By Casey Sánchez

Part 4 of 5

Editor’s Note: The following is an article from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Summer Intelligence Report, which closely monitors the activity of extremist hate groups across the country.

The misogyny of the San Diego Minute Men (SDMM) leader, Jeff Schwilk, is an accompaniment to his propaganda about an unclean Third World nation next door, brimming with cheap labor and sex trafficking. The group’s rationale for attacking immigrants shifts often from staving off an illegal alien invasion to reversing ecological plunder to stopping slave labor. But what has gotten SDMM the most mainstream mileage is its scary claim that the migrants of McGonigle run a child prostitution ring in one corner of the canyon. They call it the “Rape Grove.”

The SDMM’s only evidence for this is a half hour of shaky, hand-held video footage shot covertly by Czajkowski and SDMM activist John Matthew Monti in McGonigle Canyon. (Monti was charged in April with four misdemeanor counts of battery and four counts interference with civil rights, in addition to one count of filing a false crime report. The charges stem from a Nov. 18 incident at a day labor site in Rancho Penasquitos in which Monti initially claimed to police that he’d been attacked and robbed by immigrants.) Filmed in December 2006, “Rape Grove” is the most widely linked and downloaded SDMM video of all.

But what “Rape Grove” proves isn’t clear at all. Despite its highly provocative title, no sexual activity, let alone child prostitution, is ever seen. Even the on-the-fly voiceover by Czajkowski never once includes the word “rape.”

The video opens with daytime shots of immigrant men walking around the canyon. Minutemen are seen placing calls to the police to report that they are observing a prostitution transaction. Two officers arrive and look around, but, finding nothing, end up warning the SDMM members they could be arrested for trespassing on private property. In a final section, the video shows Minutemen walking through canyon brush in low light, searching for the alleged prostitution.

It’s not easy to find, although Czajkowski, sounding obsessed, is looking. Spotting a condom and a tampon on the ground, she turns excitedly to migrants nearby. “Do you have lots of penis here?” she asks in broken Spanish.

And that’s it. As the video rolls out its final minutes, various Minutemen ...