Leader Says No : Have Guardian Angels Taken Flight at Border?

Just a month ago the Guardian Angels, the controversial citizens patrol, announced bold plans to protect illegal aliens from border bandits.

Today, authorities say, the Angels have disappeared from the border after they themselves were robbed by bandits in the canyons they set out to make safer.

Leaders of the Guardian Angels deny they have quit under fire.

Law enforcement officials say they hope they have seen the last of the young crime fighters at the border. They say the Guardian Angels often interrupted police actions and were a danger to themselves and to others because they lacked the training to confront the violent bandits.

On the night of May 31, a group of Guardian Angels encountered four or five bandits in the canyons just east of the San Ysidro border crossing, said San Diego police Sgt. Art Palmer. One armed bandit pointed his gun at an Angel, hit him with a flashlight and took his handcuffs and keys, Palmer said.

Curtis Sliwa of New York, founder of the Guardian Angels, said he was present when the robbery occurred. The Guardian Angels were stopped by six or seven bandits with guns, he said.

“I look at the incident as a positive event,” Sliwa said last week. “We didn’t get killed, we didn’t get shot.

“To say we are not patroling the canyons is wrong. To say we are not patroling Colonia Libertad is wrong. To say we are not patroling so extensively is correct,” Sliwa said in a phone interview from San Antonio, where he is trying to start additional Guardian Angel border patrols.

Sliwa said Guardian Angels patrol the canyons near San Ysidro every Saturday night.

Sgt. Chuck Woodruff, a San Diego police officer who heads the Border Crime Prevention Unit, said no member of the 12-man unit has seen a Guardian Angel “since they got robbed and decided to leave.

“We work out there five nights a week. We fluctuate our nights off. So far here we’ve worked every Saturday night for the last few weeks and we haven’t seen them,” Woodruff said.

“There are only a certain number of ways you can enter the canyons. Border patrols or members of the bandit detail (patrol) would have seen them.”

Five times Guardian Angels have interrupted the border crime prevention unit as the unit was involved in an operation to catch bandits, Woodruff said. One night the Guardian Angels were asked twice to leave the area, but they were spotted later sharing food with a group of men whom law enforcement officials had observed previously robbing illegal aliens, he said.

“They are unable to differentiate between bandits and the people they are trying to help,” Woodruff said.

Sliwa denied that Guardian Angels had ever fed any border bandits. Border officials have created a myth of dangerous bandits to explain their inefficiency at stopping them, he said.

“They are just young scalawags, punks taking advantage of ripe pickings,” Sliwa said.

Since the border crime prevention unit was formed in February, 1984, 12 shoot-outs between bandits and law officers have occurred, Woodruff said. Last year, 75 robberies and 13 rapes were reported to the unit, he said, and many more crimes probably went unreported.

“If they wanted to escort the elderly downtown, that would be OK. They operate in good conscience, but they are playing with people who are extremely violent criminals,” he said.

In May, Sliwa announced that a group of 50 Guardian Angels from throughout Southern California would begin to patrol the canyons. He said groups of Angels would patrol the Colonia Libertad, reputedly the neighborhood where many of the border bandits live, for six hours on week nights and 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday nights.

Gary Guzman, president of the San Diego chapter of the Guardian Angels, said eight to 10 Angels now patrol the canyons on Saturday nights for three to five hours.

“When Curtis (Sliwa) came, we had Guardian Angels come in from Hollywood, Santa Ana, the west side of Los Angeles and San Fernando. We had to see what the canyon was like. We feel we can go in there now with eight to 10 people,” Guzman said.

“You go in there Monday through Friday and there is very little activity,” Sliwa said. “It seems the main crossing day is Saturday. It’s physically demanding to go through the canyons; we had to pick out when we were most effective.”

But Gene Smithburg, spokesman for the Border Patrol, said border agents have not spotted Guardian Angels within the canyons in the last four weeks. “We haven’t seen them for a couple of weeks. I don’t know where they are,” he said.

“When they were out there, they were interfering with our duties, our performance. They were untrained and they don’t know the area,” Smithburg said.

Smithburg agreed that weekends are the busiest days in the canyons. “Sundays are our busiest day, Saturdays are probably our second busiest,” he said.

Tijuana Police Chief Rafael Rubio Alarcon said no one on his force has reported seeing a Guardian Angel since he took office June 11. “I think they quit before I left office. I think they were coming in with uniforms; we can detect that. They might be coming in without uniforms.”

Two Guardian Angels are crossing over into Colonia Libertad at least once a week, Sliwa said, but not wearing uniforms. The Angels, whom he would only identify as “Rock” and “Ice,” pass through the San Ysidro border crossing to train a group of 12 Mexicans, who will form a Tijuana chapter of the Guardian Angels, he said.

The Guardian Angels have decided against patroling deep withing the colonias, for “safety reasons,” Guzman said. On May 27, Tijuana police arrested Rick Brooks, a Guardian Angel from Los Angeles, who was patroling Colonia Libertad. The police released Brooks the next day.

Mexican nationals have also crossed illegally into the United States to attend training seminars in San Diego, he said. “Some do have work visas. Some do not have the proper credentials. I have not invaded their privacy to ask them if they have visas,” Sliwa said.

Mexican and American officials have maintained that the Angels are breaking immigration laws when they enter Mexico while patroling the canyons.

“We have our own institutions to guard our citizens, to protect them,” Alarcon said. “We don’t think that we need a foreign outfit here in Mexico, in order to do whatever it is the Guardian Angels do.”

Sliwa said he intends to start border groups in El Paso, Laredo and Brownsville, Texas. If the groups are successful in other border towns, “the Tijuana police force may be more inclined to take a second look at us. Maybe it would start the thawing of an ice block.”

The need to help illegal aliens who are victimized by the border bandits outweighs immigration laws, Sliwa said.