Jonestown, Harvey Milk, and George Moscone

CAVEAT: Some of the particulars in this article are false due not to authorial oversights, but media misreporting. Larry Layton led a death squad at the airstrip in Guyana - but he wasn't a "scapegoat" as the author believes. Layton was a member of the military family that actually controlled Jones and the People's Temple. He was in a glassy-eyed state and completely disoriented at the airstrip, and it's likely that Larry was - LIKE DAN WHITE BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO - mind controlled. The People's Temple parishioners did NOT commit "suicide," despite widespread belief to the contrary. Most took forced injections under the shoulderblade, and some 30 percent were shot. There wasn't enough cyanide in a glassful of the punch to kill an adult. It killed children. The adults had to be murdered at the People's Concentration Camp by Jones's death squads.

Jones was a Nazi with a KKK father. At the age of five, little Jimmy combed his hair in Hitler's style, and he delivered "funeral orations" over the dead pets of his friends - animals he'd murdered. Jones was Nazi, not "left-wing" (the charade is an echo of the National "Socialist" front used by the far-right Nazis to co-opt and kill off Germany's communist agitators in the wake of WW I).

And it was not Jones's corpse found at Jonestown, but a double - CIA agents and Nazis do that (look into Heinrich Mueller's "death" at the close of WW II for the classic example. CIA recruit Joseph Mengele kept getting found in South America and had to "die" five times).

Jones survived the carnage. (If the world believes otherwise, it should have a good talk with the CIA/military media. ... )

- AC

Also see: "Jim Jones, the Guyana "Suicides" & Harvey Milk's Premonitions of Death," and "Jonestown, the CIA & Mind Control"

http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/

... One of the most discussed modern mass suicides occurred in the unique setting of Jonestown, Guyana.

Jonestown in the early 1970s was little more than a nine‑hundred acre island cut out of the thick South American rainforest. It was there that the Reverend James Warren “Jim” Jones relocated his People's Temple from the San Francisco area. Allegations were first published in the Guyana Daily Mirror that Jonestown was a “concentration camp” in which Jones’s flock were given psychotropic drugs, sexually abused, sleep deprived, and forced to work 18 hour days. Former members told of drills, called “white nights,” in which middle-of-the-night sirens called members to a line up where they were told they were going to have to take a poison.

Jonestown residents became pre-conditioned into expecting a coming invasion of the camp by Russians, the CIA, or other imagined “enemies” by the delusional Jones. In the wake of these claims, the pressure mounted for San Francisco officials to look into the Jonestown “cult.”

On July 26, 1977, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone announced that he would not hold an investigation of Jones. In a letter to President Jimmy Carter, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk defended Jones as a friend to minority communities. But soon, San Francisco family members asked their congressional representative to fly to Jonestown to look into the situation (and hopefully rescue their relatives). This finally occurred with a one-day delegation headed by Congressman Leo Ryan.

On November 18, 1978, supposedly frightened by the investigative visit of Ryan, cult leader Jim Jones ordered Larry Schact, a medical school graduate and designated camp doctor, to prepare a huge cyanide‑laced vat of grape Flavor‑aide.

At the Guyanese airstrip near Jonestown, Jones sent gunmen to ambush Ryan and about 30 newsmen, government aides, and relatives of People's Temple members before they could board their plane for a return to the United States. Ryan, three reporters, and a Jonestown defector were killed, and among the wounded were the area’s alleged CIA's Chief of Station Richard Dwyer, and Ryan aide, Jackie Speier. Later Jones, with armed guards at his side, had his followers drink the potion and kill themselves. Those that refused to take the poison were machine-gunned to death by guards who apparently escaped. Thus some of the Jonestown deaths were indeed murders.

By most counts, the death toll was 913. Initially, the general public could not believe that the news accounts were true, despite widespread press and broadcast attention bringing the details into American living rooms. Media reports about the People’s Temple suicides would drag on for years. (It was not until 1986 that one of Jim Jones's assistants, Larry Layton, the only person prosecuted for any of the events in and around Jonestown, was convicted for his involvement in the Jonestown incidents and Ryan’s death. Layton was released from custody in April 2002, on parole, after 18 years in prison. Many believed he was an innocent scapegoat.)

As often happens after well-publicized suicides and mass suicides, the copycat effect took the form of follow-up murders. This happened quickly and in spectacular fashion in San Francisco.

Nine days after the Jonestown events, on November 27, 1978, San Francisco Bay Area residents would learn of the assassinations of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk. Law enforcement officials repeated the local rumors that some Bay Area residents believed that Moscone and Milk were murdered by the hauntingly named "White Night" hit squads said to have been sent by the Peoples Temple to avenge Jim Jones. As San Francisco Chronicle reporter Richard Rapaport observed, “When authorities went through the personal effects left behind in San Francisco by Jones, they found a hit list with the names of erstwhile political friends and allies like George Moscone and Willie Brown.”

The Moscone-Milk murders were carried out by a recently resigned former supervisor, Dan White, and were not directly linked to Jim Jones. White had impulsively retired from his position one year after his election and a mere two days after the Jonestown event. A former Vietnam vet, former police officer, and former firefighter, White would often go into trances during supervisors’ meetings and then impulsively goose-step around the room. His past was filled with mystery, including an enigmatic “missing year” of 1972. White’s murderous instability appeared to have been set off by the Jonestown murder-suicides and their link to San Francisco. The Chronicle’s Rapaport noted in 2003: “Part of the connection between the events came through media coverage. Each day between Saturday, Nov. 18, and Monday, Nov. 27, new and terrible video, photos and revelations emanated from the jungle retreat where many former San Franciscans had chosen, been coerced or programmed to join the man they called ‘Father.’”

In 1979 Dan White was found guilty of “manslaughter by diminished capacity,” despite opening arguments by attorney Doug Schmidt that linked Jonestown to the assassinations. Many still believe that the reason White was not convicted of first degree murder was because of what most of the media reported as the “Twinkie defense” – a phrase coined by well-known satirist Paul Krassner - that junk food had made White do it. While it was in reality HoHos and Ding Dongs, White’s defense claimed that his love of junk food was the result of his depression, not the cause of it.

The night the verdict was handed down, on May 21, 1979, the streets around San Francisco, especially near City Hall, erupted in violent protests. They became known, ironically, as the “White Night Riots.” Dan White would only serve five of his seven-year sentence. He was paroled in January 1984, tried exile in Ireland, and then returned to San Francisco despite requests from Mayor Dianne Feinstein (who had succeeded Moscone) not to do so.

On the morning of October 21, 1985, Dan White attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, a yellow 1970 Buick Le Sabre, and died by suicide at his San Francisco home. Tom, his brother, discovered the body just before 2 p.m. White had died as an Irish ballad, “The Town I Loved So Well,” played from a cassette player inside the car as it filled with deadly carbon monoxide.

Milk’s less than a month old will requested that his body be cremated, and by his direction, the ashes were enshrined with a mixture of bubble bath (to denote his gay lifestyle) and Kool Aid (to signify the People’s Temple victims). On the 25th anniversary of the assassinations, Milk was remembered as the world’s first openly gay politician to hold office, the subject of the Oscar-winning film, The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, and the focus of operas, plays, and museum exhibits. An elementary school, a civic plaza, a restaurant, a gay cultural institute and a library in San Francisco bear his name, as does a one-of-a-kind high school in New York for gay students who were tormented in mainstream schools.

Milk and Moscone were not the only persons killed in the wake of the People’s Temple suicides and murder-suicides.

In 1980, news accounts told of an alleged People Temple “hit squad,” which were suspected of killing, on February 26, a family of three who had defected in 1975 and testified against the cult. Elmer Mertle (identified in early news accounts under the alias Al Mills), was found shot in the head, lying face down in his bedroom in the family's Berkeley home. The body of his 40-year-old wife Deanna Mertle (also known as Jeannie Mills, author of Six Years with God), also shot in the head with a small-caliber weapon, was discovered on her back in an adjacent bathroom. The couple's 15-year-old daughter, Daphene, was taken to Alta Bates Hospital with two gunshots in the head, and died there later. The Mertles were the founders of Concerned Relatives, and the principal organizers of Ryan's attempt to intervene in the Jonestown cult. Jones called them “white devils.”

Less than a month later, the ripples from the San Francisco murders reached civil rights worker Dennis Sweeney. On March 14, 1980, Sweeney shot seven bullets point-blank into his former friend, Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein, at Lowenstein’s New York City law offices. Activist Lowenstein had marched in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy, authored the "Dump Johnson" movement, and ran the National Student Association, which was later revealed to be CIA-subsidized. After the shooting, Sweeney sat down, smoked a cigarette, seemed to be in a trance state, and calmly waited for the police to arrive.

During his trial, Sweeny testified that the CIA (with Lowenstein's help) had implanted a chip in his head 15 years earlier, and he could hear voices transmitted through his dental work. Sweeny blamed CIA “controllers” for his uncle's heart attack and the assassination of San Francisco mayor George Moscone. Sweeney was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and in 2000, was released from a mental hospital in upstate New York. (The media loved the Sweeney-Lowenstein story. Teresa Carpenter even won a Pultizer Prize for her Village Voice exclusive, quoting Sweeney saying that the shooting was a gay lovers’ quarrel. The only trouble was that Carpenter never interviewed Sweeney; she had made the whole thing up.)

Other deaths followed. Joe Mazor, the private detective hired by the Concerned Relatives to persuade people to leave Jonestown, was shot dead a few years after the Mertles/Mills deaths. Walter Rodney, an intellectual and renowned Caribbean scholar born and raised in Guyana, was assassinated there on December 13, 1980, via a bomb-implanted walkie-talkie. Paula Neustel Adams, Jim Jones's top liaison in the upper echelons of the Guyanese government, was murdered in suburban Bethesda, Maryland in October 1983. Her longtime companion, Laurence Mann, Guyana's ambassador to the United States from 1975-81, apparently killed her, their child and then himself, in a murder-suicide. Members of the Jonestown Institute and author Garrett Lambrev have written that many questions remain unanswered about the true extent of all the copycat suicides, murder-suicides, and murders that occurred since the Jonestown massacre.

