Haiti charges U.S. church missionaries with kidnap

I vote very naive. I think they probably really wanted to help orphaned kids but probably went in with a condescending attitude about the efficacy of Haitian law and the plight of Haitian children. They thought the kids would be better off if they could get out of Haiti and that Haiti's rules about their kids could or should be set aside or fast-tracked because of the country's urgent needs. The group probably didn't have enough experience working with foreign governments, or Haiti's in particular and miscalculated the gravity of their actions. They likely saw the process around getting the kids to DR as red-tape to be overcome and not as a safeguard for the children.

Still, I think it's a little sad that there's all this focus on these clueless but well-meaning missionaries when there are problems with actual child trafickers. The real criminals are laughing at these poor missionaries while they ship out kids for sex slaves, organs, or who knows what.

 

Honestly that seems kind of petty to me. You're not going to help a whole country because that country is choosing to uphold their laws. If you think what the missionaries did is in the best interests of the children how is not donating to help out the country overall in the best interests of those childre.

Also if you are giving to NGO's that money isn't going to the Haitian government.

 

You are absurd and insane. Read some of the other posts and try to understand!

 

Do you think a former African slave colony might get antsy about random white people walking in and scooping up their kids? No matter, the same thing that would have gotten those nutjobs their sermon props will get them out of jail.

 

America built a multi-trillion dollar economy conning or militarily coercing land, resources and cheap-to-slave labor from these countries for half a millenium.

So, kind of an offset.

 

The word you're looking for is Encouraged.

Anyways, so you're saying it's WRONG for a government to investigate potentially illegal activities just because the country is receiving millions of dollars in earthquake relief money?

What kind of sick and demented logic are you running on...

 

LOL!!!!!! Reminded me of chip..

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There is no way on God's green earth that they didn't know. Every human on this planet knows you can't do that. Every single one.

 

That's exactly what I was thinking when i read that part. I'm sorry officer I didn't know I couldn't do that. LOL +1rep. How on earth could they not know. Out of ten people nobody thought hmmmm maybe taking children out of their country is not such a good idea.

 

NBC news had an interesting report tonight.

An NBC reporter got to speak with the missionaries today. One of the missionaries was able to slip a note to an NBC producer during the meeting. The note said the leader of the missionaries, Laura Silsby, "wants to control, we believe lying, we're afraid". This note was signed by eight of the ten missionaries. The only missionaries that did not sign the note were Laura Silsby and her Aid/Nanny Charisa Coulter. Silsby and Coulter founded New Life Children Refuge, a nonprofit that Silsby incorporated in Idaho in November.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/35273848#35273848

 

It looks like the missionairies might be freed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35337741/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake

Reuters: Haiti judge will free 10 Americans
Missionaries, who were accused of kidnapping, could be released Thursday

msnbc.com news services
updated 1 hour, 47 minutes ago
A Haitian judge has decided to release 10 U.S. missionaries accused of kidnapping 33 children and trying to spirit them out of the earthquake-stricken country, a judicial source told Reuters Wednesday.

However, NBC News reported that no final decision had been made, though it's possible a decision could be made as early as Thursday. A lawyer representing one told The Associated Press he expects Judge Bernard Saint-Vil to issue his recommendation to the prosecutor Thursday.

The prosecutor has the right to appeal if the judge recommends that charges be dropped, but the judge has the final say.

The source told Reuters that the missionaries, who have been in jail since they were stopped at Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic on Jan. 29, could be released as early as Thursday.

"The order will be to release them," the source, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. The decision has not yet been made public.

"One thing an investigating judge seeks in a criminal investigation is criminal intentions on the part of the people involved and there is nothing that shows that criminal intention on the part of the Americans," the source said.

The missionaries, most of whom belong to an Idaho-based Baptist church, were arrested trying to take the children across the border to the Dominican Republic 17 days after a magnitude 7 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people in the impoverished Caribbean nation.

The five men and five women have denied any intentional wrongdoing and said they were only trying to help orphans left destitute by the quake, which shattered the Haitian capital and left more than 1 million homeless. But evidence has come to light showing most of the children still had living parents.

As part of Haiti's legal requirements, investigating Judge Bernard Sainvil must send a notice of his decision to the prosecutor. That will be done on Thursday, the source said.

Once he receives the order, the prosecutor could offer an opinion that one or more of the Americans should be held but that would have no legal effect on the judge's decision, the source said.

The case has been a distraction to the Haitian government as it tries to cope with the aftermath of the earthquake and was diplomatically sensitive for the United States as it spearheads a massive international effort to feed and shelter Haitian quake survivors.

Haiti's beleaguered government had warned that unscrupulous traffickers could try to take advantage of the chaos that followed the quake by taking away vulnerable children, and it tightened adoption procedures.

Meanwhile, Lynn University officials in Florida said they had received word that the U.S. Department of State confirmed the death of Lynn student Courtney Hayes. Courtney was one of four students still unaccounted for in Haiti. Two faculty members and three students remain missing.

 

Ofcourse they will be freed.

Since some of these children have parents, what are the chances they're allowed to sue the missionairies before the missionairies get back to the US and never have to face this again?

 

probably has to do with the recent report that some of the parents came forward to say that they willingly gave their children to them so that the kids could have a better life.

 

They are going to have a hard time making a lawsuit stick when they voluntarily let their children go with the group thinking they'd be better off under the care of the church group than in the earthquake ravaged area.

I know these people are American which makes them bad and, gasp, Christian which makes them the enemies of all rational people alive!, but it is silly to think a group of Baptist missionaries, most of whom are just church members down on a "good deeds trip", were really trying to do something evil here.

 

Yeah, Christians are certainly persecuted and marginalized in this country.



