The Elian grab
A turbulent Good Friday gives way to a dramatic and surgical
invasion of the Gonzalez home--and a long-awaited reunion
between Elian and his dad
April 24, 2000
Web posted at: 2:31 p.m. EDT (1831 GMT)
Elian was having trouble sleeping. He kept climbing out of his
little race-car bed and going into the living room, where his
great-uncle Lazaro lay on the white leather couch. The boy had
been watching his relatives fight over him all this time; he had
seen the news reports. It had been another long day. He snuggled
next to Lazaro, who stroked the boy's hair. "I'm afraid. Are they
coming for me?" Elian asked again and again. Lazaro tried to
comfort him, explaining in a calm voice that everything would be
O.K. "Relax," Lazaro said in Spanish. "Relax, Eliancito."
Donato Dalrymple was dozing on another couch nearby, still
dressed in his jeans and polo shirt. One of the fishermen who
rescued Elian on Thanksgiving Day, the former missionary had
practically moved into the Gonzalez house these past few days,
convinced that he had a calling to protect this kid, no matter
what. When he heard the pounding and the screaming, he thought it
was a dream.
As Dalrymple tells it, when the Immigration and Naturalization
Service agents stormed into the house just after 5 a.m., he
grabbed Elian and fled to a bedroom, locking the door and then
trying to duck into a closet. But the closet was crammed too full
of clothes, and they could not close the folding doors. "Help
me!" Elian cried. "Help me!"
The INS agents, armed with 9-mm MP5 submachine guns, looked
first for Elian's cousin Marisleysis, assuming she would be the
one to lead them to Elian. "Where the f------- is the damn boy?"
Marisleysis says they shouted at her. She begged them to hold
off, she says. "I will give you the boy; just put the guns
down!" As they raced through the rest of the house, the agents
knocked over a statue of the Virgin Mary and a huge picture of
the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the living room. Finally, they
kicked their way into the bedroom, breaking the door in half.
They found Dalrymple and Elian clinging to each other. "No, no
no!" Elian screamed. They gave him to Betty Mills, an eight-year
INS veteran who spoke to Elian in Spanish as she covered him with
a blanket and raced out to a waiting white minivan. As the pepper
spray wafted outside the house, bystanders could hear the agents
shouting the code meaning that they had Elian in their
possession: "Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!" Mills told Elian that it was
O.K., that he was going to see his "papa" and take his first ever
airplane ride--not, she kept promising, a boat back to Cuba, the
stuff of his worst nightmares.
Lazaro Gonzalez ran into the front yard and collapsed. Dalrymple
screamed, "Bastards!" as he, too, ran to the front yard and
hurled plastic milk crates at the agents. "It was a horror show,"
he says. As the motorcade drove off, agent Jim Goldman called INS
headquarters to report that Elian was scared and shaken, but
safe. Goldman said he was stroking Elian's back, while Mills told
him of his coming reunion with Papa. "This is one tough little
kid," Goldman marveled. "I was shaking. He was not."
But Elian was crying again as the U.S. Marshals plane took off
from Homestead Air Force Base. Hoping to ease his fear, INS
officials handed Elian a toy plane and explained that they were
flying to Washington; agents showed him a map of the plane's
route, then gave him a watch and showed him how much time would
pass before he would see his father. They raised the window
shades and showed him the dawn sky. "He became completely
enthralled in the pretty colors," said an INS official. Elian
spent most of the flight sitting in Mills' lap; for a while, he
even slept.
When the plane landed in Washington, Juan Miguel Gonzalez left
his entourage and climbed aboard to be alone with his son. Five
minutes later and teary eyed, he came down the plane steps with
Elian in his arms, the boy's legs wrapped tight around his waist,
and headed into a residence at Andrews Air Force Base. Later Juan
Miguel invited agents Mills and Goldman to join him and his
family for a while, to thank them for taking care of his son.
Elian, they said, was playing on the floor--"like any six-year-old
boy."
For the residents of Little Havana, this has been, from the
start, a passion play. Elian was the Miracle Child, delivered
from the sea for a sacred purpose, and so it was no surprise that
when they awoke Saturday morning to news of his seizure, the
exiles arrived in force, one man carrying a crucifix with a
bloody doll nailed to it, and accused Janet Reno of playing
Pontius Pilate. For Elian's Miami relatives, the morning was a
kind of death, after five months of hope and power and fame and
the satisfactions of righteous rage.
