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Why Can’t We Do Anything About Guns?

Read the original article here: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/06/188793/why-can{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99t-we-do-anything-about-guns

Once again, in the wake of a horrific mass shooting, Congress has failed to pass even any token gun reform legislation. This time, legislative inaction took a little more than eight days.

Why can’t we do anything about massacres with semi-automatic, high-capacity guns that have helped make ours the most violent advanced nation on earth? Because we have allowed a minority of extremists to control the gun debate.

The only thing stopping real gun reform in the United States is a paranoid fear that has long been quietly peddled by the gun lobby. Any system of regulation, they maintain, would create lists of gun owners that some future, tyrannical regime would use to seize Americans’ guns and impose a totalitarian state.

That might sound like hyperbole (and it is), but propaganda about a federal government registry or list of gun owners is the chief obstacle to meaningful gun reform in the United States.

For decades, proponents of gun reform have avoided the gun lobby’s central argument. Cowed by the NRA, they have chosen to try to make incremental reforms in the vain hope that they might some day build enough momentum to make a difference. That’s what happened when Democratic Senators led a filibuster last week after the Orlando gay nightclub shooting, and proposed reforms including a “no-buy” list for suspected terrorists, and a new “assault weapons” ban.

A “no buy” list would be a step in the right direction, but it would still only stop terrorist suspects who have already been clearly flagged as dangerous. An “assault weapons” ban, if it looks anything like the 1994 ban, would outlaw guns based more on their cosmetic features than their mechanical functions, or proscribe some guns while allowing for other, equally lethal weapons.

Similarly, expanded background checks, a reform proposed after the Sandy Hook school shooting that failed to pass Congress, would deter some gun buyers. But even so-called “universal” background checks, if they were finally enacted, would only marginally help reduce gun violence. In the bills proposed after recent mass shootings,  “universal” background checks have been riddled with loopholes for gun shows and private sales.

Over and over, members of Congress have allowed the NRA to deflect, distort and ultimately define the terms of the gun debate. Aging rocker, bona fide Vietnam-era draft dodger, and NRA board member Ted Nugent may be a raging, racist buffoon, but NRA executive director Wayne LaPierre is a master at public communication. He has long quietly struck an ideological chord with NRA loyalists, while making far more pragmatic sounding arguments in public.

NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia declined to comment for this story.

But NRA spokespeople follow a script, as anyone watching cable news since the Orlando gay nightclub shooting must have noticed. This is how it goes:

  • Before trying to pass any new laws, government must first “enforce the laws already on the books.” (Don’t mention that NRA lobbying has ensured that agencies tasked with enforcing gun laws don’t have the resources to do it. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or ATF, prevented by law from using an electronic database to track gun sales, specifically because of NRA pressure. The Centers for Disease Control are barred from conducting research on gun violence.)
  • Proposed reforms would not have prevented shooters in recent tragedies from obtaining guns, as LaPierre said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” (The NRA, by the way, is largely right on this point, as I explain above.)
  • Bog the discussion down with mechanical minutiae about guns like whether an AR-15 riflewas used in Orlando. Disdainfully point out, for instance, that the Sig Sauer MCX rifle used inside the nightclub operates with a different firing system—gas piston instead of direct impingement- than the traditional AR-15, which the NRA has dubbed “America’s rifle.” Even though the manufacturer markets the MCX as a “next generation” improvement on the AR-15.

Most importantly, wrap yourself in the Second Amendment, saying undermining it is no way to respond to gun tragedies, like Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan did last week after Orlando. Without ever explaining how exactly the Second Amendment allegedly protects an unlimited right to guns, as the NRA claims; it doesn’t, and no court has ever ruled it does.

Finally, start over and repeat the same points ad infinitum, to prevent gun dialogue from advancing any further. The result? After each gun tragedy from Sandy Hook to San Bernardino, from Aurora to Orlando, from Columbine to Charleston, from Virginia Tech to Tucson, we end up talking more about why specific reform measures won’t work than about what actually will. Rarely, if ever, do we begin the conversation with a simple premise, Why can’t we make a difference?

This is the kind of broad question that makes NRA lobbyists nervous, as the answer has the potential to unmask the fallacy of their own core claim: Americans must have unregulated access to unlimited quantities of high-powered firearms to defend our freedom and, if necessary, fight a war or wage an insurrection against the state.

That claim might sound like a B movie pitch (as in the 1984 classic “Red Dawn” starring the late Patrick Swayze and directed by former NRA board director John Milius). But it is the steady drumbeat played by right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and Internet outlets including  Glen Beck’s DailyCaller.com and Alex Jones’ InfoWars.com. More than a few Twitter streams are similarly flooded with terms like #Molon Labe, a classic Greek phrase for “come and take” them [guns], often juxtaposed to #NRA.

Such views have helped spawn terrorism before. In 1995, on the second anniversary of the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children. McVeigh later said he was acting in revenge for Waco’s federal raid over illegal guns, and in opposition to the “assault weapons” ban that had just passed Congress.

The gun lobby has publicly distanced itself from people like McVeigh, but its leaders clearly support the notion of armed insurrection against the state.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so Americans would never have to live in tyranny,” LaPierre said in 2012 before a United Nations international arms control panel. “Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea.”

“History proves it,” he went on. “When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

History proves no such thing, even though Ben Carson made this explicit claim in the case of Nazi Germany both in his book and when he ran for the Republican nomination for president earlier this year. Historians like professor of history and Holocaust studies Alan E. Steinweis at the University of Vermont have debunked this view, and no serious scholar has ever made a credible case for it.

Nor have U.S. courts ever even heard, let alone upheld such a view. The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment as ensuring not just the right of state militias to be armed, but also the right of individuals to keep a gun in the home for self-defense. But instead of upholding the gun lobby’s expansive claim of individual gun rights, the Court in an opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that that the Second Amendment is “not unlimited” and that laws may be passed on “conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

While quietly telling its base that the NRA defends its alleged right of unlimited access to guns, NRA leaders have been far more circumspect in public when asked to address the matter. In 2013, after the Sandy Hook massacre, Sen. Dick Durbin asked LaPierre point blank about the purpose behind the Second Amendment, saying his own constituents in Illinois who are NRA members have told the senator: “We need the firepower and the ability to protect ourselves from our government—from our government, from the police—if they knock on our doors and we need to fight back.”

