Marcello Lucero: Another Latin@ Murdered

by Dave Bennion

Published November 10, 2008 @ 10:20PM PT

Tragically, the anti-Latin@, anti-migrant rhetoric that has become unremarkable over the past few years claimed another victim over the weekend, this time in Long Island.  From Newsday:

They told police they wanted to beat up someone who looked Hispanic.

That was the motive, police said, that a mob of seven young men had in mind when they attacked a Patchogue man, who ended up being stabbed to death minutes before midnight Saturday, Suffolk police said.

"These individuals told detectives that they were looking to beat someone of Latino heritage," said Det. Lt Jack Fitzpatrick, commander of the homicide squad, adding that the victim, Marcello Lucero, 37, is of Ecuadorian descent.

Fitzpatrick said the seven suspects drove around Patchogue searching for victims and found Lucero and another Ecuadorian man.

Long Island Wins has been posting updates about the story all day.  Here is the latest:

[The assailants] said that they were on patrol to go "Beaner jumping". "Beaner" is a derogatory word for Mexican. The attackers told police that they said 'Let's go find some Mexicans to -- -- up,'

Pat Young of LIW puts the attack into context:

The horrible murder of Marcello Lucero is the latest and deadliest of a series of anti-immigrant attacks in Suffolk County. The seven young men charged in the attack come from an area a few miles south of the hamlet of Farmingville, the epicenter of anti-immigrant organizing on Long Island. Farmingville first gained national attention in 2000 when two young men abducted a pair of Mexican day laborers and tried to beat them to death. It was in the headlines again a few years later when five high school students burned down the house of a Latino family, whose sleeping occupants barely escaped with their lives.

Since then, human rights advocates have urged politicians in Suffolk to stop using the scapegoating of immigrants as a path to electoral victory. We have failed.

For example, after the beating of the two Farmingville day laborers, a member of the county legislature declared that if Mexicans moved to his town he, too, would greet them with a baseball bat. This year, as tensions mounted around immigration, the county legislature saw no less than five anti-immigrant bills proposed and a Congressional candidate ran for election in the district where the attackers were from on an anti-immigrant platform.

Suffolk's political class, led by the County Executive and the Presiding Officer of the Legislature, have done nothing to bring together the county's nearly 200,000 immigrants and 1.4 million native-born residents. Unlike other nearby suburban counties like Nassau and Westchester, Suffolk government has repeatedly missed opportunities to foster understanding and instead has depicted the hard-working immigrants of the county as a "problem" begging to be solved.

Should it surprise us that young men, hearing immigrants being described as criminals and invaders, would take it upon themselves to solve the problem with knives?

Paco Fabian at America's Voice connects the dots:

For the fourth solid year in a row, hate crimes against Latinos are on the rise. According to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Hate crimes targeting Latinos increased again in 2007, capping a 40% rise in the four years since 2003, according to FBI statistics released earlier this week.

As anti-immigrant propaganda has increased on both the margins and in the mainstream of society - where pundits and politicians have routinely vilified undocumented Latino immigrants with a series of defamatory falsehoods - hate violence has risen against perceived "illegal aliens."

Organizations that advocate on behalf of Latinos, such as NCLR and CASA Maryland, have also been prime targets of this frightening trend-as well as major forces to counteract it. NCLR recently launched a website called "We Can Stop the Hate," and has won a battle in court over death threats to immigrant advocates.

. . .

An out-of-control immigration debate, left to fester in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, has given rise to new waves of racial hatred against anyone perceived as "Latino."

[Image: ABC News]