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Has Guatemala Become the Cali Cartel’s Bodega?

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Original article can be found here.

Colombia has been reluctant to prosecute top leaders of the Cali cartel and dismantle their organization. The Clinton administration is pushing Colombia to do more, while the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Jesse Helms (R., N.C.), threatens to impose trade sanctions.

But Colombia is not the only country where drug cartels and their major confederates operate with impunity. It shares that distinction with Guatemala, where the Drug Enforcement Administration has also uncovered evidence of institutional corruption.

While Colombian cartels used the Caribbean as their primary smuggling route through the mid-1980s, increased radar, as well as opportunity, led them to shift operations toward Mexico. In the late 1980s, they expanded those routes to neighboring Guatemala.

So much cocaine was detected there by 1990 that DEA special agents coined Guatemala la bodega or “the warehouse.” Today up to 75{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of the cocaine reaching the U.S. still passes through Mexico, but, according to the DEA, up to one-third of it is first received and stored across Mexico’s southern border in Guatemala.

Guatemala, like Colombia, has cooperated with the U.S. in both poppy eradication and cocaine interdiction. But in both countries this cooperation breaks down over prosecution or extradition of major suspects. “Extradition is the Achilles heel of this whole process,” says the DEA’s chief spokesman, James McGivney, in Washington, “whether it be Guatemala or Colombia.”

Unlike Colombia, Guatemala has an extradition treaty with the U.S. But Its Constitutional Court has only honored it in a few cases. The process is complicated by the fact that many major suspects are Guatemalan military officers.

In response, the Clinton administration has been willing to forgo prosecution of these cases. Why? One reason is to achieve cooperation with the military on other matters (the Guatemalan military receives no U.S. funding, but the police do). But the result only gives officers blanket impunity.

Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz was allegedly working with two Colombians from Call. Now wanted in federal court in Florida, Lt. Col. Ochoa is the first Guatemalan military officer against whom the DEA initiated prosecution. Back in October 1990, special agents watched him and others allegedly load cargo on a private plane, and then tracked it to Tampa.

The State Department requested his arrest and extradition. But one month later a Guatemalan judge released him. By 1992, two more civilian judges had ruled in his favor, while the military discharged Lt. Col. Ochoa and two Army captains also implicated in the case to put distance between them and the institution.

But that didn’t stop a military tribunal from unexpectedly reclaiming jurisdiction in 1993, and ruling to dismiss all proceedings in Guatemala for “lack of evidence.” The evidence in Tampa includes a half metric ton of cocaine. That’s worth about $7.5 million wholesale; retail it’s enough to fill a few million pipes with crack.

One judge who took the evidence into account was Epaminondas Gonzalez Dubon, the Constitutional Court president, and Guatemala’s highest justice. No other judge in memory was more independent. In May 1993, then President Jorge Serrano declared a “self-coup” and imposed martial law; Judge Gonzalez promptly declared it unconstitutional.

This helped galvanize both domestic and White House opposition, bringing down the “self-coup” one week later.

In March 1994, Judge Gonzalez made another independent ruling. “Gonzalez Dubon had signed a Court decision in which he declared [ex-Lt. Col. Ochoa’s] extradition constitutional,” reads a Human Rights Watch report. Judge Gonzalez then left Guatemala City with his family for an Easter day-trip. On their way back, in Guatemala City on April 1, four men in a car shot and killed Judge Gonzalez in front of his wife and son.

Police treated this, the slaying of Guatemala’s highest justice, as a common crime. Attorney General Ramses Cuestas claimed that it was an attempted car jacking, although no one stole anything. The surviving judges then declared ex-Lt. Col. Ochoa’s extradition unconstitutional, exhausting the State Department’s appeal.

This aborted the DEA’s most important test of whether the U.S. can prosecute a Guatemala military officer. How did the Clinton administration react? The U.S. ambassador, Marilyn McAfee, first ignored the denial, and then issued a press release, which concluded: “Unfortunately, there have been cases in which efforts to process suspected drug traffickers have been frustrated. Examples of these cases include that of Lt. Col. Ochoa, whose extradition was denied by the Constitutional Court, and the rejections for extradition of the American citizen, Carolyn Holly Fried, who has been accused of selling thousands of doses of illegal drugs to school-age children.”

According to Paul Mountain, supervising agent at the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, Ms. Fried is not accused of selling drugs to any children; and the same Constitutional Court that denied ex-Lt. Col. Ochoa’s extradition two months later approved Ms. Fried’s.

Last month, the Constitutional Court denied the extradition of another Guatemalan, this time a wealthy businessman, Roberto Antonio Beltranena Butalino. He is named as a defendant with ex-Lt. Col. Ochoa in Tampa. Ironically, this ruling was announced in Guatemala the same day that the State Department certified to Congress that Guatemala had “cooperated fully” in the war against drugs.

When asked to comment on these matters, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gelbard declined. Staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say they will now review the administration’s handling of Guatemala.

More suspects remain untried, including six Army captains and two Air Force majors. Guatemala discharged all of them from active service over the DEA’s accusations. Yet, last year’s State Department drug control report, says: “in most cases, the officers continue on with their suspicious activities.”

The impact of cocaine trafficking in Guatemala, as in Colombia, is ripping its social fabric, already in shreds from four decades of Central America’s war. It was brave of Judge Gonzalez to say that the rule of law applies to all. But rather than back up the judge who backed up special agents, the Clinton administration has gone to unusual lengths to erase his memory. This only helps the Cali cartel and other Colombian drug traffickers. Threatening Colombia while coddling Guatemala won’t work.

People in the Mist

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Well over six feet tall, Louis Nzeyimana has long arms and legs, a strong build and high cheekbones. A veterinary scientist who worked with Rwanda’s mountain gorillas until the country imploded in April, Nzeyimana is an obvious Tutsi, like the vast majority of the 300,000 to 500,000 Rwandans killed in recent months in this Central African nation. But he’s not. He’s a Hutu, generally shorter than Tutsis, but not always. In the madness of Rwanda, Nzeyimana’s Tutsi-like features made him a marked man by his own people, as Hutu government soldiers and rampaging militia men set out to kill anyone remotely resembling a Tutsi.

He was in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, on April 6 when the country blew up with its president, Juvenal Habyarimana, shot down by Hutu extremists in a palace coup. While gunfire and screams filled the air and tens of thousands of corpses stacked the streets, Nzeyimana and his family hid inside their home for 10 days. When he finally got permission to leave the country, he had to drive through a gauntlet of roadblocks where his Tutsi looks put him at the mercy of every gun-toting soldier and goon squad. It was only a 60-mile trip to the Zairean border, but he had to go through 65 checkpoints. At each one, soldiers sticking rifles and machetes in his face demanded to see the governor’s writ of safe passage and the apartheid-like identity card that all Rwandans are required to carry.

“We had to give the identification cards every time,” says Nzeyimana, safe for now in Gloucester, England. His card, like his wife’s, is stamped “Hutu.” His trip was three days of Russian roulette, never knowing which lunatic might not buy his story. The last few roadblocks before Zaire were the most difficult, soldiers scrutinizing his papers incredulously. “I look like a Tutsi,” he admits, still shaken from the ordeal.

Nzeyiniana, who has a Ph.D in Veterinary Science, was the first Rwandan scientist hired by the Karisoke Research Center, which was set up by Dian Fossey, the American researcher, to protect Rwanda’s few remaining mountain gorillas. Fossey’s exploits, portrayed in the film Gorillas in the Mist, brought worldwide fame to the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. The gorillas became a prime adventure tourism attraction and an international cause. But the people in the rnist — just as endangered by war, poverty and starvation — were ignored. A year before Rwanda’s present crisis broke out, a dominant male silverback named Mrithi was killed during fighting between the (Hutu) Rwandan army and the (Tutsi) Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The gorilla’s death attracted headlines, but there was no mention of the fact that one out of eight people had been displaced by the civil war at that time, eight of nine Rwandans were poor and one of eight were on the verge of starving. It took a slaughter of apocalyptic proportions for Rwanda’s people to finally receive more attention than its gorillas.

The upheaval began on April 6 when the plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down near Kigali airport, precipitating a killing frenzy in the nation. “I was at home when it started,” says Nzeyimana. “Some friends called at midnight to say the president’s plane had been shot down. At 5 a.m. the shooting started.”

According to Belgium’s Foreign Minister, William Claes, Belgian troops saw who did it. The rocket that struck the plane came from the area of the Kanombe army base on the eastern border of Kigali airport; farther east are the Presidential Guard headquarters. The Presidential Guard was created by a group of men known, in Kinyarwanda, as the Akazu or “Little House” around the president.

President Habyarimana was a Hutu like them. But more moderate, he had agreed to share power with both Hutu opposition leaders, led by interim Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and Tutsi RPF guerrillas. in Rwanda (and neighboring Burundi), Hutu are an 85 percent majority, while there were an estimated 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda.

At five in the morning, a Presidential Guard unit came looking for Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana at her home. She was being guarded by 10 U.N. peacekeepers from Belgium, but it didn’t matter. Uwilingiyimana and three of the peacekeepers were found three blocks away, shot down. A Canadian general found the remaining peacekeepers at Kanombe army base, hacked to death by machete.

The vast majority of victims, however, were Tutsi. Months before the bloodbath, Radio de Milles Collines in Kigali, controlled by the Little House, had incited Hutu listeners against Tutsi: “The grave is half full, who is going to fill it up?” Such taunting fanned Hutus’ historical fear and resentment of Tutsis. Their Mwami kings had ruled over Hutus from the 16th century until this one. While Tutsi comprised the ruling class and owned most of Rwanda’s cattle, the Hutus lived under them as subsistence farmers, like serfs in Europe.

Radio propaganda also reminded Hutu listeners of how they were treated by Belgium, which governed Rwanda as a colonial protectorate from 1917 until its independence in 1962. Belgium’s policy was explicitly racist, educating only the sons of Tutsi. Because the two ethnic groups were often hard to tell apart, Belgian authorities also instituted apartheid-like identity cards that were stamped Tutsi, Hutu or Twa (pygmies, about one percent of the population), still in use today.

But by 1959, Hutus began to revolt and kill Tutsi, with bloodshed continuing for another five years. Philosopher Bertrand Russell called the overthrow and its aftermath “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” Historian Alison Des Forges, one of the most quoted experts on Central Africa, believes that up to 20,000 Tutsis perished — a fraction of the present death toll.

