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TORTURE SUSPECTS FIND U.S. HAVEN Scores accused of atrocities live in S. Florida BY ALFONSO CHARDY AND ELISABETH DONOVAN Though more than 100 foreign nationals accused of human rights atrocities have recently been arrested or investigated in the United States, at least 100 others are still quietly living in this country, many with the tacit approval of the U.S. government, The Herald has found. Some arrived legally. Some were covertly assisted by U.S. intelligence officials. Others carried tourist visas issued by unwitting American consuls. Eventually, most of these alleged torturers and murderers received political asylum, temporary or permanent residence, even U.S. citizenship, which has allowed them to stay in this country despite the allegations against them. They are, according to a Herald review of their cases, men such as Alvaro Rafael Saravia Marino, who arrived in Miami in 1985 on a tourist visa issued by the U.S. Embassy -- even though just five years earlier authorities in El Salvador had identified him as a key suspect in the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980. Romero was seen as a champion of the poor and oppressed. Saravia Marino has since moved to California. ``It is outrageous that known murderers and torturers are allowed to come to the United States and be shielded from justice here,'' said Reed Brody, advocacy director for the prominent human rights organization Human Rights Watch in New York. At least 80 of these foreign nationals are believed to be living in South Florida alone, according to The Herald's review. ``It's like rubbing salt in the wounds of real refugees and victims to have their tormentors openly walking around in their communities here in the United States,'' Brody said. Among others whose cases have been newly documented: Juan Evangelista López Grijalba, who came to this country with clearance from a U.S. embassy -- two years after officials in Honduras linked him to an elite CIA-trained army intelligence unit blamed for the abductions and murders of 184 leftists in the 1980s.Justice Department sources believe he is living in Miami-Dade County. Emmanuel ``Toto'' Constant, who moved to New York in December 1994, one year after creating -- allegedly while an agent for the United States on the CIA payroll -- a paramilitary organization implicated in the murders of 3,000 pro-democracy activists following the 1991 ouster of U.S.-backed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Constant, too, came on an embassy-issued visa. Miami resident Eriberto Mederos, a former Havana Psychiatric Hospital orderly now living in Allapattah. Mederos became an American citizen in 1993 -- two years after his involvement in the alleged electroshock torture of Cuban dissidents was exposed in a book published in the United States. The U.S. attorney's office in Miami is now investigating whether to seek a grand jury indictment to revoke his U.S. citizenship. ``The first line of defense is inspection at the port of entry,'' said James D. Goldman, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's assistant district director of the investigations division in Miami. ``But often we don't know about allegations against somebody. Besides, a publicly known allegation may not be sufficient. There has to be legal evidence that rises to the level of probable cause before we can act. ''Immigration officials and human rights activists began looking for alleged abusers in the United States only after Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón pioneered the concept of prosecuting suspected foreign human rights violators when he sought the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998. Since current U.S. immigration laws do not require suspected human rights violators to be included on border watch lists of known terrorists or criminals, such people as Mederos, Constant, López Grijalba and Saravia Marino have slipped into the United States. But because of The Herald's review, Justice Department sources said agents are now looking for López Grijalba and have started a review of Saravia Marino's file. Constant, however, may be immune for now because of a confidential deal his attorneys worked out with the Justice Department in the 1990s to prevent his deportation, the sources said. MURDER IN EL SALVADOR Suspect in archbishop's death remains free in U.S. In the case of Saravia Marino, evidence linking him to the Romero assassination emerged less than two months after the archbishop was killed while celebrating Mass on March 24, 1980, at the chapel of the Hospital of the Divine Providence in San Salvador. During a May 7, 1980, raid on a Salvadoran ranch where several military officers were detained for allegedly plotting a coup, soldiers discovered a datebook belonging to Saravia Marino, a former Salvadoran army captain. Notes in the datebook referred to purchases and deliveries of arms and ammunition, some of which were the type supposedly used in the assassination. Two years later, The Herald reported that evidence in the datebook led senior Salvadoran officials to conclude that Saravia Marino and several associates, including the late Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, ``were responsible for the killing of Romero.'' And yet, three years later, on Oct. 5, 1985, Saravia Marino arrived in Miami -- bearing a U.S. tourist visa. U.S. diplomats assigned to El Salvador at the time said they do not remember the visa request. The U.S. ambassador then, Thomas Pickering, denied through an aide that he approved or knew about the visa and pointed to embassy consular office staffers as having had the authority to issue the visa. Robert Chevez, the U.S. consul general at the time, said he did not remember the case because it was probably one of many ``routine requests.'' ``Let me tell you how it works,'' said Chevez, now retired. ``Generally, you have four or five consular officers who get thousands of visa requests each day. And what we look for in applicants in whether they qualify is that they not intend to stay in the United States.'' But Saravia Marino stayed. Since he was not on a watch list, consular officers had no legal basis to deny the visa or suspect he would use it to immigrate illegally to the United States. He settled with his family in a one-story house on Southwest 137th Court. One year later, the Salvadoran government filed papers in U.S. District Court in Miami to have Saravia Marino extradited to stand trial in the Romero assassination. According to court records, Amado Antonio Garay, the man who drove the assassin on the day of the murder, claimed it was Saravia Marino who ordered him to drive with an unknown gunman to the hospital where Romero was saying Mass. Garay said he later drove the assassin back to Saravia Marino, to whom the gunman said: ``Mission accomplished.'' U.S. federal agents arrested Saravia Marino in Miami on Nov. 23, 1987. Less than a year later, the Salvadoran Supreme Court -- because of inconsistencies in Garay's testimony -- threw out the case. And Saravia Marino, who has always denied any connection to the murder, was free. He has since received temporary work and residence permits under an INS program for Central