JAKARTA, Indonesia — They have long worked illegally in the shadows of Indonesia’s police stations, attorney general’s office and courts, the common link in what is called Indonesia’s “judicial mafia.” Called “markuses,” they are middlemen who can persuade corrupt police officers, prosecutors and judges to drop a case against a client for the right amount of money.
The markuses gained national attention last month after they were featured prominently in wiretaps involving a long-running battle between the nation’s law enforcement agencies and anticorruption officials.
With that leap into unaccustomed and unwanted prominence, they were transformed overnight into symbols of this country’s broken justice system. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that he would make eradicating the judicial mafia of markuses and corrupt officials a priority of his second term.
Indonesians, who in the past were aware only dimly, if at all, of the markuses, are now urged to report wrongdoing to the government by mailing in envelopes marked with the message “Ganyang mafia,” or just “Crush the mafia.”
But lawyers, officials and watchdog groups warn that uprooting the so-called judicial mafia will require an overhaul of the country’s law enforcement and justice systems. They say that Mr. Yudhoyono, who shies away from confrontation, is unlikely to push through changes inside the nation’s powerful police force, attorney general’s office and courts, institutions that are considered among Indonesia’s most corrupt.
Most experts agree that it will take years, or even decades, to reform the criminal justice system in Indonesia, which is ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt countries by Transparency International, a Berlin-based anticorruption organization. The 32-year rule of President Suharto, which ended just a decade ago, left behind law enforcement agencies that perpetuate graft, the experts say.
Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the leader of a new presidential task force to reform the justice system, said Indonesia’s criminal justice system was fertile ground for middlemen representing moneyed clients.
“We want to have a system that is fair for everybody, not dependent on whether he or she has power or money,” Mr. Mangkusubroto said in an interview, adding that cleaning up the current system would take years.
Last month, wiretapped conversations revealed a plot by a prominent businessman, along with police officials and prosecutors, to fabricate a case against officials at the Corruption Eradication Commission, the nation’s chief anticorruption agency. The people heard in the wiretaps spoke of bribing key officials by handing out cash through a network of middlemen.
What shocked most Indonesians was not the brazenness of the speakers but the fact that the practices mentioned in the wiretaps seemed routine. By contrast, Indonesians without money have seemed increasingly at the mercy of a legal system that metes out severe punishment for seemingly harmless offenses.
“There is no normative standard of punishment in this country,” said Adnan Buyung Nasution, 75, one of Indonesia’s most prominent lawyers. “The punishment is very heavy in some cases, very light in others. That’s why people are disgusted at the justice system.”
The investigation, prosecution and judgment of a particular case follow rules dictated less by the law than by the free market of the middlemen. “It depends on how much money you have,” said Mr. Nasution, who recently led a presidential advisory group that recommended far-reaching changes in the country’s law enforcement agencies.
He added: “Each stage — the police, the attorney general’s office, the courts — has its markuses. But there are markuses that are so dominant, they can arrange everything in one package.”
In dealing with the police, the markuses — who are typically relatives of police officials, lawyers, journalists or anyone with contacts in law enforcement agencies — bribe police officials on behalf of a client in trouble with the law. With money, they persuade the police to change evidence or drop a case, according to watchdog groups, police officials and lawyers.
Because the money is usually distributed to the officer’s supervisors, police officers with a good nose for potentially lucrative cases tend to rise quickly in the force, said Neta Pane, executive director of Indonesia Police Watch, a private group.
Mr. Pane said that police officers had a strong incentive to engage in corrupt practices from the very beginning of their careers. To get into the national police force, applicants must pay bribes, which here in the capital range from $6,000 to $9,000, he said. Typically, the applicants are in a hurry to repay the sum, which they have borrowed and cannot repay on a low-ranking officer’s monthly salary of $100.
“The system requires corruption to survive,” Mr. Pane said.
Aryanto Sutadi, 58, a retired official who ran the national police’s legal division until last month, estimated that 25 percent of police officers bent the law to earn extra income. But Mr. Sutadi estimated that 90 percent of police officers accepted some form of “gifts.”
“If someone is satisfied with the service he has received and gives gifts to show his gratitude, that is not considered bad,” Mr. Sutadi said.
Accepting gifts is an illegal, though commonly accepted, practice among police officers, prosecutors and judges. In fact, many people draw an ethical line between those who actively seek bribes and those who passively accept gifts. Markuses also hand out gifts on behalf of a client or a lawyer.
“That’s our culture,” said Otto C. Kaligis, a prominent lawyer whose office walls are adorned with photographs of him standing next to Suharto and President Obama. “Then it’s O.K. No problem if the clients, as a sign of gratitude, are willing to give.”
But Mr. Kaligis said a lawyer unwilling to give gifts to judges would not win many cases. “When, for instance, as a lawyer you open a law firm and then you lose 40 percent, then you are not marketable,” he said.
So far, attempts to reform or monitor the police, prosecutors and judges have been largely cosmetic, experts say.
Created in 2005 to oversee the nation’s judges, the Judicial Commission recently moved into a gleaming, six-story building with the capacity to house a staff far larger than the commission’s 200 employees. Inside, the commission’s posters display mafia-like judges wielding guns and holding stacks of money. The posters urge people to report corrupt judges, saying, “Don’t let them kill justice.”
Since its founding, the commission has received 6,555 complaints about judges, said Busyro Muqoddas, the commission’s chairman, adding that Indonesia had 6,900 judges. But with limited powers of investigation and no authority to summon judges for interrogation, the commission has been able to recommend sanctions against only 39 judges suspected of corruption.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court, which oversees the conduct of all the nation’s courts, has mostly ignored the commission’s recommendations, choosing instead to protect colleagues, Mr. Muqoddas said.
Of the 39 judges suspected of corruption, only 2 have been fired, for accepting bribes.
A bill to strengthen the commission’s powers sits in the Parliament, Mr. Muqoddas said, but he added that he held little hope for its passage. Parliament, ranked as the country’s most corrupt institution by Transparency International, recently announced a list of 55 priority bills it planned to take up next year.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed narcotics and terrorism conspiracy charges on Friday against three West Africans they said were associates of Al Qaeda and a related terrorist group, marking the first time such charges had been brought against people said to be linked to Al Qaeda.
The men, who were taken into custody on Wednesday in Ghana and flown to the United States on Thursday night, were arrested after a four-month investigation in which paid informants working with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration posed as members of a Colombian terrorist group, according to court papers.
Federal authorities have long maintained that Al Qaeda has been involved in drug trafficking, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.
The two informants approached the defendants and sought their assistance in transporting and providing security for cocaine shipments as large as a ton from West Africa, through North Africa and on to Spain, according to the papers. One informant posed as a Lebanese radical who represented the Colombian group, the FARC, and the other as a member of the group.
“Today’s allegations reflect the emergence of a worrisome alliance between Al Qaeda and transnational narcotics traffickers,” Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney in Manhattan said in a statement announcing the arrests. “As terrorists diversify into drugs, however, they provide us with more opportunities to incapacitate them and cut off the funding for future acts of terror.”
The three men in custody were identified as Oumar Issa, Harouna Touré and Idriss Abelrahman. They were charged with conspiracy to commit narco terrorism and conspiracy to provide material support to terrorist groups — Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The court papers in the case, an 18-page criminal complaint unsealed in United States District Court in Manhattan, detail the international sting operation that ensnared the three men, all members of what prosecutors described as “a criminal organization operating in the West African countries of Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali.”
The group had close ties to Al Qaeda, which was to provide security for the last leg of the drug shipment’s journey through the North African Desert, according to the complaint.
The two informants met with the men several times from September to December to negotiate the terms and plan the shipments, sessions that were secretly recorded by the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to the complaints. The complaints said the informants also communicated with the defendants by telephone and e-mail as they made arrangements.
Mr. Touré initially cited a transportation price of $2,000 per kilogram of cocaine, as the men discussed shipments ranging from 500 to 1,000 kilograms, the complaint said. But he later upped the price to $10,000 a kilo, citing his own costs and expenses, including paying people along the route. While the informants initially balked, they eventually agreed, according to the complaint.
The three defendants identified themselves to the informants as associates of Al Qaeda and said they had provided similar services to the terrorist group in the past, officials said.
The men were set to be arraigned Friday afternoon before Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV in United States District Court in Lower Manhattan.
A defense lawyer for Mr. Abelrahman, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, said he was reviewing the charges.
James M. Roth, a lawyer for Mr. Toure, declined to comment; Mr. Issa’s lawyer, Julia Gatto, could not be reached for comment.
The three men were charged under statutes passed in 2006 that give federal drug agents the authority to prosecute narcotics and terrorism crimes committed anywhere in the world if a link between a drug offense and a specified act of terrorism or a terrorist organization can be established.
By Griff Witte Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, December 17, 2009; A12
ISLAMABAD -- Pakistan'sSupreme Court nullified on Wednesday a controversial deal that had given President Asif Ali Zardari and thousands of other government officials amnesty from prosecution on corruption charges, a decision likely to further weaken Zardari's shaky hold on power.
The ruling could open the door to additional legal challenges against Zardari. Although he still has immunity from prosecution under the constitution, opponents plan to contest that by arguing that Zardari is technically ineligible for the presidency.
The court decision comes as the United States pushes for an expanded strategic partnership with Pakistan to help combat the growing threat from Islamist extremist groups, including the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The United States is sending 30,000 additional troops to neighboring Afghanistan and wants Pakistan to step up efforts on its side of the border to keep militants from finding refuge there.
But Zardari's ability to make decisions about the level of Pakistani cooperation with the United States has been compromised by his struggle to simply hold on to his job -- a task likely to be made more difficult by the court ruling.