Pogroms against Tutsi continued, with the worst massacres in 1990. While the Rwanda army fought the RPF guerrillas, Rwanda’s Hutu leaders directed the slaughter of a few thousand Tutsi civilians. The situation was aggravated further by the abundant supply of arms available to both sides in the war, with hardware flooding Rwanda from around the world. While Uganda armed the RPF, France backed Rwanda’s government, providing weapons, in addition to financing its ability to buy even heavier equipment from Egypt. South Africa also sold Rwanda arms. Much of the weaponry, including hand grenades and automatic rifles, was used this April when Rwanda’s present crisis began.

Within 10 minutes of the president’s plane going down, militiamen known as the Interahamwe or “Those Who Attack Together” began to set up roadblocks in Kigali, and later on all roads leading out of the capital. They slaughtered Tutsi men, women and children and anyone suspected of being one. What was the point of all this carnage? By murdering the Hutu opposition and exterminating the Tutsi as a people, the Little House sought to eliminate all their enemies and to form a pan-Hutu alliance against Tutsi. In particular, they sought to renew the war between the primarily Hutu army and the Tutsi RPF guerrillas, hoping that the Rwandan army, with French backing, would win. But France closed its embassy in Kigali the day that RPF forces began to attack the capital. Six weeks later, the RPF was in control of Kigali airport and the Kanombe army base, while Tutsi guerrillas were photographed lounging triumphantly on late President Habyarimana’s bed.

While the Little House’s plan fell short of its goal concerning the RPF, it did succeed in murdering nearly all of Rwanda’s Hutu opposition leaders along with their spouses and children, and in wiping out perhaps a quarter, perhaps half, of Rwanda’s resident Tutsi population. Even in a world accustomed to wholesale violence, the speed and brutality of Rwanda’s bloodletting has few parallels in modern times.

Beyond politics, the underlying tension that drives hatred between Hutus and Tutsis is the struggle over land. The most densely populated nation in the world, Rwanda is the size of Maryland with a population density just shy of New Jersey. Although the Parc National des Volcans, the gorillas’ habitat, is relatively small with less than 30,000 acres, its rich, black topsoil is among the most fertile in the country.

Within the park, there are about 325 mountain gorillas that sometimes travel into Zaire, with another 320 living in a park in Uganda. But all of them are crowded and live in a closed, genetic pool. And for people living around gorilla habitats, there is not one acre of land to spare. “It’s the same ecosystem,” Nzeyimana told me in Kigali in June, 1993 during a tense cease-fire in the civil war. “In the long-term, to protect the gorillas, we have to find a balance between them and people.”

Dian Fossey recognized the same problem in her autobiography, published in 1983. “The fertile soil adjacent to the park contains 780 inhabitants per square mile,” she wrote. “The people freely cross back and forth into the park to collect wood, set illegal traps for antelope [which sometimes catch gorillas by mistake, especially infants, who often die from gangrene in their wounds], collect honey from wild bee hives, graze cattle, and plant plots of potatoes and tobacco. Encroachment upon this terrain may be responsible for the mountain gorilla becoming one of the seven or so other rare species both discovered and extinct within the same century.”

But unlike Nzeyimana, Fossey’s solution was force. She helped create a team of park guards to keep people out. In addition to using them against families living around the park, Fossey also employed them as frontline troops in a heroic campaign against gorilla poachers, who sold captured infants to zoos, and murdered adults for trophies. In 1985, she was murdered for her efforts. The order came from a Little House official who had been involved in poaching, Rwandan army officers say. But while the film depicts Fossey’s murder as the product of an ongoing struggle with gorilla poachers, the fact is that she was killed after she won an outright victory. By 1984, as a result of Fossey’s efforts, the market for direct gorilla poaching had been entirely wiped out.

Dr. Nzeyimana is no fan of Fossey, who advocated force against gorilla poachers and impoverished Rwandans alike. “For many years, they tried to stop the invasion of the park by people, but it’s not possible,” he said. The best method is to educate people about conservation.”

With millions of people dead, dying or starving now, the situation has grown far more critical. But even before the present crisis, many Rwandans resented what they saw as the West’s disproportionate concern for primate preservation. “We have eight million people here,” said an aid worker a year ago in Kigali, “and all you Americans care about are those damn gorillas.” Now, desperate just to survive, Rwandans have little, if any, reason to support efforts to save the mountain gorilla.

The world, slow to act before and during the cataclysm, has lost its credibility with Rwandans, and, to a large degree, so has the Karisoke Center. Nzeyimana says it’s time for a new direction that fully takes into account the issues that created Rwanda’s crisis. To help both people and gorillas, Nzeyimana says education must replace force as a way to encourage people to stay out of the park. But to make it work, education must be coupled with incentive and human development projects. “The people must be convinced that the gorillas are a valuable resource they can count on.”

Despite his harrowing escape, Nzeyimana is anxious to return to his work in Rwanda. But after the horrors of recent months, it’s unclear what he would be returning to. The question remains whether the Karisoke Center will continue to use Nzeyimana to merely educate Rwandans, or also support his proposals for human development. “This is definitely a new area for us,” says Craig Cummings of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund that raises money for the Karisoke Center, by telephone from London. “But it is essential to the overall program.”

If there’s any lesson that can be drawn from the horrors of Rwanda, it’s that there are endangered people as well as animals and habitats. Ignoring Rwanda’s human needs will lead to more tragedy, says Nzeyimana, and the guarantee of a quick extinction for the mountain gorilla.”

Where’s the Brief

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Congressman Robert Torricelli is Washington’s most aggressive anti-Castro politician, even though 90 percent of his northern New Jersey district is non-Hispanic (mostly Italian, Jewish, or Irish descent) and less than 2 percent is Cuban. These Cubans have yet to organize even one demonstration against Castro. But recently people have begun to demonstrate against Torricelli. Even The Bergen Record, his county’s paper, has begun to question his stance: “It is an odd twist, perhaps, that Torricelli should find himself leading the offensive against Castro,” reports Thomas Moran. “He represents a district that is just 10 percent Hispanic, yet he is a champion for anti-Castro voters nationwide.”

Anti-Castro groups gave Torricelli $26,750 for his re-election in 1992, and about $10,000 so far this year. He has already secured the powerful Cuban vote based in Hudson County, adjoining his district, should he ever seek statewide office. And if he entertains higher ambitions, he can count on help from the Miami Cuban exile community’s hard-line leader, Jorge Mas Canosa, as one of his biggest fans. “He is presidential material,” Mas Canosa told the Record. “You have dinner and drinks with him, and you come to know him. There are very few people who have his sense of purpose, of direction, and destiny. He has been called for a bigger mission.”

Torricelli defends his Cuba interest by saying that he is motivated by principle and commitment to a democratic ideal. Indeed, as chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, he has been an active supporter of human rights in Latin America. During his first campaign in 1982, he criticized the Salvadoran government’s abuses. (His current companion in Englewood, Bianca Jagger, was once an activist on El Salvador.)

Later, like many of his colleagues, Torricelli questioned the way U.S. officials handled the 1989 murders of sic Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. Shortly after the killings, U.S. Army Major Eric Warren Buckland implicated El Salvador’s High Command and its Chief of Staff, Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, in testimony to the F.B.I. But State Department officials buried the affidavit for nine months, and, when it was “discovered,” claimed that the F.B.I. had bullied Buckland, a Special Forces Green Beret, into making a false statement. Last year, after the United Nations Truth Commission found that Ponce himself had ordered the murders, the official U.S. response went something like, “Gee whiz, whaddaya know?”

Torricelli, however, expressed outrage and promised to investigate whether U.S. officials had committed perjury when testifying to Congress about that and other crimes. Eighteen months later, no such investigation or hearing has occurred. When asked why, Torricelli declined to comment. He made a promise to principle and to the people in his district. But so far he has shown more loyalty to the Cuban vote outside it.

Arming Genocide in Rwanda

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Read the original article here.

The high cost of small arms transfers

Rwanda is only the latest example of what can happen when small arms and light weapons are sold to a country plagued by ethnic, religious, or nationalist strife. In today’s wars such weapons are responsible for most of the killings of civilians and combatants. They are used more often than major weapons systems in human rights abuses and other violations of international law. Light conventional arms sustain and expand conflict in a world increasingly characterized by nationalist tensions and border wars. Yet the international community continues to ignore trade in those weapons, concentrating instead on the dangers of nuclear arms proliferation.

In the post-Cold War era, in which the profit motive has replaced East-West concerns as the main stimulus behind weapons sales, ex-Warsaw Pact and NATO nations are dumping their arsenals on the open market. Prices for some weapons, such as Soviet-designed Kalashnikov AKM automatic rifles (commonly known as AK-47s), have fallen below cost. Many Third World countries, such as China, Egypt, and South Africa, have also stepped up sales of light weapons and small arms. More than a dozen nations that were importers of small arms 15 years ago now manufacture and export them. But most of this trade remains unknown. Unlike major conventional weapons systems, governments rarely disclose the details of transfers of light weapons and small arms.

The resulting costs of such transfers are apparent. Small arms and light weapons have flooded nations like Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, not only fanning warfare, but also undermining international efforts to embargo arms and to compel parties to respect human rights. They have helped undermine peacekeeping efforts and allowed heavily armed militias to challenge U.N. and U.S. troops. They raise the cost of relief assistance paid by countries like the United States. Yet the international community has no viable mechanism to monitor the transfer of light and small weapons, and neither the United Nations nor the Clinton administration has demonstrated the leadership required to control that trade.

Rwanda’s war

No tragedy better illustrates the need for controls than Rwanda, where the U.S. contribution to the present relief effort is expected to reach $500 million, or about two dollars for every U.S. citizen. Rwanda’s genocide, which began in April 1994, was preceded by a war launched in October 1990 by Tutsi guerrillas of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) against the Hutu-led government. Rwanda was already one of the poorest nations in Africa. Although both the government and guerrillas had limited resources with which to buy arms, and their combined 45,000 combatants never comprised a very large market, arms suppliers rushed to both sides like vultures to a carcass.

The war’s origins go back, in part, to a wave of violence from 1959 to 1966, when the Hutu overthrew the Tutsi monarchy, which had ruled for centuries. Between 20,000 and 100,000 Tutsi were killed in a slaughter that the British philosopher Bertrand Russell then described as “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” The violence drove about 150,000 Tutsi exiles, known as Banyarwanda, to Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Zaire.

In Uganda, Banyarwanda and their descendants suffered under the tyranny of dictators, including Milton Obote and Idi Amin. In the early 1980s at least 2,000 of them joined a guerrilla movement led by a former defense minister, Yoweri Museveni. In 1986 Museveni and his men took power. In 1990, when the RPF invaded Rwanda across its northern border with Uganda, more than half its initial guerrillas and most its officers were drawn from Uganda’s army. Uganda also provided an array of small arms and other weapons systems, including recoilless cannons and Soviet-made Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers.

