This
Week’s Feature Stories:
The Colombian
Connection
Are U.S. government dollars
being used to fight the South American drug trade—or to ensure that the
flow of drug money will benefit American politicians?
Newsfronts
How Much Is That
Voter in the Window?:
The proprietor of a Web site that
auctions votes says he’s just being entrepreneurial—but critics say he’s
illegally undermining the electoral system
Politics and Real Estate Make Strange Bedfellows: Democratic activist questions the motivation behind HVCC’s sale of home used by college presidents
Trailmix:
Bush Wackers
and
Lawsuit Filed by Mastercard: $5 Million
FYI:
Other area
news...Almost Free
and Workers Unite...For
Lunch
Profile:
Matt
Bielinski
How Much Is That Voter in the Window?
The proprietor of a Web site that auctions votes says he’s just being entrepreneurial—but critics say he’s illegally undermining the electoral system
Criticisms that a two-party-dominated electoral process yields
little in the way of true choice have become a common aspect of election
season. At the same time, the seeming alternative—the third-party
candidate—is roundly derided as a wasted vote. While this context inspires
apathy in many, it made James Baumgartner see an opportunity: The
26-year-old graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created
the web site www.voteauction.com, the stated goal of which is “bringing
Capitalism and Democracy closer together” by auctioning off blocs of votes
to the highest bidder.
“I took a look at the two candidates, and I couldn’t discern too much difference between them,” said Baumgartner. “If you have two products that are very similar—like Coke and Pepsi, which have pretty much identical nutritional content and just a little bit of difference in taste, kind of like Bush and Gore—the only way they can differentiate themselves is by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising. So, that’s what Bush and Gore are doing this year. I haven’t seen a total aggregate estimate, but I’m sure it would top $1 billion. . . . I thought, ‘There might be a way to have an Internet start-up company that would profit from this.’ ”
So, Baumgartner constructed Voteauction, at which members of the heretofore nonvoting public (estimated at 100 million) can register to sell their votes, while corporate interests and individuals can register to purchase them. Sellers fill out absentee ballots and await word from Voteauction, which informs them of the winning bid and the winning bidder’s candidate choice; sellers then forward their ballots to Voteauction, which verifies that the ballots were made out in the name of the winner’s candidate, then directs the ballots to the appropriate election district. Proceeds are distributed evenly among the vote sellers. (The original minimum bid was $100, with a minimum increase of $50.)
Not surprisingly, there were objections. Deborah M. Phillips, chairwoman and president of watchdog group the Voting Integrity Project, decried Baumgartner’s site.
“Rather than performing some perverted service by raising new legal issues about the vote,” she wrote at VIP’s Web site, “the perpetrators of the website and all their cynical participants are engaging in illegal activity which could be tantamount to a bloodless coup. . . . This website is an INSULT to every American who has ever fought to protect our freedom or for the right to vote in America!”
Baumgartner shrugged off such criticism. “I don’t really believe that this is cynical,” he said. “I think it’s an honest reaction to the way the system is currently operated. I saw that the money that’s being raised for these elections is mostly from corporations or wealthy individuals that are making donations through soft money and that sort of thing. If they could just give that money directly to the people, it would be a much more direct and efficient way for the corporations to influence the election. The nonvoters would be voting for the first time, possibly, and getting an incentive for voting, a financial reward. They would be able to change their voting potential into capital.”
Baumgartner argued that the vote auctioning is legally protected under a 1976 Supreme Court ruling, Buckley v. Valeo, which equated certain campaign donations with free speech. “I believe that campaign contributions are the corporations’ method of speaking,” he said. “At least, that’s what the Supreme Court believes. So, I was allowing the corporations to speak directly to the voters.”
Lee Daghlian, director of public information for the state Board of Elections, said that he’s not so sure of that presumed protection. “There are laws not only in this state, but probably every state, about trading votes for money,” he said. “Whether it’s a Web site or handing somebody cash to go vote for a candidate, it is illegal.” He further dismissed Baumgartner’s citation of the Buckley v. Valeo decision as defense “a stretch.” He added, however, that there have been no official complaints registered with the board and that, to his knowledge, no action against Baumgartner is pending.
In any case, Baumgartner may now be out of the loop. He recently sold the Web site to an Austrian holding company, and although he may remain involved to a minor extent as the “North American press contact,” he has plans for a new project of his own. “I’m going to be creating a new Web site,” he said. “I don’t want to reveal the name of it yet, but it’ll be about the Voteauction process and some of the issues raised by Voteauction.com.”
