2 Men Charged in Attack on Latino Camp in Alpine : Crime: Warrants out for others in assault to avenge a purported rape, for which the D.A. finds no case.

Two men have been charged, and arrest warrants have been issued for others suspected of beating three Latino migrants with baseball bats earlier this month, San Diego County Sheriff Jim Roache said Thursday.

Ronald Aishman, 26, of Spring Valley was arrested Oct. 15 and pleaded not guilty Monday to three counts of battery and three counts of assault with a deadly weapon. His bail has been set at $200,000.

Charges also have been filed against Ronald Inman, 22, of El Cajon, who is not yet in custody, Deputy Dist. Atty. Luis Aragon said Thursday. Roache would not say how many others are named in arrest warrants.

The district attorney’s office has decided not to prosecute a reported rape of a white woman that led to the Oct. 1 bat attack by six to eight Anglo men at a creekbed encampment in Alpine. The bat attack was meant as retaliation for the purported rape.

Tensions over the presence of the day laborers in Alpine boiled over after the rape reports, and the woman’s husband and his friends threatened the migrants for a week before the bat attack, witnesses said. The woman’s husband is not in custody, and Roache would not say if he is a suspect.

“The key thing that I want to say to Alpine and to the entire community is that vigilante justice in a civilized society is totally unacceptable,” Roache said.

On Thursday night, about 100 Alpine residents, migrant activists and law enforcement and Border Patrol personnel attended the meeting of an Alpine planning group called to focus on the migrant issue.

George Vanek, a planning group and San Diego County Grand Jury member who had the grand jury examine the issue of migrant trespassing in its 1991-92 report, asked the planning group to endorse that report.

The grand jury recommended that sheriff’s deputies continually cite migrants for trespassing. Planning group president Ken Dawson also moved that the group support the property owner’s efforts to fence off his land, some of which is designated open space by the county, and requires special permits to fence.

The baseball bat beating was a direct result of the Sheriff Department’s failure to enforce trespass laws, Dawson said, declaring: “Lawlessness abets lawlessness.”

Dawson asked that comments be restricted to the legal issue of trespassing. But several members of the audience addressed the larger issue.

“You can try as you might to couch this issue as a color-blind land-use issue, but we all know it’s about ridding your community of migrants,” said Claudia Smith, counsel for California Rural Legal Assistance, which represents some of the migrantsp. Smith told the planning group that, under state law, they are responsible for developing low-income housing in Alpine. “You’ve sat on this issue,” she said. “You are part of the problem. You have an obligation to come up with some constructive solution.”

Although many audience members consistently referred to the migrants as “illegals” and one person suggested that the canyon be bulldozed, Teddy Hampton, chief of the Border Patrol sector in El Cajon, told the audience that 80% to 85% of the migrants in Alpine are in the U.S. legally.

Several members of the audience suggested that those who employ the migrants take some responsibility for the situation.

“We will continue to have problems until we deal with this as a compassionate community,” said one resident who houses migrants who help her with yard work. “They can’t be living in the creekbed like animals. They’re not animals.”

Two Mexicans and a Guatemalan--none of them linked to the purported rape--were beaten with bats and seriously injured when the Anglo men stampeded through the encampment.

The Sheriff’s Department responded by dispatching extra teams of detectives to Alpine to investigate the attack and rape report, and interviewed dozens of people in the United States and Mexico, Roache said.

The FBI also opened a preliminary civil rights investigation, an FBI spokesman said.

Because the assault was racially motivated and the men acted in concert, they could face an additional four-year sentence if convicted, Aragon said.

Sheriff’s Department officials said they had hoped to make arrests in both cases to alleviate mounting racial pressures in Alpine. But, according to the district attorney’s office, the victim’s, suspects’ and witnesses’ accounts of the supposed rape were “vague and contradictory,” Roache said.

Although the woman maintained that she had been raped by one Latino man near the migrant encampment, witnesses and suspects told investigators she had been drinking beer with the men and had consensual sex with several of them, Roache said.

“We tried to put the puzzle together and make these pieces fit. And they weren’t there. They absolutely weren’t there,” Alpine Sheriff’s Lt. Sylvester Washington said of the rape investigation.

As Alpine residents were planning to gather Thursday night, migrant activists warned day laborers to stay way from the meeting for fear that anger over the district attorney’s decision not to prosecute the purported rape would turn to violence.

Tensions mounted even more last week when a woman entered Ye Olde Tavern and said she had been raped. Initial reports of the rape identified the suspects as “three Mexicans,” and talk in the bar turned to “going out and playing vigilante,” a bartender said last week.

But, when deputies interviewed the woman, she said her assailant was a lone Anglo.

Deputies are investigating that purported rape and trying to pinpoint where the report of the three Latino assailants originated, Washington said. It appears the woman identified her attackers as three Latinos and then changed her story when deputies arrived, he said.

The migrant encampment, a trash-lined creekbed on private property that has now been fenced off by the property owner, has been home to day laborers for several years. The men, many of them documented workers who return to their families in Mexicali on weekends, are picked up near the encampment by contractors and homeowners in search of cheap labor.

Although the camp has attracted a fringe element of lawbreakers who shoplift and drink a lot, migrants say they have all been made scapegoats for crime by people in the community.

Two of the men injured in the attack--Leobardo Zarco of Mexico City and Oscar Mendoza, a Guatemalan who has lived in the United States for 14 years, had arrived the day before to look for work. Both suffered head injuries. Additionally, Zarco’s knee was shattered and arm gashed, and Mendoza’s arm was broken in several places.

The third victim, 39-year-old Jose Luis Lopez of Mexicali, has worked for a Santee motorcycle shop more than a year and has slept at the Alpine encampment during the week for several years.

He was beaten on the face and head and returned to Mexicali for treatment after Grossmont Hospital officials recommended that he see a plastic surgeon immediately for a fractured cheekbone.

Though Lopez had intended to return to work this week, he was admitted to Grossmont Hospital for tests Thursday after suffering headaches and dizzy spells, Smith of California Rural Legal Assistance said.