Wasn’t that the perfect chance for LaPierre to say clearly for all to hear how much the NRA cherishes the Second Amendment for its defense of freedom? But instead the NRA executive director, just seven months after his campy U.N. speech, spoke in a more subdued tone on national television:

“Senator, I think that without a doubt, if you look at why our Founding Fathers put it there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again,” answered LaPierre.

The polished NRA communicator then deftly changed the subject.

In today’s world, LaPierre went on, the Second Amendment remains “relevant and essential” for other reasons. People fear “being abandoned by their government. If a tornado hits, if a hurricane hits, if a riot occurs that they’re gonna be out there alone. And the only way they’re gonna protect themself (sic) in the cold and the dark, when they’re vulnerable is with a firearm.”

There is an important distinction between these two types of scenarios. You might be willing to wait for a background check before obtaining a gun to protect your family. But if you are worried about the federal government, you might be concerned that any serious regulation of firearms would generate lists of gun owners could be used by “jack-booted government thugs,” as LaPierre himself put in a 1995 fundraising letter for which he later apologized, to seize Americans’ weapons and impose a rogue state.

The NRA is serious about that idea. In 2013, after Sandy Hook, the universal background checks bill that came closest to passing Congress included language as a concession to the NRA that would have imposed extra penalties of up to 15 years in prison for any official who helps create a federal gun registry.

If change is ever to come, it will mean finally calling out the NRA for a dangerous radicalism that is wholly out of step with the opinions of both U.S. courts and the public.

One of the NRA’s own slogans in this regard could help, but gun reformists must first turn it on its head. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” Remember that? Right. So, following the lead of the “no-buy” list, we need to focus less on guns, and more on gun buyers.

Let’s make the purchase of any highly lethal weapon as involved a process as buying a car. We should ensure that every new gun buyer has the training and the insurance to properly store and handle his or her firearms safely.

Many gun owners would support such steps, just as they already support universal background checks. Such measures are also nearly the minimum standard in every other advanced nation.

In the United States, many gun buyers first see new products in the glossy, color pages of NRA magazines like American Rifleman produced only for NRA members. The fear that the government might one day come for your guns drives record gun sales, especially of expensive, high-powered weapons like AR-15 or next generation rifles used in Orlando, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, Aurora and other shootings. And these sales tend to spike after every well-publicized mass shooting.

Many of the same firms that make these weapons also donate a percentage of sales or in other ways contribute to the NRA. That might help explain why both the gun lobby and its allied manufacturers continue to promote inaction, as America endures at least five times more gun violence than any other advanced nation, with a mass shooting that leaves at least four people dead or wounded occurring on average more than once a day.

The gun lobby’s professed fear of government further explains why it claims citizens must maintain access to weapons so powerful that The New York Times editorial page last week said “[n]o civilian anywhere should be allowed to have” them. Because if civilians are really going to defend America’s freedom by standing up to a potentially abusive government, they will need all the firepower they can find. That means not only AR-15-style rifles, but weapons like a .50 caliber sniper rifle along with silencers that can fit almost any kind of gun.

American gun violence is dominated by white males committing suicide, followed by young minorities dying on the streets, and at least 30 people dying every day. For the gun lobby, this is the price of freedom. For the rest of us, it is beyond obscene.

Mustering the courage to enact real reform is not going to be easy, and the struggle is certain to outlast the current electoral cycle. But if we are ever going to curb America’s pandemic of gun tragedies, we first need to face the extremist minority that enables them.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and gun owner who won the Society of Professional Journalists National Magazine Investigative Reporting Award for his Mother Jones exposé,“Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” after the Sandy Hook shooting. He has also written about the gun lobby in The Village Voice and The Washington Post, and writes often about the NRA in The Progressive.

This Is Why the NRA Endures

Earlier this year, long before this week’s latest tragic shooting at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard, one expert after another predicted the gun lobby’s demise. The horrific massacre of mostly first-grade children in Newtown, Connecticut, seemed to have changed the nation’s views of guns. President Obama and Congressional leaders promised action in Washington. Governors in states from New York to Colorado pledged to pass stricter gun laws in their states, too.

For seven long days after Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the gun lobby said not a word. When the National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre finally did speak on national television, commentators ridiculed him for sounding so “tone deaf” to the still raw emotions of the nation. His proposed solution of solving gun violence by having more guns rang hollow. The gun lobby looked vulnerable for the first time in decades since it emerged on the national stage during the unsteady, often violent times of the late 1970s.

Gun reform groups stepped up after the Newtown tragedy to do something they had never done before: They tried to match the NRA dollar for dollar in electoral campaigns to help gun reform candidates win. National trends seemed to be on their side. Analysts noted that gun ownership has fallen from half of American households back in the 1970s to a third today, and that politicians have won elections even in conservative states despite having defied the NRA. Soon one New Republic author boldly proclaimed, “This is How the NRA Ends.”

Today, however, the NRA seems strong and at no risk of going away nine months after Newtown’s Sandy Hook school shooting. NRA membership is, by any measure, at a record high. Gun sales across the nation are also breaking records. More importantly, this spring in Washington and this summer in Denver, the NRA has shown it still has the clout to influence major legislation in defiance of what opinion polls post suggest voters want, and to punish individual officials who respond to t voters’ wishes by defying the NRA and its gun rights agenda.

Underestimating the gun lobby has been the gun reform movement’s biggest mistake. Defeating an organization so deeply rooted across so much of American society will require a different approach. The side that wins this debate will be the one that manages to appeal to more gun owners and countless other Americans who share many of the same fears. It will require taking on the gun lobby where it is most vulnerable: its absolutist, if not extremist, ideology that puts forth a false choice between freedom and tyranny. Instead the gun reform movement needs to reframe the debate as a choice between gun violence and gun safety.

Nine months after the Sandy Hook school massacre, millions of Americans are actually living with fewer gun restrictions than before. Six out of the nation’s fifty states have passed stricter gun laws in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

New York, Connecticut, and Maryland have improved background checks before gun purchases, limited military-style, semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazines, along with requiring safety training and strengthening measures to keep guns away from domestic violence abusers and the mentally ill.

Delaware and Colorado now require background checks on all gun sales. Colorado also limited magazine capacity.