As for the site itself, it is up and running. Although the new owners did not respond to calls for comment, an announcement posted at the site makes their motivations clear: “We feel that the American Election Industry provides unique new opportunities for the foreign investor. We purchased voteauction.com in order to investigate the profit-making potential of the American Election Industry.”
—John Rodat
photograph by Kris Qua
Politics and Real Estate Make Strange Bedfellows
Democratic activist questions the motivation behind HVCC’s sale of home used by college presidents
While Hudson Valley Community College officials have said they
are pleased to sell a home in which college presidents have lived for a
quarter of a century, an outspoken Rensselaer County Democrat wonders why
the decision was made to sell. Charlie “C.B.” Smith, who is often critical
of county Republicans, argued that the Brunswick mansion is a valuable
attribute that the school is losing because of political
patronage.
Located at 8 Ridge Road, the house was bequeathed to HVCC 25 years ago by Margarit Amstuz, who wanted the school to use the home as a recruiting tool when hiring presidents. A stipulation of the bequest, however, stated that if the school stopped using the house, it would have to be sold.
HVCC’s current president, Republican John Buono, was Rensselaer County Executive from 1985-1995, at which point he resigned to take a job with the state Dormitory Authority. (He was succeeded, after a special election, by fellow Republican Henry Zwack.) Buono was hired by the college last year.
Because Buono already has a home near the college, HVCC officials realized they had to relinquish the Ridge Road house, which they have said costs $30,000 annually to maintain; officials have also said that they will keep the proceeds from the sale for college use, while properties adjoining the house will revert to the Amstuz family.
“It’s just a winning situation all around,” William O’Connor, president of HVCC’s board of trustees, told the Times Union last week. “We’re eliminating maintenance and operation costs and putting the house back on the tax rolls. It’s a good thing for a public entity to do, and the estate gets something back, too.”
Smith questioned the motivation behind O’Connor’s enthusiasm. “They’re out there trying to do a masterful spin job,” the activist said. “They’ve allowed a local politician to take over the presidency and put politics into the school, and here’s the first cost of those kinds of decisions.”
According to Smith, because HVCC is funded by public money, there is a long tradition in Rensselaer County of both parties using jobs at the college for political patronage. While he offered no proof that patronage was behind Buono’s hiring or the decision to sell the Ridge Road house, Smith asked if the school was selling the house voluntarily or because it had no choice.
“Had Mr. Buono acted to protect the school’s recruiting tool, they could have kept this [house],” Smith claimed. “If they ever get back to the point when they are not governed by politics in their hiring decisions, they will not have this recruiting tool.”
Taking the opposite tack, O’Connor has said that Buono’s refusal to live in the Ridge Road house was a boon to the school: “We were able to attract a world-class president without providing housing for him,” he told the Times Union.
—Peter
Hanson
photograph by Kris Qua
Bush Whackers
Anyone but Bush in 2000. That’s the theme of a new online artists’ community that has taken up residence at www.stopbush2000.com.
The site is home to an artists’ collective, the self-proclaimed goal of which is “stopping George W. Bush in the year 2000 through the distribution of flyer artwork that can be easily downloaded, printed and copied.” Visitors to the site are invited to browse a selection of flyers, submitted by artists from around the country, that feature variations on the theme of, well, stopping Bush.
There’s the black-and-white, horror-movie illustration of Bush sprouting devil’s horns; the raunchy “Bush is no pussy” flyer; the Cokémon Bush, featuring the Texas governor with a powdery white lip and bright yellow skin; and the ominous, blood-spattered Bush.” These are only a few of the 20 or so flyers that site founders Tod Brilliant, Jason Willmon and Lisa Key encourage people to print and post “in every nook and cranny of the U.S.A.; from bus stops in Detroit to fence posts in Boise.”
“Every September and October, we are deluged with these red-white-and-blue posters for the candidates, and I was thinking, ‘How can you really have an impact on something as set in stone as the presidential race?’ ” Brilliant said. “I’ve always been a big proponent of flyer artwork. . . . One of my co-conspirators and I came up with the idea for the site. The whole intention was to get anti-propaganda propaganda out there that represents people from a bunch of different communities, a bunch of different lifestyles, a bunch of different backgrounds. We kind of wanted to offer a site that would have a wide range of beefs and criticisms that represent a wide range of people.”
So far, Brilliant said, feedback to the site has been mixed: “We get a lot of random, super-right-wing hate mail, to be blunt,” he said. “It’s kind of sad, because it’s all been based on the supposition that we’re pro-Gore. But we’re not pro-anybody. Personally, I’m gonna vote for Nader, but I’m not representing the Web site when I say that—that’s just me personally. The artists themselves are voting for numerous candidates, and some of the artists are conservatives. They just don’t like Bush representing their platform.”
