Civil Rights Attorney Barred from Airlines Flight

By Kari Lydersen, In These Times. Posted January 28, 2007.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Francisco "Kiko" Martinez, a Colorado civil rights attorney and long-time Chicano activist, was flying home from visiting family in Washington state. At the Salt Lake City airport, federal officials barred him from making his connecting flight back to Colorado. After they questioned and prohibited him from boarding his flight, he ended up taking a bus home.

Turns out he was on the "no fly" list, a shadowy roster of thousands of people the government has identified as potentially having links to terrorism. People can end up on the list because of legal political activity or membership in legal groups; or just because they have the same name as someone the government is keeping an eye on. Those erroneously listed have included an Air Force sergeant, an attorney, a minister and even children.

Since November 2001, the Transportation Security Administration has adhered to two lists: a "no fly" list that prevents people from boarding any commercial airliner and a "select list" that subjects them to extra screening and questioning.

In 2003 a broader "U.S. master terror watch list" combined 12 government lists into a register of more than 100,000 people. The list, officially called the FBI-CIA Terrorist Threat Integration Center, is meant to "create a structure to institutionalize sharing across agency lines of all terrorist threat intelligence," according to a government fact sheet.

Martinez likely made it onto these lists because of 1973 charges related to package bombs sent by Chicano activist groups. He fled to Mexico from Colorado, saying he feared for his life since local police officers were out to get him. He eventually went to trial in 1980 after crossing back into the United States. The charges were either dropped or ended in acquittals.

On three other occasions while driving, Martinez, 60, has also been detained by law enforcement for no obvious reason beyond his activist past. In July 2000, police held him after he got a speeding ticket in Pueblo, Colo., and in December 2004, in Morris, Ill., when he and his family were driving back from a national cross-country meet his son was competing in.

Most recently, he was detained on April 19, 2005. While driving back from giving a speech at the University of New Mexico, a state trooper and Pojoaque tribal officer pulled Martinez over. He was held while the officers called an FBI agent, who asked questions, then ordered his release. This summer he filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Santa Fe challenging the detention.

And on Dec. 4, Martinez filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Chicago, charging that Illinois state police and local FBI agents violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure during the Morris traffic stop. Since Martinez can't fly, at a Chicago press conference about the lawsuit, attorney Jim Fennerty of the National Lawyer's Guild placed his photo on an empty chair with a phone broadcasting his voice to media.

The next day, Martinez spoke with In These Times.

How did you end up on the watch list?

I was placed on the Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization File (VGTOF). Basically the only guidelines for being placed on that list are that a police officer nominates you. That's what we think happened to me. The government won't confirm or deny it. The only way we figured it out is on the police reports from Colorado and New Mexico it mentions the VGTOF.

What effect has this had on your life and work?

We supposedly have a constitutional right to travel, but I can't get on a plane. If I drive, even the slightest infraction can result in a detention of one to three hours or more. I have to be careful who I travel with because I don't want to subject most people to what I have to go through if I'm stopped.

And. of course, there's the racial profiling that happens on most highways. The time I was stopped in Colorado [in 2000], I think it was racial profiling. I was driving an Oldsmobile sedan fixed up nice, they probably thought a young gangster was driving it.

The world is a fast place these days, so this has really slowed me down, since I can't fly or drive long distances.

Do you truly feel you are not able to fly?

I wasn't allowed to fly before. I don't want to subject myself to that humiliation again.

How does the current surveillance and monitoring of activists or suspected dissidents--through things like the watch list--compare to the situation in the '60s and '70s?

See more stories tagged with: terrorism, "no fly"

Kari Lydersen, a regular contributor to AlterNet, also writes for the Washington Post and is an instructor for the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in Chicago. She just published a book, Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration in the Global Age.

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