For Juan Miguel and his allies in Washington, the pain of
Saturday morning was an awful means to a joyous end. The reunion
of father and son would, as Juan Miguel's lawyer Greg Craig said,
"revive" Elian. For those who had come to view the Miami Cubans
as well-meaning kidnappers, the raid by INS agents was nothing
more or less than a rescue mission--unavoidable, long overdue and
mercifully quick. The images were wrenching, but the outcome was
a relief.
By the end of the day, both sides had the picture they wanted. An
intrepid AP photographer captured a federal agent holding a
submachine gun as the fisherman held the terrified child. Within
hours came the counterrevolution, the image of a grateful father
holding his smiling son. In the end, what you made of the passion
play depended on which picture stayed with you longer, and whose
version of the story had the ring of truth.
For months Janet Reno had been trying to solve the crisis in her
own lonesome way. She tried to play every role herself: Attorney
General, family shrink, hostage negotiator and grandmother
manque. It meant assuming that everybody involved would behave
rationally and put the child's interest first. And she believed
above all that she could wait out her rivals in Miami and absorb
hit after hit about her go-slow approach, certain that the law
was on her side, even if nobody else was.
Then even the law seemed to abandon her. When a federal appeals
court in Atlanta ruled last week that Elian might be able to
decide his future for himself, Reno found herself, as a lawyer on
the case put it, "in a deep, dark hole." Having promised Juan
Miguel two weeks earlier that she would return his son quickly,
Reno was now looking at months of legal wrangling and no
guarantee that Elian would ever be reunited with his father, much
less his homeland. By Thursday, White House dismay with Reno's
bottomless patience was quietly rising, and so that afternoon,
returning on Air Force One from a memorial marking the fifth
anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Reno huddled for 45
minutes with Bill Clinton and two aides to change course.
As she reviewed the ruling and her options for taking Elian from
the Miami house, Reno said she had to prepare for the worst: that
there might be guns in the house, or in the crowds outside; that
old women would throw themselves in front of federal vehicles;
that dump trucks filled with gravel would block intersections.
The INS team wanted to go in before dawn, but Reno worried about
the image of a nighttime raid. So grim was the picture the
Attorney General was painting, it appeared to the aides that she
would prefer to wait some more.
"Then it turned," said a participant, who listened as Reno began
to lay out for the President the reasons for an immediate rescue:
Juan Miguel had promised to stay in the country through the
appeals; the court order made that promise stick, so the
relatives had no reason to worry about Elian suddenly
disappearing; and, most of all, Elian needed to be with his
father, and away from Little Havana's media circus. Normally dry
as talc, Reno at one point waxed nostalgic about the Miami of her
childhood. She said she wanted to make a move soon. "Her feeling
was the boy needs to get out of there and get to his father,"
said a participant.
Clinton had come to the same conclusion the night before, aides
said, but was pleased that Reno got there on her own. "Janet," he
said, "I think you're right." And a few hours later in the Rose
Garden, he began to prepare the nation. "I think [Elian] should
be reunited," Clinton said, "and in as prompt and as orderly a
way as possible."
Reno was not completely tone deaf. It was a week of harrowing
anniversaries: Columbine, Waco, Oklahoma City, the Bay of Pigs.
She was not about to go in on Good Friday or on Easter Sunday.
But she told INS officials that Saturday or Monday were both
possibilities if negotiations stalled, and they in turn said
whatever happened had to occur before 6 a.m., when the traffic
lights in the neighborhood switch from blinking yellow to red,
yellow and green, and the streets start filling with cars, and
the sidewalks with anxious, angry people.
Thanks to widespread leaking, just about everybody in Washington
and Miami woke up Friday morning confident that Reno was ready to
move. But instead, in a last-minute twist, the Attorney General
was in her cavernous fifth-floor office at Main Justice, on the
telephone with a group of fellow Miamians who thought they could
still persuade the relatives to turn the boy over to his father.
The group, led by University of Miami president Tad Foote,
proposed a cooling-off period: both sides of the family would
repair to a neutral retreat until the appeals process concluded,
where Elian would be allowed to make a gentle transition from his
new home to his old. The idea made some sense to Reno, but she
had two conditions: first, Elian had to be put immediately into
his father's custody, and a deal had to be inked fast. Reno told
the go-betweens that if they couldn't work out the details
overnight, there would be no deal at all.
What even Reno may not have realized was that the mediators
weren't dealing only with the Gonzalez clan: they wanted the
blessing of the Cuban-American leaders too, so there would be no
picketing or problems. "We wanted everyone to be able to leave
the family alone," says Aaron Podhurst, one of the mediators and
a longtime Miami lawyer who has been a friend of Reno's for 30
years.
