A Safe Haven, But for Whom?
The U.S. provides sanctuary for many of the world's most wanted
Jezdimir Topic, alleged to have been a guard at the Serbian prison camp Trnopolje, a converted schoolhouse where numerous cases of murder, rape, and torture reportedly occurred during the Yugoslavian war. Topic now lives comfortably in Boston.
Frustrated by the INS's seeming inability to weed out such immigrants, human-rights groups have filed civil lawsuits against alleged war criminals seeking damages for victims. The Center for Justice and Accountability is suing two former Salvadoran generals now living in Florida, Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova and Jose Guillermo Garcia, on behalf of a Salvadoran woman living on the West Coast. The woman, identified in court papers only as Jane Doe, alleges that in 1979, when she was eight months pregnant, she was kidnapped, raped, and tortured by members of the Salvadoran National Guard. The Salvadoran officials are also being sued by the brother of Ita Ford, one of three nuns kidnapped, raped, and murdered by National Guard members in 1980. Kurt Klaus, the lawyer for both men, says his clients are innocent.
Earlier this year, the Center for Justice and Accountability also filed a suit on behalf of a Chilean woman, Zita Cabello-Barrueto, against Armando Fernandez-Larios, a member of the Chilean secret police under former dictator Augusto Pinochet. (Pinochet is in custody in London awaiting extradition to Spain to face torture charges.) The suit alleges that Fernandez-Larios was part of a military commission, the "Caravan of Death," that executed 72 political prisoners in northern Chile, including the plaintiff's brother, Winston Cabello, a government economist. In 1995, Cabello-Barrueto learned that Fernandez-Larios was living in Florida. He had gone to Washington, D.C., eight years earlier to testify at a trial in connection with the 1976 murder of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier. Fernandez-Larios was one of three Chilean intelligence officials charged with the killing. He was released from prison after serving an abbreviated sentence on a reduced charge of accessory to murder.
The fruits of these lawsuits have been bittersweet. In 1991, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York sued former Guatemalan Defense Minister Hector Gramajo as he graduated from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He was blamed for the deaths of thousands of Guatemalan Indians in the early 1980s and with the 1989 rape and torture of an American nun, Dianna Ortiz. In 1995, a Boston federal judge granted the plaintiffs over $47 million in damages. Gramajo left the country--without paying a dime. A Miami court ordered former Haitian dictator Prosper Avril to pay $41 million to six Haitians who alleged they had been tortured and imprisoned for opposing his military regime. Avril simply returned to Haiti.
Red Terror. Perhaps the case that best sums up the ease with which alleged war criminals can start life anew in the United States is a 1990 lawsuit filed against an Ethiopian man, Kelbessa Negewo. The plaintiffs, Atlanta resident Edgegayehu Taye and two other Ethiopian women, one now living in Los Angeles and the other in Canada, charged they were tortured, beaten, and raped by troops under Negewo's supervision during Ethiopia's so-called Red Terror campaign in the 1970s. Taye later sought exile in the United States, where she was getting on with her life. Then one day in 1990 she ran into Negewo, who was working as a bellman at the same Atlanta hotel where she worked as a waitress. She sued. A federal district judge awarded the three women $500,000 each in damages.
Soon after the ruling, in a move that left even the judge scratching his head, the INS granted Negewo citizenship.
advertisement