The specter of Jonestown filled the newspapers for years and produced a made‑for‑television movie called Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980), starring the then-new and unknown actor Powers Boothe in a highly acclaimed performance as Jones. The Jonestown event had other broad cultural outcomes besides creating a model for mass suicides. For example, despite the actual use of Flavor-aide, the media had quickly mislabeled what was used as “Kool Aid,” and worldwide sales of Kool Aid crashed. Another lasting linguistic legacy of the People’s Temple tragedy is the expression, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” This has come to mean, “Don’t trust any group you find to be a little on the fanatical side.”

© Loren Coleman 2004 ~ from The Copycat Effect (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

Co-opting Intellectual Aggressors - The "Progressive" Face of the CIA

" ... In an attempt to develop a more nuanced understanding of the CIA's role in contemporary society this essay will explore their long-term involvement in utilising ostensibly progressive dissent in the service of imperialism. ... It should not be surprising that the same elites who worked within the upper echelons of both the CIA and the world of liberal philanthropy would ensure that the CIA (which was created in 1947) would play an important role in manipulating progressive social movements globally. ... "

by Michael Barker
Swans Commentary
November 17, 2008

"The CIA offers exciting career opportunities and a dynamic environment. We're on the forefront of world-altering events -- as they happen. So working here isn't just a job, it's a mindset and a lifestyle." — Central Intelligence Agency -- 2008.

"Those who hold power in the society retain control, though they may grant support to dissidents when it suits their immediate purposes... [T]hose in power know precisely why their support is rendered, even if the recipients know neither the reason nor the source." — Dan Schechter, Michael Ansara, and David Kolodney -- 1982. (1)

(Swans - November 17, 2008) Mention the CIA to most historically-informed people and the immediate images that spring to mind are those of assassinations, coups d'état, drug running, and covert wars. On the other hand, those individuals whose understanding of the CIA's work has been stunted, primarily though exposure to the mass media, are more inclined to associate the CIA with bungling over-resourced spies, rogue elephants, or perhaps, in the case of conservatives, as patriotic warriors protecting homeland security. (2) Yet another side to the CIA that is rarely mentioned by progressives, let alone the mainstream media, is their commitment to public activism. By commitment I do not refer to their dedication to infiltrating progressive social movements with informants or agent provocateurs, although this is of course an important aspect of the subterfuge undertaken by the Agency. Instead I refer to the CIA's ongoing efforts to channelling popular dissatisfaction with political processes -- on both a theoretical and grassroots level -- towards support for counterrevolutionary causes. (3) Key organizations that have historically played an important role in helping the CIA's democracy manipulators include the most influential liberal foundations, two prominent examples being the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. (4) So in an attempt to develop a more nuanced understanding of the CIA's role in contemporary society this essay will explore their long-term involvement in utilising ostensibly progressive dissent in the service of imperialism.

Like most class-conscious institutions, the CIA is not stupid, although a useful PR purpose is served by presenting their activities as such. Instead the elites managing the upper echelons of the CIA have long understood the power of grassroots activism, and have demonstrated their longstanding fear of the public by industriously working to undermine our ability to effectively cooperate with one another to promote our own best interests. One simple elite method of attacking popular social movements that challenge capitalist interests is to destroy their leaders, firstly by attempting to weaken their legitimacy in the cultural sphere, and when this fails, by resorting to the literal termination of their lives. However, another more proactive, and arguably more effective, strategy to undermine the revolutionary potential of dissent is to co-opt it: a tactic that if taken to its logical extreme involves the manufacture of dissident groups, which pre-empt organic (more radical) grassroots responses to capitalist-driven injustices. This form of political warfare is as old as politics itself; yet as a result of significant plutocratic advances in the early twentieth century, and the ensuing public resistance to these developments, such co-optive strategies were institutionalized within capitalist states in the form of liberal foundations. As Edward Berman notes in his important book The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy (State University of New York Press, 1983), the goals of such foundations...

It should not be surprising that the same elites who worked within the upper echelons of both the CIA and the world of liberal philanthropy would ensure that the CIA (which was created in 1947) would play an important role in manipulating progressive social movements globally. In this regard it is clear that the leading US-based liberal foundations were not the CIA's unwitting dupes. (8) However, given the progressive image that these liberal philanthropists wish to project to the public, revelations in the late 1960s of their ties to the much maligned CIA led to "reforms" of the CIA's funding relations. In truth these reforms merely catalysed a chain of events that would ensure that the CIA's soft-power politics (philanthropic manipulation) were institutionally isolated from their hard-power politics (which includes their covert military operations). ...

STORY CONTINUES

http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker08.html

UN Adopts Russia’s Anti-Nazi Resolution

Moscow News
№46 2008
21/11/2008 |

UN (RIA Novosti) - The UN General Assembly on social and humanitarian issues has adopted a draft resolution proposed by Russia on tackling a rise in the glorification of Nazism and the desecration of WWII monuments.

The draft resolution on "combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance," is aimed at tackling the practice in the former Soviet republics of Latvia and Estonia of honoring SS veterans who fought for Nazi Germany during WWII.

"Nazi monuments are unveiled in a ceremonial atmosphere and the dates of liberation from the Nazis are proclaimed as days of mourning," Russia's UN representative, Grigory Lykyantsev, told the UN, adding that "this attitude towards anti-fascist veterans plays into the hands of those who call for ‘a pure race.'"

The resolution was passed with 122 countries voting in favor, while 54 delegations abstained, including Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia. Only the U.S. voted against. The resolution is now practically guaranteed to be adopted at the next UN General Assembly session in December.

Parades in honor of Waffen-SS veterans, involving veterans from the Latvian Legion and the 20th Esto­nian SS Division and their supporters, are held annually in Latvia and Estonia. Russia has repeatedly criticized the Baltic States for allowing these parades to take place.

Another former Soviet republic, Ukraine, announced plans in July to erect a statue in Lutsk, western Ukraine, honor of Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) that fought against the Soviets during WWII.

The resolution also raises Russian concerns over the dismantling and desecration of Soviet-era WWII monuments and the "unlawful exhu mation" or transfer of the remains of those killed in the fight against fascism.

The dismantling in Tallinn of the Soviet war memorial, the Bronze Soldier, just before the May 9, 2007 Victory Day celebrations in Russia led to street protests in which over 1,000 people were arrested and one Russian national was killed.

Relations between Russia and Latvia and Estonia have also been strained over what Moscow calls the two states' unequal treatment of ethnic Russians, the alleged persecution of Soviet WWII veterans, and the apparent revival of nationalism and fascism.

http://mnweekly.ru/news/20081121/55357975.html

Washington State: What is it about Bellvue and Nazis?

What is it about Bellevue and Nazis?
By Knute Berger
November 26, 2008
http://crosscut.com/blog/crosscut/18683/

First it was a Bellevue retiree who turned out to be a former member of a notorious SS unit charged with exterminating Jews, Gypsies, and others in Yugoslavia during World War II. Think of it as the Nazi version of "meals on wheels." Instead of hauling victims to death camps for extermination, the Einsatzgruppen brought mobile gas chambers to their victims.

The Bellevue man, Peter Egner, 86, is alleged to have been a member of this death squad In Belgrade from 1941 to 1943. He may have been involved in the deaths of thousands of people. The ailing Egner denies the allegation of the U.S. government which is seeking to strip him of his U.S. citizenship. Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the case against Egner can go forward. If Egner's citizenship is revoked, Serbia could extradite him and try him for war crimes.

Now there's a report that a man was arrested this week at a Bellevue Starbucks for trying to sell a golden bookmark that belonged to Adolph Hitler. According to the Seattle Times, federal agents ran a sting operation and recovered the artifact which is believed to have been stolen in Spain in 2002. The bookmark was reportedly a gift to Hitler from his mistress, Eva Braun, to cheer him up after the German defeat at Stalingrad. The seller was allegedly a Romanian national who lives in Kenmore. He was asking $100,000 for the bookmark which is engraved with a portrait of the Nazi leader.

Knute Berger is Mossback, Crosscut's chief Northwest native. He also writes the monthly Gray Matters column for Seattle magazine and is a weekly Friday guest on Weekday on KUOW-FM (94.9). You can e-mail him at mossback@crosscut.com.

Vatican to keep Hitler’s Pope papers secret

by Marcus Papadopoulos
www.tribunemagazine.co.uk
November 6, 2008

ARCHIVAL material pertaining to the pontificate of Pius XII – the man known as “Hitler’s Pope” – will not be disclosed to the public within the next six or seven years, the Vatican has announced.

In response to a request by Rabbi David Rosen, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Department for Interreligious Affairs, who was received last weekend at the Vatican by Pope Benedict XVI, the Reverend Federico Lombardi said that while requests to make the wartime archive available were “understandable” it would take “six or seven years” to prepare the 16 million documents.

But Rabbi Rosen added that Benedict XVI would give “serious consideration” to his request not to proceed with the beatification of Pius XII, the penultimate step to canonisation, until the archives have been opened.

The papacy of Pius XII from 1939 to 1958 was extremely controversial and continues to plague the Vatican today.

The charge is that, in the view of historians of the Holocaust and in the words of one book on the subject, he turned a blind eye to murder by failing to speak out against or trying to prevent the Nazis exterminating millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals and gypsies.

Some Jewish human rights groups go further and say that Pius XII was anti-Semitic and the Roman Catholic church was complicit in the rounding up of victims.

Hitler’s Pope also enjoyed close relations with the Ustase regime in Croatia, a Nazi puppet state established after the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, and its leader Ante Pavelic.

He was responsible for the murder of more than 500,000 Serbs, many at the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp.

The accusation against the Pope is that, again, he did nothing to stop the killing.

