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Will Justice Be Possible In Guatemala?

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A partial retrial for 86-year-old ex-President Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity now seems likely after Guatemala’s top court this week overturned his historic May10 conviction on a technicality. Regardless of whether he is convicted again, other former military officers, who were even closer to the carnage against Ixil-speaking and other ethnic Mayans in Guatemala’s highland regions, remain at large.

One of them is Guatemala’s president, Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general who, according to an ex-soldier testifying in Ríos Montt’s trial, ordered soldiers to burn and loot villages and “execute people.” But President Pérez Molina was not on trial and no corroborating evidence against him was heard. (Pérez Molina denies any wrongdoing, or even that genocide in Guatemala ever took place.)

Such evidence exists, however. And there is more evidence still against other officers, particularly the tight-knit group who filled the chains of command during the genocide in the early 1980s, between then-Major Pérez Molina and then-President and General Ríos Montt.

Ríos Montt may yet become the first former head-of-state successfully prosecuted in his own nation for genocide. But this story doesn’t end with one facing an odd genocide trial and another president implicated in war crimes from thirty-odd years ago. A third Guatemalan president, Alfonso Portillo, faces trial in Manhattan on US money laundering charges, which were filed in 2010. Although they each served decades apart, and only two of them are former military officers, these three presidents have stories that are tightly interwoven. Much like the threads of an olive green military dress uniform, pulling too hard, now, at any one loose string, could start unraveling the fabric to eventually bare what lies beneath. This would also include the role of the United States in the violence in Guatemala.

If he were ever brought here for trial, ex-President Portillo would become the first former head of state from any nation to be extradited to the United States. (Former Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega was brought in 1990 as a de facto prisoner of US military forces who captured him following an American invasion.) Portillo has denied charges that he embezzled tens of millions of dollars of Guatemalan funds, “converting the office of the Guatemalan presidency into his personal ATM,” as the indictment from the US Southern District Court of New York charges. He allegedly stole funds from Guatemala’s school libraries, defense ministry and a national bank, laundering the money through banks in the United States and Europe.

An elite group of former military intelligence officers are implicated in the same crimes. Back when General Ríos Montt assumed the presidency through a 1982 coup, these officers bonded and rose as an informal but powerful force. The same club of officers exists today—the place where genocide and organized crime meet.

A Defense Intelligence Agency cable from 1991 identifies this “intelligence club,” whose members called themselves the “Cofradía…the name given to the powerful organizations of village-church elders that exist today in the Indian highlands of Guatemala.” According to the once-classified cable, “This vertical column of intelligence officers, from captains to generals, represents the strongest internal network of loyalties within the institution.”

La Cofradía was formed during the peak of violence in the early 1980s by a group of Army Colonels, who, according to the cable, “must be given much of the credit for engineering” the military operations that both defeated the nation’s leftist guerrillas and resulted in genocide for 5.5 percent of the nation’s Ixil-speaking people.

“Under directors of intelligence such as then-Col. Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas back in the early 1980s, the intelligence directorate made dramatic gains in its capabilities, so much so that today it must be given much of the credit for engineering the military decline of the guerrillas from 1982 to the present,” reads the cable, which was obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

These Army colonels recruited “other capable officers” who were their juniors to serve in “key operations and troop command assignments.” The “Operators” developed their own “network of recognition, relationships and loyalties.” One of the operations officers, the cable goes on, was then-Major Otto Pérez Molina.

***

Ríos Montt took power in 1982 through a coup and later formed a political party called the Guatemalan Republican Front. Having always wanted to be a popularly elected president, he tried running for it three times, but Guatemalan courts kept ruling he was ineligible over his role in a past coup. So Ríos Montt handpicked a career politician named Alfonso Portillo to run on his party’s ticket in his place, and Portillo, after losing one election, won the next one to take office in 2000.

One of President Portillo’s most frequent guests at the National Palace was retired intelligence chief and Cofradía officer Ortega Menaldo, spotted so frequently, a spokesman felt compelled to tell reporters that he was just a close friend and not an official advisor.

In March 2002, the State Department revoked Menaldo’s US entry visa due to narco-trafficking allegations. Menaldo denied the allegations, telling reporters that he had previously collaborated with both the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration against drug trafficking. The same top Cofradía officer named in the DIA cable, now-ret. General Callejas y Callejas, also had his visa revoked on the same grounds, but never responded to the allegation.

The Bush administration eventually decertified Guatemala for failing to cooperate against drug trafficking.

“Narcotics trafficking, alien smuggling, car theft, money laundering, and organized crime in general are on the increase in Guatemala,” a State Department official, Paul Simons, testified to Congress. “Some of the leaders of these activities have very close ties to the president and regularly influence his decisions, especially with respect to personnel nominations in the military and ministry of government.”

US agencies have finally begun holding Guatemala accountable for criminal activity, after largely ignoring drug trafficking and other crimes by retired military officers and others for years. But the United States has yet to account for its own role in Guatemala’s genocide. To date the closest any U.S. official has come was then-President Bill Clinton saying in Guatemala City in 1999 that “support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong.”