The ripple effects
The decision to overturn the amnesty deal had been expected, but the 17-member Supreme Court panel went further, requesting that Swiss authorities open years-old corruption cases against Zardari that had been set aside.
It was unclear whether the ruling Wednesday would have any bearing on the decisions of the Swiss courts. Zardari is suspected to have received millions in illegal commissions from two Swiss companies, and he was convicted in 2003 on money laundering charges by a Swiss magistrate. The conviction was later suspended. Zardari has denied the allegations and has said they are politically motivated.
The Pakistani court's ruling had the immediate effect of reopening cases against thousands of politicians and bureaucrats that had been frozen under the amnesty deal. Four government ministers had been protected under the amnesty. One, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, had been convicted and may now be forced to appeal his conviction.
The amnesty deal, known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance, was forged in 2007 as part of an agreement between former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and then-President Pervez Musharraf. The U.S.-backed deal allowed Bhutto and her husband, Zardari, to return to Pakistan without facing prosecution over long-standing corruption allegations.
Bhutto was assassinated months later, and Zardari succeeded her as leader of the Pakistan People's Party. After the PPP won elections last year and Musharraf stepped down, Zardari became president.
President vs. the people
In the hearings leading up to the court's decision, the government had not defended the unpopular deal. But the ruling is likely to be a major distraction for the government as prosecutors dust off old cases. The Supreme Court said it would establish a special commission to ensure the cases are prosecuted vigorously.
Zardari spokesman Farhatullah Babar said the government would respect the court's decision, but he reiterated that the president, by virtue of his office, remained immune from prosecution under the constitution. "We believe this does not affect the president of Pakistan," he said.
Others had different ideas. Roedad Khan, a retired civil servant who was one of the petitioners who had challenged the amnesty, said the decision would "destroy" Zardari.
Khan called Zardari "a man who has looted and plundered this poor country. Is there one law for Zardari and one law for the 160 million people of Pakistan? No, there is one law for everyone."
Zardari is deeply unpopular in Pakistan, in large part because of persistent rumors of corruption. He spent 11 years in prison in Pakistan but was not convicted.
Still, opponents argue that he is not eligible for the presidency because of the suspended Swiss conviction and because he fled Pakistan rather than appear in court to face charges. Under the constitution, a person convicted of a crime is ineligible to be president.
Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, a veteran lawyer who argued that the amnesty deal should be nullified, called the decision "a victory for truth" and "a victory for the country." He predicted that "many public office holders will be relieved of their services" because of the ruling.
Wednesday's decision deepens the divide between Zardari and the Supreme Court, particularly its independent-minded chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. The chief justice had been removed from his job by Musharraf, and Zardari angered many lawyers because he took months to reinstate Chaudhry.
In addition to facing judicial challenges, Zardari's weak civilian government has had an uneasy relationship with the military, which has run this country for about half its history. On a visit to Pakistan this week, Gen. David H. Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command, told Pakistani journalists that he saw no reason to think that the military intended to seize power. Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain contributed to this report.
ACCOUNTING MISMANAGED $1.4 billion in payments to end 13-year-old battle
By David A. Fahrenthold Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Obama administration said Tuesday it would pay $1.4 billion to a group of American Indians who said the government mismanaged a century-old system of Indian land trusts.
The settlement, which would end one of the epic lawsuits of modern Washington, would be divided among more than 300,000 people, the descendants of Indians to whom the government assigned plots of tribal land under an 1887 law. Many of the plots are controlled by hundreds or even thousands of heirs, and a federal system designed to track claims and distribute revenue generated by the parcels has broken down.
The administration said it would spend $2 billion in addition to the payouts to try to buy back sole ownership of the many plots, one tiny fraction at a time.
The deal, announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., would end a lawsuit that has lasted 13 years, coloring the relationship between federal and tribal governments with a bitter reminder of the Indian wars. Officials said they intended the settlement to create trust between Washington and "Indian country."
"We are here today to right a past wrong," Salazar said. Of the plaintiffs the government had battled so long, he said: "They [brought] a national injustice to the attention of our country."
This suit might be best known as the case that took the Interior Department off e-mail: In 2001, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth determined that the Indian trust accounts were vulnerable to hackers and issued an order that caused the department to sever connections to the Internet.
But its origins go back to the administration of President Grover Cleveland, when Congress passed a law allotting individual tribe members parcels of 40 to 160 acres, to be held in trust by the government for 25 years. In most cases, the land never left government hands.
Today, the Interior Department manages more than 100,000 parcels, totaling more than 56 million acres. When these lands are used for grazing, mining or drilling for oil or natural gas, the revenue is supposed to be split among its owners. But the system quickly devolved into an accounting mess. The number of owners multiplied, since many Indians died without wills and their children inherited equal ownership fractions. The parcels are split 4 million ways.
To make things worse, government records for tracking them were kept in poorly maintained warehouses, where some were destroyed by fires, floods or insects. Owners complained that they were being paid irregularly, improperly or not at all.
In 1996, they filed suit. Since then, officials said, the case has encompassed dozens of hearings, 192 days of trial proceedings and multiple appeals to higher courts. And two different judges: In 2006, an appeals court removed Lamberth from the case after finding that he appeared to be biased against the Interior Department.
The settlement announced Tuesday must be voted on by Congress and approved by the new judge, James Robertson. At a ceremony honoring Robertson on Tuesday, Lamberth praised his handling of the case and said this was "a great day for Americans and for all Native Americans."
Under its terms, officials said, most Indian shareholders would get a check for $1,000. Some could get more, however, if the judge decides they lost more money because of federal mismanagement. Some of the $1.4 billion will also be used to pay attorneys' fees.
The plaintiffs had asked for many more billions. But Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff and a resident of the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, said her side did not want the case to drag on further.
"This is significantly less than the full accounting to which individual Indians are entitled," Cobell said at the news conference. "We are compelled to settle now by the sobering realization that our class grows smaller" as older members have died, she said.
In addition, the settlement would use $2 billion to begin buying back 37,000 of the most heavily subdivided parcels of land, so that the federal government would be the sole owner.
David Hayes, a deputy secretary of the Interior, said that the newly bought land would be owned by the federal government but that individual tribes would be able to decide what to do with it. Hayes said the government did not want to give up the land, fearing it might allow non-Indians to buy parcels on reservations.
An official for the National Congress of American Indians said the divided ownership has made it difficult for tribal governments to build schools or health clinics because it was difficult to convince a majority of the owners to agree.
"We had kids going to school in double-wide trailer houses, that were running from double-wide to double-wide when it was 40 below zero," said Richard Monette, the former chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, whose reservation is in North Dakota. "We got money for a school, but we didn't have a place to put it" because the land was shared among so many owners, he said.
Staff writer Carol Leonnig contributed to this report.
Obama Should Commit to Long-Term Strategy for Civilian Protection
December 1, 2009
(Washington, DC) - US President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan plan needs to strengthen civilian protection through ending the impunity and warlordism that have fuelled the insurgency, Human Rights Watch said today.
There is no magic number of US troops that will bring security to Afghanistan," said Rachel Reid, Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch. "What matters is what the troops are there to do, and how they can enhance a long-term strategy to improve Afghans' human rights."
Human Rights Watch said that the recent focus of the US government on corruption and rule of law in Afghanistan is long overdue, and will require sustained institutional reform. Improving governance and rule of law depends upon a clear strategy for combating corruption, removing warlords, and holding rights violators accountable.
"If the US wants Afghans to have a government they can believe in, there needs to be effective mechanisms for bringing human rights abusers to justice," said Reid.
Human Rights Watch said plans to focus on building the capacity of the Afghan army and police are encouraging, but pointed out that expansion ambitions need to be restricted to a force that is sustainably sized with sufficient training to ensure basic rights protections. The police should be capable of fighting crime as well as providing security against insurgents.
Human Rights Watch expressed concern regarding the US military's interest in increasing use of tribal militias through the Afghan Public Protection Force and the Community Defense Initiative. Previous attempts to foster such auxiliary forces in Afghanistan have shown that they can increase insecurity and human rights abuses if recruits have little training, vague rules of engagement, and a weak chain of command.
In November the US Congress agreed to allow the US military to use unspecified sums from a 2010 $1.2 billion fund for "reintegration" programs with insurgent factions, without identifying who or how such programs will be implemented.
A poorly implemented program using large sums of cash to buy the short-term allegiance of fighters has the potential to add to the corruption and empowerment of malign actors," said Reid. "Improving security, governance, and the rule of law will take time - there are no shortcuts."
NEW ORLEANS — Since the first days after Hurricane Katrina, when the streets were still under water, many residents of New Orleans and its surroundings have maintained that the flood that wrecked their lives was the government’s fault, and that the government should pay for it.
On Wednesday night came news that many had hoped for but few had believed would ever actually happen: a federal judge agreed.
“My head is spinning,” said Pam Dashiell, a co-director of the Lower Ninth Ward Sustainability Project and a 20-year resident of the neighborhood. “Maybe things are really breaking for the people.”
The sense of vindication was widespread, but the practical implications were less clear. The morning after Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr.’s decision that the Army Corps of Engineers’ negligent maintenance of a major navigation channel led to major flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward and the adjacent St. Bernard Parish, a pleasantly startled New Orleans was still trying to decipher what it meant.
Was it an opening for tens of thousands of lawsuits, or a big class-action lawsuit, that could add up to billions of dollars in compensation for residents? Or was it leverage for negotiating a broader, regionwide settlement with the government? Some experts suggested that it was a welcome but ultimately symbolic ruling that could be overturned on appeal.
Charles S. Miller, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said that the government was still reviewing the decision.
