Dorelien, who won a $3.2 million Florida lottery jackpot, was convicted by a Haitian court in absentia for his role in the fishing village massacre and is currently cooling his jets in the INS Krome Detention Center in Miami. It seems a cruel irony that he's fighting deportation on the basis he'd be subject to torture if he were sent home.

It's estimated that close to 200 war criminals from around the globe are currently living in Florida.

So, how do they get in?
They probably come in by military plane to Andrews Air Force Base and then disappear into something like the federal witness protection program, Florida Congressman Mark Foley told me.

Many of them majored in torture technique at the U.S. Army's School of The Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, and its arm in Panama. (The infamous institution underwent a cosmetic name-change to the "Western Hemisphere Institute For Security Cooperation," but a thorn by any other name still stings. The one-time atrocity academy is still the site of demonstrations by protesters, including TV-president Martin Sheen.)

These war criminals and petty tyrants are what the CIA calls "dirty assets," tattletales and turncoats with blemished backgrounds who helped us out in our various foreign misadventures. But, as former ambassador to El Salvador Robert E. White and current head of the Center for International Policy, a Washington DC think tank asks, "Should the U.S. be the dumping grounds for the human rights violators of the western hemisphere."

Apparently, these guys are our invited guests. According to a high ranking intelligence official, "The director of the CIA can bring in fifty to a hundred people... you want to get in, we will get you in, get you a house, whatever...."

Any one of them could be your neighbor.

The Salvador connection Like the two retired Salvadoran generals Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova and Jose Guillermo Garcia, for example. Garcia's former deputy Nicolas Carranza has been revealed as a CIA informant paid $90,000 a year. And Vides kindly lent us his airport so we could supply, illegally, the Nicaraguan Contras, an operation apparently managed by the elder George Bush when he was vice-president. In those days, twenty years ago, a young woman named Neris Gonzalez taught bible studies to dirt poor campesinos in El Salvador. She fell for a university student who'd come to help and was eight-months pregnant by him when she was snatched up by the savage National Guard in broad daylight at the village marketplace.

They burned her with cigarettes and poured acid on the burns; slit her fingertips, thighs and breasts, pulled out her fingernails with pliers and shot neuron-jangling electrical jolts into her breasts while smothering her in a powder-filled rubber mask.

Guardsman cut open the stomach of a male prisoner, rubbed her face in his entrails and made her drink his blood.

At National Guard headquarters, she was tossed naked into a dank cell with "Human Slaughterhouse" scrawled on the wall in blood, scraps of flesh on the floor and rats salivating over their next human snack. Thrown onto a bare metal bed frame, she was repeatedly raped. Then she was shoved under the frame that was balanced on her pregnant belly while two drunken Guardsman danced atop. Finally, she was piled into a truck stacked with corpses and left for dead by the side of the Pan American Highway. Her infant son, born with broken bones, died within two months.

Garcia and Vides, as he prefers to be known in the America-style, are alleged to be responsible for those horrors. Vides commanded the National Guard and Garcia was his boss as Minister of Defense. When Garcia was forced into early retirement by his own field officers, Vides-disparaged as "Senorita Casanova" because he had no combat experience-followed him into the ministerial post as the military's top dog.

Today, they are comfortably ensconced in South Florida's suburban sprawl, complete with backyard swings for the grandkids, big screen TVs and religious shrines.

The two amigos are in their sixties now, and they look more like Wal-Mart welcomers than Kings of Kruelty. Last year, they were cleared in a West Palm Beach trial for ordering and covering up the brutal rape and murder of four American churchwomen, despite a UN Truth Commission Report which found the execution was planned and carried out on orders of a superior, and Garcia and Vides were involved in the cover-up.

Both men have been given amnesty in El Salvador. But, in the U.S., they can be brought to trial under the Alien Tort Claims Act (a 200-year-old law) and the more recent Torture Victim Protection Act. They will be back in that same federal court in the Gonzalez case. It's a civil suit: Liability, rather than guilt or innocence is at stake. So, if they lose, their worst-case scenario is a big financial hit (though their lawyer Kurt Klaus, Jr. calls them "judgment proof") and a one-way ticket back to Palookaville.

But, as Bob Montgomery, Jr. who represented the churchwomen's families pointed out, "Their neighbors know who they are."

(The verdict has been appealed by the families, and the Gonzalez trial has been delayed until a decision is handed down.)

But the Salvadoran generals are just two of the alleged monsters enjoying freedoms and perks paid for by our tax dollars.

Avenging Angel
According to Richard Krieger, there are more than 150 foreign war criminals living in Florida, not including 45 purported Nazis on the state's west coast, still being pursued by the OSI. Krieger is the former State Department coordinator of refugee affairs, Justice Department consultant, and executive director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council; he now heads the non-profit International Educational Missions in Boynton Beach.

