When Jacqueline Tarsa LeBaron was sentenced to three years in prison by a federal court in Houston Texas last week, it was not simply a matter of bringing a fugitive to imperfect justice. Unraveling a story of religious fanaticism in the Chihuahua desert requires going back to the mid-nineteenth century, and, with the peripheral involvement of Benito Juarez, Pancho Villa, Javier Sicilia and a possible candidate for President of the United States, raises questions of identity, tolerance and our response to violence.
Captured in Honduras, 13 May 2010, LeBaron had been sought by U.S. authorities since 1992, which offered a 20,000 Dollar reward for information leading to her apprehension. The Mexican citizen faced charges in the United States including conspiracy to commit murder for hire, conspiracy to tamper with a witness, murder for hire and obstruction of religious beliefs. In return for certain unstated considerations, and avoiding trial, she pled guilty to the relatively minor offence of “obstruction of religious beliefs,” and was sentenced to three years in the Federal Penitentiary.
LeBaron is the grand-daughter of Alma Dayer LeBaron, an “apostate” Mormon, who supposedly fled Utah with a lynch mob and federal marshals on his trail for Chihuahua in 1924.
Mormonism had, at one time, sanctioned “plural marriage”, although – under pressure from the United State government – the main body of Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints) officially repudiated the doctrine in 1890. Church and State joined in persecuting the polygamous “apostates”, many of whom either went underground in the United States, or fled to Chihuahua to found farming colonies. Although polygamy is against the law in Mexico, it was tacitly accepted.
After 1857, with religious tolerance being granted to non-Catholics, and after the 1880s, the Mexican state actively seeking foreign colonists to settle in the “wild north”, the polygamous colonies were welcome as farmers and settlers, and not seen as any sort of social threat.
As successful communities, these colonies attracted “mainstream” Mormons as well as the polygamous “apostates,” the inhabitants often identifying themselves (and believing themselves) to be citizens of the United States. Among the more prominent families to resettle in Mexico during this period were the Romneys.
During the Mexican Revolution, when Pancho Villa made himself de facto ruler of the State, the Mormons were torn between those who backed the Revolution, those who favored the old regime, and those who saw themselves as U.S. citizens. In 1912, when U.S. citizens were advised to flee conflict areas (like northern Chihuahua), many of those who felt they were U.S. citizens fled to the United States, including the parents of seven-year old George Romney, who would go on to a successful career as an automotive executive and politician in the 1950s and 60s. In 1968 George Romney, then the popular governor of Michigan, was a likely prospect for the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. While his nomination was thwarted for other reasons, making the issue moot, the question of Romney’s citizenship was never considered important by the Republican Party, or anyone else, at the time. However, with opposition to immigration, and having made an issue of Barack Obama’s being the son of an immigrant, Romney’s son, “Mitt” – like his father, a prospective Republican Party presidential candidate – has been attacked within his own party for his alleged ties to Mexico.
The Romneys who remained in Mexico generally sided with the Revolution, and have prospered since then, becoming respectable, well-established members of the Chihuahua establishment. Pancho Villa, the de facto Revolutionary ruler of Chihuahua for much of the Revolution, generally left the Mormon colonists alone. Despite the fact that the U.S. Army, during the 1916 invasion of Chihuahua to “hunt” for Villa (whom they never found), made its headquarters in the Mormon colonies, and found willing collaborators among the colonists, contracted colonists, Villa himself never had anything but respect for the colonists, and some Mormon memoirs of the era claim Villa was a Mormon. He was, at any rate, a polygamist.
Villa, after being convinced to lay down his arms, continued to take a keen interest in the Chihuahua colonies, and used what political influence he had to bring in other foreign religious colonists, notably Mennonites, but also Alma Dyer LeBaron and his small band of followers, who named their community, not surprisingly, “Lebarón”.
Alma and his followers became something less of outsiders within the larger Mexican Mormon community when they joined what might be called the “mainstream” polygamous Mexican sect, the Apostolic United Brethren in 1944. But, following Alma’s death, his successor as the colony’s leader, his son Joel, left the Apostolic United Brethren to found his own church, Unusual for such sects, the “Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times” was successful in attracting converts from outside the Mormon fundamentalist community to join. Joel, as Prophet, had a falling out with his brother Ervil, the sect’s Patriarch, who split the church once again, to found his own sect, “Church of the Lamb of God,” and… for good measure… in 1974 sent a hit man to murder Joel and burn down the sect’s second colony in Baja California. For good measure, he also sent two of his wives to assassinate Rulon Allred, the head of the Apostolic United Brethren, in Utah. Ervil was tried, but not convicted for his murders in Mexico, and moved to San Diego California. And, then it gets very, very weird.