“We have made no decision as to what the government’s next step will be in this matter,” he said in a statement.
But given the potential of liability, legal experts are expecting the government to appeal.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, where the case would go, has a record of hostility to plaintiffs in environmental cases, said Oliver Houck, a law professor at Tulane University. But, he said, Judge Duval’s decision is so technical and packed with details — it came with a 33-page appendix of graphs, charts and maps — that there are only a few areas where it would be exposed to a reversal.
“For an appellate court to reverse him on the facts is unthinkable,” Professor Houck said.
In 2008, Judge Duval dismissed a lawsuit arising from drainage canal breaches that flooded much of the city, ruling that a 1928 act gave the corps immunity for damages that came from a flood protection project. But his decision was scathing nonetheless, and he insisted that the government should not be free “from posterity’s judgment concerning its failure to accomplish what was its task.”
Wednesday’s decision was about a different corps project, the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a navigation channel known as MR-GO (pronounced Mister Go). In the 156-page decision, the judge wrote nearly as much about complicated immunity issues as he did in determining that the corps’s negligent maintenance of the channel actually caused the flooding in two areas, including the Lower Ninth Ward.
Lawyers for the corps had raised a variety of immunity shields in addition to the Flood Control Act, and the judge knocked these down one by one. With every one, though, he created a potential opportunity for higher judges to overturn the decision on appeal.
The judge ruled that the corps was liable for damages because, he said, it should have been filing environmental impact statements as the landscape around the channel significantly changed: wetlands had disappeared, levee banks had eroded, and the channel had more than doubled in width.
This is a conclusion of law rather than of fact, experts said, and thus is open territory for appeals judges. When legal opinion is at issue, said Howard J. Bashman, a Pennsylvania lawyer specializing in appellate practice, “the court gets to make up its own mind, without any deference paid to the trial judge in how the law was applied.”
At a Thursday morning news conference, the plaintiffs’ lawyers painted the decision in superlative terms, even comparing it to the victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans.
The lawyers said they hoped the decision, and the possibility of thousands more cases following, would compel Congress and the Obama administration to agree to some kind of larger settlement for the entire city, like the one for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“It’s time that we stopped litigating and started negotiating,” said Pierce O’Donnell, one of the lead lawyers.
Mr. O’Donnell said that he and the other lawyers had scheduled meetings on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks at which they would push for damage compensation for property owners, billions of dollars to rebuild infrastructure projects, and restoration of the area’s coastal wetlands. They will also demand a widespread overhaul of the Army Corps.
For now, however, much of the city was just enjoying a rare sense of triumph. Friends who were watching the news Wednesday night grabbed for their cellphones. At a coastal planning meeting in St. Bernard Parish, people broke into applause.
Mark Madary, who was on the St. Bernard Parish Council at the time of Hurricane Katrina, had campaigned against MR-GO ever since he heard the forecasts of catastrophe at a sportsmen’s league meeting in 1978. He said he never thought the case would even make it to court, but now expects a regionwide settlement.
“Now that the corps has been thrown over and exposed, it’s their duty,” Mr. Madary said.
Others in New Orleans, a city that has become accustomed to disappointment over four long years, were not as elated.
“It is an answer to something that was obvious from the beginning, and we’re glad we finally got a federal judge to agree with us,” said Robert Green Sr., a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, who lost his mother and granddaughter in the flooding.
But it was clear that Mr. Green was more interested in talking about a grocery store that could be coming to the neighborhood.
“The lawyers are happy and the people are happy,” Mr. Green said of the decision. “But at the same time, we waited four years. So you deal with the important issues that are right in front of you.”
A shift to civilian court Four co-conspirators also will be transferred
By Peter Finn and Carrie Johnson Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, November 14, 2009
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and four co-conspirators will be tried in Manhattan federal courthouse less than a mile from Ground Zero, the Justice Department announced Friday, the most concrete demonstration yet of the Obama administration's desire to reassert the primacy of the criminal justice system in responding to terrorist acts.
In planning to transfer Mohammed and his co-defendants from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to civilian court, the administration takes a significant step toward reversing the Bush administration's practice of declaring suspected members of al-Qaeda and related groups to be unlawful enemy combatants subject to extra-judicial or military detention. The decision also adds some momentum to the administration's lagging effort to close the military prison camp on the southeastern tip of Cuba.
"For over 200 years, our nation has relied on a faithful adherence to the rule of law to bring criminals to justice and provide accountability to victims," said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. "Once again we will ask our legal system to rise to that challenge, and I am confident it will answer the call with fairness and justice."
But the effort to criminalize the events of Sept. 11 and accord Mohammed the full panoply of rights enjoyed in a federal trial has infuriated and dismayed Republicans, as well as some organizations of victims' families. They argued that military commissions at Guantanamo Bay offered a secure environment, a proper forum for war crimes, and adequate legal protections for a ruthless enemy.
"The Obama Administration's irresponsible decision to prosecute the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York City puts the interests of liberal special interest groups before the safety and security of the American people," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) in a statement. "The possibility that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators could be found 'not guilty' due to some legal technicality just blocks from Ground Zero should give every American pause."
The trial of the man the 9/11 Commission Report called a "self-cast star -- the superterrorist" will probably draw extraordinary attention and could burrow into the raw details of the Sept. 11 plot and its fallout, from its conception in Afghanistan to the treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at CIA "black sites" around the world. Officials said they hope that in placing Mohammed before a jury of ordinary Americans, he will be denied the warrior status he craves.
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other officials applauded the decision, but on the streets of Lower Manhattan, the financial district wreathed in ash when the World Trade Center came down in 2001, reaction was more nuanced.
"The jurisdiction of the crime is New York, so I guess it makes sense," said Gwen Taylor, an office worker grabbing her midday meal at a lunch truck, the stainless steel All American Diner. "However, I would rather try them in Guantanamo. Bringing them here and trying them here may cause other radicals to show up and protest. Or it might provoke them into doing something in support of their brethren. But I really understand why they have to do it here."
Shaka Trahan, 34, displayed no such ambivalence. "Wow," he said. "I look at it like this: Wherever the crime took place, that's where they should try them."
Speaking to reporters in Japan, President Obama defended Holder's decision. "I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheik Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice," Obama said. "The American people insist on it, and my administration will insist on it."
Difficult deadline
Although Guantanamo Bay will soon lose some of its most infamous inhabitants, the administration has all but acknowledged that the facility itself cannot be closed by Jan. 22, the one-year deadline Obama set in an executive order shortly after taking office. Bruising and often unexpected political, diplomatic and legal problems have slowed the administration's effort to empty the military detention center.
The four other alleged key players in the Sept. 11 conspiracy to face trial in Manhattan are Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni; Tawfiq bin Attash, a Yemeni better known as Khallad; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mohammed's nephew and a Pakistani also known as Ammar Al-Baluchi; and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a Saudi.
The administration is required to give Congress 45 days' notice of its intent to transfer detainees so that the Sept. 11 defendants will not be immediately moved to the United States.
The administration also announced that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi accused of orchestrating the bombing of the USS Cole when it was docked off the coast of Yemen in 2000, will be tried at a military commission. Holder said one factor in deciding to keep Nashiri's case within the military justice system was that the attack targeted a U.S. warship docked in foreign territory, rather than a civilian target on American soil. Seventeen sailors were killed in the bombing.
The cases of four other detainees who had been charged in military tribunals will remain in the military system, officials said. They include Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian citizen, who is accused of killing a U.S. Army sergeant in a grenade attack in Afghanistan in 2002. His case is controversial because he was a minor at the time of the alleged attack, and his attorneys, as well as international human rights monitors, argue that he was a child soldier who should be rehabilitated, not prosecuted.
While in CIA custody, Mohammed was subjected to a series of coercive interrogation techniques, culminating in waterboarding. Asked about the prospect that defense attorneys could use the acknowledged waterboarding to derail the case, Holder said he would not have authorized the prosecutions if he were not convinced the outcome would be successful.
Emptying Guantanamo
Prosecutors must still present evidence before a New York grand jury, and while the specific charges they will seek remain unclear, Holder said Friday he was all but certain to order the death penalty against the five Sept. 11 conspirators. Mohammed and his co-defendants have said at Guantanamo Bay they want to be executed so to achieve martyrdom.
Of the 215 detainees who remain at Guantanamo Bay, nearly 90 have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in third countries, according to an administration official. But more than 30 of those are Yemeni, and the administration is reluctant to send them home to a country plagued by a resurgent al-Qaeda and civil strife. A deal to send some Yemenis to Saudi Arabia for rehabilitation is all but dead, the official said. Other detainees are resisting repatriation, and the administration's special envoy, Daniel Fried, is still searching for enough countries to resettle the rest.
As many as 40 detainees could ultimately be brought to trial -- some in federal court and some in military commissions. Both federal and military prosecutors have also been discussing plea agreements with lawyers for detainees, according to sources who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.
Excluding those detainees destined for transfer or trial still leaves as many as 75 inmates who will probably be held in some form of prolonged detention because they are too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted -- a sizable category not anticipated by some in the administration until they started to read classified files, a number of government officials said privately.
The administration has yet to identify and refurbish facilities in the United States for both military trials and indefinite detention. That process could take at least eight months, according to Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, former deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in the Bush administration, who studied the logistics involved in 2006.
Human rights groups welcomed the prospect of federal trials.
"The transfer of these cases is a huge victory for restoring due process and the rule of law, as well as repairing America's international standing, an essential part of ensuring our national security," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. The organization, along with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, provided legal assistance to the five individuals accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks.
The ACLU and other human rights and civil liberties organizations continue to balk at the administration's decision to continue to use a revised system of military commissions for some detainees, and are stridently opposed to prolonged detention without trial.
