albuquerque News.

Terrorist Subcurrents

What does Truxillo mean when he invokes the familiar revolutionary refrain, "By any means necessary"? One clue can be found in how Truxillo reveres Reies Lopez Tijerina, a bloody-handed 1960s Chicano agitator. It was from Tijerina, states Truxillo, that he learned "I was a member of a people with a country that had been taken from them by war, a land that was our own by treaty."

Tijerina's chief claim to infamy was his role in leading a June 1967 guerrilla assault on the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. During the two-hour assault, Tijerina and 150 terrorist thugs killed Deputy Sheriff Nicainor Saizan, pistol-whipped Undersheriff Dan Rivera, and shot 63-year-old jailer Eugolio Salazar. The Tijerina-led mob also took 20 local citizens hostage in the courthouse before fleeing town. Although Salazar survived the initial assault, he was beaten to death before he could testify at Tijerina's trial. With the jury and material witnesses intimidated by the possibility of another outbreak of violence, Tijerina -- who had shot Salazar pointblank in the face -- was given a two-year sentence, of which he served six months before being paroled.

In a "Manifesto" published in the Albuquerque Journal shortly before the attack on Tierra Amarilla, Tijerina's terrorist group laid claim to millions of acres of the American Southwest -- including the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico -- on behalf of the "Nation of Aztlan." Tijerina and his thugs asserted "exclusive and supreme" powers "within our territorial jurisdiction, over all persons and property situated therein, to the exclusion of all other countries and governments."

"We shall enter troops into these territories to restore our authority; and our troops will preserve the strictest discipline," continued the terrorist screed. "[I]f the aggressors shed one drop of blood of any of our soldiers during the progress of this liberation campaign, a state of war shall exist as of that moment between us and that aggressor; and ... during the progress of such a war, we shall not take any prisoners of war, but shall take only war criminals and traitors, and try those war criminals and traitors by a military tribunal and execute them." During the Tierra Amarilla assault, Tijerina and his cadres carried out that edict by murdering one Mexican-American law enforcement officer and wounding two others.

After descending into obscurity, Tijerina dramatically reappeared at the national "Latino Leadership Summit" at the University of California-Riverside in January 1995. Introduced to an audience of radical professors, lawyers, labor leaders, student agitators, and more than 400 "Latino activists," Tijerina was greeted with sustained, tumultuous applause. Many in the crowd raised their right arms in the communist clenched-fist salute, exclaiming "iViva la Revolucion!" and "Power to the People!"

Present at the 1995 Latino Summit were representatives of the "Brown Berets de Aztlan," a paramilitary group that threatened to "make the streets ma red" with their opponent's blood. Also prominent were representatives of the Moviemento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, or MEChA), a militant separatist group active on high school and university campuses.

Speaking to the Houston Chronicle during MEChA's national conference in that city in March of this year, Jose Galvan of the group's University of California-Berkeley chapter insisted: "We're not trying to take over. We just want to help people of color get an education." Galvan spoke those words shortly after his MEChA chapter displayed its commitment to "education" by vandalizing the offices of a conservative student newspaper and issuing death threats against the paper's editorial staff.

According to the March 5th Washington Times, members of the Berkeley Conservative Foundation at the University of California-Berkeley became "a target of death threats after the group printed a story criticizing a Hispanic campus group's call for revolutionary liberation from white people." In February, the Foundation-sponsored California Patriot newsmagazine published a critique of the MEChA. Some members of the Conservative Foundation were harassed by MEChA cadres, and others received death threats. On the following day, the Patriot's editorial office was ransacked: All 3,000 copies of the magazine were stolen, and thousands of dollars' worth of damage was done.

This was hardly the first time MEChA had gone on a rampage on a California campus. In 1993, MEChA cadres at UCLA caused $500,000 in damage in a protest demanding full department status for "Chicano Studies" -- courses designed to cultivate a revolutionary mind-set among Hispanic students. The program of MEChA's April 1997 national conference at Michigan State University offered a snap-shot of that mind-set: "We must ... become a nation within a nation, with a national plan of action as new soldiers in our struggle for national independence, and an emerging XICANO [Chicano] nation."

Asked about his group's ideology and intentions, Miguel Perez of Cal State-Northridge's MEChA chapter replied: "The ultimate ideology is the liberation of Aztlan. Communism would be closest [to it]." Once Aztlan is established, continued Perez, ethnic cleansing would commence: "Non-Chicanos would have to be expelled ... opposition groups would be quashed because you have to keep power." In their intimidation campaign against the staff of the California Patriot, Berkeley's MEChA thugs offered a foretaste of this ruling philosophy in action.