Just before 5 p.m., Reno was sufficiently encouraged to brief
Clinton on the deal. By midnight the feds had put a nine-point
plan on the table: Lazaro and his family would hand over Elian to
the government at 3:30 a.m. at the federal courthouse in Miami;
the family would be put up at a hotel under guard and driven the
next day to Washington. (The relatives claimed they didn't want
Elian to fly. Justice officials assumed someone else in the
family had a fear of flying, but agreed to chauffeur them to
Washington anyway.) Once in Washington, Juan Miguel would be
reunited with Elian, and the two families would live in separate
but adjacent quarters during a weeklong transition period. Three
new child-psychology experts would be brought in to smooth the
handoff; in addition, Lazaro and his wing of the family would
waive all rights to sue Juan Miguel for custody later or go back
to court for damages. For their part, Justice lawyers would go to
court and seek a departure control order for Elian so that he
could not be taken out of the U.S., in accordance with the 11th
circuit order.
Craig, working in his office, put the deal to Juan Miguel after
midnight. Initially the father balked at the idea of living
anywhere close to Lazaro, but after some calls back and forth, he
agreed. But at this point the accounts diverge: federal officials
say Lazaro and his kin objected to all sorts of conditions and
kept wanting to add new ones. It wasn't even clear who was making
the decisions. "We were never able to say Lazaro Gonzalez had
agreed with anything," says an official. "It was never clear who
the lead lawyer was, and that made it difficult to figure out how
you could talk to these people."
Podhurst claims that he felt they were very close to a deal as
late as 3 a.m., and that it was Reno who suddenly balked. The
neutral safe house would have to be around Washington, she said,
not Miami. Even if he could get the family and the lawyers to
agree, he was worried about the Cuban-American leaders. "They
couldn't wake everyone up to ask them if they would accept moving
the safe house to outside of Florida," he says. "I had the
Attorney General on hold while I was talking to [family lawyer]
Manny Diaz. And then he says, 'Wait a minute. Here come the
marshals.'"
When 4 a.m. rolled around, Reno had hit the wall. Huddled in her
small inner office, she polled all her top advisers: they were
unanimous. "You could see she was very anguished. You could see
the pain," says one of those in the room. So she told the
negotiators, "Time has run out," gave INS chief Doris Meissner
the go sign, and the wheels of Operation Reunion began to roll.
"I was shocked," says Podhurst. "I think we could have worked it
out."
Craig, meanwhile, was still working. He had sent his client home
to sleep and was still in his office with the TV on mute when
around 5 a.m. he saw the rescue unfold on the screen. He jumped
to the phone and called Bethesda, waking up Juan Miguel in his
room at the residence of Fernando Remirez, head of the Cuban
diplomatic mission to the U.S. "Turn on the TV! Turn on the TV!"
A man who had been guarding the outside of the Miami house tried
to alert the small crowd that something was happening. "They're
here! They're here!" he shouted. When Eddie Gonzalez, 40, saw the
agents moving in, he jumped over the barricade and shouted, "What
the hell are you doing?" The officers immediately began spraying
a green-colored pepper spray from canisters held at their waists
and pushed him down to the ground. Student Fausto Vilar, 18, was
hit with the butt of a rifle as he jumped over the bars. "They
grabbed me and an older man behind me and pushed us down to the
pavement. I couldn't breathe or see. I had to go to a house and
spray a water hose in my face." Gustavo Moller, an NBC audio
technician, suffered a gash above his left eye when an agent
pressed the barrel of an automatic rifle into his face as he
stood in the front door. "It was the ugliest thing I've ever
seen," Moller says. "This is the most inhumane way to get at
justice."
Watching the constant replay of the raid on the networks, the
staff members back in Reno's office were troubled at the image of
the child cowering in the closet and crying in the agent's
arms--but they had no regrets. "It was a very sad thing to see,"
said Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. "I was disappointed
that people who indicated they cared most for the boy were unable
to do the simple things that would have prevented what happened
from occurring."
The Miami relatives and their supporters were on the air
instantly, telling their harrowing story and denouncing the
government. "If this had been your son, would you have wanted a
gun to be pointed at his head and have him dragged out of your
house that way?" Marisleysis said. "Bill Clinton and Janet Reno
betrayed this country--not just my family, but this country!"