Despite these allegations Benedict XVI, who as Joseph Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth in 1941, last month marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Pius XII with a pontifical mass commemorating his papacy.

http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2008/11/06/vatican-to-keep-hitler’s-pope-papers-secret/

Research Center Tied to Drug Company

By GARDINER HARRIS
NYT/November 25, 2008

When a Congressional investigation revealed in June that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a world-renowned child psychiatrist, had earned far more money from drug makers than he had reported to his university, he said that his interests were “solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study.”

But e-mail messages and internal documents from Johnson & Johnson made public in a court filing reveal that Dr. Biederman pushed the company to finance a research center at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, with a goal to “move forward the commercial goals of J.& J.” The documents also show that the company prepared a draft summary of a study that Dr. Biederman, of Harvard, was said to have written.

Dr. Biederman’s work helped to fuel a fortyfold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder and a rapid rise in the use of powerful, risky and expensive antipsychotic medicines in children.

Although many of his studies are small and often financed by drug makers, Dr. Biederman has had a vast influence on the field largely because of his position at one of the most prestigious medical institutions.

Massachusetts General said in a statement Monday that it took the accusations related to the research center “very seriously” and intended “to investigate these issues thoroughly.”

Johnson & Johnson makes a popular antipsychotic medicine called Risperdal, or risperidone. More than a quarter of its use is in children and adolescents.

Last week, a panel of federal drug experts said that medicines like Risperdal were being used too cavalierly in children and that regulators must do more to warn doctors of their substantial risks. Other popular antipsychotic medicines, also referred to as neuroleptics, are Zyprexa, made by Eli Lilly; Seroquel, made by AstraZeneca; Geodon, made by Pfizer; and Abilify, made by Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Thousands of parents have sued AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson, claiming that their children were injured after taking the medicines; they also claim that the companies minimized the risks of the drugs.

As part of the lawsuits, plaintiffs’ lawyers have demanded millions of documents from the companies. Nearly all have been provided under judicial seals, but a select few that mentioned Dr. Biederman became public after plaintiffs’ lawyers sought a judge’s order to require Dr. Biederman to be interviewed by them under oath.

In a motion filed two weeks ago, lawyers for the families argued that they should be allowed to interview Dr. Biederman under oath because his work had been crucial to the widespread acceptance of pediatric uses of antipsychotic medicines. To support this contention, the lawyers included more than two dozen documents, among them e-mail messages from Johnson & Johnson that mentioned Dr. Biederman. A judge has yet to rule on the request.

The documents offer an unusual glimpse into the delicate relationship that drug makers have with influential doctors.

In a November 1999 e-mail message, John Bruins, a Johnson & Johnson marketing executive, begs his supervisors to approve a $3,000 check to Dr. Biederman as payment for a lecture he gave at the University of Connecticut.

“Dr. Biederman is not someone to jerk around,” Mr. Bruins wrote. “He is a very proud national figure in child psych and has a very short fuse.”

Mr. Bruins wrote that Dr. Biederman was furious after Johnson & Johnson rejected a request that Dr. Biederman had made for a $280,000 research grant. “I have never seen someone so angry,” Mr. Bruins wrote. “Since that time, our business became non-existant (sic) within his area of control.”

Mr. Bruins concluded that unless Dr. Biederman received a check soon, “I am truly afraid of the consequences.”

A series of documents described the goals behind establishing the Johnson & Johnson Center for the study of pediatric psychopathology, where Dr. Biederman serves as chief.

A 2002 annual report for the center said its research must satisfy three criteria: improve psychiatric care for children, have high standards and “move forward the commercial goals of J.& J.,” court documents said.

“We strongly believe,” the report stated, “that the center’s systematic scientific inquiry will enhance the clinical and research foundation of child psychiatry and lead to the safer, more appropriate and more widespread use of medications in children.

“Without such data, many clinicians question the wisdom of aggressively treating children with medications, especially those like neuroleptics, which expose children to potentially serious adverse events.”

A February 2002 e-mail message from Georges Gharabawi, a Johnson & Johnson executive, said Dr. Biederman approached the company “multiple times to propose the creation” of the center. “The rationale of this center,” the message stated, “is to generate and disseminate data supporting the use of risperidone in” children and adolescents.

Documents show that Johnson & Johnson gave the center $700,000 in 2002 alone. Massachusetts General said in its statement on Monday that grant agreements indicated the center “was for scientific and educational purposes only and not for purposes of promoting, directly or indirectly, the products of Johnson & Johnson and its affiliates.”

A statement Monday from Janssen Pharmaceutica, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, said it helped finance the research center in 2002 “with an objective to conduct rigorous clinical trials to clarify appropriate use and dosing of Risperdal in children.”

A June 2002 e-mail message to Dr. Biederman from Dr. Gahan Pandina, a Johnson & Johnson executive, included a brief abstract of a study of Risperdal in children with disruptive behavior disorder. The message said the study was intended to be presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

“We have generated a review abstract,” Dr. Pandina wrote, “but I must review this longer abstract before passing this along.”

One problem with the study, Dr. Pandina wrote, is that the children given placebos and those given Risperdal both improved significantly. “So, if you could,” Dr. Pandina added, “please give some thought to how to handle this issue if it occurs.”

The draft abstract that Dr. Pandina put in the e-mail message, however, stated that only the children given Risperdal improved, while those given placebos did not. Dr. Pandina asked Dr. Biederman to sign a form listing himself as the author so the company could present the study to the conference, according to the message.

“I will review this morning,” responded Dr. Biederman, according to the documents. “I will be happy to sign the forms if you could kindly send them to me.” The documents do not make clear whether he approved the final summary of the brief abstract in similar form or asked to read the longer report on the study.

Drug makers have long hired professional writers to compose scientific papers and then recruited well-known doctors to list themselves as the author. The practice, known as ghostwriting, has come under intense criticism recently, and medical societies, schools and journals have condemned it.

In June, a Congressional investigation revealed that Dr. Biederman had failed to report to Harvard at least $1.4 million in outside income from Johnson & Johnson and other makers of antipsychotic medicines.

In one example, Dr. Biederman reported no income from Johnson & Johnson for 2001 in a disclosure report filed with the university. When asked by Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who is leading the Congressional inquiry, to check again, Dr. Biederman said he had received $3,500. But Johnson & Johnson told Mr. Grassley that it paid $58,169 to Dr. Biederman in 2001.

A Harvard spokesman, David J. Cameron, said Monday that the university was still reviewing Mr. Grassley’s accusations against Dr. Biederman. Mr. Cameron added that the university had not seen the drug company documents in question and that it was not directly involved in the child psychiatry center at Massachusetts General.

Calls to Dr. Biederman were not returned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/health/25psych.html?bl&ex=1227762000&en=ab700f6adb9c70e5&ei=5087%0A

Warren Buffett & Wealth Transfer

" ... the stock price of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has soared 14.4% in the less than a month since Mr. Paulson set in motion a global financial crisis. ... Berkshire owns Geico, a major insurance company; the government has crippled a Geico competitor, American International Group, by taking it over without the vote that AIG had promised shareholders in its initial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ... " - The New York Sun Editorial | September 29, 2008

As members of Congress prepare to vote on the Bush administration's plan to take troubled assets off bank balance sheets and put them in custody of the United States Treasury, here are two points to remember. First, the congressmen at least get a vote on the plan, which is more than the shareholders of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or AIG got before the government seized 80% of their companies.

And second, while the administration from the president on down is full of scare talk about a huge recession — "falls of 3,000 or 4,000 points on the Dow," one "Republican" "close to" the secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, quoted predicting over the weekend in the Telegraph — as we speak there are those making billions of dollars.

Not that there is anything wrong with making billions of dollars, the Bush bailout plan's new strictures on executive pay notwithstanding. It is far preferable to the alternative of losing billions of dollars. What's troubling in this case, though, is that the billions are being made and lost not necessarily as a result of any great business skill or foresight but as the consequence of arbitrary government decisions.

For all the talk about how the economy is taking a nosedive, the stock price of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has soared 14.4% in the less than a month since Mr. Paulson set in motion a global financial crisis by announcing the seizure of Fannie and Freddie. Berkshire owns Geico, a major insurance company; the government has crippled a Geico competitor, American International Group, by taking it over without the vote that AIG had promised shareholders in its initial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Bloomberg news service reported over the weekend that the New York Stock Exchange had waived its normal requirement of a shareholder vote because taking the time to complete a vote would "jeopardize the financial viability" of the insurer. Seems to us that having the government offer on the table is more than enough to backstop the company's financial viability. For an administration that is so determined to promote elections in un-free countries abroad, it sure seems to have discovered a sudden aversion to elections for shareholders here at home.

Mr. Buffett benefits not only from the changes in the insurance competitive landscape but also from the chance to invest in Goldman Sachs at bargain basement prices. No one is denying that Mr. Buffett is a financial whiz, but the sage of Omaha got quite a helping hand from Washington. Somehow we don't think those caps on executive pay that are part of the Paulson-Pelosi bailout plan are going to curb his windfall on the Goldman deal or on Geico's new advantage versus AIG.

Another company that has weathered the storm on Wall Street handily is Allianz, the parent of the bond firm Pimco. It closed at about $15 a share on Friday, about the same level as on the Friday before the Fannie rescue. Pimco's funds made a reported $2 billion the day after the Fannie and Freddie seizure was announced. We're betting the Paulson-Pelosi pay curbs don't apply to Pimco's Bill Gross. The New York Post's Terry Keenan reported yesterday that Alan Greenspan has joined the board of John Paulson's fund that has made billions shorting the housing market.

Again, there's nothing wrong with making money. But as Washington cries "crisis" and "recession" and seizes private property without shareholder votes while imposing new restrictions on executive pay at companies that participate, it's worth remembering that what is going on here is less wealth creation than a wealth transfer. It is a taking of property from private shareholders and mortgage holders and a transfer of wealth to bondholders, the federal government, and certain competing firms.

Political risk is an investment uncertainty that comes with the territory, but one normally hears about it more often in war-torn third-world countries or corrupt dictatorships than in America, which is supposed to have a predictable rule of law with protections for private property from arbitrary government decisions. Mark this danger. If the political risks in America are severe enough, global capital will flow elsewhere.

