Bob Barr

Boycott of Aruba a Lost Cause
January 04, 2006

In November, shortly before refrains of "Jingle Bells," "Christmas in Dixie" and "Auld Lang Syne" began wafting over Alabama's airwaves, that state's governor, Bob Riley, announced a boycott of Aruba. Well, not a real boycott — after all, and thankfully, the governor of a single state cannot set the foreign policy of our country. Only the president can direct that U.S. citizens, whether they hail from Alabama or Maine, are not permitted to travel to a particular event or country.

Boycotts are, more than anything else, generally expressions of frustration by U.S. presidents. They are more admissions that our ability to effect real or rapid changes in a particular area or country is far less than what we'd planned. Rarely, if ever, do they accomplish their publicly stated goal. Who can forget the spectacularly pointless boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics ordered by then-President Jimmy Carter to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? The boycott of Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the years leading up to the 2003 invasion was another notable failure.

Thus it appears to be with Gov. Riley's call for a boycott of Aruba, a tiny island known as a tourist mecca for hundreds of thousands of Americans seeking a relatively inexpensive Caribbean vacation each year. Tragically, one of those American tourists — 18-year-old Natalee Holloway of Alabama — disappeared May 30, 2005, while vacationing on the island. Foul play appears certainly to have been the cause of her disappearance, and the family remains understandably frustrated at the slow pace of the investigation.

However, going out of your way to insult the authorities at every opportunity and pressuring the governor of your state to call for a tourist boycott not only will fail to produce the desired results, but more likely than not will impede those efforts.

Perhaps even less comprehensible than Riley's call for the good people of Alabama to refrain from visiting Aruba, however, is the fact that he talked two other governors — our own Gov. Sonny Perdue and Arkansas' Mike Huckabee — into joining the rather pointless exercise. Other than simply trying to lend a supportive hand to a friend facing a tough re-election battle (Riley is being opposed in the GOP primary by former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore), expending political capital on such a joust at a windmill makes no sense at all.

It happens to be a fact of life in this imperfect world that U.S. citizens are occasionally mistreated in countries around the world — and sometimes they even disappear. For example, another young, pretty American woman, Claudia Ann Kirschhoch of New York, disappeared from a resort in Jamaica in May 2000 under circumstances similar in many ways to those surrounding Holloway's disappearance. The investigation by the Jamaican authorities seems to have been thoroughly bungled in such a way as to make the Aruban investigators proud, and the case remains unresolved to this day. Had New York's governor, George Pataki, called for a tourist boycott of Jamaica, perhaps the case would have been immediately solved, but I doubt it.
Seven years ago, another young American citizen, Amy Bradley, disappeared from a cruise ship that was about to dock at Curacao, sister island to Aruba. Like Holloway, Bradley may have gotten too close to local characters of less-than-stellar repute. Her disappearance remains unresolved to this day.

Mexico regularly witnesses the abduction of American citizens visiting that country, which is the source of so many illegal aliens in the United States. The situation had become so bad that in early 2005 the U.S. State Department issued a warning to those contemplating travel to Mexico, and American law enforcement officials have been openly critical of the apparent disinterest on the part of their Mexican counterparts to address the problem. Of course, we are all familiar with the kidnappings and murders of Americans and other visitors to Iraq. But few sane people would even contemplate a tourist visit to Baghdad these days.

The lessons in all this? The obvious — be careful, prudent and responsible when you travel abroad, and bear in mind that the world continues to be a dangerous place in which few countries possess the investigative acumen and legal system to which we've become accustomed in this country.

Beyond that, one hopes that those governors calling for a tourist boycott of a tiny Caribbean island will, in 2006, turn their attention inward, to solve problems over which they have at least some chance of succeeding — such as education, crime and high taxes.

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr is a frequent commentator on political and social issues and the chairman of the American Conservative Union Foundation's 21st Century Center for Privacy and Freedom