By Niles Lathem. NYPost.
com
May 14, 2001 -- The United States has become the safe haven of choice for
foreign war criminals, torturers and abusers of human rights.
They are the "new Nazis," who come from Latin America, the Balkans
and Africa, taking advantage of lax immigration procedures and loopholes in U.S.
laws to live here quietly and prosperously.
One of them, Heriberto Mederos, was a cruel mental-hospital head nurse
considered the Joseph Mengele of Cuba.
Known as El Enfermero - the nurse - to his victims, Mederos would smile
while he administered gruesome, electric-shock treatments to political
prisoners.
Jorge Ferrer, who was arrested trying to flee Cuba in 1968, has vivid
memories of the torture sessions that took place every other morning.
Mederos would soak the electrodes in water to give them extra strength and
then attach them to the heads or testicles of his "patients."
He would smile and curse his prisoners as they writhed in agony on the
urine-soaked floor, often clenching their jaws so tight their teeth would break
or they'd bite off the tip of their tongues, said Ferrer and two other torture
victims.
"Then we would have convulsions. The convulsions were terrible. You
wouldn't recover your mind until late in the afternoon. This is a trauma that I
am going to have for the rest of my life," Ferrer told The Post.
The nightmare for Ferrer and fellow hospital inmates, including prominent
anti-Castro Cubans Eugenio de Sousa Chabau and Nilos Jerez, resurfaced a few
years ago when they discovered that the feared El Enfermero was living near them
in Miami.
Mederos, 68, had come to the U.S. in one of the infamous boatlifts of the
1980s - posing as a refugee from a regime he once ruthlessly supported.
He married an American woman and became a U.S. citizen in 1993, successfully
hiding his awful past from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Efforts by his victims, human-rights groups and members of Congress to strip
him of his citizenship have failed.
"He's been seen working as a nurse in a retirement home here in the
Miami area. It's incredible. It's an outrage," Chabau said.
Amazingly, the Mederos case is not unique.
Richard Krieger, a longtime State Department official who hunted Nazis and
now runs a group called International Education Missions, has assembled a list
of 800 foreign-born war criminals and human-rights abusers now in America.
They include:
* Juan Lopez Grijalva, former head of the Honduran secret police who is
wanted in his homeland for the 1982 death-squad executions of leftists.
Grijalva is now living in an affluent neighborhood in Sweetwater, Fla.,
under special immigration status given to victims of Hurricane Mitch in 1999.
* Nikola Vuckovic, a former Serb concentration-camp guard in Bosnia who is
accused by two of his victims in a lawsuit of torturing and beating his Bosnian
Muslim prisoners.
After the Bosnia war, Vuckovic married a Muslim woman and received special
refugee status, claiming he was a victim of persecution.
Vuckovic now lives in Clarkson, Ga., where he works in a factory.
* Former Ethiopian security official Kelbessa Negewo, who oversaw the
torture and execution of political prisoners during his government's "Red
Terror" campaign in 1978.
One of his victims, Edgegayehu Taye, was startled when she came face to face
with him in an elevator in an Atlanta hotel where both were working - Negewo as
a bellhop, Taye as a waitress.
She and two others sued him, and each were awarded $500,000. Soon after the
ruling, Negewo was granted U.S. citizenship.
Frustrated by the INS' inability to deal with these cases, Reps. Gary
Ackerman (D-N.Y.), Mark Foley (R-Fla.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) - plan
this week to reintroduce legislation that would give the Justice Department the
same powers it had dealing with Nazi criminals after World War II.
Ideally, under the legislation, the thugs would be denaturalized and tossed
out of the United States.
Copyright 2001 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
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