Do MEChA and its Aztlandista allies have the means to match their ambitions? Not yet, obviously. But their terrorist infrastructure is being created, and it grows with each wave of unassimilated immigrants from Mexico. Kosovo offers an ominous parallel: The narco-terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which now governs that Serbian province under UN supervision, recruited much of its membership through campus-based ethnic separatism among ethnic Albanians. And the KLA's campaign to seize Kosovo gained strength through rampant illegal immigration from Serbia's southern neighbor, Albania.

Assimilation in Reverse

Historically, immigrants to the United States were expected to assimilate our language, customs, and public culture. However, as the border between the United States and Mexico erodes, we are witnessing what could be called "assimilation in reverse" as the public institutions of the affected communities are required to accommodate large, undigested masses of Mexicans.

For example: The City of Houston has announced that the "matricular card," a form of identification issued by the Mexican Consulate, would be "considered official identification by Houston police officers," reported the March 8th Houston Chronicle. The paper notes that this is a particularly welcome development for Mexicans whose "immigration status may be in question ... [and therefore] have no valid U.S. forms of identification, such as a driver's license."

All that is required to obtain a matricular card, noted a March 22nd Fox News report, is "a Mexican birth certificate and some proof of U.S. residency." No proof of U.S. citizenship is required. In some states, continued the Fox News report, "matricular ID holders can use the card as one of two pieces of identification needed to apply for a driver's license."

From the Mexican Consulate in Colorado comes a proposal that would make it even easier for illegal immigrants: Why not repeal the state law against granting driver's licenses to "undocumented residents" from Mexico? "Undocumented" Mexican workers -- that is, Mexican nationals who violate our nation's immigration laws -- "are providing labor and energy to the economy of Colorado," insisted Leticia Calzada, Mexico's consul general in Denver. Besides, criminal cases resulting from enforcement of the state's traffic laws "are clogging courthouses in many counties because these Mexicans need to drive."

The Texas gubernatorial race offers one of the most dramatic examples of "assimilation in reverse." Shortly before last March's Democratic gubernatorial primary in Texas, candidates Tony Sanchez and Dan Morales made history by conducting a debate in Spanish. While there was no clear winner on substantive issues, Morales clearly lost where the most important issue of style was concerned -- the question of Hispanic "authenticity."

Texas native Morales lives in San Antonio, home of the Alamo. After earning a law degree from Harvard, he returned to serve as a legislator, and then as state attorney general. But Morales "only recently taught himself Spanish," noted an Associated Press profile. While debating with Sanchez, Morales infuriated the state's Hispanic-identity constituency by insisting on translating his answers into English, contending that since English remains the lingua franca of Texas it is wrong to "elevate the status of Spanish to English."

"I didn't like the way Dan Morales said Spanish can't be even with English," groused spectator Felipe Banvelos, a 45-year-old Mexican expatriate who became a naturalized citizen in 1999. Mayor Betty Flores of Laredo, who has been a U.S. citizen a great deal longer, also condemned Morales for lacking the proper ethnic consciousness. "I can tell you I've worked on issues with Dan Morales and he used to not want to be Hispanic," declared Flores. "He didn't speak Spanish, he didn't understand what was going on, he did not really comprehend the whole issue of the strength of minorities in Texas."

By crafting a political persona tailored to the state's emerging Mexican voter bloc, Sanchez managed to secure the democratic nomination. An oil millionaire from Laredo who also helps manage the International Bank of Commerce, Sanchez is immersed in the border city's binational, Hispanic-focused commerce" and campaigns "to the tune of a Mexican-style ballad," noted the AP. More importantly, Laredo is ground zero for the North American Free Trade Agreement." Its business district draws "throngs of foot traffic from Nuevo Laredo, its sister city across the Rio Grande. Locals tout it as 'Los Dos Laredos,' one city sliced by an international border."

Just as Sanchez figuratively straddles the U.S.-Mexican border, he also bridges the narrow gulf between the Republican and Democrat parties. Prior to being tapped by the Texas Democrat Party establishment to run for governor, Sanchez had no elective political experience. He did, however, prominently support then-Governor George W. Bush.

The Texas Observer notes that Sanchez and his family have given the Bush campaign "a total of $323,650 over the years, making them the third most generous patron of Bush's political career."

Sanchez' ties to the overwhelmingly popular Republican president, notes the Observer, will serve "as a form of inoculation" against criticism of his Hispanic-identity politics. "You're going to hear that Tony Sanchez is nothing but a drug-running, money-laundering, influence peddling, brown guy," notes campaign spokesman Kelly Ferro. "But an awful lot of that money wound up in George Bush's bank account."

While occupying the office that Sanchez hopes to win, George W. Bush and his advisers devised a version of the political strategy now used by the Sanchez campaign. "By 1998," notes the Observer, "Republican political guru Karl Rove was already instructing George W. Bush to reach out to Hispanic voters by speaking in broken Spanish whenever he could. The Bush team saw that not just Texas but the entire Southwest was tilting Hispanic, and tilting fast. Capturing the Latino vote is the key to the future dominance of one or the other of the political parties -- at both the local and the national level."

