Between 1995 and 1997 alone, the Clinton administration gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. Use of self-repeating handguns with large clips has been encouraged and expanded. Official sanction by the Clinton administration for escalated police violence has led with increasing frequency, from one end of the country to the other, to cold-blooded murders by cops. But we should remind ourselves that the pattern of domestic police violence does not stand in isolation. They do at home what they do abroad.
Foreign policy is always ultimately an expression of the real trajectory of domestic policy.
But no one suspects that Elian is here illegally. He was never found, but others in the neighborhood were detained, manhandled, and grilled. Immediately following the Miami raid, the U.S. government announced it would soon begin operations with U.S. marshals and other federal police agencies to clear the Puerto Rican island of Vieques of the protesters permanently camped there to prevent the Pentagon from resuming use of the island as a weapons-testing site. High levels of support for the INS raid among African-Americans polled in South Florida is one register of the successful attempt to bolster decades of resentment against many in the Cuban community for reactionary ends. As a people they bear a collective guilt.