Pubdate: Fri, 21 Apr 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
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Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Authors: Eric Pianin and Anthony Faiola, Washington Post Staff Writers
Note: Faiola reported from Quito.

IN ECUADOR, A JAIL TERM IMPRISONS AID BY U.S.

Fla. Man's Kin Persuade U.S. Lawmakers to Act

For nearly four years Florida businessman James Gordon Williams has
been desperately trying to get someone in a position of power to take
a look at his situation. Charged with laundering drug money, which he
denies, Williams spent 13 months in jail in Ecuador before he was
convicted in October 1997.

Now Williams is getting attention--in a big way.

Rep. Sonny Callahan (R-Ala.), chairman of the Appropriations
subcommittee that controls foreign aid, has vowed to hold up more than
$22 million in U.S. assistance for Ecuador until Williams is freed and
allowed to return to Florida to stand trial on related drug charges.
Callahan said he doesn't know if Williams is guilty or not, but he's
convinced Williams was denied due process by Ecuadoran and U.S. officials.

The case has roiled U.S. relations with Ecuador, where Callahan's
action has been condemned by senior officials as heavy-handed
bullying, and spotlighted the unusual ability--and willingness--of
individual members of the appropriations committees to attempt to
influence U.S. foreign policy.

It is also a curious story of how sheer persistence by Williams's
family, including his wife and an uncle who's been a political
supporter of Callahan in Alabama, paid off. While the White House and
State Department have showed her little sympathy, Robin Hart-Williams
eventually persuaded a handful of powerful lawmakers that her husband
had not been treated fairly by the Ecuadoran courts.

"Even mass murderers in the United States receive due process,"
Callahan said recently. "I do not believe he has received a fair trial
there."

Williams, however, was convicted normally in the Ecuadoran justice
system, and the U.S. Embassy in Quito has found no irregularities with
his treatment. Ecuadoran authorities complain that Callahan is holding
hostage assistance for millions of poor Ecuadorans to force the
release of a convicted money launderer with an influential family.
Ecuador is being punished, they say, for doing precisely what Congress
and the Clinton administration have urged it to do: aggressively
prosecute suspected drug traffickers.

"This is a 150-percent-proven money launderer we're talking about, and
the pressure being applied and the measures being taken--to cut aid
that affects the poor--is very difficult for us to accept," said
Ecuadoran Foreign Minister Heinz Moeller Freile.

Williams, who spends most of his days in a book-lined cell in a quiet
ward of a penitentiary just outside of the port city of Guayaquil,
said all he wants is an opportunity to prove his innocence. "I just
want a fair trial outside of Ecuador," he said in a recent interview.

Williams's legal troubles stem from his friendship and business
association with Colombian Jose Castrillon Henao, who law enforcement
officials allege was responsible for shipping 5 tons of cocaine into
the United States for the Cali cartel. Castrillon was extradited from
Panama in June 1998 and is awaiting trial on drug charges in Tampa.

Williams, 53, said he met Castrillon in Colombia in 1992 through a
mutual friend. A biochemistry major from the University of Georgia,
Williams had been working in the fishing business in Jacksonville,
Fla., since the 1970s, focusing on the Caribbean and Latin America.

Williams helped Castrillon get started in the fishing business.
Castrillon supplied the fish and then Williams exported and sold the
product to the states. Though the two struck up a friendship, Williams
said, "to this day I can say that I never saw a bag [of coke], I never
saw wads of hundred dollar bills, or anything else that would have
made me believe something was going wrong."

But for several years, U.S. and Ecuadoran officials believed Williams
was using his fish import business to disguise the flow of money from
illegal drug sales. Soon after Castrillon's arrest in April 1996,
three agents from the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) visited Williams at his Florida home and began questioning him
about his ties to Castrillon.

Williams and his attorney subsequently met with the FBI again, offered
to cooperate fully and began providing records. But during a follow-up
meeting, FBI agents told Williams they believed he was holding back
incriminating evidence.

When Williams's attorney wrote to the FBI that summer saying Williams
intended to return to Ecuador to resume his work, the FBI didn't
object. But on Aug. 14, the DEA sent a letter to Ecuadoran police
identifying Williams as a member of a large international drug money
laundering cartel headed by Castrillon and saying that Williams and
the others should be "disarmed." Shortly after he returned to
Guayaquil on Sept. 18, Williams was taken into custody at his posh
hotel.

