MANILA — Gunmen took 75 people hostage at an elementary school in the southern Philippines on Thursday, later releasing 27, including all the children, officials said.
The standoff, about 500 miles south of Manila in a restive region that has been the scene of recent violence, began when 15 to 20 assailants took the hostages after police officials tried to serve an arrest warrant on one of their leaders, said Maj. Randolph Cabangbang, an army spokesman.
The leader, identified as Ondo Perez, is suspected of heading a criminal organization called the Perez Group and is wanted for the murder of a resident of the town of Prosperidad, in Agusan del Sur Province on the southeastern island of Mindanao.
Senior Superintendent Nestor Fajura, operations chief of the Philippine police in the region, told ABS-CBN television that Mr. Perez and his group took the hostages at a school in Prosperidad to prevent his arrest. Mr. Fajura said that the abductors were demanding the withdrawal of the murder charge against Mr. Perez and a halt to police and military operations against the group.
The hostage takers initially released 17 children and an older woman, Major Cabangbang said. Also among the hostages were a teacher and two employees of a logging company, he said. Police officials have not yet established the identities or the conditions of the remaining hostages, he said.
Early Friday, The Associated Press reported the release of nine more hostages, eight women and one man, reducing the number of captives to 48.
Major Cabangbang said negotiators had been sent to the village to try to persuade the men to surrender. “The situation remains fluid at this point,” he said by telephone.
Mr. Perez is a former member of a paramilitary group that the military armed and trained to help in counterinsurgency operations, police officials said.
Such groups have often been accused of criminality and human rights violations.
A recent massacre on Maguindanao Province, also in Mindanao, of 57 people — most of them journalists and media workers — was attributed to militiamen who the authorities say were under the command of Andal Ampatuan Jr., a scion of the province’s most influential family.
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.
NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania -- Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels are spreading far beyond their original battleground in Algeria and increasingly threatening Africa's Sahara belt, scaring away investors and tourists as they undercut the region's fragile economies.
Dozens of security personnel, as well as an American aid worker and a British tourist, were killed by militants in several attacks in the region this summer alone. The attacks -- which prompted this year's lucrative Paris-Dakar car race to relocate to South America -- have become more frequent and brazen. Recent hits occurred not just in the remote desert but also in Mali's tourist magnet Timbuktu and in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where a suicide bomber attacked the French Embassy last weekend.
Though still dominated by the veterans of Algeria's civil war, this Saharan insurgency has grown deep local roots. Armed bands roaming the desert include hundreds of recruits from Mauritania, Mali and Niger -- vast and impoverished countries that straddle the Arab world and black West Africa, and that relied on the now-collapsed tourism industry as the key source of foreign exchange.
"What had started out as an Algerian problem is now engulfing Mali and Mauritania. They are the weak link," says Zakaria Ould Ahmed Salem, a specialist on political Islam at the University of Nouakchott.
An Islamist insurgency that cost 200,000 lives erupted in Algeria 18 years ago, after that country's secular regime annulled the second round of elections that the Islamists were poised to win. But it is only in the past few years, as Algerian security forces contained the violence at home, that the rebels -- who seek to create an Islamic state encompassing North Africa -- began mounting operations in neighboring Saharan countries that had been unscathed by international terrorism.
Underlining its wider ambitions, the main Algerian insurgent movement, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, re-branded itself in 2007 as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. Actual operational links between AQIM militants in the Sahara and traditional al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan or Afghanistan are tenuous, if they exist at all, Western officials say.
But the group's new name has made it easier to find money and recruits for the cause outside Algeria. "Someone like Bin Laden is considered a hero here," explains Mohamed Fall Ould Oumere, publisher of La Tribune newsweekly in Nouakchott.
Mauritania, where most people speak Arabic and watch satellite TV chains like Al-Jazeera, is a particularly fertile ground for AQIM's growth, and accounts for a growing share of the movement's cadres, Western diplomats say. In Mali, Niger and Chad, the bulk of AQIM recruits also come from Arab-speaking communities, which in these countries are outnumbered by black African majorities.