To counter the invasion, the Hutu government drew from its existing stock of Belgian automatic rifles and French armored vehicles. But Rwanda was understocked and under siege. Until then, Belgium, Rwanda’s former colonial ruler, had been its main military patron. But Belgium had an explicit policy against providing lethal arms to a country at war. Following the invasion, Belgium continued to provide military training, boots, and uniforms to the Rwandan army, but no arms. France, however, rushed in 60-mm, 81.-mm, and 120-mm mortars and 105-mm light artillery guns. France, which was committed to keeping Rwanda within the bloc of 21 Francophone African nations, also provided seasoned advisers and four companies of 680 combat troops at a time.

An arms race was under way. More than a dozen nations helped fuel the Rwandan war, and both sides appear to have purchased considerable weaponry through private sources on the open market. By its own admission, the Rwanda government bankrupted its economy to pay for those weapons. Former Warsaw Pact countries appear to have supplied both sides, seeing opportunity in Rwanda less than one year after the Berlin Wall fell. It remains unclear how long it took ex-Warsaw Pact equipment to reach Rwanda, but eventually most RPF guerrillas carried Kalashnikov AKM automatic rifles, many manufactured in Romania. Among the rebels who had uniforms, most wore distinctive East German rain-pattern camouflage.

Russians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks, and others are aggressively promoting arms sales. The collapse of Moscow’s central control has given governments and the officials left in charge of existing stockpiles a free hand. With the Russian ruble devalued and East European nations in need of hard currency, their governments are likely to try to sell even more small arms in the future. The CIA reports that Russian crime syndicates are also involved in nongovernmental weapons sales.

By 1993, Rwanda’s Hutu government had begun to look to Russia to buy arms, especially Kalashnikov AKMs. But the key suppliers for government forces were France, Egypt, and South Africa. A $6 million contract between Egypt and Rwanda in March 1992, with Rwanda’s payment guaranteed by a French bank, included 60-mm and 82-mm mortars, 16,000 mortar shells, 122-mm D-30 howitzers, 3,000 artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades, plastic explosives, antipersonnel land mines, and more than three million rounds of small arms ammunition.

South Africa also supplied small arms, including R-4 automatic rifles, 7.62-mm machine guns, and 12.7-mm Browning machine guns. In October 1992, on the heels of the Egyptian deal, Rwanda made a $5.9 million purchase from South Africa: 100 60-mm mortars, 70 40-mm grenade launchers with 10,000 grenades, 20,000 rifle grenades, 10,000 hand grenades, spare parts and 1.5 million rounds of ammunition for R-4 rifles, and one million rounds of machine gun ammunition.

South Africa developed its arms industry in response to the U.N. embargo against it. Its conventional weaponry is considered to be among the most durable and reliable in the world — a fact Rwanda quickly learned. By late 1993, within a year of its $5.9 million purchase, Rwanda had decided to standardize its infantry forces with South African arms. These purchases from South Africa were in contravention of U.N. Security Council Resolution 558 opposing importation of weapons from South Africa. The import prohibition was voluntary, unlike the U.N. ban on arms exports to South Africa, which was lifted in May.

Who is responsible?

The proliferation of weapons in Rwanda expanded the conflict, displacing, last year, one out of eight Rwandans — one million refugees who went unnoticed internationally. The arms flows also facilitated violations of international law (both the army and RPF engaged in direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas) and increased human rights abuses. Regrettably, that turned out to be a tragedy of minor proportions compared to what came next.

Relief groups estimate that 200,000 to 500,000 people have been killed in the genocidal carnage that began in April, although some U.S. intelligence experts estimate the death toll at one million or more. Much of the killing was carried out with machetes, but automatic rifles and hand grenades were also commonly used. Their wide availability helped Hutu extremists carry out their slaughter on a horrendous scale. The huge piles of Tutsi bodies massacred in Rwanda since April are now juxtaposed with the huge piles of rifles in Goma, Zaire, that were confiscated from fleeing Hutu.

Rwandan authorities distributed large numbers of firearms to militia members and other supporters months before the genocide began, and again after most foreigners left Rwanda at the beginning of the carnage. One example is sufficient to demonstrate the impact of small arms in the hands of those capable of crimes against humanity: Human Rights Watch/Africa reports that 2,800 people gathered in a church were slaughtered by militiamen using automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, and machetes. As people fled, it took the militia four hours to kill them all.

Governments that supplied weapons and otherwise supported those forces bear some responsibility for needless civilian deaths. In March 1993, following the release of a report detailing the massacre of several thousand unarmed Tutsi civilians between 1990 and 1993, Belgium withdrew its ambassador, Johan Swinnen, for two weeks to protest the abuses. In contrast, France apologized for them. Said French Ambassador Jean-Michel Marlaud, “There are violations by the Rwandan Army, more because of a lack of control by the government, rather than the will of the government.” Hutu leaders got the message that they could get away with genocide facilitated by foreign arms.

Perhaps if more had been known about the flow of light weapons and small arms into Rwanda, if the international community had the opportunity to stop the arms influx or at least to pressure suppliers into conditioning arms supply on human rights performance, the outcome would have been different. Yet to this day France, South Africa, Egypt, and Uganda have not fully disclosed the nature and extent of their military assistance and arms transfers.

For Rwanda, international scrutiny came too late. In the future, human rights organizations may continue to disagree with governments about the impact of the transfer of light weapons and small arms. But a democratic debate over whether such transfers conflict with human rights requires knowledge of the transfers themselves. This is something that any democratic republic, including France and the new South Africa, should understand.

The problems of control

On every continent, trade in light weapons and small arms — both legal and on the black market — is rapidly expanding, although there are no reliable statistics. This contrasts with the global trade in heavy weapons systems, which, according to most statistics, has actually declined in dollar value in recent years.[1] Both trends reflect the high demand for light weapons and small arms in regional conflicts. Most observers agree that those arms have never before been so easily obtainable.

It is increasingly clear that the proliferation of light weapons is a destabilizing force throughout the world. Pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenades, light mortars, and light artillery are the weapons used most often in repressing civilian populations. Included in their toll is the suffering of refugees, and the corresponding costs of international humanitarian relief efforts. Small arms raise the cost of international peacekeeping and peacemaking operations. Thus, they endanger not only internal, but also regional and international stability.

Nonetheless, conventional arms trade control remains a secondary issue for most nations. Almost no effort is being made to monitor and control trade in light weapons and small arms. Governments and independent analysts alike focus almost exclusively on major weapons systems.

Disclosure of arms transfers is in the interest of the United States and the international community. Therefore, the first and essential element of any control mechanism should be to compel as many states as possible to make their transfers public. Some states, however, will oppose any attempt to compel transparency for fear that disclosure of their buyers might invite competition. Even more states, those that sell arms to human rights abusers, would fear that disclosure would subject them to stigma. But both concerns should be overridden by the collective international need for transparency.

The dynamics of the arms market give rise to another obstacle. Clearly, any control mechanism would be imperfect. The leakiness of existing and past arms embargoes on individual nations is ample evidence of the difficulties involved. A major reason those embargoes have been difficult to enforce is that without any mechanism to control transfers, states can easily buy arms through second- and third-party transfers, without the knowledge of the original producer.

There is also the huge problem presented by the voluminous covert trade in light weapons, which some observers believe may amount to billions of dollars each year. In one incident in 1993, 150 tons of assault rifles, mortars, rocket launchers, land mines, and ammunition, mostly of Chinese and Czech manufacture, were found in a warehouse in Slovenia, intended for Bosnian Muslims. Clearly, private arms dealers would seek ways to illegally circumvent any control mechanism. “Yet the biggest regular suppliers of weapons to the covert arms trade are not freelancing private arms dealers, but governments themselves,” reports The Economist. “The main motive is cash.”

The international community has never established a viable mechanism for controlling the transfer of conventional arms. Attempts at control have largely consisted of a patchwork of often ineffective arms embargoes against perceived rogue nations and failed international discussions, notably the Conventional Arms Transfer Talks during the Carter administration and the U.N. Security Council “Perm 5” talks following the Persian Gulf War. Many nations have domestic legislation regulating arms trade, but such regulations tend to be weak and susceptible to duplicity by such means as false end-user certificates. And, in general, there is far less official scrutiny and regulation of the trade in small arms and light weapons than in major weapons. Most troublesome, nations rarely have meaningful control over how their weapons are used once transferred.

The most significant international initiative to date has been the establishment of the United Nations Register on Conventional Arms. The register was made possible by the end of the Cold War, which created a more sympathetic environment for conventional arms trade control, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which convinced many nations of the dangers of excessive arms transfers. The U.N. register is a voluntary mechanism, designed not as a control measure but as a confidence-building procedure. Data is requested on the export and import of seven categories of major weapons systems: battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large-caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, naval warships, and missiles and missile launchers. The U.N. established the register in 1991, and states made their first entries in 1993 for the previous calendar year.

The U.N. register has been a qualified success. Some previously unknown information was reported, while some critical and otherwise known transfers were not.[2] Fortunately, most arms exporters participated, including a number of countries that have traditionally been secretive about their arms trade, such as France and the United Kingdom. But only two-thirds of arms importers participated; some key nations in the Middle East and Asia did not.

These shortcomings stem partly from fundamental problems with the register itself. It does not include light weapons and small arms; it requests reporting only after the completion of a calendar year; and it requests states to participate on a voluntary basis. Rwanda is a case in point. Despite the heavy flow of arms into that country in 1992, the only entry listed in the register is Egypt’s provision of six 122-mm howitzers. These problems are readily recognized by people responsible for developing the register, but they point out that the collective political will necessary to correct the problems does not exist at this time.

Still, the premise of the U.N. register is sound. Increased transparency enhances peace and stability. A register for trade in light weapons and small arms is needed more than one for major weapons systems, as far more about trade in the latter is already known. The addition of light weapons and small arms to the register, even if unevenly reported, would be a major step forward. Transparency can also be a crucial tool in the much-needed effort to demand accountability for weapons misuse by the supplier as well as the recipient.

Whatever control mechanism is used, to be effective it must seek to compel rather than merely request disclosure, and disclosure should be within a reasonable period. A nation’s willingness to cooperate should be a prerequisite for its acceptance by the international community. The nurturing of such a climate would, of course, take time. The first step should be expanding the register to include light weapons and small arms.

Many states will be opposed to controls on trade in light weapons and small arms, and reasonable questions will be asked about the feasibility of constructing a verifiable or enforceable export control regime. Nevertheless, this is an opportunity for the Clinton administration to show leadership on an important but largely ignored threat to international peace and stability.

