Two "Anglo " brothers are accused of persecuting Mexicans
Down U.S. Highway 80, past Wyatt Earp's haunts, past a dreary town called Tombstone, lies the border city of Douglas in Arizona's sparsely populated Cochise County. Signs pointing to Mexico dot Main Street, and an estimated 10,000 of the 15,000 residents of Douglas are Mexican Americans. Most of them have relatives living across the border in Agua Prieta, or "AP," as the locals say.
Some 250 miles east of where the party of illegal immigrants died in the desert, Douglas was the site of an episode that reflects another bitter and brutal aspect of the problems stemming from aliens crossing the border. Two ranching brothers—Patrick Hanigan, 26, and Thomas Hanigan, 23—were on trial last week in federal court in Tucson, charged with beating and robbing three Mexican aliens in 1976. The case has divided the city of Douglas and inflamed passions on both sides of the border. Many ranchers of Anglo-Saxon descent—the "Anglos"—insist that the Hanigans are being unfairly persecuted, while many Mexicans and Mexican Americans argue that the alleged crimes of the two brothers reflect the racism that pervades the region.
The Hanigan case began on a hot August morning in 1976, when three Mexicans set out from Agua Prieta to seek work in Arizona. The trio—Manuel Garcia, Bernabe Herrera and Eleazar Ruelas—slipped across the border and soon stopped to refill their water jug on land leased by the Hanigans. A man, later identified by the Mexicans as Thomas Hanigan, drove by in a pickup truck and yelled out, "Hey, wetbacks, where are you going? Are you going to steal or rob?" Hanigan allegedly forced the Mexicans into his truck at gunpoint and then summoned his father George, 67, and brother Patrick, who accused the Mexicans of robbing his trailer home the previous month. The Hanigans, according to police, next stripped and tied the Mexicans and beat them with pistols and a metal rod. The cattlemen were alleged to have scorched the soles of Ruelas' feet with a hot poker and threatened to castrate and hang the trio. Finally the captors freed the aliens, pumping shotgun pellets into their backs and legs as they scrambled across the border to Agua Prieta.
Two weeks later the Hanigans were indicted on charges of kidnaping, robbery and assault. The news stunned Douglas. The Hanigans were one of the area's most prominent families. Besides his cattle ranch, George Hanigan owned a string of Dairy Queen stores throughout the state. "They were very good people, never in trouble," says Dolores Zavala, a Mexican American who runs a grocery in Douglas.
George Hanigan never lived to stand trial; he died of a heart attack in March 1977. The Hanigan sons were tried in a county court in October 1977; the all-white jury found them not guilty. The outcome incensed Mexican Americans and Mexicans alike. "Racist, frontier justice," charged Raul Grijalva, a Tucson school district board member. In Mexico, ballads lamented the fate of the aliens, and President José López Portillo criticized the outcome. "There was a pretty hot feeling," George Patterson, a civil engineer in Douglas, told TIME Correspondent Diana Coutu. "People were afraid to cross the line into Mexico because they were after the gringos."