AQIM is trying to spread south, "aiming to attract the young Muslims of the region -- white ones and black ones," says Isselmou Ould Moustafa, a specialist on AQIM who interviewed many of the group's members for his Mauritanian publication, Tahalil Hebdo.
Security officials in Nigeria recently claimed that AQIM trained in Algeria some members of Boko Haram, the Islamist sect whose armed uprising cost several hundred lives in northern Nigeria last month. According to some experts on AQIM, there is also evidence of contacts between the Saharan insurgents and the Shabaab, the radical Islamist militia controlling a chunk of Somalia. "It's an arc of fire," says Mr. Oumere.
All the governments in the region say they are fighting back. But the area's political instability and frequent bickering between neighboring countries have long made it easy for Islamist rebels to roam the Sahara, obtaining sanctuary and help from local tribes. Mali and Mauritania both have strained relations with Algeria. Planned regional summits to tackle the cross-border terrorism problem have been repeatedly postponed.
A military coup in Mauritania last year complicated the situation: The U.S. reacted to the overthrowing of Mauritania's democratically elected president by reducing military cooperation with the country and pulling out a reconnaissance plane that flew regular sorties over the Sahara to search for insurgents. Cooperation is likely to be restored now that Mauritania has held a democratic election last month.
Government officials here say that, without outside help, Saharan countries have little chance of defeating AQIM. "This is a zone that can't be controlled. We don't know who's out there in the vast desert and what are they doing," says Mohamed Ould Rzeizim, who served until this week as Mauritania's minister of interior.
To finance its campaign, AQIM is smuggling Europe-bound cigarettes, drugs and illegal immigrants through the desert, Mauritanian and Western officials say. Depots of untaxed cigarettes, often brought in by ship from South America, dot the desert along Mauritania's porous northern borders.
An equally important source of revenue for AQIM is ransom money -- estimated at tens of millions of dollars -- paid by European governments for the freedom of European tourists kidnapped in separate attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali and Niger. The hostages were usually transported across the Sahara to AQIM's bases in lawless northern Mali, where local officials helped negotiate the ransom collection and the tourists' release.
Mali's role as a sanctuary for AQIM has long infuriated Algeria and the U.S. The country appears to be taking a harder line after the Islamist rebels -- who refrained from killing their hostages in the past -- announced in June that they executed their British captive, Edwin Dyer.
A few days after the killing of Mr. Dyer, suspected militants also gunned down in Timbuktu the regional chief of Malian intelligence, Lt. Col. Lamina Ould Bou. The colonel, an ethnic Arab and former Islamist rebel, had played a crucial role in Mali's efforts against AQIM. According to Malian government accounts and al Qaeda Internet postings, armed clashes in the region in following weeks killed dozens of Malian troops and Islamist guerrillas.
"We are now engaged in a total struggle against al Qaeda," Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré declared last month.
The Saharan rebels have so far targeted only foreigners and security forces, sparing civilian targets like restaurants and hotels. In Algeria, Pakistan and Iraq, by contrast, al Qaeda-affiliated militants showed no concern about killing large numbers of Muslim civilians.
"These youngsters are not yet ready to carry out blind attacks and to explode car bombs, Algerian-style. They have not yet completely broken with the Mauritanian society," says Mr. Moustafa, the AQIM expert. But, he cautions, bloodier attacks are likely to happen soon: "They have bad teachers. Their future targets will be Mauritanian."
BEIJING — China’s nascent legal rights movement, already reeling from a crackdown on crusading lawyers, the kidnapping of defense witnesses and the shuttering of a prominent legal clinic, has been shaken by the detention of a widely respected rights defender who has been incommunicado since the police led him away from his apartment 12 days ago.
Xu Zhiyong, 36, a soft-spoken and politically shrewd legal scholar who has made a name representing migrant workers, death row inmates and the parents of babies poisoned by tainted milk, is accused of tax evasion. The accusation is almost universally seen here as a cover for his true offense: angering the Communist Party leadership through his advocacy of the rule of law.
If convicted, he could face up to seven years in prison.
“We’re all shocked by his detention, because Xu Zhiyong has always tried to avoid taking on radical and politically sensitive cases,” said Teng Biao, a colleague. “His only interest is fighting for the rights of the vulnerable and trying to enhance China’s legal system.”