Williams and his wife insist that Williams has been a pawn in an
effort by federal authorities to nail Castrillon. They said that he
was kept in solitary confinement with little food or water for six
days after his arrest; U.S. Embassy officials did nothing to help and
even signaled they thought he was guilty, and the State Department
discouraged efforts by an Ecuadoran lawmaker to obtain a grant of
amnesty for Williams.

"It's frightening, because I don't know who I'm fighting any more,"
said Robin Hart-Williams, who has waged a nearly four-year battle on
her husband's behalf. "I'm fighting them all: the State Department,
the Justice Department, the DEA, the Ecuadoran justice system."

Attorney General Janet Reno has vigorously denied that Williams's
arrest was "orchestrated" by the FBI or the DEA to force his
cooperation in prosecuting Castrillon.

Ecuador's chronically underfunded legal system is very different from
that of the United States. There are no jury trials, for instance, and
defendants are not automatically entitled to confront their accusers.
Yet Ecuadoran criminal justice officials say Williams was convicted on
hard evidence of dubious money wire transfers and business alliances,
and they emphasize he was treated the same, if not better, than any
Ecuadoran.

Williams and his backers say much of the evidence was circumstantial
or hearsay--one piece of evidence was a newspaper article--and
Williams's attorney was never allowed to question police and
authorities who brought the charges.

Williams has been indicted in Florida on related drug charges and will
stand trial there once he is released from the Ecuadoran prison. That
could occur as early as September, when Williams will have completed
half of his eight-year sentence and would qualify for parole under
Ecuadoran law.

 From the start, Williams's family has doggedly sought to enlist
support in high places and in recent years, the case became a cause
celebre of former president Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International and a
handful of conservative and liberal House members, including Callahan
and Reps. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) and Jack
Kingston (R-Ga.).

Callahan, 67, a former Alabama businessman and one-time Democrat, is
not reticent about using his subcommittee chairmanship to attempt to
influence foreign policy. Robin Hart-Williams first contacted Callahan
nearly three years ago through Brown, the first member of Congress to
take an active interest in the case and who visited Williams in jail
three times. (Williams is from an adjoining district in Florida.)

Callahan was impressed with Hart-Williams's story and arranged for her
to testify before his Appropriations subcommittee on foreign
operations in April 1998. Callahan has never met Jim Williams, but
twice during trips to Latin America he has arranged to stop in Ecuador
to confer with U.S. Embassy and Ecuadoran justice officials about the
status of the Williams case.

Callahan also was contacted by a longtime associate and political
supporter, P. Grey Cane Jr., who strongly urged him to get involved in
the case. Cane, a prominent businessman from suburban Mobile, Ala., is
Jim Williams's uncle. "It's criminal what they did to this man," Cane
said. "I think Sonny sincerely believes in the need for some justice
to be carried out down there" in Ecuador.

During one meeting with Robin Hart-Williams, Callahan asked what he
could do to help. Hart-Williams said she urged Callahan to meet with
her husband, to show him that somebody in the government cared. "And
second, I want you to withhold every dime possible from Ecuador,
because that government has done my husband wrong," she recalled saying.

Last December, Callahan began turning the screw, holding up State
Department disbursement of $2.2 million of aid to Ecuador that was
earmarked for population control and a rule-of-law project. Last month
Callahan upped the ante by putting a hold on $20 million in aid for
Ecuador included in an emergency spending package approved by the
House. Most of those funds are for drug interdiction programs, but $8
million is for "alternative economic development" and other programs
to improve water, sanitation and health services.

A State Department official said the department is trying to get
Williams an expedited appeal. "But they do have an independent
judiciary and there are limits to how much we can do," he added.

Mariana Yepez, Ecuador's attorney general, concedes Williams's case
"took a long time" to go through the system by U.S. standards, but
added that it was "more or less" similar to other cases in Ecuador.

Callahan is unmoved. "I try not to interfere in the administrative
branch affairs," he said. "But the only alternative I have to show I'm
serious is to put a hold on money to the country."

Faiola reported from Quito.
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