Brilliant said that Stop Bush 2000 is extending an open invitation to artists of all media and abilities to submit their anti-Bush flyers for display at the site. Works will be posted at the discretion of Brilliant, Willmon and Key, who say they won’t post anything slanderous or critical of “George Bush as a person—just as a politician.”
“We don’t want to be mean or vindictive,” Brilliant said. “We’ve never met the guy. We just want to express ourselves and remind artists that it’s OK to do political pieces.”
—E.S.
Lawsuit Filed by MasterCard: $5 Million
Ralph Nader, the self-avowed crusader against alleged corporate abuses, gave his presidential campaign a little boost this month when he parodied a commercial popularized by one of the most prominent institutions of global capitalism. Now, the Green Party’s candidate is embroiled in a lawsuit challenging his use of the ad.
Nader’s “Priceless Truth” commercial began airing on Aug. 6 and was shown primarily in the state of California, especially during the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles (it can also be viewed at www.votenader.org). It mocked the fundraising practices of both Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Democratic and Republican nominees for president, respectively. “Grilled tenderloin fund-raiser: $1,000 a plate,” the voiceover intoned. “Campaign ads filled with half-truths: $10 million. Promises to special-interest groups: over $10 billion.” Referring to Nader, the voiceover continued: “Finding out the truth: Priceless.”
MasterCard International Inc., the credit-card giant, filed suit in federal court on Aug. 16 against Nader and his campaign committee, seeking $5 million in damages because Nader’s ad was modeled on MasterCard’s $100 million “Priceless” ad campaign. According to MasterCard, the campaign—which began airing on America’s television screens in 1997—airs in 48 states and in 22 languages.
“The [Nader] ad, which has been running on national television, clearly violated MasterCard’s copyrights and trademarks, and misleads our viewers into believing that MasterCard is endorsing Mr. Nader’s campaign,” the company said in a statement, which was issued from its headquarters in Purchase, N.Y.
According to his campaign, the Nader commercial was intended to ensure his inclusion in this fall’s presidential debates. (In June, Nader filed a lawsuit against the Federal Elections Commission in order to force that inclusion.) “Without Ralph Nader in the presidential debates, the truth will come in last,” the advertisement concluded.
MasterCard’s executives, while noting that “we fully appreciate Mr. Nader’s desire to promote his views,” claimed they were unwitting participants in his crusade for the presidency. “The success of the ‘Priceless’ campaign demands that we protect it from those who attempt to use it for their own promotional purposes, without our permission,” MasterCard said. “The lawsuit was filed only after repeated requests to the [Nader] campaign committee to stop running the ads proved unsatisfactory.”
In a written response to the suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Nader said MasterCard was trying to “dominate . . . the arena of free speech and the free flow of creative ideas in the political arena. They should lighten up. They’re taking their name ‘Master’ too seriously. This is America.”
Nader then attacked the credit-card industry, arguing that “credit-card charges are an outrageous fleecing of consumers, lead to invasions of consumer privacy and are used by too many merchants, who threaten damage to credit ratings to stifle legitimate customer complaints.”
Earlier this summer, Nader stated that—if elected president—he would seek the passage of the “Credit Card Bill of Rights” to protect consumers from alleged abuses in the credit industry.
—L.G.
Almost Free
In 1995, during a trial arranged by the Peruvian military, Lori Berenson faced hooded judges and was never allowed to respond to the charges lodged against her. She was convicted of sponsoring terrorism in Peru and was sent high into the Andes mountains to serve a life sentence in a secluded prison.
This week, the 30-year-old Berenson, an American citizen, received word from Peruvian officials that her life sentence had been nullified. The country’s Supreme Military Justice Commission informed her of the decision on Monday (Aug. 28), without elaborating about the reasoning behind the ruling.
The charges have not been dropped, according to Rhoda and Mark Berenson, the young woman’s parents. Their daughter still faces an appearance before Peru’s civilian courts because of the allegation that she was a leader of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a leftist opposition group that had planned to take over the Peruvian Congress in 1995.
“Peru has now admitted that Lori Berenson was not a leader of MRTA,” the Berensons said in a statement read to reporters Monday evening. “She has been imprisoned in Peru for four years and nine months under cruel, inhumane and degrading conditions without justification. . . . There is no basis in truth, or law, for holding Lori another day.”
To learn more about Berenson’s case, or for updates, visit www.freelori.org.