Other human rights activists say military commissions, as recently restructured by Congress to provide more due process rights to defendants, can be appropriate for some detainees.
"We applaud the administration's recognition that both the law of war and domestic criminal law are appropriate tools" against al-Qaeda, said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. "It makes sense that those who killed civilians in New York face justice in federal court there. And using military tribunals to try those who attack military objectives overseas as part of a self-declared war on the United States is consistent with the law of war so long as those trials are in fact fair."
Staff writer Karl Vick in New York and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
After Manufactured Charges and Unfair Trial, Activist Forced to Leave the Country
November 7, 2009
(New York) – Turkmenistan’s release of the environmental activist Andrei Zatoka from prison on November 6, 2009, is a welcome development, but reports that the authorities effectively forced him to leave the country and may have confiscated his apartment, having already brought false charges against him, are troubling, Human Rights Watch said today.
The Dashaguz Province Court commuted Zatoka’s five-year sentence to a fine of the equivalent of about $350.
“We are very happy that Andrei Zatoka is no longer behind bars,” said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The charges against him were completely bogus, and he should never have been in prison in the first place.”
Zatoka had been sentenced to five years in prison on charges of “causing bodily harm,” following an incident in which a man attacked him in a market on October 20.
According to Zatoka, he was given to understand by the authorities that he would have to give up his apartment and immediately leave the country that had been his home for 27 years. Friends who had been helping him to pack were summarily kicked out of the apartment by the authorities, leaving Zatoka and his wife to pack on their own.
On November 6, the United States government issued a statement expressing concern about Zatoka’s trial.
“We continue to be deeply concerned about the safety and well-being of activists and their families in Turkmenistan,” Cartner said. “We urge the international community to support this jeopardized community.”
MILAN — In a landmark ruling on Wednesday, an Italian judge convicted a C.I.A. station chief and 22 other Americans accused of being C.I.A. agents of kidnapping in the 2003 abduction of a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan.
An enormous symbolic victory for Italian prosecutors, the case was the first ever to contest the United States practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are captured in one country and taken for questioning in another, presumably one more open to coercive interrogation techniques. The case was widely seen as an implicit indictment of the measures the Bush administration relied on to fight terrorism.
Judge Oscar Magi handed an eight-year sentence to Robert Seldon Lady, a former C.I.A. station chief in Milan, and five-year sentences to 22 other Americans. Three of the other high-ranking Americans were given diplomatic immunity, including Jeffrey Castelli, a former C.I.A. station chief in Rome.
The judge did not convict three high-ranking Italians charged in the abduction, citing state secrecy, and a former head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolò Pollari, also received diplomatic immunity. All the Americans were tried in absentia and are considered fugitives.
Through their court-appointed lawyers, they pleade not guilty.
Italian prosecutors had charged the Americans and seven members of the Italian military intelligence agency in the abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors said he was snatched in broad daylight, flown from an American air base in Italy to a base in Germany and then on to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured.
That Italy would convict intelligence agents of an allied country was seen as a bold move that could set a precedent in other cases.
But the convictions may have little practical effect. They do not seem to change the close relations between the United States and Italy. Nothing new was learned about whether the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had approved the kidnapping. It seemed highly unlikely that anyone, Italian or American, would spend any time in jail.
Armando Spataro, the counter-terrorism prosecutor who brought the case, said he was considering asking the Italian government for an international arrest warrant for the fugitive Americans.
Mr. Spataro said he was pleased with what he called a “very courageous” verdict. He said it was a victory that “we brought the trial to an end, and the facts were shown to be what they were.” In his closing remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Spataro denounced torture and said that the abduction undermined the work of Italian counterterrorism investigators. He also criticized American authorities for not cooperating with the Italian justice system.
Since it began in 2007, the trial has faced many complex legal hurdles. That it has reached this late stage is a testament to the persistence of Mr. Spataro, a veteran of counterterrorism and Mafia investigations, and the earlier rulings of Judge Oscar Magi.
In May, Mr. Magi ruled that there was enough evidence to proceed with the case even after Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled in March that all evidence of coordination between the Italian secret services and the C.I.A. violated state secrecy rules and was therefore inadmissible in the trial.
Judge Magi also asked for $1.45 million in damages for Mr. Nasr and $750,000 for his wife, Ghali Nabila. In separate lawsuits, Mr. Nasr, who is now living in Alexandria, Egypt, is seeking $14 million in damages from the defendants, and h is wife is seeking $7.4 million against the Italian authorities “for their refusal to cooperate” with justice. In August the couple also filed a suit with the European Court of Human Rights.
At the time of his abduction, Mr. Nasr was under surveillance by the Italian authorities, who suspected him of delivering sermons preaching violence from his Milan mosque and recruiting militants to send to Iraq in anticipation of the American invasion. He disappeared for a year after his abduction, finally resurfacing in Egypt, where he called his wife in Italy to say he had been tortured.
The phone call was enough to activate Italian prosecutors, who are required to investigate if there is the possibility a of a crime.
Prosecutors were able to reconstruct his disappearance using cellphone records traced to the American agents. The operatives used false names but left a significant paper trail of unencrypted cellphone records and credit card bills at luxury hotels in Milan, suggesting they believed they were operating with latitude.
Court-appointed lawyers for several of the American defendants claim that prosecutors never adequately established their clients’ identities.
“The CIA has not commented on any of the allegations surrounding Abu Omar,” said Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A spokesman.
Italian government has denied involvement.
In June, Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by a brother of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and widely seen as close to the Italian government, published an interview that it said it had conducted via Skype with Mr. Lady, who has since retired and whose whereabouts are unknown. In the interview, he said of Abu Omar’s abduction, “Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism.”
Among the 22 Americans convicted was Sabrina De Sousa, who worked in the United States Embassy in Rome and was accused of having worked closely with Mr. Lady Ms. De Sousa, who denied the prosecutors’ assertion that she was a C.I.A. operative, sued the State Department for diplomatic immunity.
Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.
If your ex-spouse has run off and taken your children abroad, and the international legal system is failing to bring them back, what are you to do? One option is to call Gus Zamora, a former Army ranger who will, for a hefty fee, get your children back. Operating in a moral gray area beyond the reach of any clear-cut legal jurisdiction, Zamora claims to have returned 54 children to left-behind parents. Here’s the story of number 55.
A sound recording of the moment that became this story’s climax
On a humid Thursday afternoon in February, I am riding in a rented van in Central America with a man who abducts children for a living. The van’s windows are tinted, and Gustavo Zamora Jr. is speeding east on a two-lane highway toward Siquirres, a town buried in the lush abundance of eastern Costa Rica. Gus is planning to snatch Andres, a 9-year-old American boy who has been claimed by too many parents. Sitting behind me is one of them: Todd Hopson, a 48-year-old lawyer from Ocala, Florida, who considers himself the boy’s father, by rights of love and U.S. law. Ahead of me in the front passenger seat is Gus’s 22-year-old son and partner, Gustavo Zamora III.
“That’s too far for a switch,” the elder Zamora, 53, is saying, pointing to a hotel 10 miles outside of Siquirres. His plan is to use two vehicles for what he calls the “recovery,” or “snatchback.” Once he gets Andres, he intends to drive a white Toyota SUV to a switch point, where he will abandon the SUV and put Andres in the van. That way, any witnesses to the snatchback will report seeing the SUV headed west in the direction of the capital, San José—while in fact Gus and Andres will be in the van headed southeast toward Panama. But this hotel won’t work. “We definitely can’t come all the way back down this way,” Gus says. “I want to make time.”
Even by the standards of this American age of divorce, when byzantine custody arrangements are commonplace, Andres’s situation is complex. His biological mother, Helen Zapata, who is from Costa Rica but now lives in America, was married to Todd Hopson for just under three years. Now they are divorced—but they continue to share custody of Andres and, until recently, lived together in Florida. Todd never formally adopted Andres, but he and Helen got an official document in Florida in June of 2008 acknowledging Todd’s legal paternity. They also asked a Florida court to declare Andres “born of their marriage,” a request that was granted the following September and applied retroactively to 2004, the year they divorced.
“I got to thinking—what if something happens to me, and Andres has Helen’s last name? Andres wouldn’t be entitled to any rights or benefits,” Todd told me. “I’m a lawyer and should have been thinking about those things earlier, but I didn’t.”
At the end of June 2008, Helen flew to Costa Rica to spend time there and, with Todd’s support, to enroll in a drug clinic to kick a cocaine habit. Every year, Helen and Andres traveled to Costa Rica to visit not only Helen’s relatives, but also those of Jason Alvarado, who is Andres’s biological father. So that June, as usual, Andres went along, though he didn't want to go—he didn't want to miss Little League season in Ocala, for one thing. Before Helen left the U.S., she called Jason in Costa Rica, asking if he would look after Andres for a few days and saying that she planned to go job-hunting in Costa Rica so that she could move there permanently. “I lied to him” to hide the drug problem, Helen concedes. When Jason learned Helen’s true whereabouts, he called Todd in Florida, thanking him for everything he’d done for Andres and telling him, Todd says, that he planned to raise the boy himself.
Todd felt blindsided. He had thought Andres would be visiting with Helen’s mother and told me he had “no idea that Jason had any interest” in having custody of Andres. As Todd saw it, Jason had never previously tried to gain custody or in any way contributed to Andres’s care. “If you’re going to be the father,” Todd says, “you don’t let someone else pay the freight.”
