Rediscovering

After Sept. 11, 2001, Americans across the country saw enemies and wanted security. In Arizona, the terrorist attacks ushered in a new era focused on the border with Mexico. From self-appointed border patrols to a newfound focus for “America’s toughest sheriff,” Joe Arpaio, nativism took hold in Arizona. Initially, it drew support from people with serious personal problems and morphed into a broad...

The upheaval of assassinations, antiwar protests and civil rights advocacy helped define an era that began in the 1960s and included flourishing political and social fringe movements.  In Arizona, far-right guerilla groups like the Minutemen and Posse Comitatus challenged long-accepted ideas of who exactly held power. Political tumult in Arizona opened a path for a perennial election gadfly with a...

After World War II ended, Arizona boomed as modern comforts made life in the desert more palatable. The state’s growth brought political upheaval and largely reinforced a social obliviousness to civil rights. As the state grew, it shed its loyalty to Democrats in favor of a conservatism marked with anti-Communist zealotry. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, held the nation in a grip of fear over a...

Even before Arizona was a state, it was a hotbed for extremism. Images of gunfights and brothels were thrust upon it by writers back East, but it wasn’t far from the Wild West mentality adopted in the territory.  Settlers, some looking for an escape from government control, found haven in the hot deserts of early Arizona, clashing with the Native Americans already living here.  Arizona teemed with...

Face-painted, shirtless and wearing bullhorns, Arizona resident Jacob Chansley became the face of the January 6 insurrection. Meanwhile President Donald Trump used Arizona as ground zero to try and over turn the results of the 2020 election. Arizona lawmakers leaned in. While this was happening, one question came to mind: What is going on in Arizona?  Chansley is an outlier, but he's not alone. Ex...

After two criminal trials against Lonnie Swartz wrapped up in Tucson, Jose Antonio’s family turned to their civil lawsuit against the agent.  Swartz’s attorneys argued that the agent had qualified immunity from prosecution in the case because he was carrying out work for the federal government. They also argued the teen’s family had no standing to sue because Jose Antonio did not have strong ties...

In a historic move, U.S. federal prosecutors charged Lonnie Swartz, a Border Patrol agent, with three separate charges in the shooting and killing of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez.  The most severe of the charges was for second degree murder, that meant prosecutors believed Lonnie had intentionally killed Jose Antonio. It was now their responsibility to prove that in court.  Bringing Sw...

It did not take long for the family of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez to start putting pressure on U.S. authorities. They demanded that the U.S. Border Patrol release the name of the agent who had fired his gun from Arizona into Mexico in Ambos Nogales.  In July 2014, attorneys for Jose Antonio’s family filed a lawsuit in the United States on behalf of Araceli Rodriguez. The lawsuit accu...

A U.S. border agent shot 16 times through the gaps in the border fence in the span of 34 seconds on the night of October 10, 2012.  Ten bullets struck and killed 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, who was standing on the Mexico side of Ambos Nogales, a binational community.  The border agent claimed someone was throwing rocks over the fence and that he fired in self-defense. Jose Antonio’s...

It’s been almost a decade since a boy in Mexico was shot dead by a Border Patrol agent in the United States.  His family couldn't believe it. And federal prosecutors didn't let it pass, even though Border Patrol agents rarely are scrutinized for excessive force. Recorded and retold in Spanish and English, these stories go beyond the killing of Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez in search of something st...

Season two of Rediscovering, a podcast from The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, explored the events leading up to and following the passage of Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona.  The 2010 “show me your papers” law was met with pushback from Latino organizers, grassroots activists, DACA recipients and more. That pushback didn’t end after SB 1070 was signed. Latino activists continued to organize. The...

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 took years of effort that culminated in a moment when the Legislature, the governor and the public — pushed by a terrible slaying agreed — to do something about illegal immigration, even if the White House and Congress couldn’t. Closer to the time of its passage, SB 1070 was popular and was a good way to win elections in Arizona. Russell Pearce, Jan Brewer and John McCai...

