Lawyer for Haiti Missionaries Could be Trafficker: Police

[Hissyspit]

Source: Australian Broadcasting Company

Lawyer for Haiti missionaries could be trafficker: police

Updated 1 hour 7 minutes ago

El Salvador police are investigating whether a man representing 10 Americans charged with kidnapping in Haiti is the same person wanted for human trafficking in the Central American nation, police said.

El Salvador police said in a statement they are working to determine if Jorge Torres Orellana could be Jorge Anibal Torres Puello, who has been presented as a Dominican lawyer for the Americans. They re-opened the case after photos of Mr Puello emerged in international media and police are now comparing them with pictures in their records.

- snip -

"For the moment, we cannot confirm that it is the same person until we finish analysing fingerprints," the statement said. The statement added that they were working with Interpol on the case.

- snip -

A Haitian judge says he has ruled in favour of the release of the missionaries.

Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/14/2819083.htm?section=justin

[EFerrari]

1. Omg.

The corruption in El Salvador may be a little less rampant than in Haiti but not by much, I'm afraid.

If this is the same guy, I hope they nail him.

[NashVegas]

8. Well, If Anyone's Going to Know How to Get Kids Out ...

[Edweird]

2. The guy isn't even a lawyer.

[winyanstaz]

3. So if I understand this right...

The lawyer is the trafficker that sat the stupid right winger missionaries up to help him steal kids?
If so I am glad they caught his mangey butt.
I read a lot of testimony from neighbors and families and friends that the missionaries thought they were doing the right and legal thing.
I wonder how many other people he used like this?

[SemperEadem]

4. I'm not willing to give those child traffikers a pass

That woman who is the leader of the group admitted that she didn't bother to seek out getting the legal documentation from the country of Haiti on those children---what other country can someone waltz in -- someone who CLEARLY is not from that country -- and take off with 33 children without having documentation in place?

No, they knew what they were doing was wrong because if they were on the up and up, they'd have obeyed the laws, had the parents legally sign the children over and gotten passports for the children, not dismiss the government because it's just a poor black country in the middle of a crisis. They didn't even bother to vet the "lawyer", who has a shady past in alleged child trafficking to kidnap the children over the boarder into the DR, out of Haiti's jurisdiction. Not to mention that dominicans are quite hostile towards Haitians, so exactly how much better are those children's lives going to be in a country that believes them to be less than they are?

From http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=conflict_haiti_dominican :In fact the two countries merely coexist on this small island -- conflict arises almost everyday between the two governments. These cultural differences may be at the root of the long-standing Haitian-Dominican conflict culminating in the murder of more than 25,000 Haitians in 1937 by the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molinas. And you're willing to put little children in that mess and call yourself "coming to their rescue"?

They need to be tried on international child kidnapping charges because letting them go with less than a touch on the wrist means that it's ok to go down to Haiti and smuggle children out of the country without the legal paperwork spelling out exactly where the children are going and if their parents have actually signed away their rights. Right now, what has taken place is that the parents who've given their children up behind a lie these people told may not have legal recourse to get their children back once the truth comes out because what they've done is akin to child abandonment.

[winyanstaz]

5. Well I certainly hope they can get their children back...

I am sure they thought they were giving those babies a good chance at a future and life so the parents should not be punished.
If I had no way to feed and cloth my babies I might have given them up in my youth if I saw no other way to save them myself. Luckily I was able to take care of them but we came close a few times. Although my children never went without a meal..there were a number of meals I missed so I can relate to how desperate these poor parents must have been feeling.
Unless we have walked a mile in their shoes during this catastrophe we just cannot judge the parents.

[SemperEadem]

9. Given the history of Haiti and the DR

I cannot agree that had these parents known the full intent of that woman's motives that their children stood the chance of being delivered into servitude over in the DR, they would not have allowed their children to be taken anywhere. Nothing would move me to give up my children for any reason--and perhaps it's because I'm black and my ancestors have already walked too many "miles in those shoes" through their experience in this country of having their children snatched from them and sold off into slavery to someone else someplace else to be abused, beaten, starved or raped.

Time has an excellent article on this very thing that puts the finish on what I said above:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1963749,00.html

Desperation deforms judgment, and not just among victims. Thus we meet missionary Laura Silsby and her flock, who in the face of so much suffering set out from Boise, Idaho, with a trailer full of children's clothes and a vow to help Haiti's orphans "find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ." "Our hearts were in the right place," she insisted, but her head was somewhere else entirely, and they all wound up in jail. We know a bit more now about her regard for the niceties of law and protocol: unpaid debts, civil lawsuits, a house in foreclosure and an improvised mission to scoop up a load of children and head to the border without so much as a license or even confirmation that they were all orphans.