Todd consulted with the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica, which advised him to proceed with his plan to pick up Andres in early August. But when Todd flew to Costa Rica, Jason would not let him talk to the boy. Todd was livid. He had hoped to reason with Jason, but he realized that the man had no intention of backing down. So Todd got an injunction from a San José court ordering Jason to surrender Andres, and he and Helen accompanied the Costa Rican police when they went to Jason’s office to deliver it. Jason still refused to relinquish Andres, and Todd says the police told him that they didn’t have the right under Costa Rican law to enter Jason’s home and take the boy. Todd returned to Florida while Helen stayed in Costa Rica. Later in August, Jason challenged Helen’s maternal fitness in light of her drug habit and won temporary custody of Andres from a different Costa Rican court.
The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction was drafted in 1980 to resolve custodial claims between what are known as the “taking parent” and the “left-behind parent.” To date, 81 nations, including the United States, in 1988, have agreed to the treaty. The State Department, which enforces the treaty in the U.S., currently has more than 2,000 active cases involving nearly 3,000 children abducted from the U.S. or wrongfully retained abroad. In 2008, it opened 1,082 new files, an increase of more than 25 percent over 2007. (The increase reflects a rise in transnational marriages, and consequently transnational divorces, as well as growing awareness of the Hague Convention.)
Todd considered filing a Hague application with the State Department, but he was skeptical that it would amount to anything because he distrusted what he dismissed as the corrupt legal system in Costa Rica. The application, he feared, could take months to process. He wavered between feelings of fury and utter helplessness. “It breaks my heart,” he said to me. “I don’t have any control.” Determined to regain some, he surfed the Internet for security agencies in Costa Rica, thinking, “I’ll hire some bodyguards and just take Andres.” A man Todd spoke to at one agency said he didn’t do child recoveries but could recommend someone who did: Gus Zamora. “That’s all he does,” the man said.
Gus, a former U.S. soldier, has dyed brown hair and a tidy moustache. He wears Oakley sunglasses and a gold necklace with a pendant shaped like a diver. A martial-arts tattoo adorns the back of his left hand. In Gus’s mind, he’s never stopped being a soldier. In Tampa, his home, he drives a royal-blue BMW with the license plate ABN RGR, referring, respectively, to his time as a member of the 101st Airborne Division and as an Army ranger. When on assignment, like on this scouting mission through eastern Costa Rica, he talks about conducting “recon” and moving his “assets.” His dark eyes flit from side to side, taking stock of his surroundings, and he rarely stops talking, dispensing instructions, expletives, and commentary about his travels to 64 countries and counting.
As Gus continues to drive east, evaluating prospective switch points, we pass pineapple fields before turning left off Highway 32 toward Siquirres. In a minute or so, we are at the town square, a stretch of grass dominated by soccer goalposts. Gus points to a bench where he says a bus picks up Andres for school each day.
Musing aloud, Gus runs through potential scenarios. Where’s the best spot to grab Andres? At the bus stop, on his way to school? A possibility, but Jason or Jason’s father sometimes waits with the boy there. At the school itself? Maybe, depending on how far it is from Highway 32. During one of Helen’s supervised visits with Andres at the home of Jason’s parents?
Across the street from the square is a yellow house with a black iron gate. Todd identifies it as the home of Andres’s paternal grandparents, where Helen has her custodial visits. Gus likes what he sees; Helen could walk through the gate with Andres to the waiting SUV. “They could come and get in,” Gus says. “This is a straight shot. The highway’s right up here,” allowing a quick getaway.
“It’s a very short route,” Todd agrees.
“I like that a lot better. She can walk out the door,” Gus says. “She walks down the street, gets in the van. Boom, gone …”
Helen and Jason grew up in Siquirres. They met as teenagers and started dating seriously when she was 17 and he was 19. Jason moved to San José to attend dental school; Helen finished high school and followed him there. After two years, they began to grow apart. Jason told me he broke up with Helen because she cheated on him. Shortly thereafter, Helen told Jason she was pregnant. According to Helen, Jason wanted her to have an abortion. Jason denies this, adding that he promised to take responsibility for the child if he proved to be the father.
A few weeks later, Helen met Todd Hopson, 18 years her senior. The divorced father of an adult daughter, he was vacationing by himself at a golf resort on the outskirts of San José. Though neither spoke the other’s language, he and Helen ended up spending the rest of his vacation together, touring the Costa Rican capital.
When Todd returned to the U.S., he talked to Helen by phone and exchanged letters with her; a friend of Helen’s acted as interpreter. Todd invited Helen to Florida. When she told him she was pregnant, he said he had already suspected that, and reiterated his invitation. Bringing along the friend as a translator, Helen flew to Florida and moved in with Todd. (The translator left after a couple of weeks, and Helen now speaks English.)
Two months later, Helen’s appendix burst, and she was hospitalized in Ocala. The next day, September 6, 1999, she gave birth to a boy. Todd held the infant before Helen did, marveling at his shock of black hair. When Andres left the hospital, a week before his mother did, Todd cared for him. Todd also paid the hospital bills, which came to $25,000, and financially supported Andres from then on.
Shortly after giving birth, Helen called Jason to tell him he had a son. Jason wanted to make sure that the boy was his, so he asked Helen to send him blood samples, which she did. Jason sent the samples to a laboratory in Costa Rica, and when the test confirmed that he was the father, he wanted to acknowledge his son legally.
When Andres was a year old, Jason flew to Ocala to get a copy of the birth certificate, which named no father. Even though she hadn’t intended to cooperate, Helen helped Jason obtain it, and invited him home, where he visited with her, Andres, and Todd. Jason then registered his paternity with the Costa Rican consulate in Miami, but he didn’t pursue custody, because, he told me, he was willing to allow Andres to live with his mother. In 2001, Helen married Todd.
Meanwhile, Todd bonded with Andres. As a toddler, Andres would cry and chase the car when Todd went to work. When Andres grew older, Todd helped him with his homework and shuttled him to and from school. When Andres developed a fascination with baseball, Todd nurtured it, taking him to batting cages, hiring a private coach, and cheering him on at games. In 2008, they attended spring training for the Yankees, where Andres was thrilled to be within 15 feet of his favorite player, Alex Rodriguez.
Meanwhile, Helen chafed at the quietness of Ocala, escaping to Orlando for days at a time. She liked to throw on tight jeans and high heels and revel in the attention she attracted. Soon, she was seeking out more dangerous highs.
“I’ve been 100 percent the father and, over the last year, maybe 80 percent the mother,” Todd told me.
“Andres trusts Todd more than he trusts me,” Helen says.
In July of 2008, Todd says, Andres called him from Costa Rica in tears. Andres said he wanted to go home and asked, “Daddy, would you come and get me?” Todd counseled him to be patient, promising that he would come to bring him home soon.
Todd Hopson does not come across as the sort of person who would hire a kidnapper. His idea of excitement is watching Seinfeld reruns. He is quick with a one-liner if conversation flags. He clears his throat repeatedly, a nervous tic that may be related to his fondness for cigars. During most of our time in Costa Rica, he wore the same outfit—a khaki shirt with lots of pockets, jeans, and bright-white sneakers. But while Hopson may seem like a softie, his resolve is strong: he would rather break the laws of Costa Rica than his word to Andres.
In late August, even before Todd filed a Hague application, he contacted Gus Zamora, who was feeling the pinch of the recession. It had been nine months since his last recovery. “If somebody asked me to find his dog or cat on a roof, I’d do it,” he joked. Gus offered to do the job for $25,000, including expenses—about a third of his usual rate. Still, Todd had to borrow money against his house to pay the fee. Gus planned to take two trips to do the recovery, and Todd agreed to pay him $10,000 before the first and $15,000 before the second.
In September, Gus flew from Tampa to Costa Rica to rendezvous with Helen and do reconnaissance in Siquirres. From the start, Helen resisted doing a recovery; she didn’t want to break any laws and possibly jeopardize her ability to return to Costa Rica. Todd felt he needed her cooperation, however, because she had access to Andres—and Andres’s passport had her last name on it. (A child traveling with adults without the same last name might raise suspicion.) At Todd’s insistence, Helen agreed to meet with Gus.
One day, while doing surveillance with Helen, Gus saw an opportunity to grab Andres. But Helen called him off, deciding instead to rely on the local lawyer she’d hired to regain custody. By February, however, Helen was fed up. She had just returned from a visit with Andres, and she was furious that she could not take him anywhere—not even an ice-cream shop—on her own.
“After I go through all the pain and drama of childbirth, they come and take my son away,” she told me. “Hell, no. I decided, ‘Gus, come here. I’m not waiting for the law, for Jason, for nothing.’”
The assignment seemed straightforward. Helen had access to Andres through her visitation privileges. Todd had assured Gus that Andres wanted to leave Costa Rica. Under these circumstances, how hard could it be to snatch Andres from Jason or from his paternal grandparents, who often cared for him while Jason, the town dentist, was at work? But Gus had learned from the previous recoveries he had conducted—54 of them, by his count—to proceed with caution.
The price of a mistake, after all, could be imprisonment. Agents like Gus risk arrest for kidnapping or related charges if they’re caught. When Gus first started doing child recoveries, in the late ’80s, he worked for a man named Don Feeney, who pioneered the practice through his company, Corporate Training Unlimited, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In 1993, Feeney was arrested on kidnapping charges for trying to recover two American girls from their mother in Iceland. He served one year in an Icelandic jail.
The risks remain high. In 2006, two agents were arrested in Lebanon for taking two girls from their father. The mother, who had hired the agents, spent seven weeks hiding in Lebanon with the girls because she, too, faced kidnapping charges. Gus says he himself has never served jail time—but a warrant for his arrest, for kidnapping, was issued in Mexico in 1997. (The charges were subsequently dropped.) To reduce the likelihood of his being charged with kidnapping, Gus says, he insists that the parent who hires him be present during a recovery.