Mr. Teng helped Mr. Xu establish the Open Constitution Initiative, a six-year-old nonprofit legal center that the authorities closed last month, charging that it was improperly registered and that it failed to pay taxes.
Mr. Xu is not the first rights advocate in China to face the wrath of the authorities in recent years. Gao Zhisheng, a vocal lawyer, vanished into police custody six months ago, and Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer, was beaten and then jailed after exposing abuses in China’s birth-control program.
Although rights lawyers and grass-roots social organizations have always been tightly controlled here, the pressure has intensified in recent weeks. More than 20 lawyers known for taking on politically tinged cases were effectively disbarred, and the police raided a group that works to ease discrimination against people with Hepatitis B.
Last week, China’s justice minister gave a speech saying lawyers should above all obey the Communist Party and help foster a harmonious society. To improve discipline, the minister said, all law firms in China would be sent party liaisons to “guide their work.”
But given Mr. Xu’s international stature and reputation for working within the law, legal scholars both in China and abroad say his prosecution suggests a new level of repression.
“What makes his detention particularly disturbing is that he’s a special figure in so many ways,” said Paul Gewirtz, director of the China Law Center at Yale Law School, which helped Mr. Xu establish his legal center, known here by its Chinese name, Gongmeng. “He’s at the forefront of advancing the rule of law, which is something everyone agrees China needs for its ongoing development.”
After 30 years of reform, China’s legal system is at a critical juncture. Law schools continue to pump out thousands of graduates each year, and the courts, even if imperfect, have increasingly become a forum for resolving disputes. Late last month the Supreme People’s Court announced reforms intended to markedly reduce executions.
But as lawyers here discover, there are limits to China’s embrace of judicial reform.
The Constitution, which includes guarantees of free speech and human rights, is unenforceable in court. Judges routinely ignore evidence, making determinations based on political considerations. And when it comes to vaguely defined offenses like “subversion of state power” or the invoking of “state secrets” laws, even the best-trained lawyers are powerless to defend the accused.
He Weifang, a law professor and legal adviser to Gongmeng, said conservative forces in the Communist Party were increasingly wary of lawyers, who they suspect are ultimately seeking to challenge one-party rule. Their greatest fear, Mr. He said, is that advocacy lawyers and civil society organizations could one day lead a pro-democracy movement among the poor and disenfranchised citizens they represent.
“What the authorities don’t appreciate, though, is that lawyers are leading these people to the courts, where their complaints can be resolved by rule of law,” he said. “People like Xu Zhiyong can only help the government solve some of the problems it faces.”
According to Gongmeng, Mr. Xu is being held at the Beijing No. 1 Detention Center, although public security officials have not confirmed that he is in their custody. Peng Jian, a lawyer who is advising Gongmeng, said the authorities had imposed a $208,000 penalty for nonpayment of taxes due on funds received from Yale for cooperative research projects.
A day after the raid on Gongmeng’s office, Mr. Xu held a news conference to say that the accusations were baseless. He described the attack on his research center as a battle between corrupt officials and society’s most vulnerable citizens. “We believe conscience will surely triumph over the evil forces,” he said.
A week later, police officers came to his door and led him away. Another employee of the research center, Zhuang Lu, was also taken away the same day.
Soon after graduating from Peking University law school, Mr. Xu became immersed in the case of a graphic artist who was beaten to death in 2003 in police custody in the southern city of Guangzhou. The artist, Sun Zhigang, 27, had been arrested under vagrancy laws that allowed the police to detain people for traveling outside their registered hometowns without a permit.
Mr. Xu led a campaign to end the practice, which gained widespread media attention. A few months later, the State Council abolished the system.
That same year Mr. Xu rose to the defense of a muckraking editor jailed in Guangzhou after his newspaper, Southern Metropolis, ran a series of articles about Mr. Sun’s death. The editor, Cheng Yizhong, said Mr. Xu helped rally lawyers and journalists, leading to his release five months later. “Only Xu had the courage to take on my case,” he said.
More recently, he was preparing a challenge to black jails, the illegal holding cells that some officials use to silence persistent critics. Last year, friends say, he was roughed up several times while gathering evidence from petitioners who had come to Beijing to press their grievances to the central government.