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/wealth-transfer/86787/

Terrorist "Linked to Al Qaeda" Killed in Pakistan Missile Strike was a CIA-ISI Cutout

By Alex Constantine

"According to officials ... "

The headline: "Rashid Rauf was linked to al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri" (Telegraph, 23 Nov 2008)

"A British al-Qaeda suspect reportedly killed by a US missile strike in a Pakistani tribal area was linked to the group's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to officials.

"Rashid Rauf and a Saudi militant called Abu Zubair al-Masri were among five killed in a missile attack in North Waziristan on Saturday. Rauf, a British national, was alleged to have been the mastermind of an al-Qaeda plot to blow up passenger aircraft in mid-air after they left London bound for the United States. ... "

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3507104/Rashid-Rauf-was-linked-to-al-Qaedas-number-two-Ayman-al-Zawahiri.html
•••••••
Re Rashid Rauf, the Supposed Al Quaeda "Connection" to bomb plot:

Families of those supposedly involved in the "plot" were paid off:

British Papers Paid Hundreds Of Thousands To Families Of Alleged Liquid Bombers: Why?
http://peroxideplotters.blogspot.com/

... Rashid Rauf, who was arrested in Pakistan, was the alleged al Qaeda connection to the alleged plot. But Rashid Rauf has played no role in the trial, because he's missing. He supposedly slipped away from a police escort last December while on his way to a court appearance. And he hasn't been seen since, although five policemen were arrested after his "escape" and nine have been sacked in its wake.

Where would the "Liquid Bomb" plot be without Rashid Rauf and Assad Sarwar? There would be no al Qaeda connection, no bomb-making expert, no bomb-making chemicals, nothing! So these are bad guys of the highest order: indispensable bad guys who allegedly meant us great harm. ...
•••••••
Rauf was Allowed to Escape from Prison

The "terrorist groups" that Rauf belonged to are "protected by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, which itself cooperates closely with Britain's MI6, as befits a virtual branch of the CIA":

From: Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War
winterpatriot.blogspot.com

... There are many ways to eliminate a cutout. Rashid Rauf supposedly "escaped" from the Pakistani police, even though it's fairly clear that he was deliberately released. And we may never see him again.

Thus the cutout has been removed, and the trail from the knuckleheads to the planners has been cut. But if you could follow it, where would the severed trail lead? To J-e-M? L-e-T? al Qaeda? More than one of the above -- or even all three?

Here we can get profoundly confused, especially if we forget that J-e-M is tolerated and L-e-T openly supported by the military government of Pakistan, which itself doesn't like India very much.

Both these banned terrorist groups are apparently protected by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, which itself cooperates closely with Britain's MI6, as befits a virtual branch of the CIA.

You may recall Major General (Retired) Tanvir Hussain, who in the previous session served as Parliamentary Defense Secretary. Major Hussain raised a few eyebrows in a parliamentary debate when he said he had been a member of L-e-T. When he was asked for clarification, he didn't distance himself from the terrorists, nor did he claim that his association with them had ended. Instead the Parliamentary Defense Secretary of America's leading Asian ally in the Global War On Terror said that he speaks at L-e-T's conventions and admitted that he gives them other forms of assistance, too.

Don't be surprised if you haven't heard of this. Tanvir Hussain's statements were reported matter-of-factly in the Pakistani press, mentioned in a quizzical way by an Australian daily, and howled over by the Indian papers. But they were never reported anywhere else; no Western "news" outlet breathed a word of the story.

http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/2008/01/inadequate-deception-impossible-plots.html
•••••••
Pakistani officials allowed Rauf to escape from prison, pt. II - awaiting extradition ...

US Kills Al Qaeda Mastermind of Airline Liquid Bomb Plot
Rashid Rauf Was Target of CIA Predator Attack, Pakistan Officials Say
By HABIBULLAH KHAN, NICHOLAS SCHIFRIN and BRIAN ROSS

November 22, 2008—Rashid Rauf was arrested in Pakistan and was remanded to Adiala prison which, according to human rights campaigners, has been the scene of physical abuse and torture of terrorism suspects.

In December 2006 he resurfaced in court. A judge dismissed terrorism charges but said he should still face explosives and false identity allegations.

The UK pressed for his extradition over the 2002 murder of his uncle. That application was progressing when he escaped in December 2007.

According to the official version of events, he managed to unlock his own handcuffs and escaped while being allowed to pray alone at a mosque near the courthouse. The mosque in question is said to have high walls leading to open fields.

It's not clear to this day whether that is genuinely what happened, the suspicion being that pro-Islamist intelligence officials in Pakistan helped the Briton to quietly flee. ...

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6312852&page=1

Extradition to the UK would have been a critical priority if Rauf was, as officials maintain, an "Al Qaeda link":

THE CURIOUS CASE OF RASHID RAUF - INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO. 161, By B. Raman: " ... Since Rashid Rauf was projected by the Pakistani authorities as the most important player in the plot and as the man, whose arrest led to the unearthing of the planned terrorist conpiracy in the UK, one would have thought that his being handed-over to the British for interrogation would have been of the highest priority to the British investigating authorities. But, no action has been taken so far. ... "
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers21%5Cpaper2052.html

Top British terror suspect escapes

Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
Sunday December 16, 2007
The Observer

" ... Rashid Rauf's escape now threatens to spark a major diplomatic row by reigniting questions about why Pakistan's authorities had not approved his extradition, despite repeated requests from Britain dating back more than a year. ... The fact Rauf was able to escape so easily will raise questions about the security status given to him by the Pakistani authorities. ... "

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3103358
•••••••
Rauf was a British Citizen
November 23, 2008

MPs question killing of terror suspect
www.timesonline.co.uk

... Rauf is believed to have been one of five militants killed in Pakistan yesterday.

Critics of the action include Andrew Dismore, who chairs parliament’s human rights committee, and Patrick Mercer, former shadow security minister, who said: 'This raises the question of how much cooperation the British intelligence agencies provided in what is ultimately the execution of a British subject. The government must explain its involvement.' ... ”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5213583.ece
••••••
Also see: "Fade to Black: Another Terror Plot Unravels," By Chris Floyd, informationclearinghouse.info, 08/21/06.

http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/04/into-dark-pentagon-plan-to-foment.html

Imperialism and International Migration in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1961-1966

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Publication Date: 01-JAN-04
Author: Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse

Abstract. This article re-examines the relationship between United States imperialism in Santo Domingo and the advent of mass Dominican migration to the United States in the early 1960s. There was no coherent imperial plan to displace Dominicans from their homeland. The United States relied on a combination of brutal domination and negotiated consent in its attempts to control politics in Santo Domingo. Knowingly or not, Dominicans capitalized on Washington's desire to present the US as a friend of the Dominican people to wedge their way from the periphery to the centre of the imperial system. However, the rise of migration did not signal the beginning of a new, more egalitarian alternative to imperialism in hemispheric relations. More research is needed about the new system of international inequality that emerged as Dominican migrants moved back and forth between a perpetually reeling Dominican economy and the bleak urban spaces of the United States.
**********

In 1968 an anthropologist studying rural to urban migration in the Dominican Republic found, to her surprise, that reaching Santo Domingo was not the ultimate goal of the campesinos she interviewed. As she expected, the rural population was mobilizing in response to shifting economic conditions and rumours of distant urban comforts. And the largest number of those who left their villages did end up in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo. But peasants' notion of progress, she found, was shaped around the eventual prospect of reaching New York (Gonzalez 1970).

That Dominicans might imagine a world in which movement from rural backwardness to urban modernity had its logical conclusion in the United States is, in retrospect, no surprise. From the middle of the nineteenth century, relations between the United States and the Dominican Republic were both intimate and brutally lopsided. Representatives of the United States government sought to purchase a portion of the Dominican Republic shortly after it achieved independence from Haiti, and later President Ulysses S. Grant nearly succeeded in a project to annex the entire country. In the 1890s a group of Wall Street chiselers, with connections in Washington, purchased the Dominican national debt. In collaboration with Dominican dictator Ulises Hereaux, they drove the country into bankruptcy. In the wake of that disaster, the United States government, declaring itself the arbiter of civilized economic behaviour in the hemisphere, took control of the Dominican customs house. In 1916, the United States military occupied and ruled the country by force for eight years, then supplied a 30-year dictatorship with legitimacy and aid, then invaded and occupied a second time in 1965. United States movies, music, and consumer products also leaked into the small national market. Representatives of the United States occasionally made earnest, if self-serving, attempts to alleviate poverty, build a modern state, and establish a democratic polity in the Dominican Republic. A strident rhetoric of friendship and tutorship, and an open assumption of the superiority of North American society, accompanied these wildly asymmetrical arrangements. The image of the United States as the epitome of modern life overshadowed the projects of economic extraction and national modernization begun under its condescending tutelage (Atkins and Wilson 1998; Gleijeses 1978; Moya Pons 1995; Roorda 1998; Veeser 2002).

In short, the Dominican Republic was a primary target of United States imperialism as it evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, the United States held a powerfully ambivalent grip on the imaginations of Dominican elites, who both admired and deplored the neighbour that so dominated them. And as popular sectors began to incorporate the idea of progress into their own lives in the middle of the twentieth century, it is little wonder that the United States lured them as well. The United States was in many ways a more convincing symbol of power, modernity, and well-being than the intrusive Dominican state. The image of New York was widely diffused in Dominican popular culture, offering a more convincing icon of progress than Santo Domingo. This deep historical influence of United States imperialism on Dominican imaginations makes peasants' unexpected desire to travel to the United States in 1968 wholly understandable.