A successful snatchback is only the beginning of the journey. Sometimes, the child doesn’t want to go. Early this year, Gus says, an American father agreed to pay him $70,000 to recover his 10-year-old daughter from Japan, assuring him that the girl would acquiesce. Gus went to the Philippines to prepare an escape route by boat. He then flew to Tokyo and, accompanied by the father, hustled the girl into a van as she left home. “That little girl screamed bloody murder,” Gus told me. “She was beating at the windows. Contrary to everything we’d been told, she definitely did not want to go.” After a day of unsuccessfully trying to calm the girl down, he released her. (He says he received half of his fee up front; he wasn’t paid the remainder.) Gus says he would never snatch an unwilling child—though he also describes recoveries in which a resistant child grew more willing over time.
Even if a child wants to go, exiting a country can be challenging, because the forsaken parent will usually report the snatchback to the local authorities. In 2000, George Uhl, a neurologist from Maryland, hired Gus to find and recover his 2-year-old son. The boy was traced to western Hungary, where his mother had left him with her parents. After Gus helped Uhl take the boy, French police intercepted Uhl at Charles de Gaulle airport on his way home. Uhl was released that same day, but his son was returned to the boy’s mother. Gus blames Uhl for failing to follow instructions. He says he told Uhl to pay cash for a direct flight to the United States; Uhl’s mistake was choosing to connect through Paris. At the time, however, there were no direct flights to the U.S. from Venice, where Uhl was dropped off.
In 2007, a woman hired Gus on behalf of her daughter to retrieve her two granddaughters, then 5 and 4, who had allegedly been abused by their father, the daughter’s ex-husband, in Ankara, Turkey. The father had won custody in the Turkish courts and kept the girls’ passports, making it hard for Gus to get the girls out of Europe. Traveling with the grandmother and mother, he got the girls to a neighboring country, but the mother could not get papers from the U.S. Embassy for both girls to travel to the States. The mother and the girls have since gone into hiding. (Names and identifying details have been withheld here because the grandmother and mother’s lawyers say the girls are at risk of more abuse if they are located.) The grandmother blames Gus. “I gave him $86,000, and he left us stranded,” she told me. But Gus says he had set up an exit route for the family through a third European country, adding that the grandmother stiffed him for $25,000.
Gus demands obedience from his clients, and tends to view questioning from them as an affront. Some of his gripes are justified; his clients can be unreliable partners. “The client can be your worst enemy,” he says. “Every now and then you get a perfect client, but unfortunately in this business, you’re dealing with people who are damaged. They’re on their own special shelf.” Custody battles as intractable as the ones that call for Gus’s services rarely involve uncomplicated actors.
Helen raised Gus’s hackles from the start. He didn’t trust her, but he felt he had to work with her because it was she, not Todd, who had access to Andres. While she visited with Andres on the front porch, Helen explained, the grandfather usually went to karate class. That left only the grandmother, who spent a lot of time talking on the phone. It seemed to be a situation from which Andres could be easily extricated.
So as dusk falls on a Friday in February, a day after our initial reconnaissance, I am sitting in the SUV, parked around the corner from the yellow house, while Helen visits with Andres on the porch, waiting for an opportunity to take him and make a break for it. Gus has told her not to try anything unless she has a few minutes when she is completely unobserved. But she is having trouble. In the seat behind me, Gus’s son is reading aloud text messages from Helen. “She still looking,” Helen texts, referring to Andres’s grandmother. “She don’t move.”
A police car passes by. “We’ve been standing in this spot too long,” Gus says. It’s a normal patrol, he adds, but if the car returns, he’s inclined to leave. Then Helen texts: “We can’t do it today.” Gus puts the SUV in gear and drives past the yellow house and a royal-blue Toyota Camry—Jason’s car—parked in front of it.
The following Monday, I am waiting with Gus and Todd in the parking lot of the motel Gus has chosen as the switch point. Inside, the motel has rooms with mirrored ceilings and rainbow-colored wallpaper; the outside is a garish purple. But Gus has been attracted by subtler selling points: it’s only a three-minute drive from the yellow house, and its parking lot is set back from Highway 32, concealed by palm trees. The SUV and the van are parked there, side by side.
Gus is sitting on the back ledge of the van, wearing black cargo pants and a silky gray shirt. Todd is standing nearby, running his hands through his hair, which is slick with sweat. Every few minutes, he takes his cell phone out of his shirt pocket and looks down at it, pushing his glasses up on his nose. When the phone rings at last, Todd jumps. Helen has arrived for her visit, and she has put Andres on the line.
“Hey, Papi, how are you doing?” Todd says, using his nickname for Andres. “You ready to come home soon? What’d you do if you see me? You come running to me, huh?”
Rain starts pouring down, so we take refuge in the van. Gus says the weather reminds him of his days as a ranger in the late 1970s, when one of his instructors, a Vietnam vet, ordered the men to strip off their ponchos in torrential rain. “Men,” Gus says, recalling the sergeant’s instructions, “the best time to catch the enemy with his pants down is when he’s under a poncho, in a defensive situation, with a cup of coffee, feeling sorry for himself. That’s when you should be moving against his position.”
From the porch of the yellow house, Helen texts that the grandfather hasn’t gone to karate. As it becomes clear that, once again, Helen is being too closely observed to initiate the snatchback, Todd grows visibly frustrated and wonders aloud whether one solution might be to slow down “the old man” long enough to keep him from impeding the snatchback. “What if you hire a couple of lowlifes…?”
“It would take me time to fucking do that,” Gus says. For all his tough talk, he doesn’t seem eager to break down doors.
“Okay, okay,” Todd says. “I was just thinking. I don’t mean hurt him, but just to, to delay him, to stall him.”
Gus doesn’t respond. He later tells me that he hasn’t been paid enough for that kind of job.
Breakups know no borders. Lovers from different countries connect, conceive, and in some cases, combust. Their children must weather the aftermath; in the worst cases, they are abducted by a parent and made to live underground. The Hague Permanent Bureau, which collects information about the Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and advises countries about its implementation, does not keep comprehensive global statistics on this phenomenon. But in 1994, the U.S. State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues, which handles family abduction cases, had four staff members; today, it has 57.
The convention was designed to mediate cross-border tugs-of-war. Any country that has agreed to the treaty promises to respect the custodial decisions of the other contracting countries. The convention’s goal is to secure the “prompt return” of a child who has been “wrongfully removed to or retained in” another contracting country. The convention specifically defines prompt: a judge or administrator in the country where the child is being held is supposed to render a decision within six weeks. The judge is not authorized to make a decision about custody; his job is to determine whether the child should be returned to his “habitual residence” so that the courts in that place can exercise their jurisdiction.
According to the Permanent Bureau’s latest statistics, based on surveys of member nations in 2003, in 68 percent of cases, the parent who initially flees abroad with a child is the mother. After a marital separation, mothers are more likely to have primary custody, and many “taking mothers” cite domestic violence as their reason for running off with their kids. Indeed, the most popular defense against a “prompt return” of a child is Article 13B of the convention—that the child would suffer a “grave risk.” Another common defense is Article 12, which, after a year has elapsed since the abduction or wrongful retention, allows a judge to take into account whether the child has “settled into its new environment.”
“You’ll see this when you look at compliance reports,” says Martha Pacheco, Abduction Unit chief at the Office of Children’s Issues. “The child will not be returned quickly, for whatever reason. A year goes by, two years go by, and then the argument is made by the taking parent that the child has settled in the country and it will be traumatic for the child to go back. It’s not fair—it’s a catch-22.”
The left-behind parent faces tough odds. Many countries, especially in Asia and the Middle East, have not signed the convention. Those countries have a tendency to favor the rights of their nationals, even if they’re the taking parents. Japan has one of the worst records among non-Hague countries. The State Department is handling 73 outstanding cases involving 104 children who have been abducted to or retained in Japan by parents.
The predicament of Walter Benda is typical. In 1995, he was living with his wife of 13 years in her home country of Japan. According to Benda, he wanted to return to the U.S. and she did not. One day, she disappeared with their two daughters. “Please forgive me for leaving you this way,” she wrote in a note she left. The Japanese police, Benda says, would not investigate what they viewed as a family matter; it took him three and a half years to find the girls. He never won visitation rights. “It took a couple of years before the courts even interviewed my children,” he recalls. “By that time, they’d been brainwashed and didn’t want to see their father.”
Sometimes even countries that have agreed to the Hague Convention are no better. For instance, the State Department has more than 500 open cases involving 800 children abducted to or retained in Mexico. The convention has no enforcement mechanism; it’s up to the judicial system of a member nation to make its court’s decision stick. According to the Hague’s own statistics from a 2003 study, only 51 percent of all applications end with the child’s return to the left-behind parent. When the abducting parent does not consent to give up the child, judges take an average of 143 days to order a return—a far cry from the six weeks mandated by the convention. (Costa Rica, which agreed to the convention in 1998, did not respond to the Hague survey, so it is not included in these statistics.)
In addition to pursuing the matter as a civil issue through the convention, a left-behind parent can press authorities to bring criminal charges against the taking parent. This can result in an Interpol “red notice” calling for police to arrest the taking parent, with a view toward extradition. That’s likely what happened last April, when a Russian mother was arrested in Hungary after abducting her daughter in France from her ex-husband, who was badly beaten during the abduction. The mother was extradited to France to face charges of kidnapping and complicity in the assault; she was later freed.