California strengthened laws to confiscate guns from criminals and the mentally ill.

But many other states have moved in the opposite direction.

Arkansas now allows firearms to be carried inside churches and other places of worship.

Wyoming now lets judges decide whether to allow guns to be brought into their courtrooms.

Virginia made the records of concealed carry permit holders private.
This month in Missouri legislators tried to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a bill that aspired to make it illegal for state police and other authorities to enforce federal gun laws.

Moreover, in Washington, after their defeat this spring, gun reform groups are not expecting to make any progress until the November 2014 elections. Even then it remains far from certain how many or whether enough gun reform candidates may win.

What accounts for the gun lobby’s uncanny pull across the nation?

Many critics blame the influence of the gun industry. No doubt the gun industry plays a major role. In January I reported first in Mother Jones and later The Progressive how George K. Kollitides II, the CEO of Freedom Group that made the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in Newtown, had quietly served on the NRA’s Nominating Committee for its own internal elections. Last year Freedom Group led the gun industry with record sales of $931.9 million. Freedom Group CEO Kollitides is also a Trustee of the NRA Foundation.

Other gun industry executives sit on the NRA’s board. One is Pete Brownell, the third-generation family CEO of Brownells, Inc., America’s largest supplier of firearms parts, tools and accessories, whose father and chairman, Frank R. Brownell III, is President of the NRA Foundation. Another is Ronnie G. Barrett, the CEO of the Tennessee-based Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, which designed the first .50-caliber rifle for civilian use. A third is Stephen D. Hornady, an NRA board director who, like Kollitides, is an NRA Foundation Trustee. Hornady is the second-generation family CEO of the Nebraska-based ammunition-making firm, Hornady Manufacturing.

Other gun industry figures, like Larry and Brenda Potterfield of MidwayUSA, stay out of NRA board politics while still contributing heavily to the gun lobby. A Missouri-based retailer and wholesaler of firearms products, MidwayUSA, has contributed generously to the NRA through programs like “Round-Up,” which allows firearms consumers to round-up their purchase to the next dollar to make a donation in the name of defending the Second Amendment. To date MidwayUSA’s Round-Up program alone has contributed $8.9 million to an NRA endowment.

But gun industry money is only part of the story. Gun ownership may be down across the United States. But gun culture and politics surrounding it still thrive, especially in rural and even many suburban areas in nearly every state.

Moreover, gun rights activists have been organizing voters at the grassroots decades before anyone ever heard of the Tea Party. So-called Second Amendment activists may not have majority appeal, but they seem have to deep support across sizable minority of the population, which translates into a majority in many predominately white and rural voting districts.

Here the recall votes in September of Colorado are instructive. State senators John Morse from Colorado Springs and Angela Giron from Pueblo became the first elected officials ever recalled in the Rocky Mountain state. Colorado voters in their respective districts and across the state, much like voters across the nation, favored recent gun control legislation requiring background checks on gun purchases and limiting ammunition magazines to no more than fifteen rounds. The incumbents were put at a disadvantage in the recall election by a court ruling disallowing mail-in ballots. At the same time, they were helped by funds poured into the state by gun reform groups that in the case seem to surpass even campaign spending by the gun lobby.

The two Colorado state senators, one of whom is a former police chief, lost at the polls due to a truly impressive turnout by voters favoring gun rights.
This is what many commentators and NRA critics missed. The gun lobby may not enjoy majority appeal. But it has a larger army of organized, devoted supporters than any other single-issue lobby in America.

The gun reform lobby includes Mayors against Illegal Guns, funded by billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Americans for Responsible Solutions, organized by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (who survived a 2011 shooting in her Phoenix, Arizona, district that left six people dead, including a nine-year-old girl). These groups have money, but nowhere near the NRA’s kind of grassroots organization.

This also helps explain the defeat in Congress in April of a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania. The bill was widely criticized as a weak and ambivalent piece of legislation that divided advocates on both sides of the debate, but it would have required background checks for at least all commercial sales of guns. Its defeat was a symbolic, but still powerful victory for the gun lobby, demonstrating the ongoing national power of the NRA.

What is the lesson of the gun lobby’s success since Newtown?

The NRA does not need majority support across the nation or even individual states. As long as it can effectively divert money and mobilize voters to defeat key candidates who vote for gun reform, it can tip local locations in its favor to protect its gun rights agenda.

Promoting any meaningful gun reform in the United States will require organizing people in their communities in a way that progressives in this nation have long dreamed about but rarely been able to do, or sustain for very long. Ironically, if done properly, the need for an effective gun rights movement could finally bring progressives such a chance.

What is not needed to effectively promote gun reform across the nation is for ultra-liberal cable TV commentators who live in cities on either coast throwing up their hands and asking why anyone would ever even need a gun.

Instead, what is needed to finally promote gun reform may seem counterintuitive to some progressive: to acknowledge and respect gun owners on their own terms.

People keep firearms for many reasons. Millions of Americans hunt prey from waterfowl to deer every year. Many homes across America have shotguns, rifles, and other firearms that have been passed down through generations. For many young boys and increasingly girls, getting their own hunting rifle is a rite of passage.
Many other Americans enjoy target shooting, including in highly organized competitions.

And a lot of people have guns for what they perceive as their need for personal protection. Pointing out, as many liberal critics are prone to do, how one is statistically safer in a home without a gun rather than with one is unlikely to resonate across much of the heartland. Instead effective gun reform advocates need to reaffirm Americans’ right to keep their firearms, while making the discussion one about gun safety.

The gun lobby’s core argument is not about gun safety, though groups like the NRA deserve credit, in fact, for organizing more gun safety classes across the nation than any other groups.) The NRA’s driving principle is that guns in the hands of citizens are the first check and necessary bulwark against the possibility of government oppression. That’s is why the Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution, the NRA says.

“Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea,” said NRA CEO LaPierre before a United Nations panel last year in New York.

“History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

This is a bogus, ahistorical argument as I wrote in The Progressive in March in “Gun Control and Genocide.” But it is a view that many self-described Second Amendment absolutists in and out of the NRA share.

Only in recent decades did the NRA first become such anideological organization. In fact, for the first 106 years of its existence, the NRA was a gun club devoted to sports shooting and safety training. But in 1977 the NRA got taken over by Second Amendment absolutists and underwent a metamorphosis into the gun lobby.