We also know that the families she encountered were desperate to survive. Parents were told their children would be cared for and schooled in the Dominican Republic; the families could even visit. "If someone offers to take my children to a paradise," a mother told the New York Times, "am I supposed to say no?" That woman was warned by local officials about obtaining proper papers, and by that mark alone, her behavior was criminal. But it was also criminally naive.

So before you willy-nilly give a criminal a pass, you'd do yourself a service by reading up on the bitter, conflict-filled history between Haiti and the DR:
http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=conflict_... :

In fact the two countries merely coexist on this small island -- conflict arises almost everyday between the two governments. These cultural differences may be at the root of the long-standing Haitian-Dominican conflict culminating in the murder of more than 25,000 Haitians in 1937 by the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molinas.

What is the explanation for these cultural differences? How did the island the Tainos called Hayti come to be divided into two countries, and inhabited by two peoples of such different cultures? A look at the colonial past of Haiti and the Dominican Republic contains the answer to these questions. Both countries have a colonial background that has made them into what they are today. The division of the island into Haiti and the Dominican Republic is a perfect example of how colonialism and the plantation system shaped the geography, demography and psychology of the New World; shaping it in ways that eventually led to perpetual friction, including the Haitian-Dominican conflict of today.

--snip--
When Trujillo was elected president (of DR) he defined the Dominican Republic as a Hispanic nation, Catholic and White, as opposed to Afro-French Haiti which largely practiced "vodou" as a religion. He portrayed Haiti as both a threat and the antithesis of the Dominican Republic. He dreaded the growing influence of Haitian culture in Dominican territory. His fear of Haitian "darkening" of the Dominican population led him to conduct a policy of "Dominicanness" which ultimately led to the murder of more than 25,000 Haitian on the Haitian-Dominican border. After having signed a boundary agreement between the Dominican government and Haiti, Trujillo realizing that the people on the border, Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, spoke mainly creole and used the Haitian gourde as their currency. He undertook to define Haitians as racially separate from Dominicans. Under Operation Perejil, Trujillo killed thousands of Haitians and dark skinned Dominicans residing on the border zone. These people were asked to pronounce the word "perejil", believed to be hard for Haitians because of the "r" and the "j". Everyone who failed at the test was systematically killed.

Years later, the Dominican president and Trujillo’s ideological heir, Joaquim Balaguer, continued his policy of discrimination and racism against the Haitians. In his book, La Isla al Reves, he outlined his hopes and fears for the Dominican nation. This book is a monument to the fear that Haiti, as an Afro-Caribbean nation, instilled both in the author and the Dominican people. It warns of Haitian imperialism as a "plot against the independence of Santo Domingo and against the American population of Spanish origin". Haiti is a threat primarily for "biological reasons", its people multiplying themselves "nearly as rapidly as plants.".

There is no way I'll believe that if those parents were told the truth about exactly what was to become of their children in a country that has been hostile towards them for over 200 years that they would have let them go. That woman was wrong and she should pay the price for her criminal conduct. Neither her possession of ovaries nor her religion exempt her from the law.

[EFerrari]

10. This stuff was airborn in the 30s. I read the other day that the dictator

my grandfather worked under (he was in the military) decided there were too many black people in El Salvador and wrote a law denying entry to black people. I wonder how many other countries were doing the same thing. Not Mexico. They had a lovely leader at the time who was a social democrat.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Adviser to detained church members may have a lengthy criminal past

Adviser to detained church members may have a lengthy criminal past

http://cache.boston.com.nyud.net:8090/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2010/02/13/1266105815_9864/539w.jpg

Jorge Puello, left, who provided legal advice to 10 Americans held in Haiti on
kidnapping charges, is not registered as a lawyer in the Dominican Republic and
lacks a law degree. (Javier Galeano/ Associated Press)

By Marc Lacey
New York Times / February 14, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The man who was providing legal advice to the American church members arrested in Haiti may have a string of legal charges against him in the United States as well as a warrant for his arrest in El Salvador for sex trafficking, records show.

The man, Jorge Puello, was brought into the case from the Dominican Republic as a lawyer to help the 10 Americans arrested last month for trying to remove 33 children from the country after the earthquake without government permission. A website that was abruptly taken down Friday described Puello and his cousin, Alejandro Puello, as law partners.

But Jorge Puello is not registered as a lawyer in the Dominican Republic, and Alejandro Puello said in an interview yesterday that his cousin had no law degree, did not work with him, and was missing.

Exactly how Jorge Puello got involved in the case remains unclear. He said he had been hired as a lawyer by the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, which five of the Americans attended. A lawyer for one of the 10 said Puello never represented his client.

More:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2010/02/14/adviser_to_detained_church_members_may_have_a_lengthy_criminal_past/

[Joanne98]

7. Wow