What was surprising, after the early 1960s, was that the prospect of reaching the most famous city in the heart of the imperial system suddenly came within reach for many thousands of Dominicans. As in much of Latin America, the middle twentieth century had seen a gradual increase in Dominican travel to the United States. In the 1930s, 1,150 Dominicans immigrated to the United States. In the 1940s, another 5,627 joined them, followed by 9,897 in the 1950s. But between the death of Rafael Trujillo in 1961 and the United States invasion of Santo Domingo in the spring of 1965, the number of immigrant visas granted to Dominicans jumped to nearly 10,000 a year. With slight fluctuations, immigrant visas averaged about 10,000 a year for the next decade, then grew steadily for the rest of the century (Immigration and Naturalization Service 1999). By 1970, about 100,000 Dominicans lived legally in New York City (Graham 1996). Also, beginning in the period between 1961 and 1965, 20,000-30,000 Dominican tourists and students received permission to travel to the United States each year (Graham 1996; Immigration and Naturalization Service 1999; Mitchell 1992). This increase in tourism persisted throughout subsequent decades, providing still more opportunities for migration, as many Dominicans overstayed their non-immigrant visas in order to work. Starting from almost zero, in the span of a decade Dominicans became one of the largest new immigrant groups in New York, and New York became one of the largest Dominican cities.

The accepted wisdom in United States history holds that the boom in new immigration from the Third World in the 1960s resulted from the passage of the Immigration Reform Act in 1965 (Foner 2000). The 1965 act is usually seen primarily as its liberal sponsors intended: as a repeal of national origins restrictions originally put in place in the 1920s to keep out undesirable races. The reform granted a set number of immigrant visas to the eastern and western hemispheres, without discriminatory national origins quotas. This change in policy spurred transformation of New York into an archipelago of new ethnic neighbourhoods, home to hundreds of thousands of new migrants from the Third World. New York's largest group of newcomers after 1965, Dominican migrants led this remarkable ethnic explosion. But the Immigration Reform Act does not help to explain the sudden jump in Dominican migration. The Dominican Republic, like all the republics of the western hemisphere, had been exempted from the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. While often imagined as a removal of restrictions, the 1965 reform actually placed the first numerical restriction on the number of visas that could be granted to Dominicans and other Latin Americans. In any event, the legislation passed in 1965 could not have been a condition for the explosion in Dominican migration. By the time the reforms were enacted in 1968, Dominicans' colonization of New York was already well underway (Reimers 1985).

A shift in international politics, not the reform of immigration laws, produced the sudden opportunity for migration and a massive displacement of Dominicans to New York. In the early 1960s, immediately after the fall of the Trujillo dictatorship in Santo Domingo, politicians in Washington scurried to prevent what they feared might become a second Cuban Revolution, sending aid, advisors, and eventually tens of thousands of United States Marines to Santo Domingo. As its meddling in Dominican affairs increased in the early 1960s, the United States government built a large visa office in Santo Domingo and a second in Santiago, greatly increasing the number of visas it granted. United States officials also sometimes provided visas to help the local government deport troublesome members of the Dominican opposition, pushing them into exile in New York or Puerto Rico. Five years before immigration politics in Washington placed a limit on the number of Dominicans who could acquire visas, United States foreign policy created an infrastructure capable of processing tens of thousands of visa applicants per year.

To historians of the Dominican Republic, and perhaps to a majority of Dominican citizens, the argument that US foreign policy concerns, or imperialism, helped to form a Dominican colony in New York will seem painfully obvious. It has been decades since scholars first argued that Washington opened up migration as a "safety valve" to help stabilize the complicated politics in Santo Domingo after Trujillo's death (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Levitt 2001). Sherri Grasmuck and Patricia Pessar, in their essential work on Dominican migration, also observed that emigration to the United States served as a stabilizing force in the 12-year regime of Joaquin Balaguer (1966-1978), providing an exit for political actors excluded by its authoritarianism and social classes impoverished by its development model. This could be seen as a goal of United States foreign policy, since bolstering Balaguer eventually became a crucial part of Washington's meddling in the Dominican Republic. Grasmuck and Pessar were careful to point out that at the time the consulates were constructed "it was not possible to foresee the longer term consequences of a growing community of Dominicans living abroad" (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991, 33). Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernandez have likewise distinguished Washington's short-term goals from what they take to be Balaguer's long-term goals (Hernandez 2002; Torres-Saillant and Hernandez 1998). (1) Others have been less circumspect. In Santo Domingo it has become common wisdom to imagine that Washington carefully designed the tearful separation of Dominicans from their native soil. Frank Canelo, writing a series on international migration in the Dominican news weekly !Ahora! in 1977, suggested, albeit in the form of a rhetorical question, that Dominicans had been "manipulated to immigrate to the United States exactly as Puerto Ricans had been" (Canelo 1982, 66). Two decades later many Dominican intellectuals presume that the reason the United States built new embassies in the early 1960s and flexibilizo (that is, eased) the granting of visas was to empty the Dominican Republic of surplus population. (2)

This essay returns to the crucial years between the death of Rafael Trujillo and the second United States military intervention in Santo Domingo. While it confirms much of the detail first uncovered by Christopher Mitchell in his excellent analysis of United States foreign policy and Dominican immigration (1992), it offers a new interpretive perspective. With the exception of a small number of deportations, the idea that Washington conceived of migration as a political "safety valve" in the early 1960s probably overstates the intentions of United States representatives. The evidence suggests that Dominicans themselves made use of the crisis in the early 1960s to put massive pressure on the United States consular offices in Santo Domingo. Consular construction was a response to pressure by angry Dominican visa seekers. Representatives of the United States government, who had few scruples, but neither the intelligence nor the forethought to manipulate the Dominican masses, were forced to accept Dominican migration as a quid pro quo for their claims to be the sole friend and ally of the Dominican people. The sudden jump in Dominican migration to the United States is an example of just how difficult the prospect of imperial control proved to be. And it is an example of how short-term crisis management on the periphery of an imperial system can create profound, unanticipated, long-term transformations at the core.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, during the United States occupation of 1916-1924, and again after the United States invasion of 1965, Dominicans engaged with imperialism by means of a pervasive and often quite astute nationalism. But calling for national sovereignty, with or without social revolution, was only one way to engage empire in the early 1960s. The events that led to the construction of new consulates in the Dominican Republic show how many Dominicans, whether conscious of the choice or not, chose instead to find space for survival within the architecture of international inequality and imperial self-justification. Instead of seeking to dismantle the empire, many sought to move from point to point within it. The pervasive notion of progress, the shape that popular aspirations took in a context of inter-national inequality, made this movement seem natural. Caught unawares by a great surge in demand--perhaps convinced of their own rhetoric about the openness and friendship of the US toward Dominicans, perhaps simply trapped by it--US policy-makers responded by making room for unprecedented mobility. Still, if the steady stream of Dominicans escaping to the United States was an alternative form of Dominican agency within the limits of the international system, to many nationalists (including many who found themselves boarding airliners to New York) it was also one of the most ironic and infuriating aspects of the United States' presence in Santo Domingo. The empire had insinuated itself into the available solutions to the very problems it helped to create (Hoffnung-Garskof 2002).

Nor did the aggregate effects of migration do much to level the terrible inequalities of power and wealth between the United States and the Dominican Republic, as some modernization theorists predicted (Georges 1990; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Piore 1979). Despite the very real space for economic mobility and democracy opened by the construction of the visa offices, widespread movement to New York did not erode the broader architecture of empire in the Dominican Republic. Rather, as United States imperialism evolved along new lines in the 1980s and 1990s, the relationship between the United States and the Dominican Republic revolved increasingly around an exchange between a reeling national economy and an embattled ethnic enclave in post-industrial New York City. This essay confines itself to the early opening of Dominican international migration during the high water mark of Washington liberals' Cold War imperialism. Yet it fits into a broader attempt to rethink the relationship between imperialism and migration in the Dominican Republic and beyond. The events analyzed here should lead us to ponder not only how imperial policies, ideologies, or institutions contributed to international migration, but also how the tug of war between imperialism and nationalism formed the cultural and intellectual context within which Dominicans made sense of their newfound mobility. Finally, we should ask how migration and imperialism evolved together through the 1980s and beyond the Cold War. How did new regimes of national and international inequality reshape the meanings of migration, and how did migration help to form these newer systems of hemispheric exchange (Hoffnung-Garskof forthcoming)?

The Death of the Goat: Dictatorship and Hemispheric Crisis in Santo Domingo

To understand how imperialism helped open the doors to migration in the Dominican Republic in the early 1960s it is first necessary to construct a basic narrative of the political history of the Republic at the time. Most important, the death of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in 1961 and the sudden crisis it produced in local and international affairs are an essential backdrop for Washington's intense intervention in Santo Domingo in the early 1960s and for Dominican settlement in New York.

For 31 years Rafael Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic, skillfully balancing the vicious impunity with which he conducted local affairs against the need for friendship from the United States. Trujillo was fully a product of the classical era of United States imperialism in the Dominican Republic. A watchman in a sugar enclave east of Santo Domingo, he was trained as a soldier by the US Marines. He rose to prominence through the national army created by the United States military government during its tenure from 1916 to 1924. Close friendships with important figures in the Marines and the War Department in Washington helped to assure recognition, aid, technical assistance, and military supplies when he took power in Santo Domingo a mere six years after the United States military government departed. Trujillo then grew up under the Good Neighbour Policy. Washington, proclaiming an end to its interventionism in the hemisphere, willfully ignored the cruelty and illegitimacy of regimes like his. In the 1950s Trujillo integrated himself into the security build-up of the early Cold War. The United States installed a guided missile base in the Dominican Republic and helped Trujillo to beef up his weaponry, passing him off as a bulwark against international communism. Trujillo's tyranny was therefore, in the strange calculus of United States foreign policy, part of the fortress that protected "freedom" in the hemisphere (Atkins and Wilson 1972; Roorda 1998; Vega 1990, 1991, 1992).

Trujillo served the purposes of the United States in exchange for a free hand in ruling the Dominican Republic. But Trujillo took much of the initiative in defining his relationship with Washington. He was a manipulator, not a puppet. He kept United States congressmen and lobbyists on his payroll, and set up newspapers and radio stations in the United States to broadcast favourable accounts of his regime. In Santo Domingo, too, Trujillo made the United States serve his purposes, sometimes as an ally, and sometimes as a foil for his nationalism. He paraded military hardware and representatives from the United States in the banquets, parades, and other elaborate displays of power that constituted the public culture of the regime. At the same time he used well-orchestrated defiance of the United States as an extraordinarily powerful tool for garnering local support (Derby 1997; Marrero Aristy 1998; Vega 1990).