American war refugees, even though further evidence emerged against him in 1993 when a United Nations-sponsored report on civil war atrocities specifically named Saravia Marino as a conspirator in the Romero assassination. INS DECLINES TO SPEAK INS officials declined to discuss the Saravia Marino case, citing privacy laws, and would not say how he got those permits. Saravia Marino's relatives, who still live in the Southwest Miami-Dade house, said they haven't contacted him since he moved to California. At his home in Modesto, a woman who answered the telephone said Saravia Marino would not speak to The Herald. While the INS has always deported foreign nationals wanted for crimes, only in the last year has it begun systematically to track down suspected human rights abusers, said William D. West, INS chief of special investigations in Miami. Since then, about 100 suspected human rights abusers nationwide have been detained or investigated for deportation, INS officials said in Washington. At least 29 of those suspects have been detained in Florida since last year. They include two prominent former members of the military regime that ousted Aristide. Richard Krieger, head of the Boynton Beach-based human rights organization International Educational Missions, has been a prime force behind efforts to rid the United States of suspected human rights abusers. Until Krieger came along and the INS started its ``persecutor'' program, human rights suspects in the United States remained largely undetected. HONDURAN DEATH SQUAD An ex-military officer implicated in murders is sought in S. Florida Among the suspects on Krieger's list is López Grijalba, once a senior intelligence officer in the Honduran army. A student at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Panama in 1963 and 1975, López Grijalba went on to become a key contact for U.S. military officers assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa. López Grijalba is believed to be one of the principal founders and leaders of Battalion 3-16, a military unit allegedly responsible for the abduction and murder of 184 leftist dissidents in the 1980s. In December 1993, Leo Valladares Lanza -- Honduras' national commissioner for the protection of human rights -- issued a report, The Facts Speak for Themselves, that implicated many 3-16 officers, including López Grijalba, in those human rights atrocities. Since then, prosecutors in Honduras have filed charges against López Grijalba and other former officers in connection with human rights cases that remain open. INS agents are looking for López Grijalba partly as a result of these charges. ARRIVAL IN U.S. López Grijalba landed in Miami on Feb. 23, 1995, bearing a tourist visa issued by the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa. Then-U.S. Ambassador William Pryce and Consul General Fernando Sánchez both denied knowledge of López Grijalba's visa request. ``What we look for in a visitor's-visa applicant is whether he's going to come back to his country or intends to stay illegally in the United States,'' said Sánchez, consul general in Honduras in 1995 -- the year López Grijalba arrived in the United States. López Grijalba repeatedly entered and left the United States on his multiple-entry visa between 1995 and 1998. His last entry was Oct. 8, 1998, in New Orleans, according to INS records. ATTAINING PROTECTION After entry on tourist visa, suspect overstays, gains status Eventually, INS sources said, López Grijalba overstayed his visa. But his stay was legalized when the INS granted him temporary protected status as a result of Hurricane Mitch's devastation of Honduras in 1998. INS sources say they were not aware of López Grijalba's background at the time of his application for temporary protected status. Under the program, the INS extends temporary work and residency authorizations to nationals of countries in distress. The current program is about to expire and the deadline to reapply for a one-year extension ends Aug. 6. It's unclear whether López Grijalba has reapplied. SEARCH FOR HOME Public records show López Grijalba living in a gated community along Fontainbleau Boulevard in West Miami-Dade. But López Grijalba could not be reached, and people living at that address say he doesn't live there. In many of the cases examined by The Herald, the suspects arrived with tourist visas issued by U.S. consular officers who either did not know -- or care -- about the background of the persons applying for the visas. But some former senior U.S. officials believe that in other cases, some alleged abusers may have entered the United States with the covert assistance of American military and intelligence officials. The reason: Some of these former foreign officials were agents or sources for U.S. intelligence and military agencies -- allies who needed to be protected from exposure in their home countries. ``The heart of the problem is the pattern of recruiting assets by intelligence agencies among military and other components of what were in many countries members of the repressive state apparatus,'' said Richard Nuccio, a former Clinton administration official who specialized in Latin American affairs. One such agent was Constant, who began his relationship with the the CIA in Haiti in 1991 shortly after the agency discovered he was a close friend of Gen. Raoul Cedras, the man who led the coup that ousted Aristide. According to Constant, who spoke at length to CBS's 60 Minutes in 1995, the CIA paid him about $700 a month. While on the payroll, Constant said, he created the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, a paramilitary organization known as FRAPH. Founded to help the Haitian military keep Aristide from returning to Haiti, FRAPH eventually came to be synonymous with terror and death. In later years, Haitian authorities linked FRAPH to the murders of at least 3,000 pro-Aristide militants in Haiti. President Clinton ordered U.S. forces to occupy Haiti beginning Sept. 19, 1994 -- the first step in returning Aristide to office. Three months after the arrival of U.S. forces, the Haitian Ministry of Justice subpoenaed Constant to answer allegations about FRAPH's role in atrocities. When Constant refused to comply, the ministry ordered his arrest. Constant went into hiding and evaded arrest by fleeing the country -- despite the heavy presence of U.S. soldiers. HEADING TO AMERICA On Dec. 24, 1994, Constant landed in Puerto Rico carrying a U.S. tourist visa. The U.S. ambassador to Haiti at the time, William L. Swing, did not respond to a detailed question on the issue left by The Herald with a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Swing is now ambassador. Constant also could not be reached for comment. From San Juan, Constant caught a plane to New York. His presence in New York was detected in February 1995 and the State Department revoked his visa. Three months later, on May 11, 1995, INS agents arrested Constant in Queens. But in a move that outraged the Haitian exile community, the INS freed Constant under an agreement with the Justice Department that remains confidential. A Haitian court has since convicted Constant of murder and sentenced him to life in prison -- in absentia. Constant is back living in Queens. |