Pérez Molina was in Washington serving as the Guatemala military liaison to the Inter-American Defense Board, when Portillo was elected president with Ríos Montt’s and his party’s backing. When the new government was inaugurated, Pérez Molina retired from military service, and within a year founded the Patriotic Party.

Soon both Ríos Montt and Pérez Molina were elected representatives on different sides of the Guatemalan legislature. (Ríos Montt’s daughter, Zury Rios, was an elected legislator, too. She married then-Illinois congressman Jerry Weller, who later left Congress over improprieties including undisclosed Nicaragua beachfront properties first documented in the Chicago Reader by this reporter.)

Pérez Molina ran for the presidency in 2007 and lost, and ran again in 2011 and won. He came to power promising to crack down on organized crime, especially Mexican drug cartels that in recent years have inundated Guatemala. But President Pérez Molina also allowed, in no small part due to international pressure, both a UN anti-crime task force, backed by the United States since the Bush administration, as well as Guatemalan’s own dogged attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, to continue gathering evidence and bringing cases to court.

One of the nation’s future defendants could conceivably be him. Using the nom de guerre of Major Tito Arias, then-Major Pérez Molina served in the Ixil region, where journalist Allan Nairn interviewed him on camera as part of a documentary made by the Finnish filmmaker Mikael Wahlforss. The documentary recorded Pérez Molina standing amid a row of adult male corpses, as soldiers kicked their remains. A soldier said on camera that they had brought the men to Pérez Molina for interrogation, but that they provided no information. The soldiers did not explain how the men were killed.

A City University of New York anthropologist, Victoria Sanford, recently wrote a New York Times op-d saying that the Obama administration should lead nations in the Organization of American States to demand President Pérez Molina’s resignation.

***

Anthropologists have long helped document abuses against Guatemala’s majority Mayan population. In 1990, anthropologist Myrna Mack was killed, stabbed twenty-seven times, by a military high command agent. Her sister, Helen Mack Chang, was a bank loan officer who has since emerged as the nation’s leading human rights advocate.

Helen Mack long ago compared the impunity surrounding the Guatemalan military and its crimes to a wall. With the trial of ex-President Ríos Montt the wall has finally began to crack, but not yet crumble. It remains unclear whether any legal or other action will be taken against the former military “Operator” under both Ríos Montt’s and the Cofradía’s commands, now-President Pérez Molina.

Ex-President Portillo, the politician handpicked by Ríos Montt, stands indicted in Manhattan. But his extradition has been stalled for three years. A related criminal case against him has remained open in Guatemala, even though few actual proceedings occurred. Last month the case was finally closed, perhaps now paving the way for Portillo’s extradition.

Even if his extradition were approved, his money-laundering case in New York is so potentially explosive that American diplomats wonder out loud whether he would be killed before he left. “A powerful group of former senior military officers known collectively as ‘The Brotherhood’ (‘La Cofradía,’ suspected of narcotrafficking and other crimes), who colluded with then-President Portillo to embezzle millions from the state, might seek to murder him in order to ensure he does not collaborate with Guatemalan or U.S. authorities,” reads a 2010 still classified State Department cable signed by Ambassador Stephen McFarland, a career diplomat and veteran Central America hand, and obtained and made available online by WikiLeaks.

The genocide and other crimes committed with impunity in Guatemala have long ripped the fabric of the nation. Stitching it back to together will require the same kind of hand-woven care it takes to embroider a detailed, colorful Ixil woman’s huipil.

May 23, 2013

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/article/174433/will-justice-be-possible-guatemala#ixzz2U8zkGXMA

How the gun lobby has already blocked Boston’s bombing investigators

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One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

The FBI said Tuesday that gunpowder, along with pieces of metal and ball bearings, were packed into at least one pressure cooker and another device to make the crude bombs that killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and wounded more than 170 more during the Boston Marathon Monday.

But a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of  Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told MSNBC.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Please  continue reading the article at MSNBC here.

Introducing the NRA kingmakers

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The rites of spring rarely change. Every year, even before the season opens for wild turkey shooting, hunters begin sighting-in their shotguns in the field. And just like the beginning of the hunting season, every spring, members of the National Rifle Association will learn whom their leaders have quietly picked for reelection to the NRA’s governing board. Eligible NRA members will also receive their paper ballots in the mail.

The NRA board appoints a shadowy committee to handpick almost every candidate appearing on the ballot annually. The Nominating Committee members for this year’s NRA board elections include highly-connected Republican leaders, along with figures connected to the nation’s largest conservative lobbying group, gun manufacturers, and even the New York State Police, reporting and internal documents obtained by MSNBC show.

Read full article on MSNBC.com:

What the Judiciary Committee Should Ask Wayne LaPierre

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http://www.progressive.org/what-judiciary-comm-should-ask-wayne-lapierre

What the Judiciary Committee Should Ask Wayne LaPierre

by Frank Smyth, January 29, 2013, TheProgressive.org

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on gun violence featuring testimony from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, as well as Mark Kelly, the husband of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, who was shot in the head while holding a public meeting in her district two years ago.