Although he was less outspoken than some other rights activists, Mr. Xu did not shy away from cases that were bound to upset China’s power elite. Last May Gongmeng published a study challenging the official verdict that blames the Dalai Lama for the 2008 riots in Tibet. The report, disseminated online and sent to government leaders, said legitimate grievances born from failed government policies were largely responsible for the unrest.
Raised in a Christian home in Henan Province, Mr. Xu was fond of noting his birth in a county called Minquan, which translates as “civil rights.” In an interview last year with The Economic Observer, a Chinese weekly, he said this had a profound impact on his social consciousness.
“I strive to be a worthy Chinese citizen, a member of the group of people who promote the progress of the nation,” he said. “I want to make people believe in ideals and justice, and help them see the hope of change.”
Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Huang Yuanxi contributed research.
A multi-billion dollar mystery is unfolding in Iraq, and it may reach to the highest levels of the Iraqi government.
It involves what the New York Times calls an "extremist Shiite group" that has now reconciled with Prime Minister Maliki and his regime. The group is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five British contractors who, according to the Guardian, were installing a sophisticated financial tracking system in Iraq's ministry of finance in 2007.
"An extremist Shiite group that has boasted of killing five American soldiers and of kidnapping five British contractors has agreed to renounce violence against fellow Iraqis, after meeting with Iraq's prime minister.
"The prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, met with members of the group, Asa'ib al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, over the weekend, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the prime minister, confirming reports. 'They decided they are no longer using violence, and we welcome them,' he said in a telephone interview.
"Mr. Dabbagh first revealed the negotiations in remarks on Monday to Al Iraqiya, the state television network. 'We have reached an agreement to resolve all problems, especially regarding detainees who do not have Iraqi blood on their hands,' he said. He did not say anything about British victims of the group."
In other words, Maliki met with a bunch of Shiite terrorists, welcomed them with open arms. Why would he do that?
In addition, the Times reports, the terrorists have a "liaison to the government." By coincidence, his name is also Maliki, and he wants to get into the government's favor and take part in the "political process":
"Salam al-Maliki, the insurgent group's liaison to the government, said in a telephone interview that the group had not renounced fighting the Americans. 'Of course we want to get into the political process, because circumstances have improved, and the United States is out right now,' said Mr. Maliki, who is not related to the prime minister. 'We told the government anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands, you should keep him in jail. We are only fighting the United States.'"
The Guardian, in a related story, suggests that the kidnapping of the five Britons was carried out with government collusion by a team of 80 to 100 men, dressed as Interior Ministry police officials and driving a convoy of 19 white SUVs. Here's the Guardian story:
"An investigation into the kidnapping of five British men in Iraq has uncovered evidence of possible collusion by Iraqi government officials in their abduction, and a possible motive – to keep secret the whereabouts of billions of dollars in embezzled funds.
"A former high-level Iraqi intelligence operative and a current senior government minister, who has been negotiating directly with the hostage takers, have told the Guardian that the kidnapping of IT specialist Peter Moore and his four bodyguards in 2007 was not a simple snatch by a band of militants but a sophisticated operation, almost certainly with inside help. Only Moore is thought still to be alive.
"Witnesses to the extraordinary operation which led to the abductions have also told us that they have been warned by superiors to keep quiet."
And this crucial piece:
"Moore was employed to install a new computer tracking system which would have followed billions of dollars of oil and foreign aid money through the ministry of finance. The 'Iraq Financial Management Information System' was nearly complete and about to go online at the time of the kidnap.
"The senior intelligence source said: 'Many people don't want a high level of corruption to be revealed. Remember this is the information technology centre [at the ministry of finance], this is the place where all the money to do with Iraq and all Iraq's financial matters are housed.'"
The Times story, which notes that the terrorist group also killed five US soldiers, says that the five British contractors were seized in retaliation for the detention of some of the group's leaders, after the killing of the Americans. But that makes no sense. Why would they organize and carry out a 19-SUV, 80-person raid on the finance ministry just as retaliation? And could this group have done so? As the Guardian points out, only a government agency could have pulled off the attack.
