Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Recounting the negotiators' shocking final hours before the Elian Gonzalez raid.
May 4, 2000 | To hear the huffers and puffers on Capitol Hill and TV news, you would think that Janet Reno's raid on the Gonzalez home to reunite Elian with his father was the biggest betrayal since Benedict Arnold. And all those agitated Miami negotiators, piling up outrage upon outrage, made it seem as if Reno had left them in the dark while they were just minutes away from brokering a rosy diplomatic ending.
The congressional Republicans bellowed their rage and cited the shabbily treated negotiators as one of the reasons for calling hearings about the raid. Not since Pearl Harbor had such an attack been perpetrated, they assured the world. The hearings were aborted when it finally dawned on them that they had learned nothing from the impeachment fiasco.
And now, as the true story of the so-called negotiations that took place in the final hours leading up to the raid emerges, it's time to take a closer look and ask the important question: Which was the gang that couldn't shoot straight?
Aaron Podhurst, the chief negotiator for the Miami family, went out to dinner at a crucial point in the exchange -- 10:58 p.m. -- just as Janet Reno was faxing a tough ultimatum that needed to be discussed, pronto.
It must have been the longest dinner since the Last Supper. Podhurst didn't bother to look at the fax, which sat in his machine in his exercise room, until 2:59 a.m. What was he doing for four hours besides eating? Push-ups? When the lawyer finally looked at the page, he mistook it for another that Reno had sent at 2:59 a.m., thinking it was merely a duplicate. By the time Podhurst finally got around to calling Reno, she told him the family had only an hour to meet her offer.
The naiveti of Podhurst, University of Miami president Edward Foote and other civic leaders who came in at the last minute to help the family, was most apparent the day before the raid. At 4:52 p.m. that Friday, the negotiators faxed the Justice Department a six-point face-saving proposal for the Miami relatives, which included a provision for reuniting the Cuban and Miami arms of the Gonzalez family in one cozy hideaway. You can almost picture it: Elian getting yanked apart from his father by Marisleysis, who often gets the vapors, and Lazaro, who has a history of trouble with the bottle. Juan Miguel would, presumably, just sit quietly drinking tea in the kitchen.
Problem is, there was absolutely no agreement for transferring custody of Elian to his father. And again they were dictating demands that a psychiatrist and a spiritual advisor "help decide what is in the best interest of the child." The negotiators, it seemed, were the only people on the planet who had never heard Lazaro's mantra, "They will have to rip Elian from my arms."
When Reno didn't answer promptly, they took it as a good omen, but Reno never wavered in her demand that Elian be immediately turned over to his father. Still, the negotiators didn't seem to get it. Did they actually think they were making progress when they were cutting deals worse than anything the Gonzalez crew had promised to obey and then backed down from before? As one Justice Department official reportedly said, "What the hell is this?"
As for lawyers crossing t's and dotting i's, their vague wording, "We understand that you have transferred temporary custody of Elian to his father," was supposed to mean the Miami family agreed to this. I can just see a lawyer for the family tearing this up and saying, "Gotcha." It would be as binding as one party in a divorce saying, "I understand that you are temporarily taking custody of the Lexus."
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