Members of the Judiciary Committee should take the opportunity to press LaPierre on whether his organization truly represents the views of most American gun owners–and on what, specifically those views are.

While the NRA boasts a 4 million strong membership, it has a secretive and tightly controlled process for choosing its board of directors.

That’s why journalists did not find out that one of the NRA’s most trusted, top officials lives just a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Patricia A. Clark, a longtime Newtown resident, is chairman of the NRA’s shadowy, but powerful nominating committee.

She is also an instructor in the Eddie Eagle GunSafe program–heralded right after the Newtown tragedy on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by Wayne LaPierre–but she has been on the NRA’s governing board of directors since 1999, entrusted with ensuring that the NRA board’s own ruling clique remains in power.

I have spoken with numerous NRA members who complain about the obscure, Politburo-like governance of the NRA, which keeps ordinary members in the dark about how the organization is run and by whom.

One of the figures whom the NRA board quietly appointed to the 2012 Nominating Committee is George Kollitides II, the chief executive of one of America’s largest consortiums of gun manufacturers. Kollitides last year also became head of the consortium Freedom Group, which includes the company that made the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle used not just at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, but also at last year’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and, a decade before, by the DC sniper in and around Washington.

The NRA’s executive vice president and chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre, has artfully managed the gun lobby’s message for more than 20 years. His skills include knowing what not to say and when.

A little more than one week after the Newtown shooting on “Meet the Press” with David Gregory, LaPierre made a wholly pragmatic (and not necessarily convincing) argument. When asked whether he would support any gun control measures including restrictions on high-capacity magazines, LaPierre replied, “We don’t think it works, and we’re not going to support it.”

Instead he said the NRA will “support what works,” making the case to put armed guards or police in every school. LaPierre’s TV comments then and in a “no-questions” press conference right after Sandy Hook seemed to resonate, as, for weeks, news outlets explored how and whether armed guards in schools might work.

But the main argument driving the modern NRA is not a pragmatic, but an ideological one.

“American gun owners will never surrender our Second Amendment freedom. Period,” LaPierre said in July, expressing the NRA’s opposition to a proposed U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. “Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea. History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

That statement suggests the NRA sees the Second Amendment as being more important that all nine other articles of the Bill of Rights, or any other principle or article of government including perhaps the original U.S. Constitution that became law by itself several years before.

LaPierre made no reference to the Second Amendment at all last month in his overly hyped press conference at NRA headquarters one week after the Newtown shooting. On “Meet the Press,” he only referred to it negatively, saying he and the NRA will not back any effort “to destroy” or “lose the Second Amendment.”

But what exactly does than mean after Newtown? NBC’s David Gregory was credited with challenging LaPierre on his vague, unsubstantiated claims that gun control measures won’t work. But he missed an opportunity to probe the longtime NRA chief on whether his interpretation of the Second Amendments means he would never support gun control measures, even if they could be proven to work.

LaPierre, who earned close to $1 million in salary and other compensation from the NRA and related organizations in 2010, has been at the NRA’s helm for the last 22 years.

Few people remember that, before LaPierre, the NRA was not always so extreme. Back in 1968, the NRA’s then-executive vice president, retired general Franklin Orth, supported what still stands as America’s most important gun control law. The Gun Control Act regulated the interstate sale of firearms and effectively rewrote a prior, post-Prohibition-era law banning machine guns or fully automatic weapons. The act passed in 1968 just months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, and five years after Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy with a single, bolt-action rifle he bought through an ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine.

But a group of hardline gun rights advocates resented what they saw as a sell-out of Americans’ Second Amendment rights. LaPierre began working as a paid lobbyist for the NRA in the late 1970s, just as the hardline advocates were consolidating control of the NRA board. For the next two decades, the NRA’s internal debate boiled down to one question: whether to try and repeal the ban on fully automatic weapons, or let it stand while allowing no other gun control regulations. (A chronology of U.S. laws concerning “Fully-Automatic Firearms” compiled in 1999 and still posted on the website of the NRA’s lobbying wing is sympathetic to a Georgia man who unsuccessfully tried to register a fully-automatic weapon in 1986.)

LaPierre became the NRA’s operations chief in 1991, right before a series of raids by U.S. agencies lead to many violent deaths over illegal guns. In 1992 federal charges related to the sale of two illegal, sawed-off shotguns eventually led to a federal raid in Ruby Ridge, Idaho resulting in the wounding of two men including the suspect, Randy Weaver, who was a white supremacist, and the killing of his wife, and their 14-year-old son along with an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms or ATF.

But it was another federal siege, this one over illegal, fully-automatic firearms, less than a year later that became nothing less than a call to arms for gun rights hardliners. In February 1993, federal ATF agents attempted to serve a search warrant to look for the illegal, fully automatic firearms at the compound of a small religious sect known as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. After a 50-day standoff, ATF agents launched an assault, and the ensuing firefight along with a fire of still unclear origins resulted in the deaths of at least 74 people including 25 children.

LaPierre soon wrote unambiguously in his first book published the following year: “The people have a right to take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government.”