America’s role

No discussion of conventional arms exports should omit the fact that the largest conventional arms exporter is the United States. The Clinton administration has trumpeted the increased threat of the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the foremost danger facing the United States. Yet it has issued hardly a word on conventional arms — the real killer — except to assert their importance to U.S. defense manufacturers. For almost two years, the administration has labored to develop an official arms transfer policy. According to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, “Regrettably, the evidence clearly indicates that the administration has sought to promote arms sales, rather than to reduce them.”

The United States, as the world’s number one arms merchant, should take the lead in proposing new ways to control the flow of light weapons and small arms. An administration that is struggling to deal with crises in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and elsewhere should recognize its own need to check this type of proliferation.

To its credit, the U.S. government has taken action on light weapons in two notable instances. In a precedent-setting action earlier this year, the United States announced that it would no longer provide small arms to Indonesia in recognition of its government’s use of such weapons in human rights abuses in East Timor. The U.S. Congress has incorporated a similar ban into this year’s foreign aid appropriations bill.

Even more noteworthy is the leadership the United States has exercised in prohibiting the export of a particularly egregious light weapon — the antipersonnel land mine.’ With strong encouragement from a broad coalition of human rights, humanitarian, arms control, development, and environmental organizations, the United States, at the initiative of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Representative Lane Evans (D-Ill.), enacted a one-year moratorium on the export of all antipersonnel land mines in 1992 and extended the moratorium for another three years in 1993. The U.N. General Assembly subsequently passed a resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on land mine trade, and to date about a dozen nations have announced an export ban. The U.S. State Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency are developing a framework for an international export control regime for antipersonnel land mines. This could provide a model for limiting the trade in light weapons and small arms.

While the vast majority of the United States’ major weapons transfers are public, most of its transfers of light weapons and small arms are not. For this trade no regular reporting is made to Congress in classified or unclassified form.[3] Many sales are private commercial transactions, and attempts to get detailed data on them through the Freedom of Information Act are routinely denied on proprietary grounds. But since the United States has perhaps the most transparent arms transfer system of any arms-producing nation, it has little to lose and much to gain by compelling competitors to move toward an equal or higher standard.

Transparency would not translate into control. But it is a necessary starting point in coming to grips with the nature, scope, and effects of the trade in light weapons and small arms. The costs to the world of this uncontrolled trade are so great that urgent action is needed. Nations need to devote more resources to monitoring and assessing the impact of the light arms trade. The international community needs to do some serious and creative thinking about how to design a control regime. To preclude more killing fields, the world begs for leadership now.

1. See, for example, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1991-1992, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994; U.S. Congressional Research Service, “Conventional Arms Transfers to the Third World 1986-1993,” CRS Report to Congress, #94-612F, July 29, 1994; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 1994, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

2. See Edward J. Laurance, Siemon T. Wezeman, and Herbert Wulf, Arms Watch: SIPRI Report on the First Year of the U.N. Register on Conventional Arms, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

3. For several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a useful and detailed annual report was publicly released to Congress that contained comprehensive data on the U.S. trade in light weapons and small arms — the “Annual Report on Military Assistance and Exports, as required by Section 657, Foreign Assistance Act.” Resuming publication of this report would be the singly most important step the U.S. government could take to increase transparency in arms transfers,

Justify My War: Why Clinton Eyes Haiti’s Drug Trade and Ignores Guatemala’s

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Original article found here.

While Bill Clinton’s White House invokes Haitian drug trafficking as a key rationale for invasion, it is continuing the Bush administration policy of virtually ignoring massive cocaine shipments — and related mass murders — by Guatemala’s military. U.S. officials on Friday said that they were investigating a possible drug indictment against two top Haitian officials, military leader General Raoul Cédras and police chief Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Michel Francois. But they are being far less aggressive toward Guatemala, which transships at least six times as much cocaine into this country than Haiti.

Like his predecessor, Clinton claims to have struggled against foreign governments and especially militaries involved in trafficking. President Bush used this pretext to invade Panama and later to put General Manuel Noriega on trial. Today the Clinton administration’s special adviser on Haiti, William Gray III, says that democracy, drugs and refugees — in that order — are its justifications for a possible invasion.

In May, Clinton administration officials began to say that the Haitian military’s involvement in cocaine trafficking was a threat to U.S. national security. Three weeks later, on June 8, The New York Times quoted unnamed administration sources “saying that the Haitian officers are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars each month for allowing their country to be used as a transshipment center by the main Colombian drug rings in Cali and Medellin.” But, the same day, when asked to elaborate by members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Gray declined, saying, “What type, size, who are involved, are] currently under review, and when that review is completed we’ll get back to you.”

On the contrary, the facts about Haiti’s role in the cocaine trade are already well known to State Department’s International Narcotics Matters (INM) bureau and DEA experts, including the DEA’s Miami Field Division Chief, Thomas Cash; all describe it as “relatively insignificant.” They say that before the export embargo was imposed last year, Haiti transshipped only between six and 12 metric tons of cocaine annually, much if not most of it to Europe.

While Clinton focuses drug attention on Haiti, vastly more cocaine pours into this country from Guatemala. INM and DEA experts say Guatemala today transships between 50 and 75 metric tons annually to the United States. Similarly, the largest single seizure of cocaine known to involve Haiti is the 160 pounds discovered in three unclaimed suitcases at JFK airport in New York in April 1992; the same month, authorities confiscated 6.7 metric tons — 14,740 pounds — of cocaine discovered inside cases of frozen Guatemalan broccoli in Miami.

This seizure led to the nearest arrest of Harold Ackerman, whom the DEA’s Cash described as “the Cali cartel’s ambassador to Miami.” He was working with confederates in Guatemala, where U.S. embassy press attaché Lee McClenny said, “the vast majority of cocaine trafficking is Cali cartel-related.” As has been widely reported, U.S. experts say the Cali cartel now controls at least 75 per cent of the world’s cocaine trade, and two-thirds of the cocaine entering the United States passes through either Mexico or Guatemala, on NAFTA’s southern border.

While federal prosecutors now try to indict Francois and, perhaps, Cédras, the DEA has implicated Guatemalan military officers of all ranks. They include one air force general, two air force majors, one army lieutenant colonel, and six army captains; the DEA has collected enough evidence against each to either recommend or take legal action. But because Guatemala’s military and the courts it controls protect them, not one officer has gone to trial. “Guatemalan military officers strongly suspected of trafficking in narcotics rarely face criminal prosecution,” reads this year’s INM International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. Instead the officers above were either expelled or retired from military service. But this is no deterrent. “In most cases, the officers continue on with their suspicious activities,” according to the INM report.

The DEA has even observed air force officers using military aircraft to smuggle cocaine. One suspect is General Carlos Pozuelos Villavicencio, the former air force commander. Last October, the State Department denied him an entry visa to the United States under the section of the U. S. immigration law that allows barring entrance to known narcotics traffickers. Another is Army Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Ochoa Ruiz, who, along with two army captains, was set up in a DEA sting way back in 1990. While agents watched, Ochoa and his men loaded a half metric ton of cocaine, worth $7.5 million wholesale, on board a private plane. It landed in Tampa, where Ochoa was later indicted by a U.S. grand jury.

But Guatemalan civilian courts have three times denied Ochoa’s extradition to stand trial. And although the evidence against him includes the half ton of seized cocaine, a military tribunal ruled last year to dismiss all charges for lack of evidence. Rather than demand his extradition, the Clinton administration doesn’t want anyone to know Ochoa’s still wanted. While not one Haitian military officer is currently charged in any U. S. court, Ochoa, an alleged multi-million-dollar trafficker, walks away from the U.S. indictment.

In addition to the above 10 officers implicated by the DEA, seven more officers, a town mayor currently being prosecuted in federal court in Brooklyn, and 19 other paramilitary “commissioners” under military control are accused of narcotics trafficking in legal testimony recorded by the office of Guatemala’s Human Fights Ombudsman. The charges include illegal detention and torture.

Guatemala’s army has the absolute worst human rights record in the hemisphere, and most of its victims are native Mayans. (On Friday, Guatemalan authorities said the charred bodies of 1000 men, women, and children had been found near the Mexican border.) Previous abuses include an estimated 40,000 people disappeared, and another 100,000 murdered, usually for their armed resistance or politics.

But today, Mayans are killed for greed. In Los Amates, near Guatemala’s Caribbean coast, dozens of Mayans, 32 of whom added both their thumbprints and signatures to the human rights testimony, claim local military and municipal authorities tortured three men before killing one of them, and then killed eight more people, including a mother and son. Their objective was to force them and hundreds of survivors off land that most of them have farmed for two generations. Why? To build clandestine runways to run drugs.

In January 1991, the ombudsman made a ruling on the initial charges of legal detention and torture, declaring them “proven”, and implicated, among others, colonel Luis Roberto Tobar Martinez, Colonel Baltazar Aldana Morales, Colonel Luis Arturo Isaac Rodriguez, Colonel Alfredo Garcia Gomez, Major Reyes, Captain Carlos Rene Solorzano, and Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, the ex-mayor of Zacapa. Vargas alone had just been indicted in Brooklyn on separate but related trafficking charges. The ombudsman also acknowledged that one of the tortured men had since been murdered, and then declared open a second investigation he never completed.

The ombudsman, Ramiro de Leon Carpio, is now Guatemala’s president. He was supported for the post by President Clinton a year ago in June, after Guatemala’s last civilian president tried to give himself — and his military — dictatorial powers in a “self-coup”. After it failed in the face of popular and foreign opposition, the military allowed De Leon to assume office. This year, in a letter to President Clinton, President De Leon promised to continue the ombudsman’s work and bring authorities who have “committed a crime or human rights violation” to justice. Nonetheless, the above case remains open.

Survivors say the runways were built from 1990 to 1992, when the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala was Thomas F Stroock. A quintessential political appointee, Stroock met George Bush at Yale, and later, as a successful oil magnate from Wyoming, was a major fundraiser for Bush’s presidential campaign. Throughout his term in Guatemala, Ambassador Stroock — who was replaced by 1993 — denied that the military, as an institution, was involved in cocaine trafficking. Similarly, today, the Clinton administration lists Guatemala as one of the countries “cooperating fully” with U.S. efforts against drug trafficking.