Gus Zamora, for his part, is generally dismissive of what he calls “the Vague Convention.” But he’s seen it work. In 2004, Hal Berger’s then-wife abducted their son from California to South Africa. A year later, he filed a Hague application, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and eight months in South Africa during the litigation; finally, South Africa’s Supreme Court ordered the boy’s return to the U.S. Berger, his estranged wife, and their son flew back together on the same plane. But 10 months later, she took off with the son again, using fake passports to return to South Africa. Berger went back to the South African courts—but this time he hired Gus, in case the courts ruled against him, or his estranged wife fled a third time. After spending hundreds of thousands more, a night in jail, and more than a month in Africa, Berger won his case in the South African courts in December 2007 and flew home with his son.
More often than not, Gus gets involved when his clients have lost patience with the courts. When parents come to him in desperation, he asks them three questions: Do they have custodial rights? Do they have an idea where their kids are? And can they afford his fee?
One morning in November of 2005, an engineer (who asked that his name and other identifying details not be used here because of pending legal issues) left his home in the Midwest for work, carrying the lunch his wife had packed for him. A few hours later, he picked up a voice mail from her saying that she had taken their 2-year-old daughter shopping and wouldn’t be reachable for a while. Only that evening did he learn that she’d fled to India. The engineer flew to Mumbai, hoping to reconcile. But the marriage seemed irretrievable. On his lawyer’s recommendation, he filed for divorce and custody after he returned to the U.S. in January. Ten months later, the engineer called Gus, who advised him to let the custody issue play out in the courts first. Shortly thereafter, the engineer won a default custody judgment in a court in his home state when his ex-wife didn’t show up to contest it. At the end of 2006, he flew to Mumbai and met Gus. He returned home with his daughter days later. A kidnapping case is still pending against the engineer in Mumbai.
“Don’t drive fast, especially on the wet roads,” Gus counsels Helen, who is standing under the awning of the purple motel, watching the rain pour down. It’s 6a.m. on Tuesday. The parrots are chirping, and the palm trees bend under the weight of the water. “Take your time and get here,” Gus adds. “It’s only a couple of minutes.”
Gus is prepping Helen to snatch Andres at the bus stop. If a stranger like Gus tried to grab the boy, witnesses might intervene, and the police would react immediately. But a mother calling out to her son and inviting him to step into her car might not trigger an alarm. Ordinarily, Gus would ride along in the car with Helen, but he doesn’t trust her. He also has doubts about whether Andres will go with his mother. He has more faith in Todd’s relationship with the boy, so he has decided that Todd should be in the SUV with Helen. Gus and his son will wait in the getaway van at the purple motel, preparing for a run to the Panama border.
Wearing a striped scarf to cover her distinctive auburn curls, Helen drives into Siquirres. Rain lashes the windshield. Schoolkids carrying backpacks walk into the curve of their umbrellas. Hunching low in the middle of the backseat to avoid detection, Todd warns Helen not to drive off the edge of the road, which drops precipitously into a deep gutter.
Helen pulls over alongside a Baptist church. We can see the town square and the bus stop where Andres gets picked up for school, a block away. Cars swoosh by on the slippery road. The windshield wipers swing back and forth. The weather is a problem. The bus stop has no shelter, so whoever drops off Andres is likely to wait with him in the car, to keep the boy dry until the bus arrives.
Todd and Helen are running out of chances. Helen is supposed to have another visitation at the yellow house later today. Todd, Gus, and Gustavo are scheduled to fly back to the United States tomorrow. A solo practitioner, Todd has cleared his court schedule only until the end of the week. And he can’t afford to hire Gus for a third trip.
At 7:00, a white bus stops on the town square. No one boards it. There are no schoolkids at the bus stop. “I don’t see any activity,” Todd says, sighing.
Time passes. The only sounds are the relentless pounding of the rain, the swish of the wipers, and Helen’s occasional sniffs.
Suddenly, Helen sits bolt upright. “That’s Jason. You see?” A blue Camry heads toward us and turns left onto the street perpendicular to ours. She warns Todd to duck down.
“So where’s Andres?” Helen says, perplexed. Why didn’t Jason pull over at the bus stop? Why did he turn onto the side street instead? Could Andres’s bus stop be located on that side street—not by the square, as she had thought? She asks Todd whether she should check out the side street. He encourages her to go.
“I don’t know if we should,” she says, even as she turns the ignition, inching forward and looking from side to side. She turns right, following the route the blue car took.
“Oh, here,” Helen gasps, looking at two boys in identical uniforms—dark-blue polo shirts and khaki pants—standing along the side of the road. She puts down the passenger-side window, shouting: “Come, Andres! Ven, Andres!”
The shorter and slimmer of the two boys, who has close-cropped hair and a light scar on his brow, stares at her. His brown eyes widen, and he steps forward slightly. Then he looks at the other boy, looks back at Helen, and shakes his head.
“He says no,” Helen says, putting up the window.
“Did Chino see me?” Todd asks, referring to Andres’s companion, who is his uncle. Helen says yes. Todd tells Helen to get out of the car and get Andres.
“He doesn’t want me to,” she says.
“Go out and get him, Helen,” Todd says, his voice rising in frustration. “Just go out and get him.” Helen drives on. Todd moves aggressively into the space between the front seats, directing Helen to do a U-turn and return to Andres. She obeys, warning Todd that Andres’s bus is coming.
“I don’t care, because we’re made. Let’s go,” Todd shouts. “I’m going to get him. Just go!” Helen sniffs, and Todd orders her to stop the SUV. He leaps out and goes to Andres, who is wearing an olive-green backpack.
“Let’s go,” he says, touching Andres’s shoulder. “Come on, buddy!”
Helen adds her encouragement from the driver’s seat. “Come, Andres!”
Andres hesitates, glances at Chino, and then walks quickly to the open door of the SUV. Todd throws himself into the SUV behind Andres and slams the door. “Go!” he shouts.
Helen hits the accelerator.
“Hi, buddy,” Todd says to Andres, hugging him. “How are you, sweetie?”
“Hi,” Andres mutters. He’s clearly unnerved.
“Don’t worry, Papi,” Todd assures him. “It’s going to be okay.”
In the rearview mirror, Helen can see Chino running toward the yellow house. Todd tells her to focus on the road. “Nice and easy,” he says. But Helen careens around the corner, narrowly missing an old man on a bicycle as she swerves to avoid an oncoming bus. As she drives, she keeps asking Andres why he refused to come to her. “He’s scared,” Todd says. (Click here for an audio recording and full transcript of the scene at the bus stop.)
Helen turns onto Highway 32, smack into a long line of traffic. Todd kisses Andres. “Who’s following us?” Andres asks. Helen keeps glancing behind us, worried that Jason will be there. As the SUV creeps forward in the traffic, she pounds the heel of her right hand on the steering wheel, shouting at the cars. “They need to move!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, buddy,” Todd keeps saying to Andres, who sits rigidly, staring out of eyes that seem to have lost their ability to blink. “That car just happened to be behind us. I don’t think they were following us.”
The palm trees in front of the purple motel come into view, and Helen turns sharply to the right before veering left and screeching to a halt. Gus and his son are waiting in the van, eyebrows raised.
Helen, Todd, Andres, and I jump out of the SUV. Gustavo hustles us into the van.
“Let’s go,” Gus shouts from the driver’s seat.
Helen remembers that she’s left the keys in the SUV.
“Leave ’em,” Gus barks. “Everybody duck down—you especially,” looking at Helen. “Your big head has got to duck down. Don’t worry about anything. Just stay down until we get a safe distance away.”
Gus roars out of the parking lot and turns left onto the highway, heading east. A blue Camry speeds past us in the opposite direction.
At Gus Zamora’s home in Tampa are two huge black safes containing dozens of machine guns, pistols, and rifles—enough artillery, he explains, to outfit a SWAT team of 10 men. (Gus also trains bodyguards.) Inside his office, the shelves are crammed with textbooks like Shooter’s Bible and The Gun Parts. The closet is jammed with model airplanes and shooting trophies. On the walls are pictures and statues of bald eagles; a clock with a camouflage pattern on its face and bullets arrayed around its circumference; certificates attesting to esoteric skills, including one from the “Methods of Entry School” for a course in “surreptitious entry techniques”; newspaper clippings with photos of beaming families; and a handwritten letter from a third-grader in Texas. “Dear Gus,” the girl writes, “I remember you, and I hope I can see you sometime.”
Born in Gary, Indiana, in 1955, Gus joined the Army in 1977, and served in the 1st Ranger Battalion, an elite infantry unit; a rapid-deployment force based in Vicenza, Italy; and the 101st Airborne Division. He met his wife, Vicki, in the service and left the Army in 1984 to prepare, he says, for the birth of their first child. He received an honorable discharge and started working for a series of private security companies. After a stint with a company based in Brownsville, Texas, Gus landed in northern Costa Rica, working on a report about the Contras in Nicaragua for the U.S. Council for World Freedom. Gus stayed in the area, providing protection for John Hull, an American rancher who helped the CIA deliver aid and weapons to the Contras. (A Senate subcommittee later collected evidence that Hull had been engaged in drug trafficking; he was also indicted for murder in Costa Rica. “What’s a little murder when you’re overthrowing a government?,” Gus says. “That’s part of the process.”) Gus then made his way to Don Feeney’s company, Corporate Training Unlimited, in the late ’80s. Feeney’s first recovery case, involving the rescue of a 7-year-old girl who’d been taken to Jordan by her father in 1988, had touched off an international incident; the State Department ended up expressing regret to Jordan. Gus, who speaks Spanish fluently, covered Latin American operations for Feeney.