The government crossed another line for even more gun rights advocates when Congress passed and President Clinton signed the assault weapons ban, prohibiting a number of high-capacity, semi-automatic weapons. Seven months later, on April 13, 1995, LaPierre signed a fund-raising letter to NRA members: “The semiauto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

But his timing was unfortunate for his cause. Six days later, on exactly the second anniversary of the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh, an NRA member, and an accomplice used a fertilizer bomb hidden in a truck to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people including 19 children under the age of six. Not unlike LaPierre in his letter, McVeigh in his terrorism was reminding people of the Waco tragedy, which for them both along with other hardline gun rights advocates still holds significance as a deplorable federal raid over fully automatic guns.

LaPierre was forced to apologize for his “jack-booted thugs” remark, after former President George H.W. Bush, a decades-long member of the NRA, resigned from the organization over his letter. But few NRA members followed suit. Instead the NRA has increased from over three million then to over four million members today.

Extremist groups including white supremacists have long operated in the NRA’s shadow. The National Alliance is a neo-Nazi party whose members have quietly handled out literature to try and attract recruits on the floor of NRA conventions. (I was handed one at the annual NRA convention in Phoenix in 1995 –two months after the Oklahoma City bombing– after I showed a man my New Jersey Firearms Purchaser Identification Card to demonstrate that I was a gun owner.) The late head of the National Alliance also wrote a novel, The Turner Diaries, about a coming race war and insurrection against a Jewish-dominated government; McVeigh used scenes in the novel as an explicit blueprint to make the bomb and choose his target in Oklahoma City.

LaPierre has become expert at handling the press. But there is little question that he holds an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment. “[T]here is no such thing as a free nation where police and military are allowed the force of arms but individual citizens are not,” he wrote in a 2003 book.

WOULD U.S. courts agree? In 2008 the Supreme Court made its first ruling on the Second Amendment in 69 years, affirming the right in the District of Columbia v. Heller of an individual to keep a handgun in his home for self-defense within the district, and then in 2010 affirming the same right throughout the United States.

Yet Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, still allowed for some limits on the right to bear arms including “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” Scalia went on to say he could also find “support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Exactly what kinds of weapons might meet that criteria, however, remain unclear. Justice Scalia in an interview in July on Fox News –after the Aurora movie theater shooting– made seemingly more ambivalent comments. Scalia said the Second Amendment only applies to arms that can be borne or carried, but added that whether it would allow for arms like “hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes” will have be decided in future court decisions.

Could government airplanes be legitimate targets?

Fear and hatred of government agencies, especially the ATF, helps explain why many gun rights advocates were so supportive of House oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s investigation last year into Operation Fast and Furious, which involved ATF agents planting up to 2,000 guns into the Mexican black market in an effort to trace them to drug cartels.

Besides absolutist ideology, gun manufacturers play an important role in the NRA’s uncompromising stance.

NRA revenues from fundraising –including donations from gun manufacturers—have grown twice as fast as income from members’ dues, according to Forbes. Over 50 firearms-related companies have given the NRA almost $15 million since 2005 –the same year that NRA lobbyists helped get a federal law passed that limits liability claims against gun makers. Two gun-making firms’ chief executive officers, Ronnie Barrett and Pete Brownell, sit on the NRA board.

Yet nearly half of the NRA’s total annual revenues still come from its (rarely-voting) dues-paying members.

Members of the Judiciary Committee should ask LaPierre whether NRA opposition to gun control is rooted in the view that the Second Amendment allows citizens to have the same “force of arms,” to borrow LaPierre’s phrase, as police and military forces.

And they should pin him down on automatic weapons: NRA leaders and other their supporters often try to change the conversation when questions like whether they believe fully automatic weapons should be legal.

Providing unfettered access to enough firepower, as LaPierre’s own writings suggest, to “take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government,” to quote him again, is simply incompatible with any integrated effort to curb today’s gun violence.

For LaPierre and most NRA directors including, apparently, Newtown’s Chairman Clark, the slaying of 27 people including 20 children in Newtown is an acceptable price to pay for upholding what they maintain is “freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea” embodied in the Second Amendment.

Today’s NRA leaders are not just “gun nuts.” They are ideologues wielding extraordinary power, and secrecy is part of their success. After all, who knew their board’s nominating chairwoman lives just a few miles from the now shuttered Sandy Hook school? Or that the executive of the firm that made the gun that killed the kids there had been appointed to the same shadowy committee?

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has been covering the NRA and related groups since the early 1990s, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Texas Observer and Mother Jones.

EXCLUSIVE: Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle

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EXCLUSIVE: Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle

EXCLUSIVE: Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle

The NRA’s shadowy leaders include the CEO who sells Bushmaster assault rifles and a top director who lives in Newtown.

—By 

| Wed Jan. 16, 2013 3:06 AM PST
NRA logo

The resurgent debate over gun control has put a spotlight on the hardline leaders of the National Rifle Association. In the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre delivered a full-throated rejection of gun control and called for more firearms in schools, while David Keene, the group’s president, predicted the failure of any new assault weapons ban introduced in Congress. The two NRA figureheads purported to speak for more than 4 million American gun owners, though the group’s membership may in fact be smaller.

