friendsoflatinamerica

Review the Convictions of the "Cuban Five"

OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT: WORLDWIDE URGING THE U.S. SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW THE CONVICTIONS OF THE "CUBAN FIVE" For Immediate Release March 6, 2009 Contact: Thomas C. Goldstein, Esq. In a previously unheard of twelve separate briefs, array of supporters worldwide - including ten Nobel Prize winners who have championed human rights (including East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta andbIrish peacemaker MA-iread Corrigan Maguire); the Mexican Senate; and Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland - today filed amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs imploring the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Miami convictions of five Cuban government agents, the so-called "Cuban Five." Those participants in the briefs were joined by hundreds of parliamentarians from the European Parliament and other parliaments around the world, including two former Presidents and three current Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament, as well as numerous U.S. and foreign bar associations and human rights organizations. This is the largest number of amicus briefs ever to have urged Supreme Court to review a criminal conviction. This extraordinary support for the Cuban Five's case arises from widespread concern in the United States and around the world that their trial was conducted in an atmosphere tainted by prejudice against agents of the Cuban government and fear of retaliation, which amici say prevented the jury from fairly evaluating the charges against the Five. Among others, the United Nations Human Rights Commission has condemned the Miami trial of the Cuban agents, marking the first and only time in history that that body has condemned a U.S. judicial proceeding. Citing a "climate of bias and prejudice" in Miami, the Commission's Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions concluded that the "trial did not take place in the climate of objectivity and impartiality that is required to conform to the standards of a fair trial." The amicus briefs filed today ask the Supreme Court to review the fairness of trying the Cuban agents to a Miami jury. "The trial and conviction of the Cuban 5 is a national embarrassment," explained Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the Nobelists in filing their amicus brief. "Our clients, ten Nobel Prize winners, acclaimed for their efforts to advance human rights, believe the trial was an international embarrassment as well. This was a trial that should have never occurred in Miami. There was no way a jury from that Miami, with is history of violence and intimidation against the Cuban government, could have reached a verdict free from retaliation by the anti-Castro community." Several of the amicus briefs filed by U.S. organizations also ask the Supreme Court to review the prosecution's striking African-Americans from the jury. The prosecutor used seven of nine "peremptory challenges" (where no explanation need be given to strike a juror) to strike black jurors. The Court of Appeals ruled that no inquiry need be made into the prosecutor's motives because three other black jurors, a minority on the 12-person jury, were seated. Amici maintain that this is allows prosecutors to mask their manipulation of the racial make-up of a jury. The U.S. government's brief in opposition is presently due April 6. The Court is likely to decide whether to grant review before its summer recess in June. The amicus briefs, along with a complete list of the amici, will be posted on SCOTUSblog (www.scotusblog.com) as electronic copies become available today. Additional background on the case: The United States indicted the five Cubans in Miami in 1998. The indictment focused on the charge that they were unregistered Cuban agents and had infiltrated various anti-Castro organizations in South Florida. One of the Five, Gerardo Hernandez, was also charged with conspiracy to commit murder for providing information to Havana on flights in which the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue would routinely invade Cuba airspace. On February 24, 1996, two BTTR planes were destroyed after both Cuban and American officials had repeatedly warned the Miami-based group to cease its illegal incursions into Cuban territory. Cuba maintains that it shot the planes down in its territory; the U.S. has maintained that the shootdown occurred a few miles into international airspace, after the planes entered and exited Cuban airspace. The Cuban Five requested that the trial judge move the trial out of Miami, which is home to a massive Cuban-American exile community that, beyond its ordinary hostility towards the Castro regime, had been whipped into a frenzy of anti-Castro sentiment by the Elian Gonzales debacle that took place just as the Cuban Five's trial got underway. Judge Lenard refused that request to move the trial to a new venue some thirty miles away, and a Miami jury convicted Hernandez and the others of all charges. Judge Lenard imposed the maximum available sentences on the Five, including life imprisonment for Hernandez. On appeal, a three-judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the convictions and ordered a new trial because, the court held, a "perfect storm" of community prejudice and pre- trial publicity, exacerbated by the federal prosecutor's inflammatory statements to the jury, deprived Hernandez and the other Cubans of a fair trial. The entire Court of Appeals, however, vacated the panel's decision, finding no error in the government trying the case to a Miami jury. It returned the case to a panel to evaluate the remaining issues in the appeal. In another key ruling, two of the three judges on the panel refused to reverse the Miami jury's conviction of Hernandez. Judge Kravitch dissented, finding that there was no evidence at all that Hernandez knew there would be a shootdown, let alone an unlawful shootdown in international airspace.