—Larry Goodwin
Workers Unite . . . for Lunch
Solidarity 2000: The Next Generation is the theme of this year’s annual Capital District Labor Day Celebration and Picnic, held by the Solidarity Committee of the Capital District and Jobs with Justice. All workers and their families are invited to Monday’s event, which runs from noon until dusk at Ganser-Smith Memorial Park in Menands.
Folks being honored at the picnic include student groups, such as those who try to discourage colleges and universities from buying and selling clothes and other goods made under sweatshop conditions, and several area unions: AFSCME District Council 1707 at Hope House, whose members are struggling to win a first contract; Newspaper Guild Local 34 at Capital Newspapers; and unions that are on strike.
The picnic, however, is a celebration for all workers and their families. For the potluck event, each family or group is asked to bring a dish; the Solidarity Committee and Jobs with Justice will provide beverages, hot dogs, hamburgers, veggie burgers and fixings. Call 462-1388 for information on what to bring and to help planners know how many people to expect.
The Colombian Connection
Are U.S. government dollars being
used to fight the South American
drug trade—or to ensure that the flow
of drug money
will benefit American politicians?
By Larry Goodwin
Over the course of his eight years in office, President Bill Clinton had never addressed one of his videotaped messages directly to the citizens of Colombia. But he did on Tuesday evening, just hours before a bipartisan delegation of U.S. politicians were scheduled to arrive in the port city of Cartagena, under the protection of legions of Secret Service personnel and Colombian armed forces.
“We come from different political parties, but we have a common commitment to support our friend, Colombia,” Clinton assured television viewers throughout the South American nation. “As you struggle, with courage, to make peace, to build your economy, to fight drugs and to deepen democracy, the United States will be on your side.”
The Narco News Bulletin, an Internet-based service that monitors the Latin American press, reports that there is growing opposition to the $1.3 billion military-aid package awarded by Clinton and the U.S. Congress this summer to the administration of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana, supposedly to assist Pastrana as he escalates a campaign to eradicate coca plants and opium poppies in his country.
At about the same time the president’s message was airing on TV, soldiers from Colombia’s main leftist guerrilla army attacked banks in the city of Cali. Further north, in the city of Medellín, university students demonstrated in the streets, carrying placards saying “Clinton go home. U.S. aid is not welcome.”
“What is going to be the effect of this money in Colombia?” wonders Ricardo López-Torrijos, a Colombian-American who has lived in New York state for nearly 20 years. “I guess I need to be hopeful.”
López-Torrijos, 44, admits to keeping his distance from the civil war that has ravaged his homeland for more than 40 years. But that distance doesn’t quiet his concerns about whether the war will get even bloodier in the weeks, months and years ahead. (Some observers estimate that more than 120,000 Colombians have died in the course of the civil war.)
In late June, at the same time U.S. leaders were approving the aid package, López-Torrijos and his wife, Laura Whalen, traveled from their comfortable home in Guilderland to attend his brother Fernando’s wedding in Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. It was the second journey the couple has made there in eight years, and the second time since 1983 that López-Torrijos had returned to visit family members.
When it comes to the so-called war on drugs, López-Torrijos and Whalen both point to a case that has sparked intense anger in Colombia. In June 1999, Laurie Hiett, the wife of Col. James Hiett, the U.S. Army’s station chief in Bogotá, was caught using the U.S. Embassy’s mail-delivery system to smuggle roughly $750,000 worth of heroin into Brooklyn. (James Hiett allegedly used some of that money to pay for personal expenses.) In April, federal Judge Edward R. Korman sentenced James Hiett to only 18 months in prison. The next month, at a separate court appearance, his wife was given a sentence of five years. Both sentences were denounced by officials in Colombia, who charged the United States with hypocrisy for not being stiffer with the penalties given to the Hietts.
According to López-Torrijos and Whalen, Colombians’ anger only increased when Alberto Orlández-Gamboa, a reputed member of the Caracol drug cartel accused of smuggling cocaine into the United States, was extradited from Colombia this month. Critics of U.S. drug-enforcement policy believe that once the federal judge in his case issues the sentence, Orlández-Gamboa will spend the remainder of his life in prison.
‘There is no question that Colombia suffers from the problems of a state yet to consolidate its power: a lack of confidence in the capacity of the armed forces, the police and the judicial system to guarantee order and security,” reads the preface of “Plan Colombia,” the official document summarizing the $7.5 billion aid package that Pastrana began advocating for after he was elected president in August 1998.