But whatever its true size, today’s NRA, widely considered to be disproportionately influential in politics, Its 76 board directors and 10 executive officers keep a grip on power through elections in which ordinary grassroots members appear to have little say.The NRA leadership is known as much for its organizational secrecy as its absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment. That may be why, until now, little has been known about some of its most powerful insiders. They sit on the NRA board of directors’ nine-member Nominating Committee, which, despite ballots distributed annually to legions of NRA members, closely controls who can be elected to the NRA board. Mother Jones has uncovered key details about the current Nominating Committee*:

  • George K. Kollitides II, the chief executive of Freedom Group—which made theBushmaster military-style assault rifle used in the Newtown massacre—was appointed as a member of the current committee, despite his failed attempts to be elected to the NRA board.
  • The current head of the Nominating Committee, Patricia A. Clark, lives in Newtown, just a couple of miles from the school where 20 young children and six adults were massacred.
  • While longtime NRA members and election watchers have reported that the Nominating Committee consists entirely of elected board members, the organization’s bylaws allow for three members to be appointed from outside the NRA board—as three of its current members were.
  • Two additional outsiders appointed to the current Nominating Committee include Roger K. Bain, a licensed federal firearms dealer in Pennsylvania, and Riley B. Smith, a timber company executive in Alabama.

Long before Newtown, and even before the bloodbath at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, a survey conducted in May 2012 by Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that most gun owners, including current and former members of the NRA, favor tighter gun regulations such as universal criminal background checks. And according to an ABC/Washington Post pollpublished on Tuesday, 86 percent of gun-owning households support a law requiring background checks at gun shows to close the so-called “loophole.” So what motivates NRA leaders to remain so out of step with their constituency, flatly rejecting any discussion of legal reform?

One answer may be their ties to the $11.7 billion gun industry. Freedom Group’s Kollitides ran for the NRA board in 2009 but lost, despite an endorsement from gun manufacturer Remington. “His campaign didn’t sit well with some gun bloggers, who viewed him as an industry interloper,” according to a 2011 report in the New York Times.

George Kollitides

From George Kollitides’ 2009 campaign for the NRA board.

It remains unclear who among the NRA leadership tapped Kollitides, Bain, and Smith, to be on the current Nominating Committee.

“I was appointed,” Bain confirmed in a brief phone call. “I am not a board member,” he said, declining to say who appointed him. “This conversation is over.”

Calls to Kollitides and Smith seeking comment were not returned. The NRA declined to respond to multiple requests for comment regarding its board members and other organizational details. However, one NRA official, who declined to be named, said that Kollitides “has never been on the board, although he has run several times.”

But that need not stand in the way. “You’ve got a good friend you want to get more involved, and you nominate him,” a current long-serving NRA board member told Mother Jones.

According to this document obtained by Mother Jones, outsiders appointed to the current Nominating Committee include George K. Kollitides, Roger K. Bain, and Riley B. Smith.

Back in August 2011, the NRA Nominating Committee elected Clark, a board member since 1999, as its chair. Clark, a competitive sport shooter and an instructor in the Eddie Eagle GunSafe program heralded by LaPierre in his recent media blitz, is a longtime resident of Newtown. Her home is about a 10-minute drive by car from Sandy Hook Elementary School and about a 15-minute drive from the former home of Nancy Lanza, who was also murdered by her son on December 14 after he got possession of her semiautomatic assault rifle and other legally registered weapons.

Reached by phone on December 29 in nearby Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she works in the health care industry, Clark confirmed her NRA leadership role. When asked if she knew any of the victims or their families in Newtown, she replied, “This is a hard time for me. I am not really interested in giving an interview at this time.”

Unlike the NRA’s paid executive officers, who earn big money for their work, Clark’s directorship is unpaid. (LaPierre took home $960,000 from the NRA and related organizations in 2010; Kayne B. Robinson, the executive director of general operations, earned more than $1 million.)

Elections for the NRA board, which oversees the organization’s nearly 800 employees and more than $200 million in annual revenues, occur annually for 25 directors, who serve three-year terms. The vote typically involves less than 7 percent of NRA members, according to past NRA ballot results and pro-NRA bloggers. A low election turnout among members is not uncommon among nonprofit groups, but how a candidate gets his or her name on the ballot is key. According to an NRA supporter and self-proclaimed Second Amendment activist in Pennsylvania who blogs under the handle “Sebastian,” this occurs one of two ways: It requires a grassroots petition by members, which rarely gets a candidate on the ballot, or a candidate must be included on the official slate endorsed by the Nominating Committee.

“Read the bios in your ballot and you’ll see that almost all were nominated by the nominating committee,” complained “Pecos Bill” from Illinois last January in one pro-gun-rights forum. “Seems the NRA, fine organization that it is, is being run like a modern corporation and the ‘good ol’ boys’ are keeping themselves in power.”

