[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Pete Santilli insists that militiamen saved his life from drug cartels trying to assassinate him during his “Border Convoy,” a publicity stunt held earlier this month to focus anger about Central American refugee children arriving in the United States.

But his fellow participants are not so sure, leading to a far-right internecine feud between Santilli and his chief cohort in the convoy, a longtime Tea Party organizer named Eric Odom, who Santilli has accused of “co-opting” and “psy-opping” the event and smearing him with accusations of alcoholism, and Odom dismissing Santilli as a “borderline lunatic.”

While problems trailed the convoy along its entire route through the Southwest, tensions culminated in an early morning panic whipped up by militiamen warning that the hotel in Van Horn, Texas, was surrounded by drug cartels preparing to ambush the convoy.

As the convoy described events in a press release, “most convoy members didn’t even know ‘Operation Secure Our Border’ Citizen Militia groups were watching over them for their own protection. But thanks to the quick and decisive evacuation ordered by the Texas Citizen Militia groups, convoy members may very well have been protected from potentially dangerous and deadly outcomes.”

However, Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carrillo ridiculed the report and said it was most likely “fake.” “Nothing of that nature happened here,” he said.

According to the El Paso Times, Carrillo’s detectives interviewed several hotel owners in the area and could find no witnesses that the event had even occurred. Carrillo also noted that there was no Comfort Inn in Van Horn. (Odom now said that the press release misidentified the hotel. It was the Quality Inn in Van Horn, not the Comfort Inn.)

Santilli, however, has wasted no time denouncing Odom.

“This Border Convoy thing was an absolute bloody train wreck, by design,” he told listeners last week. “It was designed that way. It was designed to be train wrecked. You were designed to be co-opted. Your original concept of stopping buses was so powerful that it drew the likes of probably one of the most disgusting co-opters in the Tea Party and Conservative movement, in my opinion, and his name is Eric Odom.”