In Colombia, the document continues, there is “a credibility crisis at different levels and in different agencies of government; and corrupt practices in the public and private sectors. All this has been fed and aggravated by the enormous destabilizing influences of drug trafficking, which with vast economic resources, has constantly generated indiscriminate violence while undermining [Colombia’s] values, on a scale comparable only to the era of Prohibition in the United States.
“Colombia requires aid to strengthen its economy and generate employment,” the plan concludes. “Our country needs better and fairer access to markets where our products can compete. Assistance from the United States, the European Community and the rest of the international community is vital to our economic development. That development, in turn, is a critical counter force to drug trafficking.”
The stated goal of Plan Colombia is to eradicate coca plants and opium poppies in two regions of southern Colombia that are, in effect, controlled by the guerrilla fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The given reason for this strategy is that FARC funds its war against the Colombian government with profits from drug sales, which have been easier to obtain since the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency dismantled the Medellín and Cali drug cartels in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The Western Hemisphere’s largest rebel army, FARC is estimated to include between 15,000 and 20,000 soldiers. In an effort to foster more productive peace talks with FARC rebels, Pastrana’s administration in 1998 declared hundreds of square miles of territory (in the country’s southern rainforest) a demilitarized zone, an area that is today identified by Colombians as “Farclandia.” Colombia’s second-largest rebel group, the National Liberation Army, has requested its own demilitarized zone in the northern part of the country.
At the same time the U.S. Congress was debating how much funding should be awarded to Pastrana to carry out Plan Colombia, peace talks with both major rebel groups stalled. Agence France-Presse reports that the countries belonging to the European Union are likely to withhold their portion of the funding until next year, citing a sharp increase in violent incidents and massacres throughout Colombia.
The ongoing escalation of the long-running civil war, López-Torrijos explains, marks a sudden reversal of the strategy championed by Belisario Betancur, a prominent figure in Colombia’s Conservative Party, who in 1982 took the unprecedented step of starting negotiations with FARC and M-19, another Marxist-guerrilla group. “Before that, the government wouldn’t recognize that there was a war going on in the rural parts of the country,” he says.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for International Policy, which is tracking the related appropriations through Congress, the U.S.’s $1.3 billion commitment contains $416 million that will directly aid the Colombian armed forces as they initiate a “push into southern Colombia.” The funding supports the creation of three new counter-narcotics battalions whose missions are targeted at the Colombian departments of Putumayo and Caquetá. (In Colombia, departments are the equivalents of states.)
Nearly $330 million of the money will go toward the purchase of 18 UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters and 30 UH-1H “Superhuey” helicopters to aid the military offensive, according to the CIP. The strategy calls for using the machines in a stepped-up assault on coca plants, the raw materials for cocaine, using a fungus called Fusarium oxysporum.
Last year, under pressure from environmental groups, officials in the state of Florida prevented the use of Fusarium to stanch the cultivation of marijuana plants, fearing the fungus would adversely affect legal crops. Despite the fact that successive Colombian governments have sprayed Paraquat, Roundup and other toxic chemicals throughout the countryside to eradicate drug crops, Colombia is still one of the largest producers of cocaine and heroin sold in the world’s wholesale drug markets, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Another aspect of Plan Colombia is its use of private contractors in the United States to assist in the training of the Colombian counter-narcotics battalions. One such company is the Alexandria, Va.-based Military Professional Resources Inc., which focuses on “military matters, to include training, equipping, force design and management, professional development, concepts and doctrine, organizational and operational assistance, quick reaction military contractual support, and democracy assistance programs for the military forces of emerging republics,” according to the company’s Web site.
Retired Gen. Ed Soyster, a 35-year military veteran and spokesman for MPRI, says the company is conducting the second phase of an $800,000 contract signed by the Colombian Ministry of Defense in 1999. About 10 MPRI staff members are presently in Colombia, he says, training the counter-narcotics battalions as they prepare to unleash their assault on the FARC rebels. “We have a contract with the Ministry of Defense for a specific task,” Soyster says, adding that MPRI’s specialties include training in “core military competencies.”
According to Soyster, “there is no question” that the privatization of U.S. military operations is increasing. “[MPRI] probably wouldn’t be in Colombia if we had an 8 million-man army,” he says.
The Center for International Policy also reports that the U.S. intervention in Colombia is part of a regional offensive against drug trafficking. Roughly $116 million of the $1.3 billion approved by Congress this summer will be used to upgrade U.S. military airstrips in Ecuador, Aruba and Curacao, from which counter-narcotics and intelligence-gathering operations will be launched. About $180 million will go to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries in an effort to promote drug-interdiction and alternative-development programs as well.