Despite this undercurrent of anti-imperialism, Trujillo's alliance with the United States, especially the United States military, persisted into the late 1950s. In 1959 and 1960 the regime in Santo Domingo began to implode in the face of a growing internal resistance, the disastrous economic effects of Trujillo's venal policies, and widespread capital flight. As the Organization of American States pushed the United States to cut Trujillo loose, politicians in Washington waffled over whether to support a coup. Some argued that toppling the dictator might lead to unrest and provide a foothold for communism. Others argued that supporting him might build up resentment of the United States and provide a foothold for communism (Atkins and Wilson 1998). Finally, in May of 1961, a mere six weeks after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, an anti-Trujillo conspiracy succeeded in killing the dictator. Armed by the CIA, and likely given encouragement by United States businessmen in Santo Domingo, a group of disgruntled military and political figures waylaid and killed Trujillo on the Sanchez Highway, west of the capital (Diederich 1978; Wiarda 1980).

The assassination resulted in exactly the kind of unrest that some in Washington had feared. Trujillo's brothers and sons, still in control of the military, quickly unleashed a reign of vengeful terror on the capital. Meanwhile, large crowds began to assemble in the Parque Colon, along the Conde, and into the Parque Independencia, the main artery and public spaces in the capital's Colonial District. They demanded an answer to their hunger and poverty, and the departure of the surviving Trujillos and Joaquin Balaguer, who was the dictator's handpicked president at the time of the assassination. They tore down statues of the dictator, and clashed with police, armed forces, and paleros, bands of thugs armed by the government. Even after Balaguer and the Trujillos fled the country in early 1962, and a civilian-military Council of State began planning new elections, the confrontations did not subside. Newly elected, and still smarting from the unmitigated disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy saw the Dominican Republic as a major crisis that might swing the Caribbean toward Cuba, and further damage his reputation as a Cold Warrior. The Dominican Republic could not be allowed to go communist (Martin 1966).

President Kennedy and the Washington liberals who surrounded him were a new brand of imperialist. They espoused the theory that the problem in Latin America was one of instability caused by backwardness and poverty. Communists, according to this view, were cunningly able to take advantage of instability to take over national politics. The answer was to use the power of Washington to alleviate poverty in the region, to breed positive public regard for the United States, and to provide the military might to crack down heavily on any sign of communism. Liberals, steeped in a New Deal ideology of social peace, hoped that moderate reform could be used to outflank revolution (Schoultz 1998). The Dominican Republic, which seemed to resemble Cuba in many ways, would be the crucial first test of this new strategy. Kennedy sent John Bartlow Martin, a journalist and speechwriter, to Santo Domingo as ambassador to coddle "moderate" anti-communists, create a Dominican equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and generally manage the situation. Washington also hurriedly put a novel array of tools at Martin's disposal: the newly created Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps (Martin 1966).

Despite the great burst of energy invested in this new Latin America strategy, the Dominican Republic would become one of the first places where the initial idealism of the Alliance for Progress would boil down to its cynical core of meddling and repression (LaFeber 1983). Helping the country to create a just social order or a democratic government was, in the end, a secondary consideration. At heart Martin's mission was to achieve stability and to avoid the political catastrophe that appearing "soft" on communism would inflict on Democrats if they made a second mistake in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. Washington would show its fundamental commitment to stable anti-Cuban governments in Santo Domingo, even at the expense of democracy, through its eventual support for the junta installed in a 1963 coup, its invasion of Santo Domingo in 1965, and its support for the authoritarian rule of Joaquin Balaguer from 1966 to 1978 (Gleijeses 1978).

These were the political and economic circumstances that gave birth to the colonization of New York City by thousands of Dominican citizens. From the moment of Trujillo's death, through the United States invasion of 1965, and into the early years of the Balaguer regime, the United States grew ever more inextricably involved in the politics, the economy, and the local workings of Dominican society. With the high visibility of Marines, investors, advisors, and tourists, the 1960s seemed, as historian Frank Moya Pons has written, to be a period of rapid "North Americanization" on the island (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988; Moya Pons 1975, 1986). Not only did this mean that the fingerprints of the United States were evident on the economic and political system from which migrants began to flee, it also meant that the process of Americanization, a central challenge for Dominicans who moved to New York, was already a hotly contested topic in Santo Domingo when the first settlers boarded planes to the United States. Washington's attempts to remake the Dominican Republic, beginning with the customs receivership in 1904 and now reaching renewed heights in the 1960s, meant that assimilation was a central problem for Dominican identity with or without migration. But, most crucially for the present discussion, the political crises of the 1960s also provided the sudden opportunity for Dominicans to flee the country through a new, highly politicized portal: the United States Visa Office.

Politics at the Visa Office: 1961-1965

Because Trujillo had strictly controlled the international travel of his subjects, the dictator's death was a decisive moment for Dominican settlement in New York. In the 1950s, wealthy families in many Latin American countries began flying to the United States to vacation, to shop, and to form middle-class immigrant enclaves. Cuban elites moved comfortably across the border in both directions between Havana and Miami, and South Americans began their own settlements of professionals, students, and exiles in Queens. Dominicans also felt this pull. In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s the average number of Dominicans migrating to the United States each year rose from 110, to 560, to 980 (Immigration and Naturalization Service 1999). Still Dominicans lagged behind Argentines, Colombians, and especially Cubans, because getting out of Santo Domingo was not easy. In the first place, the high cost of passport applications and the severe penalties for crossing the border without a passport prevented most Dominicans from traveling internationally. But even for those who could afford the application, the Dominican government presented great obstacles. According to one report, in 1959 the dictatorship received 19,631 passport applications but granted only 1,805 passports (Canelo 1982). Historians have offered several explanations for Trujillo's stinginess with passports. Trujillo's economic advisors believed the Dominican Republic to be underpopulated and sought to encourage both fertility and immigration. The restriction of any outward flow of Dominicans was owed, in part, to this conviction that population growth was crucial to modernization and national consolidation. But restricting the availability of passports also had a political purpose. Preventing the escape of possible dissidents was one way of ensuring loyalty to the regime. If an enemy crossed the dictator, or an ally passed out of favour, he or she had to endure the consequences from inside the country. By preventing his opponents' escape Trujillo may also have intended to prevent the flow of information between disaffected Dominicans and opponents on the world stage (Hernandez 2002). This was in contrast with the experience in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, where the government allowed, even encouraged, dissenters to emigrate as a way to diffuse organized opposition. Though his strategy was different, like Fidel Castro, Trujillo sought to control the terms, transactions, and symbolism of emigration, deploying his power over national borders to consolidate his political power (Garcia 1996; Immigration and Naturalization Service 1999). Trujillo's model of control over travel was perhaps workable only because of the relatively weak opposition inside the Dominican Republic.

Trujillo's death, however, brought a sudden relaxation of Dominican controls on international travel. In the winter of 1961 and the spring of 1962, the Council of State periodically stepped up the number of passports it issued. (3) It is impossible to know the exact reason for the change in passport policy, but the context provides some clues. The Dominican Congress announced a new guarantee of freedom of travel just before the Council of State took power. This act was likely an attempt to convince the Organization of American States that progress was being made on human rights (New York Times 1961; Bianchi Gundian 1967; Mitchell 1992). The United States frankly opposed the measure, favouring forcible deportation of any political actors who could not be controlled. (4) Freedom of travel, especially the right of return from exile, was important to Latin American sensibilities, however, and the United States was likelier to relax economic sanctions if the OAS went along. It seems likely, then, that the Council of State began dispensing passports as part of a broader attempt to please Latin American observers.

Quite possibly the change in policy also reflected the importance of travel for many powerful sectors of Dominican society, including the families of many of those working in the government. Trujillo had used travel restrictions to prevent many of his collaborators from defecting. This meant not only that middle-class and elite Dominicans had pent-up desires to travel, study, and shop in the United States (17,000 had been denied passports only two years earlier). They were also keenly aware that they needed a way to escape as Dominican politics swayed uneasily between neo-Trujillismo and social revolt. President Joaquin Balaguer was only the most prominent member of the old regime who fled to New York City in the early 1960s in order to save his skin. As political tides ebbed and flowed, no one could be sure that he or she would not be the next in line to need to flee the country.

What is more, after the departure of the Trujillo brothers and sons, no one in power had much reason to prevent opponents from escaping. To the contrary, now that Trujillo's clear monopoly on power had been broken, it seemed ideal to switch strategies and adopt the more established model of encouraging exit to diminish the number of dissenting voices in Santo Domingo. Making it easy for political opponents to leave might help to secure power in a political crowded landscape, and it would surely help present a positive face to the international community. It seems likely that this shift in strategy occurred to the members of the Council of State without prompting. But if it did not, Ambassadors Hill and Martin were on hand to point it out to them. Martin recalled providing visas for these deportations at the request of the Council of State, despite some personal misgivings. Yet secret documents suggest that United States policy-makers were active advocates of political deportations throughout the early 1960s, seeing this as a strategy for getting rid of remnants of the Trujillo military or, more frequently, young nationalists and leftists (Martin 1966). (5) Issuing passports more freely might, then, have been a way to satisfy Latin American calls for freedom of travel, pent-up Dominican desires for exit, and United States pressure to push certain Dominicans into exile.

Finally, Dominican officials may have quickly discovered a potential for income, both licit and illicit, in passport transactions. When tens of thousands of middle- and working-class Dominicans began lining up alongside elites and political refugees, it was surely a windfall for the officials who collected the application fees and the bribes that were required to speed their processing (Hendricks 1974).

Whatever the exact combination of reasons behind it, the change in passport policy abruptly loosened the reins on Dominican international travel. Just as quickly, it passed them into the hands of United States visa officers. Each time the Council of State increased the number of passports granted, the US delegation saw a sudden surge in visa applications. (6) The United States, it appears, is where almost all Dominicans with passports wished to travel.

