In fact, Florida, California and a handful of other states are home to hundreds of accused war criminals and torturers from all over Latin America, according to Amnesty International, a human rights group. Other suspected human rights abusers have made their way to the United States from Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Somalia, Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, sometimes settling in the same communities as their victims. (Torture treatment centers and refugee groups claim there are roughly 500,000 torture survivors nationwide, with an estimated 40,000 in the Washington area.) Vides Casanova and Garcia received U.S. visas in 1989 after retiring from the military; Garcia was granted political asylum on the grounds that he and his children had been threatened during the war. Vides Casanova was allowed to enter the country despite a 1983 report to the State Department that he was likely "aware of, and for a time acquiesced in, the coverup" of the murders of four American churchwomen. [more]
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