Opponents of the Colombian aid package have several criticisms. They argue that Congress’ passage of the necessary legislation—and President Bill Clinton’s unqualified support for it—has undermined attempts to curb human-rights abuses in Colombia. Some critics say that the package is a thinly veiled effort to help the Colombian military quash the leftist rebels. Another charge is that this particular escalation of the so-called war on drugs ignores the need for drug-treatment programs in the United States. And a number of observers say they are concerned about a more sinister possibility: that Plan Colombia is not about eradicating the drug trade, but rather about who’s going to control the drug trade.
Colombian military and paramilitary groups have long been associated with human-rights abuses in that country. Human Rights Watch lists Antioquia, Meta, Santander and Bolivar as the most dangerous states in Colombia. Last year, paramilitary groups in these areas—which HRW and other groups have accused of maintaining strong links with the military and police forces—were responsible for nearly 80 percent of the human-rights violations that were investigated by the Colombian Commission of Jurists. Leftist guerrillas were accused of committing 20 percent of such violations. Those percentages reflect the rates of atrocities that have been committed throughout Colombia in recent years, Human Rights Watch reports.
According to Walter Cole, an aide to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), it is precisely because of the shoddy human-rights record of the Colombian government that the members of the Congressional Black Caucus are contemplating whether to follow Waters’ lead in calling for the resignation of Barry McCaffrey, the head of President Clinton’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. McCaffrey is a key supporter of Plan Colombia.
Cole says Waters and many other politicians believe McCaffrey is “the wrong person for the job,” not least because of his support for Colombian intervention. “[Waters] believes we need a realignment on drugs,” Cole adds.
On Aug. 15, as the Democratic National Convention was getting under way in Los Angeles, Waters was joined in her demand by a bipartisan group of legislators at the Shadow Convention, an event organized by prominent intellectuals, including Arianna Huffington, as a forum in which American voters could address three topics that were more or less left out of both political conventions this year—including the drug war.
“The problem is that if politicians question this war on drugs, they risk being called soft on drugs,” Rep. Tom Campbell (R-Calif.) declared before his fellow legislators, according to reports from the Shadow Conventions filed by the Lindesmith Center, a drug-treatment advocacy group. “I’m not scared to have any label put on me, because America’s greatness lies in individual responsibility and freedom—not in blaming other countries for our problems.”
Prior to the passage of the financial-aid package for Colombia in late June, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) requested the attachment of an amendment to the Senate version of the legislation; the amendment would have withheld $225 million in new funding for Colombia’s military and police forces, and redirected it toward treatment programs in the United States. The amendment was defeated, 89-11.
“We had a pretty good fight here in the Senate,” offers Jim Farrell, a spokesman for Wellstone, who is one of the leading critics of the aid package. “And unfortunately, we couldn’t convince his colleagues to see the light of day on this.”
“The decision to fund the Colombian Army’s push into southern Colombia is an enormous policy shift, and a profound mistake,” Wellstone charged in a statement released from his office in June. “If the purpose of this military aid is to stop drug trafficking, shouldn’t some of that aid target the North as well? Something strange is going on here.”
Joe Occhipinti knows precisely why he has become so estranged from the politics of the United States. Like many other police officers, he has firsthand knowledge of what are perhaps the most explosive allegations—left unexamined by the mainstream media—surrounding the U.S. intervention in Colombia: that U.S. government agencies themselves are involved in drug trafficking.
Occhipinti, the founder and executive director of the National Police Defense Foundation in Newark, N.J., is the former head of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Anti-Smuggling Unit for the New York City area. He busted drug smugglers for 22 years before he himself was put in prison in the late 1980s.
In 1988, Occhipinti and a team of investigators uncovered the smuggling operation of Freddy Antonio, a member of the Dominican Federation; Antonio and the Federation were allegedly involved in the smuggling of Colombian cocaine through the Dominican Republic. Antonio reportedly concealed his operations by opening a number of “bodegas” in the Washington Heights section of New York City.
“Operation Bodega,” organized and carried out under Occhipinti’s command, resulted in about 40 arrests and the seizure of more than $1 million in cash. A total of $136,000 had been set aside by the drug dealers and was set to be disbursed to Sea Crest Trading—long identified by independent researchers as a front company that is owned and operated the Central Intelligence Agency.
Instead of getting praise from superiors for the success of “Operation Bodega,” Occhipinti was accused by United States attorneys of violating the civil rights of Antonio and his cohorts in the Dominican Federation, based on the notion that their activities were targeted because of their nationality. Occhipinti was then convicted on the civil-rights charges. He spent 36 months in prison, and was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush before he left office.