The first murder victim was Celedonio Perez. Along with about 8,000 other families, he lived among the five hamlets of Los Amates in eastern Guatemala, about 35 miles across the state line from Zacapa. There, in December 1990, the DEA broke up an operation that it charged “smuggled several tons of cocaine to the U.S. each month in tractor-trailers” overland through Mexico. This led to the arrest of Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, aka “Archie,” according to the Brooklyn grand jury indictment against him. “He was a real big fish,” said one U.S., expert. “The kind of guy who could order a guy killed.”

Vargas was a local paramilitary member of the Mano Blanco death squad since age 19, says one army lieutenant colonel. By the time Vargas became mayor of Zacapa in 1990, he owned a ranch house across the street from the army base. Vargas denies the charges of trafficking against him. His attorney, David Cooper, told the Voice: “If [any planes] landed in Zacapa, the only landing field was on the army base. ” Guatemala’s military attaché in Washington, Colonel Benjamin Godoy, denies that the Zacapa base was used to run drugs.

In Guatemala, according to the INM report, “All drug enforcement activities must be coordinated with military intelligence, which actively collects intelligence against traffickers.” Guatemalan military commanders deny that military intelligence would, instead, share information with traffickers, even if they included military officers and other officials. But according to peasants’ testimony around the same time that the DEA informed Guatemalan military intelligence that it sought to arrest Vargas, Vargas and his accomplices began forcing peasants off their land in Los Amates; five weeks later, after Vargas was finally arrested and his operation busted in Zacapa, local army authorities built more runways in Los Amates.

When Celedonio Perez resisted according to testimony, he and two other men were captured on November 18, 1990, “by the Commander and seven soldiers from the Los Amates military detachment,” who were “ordered by the Justice of the Peace.” Inside the detachment, the men claimed they were threatened and tortured by Army Lieutenant Maldonado and paramilitary authorities Byron Berganza and Baudilio Guzman who have “sufficient power and economic resources to dispose of the life and liberty of any peasant.” This claim of torture is supported by a signed doctor’s medical report as well as a photo of a man’s neck encircled by a pencil-thin laceration.

On January 6, 1991, one of the men was captured again, scaring him enough to make him and his family, finally flee their land. But Perez still resisted. Survivors say that on January 19, military authorities killed him. As word of his murder spread, many more frightened families fled Los Amates. With much of its land now cleared, the army stepped up construction of runways. But in April, after many were completed, military authorities began to target individuals, like Daniel Melgar, a tractor driver, who knew about them. “Since this man had worked on the construction of the clandestine runway owned by Francisco Villatuerte, he was assassinated by men I paid by narcotraffickers,” reads the I testimony, “and today that runway I is found camouflaged with tree trunks over it.”

Still, the public did not know what was happening, and survivors feared that they might be killed next. They decided to denounce the murders publicly. After pooling their funds, they took put an ad in Prensa Libre, one of three Guatemalan dailies. But nothing changed. Four days later, survivors claim the army killed two more peasants — “a mother and son on the shoulder of the highway CA-9 near the Seafood crossroad. This woman and he husband worked loading and unloading the planes of the narcotraffickers.”

A week later, in May, survivors took out another ad in Prensa Libre, and this time, “we mentioned the existence of the clandestine landing strips built by narcotraffickers.” Survivors also named five officials in the General Registry of Property whom they accuse of falsifying titles to “our lands that we have possessed for more than 50 years.” Still, nothing changed. The next day, military authorities killed another man, survivors claim, while three other peasants were falsely arrested for his murder. A month later, in June, survivors accused military authorities of murdering three more men, who had “worked guarding the finca (ranch) situated in the Palmilia property of Arnoldo Vargas Estrada.”

Later that month, in response to the newspaper ads, the head of the homicide department for the National Police, Jost Miguel Merida Escobar, and three other agents finally arrived. But rather than investigate the murders, “They lived for various days on the finca Rancho Maya of Byron Berganza and in the house of Baudilio Guzman where they were well-received, reads the testimony. Despite being explicitly informed about the clandestine runways, “these men forgot to make mention of them in their report.”

A month later, in July, another peasant was arrested by a group of soldiers and two police agents, this time on charges involving national security. Five days later, survivors claim, another group of military authorities assassinated another man.

Three more months passed before something happened that survivors thought might at last attract outside attention. On October 11, “before sunrise, one of the planes that transports cocaine crashed when it couldn’t, reach the runway on the finca Rancho Maya.” Guatemala’s national director of aeronautics came to investigate. But in his report, he said the plane was not headed for the finca, and that its crash was merely accidental. As a result, nothing changed, and the killings continued into 1992. Finally, in March, survivors decided to take their case to officials who they thought would listen, and addressed a copy of their testimony, from which all quotes above are taken, to “Señores D.E.A.”

While most of the killings were going on in 1991, that June, shortly after the two ads ran in Prensa Libre, a privately funded human rights delegation arrived in Guatemala City (this reporter was a member). It was led by U.S. Senator James Jeffords (Republican of Vermont) and Representative Jim McDermott (Democrat of Washington). Their report concludes, “One source said the military facilitates drug trafficking, especially cocaine, flown on small planes coming from other countries.

Non-American Western diplomats further confirmed to delegation members the Guatemalan military’s growing involvement with drugs.” Ambassador Stroock, however, denied it, saying that only a few officers were involved and that they had already been charged.

In a letter to The Progressive dated April 14, 1992, Stroock challenged: “if [anyone] has any evidence that any other army personnel are involved in drug smuggling, he should make that information available and we will act on it immediately.” But Stroock’s mission already had evidence on hand. Officials from the ombudsman’s office said they helped survivors deliver their petition to the U.S. Embassy on March 12, a month before Stroock’s letter. Press attaché McClenny later confirmed that the DEA received it.

This testimony was consistent with the DEA’s own case against Vargas, but its agents didn’t act on it, One possible reason is that, even if they did, it’s unlikely that they could have brought the officers responsible to trial. It took the United States 17 months of constant pressure to finally extradite Vargas, who, although he was linked to the military through death squads, was never a military officer. And almost four years of pressure to extradite Ochoa has failed. Now, once optimistic State Department officials no longer believe that the extradition of any current or former officer is possible.

Therefore, in Guatemala, the DEA measures success not by the number of arrests, but by the tonnage of cocaine interdicted. In July 1992, for example, DEA agents, heavily armed and rappelling from helicopters, seized 2.8 metric tons of cocaine from a small house in Jardines de San Lucas near Antigua. The DEA reports that the house “was rented to a Colombian male, his supposed wife, and his supposed young daughter,” and that it is owned by a retired Guatemalan air force captain. This seizure was then the largest in Guatemala to date, and, within a month, it led to a three-ton seizure in Guatemala City. No suspects have been arrested for either. Nonetheless, these operations are still considered successful because the seizure of 5.8 tons of cocaine, worth $87 million wholesale, more than doubled the DEA’s interdiction record for that year.

On drug matters, the most visible difference between Haiti and Guatemala is that Haiti no longer cooperates with the United States in interdiction, while Guatemala does. The result has given Guatemala in the 1990s the highest rate of interdiction of any Latin American country after Mexico, with between seven and 16 metric tons seized each year. But critics charge that this merely suggests that the amount of cocaine passing through Guatemala may be higher than estimated. The DEA maintains that anywhere else in Latin America, it is rare to interdict more than 10 percent of the total cocaine flow. For Guatemala, that would mean that the actual tonnage passing through is between 75 and 150 tons.

Indeed, Siglo Veintiuno, the Guatemalan daily that has given the most coverage to trafficking, reports “Regional experts indicate that the Cali cartel is well established in Guatemala and is able to transport more than 150 tons of cocaine through the country each year.” So much was passing through by November 1992 that a group of exporters organized a conference around the sole theme how to detect whether their products were being used to run drugs. These business leaders say that narcotics profits are both crowding out and taking over legitimate commerce.

But while newspapers can report these general trends, almost no information has been reported about who in Guatemala is behind it. Rony Sagastume, a national police detective, was appointed in September 1992 to lead an investigation to find out. An experienced professional, Sagastume also had a reputation for honesty. But the very day after his appointment, he was shot to death in his car by a death squad in Guatemala City.

Recent victims include journalists and their families. Hugo Arce is the editor of Nuestro Tiempo, a critical weekly in Guatemala City. In February, he and his 22-year-old nephew, a delivery worker, were arrested by police. Arce was released, while the nephew, in detention, sufffered broken ribs, kidney complications, swollen arms and legs, and could hardly walk. Similarly, diplomats and others suspect that a mob attack this March against June Weinstock, an American traveler, was engineered by the army it eventually drove most foreigners abroad. While Haiti formally expels its UN human rights monitors, Guatemala seems to have found another way of keeping meddlesome foreigners quiet.

Besides issuing a travel advisory about Guatemala after the attack on Weinstock, the Clinton administration has done little or nothing about anything else. The reason is that this administration, like previous ones, maintains that the mere presence of a civilian president in office denotes success.

Guatemala now has such a figurehead; Haiti does not.

The Horror: Rwanda, a history lesson

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Original article can be found here.

For most of the world, Rwanda’s dark spasm of violence seemed to come out of nowhere. It didn’t. Though the bloodiness of the killing fields is unprecedented, the country, at least in its post-colonial existence, has been subject to a number of massacres: some took place more than thirty years ago; others occurred just last year.

In any analysis of Rwanda’s tortured modern history, all roads lead to Belgium, which governed the East-Central African country as a protectorate after Germany’s defeat in World War I. Until the late 1950s Belgium allied itself with the minority Tutsi, who had ruled over the rival Hutu for centuries. Since Rwanda’s independence in 1962, Belgian officials claim to have pursued a policy of neutrality; Rwanda’s Hutu leadership disagrees. They accuse Belgium of playing a role in the April death of Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, which sparked the current fighting. Hutu-controlled Radio des Milles Collines in Kigali has gone so far as to claim that Belgian troops shot down the president’s plane. According to The Washington Post, Belgian peacekeepers were in such danger of attack that they stripped their uniforms of Belgium’s flag-patch and “traveled in undershirts so they could be mistaken for French.”

For Belgium, Rwanda has never been much of a prize. “In the darkest days of World War I,” Time magazine reported in 1959, “about the only consolation that fell to the Belgians was the capture in Africa of two small and scenically beautiful German territories”: Rwanda and Burundi. Belgium ruled “Rwanda and Burundi through a master tribe of willowy African giants named the Watutsis. The Watutsis had been for four centuries the lords of the Land of the Mountains of the Moon, and there seemed little reason why they should not continue to be so.”