The late 1970s was a precarious time, marked by rising inflation, oil prices, and crime rates, along with a widespread lack of faith in government institutions. The popular film genres of the decade involved rogue actors taking matters, if not the law, into their own hands often through the use of righteous violence. Films like Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, Serpico, and Death Wish all come to mind, and each in their own way seems to validate many of the basic precepts of today’s gun lobby.

NRA conventions are filled every year with predominately white men who all seem to share a fear of the future. Economic decline, decreasing incomes and rising health care costs, combined with the steady pace of changing demographics toward an increasingly “browner” America, along with what many see as eroding social mores exacerbated by mass media, combine to generate fear. The American lifestyle depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings is long gone.

For many Americans, the guns they keep in their homes make them feel like they still have some power in the face of a world they no longer know nor understand.

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” said then-Senator Barack Obama in a famous 2008 electoral campaign gaffe that actually touched on some truths.

Ideological extremism is where the gun lobby and the NRA are most vulnerable. Clinging to guns and bibles as a way of trying to hang on to a fleeting past is not the same as arming oneself to fight a future war against one’s own government. But the latter notion has been the driving ethos behind the gun lobby over the past 26 years, even though, until recently, most NRA leaders tried to keep such views quiet and away from public scrutiny.

Now the NRA’s most frequent keynote speaker is Glenn Beck, the former Fox News commentator and rightwing radio talk show host. Survivalists and conspiracy theorists are only growing in importance at the NRA’s base, and they hold views that often go well beyond those of even conservative libertarians. At the same time, the NRA is fighting to retain its mainstream influence within the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Fear of a future tyrannical government is the main barrier to passage of effective gun control laws in the United States. In states like New Jersey, for instance, one can have an arsenal of weapons in one’s home to protect oneself, as long as the gun owner himself and each handgun are all individually registered with the state.

Most gun owners would have no problem with that. But the Second Amendment activists who dominate and support the NRA do.

Gun reform advocates need to promote the notion that government efforts to regulate gun ownership, to provide background checks for gun purchases, to prevent guns from being in the hands of domestic abusers and other criminals, to prevent guns from ending up in the hands of mentally ill individuals who have been found to be the shooters in so many recent tragedies, are all achievable, desirable ends.

And the legitimacy of the government’s role in regulating firearms transactions was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the same decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that upheld the notion that every American citizen, unless there is specific reason to forfeit it, has a right to keep and bear arms.

In short, the gun lobby can be defeated. But only if gun reformers start seeing most American gun owners on they’re own terms and start organizing voters at the grassroots.

Tunisia Caucus Co-Chair Calls Despot Moderate and Wise

Betty McCollum told her constituents she was going to honor the dead. “Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D-MN) will spend the Fourth of July holiday visiting the North African Cemetery and Memorial in Tunisia to pay tribute to American troops, including 138 Minnesotans, who lost their lives in World War II,” reads a July 1 statement on her website. “It is an honor for me to have the opportunity to pay tribute to these courageous men on behalf of Minnesotans and the nation.”

But the state-run Tunisian press agency reported something else. The next day, on July 2, Rep. McCollum met with the Tunisian Foreign Minister, Abdelwaheb Abdallah, in Tunis. “The Foreign Minister briefed his guest about the comprehensive development work carried out in Tunisia, under the impulse of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and stressed Tunisia’s will to further reinforce its relations with the United States, highlighting the role [of the] ‘Tunisia Caucus’ in strengthening these relations,” reads a Tunis-Afrique Presse news agency report.

“Mrs. McCollum affirmed, in turn, that ‘Tunisia holds a strategic position between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and it represents the voice of moderation and wisdom in the world, a voice we must listen to,’” according to the Tunisian state news report.

McCollum’s chief of staff Bill Harper later clarified to the Committee to Protect Journalists (www.cpj.org) that she made this remark in the context of foreign policy, and, in particular, Tunisia’s advice more than five years ago to the United States. While long cooperating with Washington in the war on terror, Tunisia earlier in this decade (quietly) opposed the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq. “The premise of her visit was security,” he explained.

But Iraq was not mentioned in the Tunisian government news report about McCollum’s visit. Instead, the Tunis-Afrique Presse agency went on, “The meeting allowed as well to highlight the role of [the] ‘Tunisia Caucus,’ a group within the U.S. House of Representatives including congressmen who want to learn more about Tunisia, its culture, traditions, history, and people and to further strengthen bilateral relations.”

Apparently the bipartisan Tunisia Caucus has little or no interest in learning about, or even acknowledging, Tunisia’s abysmal record on press freedom and human rights. The so-called moderate and wise leader, President Ben Ali, is a dictator who has monopolized power for no less than 21 years. He runs Tunisia as a police state, where the country’s large, Soviet-style press does little more than laud the despot and his tight-fisted regime.

Only a handful of Internet publications and small-circulation opposition papers have attempted to seriously criticize the government or hold it accountable. But journalists writing for these outlets have been placed under surveillance, assaulted by plainclothes police, had their phone and Internet lines cut, and been prevented from leaving the country. Enough have been imprisoned since 2001 to make Tunisia the Arab world’s worst nation for jailing journalists.

Of course, Tunisia’s admirers are right to point out that it is a highly secular as well as modern nation. Not only does it have a literate population, but one in which women largely enjoy the same rights as men. The sunny Mediterranean state is also one that has little or no history of ethnic or sectarian strife. No wonder the nation seems like a natural “friend,” as U.S. diplomats prefer to call it, if not ally of the United States.

But members of Congress seeking to strengthen such ties should neither sidestep nor dismiss Tunisia’s utter lack of democratic rights and norms. Unfortunately, McCollum is hardly the first to do so. Earlier this year, the other Tunisia Caucus co-chair, Rep. Bud Cramer, Jr. (D-AL), went to Tunis where he also pledged to strengthen bilateral relations without mentioning either press freedom or human rights. The Tunis-Afrique Presse agency quoted Cramer saying, “He voiced his readiness to exert more influence…to better publicize the opportunities offered by Tunisia so as to hoist bilateral co-operation to higher levels.”

Cramer’s press officer Jennie Gibson did not return calls asking for comment.