In fact, 10 women currently serve on the board, but few people had access to that information until very recently, when the NRA posted a complete list on its website. (In the past, the NRA cloaked its board in secrecy; incomplete and outdated lists were published by outside groups using press clips and legally required NRA financial disclosures.) According to a search using Archive.org, the current board page was published sometime after December 6.

The Nominating Committee now led by Clark handpicked nearly all of the candidates on the 2012 ballot. As John Richardson, an NRA “Life Member” in North Carolina explained on his blog, No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money, in January 2012, “This year there are 31 candidates running for 25 positions. Of these 31, 29 were nominated by the Nominating Committee. The remaining two candidates were nominated by a petition of the membership which requires at least 250 signatures.” (One of those two nominated by petition was elected to the board last year.)

Other notable figures currently serving on the board include actor and firearms enthusiast Tom Selleck; anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist; Lt. Colonel Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame; right-wing rocker Ted Nugent, whose thinly veiled threats about Barack Obama’s reelection campaign prompted a Secret Service inquiry; and Marion Hammer, the former NRA president who helped mastermind the spread of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.

At a poignant news conference held in Newtown on Monday, parents of some of the slain first-graders announced Sandy Hook Promise, a new group and campaign to promote “common sense solutions” to America’s gun violence problem. It is unclear whether Patricia A. Clark attended that gathering in her local community. But she has shown a certain kind of interest in kids for decades. According to her board bio, she has “worked with Juniors for more than 30 years” as a firearms coach and instructor. As a line in her bio puts it, she is an “NRA Benefactor and Heritage Society member who believes that youngsters are the key to NRA’s future.”

*This refers to the Nominating Committee appointed by the NRA board in 2011 for the most recent board elections in 2012. This year’s Nominating Committee, whose members remain unclear, presumably will soon release its handpicked slate of candidates for NRA board elections in 2013.

 

Even Court-Approved Extraditions Have a Troubled, Bloody History in Guatemala

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Original article can be found here.

Guatemala courts have recently approved sending major drug traffickers to face criminal charges in the US, but legal delays or violence could still jeopardize the extraditions. InSight Crime examines the bloody history of extradition in Guatemala.

US counter-drug officials set a trap. It was 2005 and the top three officers in Guatemala’s new, US-trained anti-narcotics force were themselves wanted in the United States for drug trafficking. But US officials knew Guatemalan courts were unreliable. So they invited the three top cops to travel to Virginia for special training, and arrested them after they landed on US soil.

The ruse was part of a policy in the 2000s, said US officials. US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) special agents worked to lure Guatemalans wanted on US drug charges out of Guatemala to other nations including El Salvador and Mexico where they could be more easily apprehended and extradited to US courts to face trial.

But times have changed. In recent months, for the first time in decades, Guatemalan courts have approved extraditions of several alleged kingpins. The trend began in February when courts approved the extraditions of two men, one of whom was Juan Alberto Ortiz Lopez, alias “Juan Chamale” (pictured above), whom the DEA identifies as Guatemala’s top drug trafficker. In June a court approved the extradition of another major suspect, Horst Walther Overdick, alias “the Tiger,” who is accused of collaborating with the Mexican Zetas drug cartel.

These are big steps for Guatemala, a nation that has among the worst records in the hemisphere for either prosecuting or extraditing major drug suspects. The last time Guatemala extradited one of its own drug lords was nearly 20 years ago. And the complications faced by US agencies back then have continued to plague US efforts through six administrations led by four different American presidents.

The recent extradition rulings could finally threaten Guatemalan traffickers, nearly all of whom have long enjoyed impunity as long as they have remained within Guatemala. At least one suspect, an ex-president, is tied to a powerful military clique. Both US and UN officials fear the extraditions could still be jeopardized through either legal delays or targeted violence.

Back in 2007 Guatemala extradited two of its own citizens wanted on drug charges for the first time in more than a decade. But they were only mid-level smugglers who, along with a Colombian extradited from Guatemala a year later, hid at least five kilograms of heroin in a car driven from Guatemala to New York City.

Before then, the last time a Guatemalan was extradited on drug charges was back in the early 1990s. Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, alias “Archie,” was the mayor of the eastern town of Zacapa when he was arrested in 1990 with DEA help. A US embassy cable at the time described Vargas as a “major league hood.” The cable, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the George Washington University-based National Security Archive, added: “It is important to get Vargas, who is apparently both wealthy and inclined to violence, out of Guatemala quickly.”

But the town mayor’s extradition was anything but quick. One judge ruled the evidence was insufficient, even though it included a then record for Guatemala of 4,000 pounds of seized cocaine (exceeded two years later by 2.8 metric tons of cocaine found in a house rented to a Colombian by a retired Guatemalan Air Force captain). It took US State Department attorneys three more years filing in various Guatemalan courts to finally extradite the town mayor and two others by 1993.

The three suspects were convicted in a New York federal court of trafficking cocaine. Prosecutors told jurors that Vargas was receiving small planes loaded with drugs at his private ranch in Zacapa. But dozens of local farmers, in a signed petition to the DEA, told a slightly different story. Vargas and local military commanders began displacing small farmers from a nearby rural area, torturing three men, one month before Vargas’ DEA-assisted arrest. After his arrest, the same local military commanders displaced hundreds of families, and murdered at least nine more people including a mother and son, to build what the farmers in the petition claimed were clandestine runways for planes carrying drugs.