Nomadic pastoralists, the Tutsi did not come in a sudden invasion to the area southwest of Lake Victoria, but slowly in search of land to graze cattle on. The Hutu were already there farming the same land. By the sixteenth century the Tutsi monarchy was established. The Mwami king was said to be the eye of God: his children were born in the heavens but, by accident, had fallen to earth. The king’s symbol of divine power was the kalinga, or sacred drum, upon which the genitals of vanquished enemies were hung. The Tutsi dynasty lasted eighteen generations. “They are proud, sophisticated and not particularly energetic. Several times we saw Watutsi lords sitting on bicycles and being pushed by their Vassals,” wrote historian John Gunther in 1953. “‘They value women highly, almost as highly as cattle and live on milk and peas.”

Although Tutsi and Hutu have distinct origins as people, with time they came to speak the same language, Kinyarwanda. They also evolved into different classes of the same society. According to historian Alison Des Forges, the Hutu and Tutsi were not so much “tribes or even ethnic groups [but] … amorphous categories based on occupation: Hutu were cultivators and Tutsi, pastoralists.” The distinction had much to do with status: a rich Hutu who owned cattle could become a recognized Tutsi, while a Tutsi who lost cattle could wind up being labeled Hutu. But it also had to do with physical appearance: unlike Hutu, Tutsi tend to be tall, with high cheekbones and sharp facial features. “They are not Negroes even though they may be jet black,” wrote Gunther. “In any case, tallness is the symbol of racial exclusiveness and pure blood.”

In governing the Rwanda protectorate, Belgium’s policy was explicitly racist. Early in its mandate, Belgium declared: “The government should endeavor to maintain and consolidate traditional cadres composed of the Tutsi ruling class, because of its important qualities, its undeniable intellectual superiority and its ruling potential.” Belgium instituted apartheid-like identity cards, which marked the bearer as Tutsi, Hutu, or twa (pygmy). And Belgium educated only male Tutsi.

Schooling for Hutus was generally undertaken by private Catholic missions. Eventually, “the Hutus began to counter Tutsi notions of superiority with a Christian-based liberation movement. This trend was given further impetus by the growing African demand for independence from Europe. By 1957 the Hutu began to organize politically. Fearful. Rwanda’s Tutsi rulers wanted Belgium to give them autonomy quickly, before they lost control.

The Tutsi were too late. In 1959 the Hutu rose up in rebellion. Time reported: “Though the Muhutus left the Watutsi women and children alone, they showed no mercy to the males: those they did not kill they maimed by chopping off their feet. They put banana plantations to the torch, set dozens of villages afire, left some helpless old people to burn to death in their own huts.”

From then until 1964, it only got worse. The philosopher Bertrand Russell described the Hutu rebellion as “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” According to Des Forges, as many as 20,006 Tutsis perished. An estimated 150,000 Tutsi exiles — known as Banyarwanda — fled to Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire. Most went to Uganda, where they suffered under the tyranny of Milton Obote and Idi Amin.

This repression eventually drove some Banyarwanda to join a guerrilla movement started in 1981 by Yoweri Museveni, a former defense minister under Obote. At least 2,000 Banyarwanda, including a tall Rwandan by the name of Paul Kagame, fought with him. After five years of fighting, Museveni and his men took power. Over time at least 2,000 more Banyarwanda joined Uganda’s army. In October 1990 these Banyarwanda, with Museveni’s silent blessing, declared themselves members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and, with Ugandan weapons, invaded Rwanda. (Uganda insists the weapons were stolen.) At the time of the invasion Kagame was Uganda’s military intelligence chief, he now commands the RPF.

Until the RPF invaded in 1990, Belgium had been Rwanda’s main provider of military assistance and training. But Belgium is unique among former colonial states in that its laws now prohibit it from providing lethal aid to a country at war. After Rwanda’s war started Belgium continued to provide boots, uniforms and training, but no arms. Consequently, President Habyarimana turned to France, which had signed military cooperation pacts with most of Africa’s twenty-one Francophone regimes. (Because Rwanda is an ex-Belgian protectorate, French is an official language along with Kinyarwanda.) Spurred on by the fact that the RPF was English-speaking and backed by English-speaking Uganda, France rushed in weapons, munitions, paratroopers and advisers to keep Rwanda’s government from falling.

While France helped the predominately Hutu Rwandan army repel the 1990 invasion. Rwanda’s hard-line Hutu leaders responded by overseeing the killing of Tutsi civilians. Although fighting was limited to northern Rwanda, soldiers staged a battle in Kigali and used it as a pretext to arrest up to 8,000 people, mostly Tutsi. There were beatings, rapes and murders. Rwandan intelligence distributed Kalashnikovs to municipal authorities in selected villages. They gathered with ruling party militants, most of whom carried staves, clubs or machetes. Sometimes holding cardboard placards of Habyarimana’s portrait above their heads, they went field-to-field in search of Tutsi, killing thousands.

Of course, the RPF wasn’t innocent. An international human rights commission report found them responsible for abuses, including executions of up to several hundred Hutu civilians and military prisoners. In response, supposedly pro-Tutsi Belgium withdrew its Ambassador, Johan Swinnen for two weeks in March 1993. “When I returned we put pressure on [all sides] to react to the report,” he said last June in Kigali, “because the future of the country … depends on it.”

At the same time, however, France continued to defend the Hutu regime. “Civilians were killed as in any war,” said Col. Bernard Cussac. France’s ranking military commander in Kigali. Ambassador Jean-Michel Marlaud was more diplomatic. “There are violations by the Rwandan army,” he said. “[But] more because of a lack of control by, the government rather than the will of the government.” But Belgian officials said that the French were undermining collective diplomatic efforts to influence the regime. “If they would only use their military presence as a lever.” said one. “I would like to see them take a more outspoken policy on democracy and human rights.” France never did

Nevertheless, two months later, in August 1993, President Habyarimana and RPF Commander Kagame signed an agreement to end the war. Habyarimana had already begun to share power with Hutu leaders outside his party. Until then he had run the country with a small group of men, most of whom were related to either him or his wife. Known as the Akazu or “Little House” (as in: the house that surrounded the president), these men controlled the elite Presidential Guard and Radio des Milles Collines. When Habyarimana let opposition members into his Cabinet in 1992, the Little House countered by forming militias called Interahamwe, or “Those Who Attack Together” and Impuzamugambi, or “Those Who Have the Same Goal.”

Soon after, several Hutu opposition leaders were assassinated and terrorist attacks became common. Bombs exploded in public markets, land mines were placed on roads away from fighting. Though no group ever claimed responsibility, all non-French Western diplomats in Kigali suspected the Little House. “We told them it is in your interest to respect human rights,” said one Belgian diplomat, “and if you don’t, we will not be silent.”

France and Radio des Milles Collines, however, blamed the RPF. Col. Cussac said his staff had traced the serial numbers of land mines used in attacks to Belgium, which had sold them to Libya, which in turn had sold them to the RPF. Cussac said Belgium could verify these facts. Belgian officials in Kigali declined comment, referring the query to the Belgian Foreign Ministry in Brussels. There, its spokesman, Ghislain D’Hoop, said that Belgium had sold no land mines to Libya in decades.

In Rwanda now, Belgium and France are even more at odds. Belgium’s foreign minister, William Claes, says Habyarimana was killed by Hutu extremists upset at his liberalizations. The rocket that struck his plane came from the Kanombe army base just east of the Kigali airport; further east are the Presidential Guard headquarters. In April, Paris received two of the “extremists,” Brussels denied them visas.

After the president’s plane went down, one of the first things Hutu Presidential Guard soldiers did was come looking for Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, also a Hutu. Hours later, Uwilingiyimana and three of the peacekeepers were found three blocks away, shot dead. A few hours later, at the Kanombe army base, a Canadian general found the remaining seven peacekeepers. They had been hacked to death by machete.

Belgians are upset at their loss of men in Rwanda, and many blame France. They have a point. In arming the Hutu government, France pursued its own linguistic vision while ignoring Rwanda’s history; along with Tutsi and Hutu victims, Belgium paid the price. “Is there tension now;” repeated Brig. Gen. Andre Desmet by telephone from the Belgian Embassy in Washington. “I will be very cautious in the answer.” He paused. ‘There are maybe different approaches.”

—

Frank Smyth is the author of Arming Rwanda, a Human Rights Watch/Arms Project report.

Crossfire: The War Behind the Closed Doors of the NRA

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Minneapolis – For three days of its annual convention last month, the National Rifle Association (NRA) paraded its cheerful public face, showing off such varied supporters as actors Richard Roundtree and Paul Sorvino, baby-toting housewives, gospel singers, and an African American policewoman. And when that was done, the 123-year-old group convened its annual board of directors meeting in Ballroom D of the Hilton Hotel. Unbeknownst to the 74 directors, eight officers, and 25-odd NRA staff and VIP members assembled, the Voice was present, there to witness the inner workings of the most powerful single-issue lobby in the nation.

Most of the people in the room were beefy white men. And the atmosphere was tense. The NRA’s eight executive officers sat behind banquet tables on a raised platform, looking down on the assembled board. The printed agenda called for reports by each executive officer — but surprisingly, all but the treasurer claimed to be unprepared. Lack of preparation, however, had nothing to do with it. Everyone was anxiously awaiting the nominating committee’s report on its choice for the NRA presidency. Normally, this is matter of simple procedure, as the NRA rotates officers in an established order of succession. Tradition dictated that 1st Vice President Thomas L. Washington, a big-game hunter from Michigan, should be president next.

But this year was different, thanks to the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of NRA firebrand Neal Knox, who is far more powerful than his position as a board member would suggest. As the rumors swirling throughout the convention for days hinted, Knox had exercised his influence on the nominating panel. Instead of Washington, committee chair T.J. Johnston nominated 2nd Vice President Marion P. Hammer, a hard-nosed, 55-year-old grandmother who helped pass the law in Florida that allows modestly trained residents to carry loaded guns. The motion for Hammer was seconded and opened to discussion.

“This is nothing more than a total power struggle. It’s a palace coup,” Robert K. Brown protested to the board. As a hard-line gun advocate, and the editor and publisher of the mercenary magazine Soldier of Fortune, Brown should know.

The internecine conflict was further evidence of the growing crisis at the NRA, which has 3.3 million dues-paying members and assets of $160 million. Last year, it spent a whopping $22.4 million on lobbying alone. The NRA supports political candidates who abide by its views, and mercilessly tries to punish those who don’t. Its appetite for loyalty is insatiable: Republican senator Robert Dole, an NRA member and honored guest at its banquet in 1986, has been branded a traitor for softening on gun control.