Nor should members of Congress allow their statements to be used for propaganda by a police state. On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Middle East Program Coordinator Joel Campagna wrote an op-ed (http://www.twincities.com/opinion/ci_9962056) about McCollum’s recent visit to Tunis in The St. Paul Pioneer Press, her hometown paper. McCollum has yet to respond to the op-ed. Her press officer, Cleve Mesidor, also did not return calls asking for comment for this blog.

Other members of the Tunisia Caucus include Rep. Mark S. Kirk (R-IL), Ben Chandler (D-KY), Henry E. Brown, Jr. (R-SC), and Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz (D-TX).

Note: CPJ is a worldwide watchdog that accepts no government funds as it defends the rights of journalists everywhere to report the news without fear of reprisal.

By Committee to Protect Journalists Washington Rep. Frank Smyth

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Politics .

“Is Weller’s Beach an Ethics Breach?”

 

Jerry Weller, the 11th District representative who’s up for reelection in November, has some explaining to do. As I wrote in an August 25 cover story, “The Congressman and the Dictator’s Daughter,” he’s already raised questions about whether he has a conflict of interest because he’s refused to step down from the House of Representative’s influential Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere even though he’s married to Zury Rios Sosa, a third-term legislator in Guatemala. Since then, I’ve discovered that the congressman, a Republican whose district encompasses parts of the south suburbs, hasn’t revealed the value of any of the wedding gifts he and Sosa received when they were married two years ago in Guatemala. Such gifts are supposed to be listed on the publicly-available financial disclosure forms congressmen file every year, but the House Ethics Committee routinely grants waivers, and Weller got one. Still, his request raises questions, because Sosa is the daughter of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt and the second most powerful person in the party he heads, so lots of people may have wanted to give the couple something very nice.

More troubling, I’ve also learned that Weller owns several pieces of property in Nicaragua, some of which he’s disclosed to Congress as required by its rules—and some of which he apparently hasn’t.

Weller seems to have bought his first Nicaraguan lot four years ago, somewhere in the coastal township of San Juan del Sur, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Managua. Then a fifth-term congressman, he went to Nicaragua in January 2002 with other members of the House Ways and Means Committee to attend a presidential inauguration, and he seems to have bought the property sometime afterward. At the time land was still relatively cheap—Nicaragua’s the poorest nation in the hemisphere after Haiti. But cruise ships were already docking nearby, and investors had started buying up beachfront property. It’s not clear how much Weller paid for the undeveloped lot, but on his financial disclosure form, which congressmen are required to file by the Ethics in Government Act, he listed it in the assets section and checked the box indicating that it was worth $50,000 to $100,000.

Within a year, Weller had joined the House International Relations Committee and its western hemisphere subcommittee, whose main focus is Latin America. In August 2003, he and other committee members went to Guatemala to discuss issues such as expanding trade relations and curbing drug trafficking and money laundering, and that’s when he met Sosa. Eleven months later, they announced their engagement.

In the months before the announcement, Weller began shuffling his assets. According to his financial disclosure form for 2004, that January he bought a Chicago high-rise condo at 1335 S. Prairie worth $500,000 to $1 million, and in April, he sold a Capitol Hill rental property worth $250,000 to $500,000. Three days after that he bought a second undeveloped lot in Nicaragua’s San Juan del Sur township, this one on Coco Beach, a stunning stretch of white sand and surf. On the disclosure form he listed it as being worth $50,000 to $100,000.

Weller married Sosa that November, making him the first member of Congress ever to have a spouse serving in a foreign government. A month later, he wrote a letter to the House Ethics Committee asking for a waiver of the “financial rules for the reporting of gifts given in celebration of my November 20, 2004, wedding.” The Ethics in Government Act states that all gifts above a “minimal value” ($305 in 2005) must be reported. As the 1977 commission recommending the act’s rules wrote, “The objectives of financial disclosure are to inform the public . . . in order to increase public confidence in the integrity of government and to deter potential conflicts of interest.” The rules allow congressmen to ask for a waiver for wedding (and baby) gifts, though it’s not clear why, since if there’s ever a good time to butter up a congressman it’s his wedding day.

At any rate, waivers are usually requested before an event, and the rules note that requests made after an event “should include, at a minimum, a description of each gift for which a waiver is requested, including its market value, and the identity of the donor,” though this information isn’t made public. “Obviously if there is an extravagant gift of a large amount of money, the ethics committee should look at it and then decide whether it should be disclosed,” says Meredith McGehee, policy director of the nonpartisan watchdog group the Campaign Legal Center. Weller’s letter, which is public, doesn’t describe any gift, its value, or its donor. He could have provided a separate list of gifts, though current and former congressional staffers familiar with the workings of the ethics committee say the people who routinely review such lists never saw one from him.

In March 2005, the committee’s chairman, Republican Doc Hastings, and the ranking Democrat, Alan Mollohan, formally granted Weller a waiver. Spokesmen for both congressmen declined to comment. Written in the section of Weller’s 2004 disclosure form where gifts are to be listed is “none.”

According to his disclosure forms, in September 2005 Weller, by then vice chairman of the western hemisphere subcommittee, sold his Chicago condo and the next day bought a new home in Morris, his official residence in his district. And that December he bought another undeveloped lot on Coco Beach, which he listed on the forms as worth $50,000 to $100,000.

I couldn’t obtain any Nicaraguan records for the 2002 lot Weller bought, so it’s not clear how big it is or what exactly he paid, though on the disclosure form for 2004 he checked the box indicating that the property had gone up in value, to between $100,000 and $250,000. I did obtain records—all publicly available—for other Nicaraguan properties that bear his full name, Gerald Craig Weller, and passport number and list him as a U.S. citizen; one also states that his “legal residence is in the state of Illinois.”

According to the notarized bill of sale, the second lot Weller bought, in April 2004, was 13,029 square meters, for which he paid roughly $3,150 (or 24 cents a square meter). He listed it on his 2004 disclosure form as worth $50,000 to $100,000, and on the form he filed in May 2006 for 2005, he listed it as still worth the same amount. The notarized bill of sale and property title for the third lot—19,884 square meters bought in December 2005—show that he owns only a 50 percent interest in the land, having bought it with two partners. They paid $174,044 for the lot, or $8.75 a square meter, and Weller listed his share’s value as $50,000 to $100,000 on his disclosure form for the year.

