American Politics Journal -- It's a Hostage Crisis We're Talking About



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It's a Hostage Crisis We're Talking About
...Why Reno and Gore are Right in Agreeing Not to Uphold the "Rule of Law" in Miami with Tanks

by Tamara Baker

Monday, April 10, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- The Elian Gonzalez crisis, slowly but surely, is wending toward its end.

Elian's father, Juan MIguel Gonzalez, is in the country, and support for the hard-liner Batistaites holding Elian is dropping precipitously even among Miami's Cuban community.

Consider this: The hard-liners number about 150, for that is the number of persons they typically have attracted to their rallies lately.

But there are 800,000 Cubans living in Miami, and most of them have been quietly ignoring the hard-liners. In fact, as has been pointed out by John Lantigua and Myra McPherson in Salon, many of Miami's Cuban community are now doing something that the fear of having their houses firebombed made unthinkable not too long ago: They are openly speaking out against the hard-liners. One Cuban-American businessman in McPherson's piece stated his belief that the hard-liners have now tarnished Miami's image so deeply that no more corporations will ever want to relocate there.

Elian's case has caused some interesting flip-flops in the bodies politics and media, and I'm not talking about Al Gore.

I'm talking about those members of the political and media worlds that normally call themselves liberals and progressives, and who tend to abhor the use of force in enforcing the law.

These persons have rightly led the chorus of indignation over the heavy-handed way Rudy Giuliani "keeps the peace" in New York City. But when it comes to dealing with Elian Gonzalez' captors, they have been stamping their feet and wondering out loud about why Janet Reno isn't enforcing the rule of law in Miami. It's almost as if they want her to get involved in yet another Waco.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Bruce Shapiro, like most of the normally pacifist liberal and ultra-liberal writers favoring that Reno move in now with the tanks to snatch Elian from his captors (anyone else sense the irony in this?), is not following the story to its logical conclusion.

Shapiro makes a very good case in the April 8, 2000 issue of Salon for the utter depravity and viciousness of the people holding Elian Gonzalez. What Shapiro leaves unspoken is just how the depravity and violence of Elian's captors changes the situation so that the use of the kind of force that Shapiro advocates is unthinkable.

This is a hostage situation. Elian's captors are, as Shapiro accurately points out, people with not only an extensive history of wrongdoing, but with several reasons to resist, bloodily, any attempts at forced repatriation of their captive. Furthermore, Elian's captors are doing their level best to provoke a violent confrontation, invoking the specter of Waco at every opportunity. The goal of both Al Gore and Janet Reno is to deny Elian's captors that fiery vision of self-inflicted "suicide by police" martyrdom, and to safely return Elian to his father without having to kill anyone to do it.

The goal in resolving hostage crises is not to end them with force and bloodshed, but instead through the sort of delicate negotiations that Shapiro calls "pandering", as if somehow he felt that loss of face was worse than loss of life. If Reno takes the advice of Shapiro and the other suddenly hard-nosed advocates of "the rule of law", then blood will be spilled, and some of it very likely will be Elian's.