Once considered the most powerful lobby in Washington, the NRA is on the defensive now. For decades, it has succeeded in crushing almost any form of gun control legislation, but the recent passage of the Brady law and the success of the “assault weapons” ban bill in both the House and Senate confront the NRA with its most severe challenge yet. The gun-owning community it purports to represent has split, with fissures between sport shooters and Second Amendment “fundamentalists” cracking visibly open for the first time. All major national law enforcement organizations have already withdrawn their support from the NRA. Dissent is also on the rise internally, with many of its, state associations directly challenging national leaders. Meanwhile, most dues-paying NRA members have little sense of how the organization is run.

The controversy centers on Neal Knox. The 58-year-old former [Texas; original story incorrectly said Oklahoma] national guardsman had a BB gun by the time he was five. Today, he believes in arming, it seems, everyone. Last fall, Knox suggested solving the Somalia crisis by distributing Kalashnikovs to mothers: “If [they] had been armed, what do you think would have happened if some old boys in a Jeep with a .50-caliber machine gun had pulled over the truck that was bringing a little bit of food to some mother’s starving baby?” he asked in The Wall Street Journal. “That mother would have blown away everybody on that truck, and that would have been that. THAT is an armed people.”

Knox is so aggressive that even those who endorse his zealotry — such as Soldier of Fortune’s Brown — complain about his ambition. Once fired from the organization over his bullying tactics, Knox came back even stronger in 1991 and soon engineered the promotion of Wayne R. LaPierre, Jr who now runs the NRA’s daily affairs as its executive vice president. Today, Knox controls up to seven of the eight executive officers, and possibly 56 of 75 board directors. “If you want to understand the NRA board,” Knox is quoted as saying in Under Fire, a 1993 book about the NRA by Osha Gray Davidson, “you study the Politburo.”

“I’ve known Neal Knox for probably 20-years,” says Dave Edmondson from Dallas, a longtime NRA member and former board member who now leads the movement of state affiliates against him. “He’s very ambitious personally. I think his ego has gotten the best of him.”

That arrogance helps explain the Knox regime’s affront to Washington, a genial, conservationist NRA veteran who had considerable support on the board. The NRA was once run by men like Washington. Founded in 1871 after the Civil War by former Union soldiers, the NRA originally aimed to improve the marksmanship of the New York National Guard. It remained a quasi-military organization until after the Second World War, when its ranks were swelled by millions of returning soldiers who had acquired an interest in firearms. Enjoying increasing income and leisure time, many became hunters. Eventually, the NRA evolved into an organization of sportsmen. “The old guard?” says Ernest Lissabet, a retired U.S. Army first lieutenant who opposes Knox. “Those are the guys that I’m watching on television now, from Normandy.”

In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy with a bolt-action rifle he bought through an ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine. And in 1968, when assassins shot and killed Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., Congress passed its first significant gun control legislation. The Gun Control Act regulated the interstate sale of firearms and banned machine guns or fully automatic weapons. (An automatic reloads and fires to “spray” bullets for as long as the trigger is pulled; a semiautomatic also reloads automatically, but fires only one shot each time the trigger is pulled.) At the time, the NRA leadership supported the bill. Its then executive vice president, retired general Franklin Orth, told Congress, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

But a group of NRA men beneath him disagreed and began to plot their way to toward power. Harlon Carter was their leader, and Neal Knox was at his side. Nine years later, in 1977, they seized control of the NRA at its annual convention in Cincinnati: “Like the marines hitting the beach at Anzio, the group of hard-liners took over the meeting, using parliamentary procedure as their heavy artillery,” writes Davidson in Under Fire. The organization “became the Gun Lobby.”

Carter ran the NRA as executive vice president, while Knox took over as director of its recently formed lobbying wing, the institute for Legislative Action (ILA). But when Knox got too greedy and abrasive, the same Carter fired him in 1982. Rather than surrender, however, the resilient Knox began to plot his return. After Carter retired in 1985, the NRA floundered, its membership dropped, and it began to lose clout in Congress. Knox attacked Carter’s successor from outside the NRA, in columns in gun magazines like Shotgun News and Guns & Ammo, at the same time that rumors about the man’s alleged sexual improprieties began to spread. Knox also redbaited “moderates” on the board, insisting that compromise was the same as communism.

In the race for the NRA board of directors in 1991, Knox and his slate succeeded in winning 11 of 21 open seats, with nine more hard-liners led by Soldier of Fortune‘s Brown taking all but one that remained. Knox also enjoyed support among incumbents. Pugnacious and unapologetic, he was back.

Knox is still maneuvering to remake the entire NRA leadership in his image, and his immediate goal is to move all his field commanders into position. Besides LaPierre, there are two of primary importance, both women. Tanya K. Metaksa, an ex-director, was named earlier this year to direct ILA, the NRA’s lobbying wing, which Knox once ran. Metaksa is the first woman to hold an NRA command post. But anyone who thinks that this is a sign of political moderation is mistaken. In spelling her name for reporters, Metaksa says, “It’s AK, as in AK-47, and SA, as in semiautomatic.” Another is Hammer, four foot eleven with straight brown bangs, who prefers to be photographed with a steely-eyed, straight-lipped stare.

Wearing a ruffled blouse and a sky blue jacket, Hammer listened without expression as her nomination for the NRA presidency provoked an unprecedented outpouring from offended NRA traditionalists. The first of more than a dozen directors to step to a mike was James W. Porter, an attorney from Birmingham, Alabama, whose father is a past president of The NRA. “When you open my veins, NRA blood runs out,” he said with an educated drawl. But he was upset that the NRA leadership would permit Hammer to leapfrog over Washington, who had rightfully earned the post, and appalled that word of Hammer’s impending nomination had been leaked to USA Today. Worst of all were what he called the “scurrilous accusations” that had been spread over the weekend about Washington. Porter said he’d reported the gossip and infighting over his “good friend” to his 84-year-old mother [CORRECTION: The original story incorrectly reported grandmother.], a lifelong NRA member, who had replied: “That’s not the organization I know.”

Johnston, head of the nominating committee, insisted the group had paid no attention to unspecified rumors against Washington. He was “unacceptable,” Johnston flared, because he “made statements” against Knox appointee LaPierre.

There is little superficial difference between the rhetoric of Hammer and Washington, rivals for the presidency. Washington, from Michigan, is a conservationist who helped pass his state’s bottle bill and who hopes to promote the NRA as environment conscious. Along with his round, boyish face, and his courteous demeanor, Washington wants to use his moderate credentials to smooth the NRA’s image. But a nice guy is not what the Knox regime has in mind.

They want Hammer. Her appeal to Knox and his men is precisely her don’t-even-think-about-it attitude. She has launched fiery broadsides against the Clinton administration and Sarah Brady, whose lobbying group, Handgun Control, Inc., is the NRA’s toughest opponent. After speaker upon speaker had denounced the plot against Washington, director Wayne H. Stump — who, as an Arizona state legislator, tried to abolish the Federal Reserve Board — rose in defense of Hammer. “She has fire,” he said. “Marion can take on Hillary.” Several Knox supporters followed Stump, mentioning, repeatedly, the need to take on “Hillary and Sarah.”

The turning point in the debate seemed to come when Lee Purcell, a petite, auburn-haired actress from the TV miniseries Secret Sins of the Father, and one of seven women NRA directors, spoke. “We must remember we were put here by the membership,” Purcell said calmly, “and I think that is sometimes forgotten.” She did not believe that the membership wanted Hammer: “I’m a, woman, but I support Tom Washington.” The actress also pointed out that the press was aware of infighting within the leadership and suggested that if Hammer toppled Washington, word would get out.

This statement, finally, made Knox’s people nervous. Soon after, several asked the executive committee to close the ballroom door, although, by now, there were NRA staffers checking IDs at the door. Facing a rising number of enemies outside the organization, the NRA leadership has tried to downplay crossfire within. “Whatever we do, this jerkin’ around has got to end,” said Joe Foss, the ex-governor of South Dakota and a former NRA president, making a plea for consensus.

Shortly thereafter, a motion was made to go into executive session (something they might have done earlier, had they known that a reporter was present; although the board meeting, when not in executive session, is technically open to the public, a journalist who is an NRA Benefactor member was told he could not attend). Fearing this was only part of Knox’s plan to seize power, Washington and 17 of his supporters voted, in vain, against it. Everyone except directors and officers left the room. According to one report, those who remained discussed the “scurrilous accusations” made against Washington, as well as adding new ones about his alleged poor appearance. “They complained about his weight,” says one insider. “Petty things like that.” But if Washington were denied the position, the threat that his supporters might make Knox’s methods public remained real.

When the whole board reconvened and the secret ballot came, Washington, surprisingly to me, won. “By a wide margin,” said Jim Porter later in a telephone interview from Birmingham. His allies had apparently convinced a majority of the board that they would not be bullied into submission.

But this is only a small victory for Washington and his supporters. While the presidency could be used as a bully pulpit for a new image-making leader, it has little formal authority within the organization. Moreover, in Minneapolis, before the board went into executive session, outgoing president Robert K. Corbin reminded directors that while the president normally serves two years by tradition, the NRA’s bylaws state that he must be ratified after one year. Although a two-year term is normally a given, Corbin said, “We could vote again in one year.” NRA spokesperson Bill Powers says the directors will. Oh, and Director Knox. Powers denied that Knox enjoys any special power, and then said: “But you might wan to know Mr. Knox was just elected second Vice president.” In other words, when Washington leaves the pulpit post, Hammer will take over, then Knox.

It is a measure of Knox’s grip that, even in the midst of heated debate, not one elected director raised the substantive issues about his administration. Much of the criticism comes from other hard-line gun rights activists who believe that he is mismanaging, some say destroying, the NRA. This view is growing among state-affiliated NRA leaders, and even among veteran staff members of the organization.

The State Association Coordinating Committee, organized by activist Edmondson, made its case known at the rank-and-file meeting in Minneapolis through an eight-page, fluorescent-green pamphlet. It complained that “the LaPierre/Knox watch” had lost major legislative battles, at the same time that it had squandered members’ funds. Indeed, the NRA has outspent its incoming revenues by $59.2 million over the last two years. It has supported its lobbying by cutting back on popular members’ services like shooting competitions and reportedly plans to reduce the frequency of its main publication, American Rifleman. And although the Knox regime has successfully increased membership — it claims an astonishing 900,000 new members since 1991, or 1000 each day — Edmondson says that about half the new members drop out after one year.

The pamphlet claims that while Tanya Metaksa and her company have been handsomely paid — up to $194,000 for services in 1993 — the NRA is planning to slash a third of its lower-paid employees this year. (The NRA denies planning any large layoffs.) The pamphlet also says that Knox protégé LaPierre awarded contracts to two firms owned or controlled by Brad O’Leary — a longtime personal friend of LaPierre’s, according to Edmondson. Associated Press even reported that the NRA sold names and addresses of former members for profit, something that violates its own views about the Second Amendment. “After all,” the State Association pamphlet reads, “that list is a list of gun owners — and that’s exactly the kind of list required for gun confiscation.”