Other documents, all from 2005, show that Weller bought two more lots in Nicaragua—neither of which is listed on his disclosure form for that year. A notarized bill of sale shows that Gerald Craig Weller—with the same passport number listed on documents for property he’s disclosed to Congress—bought a fourth lot, again on Coco Beach, in March 2005, a little over three months after his wedding.

Earlier this month I called the municipal office where property documents are held in San Juan del Sur and spoke to a man who works with expatriates and other foreigners buying land in the area. He said undeveloped land on Coco Beach was going for between $50 and $70 a square meter. I asked if the properties owned by Congressman Jerry Weller were worth the same, and he replied, “Yeah, more or less about that.” Local real estate agents told me undeveloped property on Coco Beach goes for up to $80 a square meter.

Using the low-end figure of $50 a square meter, the fourth lot, which is 7,960 square meters, would be worth $398,000 today. Another notarized property title shows Gerald Craig Weller buying a fifth lot in April 2005, another undeveloped parcel on Coco Beach totaling 1,200 square meters; at $50 a square meter it would be worth $60,000.

Yet another notarized property title shows that in February 2005 Gerald Craig Weller sold a sixth lot somewhere in the township of San Juan del Sur—there’s no indication of when it was bought or what he paid. It’s 1,699 square meters, so today it would be worth at least $85,000. No income from such a sale appears on the disclosure form Weller filed for that year or in the amended form he filed in August 2006, though the forms do note the sale of the parking spot that went with his Chicago condo.

Not disclosing information that’s required by the Ethics in Government Act isn’t wise. You can get hit with civil penalties of up to $11,000 and with further fines and up to five years in prison under the False Statements Accountability Act of 1996. Plenty of congressmen report the money they make buying and selling expensive pieces of property on their disclosure forms, so it’s hard to understand why Weller would have reported some of his purchases and sales but not others. He wouldn’t have had to report the three undisclosed properties if they were covered by a blind trust, but he checked the box saying he had no blind trusts in 2005. He wouldn’t necessarily have had to report them if they were owned by his wife, but the titles for the properties don’t mention her. And even if the lots had in some way been part of a wedding gift, they wouldn’t be covered by the waiver he got. As the ethics rules note, “The grant of a gift rule waiver by the Committee does not waive the requirement for reporting certain gifts on Schedule VI of one’s annual Financial Disclosure Statement.” Ken Gross, former associate general counsel of the Federal Election Commission and an expert on the Ethics in Government Act and Senate and House ethics rules, says, “There’s a schedule for reporting of gifts, and then there’s an asset schedule—and those are two different things.”

There may be a good reason three of Weller’s Nicaraguan lots don’t appear on his disclosure forms, but the only person who can say is Weller. I called his office last week to ask him to comment and wound up with his campaign manager, Steven Shearer. I explained I had reason to believe Weller owned more property in Nicaragua than he’d disclosed, and Shearer said he’d get me the number for Weller’s lawyer.

Having heard nothing, I called Shearer back on Monday and asked if Weller had any comment. “He has three properties down there and has filed three properties,” Shearer said, after again promising to get me the lawyer’s name and number. “But that’s it.”

“So beyond those properties, he’s denying that he owns any others?” I asked.

“That’s correct,” he replied.

I called Shearer back later that afternoon and said I wanted to be sure it was clear I had documents showing that Weller owned six properties, only three of which were listed on the disclosure forms.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Shearer said. “His attorneys help him file his disclosure forms, and they’ll have to answer those questions.” He said he’d get me a name and number.

On Tuesday at 5:30 PM eastern time Shearer finally called and gave me the number of Jan Baran, of Wiley Rein & Fielding in Washington, D.C. Baran was still in his office. When I asked about Weller’s undisclosed properties he said he couldn’t comment because of the attorney-client privilege, adding, “I don’t know why Mr. Shearer would have referred you to me.”

The Congressman and the Dictator’s Daughter

Jerry Weller was running for his sixth term as congressman from Illinois’ 11th District in July 2004 when he announced that he was engaged to Zury Rios Sosa, an outspoken third-term legislator in Guatemala’s congress and the daughter of former dictator General Efrain Rios Montt. “I am thrilled to have found my best friend and soulmate,” Weller stated in a press release. “Our love knows no boundaries.” In the same release Sosa said, “With Jerry, I am starting an eternal springtime. I admire his character, his commitment to his responsibilities, and his honesty.”

Their mutual admiration notwithstanding, the announcement raised a red flag. Weller, who would be the first congressman ever to marry a member of a foreign national legislature, sat on the International Relations Committee and its western hemisphere subcommittee–would his votes be influenced by Sosa?

In a July 12 editorial the Chicago Sun-Times said, “The problem is the image it conveys to our Latin American neighbors, who are critical enough of our policies without concerns about how a vote might have been influenced by a committee member’s wife.” The following day the Bloomington Pantagraph, the biggest paper in Weller’s district, ran an editorial that said, “Any time an elected U.S. representative privy to confidential information is intimately involved with a central figure in a foreign government–and one whose father has been accused of genocide within that country–there should be concern. . . . There are some boundaries that elected representatives have to draw in the name of U.S. security. We can’t say Weller has crossed that line, but he’s sure tiptoeing down it.”

The Sun-Times suggested that Weller, a Republican whose district includes parts of the south suburbs, resign from the committee. His opponent in the congressional race, Tari Renner, also called on him to give up the post. Weller’s spokesman, Telly Lovelace, told the Pantagraph the congressman had no intention of resigning. “If there is any obvious conflict,” Lovelace said, “Congressman Weller will do what’s appropriate.”

In late August 2004, Weller met with members of the Pantagraph’s editorial board; without quoting him directly, the paper said he’d told them he would “recuse himself from legislation . . . specific to Guatemala.” Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the nonpartisan Latin America Working Group in Washington, D.C., says that’s a “fairly meaningless statement,” explaining that any Guatemalan issue would almost surely be part of broader legislation. Weller also went to the House ethics committee for advice. According to the Associated Press, committee members told him he had “a duty to vote on bills unless he had a direct interest in the outcome”–not exactly a clear standard.

