Carlos Montes and the Security State: A Cautionary Tale
by Mike Rose, truthdig.com
July 10th 2011
By Chris Hedges
On May 17 at 5 in the morning the Chicano activist Carlos Montes got a wake-up
call at his home in California from Barack Obama’s security state. The Los
Angeles County sheriff’s SWAT team, armed with assault rifles and wearing
bulletproof vests, as well as being accompanied by FBI agents, kicked down his
door, burst into his house with their weapons drawn, handcuffed him in his
pajamas and hauled him off to jail. Montes, one of tens of thousands of
Americans who have experienced this terrifying form of military-style assault
and arrest, was one of the organizers of the demonstrations outside the 2008
Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., and he faces trial along
with 23 other anti-war activists from Minnesota, as well as possible charges by
a federal grand jury.
The widening use of militarized police units effectively nullifies the Posse
Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the armed forces for civilian
policing. City police forces have in the last few decades amassed small strike
forces that employ high-powered assault rifles, armored personnel carriers,
tanks, elaborate command and control centers and attack helicopters. Poor urban
neighborhoods, which bear the brunt of the estimated 40,000 SWAT team assaults
that take place every year, have already learned what is only dimly being
understood by the rest of us—in the eyes of the state we are increasingly no
longer citizens with constitutional rights but enemy combatants. And that is
exactly how Montes was treated. There is little daylight now between raiding a
home in the middle of the night in Iraq and raiding one in Alhambra, Calif.
Montes is a longtime activist. He helped lead the student high school walkouts
in East Los Angeles and anti-war protests in the 1960s and later demonstrations
against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was one of the founding members of
the Brown Berets, a Chicano group that in the 1960s styled itself after the
Black Panthers. In the 1970s he evaded authorities while he lived in Mexico and
he went on to organize garment workers in El Paso, Texas. He and the subpoenaed
activists are reminders that in Barack Obama’s America, being a dissident is a
crime.
“It was an FBI action, as I recall,” Sgt. Jim Scully told reporters of the
Pasadena Star-News. “We assisted them.”
Montes was arrested ostensibly because he bought a firearm although a felony
conviction 42 years ago prohibited him from doing so. The 1969 felony
conviction was for throwing a can of Coke at a police officer during a
demonstration. The registered shotgun in his closet, bought last year at a
sporting goods shop, became the excuse to ransack his home, charge him and
schedule him for trial in August. It became the excuse to seize his computer,
two cellphones and files and records of his activism on behalf of workers,
immigrants, the Chicano community and opposition to wars. Prosecutors said
Montes should have disclosed his four-decade-old felony charge when he bought
the shotgun at Big 5 Sporting Goods. Because he neglected to do this he will
face six felony charges. The case is to be tried in Los Angeles.
“The gun issue was clearly a pretext to investigate my political activities,”
he said when I reached him at his Alhambra home. “It is about my anti-war
activities and my links to the RNC demonstrations. It is also about my activism
denouncing the U.S. policy of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, their support for
Israel and the Colombian government. I have been to Colombia twice.”
“I thought someone is breaking in, somebody is trying to jack me up,” he said.
“I was a victim of an armed robbery in December of 2009 in my home. I do have a
gun in my bedroom for self-defense. I was startled. I jumped out of bed. I saw
lights coming from the front-door area. They looked like flashlights. I saw men
with helmets and rifles. I gravitated towards the front door. I didn’t take my
gun. I could have done that. I have it there. It is a good thing I didn’t pick
anything up and put it in my hand.”
“I yelled, ‘Who is it?’ ” he said. “They said, ‘The police. Carlos Montes, come
out’ or ‘come forward,’ something like that. I approached the entryway. They
rushed in. They grabbed my hands. They turned me around. There were two police
officers on each arm. They brought me out holding my arms. I have a little
patio. They handcuffed me and patted me down. I am on a little hill. I looked
down the street and [it was] full of sheriff’s vehicles, patrol cars and two
large green vans. They were bigger than vans. People could stand in there. They
didn’t have any logos on them.… I thought it was an Army truck at first. Later
on I found it was from the sheriff.”
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