One of the same men named by the farmers, Byron Berganza, was finally arrested more than a decade laterin El Salvador in 2004. By then the owner of a trucking business based in Zacapa, Otto Herrera, was considered by US agencies to be one of Central America’s biggest drug traffickers. He arrested in Mexico the same year. (He later escaped and was captured again in Colombia in 2007.)

Back in 1990, in Guatemala, DEA special agents had another operation under surveillance. DEA later seized a half metric ton of cocaine inside a small plan near Tampa that had been tracked from Escuintla in western Guatemala. The alleged ringleader indicted with others in a Florida federal court was Army lieutenant Carlos Ochoa Ruiz, alias “Charlie.”

The case took even longer since he was a military officer. At one point, a military tribunal intervened to claim jurisdiction, ruling to dismiss all charges. But US attorneys fought to keep the case in Guatemalan civilian courts. It went all the way to the Constitutional Court, the nation’s top judicial body, led by Judge Epaminondas Gonzalez Dubon, who was well-respected for his integrity.

On March 23, 1994, the Constitutional Court led by Judge Gonzalez Dubon quietly ruled in a closed session four-to-three to extradite Lt. Col. Ochoa. Nine days later, on April 1, gunmen shot and killed the chief justice in front of his surviving wife and child. On April 12, the same Constitutional Court with a new chief justice again quietly ruled seven-to-one not to extradite Ochoa. It took the State Department, prompted by the press, no less than four years to finally admit the facts in a few lines buried in a thick report to Congress.

Over the years since, several Guatemalans were extradited to the United States to face trial for individual crimes like rape that had no international connection. But no Guatemalans were extradited on any drug charges for 14 years.

The DEA began building another big case in 2003. Guatemalan agents assisted by US officials seized over$14 million in local currency from a house in Guatemala City leading to major suspects. One was Elio Lorenzano, the youngest son of a reputed organized crime family, who was arrested in Zacapa in November 2011. His extradition was among those recently approved. His family was allegedly working for the regional kingpin Herrera.

Today more than nine Guatemalan suspects wanted in the United States have US extradition cases pending against them in Guatemala. But most of their defense lawyers have wielded a seemingly interminable writ of “amparo” claiming that their clients’ constitutional rights are being somehow violated.

One suspect awaiting extradition is former President Alfonso Portillo who faces US money-laundering charges. He has ties to a powerful Guatemalan group of retired Army intelligence officers known as “The Brotherhood” or “La Cofradia.” At first, after his New York indictment was announced in January 2010, US officials also hoped to secure his extradition quickly.

“[Ex-]President Portillo has already demonstrated his ability to manipulate Guatemala’s courts, so we think his quick extradition to face money laundering charges in the US makes good sense,” reads one US embassy cable obtained through irregular channels by WikiLeaks. Guatemala’s Constitutional Court approved his extradition in August 2011. Yet ongoing legal proceedings in Guatemala continue to delay his transfer.

Violence remains another concern. “The powerful group of former military officers known as ‘La Cofradia’ will certainly feel threatened by Portillo’s arrest,” reads another US cable obtained by WikiLeaks. “We agree with [UN officials] that they might violently retaliate against a high-profile target or targets, such as the Guatemalan prosecutor handling the case (Eunice Mendizabal), or [UN] staff.”

Francisco Dall’Anese is the director of a UN anti-impunity commission in Guatemala. “Extradition orders are processed here like they were in the 19th century,” he said in June.

In Oakland, Progress in Bailey Murder Prosecution

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ blog.

The murderers of journalists around the globe presume they won’t get caught. Unfortunately, they’re often right: Only one case in 10 results in any convictions; just one in 20 results in convictions of those who ordered the murder. For more than a year it seemed like the August 2007 slaying of U.S. journalist Chauncey Bailey might not result in the prosecution of all those involved, including the suspected mastermind. Now, however, due largely to the persistence of Bailey’s Bay Area colleagues, an indictment of suspects, including the alleged mastermind, may come soon.

The expected indictments are based in part on the ongoing grand jury testimony by one man who, for the past 20 months has been the only suspect charged with the murder. His statements to authorities have been reported by The San Francisco Chronicle as well as a group of journalists known as the Chauncey Bailey Project that was formed in the wake of the murder. Last week both outlets also reported that Oakland, California police authorities, including the lead detective on the case and two of his superiors, have come under administrative investigation.

The killers of journalists in many less developed nations often work in collusion with corrupt government officials, CPJ research has long shown. For more than a year irregularities in the Oakland police investigation into the murder of one of the Bay area’s most respected community journalists rivaled the botched or compromised murder investigations in nations from Mexico to Mozambique.

Take Sgt. Derwin Longmire, the homicide detective in the Bailey murder case. The Oakland Police Department assigned him to lead the investigation, even though his superiors knew the detective was closely associated with a man then suspected of multiple crimes, Yusuf Bey IV, and whom a grand jury is now considering indicting on charges of ordering the journalist’s murder.