You can watch a 12-minute video on the case at the Guardian site.
Curiously, the Times report adds: "American military officials say the group is supported by Iran."
I tried getting some background on the League of the Righteous, and I found a posting on the Long War Journal about them, including alleged ties to Iran's Qods Force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guards.
Police in northern Nigeria say they have found another group of women and children abducted by the Boko Haram sect, locked in a house in Maiduguri.
The group were in a deplorable condition, officials said, suffering from pneumonia, fever and rashes.
The military now says 700 people were killed in Maiduguri alone during violent clashes between police and the Islamic sect.
An earlier tally of victims of the unrest put the figure at 400.
Col Ben Ahanotu, head of security in Maiduguri, said that mass burials had begun there.
The Boko Haram compound, he said, was being used as one of the burial sites because bodies were decomposing in the heat.
More than 200 women and children have now been found over the last week, locked in buildings in Maiduguri.
The most recent group of 140 is being housed at the local police headquarters, and have been visited by the Red Cross and the National Emergency Authority.
A Red Cross official told the BBC in Maiduguri that the women had been abducted by Boko Haram from six different states across northern Nigeria.
Last week, the police rescued about a 100 young women and children from a house on the edge of the city. Many said they were the wives of sect members, and had been forced to travel to Maiduguri from Bauchi state.
The BBC reporter in Maiduguri says the Boko Haram sect believed that their families should accompany them to the battlefield.
The compound used by the Boko Haram sect was destroyed by government troops and is now smouldering rubble.
More members of the sect have been arrested in house-to-house searches across northern Nigeria and the military said most would be prosecuted.
Life in the affected areas is now beginning to return to normal with banks and markets reopening.
Maiduguri is the capital of Borno state but the fighting spread to cities across the north of the country and the total number of dead is unknown.
A military spokesman said two of those killed were soldiers and 13 were police officers.
The number of injured, meanwhile, is still being counted. The Red Cross had earlier said about 3,500 people fled the fighting.
The violence ended on Thursday when the sect's leader, Mohamed Yusuf, was killed by police.
The controversy surrounding his death continues. The police say he was killed in a shoot-out while he was being detained. But Col Ahanotu says he captured him and handed him over alive.
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/8180257.stm
BARINAS, Venezuela — Stretching over vast cattle estates at the foothills of the Andes, Barinas is known for two things: as the bastion of the family of President Hugo Chávez and as the setting for a terrifying surge in abductions, making it a contender for Latin America’s most likely place to get kidnapped.
An intensifying nationwide crime wave over the past decade has pushed the kidnapping rate in Venezuela past Colombia’s and Mexico’s, with about 2 abductions per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Interior Ministry.
But nowhere in Venezuela comes close in abductions to Barinas, with 7.2 kidnappings per 100,000 inhabitants, as armed gangs thrive off the disarray here while Mr. Chávez’s family tightens its grip on the state. Seizures of cattle ranches and crumbling infrastructure also contribute to the sense of low-intensity chaos.
Barinas offers a unique microcosm of Mr. Chávez’s rule. Many poor residents still revere the president, born here into poverty in 1954. But polarization in Barinas is growing more severe, with others chafing at his newly prosperous parents and siblings, who have governed the state since the 1990s. While Barinas is a laboratory for projects like land reform, urgent problems like violent crime go unmentioned in the many billboards here extolling the Chávez family’s ascendancy.
“This is what anarchy looks like, at least the type of anarchy where the family of Chávez accumulates wealth and power as the rest of us fear for our lives,” said Ángel Santamaría, 57, a cattleman in the town of Nueva Bolivia whose son, Kusto, 8, was kidnapped while walking to school in May. He was held for 29 days, until Mr. Santamaría gathered a small ransom to free him.
The governor of Barinas, Adán Chávez, the president’s eldest brother and a former ambassador to Cuba, said this month that many of the kidnappings might have been a result of destabilization efforts by the opposition or so-called self-kidnappings: orchestrated abductions to reveal weaknesses among security forces, or to extort money from one’s own family.
“With each day that passes,” the governor said recently, “Barinas is safer than before.”