“My investigation confirmed that Sea Crest, as well as the Dominican Federation, are being politically protected by high-ranking public officials who have received illegal political contributions, which were drug proceeds,” Occhipinti stated before the House Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on July 27 of this year. He was speaking in support of H.R. 4105, a bill that would eliminate the extensive immunities enjoyed by federal prosecutors.
“I do not feel optimistic that this legislation will be passed,” Occhipinti says, when contacted for comment at his home in New Jersey.
Occhipinti’s case has become a precedent for police agencies across the country, an example of how racial undertones can be taken advantage of by politically connected drug dealers. “When I can document 10 major investigations being prematurely terminated,” he says, “we’ve got a serious problem.”
After he was released from prison, Occhipinti says, he tried “to expose to the American public the inside story of the drug trade.” But he soon became frustrated by people’s unwillingness to consider the details of the story.
Today, he asserts, it is up to black and Hispanic political leaders to renew the investigation. “Package it, and give it to some credible civil-rights leaders,” Occhipinti says. “I really believe a majority of the drugs [are] earmarked in the minority communities.”
‘California, Florida, Texas and New York are, far and away, the states where most illegal drugs enter the United States,” writes Catherine Austin Fitts in From the Wilderness, a newsletter published by former Los Angeles Police Department investigator Michael Ruppert. “California, Texas, Florida and New York are also the states responsible for laundering most of 200-250 billion dollars of drug money that pass through the U.S. economy and banking system each year.”
Austin Fitts is a former Wall Street banker who raised more than $100,000 for the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, and was later appointed by him to the assistant secretary position in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. She says she was skeptical at first of the conclusion that political parties in the United States are steeped in drug money. But she reconsidered when looking at the actual figures.
“I just did the math and I said, ‘Oh, shit,’ ” recalls Austin Fitts.
According to Ruppert, who was fired from the LAPD in the 1970s after producing what he considered evidence of CIA drug-running in California, the 2000 elections represent a monumental struggle between two “factions” of the U.S. government: the Democratic and Republican parties. The prize of the struggle, according to the theory, is control over the wealth generated by drug profits.
And there is mounting evidence to confirm such allegations.
In a two-part series this summer, the Philadelphia City Paper, an alternative newsweekly, reported on the case of John McLaughlin, a former investigator from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office who—not unlike Occhipinti—had stumbled across a cocaine- and heroin-smuggling operation in Philadelphia that was linked to the political campaigns of high-ranking officials in the Dominican Republic, as well as to Vice President Al Gore, whose campaign coffers allegedly were beefed up in 1996 by those same Dominican officials.
“After uncovering the Dominican Connection, McLaughlin found that, like other officers around the country, there was a complete shutdown of his investigations by prosecutors, who accused him and his partners of lying and conducting illegal searches and seizures,” City Paper reported. McLaughlin and some of his partners sued the offices of the Pennsylvania attorney general and U.S. attorneys, and learned only in recent weeks that their case will be heard in the courts.
In March, the U.S. Treasury Department released its 2000 Money Laundering Strategy, an enforcement program based on the department’s finding that “the amount of funds generated by the sale of drugs, arms trafficking, bank and stock fraud, counterfeiting and similar crimes each year equals almost $600 billion.”
That was followed by a report in April from Geopolitical Drug Watch, a Paris-based group, which concluded that increased privatization of the global economy was largely responsible for the growing trade in narcotics. “Drug barons, north and south, invest their illegal profits in traditional southern markets from gold and diamonds to cocoa and coffee, drawing in governments and officials but crippling local populations,” Agence France-Presse reported.
In Colombia on Tuesday, Clinton’s televised speech was strongly denounced by Oscar Arias, the former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who counts himself among the thousands of Latin Americans advocating for the legalization of drugs as a means to win the drug war. Arias has emerged as a vocal critic of the military-aid package for Pastrana.
“Haven’t the last 20 years shown us that as long as there is a market for drugs in the United States, somebody will get them there?” Arias asks, in a statement translated by Narco News Bulletin. “By providing military aid rather than substantial social and economic assistance, the United States is missing an opportunity to address the real roots of counterinsurgency and drug production in Colombia.”
Ricardo López-Torrijos and Laura Whalen agree that Americans should learn the truth about Colombia. “We see [the civil war] as a flare-up, from our perspective, and it’s been going on for a long time,” Whalen says.
“One of the things I’m hoping for,” adds López-Torrijos, “is that a tiny little sector of the American population gets educated. They can have a huge influence.”