Bipartisan Border Assault

It is, of course, true that some of the Bush administration's policies regarding our southern border are dictated by a desire to woo the Hispanic vote. However, there is a deeper and even more insidious motivation. The administration, building upon the work of its predecessor, is seeking to erase our border with Mexico as a prelude to consolidating the Western Hemisphere into a single political bloc modeled after the European Union.

One key component of this grand design is the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which President Bush (the elder) negotiated and Bill Clinton put into place. But if the Bush administration's plans come to fruition, NAFTA will be supplanted by the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) -- a single economic unit stretching "from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego."

"NAFTA has been good for New Mexico, and it's been good for Mexico," declared the president in an August 15,2001 address to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Albuquerque. "I ask for Congress to give me trade promotion authority, so that we can not only have free trade with our neighbor to the south, [but] so that we can have free trade throughout the hemisphere."

It is important to recognize that by "free trade," President Bush -- like his predecessor, and like other proponents of NAFTA-style agreements -- is referring to managed trade as part of continent-spanning political integration. One obvious casualty of this process is national sovereignty -- as the president himself admitted in the same address.

"Oh, I know there's some voices who want to wall us off from Mexico," the president continued. "They want to build a wall. I say to them, they want to condemn our neighbors to the south in [sic] poverty, and I refuse to accept that type of isolationist and protectionist attitude." Rather than strengthening our border with Mexico, the president insisted, we should be working to "tear down barriers and walls that might separate Mexico from the United States."

Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Bush administration and its counterparts in Mexico devised a new rationale for amalgamating the United States with Mexico and Canada: the supposed need to create a common "security perimeter" protecting the NAFTA nations.

Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda told Canadian foreign affairs minister Bill Graham that "Mexico wants its North American neighbors to move more quickly towards integration on a continental scale," reported the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on February 23rd. "We would like to continentalize as much as possible," remarked Castaneda. "We have been pushing for this. And we have been encountering a receptive ear both in Canada and the United States at a certain level of intensity. We would like to move more quickly. We would like to move more deeply."

During the UN Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, President Bush spoke of the need to create a "common border" with Mexico and Canada as part of a counter-terrorist strategy. "America, working closely with Canada and Mexico, has set a goal: We are working for a common border that is open to commerce and legitimate travel, and closed to drug trafficking and terror," declared the president as he signed an agreement with Mexican President Vicente Fox intended to "make our shared border more open and more secure."

Insisting that it needed to demonstrate our nation's "compassion" to the Mexican government, the Bush administration pressured House Republicans into supporting the proposed amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants. The bitterly contested measure was passed on March 12th. Knowing that the bill would be extremely unpopular with the public, House leaders originally attempted to pass the measure by an unrecorded voice vote -- only to see that effort stymied by Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), whose state is on the front line of La Reconquista.

Nor was President Bush's behind-the-scenes pressure on behalf of amnesty the only gift he placed at the feet of Mexican President Vicente Fox. The March 20th Washington Post reported: "President Bush plans to direct $30 million to poor areas of Mexico over the next year in an effort to discourage illegal immigration by strengthening businesses there...." The fund, called the U.S.-Mexico Partnership for Progress, will include subsidies for Mexican entrepreneurs and college scholarships for Mexicans. Incredibly, this proposal was, in part, a payoff intended to assuage the anger of both the Fox regime and its constituents in this country "after fallout from the September 11 attacks delayed plans to ease the path to legalization for some of the 3 million undocumented Mexicans in this country."

That's right: Not only is the Bush administration apologizing to Mexico for its tardiness in acting to subvert our immigration laws, it's wrapping that apology in a wad of taxpayer dollars.

The Border Vanishes

The Mexican government, radical Chicano separatists, and the Bush administration all agree on one thing: The border separating our nation from Mexico should be treated as if it does not exist. The Fox regime, like previous Mexican governments for decades, uses its porous northern border as a safety valve, exporting its unemployable citizens and then organizing them within our nation as a potent political bloc. Chicano separatists intoxicated with dreams of a new "homeland" radicalize young, poorly assimilated Mexicans for a street-level army that may prove a larger long-term threat than Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network. And the Bush administration, pursuing a plan for continental "integration," treats Mexico as if it were already part of a consolidated political unit with the United States.

In his new book Warrior Politics, journalist Robert D. Kaplan correctly points out that "the tumultuous historic consolidation of Mexico and the United States" is just one facet of a process of "global political convergence" into a "kind of loose world governance...."

As "these two vastly unequal societies [the United States and Mexico] integrate at breakneck speed," the immediate result will be "social upheaval on both sides of the border." But from the perspective of the globalist elite -- a view that Kaplan enthusiastically shares -- this is simply the price that must be paid to bring about a unified world.