Former Navy SEAL Matthew Bracken Publishes Book Touting Aztlan Conspiracy Theory

By Susy Buchanan DOMESTIC ENEMIES: THE RECONQUISTA By Matthew Bracken San Diego, Calif.: Steelcutter Publishing, 2006 $19.95 (softback)

In 1973, a Frenchman named Jean Raspail wrote a bitter and paranoid novel about the "invasion" of his native land by starving Third World refugees. The book was a racist vision of the consequences of non-white immigration, aided and abetted, in the author's view, by the weak-minded liberals who failed to resist it. For almost 35 years, The Camp of the Saints has been a Bible to the radical right.

Now, courtesy of former Navy SEAL Matthew Bracken, comes the American version — a portrait of the apocalypse Bracken fears will overtake America thanks to undocumented immigration from the south. The book is a fictionalized version of the Aztlan conspiracy theory — the idea that Mexico is secretly planning a "reconquista" (reconquering) of the seven states of the Southwest — that now animates large swaths of the anti-immigration movement. It's being plugged on extremist websites, in gun magazines and similar electronic venues, and on immigrant-bashing radio shows like Peter Boyles' program on KHOW-AM in Denver.

This isn't the first angry, self-published novel from Bracken. His new book, Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista, is the second in a series that began with another paranoid fantasy about gun control and evil agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a favorite bête noire of the extreme right. His latest book, marked by an enthusiastic interest in busty women, is a xenophobe's racy vision of hell.

Domestic Enemies opens in a secret Oklahoma prison camp (D-camp) full of women detained by the federal government for acts of terrorism. Here, Bracken's curvaceous 27-year-old heroine, Ranya Bardiwell, tends the fields under the supervision of gun-toting "Internal Security Agency" guards, monitored all the while by a Radio Frequency Identification Device implanted in her shoulder. Through flashbacks, we learn that Bardiwell gave birth to a son five years ago in federal prison. He was taken from her just minutes out of the womb. The action begins as Bardiwell is summoned to the office of a female warden who attempts to seduce her. They take a bubble bath together, during which the warden reveals that Bardiwell's son is living in Albuquerque, N.M., and has been adopted by FBI agent Alex Garabanda and his IRS agent wife.

Enraged at the thought of her child being raised by federal agents, Bardiwell straddles the naked warden and chokes her to death in the tub. She escapes, intent on recovering her son, but finds herself in a brave new post-amnesty world.

Gas is at $29 a gallon, gold at $7,000 an ounce. A lethal epidemic of "Monkey Pox" has swept through the southeast. Crime and out-of-control interest rates have citizens abandoning their homes by the thousands for tent camps in the "free states" of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

Preoccupied by ethnic violence in major cities and economic turmoil, the federal government has let southwestern states sink into bedlam. Armed gangs besiege Arizona and Phoenix has lost electrical power. Los Angeles is under martial law as neighborhoods burn.

And New Mexico, where Bardiwell heads to retrieve her boy, has become a haven for communist revolutionaries. Now it's "Nuevo Mexico." The state has passed Spanish-only laws and razed businesses with English signs. Ranches once owned by Anglos are seized and given to former undocumented immigrants. The brutal, M-16-toting Milicia de Nuevo Mexico aims to get rid of all Anglos.

Bardiwell is captured by the militia in Albuquerque. But, entranced by her curves and her marksmanship — demonstrated when she shoots a hippie — the dashing Comandante Basilo Ramos orders Bardiwell to conduct weapons training for his troops and makes her his mistress, holding her captive in his mansion. In a bizarre scene, Bardiwell drugs Ramos, photographs him sodomizing a communist professor whom he strangles during sex, then escapes out a second-story window, climbing down a rope made from the comandante's silk ties. Bardiwell then hooks up with her child's disillusioned adoptive father, Alex Garabanda, who is suicidal after losing custody of the boy to his ex-wife the IRS agent and her lesbian lover.

Bardiwell and Garabanda set out to rescue the boy from his "two mommies," but first stop to conduct surveillance at a secret meeting of traitorous politicians and "billionaire globalists" drafting a new Constitution to turn America socialist.

Discovered while photographing the meeting, Bardiwell shoots down a Blackhawk helicopter and she and Garabanda escape to San Diego. In hot pursuit is Comandante Ramos, who vows to take Bardiwell to a Mexican whorehouse, inject her with heroin and force her to work as a prostitute, and IRS storm troopers, led by the steroid-enhanced girlfriend of Garabanda's ex-wife.

Ultimately, the pair recover the child, and the book closes with them cheek to cheek in a small plane flying north, the boy sleeping next to them.

Domestic Enemies plods along between the over-the-top action sequences. Bracken oversexualizes his gun-loving heroine, devoting as much prose to her breasts as he does her weapons — which is a lot — and many minor players come off as one-dimensional caricatures. But a sexy heroine shooting guns of varying calibers at liberal, communist, open-borders villains in a world destroyed by immigration and multiculturalism is an irresistible fantasy for the audience this genre of fiction attracts – no matter the novel's numerous flaws.

Of course, this fictionalization is hardly necessary, even for those given to this kind of thing. All one need do is listen to real-life zealots like Glenn Spencer, head of the hate group American Border Patrol, who puts it like this: "Our country is being invaded by Mexico with hostile intentions. When it blows up, they can't say we didn't tell them, when the blood starts flowing on the border and in L.A. We're [talking] about la reconquista."

As far as conspiracy theories go, Aztlán isn't one.

What it is a foundational national policy of every Mexican "government" since 1850. The 'Zimmerman Note' of 1916 was not some far-fetched brainstorm of the Kaiser's Foreign Office. It was seeking to take advantage of a known Mexican policy.

Try and remember that Mexico was one of the world's larger (and temporarily rich) countries. When it lost the Mexican War, despite having a far larger population, and what everyone forgets, a far larger, far more experienced military, a national sense of shame became the dominant psychological trait. It is a far darker version of "La Revanche" that drove France to recover Alsace-Lorraine at all costs. It is far darker in another sense. Until more women arrived from Spain to officially marry Spanish colonists, they of course founded a wrong-side-of-the-blanket mestizo race, who of course did the same thing to the full blooded Indians who remained. The result: an incredibly complex caste system of rather vicious one-upsmanship. (And an insane delight in taking advantage of the stupid gringos. Us.) It is not "racist," in the sense that we know of in this country, because "class" plays a far larger role.

IMNVHO, America's biggest mistake with Mexico: our first adventure in "spreading democracy" (hardly ever a good idea) by helping them throw out Emperor Maximilian. An enlightened European constitutional monarchy would have been just the ticket for turning this hopelessly foul mess into some kind of modern, well-functioning country.

There is another debate that is as old as our nation. That is "Are we a Republic," or an "Empire." Abe Lincoln, for example, was vehemently opposed to the Mexican War! However, The Imperialists won, starting the pendulum toward a dominant federal government and a diminishment of the rights of sovereign states. Now that our strong Federal Government has fallen into the hands of the Left on every level, there is no will to defend the borders established by our victory in the Mexican War. In fact, they are ideologically in league with the Mexicans, a fully socialist country like the one they are establishing here.

With the help of Team Obama and others on the like-minded Left, the Mexicans fully intend to take back "Aztlán," one baby at a time, one house at a time, one street at a time, one town at a time and one state at a time.

The Bracken Theory? It's no theory at all. It's the Mexican Game Plan.

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