This discontent has even spread to executive officers. Firearms Business, a trade publication, reports that NRA secretary Warren Cheek just resigned “in apparent protest over the organization’s handling of veteran staff members and the ‘new NRA’s’ management policies … Cheek told NRA insiders that he considers the new management to be preoccupied with personal career goals rather than being dedicated to or even understanding the group’s mission or membership. (The NRA says Cheek retired).

But apart from mismanagement, much of the criticism also has to do with the NRA’s ardent defense of the Second Amendment. On this point, the gun-owning community that the NRA claims to represent is now split wide open. And some hunters, a potentially large group, believe that it’s time the NRA returned to its sporting purpose — promoting marksmanship, collecting, and other forms of gun-related recreation.

David E. Petzal, for one, thinks the present radicalization of the NRA is hurting the interests of gun owners. Petzal, who has given thousands of dollars to the NRA, writes the “Endangered Tradition” column in Field and Stream, another centenarian institution, many of whose 2 million readers are also in the NRA. This June, the magazine made a landmark decision to break with the NRA. “It took tremendous courage,” says executive editor Petzal.

“The bugle call known as reveille is a cheerful, energetic tune that, when I was in the Army, few soldiers actually got to hear,” he writes in an editorial. “Real-world reveille came for gun owners this February,” in the form of the assault weapons ban. Petzall like the NRA, believes that this legislation is too broad. This is partly because it would ban weapons like “the AR-15/M-16, and the MIA in modified [semiautomatic] form, which are highly accurate, and have a legitimate place in organized target competition.”

But assault weapons are also implicated in terrible acts of violence, like the Stockton, California, shooting in which a deranged man killed five children and wounded 29 others using a semiautomatic AK-47 clone. “Gun owners — all gun owners — pay a heavy price for having to defend the availability of these weapons,” writes Petzal. “The American public — and the gun-owning public; especially the gun-owning public — would be better off without the hardcore military arms, which puts the average sportsman in a real dilemma” Petzal concludes by advocating compromise, something that Knox and other members of his regime say they will never accept.

To the Knox regime, the hunters’ qualms are beside the point. “It’s not about Bambi, for God’s sake,” says Larry Pratt, of Gun Owners of America, who believes the NRA should stop pretending to be an organization of sport shooters and make it clear that its first priority is to defend the Second Amendment.

This position gradually emerged in April, when NRA witnesses testified in Congress before Brooklyn representative Charles Schumer, sponsor of the assault weapons legislation, and his committee. After listening to them, Schumer held up a Tec-9 semiautomatic, a highly inaccurate, short-range, high-capacity weapon. Shorter and more concealable than a Tommy gun, it is ideal for drive-by shootings. But when Schumer asked Tanya Metaksa if NRA members hunt with it, Knox’s lobbying chief scowled at having been asked the question, and then said, gruffly, “Some probably do.” (Indeed, the Tec-9 is the kind of weapon that dictator ldi Amin used on grazing wildlife in Uganda, wiping out all of its lions and most of its rhinos and elephants. But few self-respecting NRA members, who as a group take great pride in the quality of their firearms, would ever even own one.)

But when Schumer’s committee questioned NRA witness Suzanna Gratia, who watched a gunman kill her parents in the 1991 Luby’s massacre in Killeen, Texas, she said something else. “The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting…but it is about our right, all of our rights, to be able to protect ourselves,” she said, pointing to herself and other NRA witnesses, “from all you guys up there.” She pointed to the committee.

“They advocate a firearms fundamentalist viewpoint,” says Ernest Lissabet, the former NRA activist who founded a new group, the American Firearms Association, last year. “It’s a paranoid worldview.” From this perspective, any encroachment on the right to guns is an invitation to tyranny. That was certainly the note struck before the nominating began at the board meeting. The invited speaker, Aaron Zelman, of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, based in Milwaukee, declared that the 1968 Federal Gun Control Act was modeled after the 1938 Weapons Law in Nazi Germany. If recent gun control legislation is allowed to stand, he said, the federal government will be that much closer to perpetrating a holocaust in this country. “Charlie Schumer, who claims to be a Jew, should crawl back to the rock he came from,” Zelman said. His remarks were greeted by unanimous applause. Afterward, as many directors walked over to congratulate him, Zelman distributed posters of Adolf Hitler giving a

Sieg heil! Salute, with the caption: “Everyone in favor of gun control raise your right hand.” (Zelman also believes Rwanda’s government-led genocide proves his point “another hellhole where they have gun control,” he says by telephone from Milwaukee.)

This belief, today, is the foundation of the NRA’s opposition to gun control. The Second Amendment says: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” As interpreted by the NRA faithful, this means that individuals have the right to defend themselves against a despotic government, and so must have access to no less firepower than the police, national guard, or armed forces. This is why the NRA, opposes the banning of Teflon-coated bullets that can penetrate the body armor vests police wear, and likewise, in front of Schumer, Metaksa dodged all questions about whether the NRA supported the government’s ban on bazookas.

This is also why the NRA opposes almost any government regulation of the ownership or transfer of firearms, which is likely to be the next, most important battleground of the gun control debate. Both the Brady law, which makes gun purchasers wait five days, and the assault weapons ban bills are, at best, symbolic gestures, and partisans on both sides of the debate know it. The depth of the background check mandated by the Brady law is left largely to the discretion of local authorities, some of whom have already resisted compliance. And the pending bills would ban some of the deadliest semiautomatic weapons, but they would do almost nothing about handguns, which, in New York City, are used in 95 percent of all gun-related homicides.

The problem America faces is not necessarily the mechanism of the weapons used, but their proliferation and ready availability in our society. A new justice Department survey of high schools in crime-ridden neighborhoods in four states finds that more than one out of every five male students surveyed report owning a gun.

One solution might be a National Handgun Identification Card, recently advocated in an editorial by The New York Times. New Jersey has a similar card, which residents must present to purchase any firearm. To obtain a card, a resident must apply to the local police station, which fingerprints the applicant. Copies of the fingerprinted application are then sent to the state police as well as to the FBI. The process also includes a check of court records on mental health. It takes about eight weeks to complete. But once a resident has the card, he or she can purchase any long (or hunting) rifle or shotgun without waiting. With the same card, a resident may also purchase a handgun, but he or she must be fingerprinted by police prior to every handgun purchase and wait about six weeks for another background check to clear. (When meeting New Jersey gun owners, NRA members frequently offer condolences.)

If a similar system were established nationally, it would preclude gang-bangers from the Bronx, for example, from driving to West Virginia and, in “straw purchases” through local residents, buying an unlimited number of handguns, semiautomatic shotguns, and Tec-9s from a local gun shop. But the NRA opposes such a system because it would mean that gun owners and their guns would be on file with the federal government — information that the government could use against them when and if tyranny comes. But this argument “is ridiculous, on its face,” says Petzal. “When the Bill of Rights was framed, the average farmer had the same weapon, the smoothbore musket, as soldiers.” But today, Petzal writes, “an Uzi or an AKM or an AK-47 should be no more generally available than a Claymore mine or a block of C4 explosive.”

Petzal’s defection from the cause is yet another indication that the NRA is losing the war of public opinion on gun control. Moreover, although the writings of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson support it, the NRA’s argument on the Second Amendment has no basis in American case law. U.S. courts have ruled that the Second Amendment protects the right of states to maintain their own armed militias, but not necessarily the right of individuals to bear arms. “Contrary to some popularized notions,” reads a newly released study by the Lawyers’ Committee on Violence, one of whose principal authors is Thomas D. Barr from the Manhattan firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, “no court has ever declared that either the Second Amendment to the Federal Constitution or the New York Constitution is a barrier to laws which control or limit the sale, transfer or ownership of guns. The alleged ‘right’ of an individual to keep and bear arms is myth.”

The NRA is bleeding — but like any wounded beast, it is likely to be more dangerous now than before. Knox’s radicalism may not win him any friends in Congress, but incendiary rhetoric is still a force to reckon with — witness the influence Khalid Muhammad’s oratory brings him within the Nation of Islam. Under siege, the NRA may only become a more important player in local, state, and national politics. Rather than simply fighting gun control, it will turn its attention to fighting crime and targeting politicians who are unfriendly to guns. “We’re trying to build up files on people who run for office,” Metaksa explains to NRA legislative activists in Minneapolis. “Then we can pick out something from five years ago, and say, ‘Look what you said.'”

Such character assassinations will be part of organized state and national campaigns. Rather than limit its work to spreading the word about the Second Amendment, the NRA plans to prey on people’s fear of violent crime. As a result, the NRA has now turned its attention to the pending federal crime bill. One of its favorite slogans is, “if you do the crime, you should do the time.” By promoting it, the NRA has helped pass mandatory minimum sentencing laws that give the United States the highest rate of incarceration of any developed country in the world, while incidents of crime continue to rise.

Although the NRA’s primary public focus is on violent criminals, many of those punished under mandatory minimums are non-violent drug offenders who have already suffered the heat of the emotions whipped up by its campaign. The NRA can easily outspend its opponents — the lobbying group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, for example, worked from an operating budget of only $90,000 last year, while the NRA has so far spent over $2 million on “CrimeStrike,” a program responsible for disseminating Willie Horton-like ads throughout the heartland.

Interestingly, the most vocal opposition at the NRA’s rank-and-file meeting in Minneapolis was over drugs. Speaking from a laissez-faire point of view, several members objected from the floor to “the war on drugs,” saying that it had failed miserably, and that frequently “the feds kick down your door for both guns and drugs.” Recognizing the NRA’s contribution to this climate, one speaker asked the leadership merely to consider forming a subcommittee to explore the issue. But Knox’s executives don’t like such questions. Each time the matter was raised, it was quickly crushed through parliamentary procedure to terminate debate.

“We have to stop tearing ourselves apart from the inside,” Hammer told the board just before her defeat. “Rather than fight each other, this organization has to build its moat outside the castle wall.” By beating back dissent from within, Knox and his followers hope to maintain the fiction of a united front — to use the collective clout of millions of gun owners to advance a regressive crime agenda as effectively as the NRA once contained gun control. Listen to Metaksa. “Being tough on crime isn’t just good public policy, it’s the winning solution for your campaign,” she tells the faithful. “If you can start breeding young candidates and young people who know the politics of crime, we’re going to be very successful.”