The fact that more passports automatically translated into more visa applications, while it seemed perfectly natural at the time, deserves some consideration. It is a pattern that continued long after the crisis of the early 1960s passed. The United States was the destination, for instance, of some 80% of Dominican tourists (many of whom were in fact clandestine migrants) between 1965 and 1975. (7)

Among the reasons for this choice of destination was, as has already been suggested, the way the dominating presence of the United States in Dominican life, and the widespread assumption of United States superiority, modernity, and power, shaped Dominican aspirations. The United States controlled marvellous symbols of power: warships, airplanes, tanks, dollars, and rocket ships. New York was a fantastic city of skyscrapers and underground trains. If progress was what Dominicans were after, it was clear that New York was preferable to both the campo (countryside) and the capital. But the imperial system provided more than an ideology supporting travel to the United States, it created a transportation infrastructure that enforced that ideology. In practice, San Juan, Miami, and New York were the necessary portals between Santo Domingo and the rest of the world. Airline routes out of Santo Domingo nearly all required at least a stopover in United States territory. In the web of trade and travel routes that crossed the hemisphere, the Dominican Republic was a tiny spoke off the giant hub of the United States (Oficina Nacional de Estadistica 1959-1965).

Airplane routes were only one of the sinews connecting the two societies culturally, economically, religiously, and personally. Dominican business and political elites had ties to North American companies or directly to the embassy. In San Pedro de Macoris, local Protestants, whose parents had been brought from the West Indies to work in sugar factories built with US investments, used ties with various Episcopalian dioceses in the US to get to New York (Graham 1996; Yolanda Richardson, author interview, 2001). The descendants of Puerto Rican migrants, also brought to the island to work in the sugar industry and in administrative posts during the US occupation in the 1920s, could claim US citizenship and settle, along with their close relatives, in New York (Juan D. Balcacer and Luis Simo, author interviews, 2000).

Perhaps just as important, however, was the way that representatives from the United States imagined and publicized that country's role in managing Dominican internal affairs. As anti-Yankee sentiment began to spread in Santo Domingo, the representatives of the United States saw themselves forced to respond carefully to Dominican public opinion. Earlier in the century Washington had dressed even its dictatorial military government over the Dominican Republic in an ideology of sovereignty, equality, and mutual friendship between the two nations (Derby 1998). Now as students and workers across Latin America began turning their ardent nationalism against the imperial meddling of the United States, it became all the more important to Washington's aims to put a friendly face on such meddling, even while intensifying the meddling itself. Claims of friendship and attempts to project the US as eminently able to solve the development problems of its weaker allies were the new justification for empire. It was only natural that Dominicans would turn to the United States for help in solving their need to escape the country. The pressure on the United States visa office in Santo Domingo in 1962 was not unlike that in Havana in 1960, Saigon in 1975, or Tehran in 1979.

Once the Dominican state relinquished control over travel as a political tool, it fell to Washington, actively seeking impose its own order in Santo Domingo, to take charge of the border. Washington's desire to manage Dominican public opinion gave Dominican visa seekers considerable leverage. In early 1962, as Democrats in Washington grew increasingly jittery about the constant unrest in Santo Domingo and the growing visa backlog, Ambassador John Bartlow Martin worried, "the situation has taken on political importance, and the public image of the United States is being impaired." (8) The long lines at the visa office undermined his attempt to present the United States as the unconditional and generous ally of the Dominican people.

The political geography of Santo Domingo aggravated the problem of the "visa mess." Between the death of Trujillo and the election of Juan Bosch, varied opposition forces gathered huge crowds of students and, most shockingly to the representatives of the United States, youths from the poor barrios north of the city. Smaller spontaneous disturbances, or turbas, broke out periodically in the capital as barrio residents hunted down calies, the thugs and spies who had long patrolled on behalf of the dictator, and crowds tore down the many statues of Trujillo erected about the city (Fortunato 1998). Though the interior of the country and most of the capital remained peaceful, these demonstrations had disproportionate symbolic power because they took place in the old Colonial Zone. Usually they began at the Parque de Colon, proceeded down the Conde, and ended at the Parque de Independencia or the Presidential Palace several blocks farther on. This sliver of Santo Domingo was home to banks, government offices, stores, nightclubs, and other social spaces that had been explicitly reserved for the powerful when Trujillo rebuilt the capital after the San Zenon hurricane in 1930 (Derby 1998).

The central avenue of the Colonial Zone was also home to the United States visa office, where, by 1962, the sudden increase in applications was much more than the small staff could manage. Lines had grown to more than 500 applicants daily, clogging the stairway and stretching around the corner on the hot pavement of the Conde. The wait for an application to be processed stretched to as long as 64 weeks. As groups of young demonstrators marched along the Conde, they invariably met an angry queue, suffocating on the hot pavement and ready to vent its frustrations. The mingling of visa applicants and protesters, Ambassador Martin later wrote, produced frequent "full-fledged anti-American riots" in front of the consulate. "On some days it almost seemed that the young vice consuls spent more time throwing tear gas out the windows than issuing visas"(Martin 1966, 98).

Perhaps the rioters perceived that demonstrations against the United States were an effective way to force the embassy into solving the visa backlog. Members of the Council of State, after all, spent their lives warning and threatening that unless the United States delegation met one set of conditions or another, the country was sure to go communist. This was standard political rhetoric used throughout Latin America--an attempt to manipulate the fears and ignorance of United States officials and to turn the rhetoric of tutelage and friendship back on itself. One member of the Council of State threatened Ambassador Martin that he personally would seek to create a public relations catastrophe for the United States if the visa backlog was not quickly resolved (Martin 1966). These kinds of threats continued well into the 1970s, when Dominicans politicians and journalists frequently complained of ill treatment at the hands of United States visa officers, and, in one instance, responded to rumours of widespread crackdowns on undocumented migrants with the intimation that this would lead to disaffection with the United States and a Cuban-style revolution (El Nacional, 1971).

Maybe the riots were a way for the crowds outside the consulate similarly to twist the arm of the ambassador. But whether the rioters in Santo Domingo understood themselves to be pressuring the United States to grant more visas, or were simply expressing their immediate outrage at the long lines, the turbas outside the visa office did inspire Kennedy and Martin to quick action. By April of 1962, Martin, Kennedy, and the State Department agreed to contract two Mexican-American officers from the Los Angeles Police Department to advise Dominican police on riot control. They appointed a Puerto Rican public relations firm to work on improving the image of the Council of State and the United States. And they agreed to "take immediate steps to reduce Embassy Santo Domingo's visa backlog to the point where it is no longer a political liability." (9) By September, they built a new and larger consulate in the western suburbs far from the troubled city centre. They built a second consulate in the city of Santiago, which handled 20% of non-immigrant visa applications in the Dominican Republic from 1963 to 1970, when it closed (Mitchell 1992). The Santiago consulate also served as a base for monitoring the political situation in the north. (10) Kennedy and Martin increased the consular personnel, sending in a "planeload of visa experts" and hiring more local staff. And for a brief time, they considered accepting visa applications by mail, thereby reducing the possibility of large crowds at the embassy. (11) Also in 1962, Dominican protests prevented the United States from shutting down two temporary processing centres that received applications for visas in Manzanillo and La Romana. (12)

The United States responded to the turbas, in short, by making it much easier for large numbers of Dominicans to get quickly into the United States. The resolution of the visa crisis created an active border between the Dominican Republic and the United States where none had existed before. Washington built an infrastructure capable of processing tens of thousands of immigrant visa requests and scores of thousands of tourist visa applications each year. The number of United States immigrant visas issued in the Dominican Republic rose quickly, from 464 in 1960, to 1,789 in 1961, to 3,680 in 1962, to 9,857 in 1963, when the new consulates were fully functioning. With some fluctuations, the number of immigrant visas granted would remain at this level, averaging just over 10,000 a year over the next decade (Immigration and Naturalization Service 1999). Employers in New York undoubtedly enjoyed the influx of a new, vulnerable workforce. But, unlike most previous instances of migration, employers did not need to send labour recruiters to round up new workers. Dominicans took hold of the opportunity created in 1962 and quickly laid the foundations of what would become the largest immigrant enclave in the city of New York over the following 25 years, as well as smaller settlements in San Juan, Boston, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

Ambassador Martin did not, however, change the rules governing visa eligibility as has sometimes been supposed. In fact, according to United States immigration law, there was already no theoretical limit to the number of visas that could be granted to Dominicans deemed deserving by consular officials. In accordance with existing immigration law, visa applicants had to pass literacy tests, convince consular officials that they would not become public charges, and satisfy basic health requirements. Also they could not be polygamists, prostitutes, homosexuals, or communists. Local officials may have enjoyed considerable leeway in interpreting these rules, tightening or loosening them in response to political considerations or individual whim. But since there had never been anything resembling the flood of applications that reached the visa office in the early 1960s, there is no way to compare the way officers interpreted the regulations before and after the death of Trujillo. Nonetheless, according to confidential reports, the visa office rejected close to 40% of applicants even as it sought a way to resolve the problem of angry crowds. (13) This suggests that Martin's goal was improving public perception without lowering the bar for immigration. As Christopher Mitchell has argued, Martin's solution was to apply, effectively and expeditiously, the existing US immigration laws to all who requested visas. His hope was that by increasing bureaucratic efficiency he could take the politics out of the visa process (Mitchell 1992). Of course this was, in itself, a political objective.

