Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

 It's been almost five years since notorious polygamists with a taste for sex with brainwashed, underage girls crossed state lines into West Texas.

The plan was simple: Construct a remote compound to keep tight control over the true believers and, at the same time, wall off neighbors, local authorities and any reporters who might come nosing around.

Call it a religious community.

Life in Utah and Arizona had become increasingly difficult for sect leader Warren Jeffs and others in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a throwback to 19th-century Mormonism.

So Jeff's followers established an agrarian community on 1,700 acres near Eldorado in rural Schleicher County, south of San Angelo.

They named it Yearning for Zion Ranch. A refuge where the male elders would be free to shun the outside world and its laws, and coerce adolescent girls into a subjugated life of arranged marriages and breeding.

The adult women, themselves victimized followers of Jeffs and the other elders, supported the men in their polygamy. Even now, with more than 400 children evacuated into state custody, their mothers with them, the women are making sure no one talks.

They remain fiercely loyal to Jeffs, even though he remains in prison following his conviction last year in Utah of being an accomplice to a rape for helping arrange a forced union between another sect member and an underage girl.

Jeffs' record should have removed any doubt left in the minds of indifferent state and federal authorities about what was going on inside the Eldorado compound.

The Express-News published ample reports after the compound was established. It didn't take much imagination to guess what was going on inside those walls.

Four years too late, local law enforcement authorities finally responded to a distress call from an underage girl and forced their way into the compound on April 3. They reached its inner sanctum days later, as the sect's adults looked on uncooperatively.

That's when they found the beds inside the temple.

Nothing like a little ritual sex with a pubescent virgin, all in the name of our Lord.

Sheriff David Doran defended his years of inaction, even as he disclosed that a confidential informant has been feeding him information from inside the compound almost since its inception.

Federal authorities also failed to act, despite what they knew from state investigations in Utah and Arizona into Jeffs' and the sect's practices.

More than a decade had passed since the disastrous showdown between federal agents and Branch Davidians at another walled compound in Texas, outside Waco.

Now, still operating with harsh memories of the conflagration that took the lives of about 90 people inside, many of them children, both federal and state authorities ignored the obvious.

Authorities were sure of very little as last week ended. They were struggling to identify the women and children in custody.

The only certainty seemed to be that authorities were certain they were not to blame.

One wonders: How many young girls have been forced to engage in sex in those four years that the sheriff and others stayed outside while the elders practiced their religious beliefs?

The men and women of Yearning for Zion Ranch seem to have no papers, no identification, no proof of citizenship, names that change with each interview, and under their care and stewardship, many underage girls, some with their own babies.

All they share in common is their silent loyalty to Jeffs, who remains in an Arizona jail following his Utah conviction. He still has to stand trial on other pending charges: multiple counts of incest, sexual conduct with a minor and conspiracy to conduct sexual conduct with a minor.

All those charges predate the Eldorado raid.

The Eldorado elders have retained great lawyers, and they are positioning the sect leaders and their followers as victims of religious persecution and a heavy-handed government.

The real victims, make no mistake, are the young girls, those who reached puberty and were forced to have sex with grown men, and the even younger girls right behind them who soon enough would have been ripe for the picking.