Through a spokeswoman, he declined to be interviewed.
In an election last year marred by accusations of fraud, Adán Chávez succeeded his own father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, a former schoolteacher who had governed Barinas for a decade with the president’s brother, Argenis, the former secretary of state in Barinas.
Another brother, Aníbal, is mayor of nearby Sabaneta, and another brother, Adelis, is a top banker at Banco Sofitasa, which does business with Adán’s government. Yet another brother, Narciso, was put in charge of cooperation projects with Cuba. The president’s cousin Asdrúbal holds a top post at the national oil company.
Politicians once loyal to the president who have broken with him and his family here contend that Mr. Chávez’s family has amassed wealth and landholdings through a series of deals carried out by front men.
One opposition leader, Wilmer Azuaje, detailed to prosecutors and legislators what he said was more than $20 million in illegal gains by the family since the president’s father was elected governor in 1998. But in a brief review of those claims, National Assembly, under the control of Chávez loyalists, cleared the family of charges of illicit enrichment.
“In the meantime, while the family wraps itself in the rhetoric of socialism, we are descending into a neo-capitalist chaos where all that matters is money,” said Alberto Santelíz, the publisher of La Prensa, a small opposition newspaper.
One reason for the rise in kidnappings is the injection of oil money into the local economy, with some families reaping quick fortunes because of ties to large infrastructure projects.
A new soccer stadium, built under the supervision of Adelis Chávez’s at a cost of more than $50 million, is still unfinished two years after its first game in 2007, joining other white elephants dotting Barinas’s landscape. Nearby lies the unfinished Museum of the Plains, intended to celebrate the culture of the president’s birthplace. A sprawling shopping mall stands half-completed after its backers fled a shakedown by construction unions.
More than a decade into the Chávez family’s rule in Barinas, the state remains Venezuela’s poorest, with average monthly household income of about $800, according to the National Statistics Institute. Kidnapping, once feared only by the wealthy, has spread in Barinas to include the poor. In one case this year of a 3-year-old girl kidnapped in the slum of Mi Jardín, the abductor, when told that the only thing of value owned by the girl’s mother was a refrigerator, instructed her to sell it to pay the ransom.
Kidnapping specialists here said the abductors were drawn from two Colombian rebel groups, a small Venezuelan guerrilla faction called the Bolivarian Liberation Front, other criminal gangs and corrupt police officers. Just a fraction of the kidnappings result in prison sentences.
“With impunity rampant in Barinas, how can our governor say with a straight face that people are kidnapping themselves?” asked Lucy Montoya, 38, a hardware store owner whose sister, Doris, a 41-year-old mother of three, was kidnapped in March.
Doris Montoya’s abductors have not freed her or communicated with her family since receiving ransom money in May, Lucy Montoya said, adding, “The government’s handling of this crisis is an affront to our dignity as human beings.”
Meanwhile, new figures show kidnappings climbing to 454 known cases in the first six months of 2009, including about 66 in Barinas, compared with a nationwide 2008 estimate of between 537 and 612. But officials acknowledge that the true figures are probably higher because many cases are never reported.
Here in Barinas, victims seethe over the inaction of the president and his family. “Our ruling dynasty is effectively telling us we are expendable,” said Rodolfo Peña, 38, a businessman who was abducted here last year. “The only other plausible theory,” he said, “is that they are too inebriated by power to notice the emergency at their feet.”
GROZNY, Russia — Oleg D. Masayev nervously fingered a cellphone as if working a string of prayer beads, his large blue eyes darting back and forth. He wanted to talk, he said, about his brother, who had disappeared without a trace or explanation, as if simply carried away by one of the dust devils that twirl along Chechnya’s roads.
“He was our youngest brother,” Mr. Masayev said. “He was the one we loved the most.”
The vanished brother had lived in Moscow and had little opportunity to become entangled in the separatist violence in Chechnya; he had, however, offered a chilling firsthand account as a victim of official abuse.
The wars that have ravaged Chechnya since the collapse of the Soviet Union have officially ended. Grozny, the capital, has been mostly rebuilt, and stores and cafes are open.
