Word: elian
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When the plane landed in Washington, Juan Miguel Gonzalez left his entourage and climbed aboard to be alone with his son. Five minutes later and teary eyed, he came down the plane steps with Elian in his arms, the boy's legs wrapped tight around his waist, and headed into a residence at Andrews Air Force Base. Later Juan Miguel invited agents Mills and Goldman to join him and his family for a while, to thank them for taking care of his son. Elian, they said, was playing on the floor--"like any six-year...
...residents of Little Havana, this has been, from the start, a passion play. Elian was the Miracle Child, delivered from the sea for a sacred purpose, and so it was no surprise that when they awoke Saturday morning to news of his seizure, the exiles arrived in force, one man carrying a crucifix with a bloody doll nailed to it, and accused Janet Reno of playing Pontius Pilate. For Elian's Miami relatives, the morning was a kind of death, after five months of hope and power and fame and the satisfactions of righteous rage...
...Juan Miguel and his allies in Washington, the pain of Saturday morning was an awful means to a joyous end. The reunion of father and son would, as Juan Miguel's lawyer Greg Craig said, "revive" Elian. For those who had come to view the Miami Cubans as well-meaning kidnappers, the raid by INS agents was nothing more or less than a rescue mission--unavoidable, long overdue and mercifully quick. The images were wrenching, but the outcome was a relief...
Then even the law seemed to abandon her. When a federal appeals court in Atlanta ruled last week that Elian might be able to decide his future for himself, Reno found herself, as a lawyer on the case put it, "in a deep, dark hole." Having promised Juan Miguel two weeks earlier that she would return his son quickly, Reno was now looking at months of legal wrangling and no guarantee that Elian would ever be reunited with his father, much less his homeland. By Thursday, White House dismay with Reno's bottomless patience was quietly rising, and so that...
...reviewed the ruling and her options for taking Elian from the Miami house, Reno said she had to prepare for the worst: that there might be guns in the house, or in the crowds outside; that old women would throw themselves in front of federal vehicles; that dump trucks filled with gravel would block intersections. The INS team wanted to go in before dawn, but Reno worried about the image of a nighttime raid. So grim was the picture the Attorney General was painting, it appeared to the aides that she would prefer to wait some more...