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Online panel to rate debate on SpeakOut.com
The 700 GOP primary voters watching the Des Moines debate on MSNBC will closely mirror Republican voters nationwide.
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[12/14/99]

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[12/14/99]

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[12/13/99]

Take-home test
Gov. Bush says he has been reading a biography of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Here's a reading comprehension exam for the GOP front-runner.
By David Corn
[12/13/99]

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Almost nine months later, little progress has been made in apprehending those responsible for the March murders. The Colombian government is eager to revive faltering peace talks with the guerrillas and the Clinton administration has not tied further aid to the resolution of the case, although it has refused any contact with the rebels until the suspects are handed over. But the American Indian movement, angered by the loss of Washinowatok, a key leader, is mounting a campaign to push for justice. A three-month investigation uncovered the brutal nature of the killings and the murky mix of motives and tragic misunderstandings behind the crime.

The three Americans were abducted on Feb. 25 as they left the reservation of the indigenous U'wa tribe in northeast Colombia, where they had attended a religious ceremony. Washinowatok headed the Fund for Four Directions, a wealthy American Indian philanthropic group founded by Anne Rockefeller, daughter of the late David Rockefeller, to help indigenous projects around the world. She and Gay, a photographer and organizer of Indian cultural projects in Hawaii, had been invited by the U'Wa to help set up an U'Wa Indian language school.

Freitas, an environmental activist, had been in and out of the territory for the last two years working with the U'wa and Project Underground, an aggressive environmental group that operates worldwide, to fight oil exploration by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum on their ancestral lands. The U'Wa's threat to commit mass suicide had garnered worldwide attention, but the women had no idea that the U'Wa were also locked in a longstanding feud with the guerrillas, who seek to control the oil-rich territory. Freitas was the only one who had had contact with the FARC, and he believed he had ironed out all his problems in two meetings he held with FARC representatives, according to Colombian sources.

U.S. and Colombian investigators believe that the orders to kill the Americans came from the FARC's central headquarters, but U.S. officials dispute Indian leaders' assertions that the three were targeted because of U.S. policy in the region. "We believe they were targeted because they were foreigners who went into an area where the FARC wants to control access, not because they were Americans," said Ambassador Michael Sheehan, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, which monitors FARC activities.

Although the deaths have disappeared from the media, they are still a topic of hot discussion on Indian reservations across the United States because Washinowatok was a rising star in this dismembered community. She sought to reconnect native Americans to the global indigenous movement at a time when many Indian activists were focused on fights over casino licenses, according to friends and followers. "Ingrid did heroic things. It's not that she was naive to go into Colombia, it's that she was doing what she thought was right. She lived by her principles," said John Trudell, a former radical Indian leader who was one of the leaders of the 1969 Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island, and is now a musician in Los Angeles. Trudell said few outside their community can understand the pain and anger American Indians felt at losing Washinowatok in such a violent manner, and to such an unlikely enemy.

Next page | "The way they killed them was torturous"