Yet the republic is in the throes of an epidemic of kidnappings. The abduction and killing last week of Natalia Estemirova, a celebrated human rights worker, came in the context of an escalating trend of unexplained disappearances. Dragged off the sidewalks, pulled out of beds at night or grabbed from their cars, scores of people have simply vanished.
In the first six months of this year, the Russian human rights organization Memorial, where Ms. Estemirova worked, documented 74 kidnappings in Chechnya, compared with 42 for all of 2008.
Human rights groups have blamed Chechnya’s president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, and his security forces for the bulk of the disappearances, and the killing of Ms. Estemirova.
Abductions have evolved from a largely successful, if brutal, counterinsurgency tactic to a form of political repression by Mr. Kadyrov’s government, said Yekaterina L. Sokiryanskaya, a researcher at Memorial. Mr. Kadyrov, she said, has been governing and settling personal vendettas using the same free hand Moscow granted him to fight the war.
“Everybody calls him a small Stalin,” she said. “He is getting rid of political rivals and independent voices.”
Both Mr. Kadyrov and Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, have denied that Mr. Kadyrov had a role in the killing of Ms. Estemirova. Memorial’s director, Oleg P. Orlov, has directly accused Mr. Kadyrov of the killing, reflecting the group’s broader analysis of the causes of the abduction epidemic in Chechnya. Mr. Kadyrov said Friday he would sue Mr. Orlov for slander.
The rise in abductions in Chechnya comes even as most reported insurgent activity in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus has moved outside of Chechnya, according to an analysis by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In 2008, for example, the small region of Ingushetia surpassed Chechnya in the number of reported acts of insurgency-related violence, with 350 episodes compared with 210 in Chechnya, according to the center. In Dagestan, another republic, ethnic strife and police corruption are fueling a low-grade insurgency.
Over all, the center reported, the number of violent acts in 2008 in the North Caucasus, with a combined population of 6.1 million, was about four times larger than in Colombia, with a population of 42 million.
Mr. Kadyrov, who was installed as president just after his 30th birthday, has never lost his rough edges as he has evolved from a field commander to a political leader. Stocky and bearded, he once showed up in a track suit for an audience at the Kremlin, and enjoyed careering around Grozny, assault rifles strewn in the back seat. He keeps a private zoo, stocked with fighting dogs and ostriches.
As he consolidated power, political opponents and critics were either forced out of the region or died.
Mr. Kadyrov has denied any role in these killings.
“All enemies of Kadyrov are mysteriously disappearing,” Ms. Sokiryanskaya, the Memorial researcher, said.
Ms. Estemirova’s death closed off a source of detailed criticism of Mr. Kadyrov for journalists and human rights groups. On Saturday, Aleksandr Cherkasov, a director of Memorial, said the group’s Grozny office would be temporarily closed because “what we have been doing involves mortal danger,” the Interfax news agency reported.
Mr. Masayev, whose brother disappeared last August, agreed to speak only about the grief his brother’s disappearance had caused the family. Memorial, the rights group, had documented the particulars of the case.
The vanished brother, Mukhamadsalakh D. Masayev, lived in Moscow through Chechnya’s two wars in the 1990s. A religious Muslim, he returned to Chechnya in 2006 hoping to work as an imam but was detained and held for four months in a parked bus on a Chechen military base. After his release, he granted an interview to Novaya Gazeta directly implicating Mr. Kadyrov in his abuse.
“One day, they took us out to the woods and cocked their assault rifles,” as if threatening them with execution, Mr. Masayev said in the interview. “Laughing, they brought us back. One day, a man with the nickname Jihad, the commander of some sort of battalion, beat me and yelled debasing words. Another day, the guards took us at night to a meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov put a foot forward, as if for us to lick it and ask for forgiveness.”
He said he was released after being invited to drink tea with Mr. Kadyrov.
After the publication, Mukhamadsalakh Masayev returned to Chechnya to attend a funeral against the advice of his older brother. He disappeared soon after he arrived in Chechnya. His seven children live in Moscow with relatives. “The children ask me, ‘When will Papa come home?’ ” Oleg Masayev said of his meetings with his nieces and nephews now. “And I don’t know what to say. I say, ‘He is traveling on the path of God.’ ”
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