Bob Barr

U.S. Collars "Dog" to Make Mexico Happy

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

September 20, 2006

My mom, who hates commercial television and rails regularly against television news shows, sits glued to a chair in front of her television set at 9 p.m. every Tuesday, watching the hit A&E reality show “Dog: The Bounty Hunter.”

While not yet a regular viewer, I must admit grudgingly that after watching a few episodes at my parents’ house, the show does have a certain rough-edged charm. Its star—former felon and America’s self-styled “greatest” bounty hunter, Duane “Dog” Chapman—possesses a degree of charisma that most politicians would kill for.

My familiarity with the bounty hunting reality show sensitized me to the news reports late last week that Dog had been arrested on a fugitive warrant. I knew that when I saw my mom last Saturday evening after attending an all-day National Rifle Association board meeting, I surely was going to get hit with the question, “What in the world is our government doing arresting Dog on a Mexican warrant?”

The fact that I anticipated her question did not make it any easier to answer. She has a valid point: It makes no sense for our federal government to arrest a prominent American citizen who happens to be a bounty hunter, for simply having gone down to Mexico three years ago and located a rich, sleazy serial rapist who had skipped bail in our country.

Common sense would suggest the Bush administration would issue a sincere “Thank you!” to Chapman for having done its dirty work in discovering the whereabouts in Mexico of Max Factor heir Andrew Luster, who fled south of the border during his rape trial in 2003. On the contrary, in this Bizarro World in which we live, the guy who risked his life to bring a multiple rapist to justice is instead rewarded by the U.S. Justice Department with an arrest warrant.

It’s not as if our federal law enforcement agencies had been sitting around with nothing to do regarding our southern neighbor. Millions of Mexicans illegally cross from their country to ours each year; the vast majority never are even questioned by U.S. authorities. Mexico remains a key smuggling point into our country for massive amounts of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines. Corruption is so pervasive and systemic in Mexico that often our law enforcement personnel assigned to diplomatic posts in Mexico feel they have more to fear from corrupt officials than from the civilian criminals.

Yet, the Mexican government gets its pantalones in a wad because it doesn’t like gringos coming into its territory to locate fugitives so they can be brought back to our country where, unlike in Mexico, there actually is a functioning court system. Mexico considers bounty hunting a “deprivation of liberty” and, ever sensitive to challenges to their sovereignty, the authorities in Mexico City saw Dog’s actions as an “affront” to their sensibilities. President Bush’s good friend, Mexican President Vicente Fox, therefore demanded that his U.S. counterpart arrest and send Dog Chapman back to Mexico. So far, Bush has complied.

Yet, none of this answers the question of why the U.S. Department of Justice went to court in Hawaii, where Dog’s flourishing bail-bond business is located, to seek an arrest warrant against the mullet-maned bounty hunter. Or why, instead of simply serving a warrant in a civilized manner against a highly visible TV personality, the feds felt the need to execute Mexico’s warrant commando-style and en masse at his home at 6 a.m. last Thursday.

The Bush administration is desperate to retain control of the House of Representatives in this year’s off-year election. Perhaps Bush’s advisers concluded that a tough-on-crime trick would aid in that effort (especially since recent statistics show violent crime on the rise).

Still, at a time when the president is facing immense criticism for failing to deal with the immigration crisis on our southern border, slapping a phenomenally popular TV star in jail because Mexico told him to has ( not surprisingly) generated far more criticism than kudos, at least on our side of the border.

Perhaps there was some secret quid pro quo according to which Washington got something from Mexico in return for salving Mexico’s perceived affront by arresting Chapman. Then again, perhaps it’s simply another example of modern government at its finest—unthinking, bullying, overbearing and arrogant.

While the odds may be against Dog, there are likely to be a lot more Americans cheering for him than for George W. Bush on this one.

Mr. Barr occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union Foundation.