El Salvador's Left Wins Historic Election

By Mark Weisbrot

Center for Economic and Policy Research The
Guardian (UK) March 18, 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica2009/mar18/el-salvador-election

Last Sunday's election in El Salvador, in which the leftist FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation) won the presidency, didn't get a lot of attention in the
international press. It's a relatively small country (7 million people on land the size of Massachusetts) and fairly poor (per capita income about half the regional average). And left governments have become the norm in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela have all elected left governments over the last decade. South America is now more independent of the United States than Europe is.

But the FMLN's victory in El Salvador has a special significance for this hemisphere.

Central America and the Caribbean have long been the United States' "back yard" more than anywhere else. The people of the region have paid a terrible price - in blood, poverty,and underdevelopment - for their geographical and political proximity to the United States. The list of U.S. interventions in the area would take the rest of this column,stretching from the 19th century (Cuba, in 1898) to the 21st, with the overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (for the second time) in 2004.

Those of us who can remember the 1980s can see President Ronald Reagan on television warning that "El Salvador is closer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts" as he sent
guns and money to the Salvadoran military and its affiliated death squads. Their tens of thousands of targets - for torture, terror, and murder - were overwhelmingly civilians,including Catholic priests, nuns, and the heroic Oscar Romero.  It seems ridiculous now that Reagan could have convinced the U.S. Congress that the people who won Sunday's election were not only a threat to our national security, but one that justified horrific atrocities. But he did. At the same time millions of Americans - including many church-based activists - joined a movement to stop U.S. support for the
terror, as well as what the United Nations later called genocide in Guatemala, and the U.S.-backed insurgency in Nicaragua (which was also a war against civilians).

Now we have come full circle. In 2007, Guatemalans elected a social democratic president for the first time since 1954, when the CIA intervened to overthrow the government. Last September, President Zelaya of Honduras - which served as a
U.S. base for U.S. military and paramilitary operations in the 1980s -- joined with Bolivia's Evo Morales and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez when they expelled their U.S.
ambassadors: Zelaya defended their actions and postponed the accreditation of the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, saying that "the world powers must treat us fairly and with respect." In 2006 Nicaraguans elected Daniel Ortega of the Sandinistas, the same president that Washington had spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to topple in the 1980s.

El Salvador's election was not only another step toward regional independence but a triumph of hope against fear, much as in the U.S. presidential election of 2008. The ruling ARENA party, which was founded by right-wing death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, made fear their brand: fear of another civil war; fear of bad relations with the United States; fear of a "communist dictatorship." Almost comically, they tried to make the election into a referendum on Hugo Chávez. (Venezuela kept its distance from the election, with no endorsements or statements other than its desire to have good relations with whomever won).

ARENA was joined by Republican Members of Congress from the United States, who tried to promote the idea that Salvadorans - about a quarter of whom live in the U.S. - would face extra-ordinary problems with immigration and sending remittances home if the FMLN won. Although these threats were completely without merit, the right's control over the media made them real for many Salvadorans. In the 2004 election the Bush administration joined this effort to intimidate Salvadoran voters, and it helped the right win.

The right's control over the media, its abuse of government in the elections, and its vast funding advantage (there are no restrictions on foreign funding) led José Antonio de Gabriel, the deputy chief of the European Union's observer mission to comment on "the absence of a level playing field." It's amazing that the FMLN was still able to win, and testimony to the high level of discipline, organization, and self- sacrifice that comes from having a leadership that has survived war and hell on earth.

This time around, the Obama administration, after receiving thousands of phone calls - thanks to the solidarity movement that stems from the 1980s -- issued a statement of neutrality on the Friday before the election. The administration appears divided on El Salvador as with the rest of Latin America's left; at least one of Obama's ighest-level advisors on Latin America favored the right-wing ruling party. But the statement of neutrality was a clear break from the Bush administration.

El Salvador's new president Mauricio Funes, a popular former TV journalist, will face many challenges, especially on the economic front. The country exports 10 percent of its GDP to the United States, and receives another 18 percent in remittances from Salvadorans living there. Along with sizeable private investment flows, this makes El Salvador very vulnerable to the deep U.S. recession. El Salvador has also adopted the U.S. dollar as its national currency. This means that it cannot use exchange rate policy and is severely limited in monetary policy to counteract the recession. On
top of this, it has recently signed an agreement with the IMF that commits the government to not pursuing a fiscal stimulus for this year. And the FMLN will not have a majority in the Congress.

But the majority of Salvadorans, who are poor or near- poor,decided that the left would be more likely than the right to look out for them in hard times. That's a reasonable
conclusion, and one that is shared by most of the hemisphere.

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. (www.cepr.net).