Krieger is a passionate man, a fierce advocate for refugee and victim's rights with a pedal-to-the-metal mania for chasing down foreign war criminals, atrocity-mongers and terrorists. He's also cautious. At his insistence, we met in a public place, "because I deal with killers."

A brawny man bristling with secrets, Krieger is a tipster with international tentacles reaching into the intelligence, law enforcement, legislative and diplomatic communities. He is credited with exposing Florida-resident General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of a CIA-funded Honduran death squad. Krieger also helped nab Discua's compatriot Juan Angel Hernandez Lara, who was hiding out in West Palm Beach (he was picked up at lunch at the Havana restaurant on Forest Hill Blvd.). He's also been involved in ferreting out Cuban alleged electro-shock virtuoso Eriberto "The Nurse" Mederos and keeping Guatemalan death squad leader Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz out of the U.S.

Krieger counts former ambassadors and present and past congressional representatives on his board of directors and told me he's currently working on three cases, but wouldn't reveal the specifics.

"I don't want to tip them off."

But his resources are limited. Krieger's work is dependent on tax-exempt donations, and he's not hesitant about asking for support.

"I haven't taken a salary since I've started this thing and I've probably put $150,000 of my own money into it."

Why does he do it?

"If you are part of civilized society, how do you permit these things to happen and do nothing? If you do nothing about it, it will continue to happen. You stop it by bringing to justice people who carried out these crimes."

At least a handful of U.S. Senators agree. In October 1999, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) backed a bill introduced by West Palm Beach Congressman Mark Foley and U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman to put the responsibility for catching and deporting foreign war criminals in the hands of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI). The OSI has a successful record in ferreting out, denaturalizing and deporting Nazi-era criminals.

"I have been appalled this country has become a safe haven for those who exercised power in foreign countries to terrorize, rape and torture innocent civilians," Leahy told the Senate.

The bill, passed in the Senate but log-jammed in the House, would take the enforcement job away from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The INS has been subject to stinging criticism of late for its seemingly slipshod approach in corralling the current crop of human rights criminals and granting them political asylum. The INS has also been hammered for letting suspected terrorists and kamikazes-in-training waltz into Florida.

In November 2000, after much prodding, the INS launched Operation Home Run, arresting 14 illegal immigrants in South Florida who were, according to the Palm Beach Post, "involved in political torture, murder and kidnapping," before they came to the land of the free and the home of the brave. But 11 others on the INS hit list-from Haiti, Peru, Honduras and Angola-escaped the dragnet.

Five of the 14 snared were living in Palm Beach County: one in Delray Beach; two in Lake Worth; and two in Boca Raton. There were six in Broward; six more in Miami-Dade; and one in St. Lucie.

"Many of them have admitted to committing atrocities," INS spokesperson Patricia Mancha told the Palm Beach Post.

"One former official of a certain military regime admitted that he himself had tortured upwards of 300 prisoners," said William West, chief of the INS Special Investigations unit. "Unfortunately, he's one of the ones we didn't get."

But, according to Krieger those caught in the INS net were small fry.

Still on the loose are Didier Cedras, the brother and advisor of Haitian military strongman Raoul Cedras; CIA-sponsored Honduran secret police head Juan Lopez Grijavala; and Alvaro Rafael Saravia Marino, the ex-Salvadoran military captain closely tied to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Apparently Saravia had actually been held here, but has reportedly moved to Gary Condit Country in Modesto, California.

In Miami, former Augusto Pinochet-henchman and confessed car-bomber Armando Fernandez-Larios has been embroiled in legal battles. He's accused of being part of the Caravan of Death, a military posse that traveled from prison to prison in northern Chile summarily executing political prisoners. Jean-Claude Duperval, the second highest-ranking Haitian military officer indicted in a massacre at a Haitian fishing village is laying low in South Florida, courtesy of an immigration judge. Strolling in South Beach is a former Romanian secret police figure who was kicked out of Canada along with 42 others, 10 of whom are living in the U.S. according to Krieger.

Virgilio Paz Romero, the Cuban nationalist and car bomber (he and Larios were involved in the killing of then-Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffit, the American wife of his aide, in 1976) hid in Palm Beach County for years until he was arrested in 1991. He served half of a 12-year sentence, then was held in INS custody from 1998 until he was recently released from "indefinite detention" by Supreme Court ruling.

"This is part of the problem we have," says Krieger. "People who are persecutors are not supposed to be given asylum or refugee status, but they are."

As Anne Michaels wrote, "History is amoral, but memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers."

To contact Richard Krieger or to donate to the non-profit
International Educational Mission in Boynton Beach write to:
citizenship@worldnet.ATT.net