Two years later, Weller, who’s 49, and Sosa, who’s 38, are married and just had their first child. Weller is up for reelection in November. Sosa is still a leading member of Guatemala’s single-house, 158-member congress, and until earlier this year she sat on its foreign affairs committee, the counterpart to Weller’s committee. She’s the second most powerful person in her party, the Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG, which was founded in 1989 by her father and is still led by him. It’s been plagued by accusations of corruption, money laundering, and helping drug traffickers, though no one’s accused her personally of any of those things. In many ways she’s the clean face of her party, having sponsored legislation to protect women and people with AIDS from discrimination and to protect children by regulating the advertising of tobacco and alcohol. She’s also sponsored legislation to curtail the financing of terrorists and to curb smuggling, allowing Guatemalan authorities to seize assets such as trucks, boats, and planes from drug runners.

In January 2005, Weller became vice chairman of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere subcommittee, by far the most important committee in Congress writing legislation on Latin America and the war on drugs and overseeing U.S. policy on those issues. “The western hemisphere subcommittee has been one of the only ones overseeing U.S. drug policy, and it has been the main one making U.S. drug policy,” says Adam Isacson of the watchdog group Center for International Policy. “It has huge influence.” The 16-member committee also focuses on trade and democracy in the region.

Weller often talks about these issues as they relate to Caribbean and Latin American countries–but not Guatemala, even though it has 12.7 million people, a third of the population of Central America. He voted for CAFTA, the free-trade agreement that includes Guatemala, but he doesn’t talk about specific trade possibilities with that country. He also doesn’t talk about democracy in Guatemala, which is fragile at best, and he doesn’t talk about money laundering or drug trafficking there, even though up to 70 percent of the drugs that enter the U.S. come through Guatemala. All of which raises questions about whether he’s doing everything he can to address the concerns of his constituents. He’s painted himself into a corner, and he seems to be making no effort to get out.

In 2003, the year Weller met Sosa, Guatemala was controlled by the FRG, and the nation’s president was her father’s handpicked FRG ally, Alfonso Portillo. Relations with the U.S. had sunk to their lowest in years. “By all accounts corruption continues to run rampant in Guatemala,” Otto Reich, an assistant secretary of state, had told the western hemisphere subcommittee in October 2002. “Organized crime, in particular narcotics trafficking and alien smuggling, is increasing. Guatemala is a major and growing transit country for narcotics, yet seizures have dropped to practically nothing. . . . Few high-level figures are ever charged or even formally investigated for corruption, and fewer go to trial.” Reich also stated that “large amounts of cocaine are being transshipped through Guatemala with almost complete impunity” and noted that narcotics smugglers had “very close ties to the highest levels of government.” The following month the Bush administration embarrassed Guatemala by denying a former intelligence chief a visa and accusing him of drug trafficking.

In January 2003, the Bush administration embarrassed Guatemala again by dropping it from the State Department’s list of countries seen as cooperating in the fight against drug trafficking. It was the first time Guatemala had failed to make the list since the U.S. began doing annual evaluations in 1987, and it was one of only three countries decertified, the others being Haiti and Myanmar.

A few months later, the Los Angeles Times reported that State Department officials estimated 220 tons of cocaine had been shipped through Guatemala in 2002–triple the amount of a decade earlier and over two-thirds of the U.S. supply–and that seizures by the Guatemalan government had dropped from just under 10 tons in 1999 to less than 3 tons. The flow had “turned parts of Guatemala into lawless zones ruled by family-controlled transit cartels. . . . Now U.S. and Guatemalan anti-drug officials believe that Colombian drug traffickers have mostly consolidated their operations in Guatemala with the cooperation–or at least tolerance–of current and former Guatemalan government figures.” The Times quoted a former ally of General Rios Montt who was running against the FRG in the November election: “If we don’t watch out we could become another Colombia. What has happened here is that narco-traffickers have infiltrated the people in authority–both the army and the government.”

In May, the FRG nominated Rios Montt as its candidate for the presidency in the November elections. The U.S. view, though couched in understated diplomatese, was clear. “We would hope to be able to work with and have a normal, friendly relationship with whoever is the next president of Guatemala,” said the State Department’s Richard Boucher. “Realistically, in light of Mr. Rios Montt’s background, it would be difficult to have the kind of relationship that we would prefer.”

Rios Montt had been president before, having come to power in a military coup in 1982. The Guatemalan military was then at war with leftist rebels–they’d been fighting since 1960 and wouldn’t stop until 1996–and thousands of civilians were being murdered. During the war an estimated 200,000 people were killed, up to 70,000 of them during Rios Montt’s 17 months in office; he was overthrown in another coup. According to two truth commissions set up after the war, the military was responsible for over 90 percent of the violence. Rios Montt wanted to run again for president in 1990, but the constitution passed in 1985 barred former coup leaders from running. Four years later he ran for congress and won and was soon elected its head. When he tried to run for president that year the courts again barred him, but in 2003 he was back as a candidate.

Zury Rios Sosa, who’d started her political career in 1989 doing public relations for the FRG and was first elected to congress on the party’s slate in 1995, was running for reelection in 2003–and directing her father’s presidential campaign. She regularly stumped for him, saying Guatemala needed a “strong hand” and calling him her “inspiration.” (She hasn’t publicly distanced herself from his record or denounced the murders committed while he was president in the 80s.) In mid- July, the constitutional court ruled that this time Rios Montt could continue his campaign, saying the law against former coup leaders running couldn’t be applied retroactively. The country’s supreme court said it wanted to revisit the issue, and on July 24 thousands of his supporters, armed with clubs and machetes, poured into the streets of the capital, burning cars, smashing windows, and surrounding court buildings and the U.S. embassy. A TV reporter chased by Rios Montt supporters threatening to douse him with gasoline suffered a heart attack and died. The rioters’ actions seemed coordinated, and for hours neither the police nor the military intervened. The U.S. State Department accused the FRG of providing tents and other supplies to the demonstrators, many of whom had been bused in the night before.

FRG party delegates were photographed in the middle of the crowds, and some people told reporters they’d seen Sosa among the demonstrators with a walkietalkie. A few days later a Prensa Libre journalist asked her, “There are those who say you were the brains behind the disturbances. What do you say to that?”

“Who says that?” she said.

“Some analysts, and yesterday a morning daily published their views.”

“For the moment, I have no comment.”

“And with respect to the FRG party members involved and whose photographs have been published?”