While national leaders weighed in on the passage of Senate Bill 1070, on the ground in Arizona, it was already emptying neighborhoods. The grim exodus played out quietly all over the state.  To the rest of the country, the law served as a laugh track and spectacle. The images of Arizona as a racist, backward-looking state didn’t help its economy. Within weeks of signing the law, the state’s touris...

For two decades and through three administrations, Arizonans waited for the federal government to solve the issue that many felt was right at their doorstep. They were left without a solution. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all tried to move the needle on immigration reform. They were unsuccessful. The unsolved murder of a Cochise County rancher, which was pinned on undoc...

The 1993 North American Free Trade Act, or NAFTA, put an estimated 2 million Mexican farmers out of business. Food prices in Mexico went up, while wages, after adjusting for inflation, declined.  The consequences of NAFTA and spiking unemployment from the peso currency crisis incentivized many Mexicans to head north to the U.S. in search of a better life. But with more people seeking opportunity i...

In the early 2000s, Arizona’s rapid population growth and investor speculation fueled a homebuilding binge in the state.  Contractors took advantage of a lax employment-verification system and hired undocumented workers at a cut rate, often from Mexico, in droves. At its peak, Arizona proportionately had the second-largest undocumented population of any state in the country, behind only Nevada. Ab...

In April 2010, Arizona enacted the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, better known as Senate Bill 1070. The state law required police officers to inquire about the legal status of anyone they thought might be in the country illegally.  But what would make an officer think someone was in the country illegally? To its opponents, it codified and provided legal cover for racial pr...

Three men faced charges in the murder of Arizona journalist Don Bolles. But to this day, it’s unknown who put the hit out on him.  For years, the lead investigators on the case would gather at the Clarendon Hotel at 11:30 a.m. every June 2. No grand ceremony. Just a moment of silence.  As the years pass, and as the city grows, the memory of what happened on that day fades.  But not for one woman:...

June 2, 1976, was Don Bolles’ wedding anniversary. He’d planned on celebrating with his wife Rosalie by seeing the movie “All The President’s Men.” Bolles had been off investigative reporting for three years, although people still fed him tips. One came from a man named John Adamson. Bolles went to meet him at the Clarendon Hotel after attending a committee hearing.  When Adamson called to say he...

Enraged by the stories about the wiretaps, the Funk family sued Don Bolles and The Arizona Republic. They sought damages of $20 million.  Bolles filed a countersuit, but the resulting process would air the newsroom’s dirty laundry.  Ultimately, the suits were settled without Bolles facing financial ruin. But his spirit had taken a hit. By 1973, Bolles was no longer the reporter he’d been just a fe...

There were two threats brewing for Don Bolles in 1970, at least in his mind. And one was coming from inside the newsroom.  Bolles had begun to suspect that his reporting partner had Mafia ties. Despite a lack of evidence, his partner was taken off the beat.  The Arizona Republic would go public with allegations of wiretapping. It would also publish Bolles’ 10-day seminal series, “The Menace Within...

After discovering that the Funk family may have wiretapped his phones, Don Bolles was put in a unique position. He wasn’t so much a reporter as he was trying to solve a crime.  Helping him in this endeavor was his reporting partner, Dom Frasca. Frasca was a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter who had experience looking into the mafia.  When the duo started asking questions, major concern...

The murder of investigative reporter Don Bolles shocked what was then a much smaller, sleepy Phoenix. He was a reporter killed for doing his job. It was — and still is — a rare incident in the United States.  In the years before his murder, Bolles was known for his tenacity, like a character out of film noir. Driven to keep the city from becoming mob run, Bolles worked diligently to expose ties be...

Don Bolles was an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic in the 1960s and '70s. After years of reporting on corruption in the racing industry, he was killed by a car bomb in 1976.  Decades later, we found cassette tapes of his phone calls from the '70s. Thanks to those tapes, we're telling the story of Don's life and his quarrels with the mafia before his death and how his spirit was crus...