As Time Magazine reported 29 August 1977:
Ervil LeBaron, 52, polygamous (13 wives, at least 25 children) leader of the tiny Church of the Lamb of God, is the target of investigations by police departments from San Diego and Los Angeles to Salt Lake City and Denver. Even the Secret Service is interested in his whereabouts, since some of his followers sent a threatening letter to the then presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in September 1976. LeBaron’s alleged crime: inducing several of his 40-odd disciples, including a number of women, to murder between 13 and 20 people who failed to abide by what he decreed to be the “constitutional law of the Kingdom of God.”
Eventually caught after he fled back to Mexico, Ervil was sentenced to life in prison in the United States in 1980. Before his death the next year, he wrote a 400-page “Bible” which, among other things, listed still others who needed to die. While his son, William, and his hit-wives were also tried and convicted, his daughter Jacqueline evaded capture, apparently living a relatively open life in Honduras as a hair-dresser and English teacher until May of this year.
The LeBaron clan, like the Romneys of a century ago, seems to fall into a gray area when it comes to citizenship. William LeBaron wrote a family history in prison that speaks of used appliance shops the family runs in the United States as much as a business as a means to establish U.S. citizenship for various family members, several of whom claim dual nationality. Jacqueline, at her arraignment, claimed Mexican nationality, which may have been a factor in dropping murder charges, trying a foreign citizen likely to complicate matters for the prosecution.
The Lebarón community is fairly united in their opinion that Ervil was schizophrenic, and Jacqueline’s arrest probably would have not been well-publicized if not for two recent incidents that brought the sect and the community into the news again.
In 2008, a polygamous community in Texas was raided by Texas authorities on the pretext that a 16 year old girl had called Child Protective Services alleging sexual abuse of minors. Under the assumption that the children were all part of the same household, 462 minors were taken into protective custody. The initial call turned out to be a hoax, and although there were some prosecutions growing out of the subsequent investigation, there was no evidence of child abuse. Believing themselves targeted for their unpopular beliefs (and the families later sued the State of Texas for religious discrimination), many considered moving to the Lebarón, Chihuahua, which attracted the attention of the U.S. media. Little was said about Ervil and Joel, the press focusing instead on the oddity of out-of-the-mainstream U.S. subculture thriving in the Mexican desert.
That was … until Joel’s grandson, Érick, was kidnapped in May 2009. His older brother, Benji, organized a protest not just by members of his own community, but including nearby Mennonite and mainstream Mormons to demand action by the State of Chihuahua. The Mexican Army was sent to search for Érick, who was returned without ransom. Benji, together with two other dual nationals, was later murdered.
Despite later evidence that the crimes had nothing to do with narcotics, but rather with labor disputes neighbors descended not from European colonists but from indigenous Mexicans, anxiety in the United States about narcotics trafficking in northern Mexico, and the fear of violence against visitors meant the U.S. citizenship of the victims was played up both by neglecting to mention the dual nationality and long-time Mexican ties of the victims and more subtly through editing decisions: Érick, for example, was always referred to with the English spelling, “Eric”, for example.
Initially, it appeared that Lebarón would again be known for violence. There were suggestions from the community that it pressure the State for permission to set up some sort of armed self-defense force. With the possibly “racial” implications of the original kidnapping fresh in everyone’s minds, however, this smacked of the “wild west” and arming the settlers against the Indians. And, as it turned out, when the State of Chihuahua offered to train local residents as auxiliary police officers (who could carry firearms), none of the few who applied could pass the physical examination.
But there was a more positive outcome to this recent tragedy. Julián Lebarón, Benji and Érick’s brother, working with the coalition put together by his late brother, joined with poet Javier Sicilia in the call for peace and reconciliation in Mexico. In a recent speech in San Luis Potosi, Julián said:
The violence is not in things. It is not something artificial. The violence is not in the guns or in the drugs. The violence is within us. The institutions, the government, the Army and the police are also citizens and are not things outside of humanity. Every one of us has our responsibility in this struggle. We created the violence, every day, or we make it stop existing. And only together can we end it.
And, with Jacqueline off to prison, one reminder of the violence that has affected a small community might be lessened. Perhaps the Lebarón community, with luck and hard work, can fade back into what it should have been … an obscure, eccentric place, worthy at most of a footnote in the religious and cultural history of the Americas.