“I don’t have any comment.” When the reporter asked if it was important that Guatemalans know who was responsible for the violence, she replied, “Every day thousands of people die of AIDS, and we have 13 million orphans in the world. This is what concerns me.”

Two weeks later, Jerry Weller arrived in Guatemala with three other members of the International Relations Committee to discuss trade and drug trafficking.

Weller saw Sosa for the first time at a reception the day he arrived. “From the moment I met her, I realized I had discovered the most incredible woman,” he later told journalists. He reportedly confided his interest to the U.S. ambassador, and the following evening he found himself sitting next to her at a state dinner sponsored by the Guatemalan congress’s foreign relations committee, of which she was a member. He later told Guatemalan reporters he saw it as luck, but an embassy official who was seated at the same table says, “She arranged it.”

In November, while she and Weller were courting long-distance, Sosa was reelected. Her father, whose right to run had been reaffirmed by the constitutional court a week after the July riots, got less than 17 percent of the vote, and the word was that the violence had cost him the election. A coalition of parties opposed to the FRG had won the presidency and now controlled the congress; the FRG had become Guatemala’s largest opposition party.

The following summer, Weller announced that he and Sosa were engaged. His spokesman said it would be the second marriage for both of them, and it’s not clear whether Weller knew this would actually be her fourth. At any rate, the day after they announced their engagement, they sent a petition to the Federal Election Commission asking if Sosa–who had no intention of resigning her seat, applying for U.S. citizenship, or becoming a permanent resident–could make decisions in Weller’s reelection campaign as well as solicit funds for him and speak on his behalf. The FEC said the law prohibited foreign nationals from donating funds or participating in decision making related to any U.S. election, but if she worked as a volunteer she could make speeches and ask for money, though only from Americans.

Weller won in November 2004, then flew to Guatemala, where he and Sosa were married in a villa her father owned outside the capital. Her father was under house arrest in the capital, charged with inciting the July riots, but a judge gave him permission to attend. (He was cleared of the charges this past January; in July a Spanish judge indicted him for alleged crimes, including genocide, dating back to the early 80s. Meanwhile Portillo, who remains under investigation on embezzlement charges, fled the country, and top officials from his administration were jailed on corruption charges.)

Two months after his marriage, Weller, ignoring calls for him to resign, became vice chairman of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. It’s not that he doesn’t have plenty of other interests. He’s also on the powerful Ways and Means Committee and on the International Relations Committee’s terrorism and nonproliferation subcommittee. His record, of which he’s proud, covers a wide range of issues, from eliminating the marriage-tax penalty to redeveloping the Joliet Arsenal, establishing health clinics for veterans, creating tax incentives for companies to clean up brown-field sites, and lobbying to expand the use of alternative fuels.

In 2004, Weller released a statement saying he wanted to stay on the Subcomittee on the Western Hemisphere “to focus on narcotics trafficking and international law enforcement,” and his Web site states that he “has taken an active role with U.S. government agencies in combating narco-trafficking.” Yet he seems determined to act as if Guatemala doesn’t exist. In January 2005, he led a nine-day delegation to Colombia, Panama, and Honduras to discuss trade and drug trafficking, during which he said, “Almost 90 percent of the cocaine and one half the heroin that comes into Illinois comes from Colombia and the Andean region.” He didn’t mention Guatemala, though Bush administration officials say most of those drugs passed through it. He didn’t make drugs in Guatemala an issue that May either, though he spoke about drugs in general terms: “We have tremendous concerns about narco-trafficking through the region.”

It’s not like the problem in Guatemala has gone away. In September 2003, the country was put back on the State Department’s list of countries cooperating with the U.S. on trafficking, but last fall its interior minister, Carlos Vielmann, told Reuters, “We can see the effects in Guatemala similar to what happened in Colombia from 1985 to 1990.” Also last fall Michael O’Brien of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration made a similar point. “If they don’t change things they could have a mini-Colombia,” he said, adding that what Guatemala needed was a tough law against organized crime. And DEA chief Michael Braun told the western hemisphere subcommittee, “Guatemala is a major transshipment and storage point for South American drugs en route to the United States.” The State Department’s 2006 annual report to Congress on the war on drugs says, “Large shipments of cocaine continue to move though Guatemala by air, road, and sea.”

This March at a subcommittee meeting, Weller told Bush administration officials he hoped they would focus on corruption in Venezuela, but he hasn’t talked about corruption in Guatemala. He denounced Venezuela for sheltering Colombian “terrorist groups” who’d assassinated judges and elected officials, but he didn’t denounce Guatemala, even though judges and elected officials there have been assassinated too. This spring, one of the leading delegates backing legislation to fight organized crime, Mario Pivaral, was assassinated outside the building where the congress meets. (In July the congress passed the nation’s first law that specifically fights organized crime, allowing the government to tap suspects’ phone calls and put law enforcement agents undercover.)

A thorough search of online congressional records and news reports over the past three years turns up almost nothing Weller’s said publicly about Guatemala. He is quoted in a press release his wife distributed in Spanish in Guatemala City, saying, “I am a Republican and we believe our countries must work together.” He wouldn’t comment for this story, and in a January 2006 article an AP writer complained, “Weller refused repeated requests to discuss his marriage’s impact on his work in Congress.” Other members of the western hemisphere subcommittee talk about Guatemala, including the Republican chair, Dan Burton, who last year denounced “mob justice” in the country.

Weller clearly thinks he can’t even talk about anything good that’s happened in Guatemala, including the antiterrorism legislation sponsored by his wife. “There are some positive notes in this hemisphere,” he said during a subcommittee hearing in May. “Some countries, such as Panama, Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico, and El Salvador, have all made serious prevention and preparedness efforts” against terrorism. He didn’t say a word about Guatemala, which sits between Mexico and El Salvador.

Carlos Gomez, coordinator of the Chicago-based Foundation for Human Rights in Guatemala, thinks Weller’s silence hurts both the U.S. and Guatemala. “If he did not have a relationship with Zury he would be working against drug trafficking and organized crime in Guatemala,” he says. “It is the FRG that opened the door to drug trafficking and organized crime in Guatemala. So he can’t attack the same party as his wife.”

Like every politician, Weller must know that, no matter how confident he is that he’s serving his constituents fully, appearances matter. And silence doesn’t help.