Dark and Shameful Past
Introduction
The year of the Mutant Murders started a ten year imprisonment program for mutants. Mutants were systematically stripped of civil rights and imprisoned, most at the infamous Camp American Freedom in North Dakota, a few at the smaller camps in California and South Carolina (Camp Liberation and Camp Sovereign Immunity). The murders of Senator Robert Kelly and the attempted murders of the President and Supreme Court, as well as mutant attacks on civilians, caused great outcry.
Yet resistance to the imprisonment campaign was also widespread. Canada immediately condemned the actions of its neighbor and opened its borders to persecuted American mutants. Mexico did nothing nearly as broad, but the Mexican government did resent the American attempts to tell them what to do, so American mutant hunters got short shrift there. The European countries also denounced the Americans, and the United Nations tried repeatedly to pass a resolution condemning the Americans' actions.
Not surprisingly, the resistance on the North American continent was centered in Canada, led by the legendary Wolverine and James Hudson of Alpha Flight, and in Mexico, led by Mystique and Magneto, until his untimely demise at the hands of a mutant hunter.
There were small pockets of underground resistance in the U.S. itself, of course, which was the main reason after the first year or so that the government kept getting new mutants to intern in its prisons. But the resistance continued, at least in part because the government was too cheap to fund large-scale creation of Sentinel robots. There were maybe one or two left standing after the first year, and they had been made by the lowest bidders...thus being prone to failure at the least sign of trouble.
There was also some trouble recruiting prison guards, especially since most mutants in the prisons did not hesitate to kill to get out. So the government decided the cheapest and best way to guard the prisoners was to get some of the other mutants to do so for them.
The traitor mutants were mostly, from what we can gather afterward, people who did their work reluctantly after torture or other pressures were put on them by the government (e.g. "We'll kill your mother unless...". There were, of course, a few psychotic or sadistic ones who reveled in the power they had over other mutants, but those were rare. Unfortunately, most in the prisons didn't see it that way until afterward, so few of the traitors survived.
None of the sadists survived, to our knowledge.
We have one diary from that time, donated by the owner, which we hope will help shed light on that dark time in our country. May it never happen again. May the Camps stay the smoldering pile of ash, and never be rebuilt.