White fishermen marched, Vietnamese skiffs went up in flames, and Klansmen flooded the town, some showing up equipped with semiautomatic rifles. In 1981, he rallied white-robed Klansmen and disgruntled white fishermen against Vietnamese refugees who had legally settled on the Texas coast and who had resorted to shrimping to get by. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Texas Knights of the KKK leader Louis Beam, a Vietnam war veteran who had helped organize and promote Duke’s border stunt, established paramilitary camps around Texas and trained children as young as eight in the deadly guerilla warfare tactics he had learned fighting communist rebels overseas. The vigilantism on the frontier eventually took a turn. Of violent incidents, he added, “There’s been nothing. “I believe we may have gotten one Klan call last night, but I’m not even sure of that one,” Jim Curr, the then-assistant Border Patrol chief in McAllen, told reporters the day after the Klan patrol kicked off. While some border agents said they spotted a few KKK members in certain Texas border areas, no real vigilante activities ever came to light. Some Klansmen drove around the borderlands with a sign that said “Klan Border Watch” taped to the door of their sedan. ambassador to Mexico at the time, Patrick Lucey, promised the Klansmen wouldn’t be allowed to make good on their plans.īut the operation appeared to be a dud. When then-Mexican Foreign Secretary Santiago Roel warned he would “protest if there is any case of aggression,” the U.S. Meanwhile, the affair sparked a diplomatic row with Mexico. Counter-protesters showed up at crossing points along the frontier. The Brown Berets, a militant Chicano group, threatened to rally 1,500 members to face off with the white supremacists.
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