After spending time in that Icelandic jail in 1993, Feeney cooled on the child-recovery business. But Gus was hooked. “I remember calling Gus and saying, ‘I’ve got a case. There’s almost no money in it, but I believe the child is in real danger,’” Feeney recalled when I spoke to him recently. “Thirty minutes later, he was at the front door of the office, saying, ‘When do we leave?’”
Gus thrives on the feeling that he’s doing good while having fun. He embraces the travel with the gusto of a tourist, collecting information about a well-placed bar, a cozy Italian restaurant, the best hotel Jacuzzi. When he has to plan an escape route over water, he’ll often go scuba diving for a few days while he makes contacts. Despite his specialized military skills, his real expertise seems to be the ability to network—and to talk his way out of a predicament. He’s more fixer than commando.
Gus is paid to take on risk. But his critics say that he also exposes others to danger. When I asked Feeney whether anyone was harmed during his or Gus’s recoveries, he responded, “No. I’m not going to tell you that nobody ever got smacked around a bit. But by the time we were gone on the plane, they got up and dusted themselves off.” The people guarding the child are not the only ones in jeopardy. If an operation goes wrong, a reclaiming parent risks not only jeopardizing any legal case, but also arrest or physical injury. Even worse, a child may be harmed. (Critics of Gus’s line of work often cite this risk, but I haven’t heard of a case where a child was actually physically hurt.)
Even if a recovery proceeds safely, a child may be traumatized. “One of the most psychologically devastating aspects of family abduction is the sudden, unexpected rupture,” Liss Haviv, the executive director of Take Root, an organization composed of formerly abducted children, explained to me recently. “Being recovered may produce the same result. Whether your situation ultimately improves or not, you learn once again that any- and everything can change in the blink of an eye. How do you trust after that?”
Gus insists that no one has been physically harmed during his recoveries. But military-style operations may result in casualties; that’s what may have happened in 2000, when Gus and George Uhl picked up Uhl’s 2-year-old son in western Hungary. Uhl’s ex-wife, Katharina Gotzler, had left the child there with her parents. Gus and Uhl went to the grandparents’ home to retrieve the boy. What came next is contested.
Gus says he waited in the getaway car while Uhl, an American associate, and two Hungarian “assets” went inside to snatch the boy. (When I spoke recently to Gus’s assistant on the job, she did not corroborate that Gus was in the car during the recovery, saying she could not recall the specific events.)
Gotzler was in Munich at the time. When she didn’t hear from her father that night, she called the neighbors and asked them to check on him, according to her attorney, Donald Cramer. The neighbors found the boy gone, and the grandfather dead.
A German court found that Uhl “had the son abducted with the assistance of armed kidnappers. In the course of this abduction, the grandfather came to his death.” Cramer added, “Zamora’s belongings were checked at the hotel—he had Tasers, weapons of all sorts, and ropes.”
According to Gus, one of the Hungarian men had told him the grandfather smoked a cigarette during the recovery, worrying that he’d be blamed for not protecting the boy. “We had somebody check the phone records from that apartment,” Gus says. “The grandfather called his daughter in Germany. She called him back several times, and when she arrived, he was already on the couch dead. We believe that she literally tore him apart on the phone and stressed him out so much that he had a heart attack and died.” Gus says the autopsy reported that the cause of death was natural and that the estimated time of death was four hours after the abduction. Prosecutors in Hungary did not press charges.
Uhl has not seen his son since he was stopped at the Paris airport on his way home. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)
The day after the snatchback in Siquirres, Diario Extra, a popular tabloid in Costa Rica, reports that while Andres was waiting for the bus, a white Toyota SUV stopped, and two women and a man “violently grabbed” him. The newspaper lists Helen, an aunt, and a U.S. national named “Hotson” as suspects. The article includes a photo of Andres and instructs anyone who spots him to call the police. Jason’s wife is quoted: “We are confident, given that only a few hours have gone by, that they would not be able to take him out of the country.”
But while the police search for Andres in a white Toyota SUV, we are speeding toward Panama in a beige Dodge Caravan. Andres and Helen lie against each other in the backseat, and Todd is prone against the side door. Gus is at the wheel.
“Andres looks good,” Todd says. “That was some shock and awe.”
After nearly an hour, Gus has fought his way through traffic to the turnoff to Limón. Except for some overhanging palm trees and piles of trash, the road is clear. At Gus’s say-so, we sit up. Helen pulls off Andres’s dark-blue shirt so he can exchange it for a white T-shirt that says Cornerstone Middle School.
“You want to go home, right?” Todd says.
Andres nods.
“You remember, I promised,” Todd says. “Did you think Daddy wasn’t going to come for you?”
Andres shakes his head.
Todd tells Andres that he’s left his room exactly the same and that a package has arrived all the way from Japan for him—a customized baseball glove.
“Your hair looks great, buddy,” Todd says, kissing him and observing that he’s grown a little Mohawk. Gus’s son informs Todd that the correct term is faux-hawk.
Andres takes care with his appearance; he is a handsome boy who looks like a miniature version of his favorite Yankee, A-Rod. He tells Todd that he’s started using a hair gel called Gorilla Snot. Later, he asks if he’ll be able to buy the gel in Florida. Throughout the journey, Andres says little, but he seems most concerned about having “forgotten” things—like the hair gel, his clothing, his iPod charger, his NintendoDS, and, most important, two of his baseball gloves. He had taken them with him to Costa Rica, even though he didn’t play much baseball in Siquirres.
As “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” plays on the radio in the background and the ocean crests by the side of the road, Todd tells Andres, “I was so angry when I came down and they wouldn’t let me have you.”
Andres says nothing. But he smiles a few minutes later when Todd cracks a joke about the snatchback, saying: “I was going to tell you, ‘Come with me if you want to live.’”
Gus drives past dilapidated shacks with corrugated-iron roofs, huddles of thin brown cows, and fields of banana plants, their bunches of fruit cradled in bright-blue plastic bags. After an hour, we arrive at Sixaola, a town that shares a narrow river with Panama and lies in the shadow of a border crossing. Trucks idle on a graffiti-covered concrete overpass that runs through the town. Gus’s plan is to get Todd and his family to Panama without passing through an official border stop. Presenting them to immigration officials in Costa Rica at this point is too risky.
Gus frets about finding his contact, a Nicaraguan who owns a motorboat in Sixaola. Luckily, “the Nica,” as Gus calls him, is at his home—a rickety contraption consisting of sheets of iron on a wooden base. The Nicaraguan goes off to fetch the boat. While we wait, Gus reverses the van, rocking it back and forth on the edge of an embankment, which is littered with rotting banana peels and tin cans. Finally, he manages to squeeze the van next to a pigpen in the backyard of the man’s home.
Andres gets out of the van. He plays with a purple band on his wrist and fingers his faux-hawk until a blue boat pulls up to the embankment. He steps into the rocking boat. The engine sputters to life. Minutes later, the captain hops onto Panamanian soil and ties the boat to a banana plant. Todd, Andres, and Helen walk across a stretch of swamp and step into a black pickup with tinted windows that Gus has arranged to have waiting for them.
It’s time for the Little League play-offs between the Red Sox and the Bulls at the Ocala Rotary Sportsplex. Andres—HOPSON displayed on the back of his dark-blue shirt—stands on the first-base line next to his teammates, listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” with his hat over his heart. The music stops, and Andres’s coach shouts, “All right, gentlemen, let’s go out there and throw some balls!” Soon, Andres is up at bat. He goes down in the count, two strikes against him. He stares through his mirrored sunglasses at the pitcher, a scrawny boy with a mean right arm, and swings at the next ball. The bat connects and he races to first, sliding in safe.
It’s as if Andres never left Ocala. He wakes up every day at 7:10 a.m., takes a shower, and has a bowl of Lucky Charms. Then Todd drives him to the Cornerstone School, a private school with banners along its halls promoting Mutual Respect and Appreciation—No Put Downs. Miss Candice, his third-grade teacher, says she has observed no ill effects from his absence. He does his assignments on time, and he is the Four Square star of the playground. Todd’s relationship with Helen broke down, however, not long after their return, and he asked her to move out.
Todd considered taking Andres to a psychologist, but he decided against it because the boy seemed fine. In response to my direct questions, Andres says that the Alvarados treated him well but that he doesn’t miss anything about Costa Rica. He didn’t play baseball in Siquirres. It’s “funner” in Ocala, where he plays baseball three times a week. He says he knew his dad would come for him. Andres doesn’t like to talk about Costa Rica. If anyone asks where he was, he told Todd upon his return, “I’m going to say it’s a long story.”
But as Jason Alvarado sees it, the story is simple. Helen Zapata and Todd Hopson kidnapped Andres. Andres, he says, had been adjusting well to Siquirres; he had even been president of his class. Jason says he doesn’t want to appear ungrateful to Hopson for raising Andres. Still, he believes Andres’s care should be a matter between him and the boy’s mother. “Now that his mother seems not to be able to take care of him, I don’t see why he has to stay” in the U.S., Jason says. “They have always known I’m the father. I have always been there for him emotionally and economically.” Todd, for his part, says that Jason never spent “one centavo” on Andres’s care; Jason counters that he sent money to Helen.
In theory, the U.S. State Department agrees with Jason’s view. “We cannot condone the violation of the law of another sovereign territory,” a State Department spokesperson says of private recovery attempts. Yet when Todd informed the State Department that he had, with Gus Zamora’s help, recovered Andres, the woman helping with his Hague application responded by e-mail, “We all breathed a collective sigh of relief on hearing that Andres and Helen are back home in Florida with you.” She went on to explain that Costa Rica had “a steep learning curve” about the convention, and said of Hopson’s application, “We frankly do not know how it might have worked in your case.”
Jason is giving them another chance to find out: in late May, he filed his own Hague application, requesting his son’s prompt return.
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