To call this policy of consular construction a strategy to create a safety valve suggests that Washington hoped to solve an unrelated political or social crisis by dispensing visas and encouraging migration. In fact the pressure Washington hoped to release was rising precisely because of Dominican anger over the availability of visas. Washington did see visas and deportation of key political figures as important political tools, but a policy of targeted exile would not have required new visa offices. Overall, the evidence suggests that Washington in the 1960s had anything but a coherent policy designed to bring Dominicans to the United States. As the administration struggled to resolve one set of political concerns in Santo Domingo, at home the mood in Congress turned darkly against Latin American immigrants. As the new consulates were being built in the Dominican Republic and the first trickle of Dominican migration began to flow into Washington Heights, a neighbourhood at the northern tip of Manhattan, Latin American demand for visas ran up against the stern limits of United States hospitality. By the middle of the 1960s, powerful voices in Congress began warning that the US was becoming a "dumping ground" for surplus Latin American populations. The passage of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, touted by its sponsors as opening up old national origins restrictions, in fact had just the opposite result for Latin Americans. In the same year as he authorized the invasion of Santo Domingo, President Lyndon Johnson approved a fixed limit of 120,000 immigrant visas for the Western Hemisphere. While he did not favour the measure, he accepted it in exchange for the elimination of old national origins quotas for Europe, Asia and Africa (Reimers 1985).

Dominicans, with their large new consulates, were in a prime position to apply for these 120,000 visas. Then, in the late 1970s, when limits of 20,000 visas per country were extended from the eastern to the western hemisphere, the Dominican Republic was partially shielded from the blow by the simultaneous extension of the family preferences provisions. Dominicans, who already had a strong foothold in New York, used family unification to keep the flow of visas open. But this loophole had little to do with United States policy toward the Dominican Republic. In Washington, the idea of the family unification preference was introduced in 1965 to assure anti-immigrant groups and organized labour that the new migration to the United States would mirror the existing ethnic makeup of the country. In essence it had an identical purpose to the original national origins quota system. Italians and Poles would be favoured over Africans, since they already had families in the United States lining up to request visas for them. Congress justified the extension of per-country limits and family preferences to the western hemisphere in the 1970s as the creation of a uniform, rational policy. The change unintentionally reinforced the head start given Dominicans by the turbas and the construction of new consulates in the early 1960s (Reimers 1985).

Conclusions

How are we to make sense of the crucial moments in 1962 when Dominicans, self-consciously or not, pressured Washington into opening the gates to migration? It was ironic, surely, that applicants looking for permission to move to the United States would join with crowds chanting "Fuera Yanqui" [Yankee go home] and other anti-imperialist slogans. And, Martin wrote with some relish, it was odd when he and other embassy representatives appeared at one of the anti-Yankee turbas and were instantly besieged by youths clamouring for visas (Martin 1966). The irony of the Dominican predicament in the 1960s offers a new wrinkle in the theoretical relationship Albert Hirschman has proposed between exit and voice (Hirschman 1970). What happens if disaffection from a political and economic regime leads to exit, but the only place to go is a nation that is deeply implicated in the sustenance of that regime and complicit in the repression of dissent? The irony is expressed by a famous bit of graffiti that appeared in Santo Domingo in these years. To the typical slogan "Fuera Yanqui," someone added the phrase "y llevame contigo!" ["Yankee go home ... and take me with you!"] (14)

Ambassador Martin did not see this as irony, but rather as a form of hypocrisy and a mark of the shallowness of anti-Yankee feelings. Likewise, US embassy officials weathering the storm of anti-Yankee protests during the long summer of 1965 found comfort in the lines of applicants outside the visa office. The embassy wrote triumphantly in a cable to Washington that the revolution in April seemed to have no impact on the views of visa applicants: "USA still 'land of promise' here." (15) In a sense, the embassy officials were right; the stream of hopeful migrants reflected Washington's astounding success in tying the ambitions of everyday Dominicans to the attractions of the American system. This admitted goal of US foreign policy had been accomplished as much by political imposition as by shining example. Perhaps it never would have occurred to Dominicans to migrate to the Soviet Union, but the fact that there was no Soviet embassy in Santo Domingo to which Dominicans could turn was the result of the hard-line alliance between Washington and Ciudad Trujillo in the 1950s. Still, given the difficulty of bare survival in Santo Domingo in the early 1960s, and the opportunities for work in the United States, there was nothing hypocritical about feeling both anger at the United States and desperation to get there. One could angrily blame the United States for its contribution to the crisis in the Dominican Republic, and still understand that moving to the United States was an opportunity for salvation. Faced with the reluctance of the United States to provide visas and aware of the power that any threat of anti-Americanism leant to a demand, one could lead a riot against the very nation one wished to join. This tension explains much about Dominican immigrant identities and politics in the United States.

Beyond this fundamental irony, in its simplest terms this story shows how historical contingencies and complex interactions between colonizers and colonized are as important as central planning and economic interest in shaping imperial histories. The history of empire in the Dominican Republic was more than a back-and-forth between coherent and calculated politics in Washington (or among collaborators in Santo Domingo) and a heroic nationalist resistance in the Dominican Republic. The success of the demonstrations outside the visa office show the susceptibility of a United States imperial regime, predicated on the ideology of friendship, to certain kinds of demands. Just as oppressed citizens of the United States have often used the idea of citizenship to demand redress, oppressed subjects of the United States used the theories of United States global leadership to demand other forms of redress. Ironically, the United States, no historic friend of social advancement or political power for the Dominican poor, became a place for unprecedented social mobility and for a measure of democracy. Attempts by Washington to control Dominican politics were fundamental to the origins of a Dominican enclave in New York. But, if anything, this story shows how difficult the prospect of orderly imperial control was in the Dominican Republic.

Understanding Dominicans' own agency in this encounter, and investigating the meanings that Dominicans themselves invested in their mobility, should not lead to any easy conclusion that the United States practiced a beneficent or democratic brand of imperialism. The evidence suggests rather that United States hegemony in the Caribbean, usually taken to mean unchecked domination, actually shared some attributes with the kind of negotiated consent Antonio Gramsci and his followers have posited to explain the political hegemony of the capitalist class in the industrial world (Williams 1977). That the complex regime of international inequality known as empire was not unilateral, rigid, or closed helps to explain not only how Dominicans began to migrate to the United States, but also how international asymmetries persisted and reproduced themselves even as movement from the periphery to the core swelled. The urban world that Dominican peasants imagined in 1968 evolved into something quite new, and quite bleak, as Dominican peasants, workers, and middle classes began arriving there. Dominicans escaped to New York only to be drawn into a broad history of urban neglect, racial segregation, and social inequality since the 1960s. Even as the unifying justifications of the Cold War faded, empire remained; even as migrants to the United States transferred some wealth to the island, migrants inhabited an evolving system of international inequality, now inextricably intertwined with the history of social, racial, and special injustice in the urban centres of the United States. Migration was a response to empire, but despite the claim by some that transnationalism had supplanted imperialism, it merely added fascinating new texture to the resilient transnational fabric of inequality (Atkins and Wilson 1998).

Understanding the origins of migration from the Dominican Republic (and perhaps much of the Third World) in the particulars of Cold War imperialism should serve as a useful corrective to theorists who imagine globalization or transnationalism as uniquely contemporary phenomena. But much research and thinking remains to be done about how exactly the rise of migration relates to the shifting nature of imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union. More conversation about the evolution of the relationship between empire and migration after the Cold War may prove especially useful in anticipating the consequences of the self-consciously unilateral, developmentalist, and militarized imperialism now practiced in Washington.

Notes

(1.) Hernandez claims that that the Dominican government, with an unspecified degree of independence from US backers, secretly planned the expulsion of Dominican workers while expertly covering its tracks. The key, I would argue, is to understand how migrants' choices produced a result that was congenial to capitalism (national and international), without attributing to capitalism a coherence of intention that it does not deserve. See, for instance, Mitchell (2002).

(2.) This overall impression is drawn from my fieldwork in Santo Domingo in 1999 and 2000.

(3.) Department of State. Secret. Report from the Embassy in Santo Domingo. n.d. Declassified Documents Retrieval System-United States (hereafter DDRS-US) Fiche#: 1991-135.

(4.) "Text of a background paper for President John F. Kennedy's 8/28/61 meeting concerning the Dominican Republic and ways in which the US could relieve tension in that country along with improving US-Dominican relations." Cable. Department of State. Secret. 12 October 1961. DDRS-US. "Our Consulate in Ciudad Trujillo would continue to urge that Communists and Pro-Castro elements be deported ... another agency ... has forwarded to Ciudad Trujillo a list of such undesireable persons, which, after local checking, the Consulate is to transmit to the Balaguer Government."

(5.) Ibid.

(6.) Department of State. Secret. Report from the Embassy in Santo Domingo. n.d. DDRS-U.S. Fiche#: 1991-135.

(7.) This statistic is an estimate derived from the ratio of Dominican tourist departures from the island, recorded by Dominican authorities, and the number of Dominican non-immigrant admissions recorded by the INS. See annual reports of Infotur (Banco Central de la Republica Dominicana).

(8.) Report. Department of State. Secret. "Program of Action for the Dominican Republic." 30 April 1962. DRSS-US.

(9.) "National Security Action Memorandum to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the CIA, the Director of the USIA. Subject: Policy Statement on Dominican Republic." DDRS-US. See also "Program of Action for the Dominican Republic." Report. Department of State. Secret. 30 April 1962. DDRS-US.

(10.) The Embassy Dispatch, "Dominican Republic: Status of Plan of Action Approved by the President as of July 17, 1962," DDRS-US, noted the opening of the Santiago Consulate on 1 September 1962 and indicated that "Political reporting will begin at the end of October" when a new officer was scheduled to arrive there.

(11.) Department of State. Secret. Report from the Embassy in Santo Domingo. n.d. DDRS-U.S. Fiche#: 1991-135.

(12.) "Dominican Republic: Status of Plan of Action Approved by the President as of July 17, 1962." DDRS-US.

(13.) The refusal rates are combined from January and July 1962, as reported in "Dominican Republic: Status of Plan of Action Approved by the President as of July 17, 1962." DDRS-US.

(14.) The story of this graffiti was told to me by Dr. Frank Moya Pons in a personal communication, Santo Domingo, 1999.

(15.) Cable. Department of State. Secret. 5 June 1965. DDRS-US.

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JESSE HOFFNUNG-GARSKOF

University of Michigan

Original title: "'Yankee, go home ... and take me with you!' imperialism and international migration in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1961-1966"