Drug trafficking aside, López-Torrijos compares the escalation of the conflict in his homeland to the bitter civil wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the latter two of which ended during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Much like in Colombia today, leftist insurgencies in each of those countries were the principal targets of government security forces that had obtained arms, training and extensive political support from the United States.
It was largely because of pressures exerted by the thousands of Americans who participated in civil society, López-Torrijos concludes, that it became possible to find solutions to each of those wars.
“The [number of] people who were concerned or learned something was tiny,” he says. “But I’m convinced that they influenced American policy.”
Matt Bielinski
Written by Ann Morrow • Photographed by Kris Qua
Clubgoers watching Matt Bielinski onstage may find his
neon-colored hair the most eye-catching thing about him—until he opens his mouth, that
is. A drummer with local hard-rock act the Bruise Bros., Bielinski has
been known to breathe plumes of fire while performing. And we’re not
talking about the feather-duster-sized plumes you might see spurting from
a street-corner magician: The fiery jet streams that pour from Bielinski’s
maw could impress a full-grown dragon. “You play aggressive music, you
want to get your point across,” he says. “It definitely takes people by
surprise,” he adds with a maniacal chuckle. “I see them moving out of the
way pretty quickly.”
Amazingly, no one has been scorched, or even singed, by the drummer’s daredevilry, although Bielinski admits he’s left his mark on a few clubs: Look up anywhere the Bros. have played a gig, he says, and you’ll see flame licks on the ceiling. But that’s not to say there haven’t been a few close calls. One time at a nightspot in Lebanon, rocketing flames hit a rafter and shot out to the sides, then slowly rolled right over the tops of people’s heads “like a thundercloud.” Asked how often he’s been alarmed by exhaling a flame that was bigger than expected, he gleefully replies, “Every single time.”
But it makes for a hell of show. “It’s all in the tradition of the ‘madman drummer,’ ” he says, naming John Bonham and the even wilder Keith Moon as two of his favorite musicians. Truth be known, though, the 30-year-old human flame-thrower is not really a madman but a hair stylist, and a successful one at that. Two years ago, he and a partner built a business from scratch, the Headquarters hair salon in Rotterdam.
“Now that was scary,” Bielinski says with a hint of seriousness. “I left my regular job and I had no way of knowing if my clientele was going to follow me: ‘You can build it, but they might not come.’ It was pure risk. I just thought, ‘If I succeed, I win. If I donsucceed . . .’ ” He pauses just long enough for his devil-may-care attitude to return, then adds: “I didn’t really think about that part.”
It was shortly after opening the shop that Bielinski was seized by inspiration. In the middle of a workday, he walked across the street to a convenience mart, bought some lighter fluid, broke off a broom handle to use as a torch and coughed up his first fireball. “I was feeling ballsy, and I was thinking about how to get the ultimate performance,” he explains. “When I’m playing drums, I turn into ‘the Beast.’ It’s like voodoo, the way it happens. And I thought having fire would add to that.” A few months later, he was stopped by the police and questioned on the contents of his briefcase, which includes lighter fluid, a torch and a sheet with hand-painted slogans (the band’s backdrop), but they accepted his explanation that he was a musician, not a terrorist. So far, the only person to give him a hard time about his pyrotechnics is his grandmother.
As for the lighter fluid, Bielinski pours it directly into his mouth. He scoffs at the idea of using a tastier combustible, such as 151 rum or cognac. “Nothing flames like Kingsford Edge,” he proclaims. He even considers himself something of a connoisseur. “It’s like fine wine—you have to pay a little more for the good stuff,” he says. “You want to ‘taste the fire, not the fuel’. I stay away from the stuff in the clearance bin at Eckerd’s, and generic fuel will dry out anything it touches.” A certain burning sensation is no big deal, however. “I’ve had worse things in my mouth,” he says with another gleeful laugh.
Far from deterring business to his hair salon, it seems Bielinski’s wild-man persona may be an asset, as part of his clientele consists of suburban kids looking for the latest extreme in hairstyles and colors. Currently, Bielinski himself sports an electric shade of Pimpin’ Purple.
“The shop looks like a tattoo parlor,” he says proudly. “We play loud rock music, or sometimes Pakistani acoustic music, whatever we feel like. You work for yourself, you don’t have to abide by the rules.
“I totally feel like I can be myself now,” he continues, his voice again taking on a tone of maniacal amusement. “Maybe too much so.”
Or maybe not. “I’m finding out,” he adds happily, “that the more you are allowed to be yourself, the better it gets.”