As word spread, the crowds began to grow, and Miami police worked
to maintain some order while allowing angry residents to express
their fury at the sudden turn. Some vented their anger on police,
after they heard that an assistant police chief was sitting in
the passenger seat of the INS van that took Elian away. In the
minutes after the raid, Mayor Joe Carollo had made it plain that
he had no advance warning whatever. Late in the afternoon he gave
a press conference and denounced the government's actions. "What
they did was a crime," he said. "These are atheists. They don't
believe in God."
At the heart of Little Havana, there was a gauntlet of concrete
benches, garbage Dumpsters, newspaper boxes, STOP signs, chairs
and other objects thrown into the wide streets and burned. "We
are peaceful people. We are not violent. Look at what they have
turned us into," says Alex Lugo, 34, a math teacher. "Janet Reno
is a coward. We want the world to understand that Janet Reno and
Fidel Castro have hurt this little boy."
Even as the crowds boiled, SUVs from Cuban-exile groups moved
slowly down the streets calling on loudspeakers for calm, telling
the rioters to wait for Tuesday's planned general strike and
march. Nearby, 85-year-old exile Pepe Troica shook his head and
guarded his car with a lead pipe. "I was completely against
sending Elian back," he said. "But this vandalism is ruining our
cause."
No one liked the idea of handing Fidel Castro a prize. In Havana
the reaction was subdued; the government cautioned Cubans that
the fight for Elian wasn't over yet. Nevertheless, Fidel thanked
Clinton, Reno and "American public opinion." He added, "The child
may have cried for five minutes, but at least he's now spared
from crying the rest of his life." Cuban TV lost no chance to
broadcast images of "the hysterical behavior of Marisleysis ...
and the desecration of the American flag by the Miami Mafia."
Echoing Little Havana's piety, Cuban citizens like Virginia
Sotolongo, 42, said, "The Virgin of Charity has done this
miracle. I always believed that the child would be with his
father."
If anything took the wind out of the demonstrations, it was the
fact that the leading players had exited the stage. By
mid-afternoon, Lazaro and his relatives and Dalrymple had hopped
a flight to Washington to force a meeting with Juan Miguel, or
Bill Clinton, or whatever sympathetic Congressman they could get
to take them in. Juan Miguel refused to meet with his kin, and
they were turned away at the gates of Andrews Air Force Base.
In Miami and in Washington, most parties agreed on one point:
this was not over yet. The court case could drag on for months,
and there is no telling where it will end. One of Elian's Miami
relatives, Lillian Santiago, who had arrived at the house just
as the raid was concluding, had these words to calm the growing
crowd of protesters. "The boy will be back," she told them. "The
courts will return him to us." But even if that were to happen,
which most legal experts doubt, Juan Miguel won't be leaving his
side. --Reported by Tim Padgett and Timothy Roche/Miami, Jay
Branegan and Elaine Shannon/Washington and Dolly
Mascarenas/Havana
WAS RENO RIGHT?
"We tried every way we could to encourage Lazaro Gonzalez to
voluntarily hand over the child to his father ... The Miami
relatives rejected our efforts, leaving us no option but the
enforcement action."
"This was in the end about a little boy who lost his mother and
has not seen his father in more than five months. I hope, with
time and support, Elian and his father will have the opportunity
to be a strong family again."
MARISLEYSIS GONZALEZ
Elian's cousin
"They said, 'Give me the boy, or we're going to shoot' ... He
was screaming ... 'Don't take me!' I never thought they would
do this to a kid ... How can this boy be O.K. when he had a gun
to his head? I thought this was a country of freedom ...
Whatever happens after this, let them pay the consequences."
TRENT LOTT
Senate majority leader
"When I awoke in my hometown with my family today--Easter
weekend--and learned of the tactics that had been used to seize
Elian Gonzalez, my first thought was that this could only happen
in Castro's Cuba. President Clinton should not have allowed this
to happen."
REV. JOAN BROWN CAMPBELL
National Council of Churches
"[Juan Miguel Gonzalez] was very tearful, very happy. This is a
moment he'd waited for for a very long time. And he's glad the
boy is safe."
Campbell came out in support of Reno in the very first hour after
the raid. She has been one of Juan Miguel's staunchest American
advisers.
GREG CRAIG
Juan Miguel's attorney
"I don't doubt that for those of us watching this, it looked
shocking ... But ... the early evidence is that Elian's in good
shape. He's a strong boy, and the connection between his father
and him is so powerful ... You realize that by keeping them
apart, something terrible was done."
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