“It’s unusual but not unethical,” then-Assistant Chief Howard Jordan told Anderson Cooper of CBS News’ “60 Minutes” in February 2008. In an interview today with CPJ, Jordan said he has reconsidered his position.

“The allegations as to Sgt. Longmire were not [then] available,” now-Acting Chief Jordan told CPJ. “I felt he was the best officer for the job,” he added. “I have changed my position on that.”

Sgt. Longmire and two of his superior officers, Lt. Ersie Joyner, the former head of the homicide unit, and Deputy Chief Jeff Loman are each under administrative investigation, Jordan told CPJ. All three officers face possible disciplinary action for their handling or supervision of the Bailey murder case.

Grand jury indictments are expected soon, and they may include Bey. In testimony before the grand jury this week, gunman Devaughndre Broussard said he committed the killing at the behest of Bey, his boss at an Oakland establishment called “Your Black Muslim Bakery,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“Broussard,” Jordan told CPJ, “is affirming the things that we’ve suspected all along.”

Then why did it take more than 20 months to finally prepare a case against him? “We’ve said that Mr. Bey is a suspect,” Jordan said. “But we didn’t have enough information then to charge Mr. Bey.”

Jordan declined comment on other irregularities in the Oakland police investigation, many of which were brought to light by journalists reporting for the Chauncey Bailey Project.

Broussard was part of the kitchen crew of “Your Black Muslim Bakery,” an Oakland establishment that Bey, 23, inherited from his late father. The bakery’s ownership and staff have long been linked through felony convictions and press reports to crimes including extortion, fraud, car theft, sexual abuse of minors, assault, and murder. Bey was already wanted on various felony charges and was under police surveillance at the time of Bailey’s murder. Bailey was investigating the finances of the bakery at the time of his death.

This week, Broussard told the grand jury that Bey ordered him to take sole responsibility for the Bailey murder, according to Broussard’s attorney, La Rue Grim, who was quoted in the Chronicle. Broussard had previously confessed to the crime but said he had acted alone. Now Broussard is negotiating a plea agreement for his different roles in murdering the journalist and two other men, the Chauncey Bailey Project reported. The grand jury is weighing whether to indict Bey along with another young man associated with the bakery, Antoine Mackey, in Bailey’s murder. Bey’s attorney, Anne Beles, told the Chronicle that Bey had nothing to do with the murder. Mackey has yet to respond to news reports about his alleged involvement.

Chauncey Bailey had just been promoted to editor of the Post Newspaper Group, a consortium of African-American-owned weekly newspapers focusing on the Bay area’s black communities when he was shot dead one morning on the way to his office. Immediately after, police raided the bakery and arrested Bey and other suspects on unrelated charges of kidnapping and assault, including the torture of women. But police charged only Broussard in Bailey’s murder.

Sgt. Longmire then did something that, on the face of it, seems highly irregular. The homicide detective put the murder suspect, Broussard, in a closed interrogation room with his former boss, Bey, then incarcerated on other charges. Sgt. Longmire allowed the two suspects to speak to each other alone without recording their conversation.

The police action seems even odder in the face of other evidence uncovered by Bailey’s colleagues. The Chauncey Bailey Project obtained Bey’s cell phone records, reporting that they show that Bey made a series of calls to his bakery associates and others within minutes of Bailey’s murder. The project also reported that other police detectives investigating crimes prior to Bailey’s murder had placed a tracking device on Bey’s car, and that the device placed the car outside Bailey’s apartment building the night before his murder.

For more than a year, however, Oakland police charged only Broussard with the crime, suggesting that he murdered Bailey on his own. Only in response to a series of investigative reports by the Chauncey Bailey Project did the police finally admit, in November 2008, that they had suspected Bey of being involved in the murder “within the first 24 hours of our investigation.”

The evidence produced by the project and other Bay-area news outlets included a video of Bey speaking with other suspects associated with the bakery in a different interrogation room in a nearby police department. The video was recorded by the San Leandro Police Department just four days after Bailey’s murder. On it, Bey says he put the gun used to kill Bailey in his closet after the shooting. He mocks the fatal blast to the journalist’s head. He boasts that Longmire was protecting him from being charged, and that together he and Longmire decided to blame Broussard alone for the murder. Bey later said in an interview, according to the project, that he made up stories to mislead police in the interrogation room conversation captured on video.

Last November, in response to reporting by the project, both the city of Oakland and the state of California opened separate oversight investigations into the Oakland Police Department’s murder investigation. Longmire was also removed from the case and reassigned to patrol duty, according to recent news reports. The head of the homicide unit, Lt. Ersie Joyner, was also removed from the unit and put on patrol duty.

Acting Chief Jordan told CPJ that Lt. Joyner’s transfer from the homicide unit was “part of an overall transfer of lieutenants” within the department and that it had nothing to do with the Bailey murder investigation.

Longmire was put on paid leave last week while he is under administrative investigation, Jordan said. Deputy Chief Loman has been on paid leave since February on unrelated charges of sexual harassment.