So we are just supposed to ignore that the head of this group, Silsby, lied about the parents? Are we supposed to believe they really thought they could move kids across borders without papers? Are we supposed to ignore the note they passed to the NBC news producer where they said the Silsby was trying to control them? Are we supposed to ignore Silsby's past shadiness?

 

It's very possible the Silsby lady is a nutjob that should be prosecuted.

And I never said Christians are persecuted or marginalized in this country, but they are certainly not well liked on this message board.

 

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I guess I had missed this and didn't see until watching the Daily Show, they were warned point blank that they were about to do something illegal.

A reporter had warned them before as well:

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Most of this board is Christian. There are some people who are vociferous in their criticism of Christianity but that doesn't mean as a whole this board is anti-Christian.

 

This story just keeps getting stranger...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/americas/12haiti.html?hp


Adviser to Detained Americans in Haiti Is Investigated


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The police in El Salvador have begun an investigation into whether a man suspected of leading a trafficking ring involving Central American and Caribbean women and girls is also a legal adviser to many of the Americans charged with trying to take 33 children out of Haiti without permission.

When the judge presiding over the Haitian case learned on Thursday of the investigation in El Salvador, he said he would begin his own inquiry of the adviser, a Dominican man who was in the judge’s chambers days before.

The inquiries are the latest twist in a politically charged case that is unfolding in the middle of an earthquake disaster zone. A lawyer for the group has already been dismissed after being accused of trying to offer bribes to get the 10 Americans out of jail.

The adviser, Jorge Puello, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he had not engaged in any illegal activity in El Salvador and that he had never been in the country. He called it a case of mistaken identity. “I don’t have anything to do with El Salvador,” he said, suggesting that his name was as common in Latin America as John Smith is in the United States.

“There’s a Colombian drug dealer who was arrested with 25 IDs, and one of them had my name,” he said, not elaborating.

“Bring the proof,” he said when pressed about the child-trafficking accusations in the brief interview, which ended when he said he was entering an elevator. Reached later, he became angry and said he had broken no laws.

The 10 Americans have been imprisoned since Jan. 29 in the back of the same police station used by President René Préval as the seat of Haiti’s government since the earthquake. They had been told by their lawyers that at least some of them would be on their way home on Thursday. But the judge overseeing their case, Bernard Saint-Vil, recommended to the prosecutor that they be tentatively released from custody and permitted to leave the country as long as a representative stayed behind until the case was completed.

Mr. Puello has been acting as a spokesman and legal adviser for most of the detainees in the Dominican Republic. The family of one of the detained Americans obtained independent counsel as of Feb 7.

The head of the Salvadoran border police, Commissioner Jorge Callejas, said in a telephone interview that he was investigating accusations that a man with a Dominican passport that identified him as Jorge Anibal Torres Puello led a human trafficking ring that recruited Dominican women and under-age Nicaraguan girls by offering them jobs and then putting them to work as prostitutes in El Salvador.

Mr. Puello said he did not even have a passport. When Mr. Callejas was shown a photograph taken in Haiti of Mr. Puello, Mr. Callejas said he thought it showed the man he was seeking. He said he would try to arrest Mr. Puello on suspicion of luring women into prostitution and taking explicit photographs of them that were then posted on Internet sites. “It’s him, the same beard and face,” Mr. Callejas said in an interview on Thursday. “It has to be him.”

Judge Saint-Vil also said he thought that the photo of the trafficking suspect in a Salvadoran police file appeared to be the same man he had met in court. He said he intended to begin his own investigation into whether a trafficking suspect had been working with the Americans detained in Haiti.

“I was skeptical of him because he arrived with four bodyguards, and I have never seen that from a lawyer,” the judge said in an interview. “I plan to get to the bottom of this right away.”

The judge said he would request assistance from the Department of Homeland Security to look into Mr. Puello’s background. A spokesman for the department said American officials were playing a supporting role in the investigation surrounding the Americans, providing “investigative support as requested.”

An Interpol arrest warrant has been issued for someone named Jorge Anibal Torres Puello, according to the police and public documents.

There were questions about whether Mr. Puello, the adviser, who said the Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho had hired him to represent the Americans, was licensed to practice law. Records at the College of Lawyers in the Dominican Republic listed no one with his name.

Mr. Puello said he had a law license and was part of a 45-member law firm. But his office in Santo Domingo turned out to be a humble place, which could not possibly fit 45 lawyers. Mr. Puello’s brother Alejandro said that the firm had another office in the central business district, but he declined to provide an address.

Mr. Puello said in the interview that he had been representing the Americans free of charge because he was a religious man who commiserated with their situation. “I’m president of the Sephardic Jewish community in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “I help people in this kind of situation. We’re not going to charge these people a dime.”

But other lawyers for the detainees said that the families had wired Mr. Puello $12,000 to pay for the Americans’ transportation out of Haiti if they were released, and that they had been told by Mr. Puello in a conference call late Tuesday that he needed an additional $36,000. Mr. Puello said that he had not participated in a conference call.

One lawyer for the families said that Mr. Puello had told him that he was licensed to practice law in Florida, but the lawyer said he had checked and found no such record. Mr. Puello said in the interview that he had never said he was licensed in Florida.

Mr. Puello said that he had been born in Yonkers, N.Y., and that his mother was Dominican. He said that his full name was Jorge Puello and that he had no other names. But then in a subsequent interview he said his name was Jorge Aaron Bentath Puello. He said he was born in October 1976, and not in October 1977, which the police report indicates is the birth date of the suspect in the Salvadoran case.

The report said the police had found documents connected to the Sephardic Jewish community in a house in San Salvador where the traffickers had held women.

Blake Schmidt contributed reporting from San José, Costa Rica, and Jean-Michel Caroit from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Kitty Bennett contributed research.