The Miami Spectator/Desperado
Valiunas, Algis
THE MIAMI SPECTATOR DESPERADO O n December 16, 1988, Mr. Leonardo Mercado of Miami got into a strenuous tussle with six local police officers, an ill-advised course of action for even the most...
...The tourism industry, Smith declares, has boycotted blacks for the past twenty or thirty years...
...Many decent people took it for granted—and most people probably had a suspicion—that the police had murdered Mercado precisely as the prosecution had contended...
...vacationed in Miami last December cincts, for rioting to commence...
...The damage to property was limited to some $30 million, and there were no serious injuries...
...He has made a videotape celebrating the city's wretchedness that he intends to distribute nationwide...
...Unfortunately, Smith cleaves to some nebulous but non-negotiable notions of black self-respect, so it seems that the obvious economic concessions will not be sufficient...
...There was much impassioned chanting, of Mercado's nickname, Cano, of such epithets as bandolems and asesinos, and of the demand, in molten gold, justicia...
...Of course, who was shadowy and unclean if not Mercado, whose name nevertheless became a rallying cry for those Puerto Ricans demanding justice...
...Smith is the leader of a black boycott, which has been in effect since last July, of the city's convention industry...
...The entire affair, however, revealed this city in its naked hopelessness—aching, exhausted, and foul...
...The bolder rioters looted and torched some of the neighborhood's leading businesses, while the less ambitious settled for starting fires in dumpsters...
...The empire of lawlessness has demolished the rule of law...
...Yet, despite that imposing supremacy, Wynwood did not put on much of a riot...
...So, too, one hopes, did Mercado and the six policemen...
...Subsequently, there was much talk of justice and its opposite, and the incident further fueled the boycott...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991...
...in Miami the past several years, it has seemed beyond anyone's reach...
...For these people, disgust with the murderous drug traffic, and with the general fecklessness of attempts to stem it, overcame the customary civilian regard for the legal process...
...Pedro offered the most colorful testimony, with his charge that one policeman had defenestrated him head-first and thereby caused him to fly "like Superman...
...His death at the hands of the police supposedly bespoke their own danger from the lawlessness of the lawmen...
...Young black professionals find Miami so inhospitable that they head north en masse, to Atlanta...
...On December 3, the jury acquitted the officers on seventeen counts and voted eleven to one for acquittal on the remaining seven counts...
...Mercado's stepsons, Pedro and Jose Soto, were confessed drug dealers and perjurers...
...To make the Cubans pay for the Mandela insult—as well as to demand that the storeowner be jailed as the customer had been—was the crowd's vital passion...
...For them, it did not matter that he had been a criminal preying on their neighborhood...
...Smith doesn't have it in him to see that Mandela's heroism is deeply vitiated—some would say, negated—by his warmth toward certain unspeakable regimes, and that there is no reason to expect people who have suffered from one such regime to welcome him with honor into their city of exile...
...H. T. Smith is leading the boycott of what is known as the hospitality industry because "riots don't work...
...The event was not purely a festival of mass larceny and destruction, however...
...Justice is a lot to hope for, even un- der the most civilized human arrangements...
...an Adidas sneaker print was embossed on his forehead, the relic of a fast break that must have been conducted at very high speed indeed...
...this rough justice did not cause a tremor of offense among them...
...he was a representative of their common plight...
...There were, consequently, no parades—no proclamations, even...
...Leonardo Mercado of Miami got into a strenuous tussle with six local police officers, an ill-advised course of action for even the most upright of citizens to undertake, let alone a much-arrested drug dealer whom police suspected of putting a contract out on one of their membership...
...Smith has already steered between $5 and $25 million in business away from Miami...
...Numerous prospective jurors informed the court that Mercado had, by his choice of profession, violated their civil rights and surrendered his own...
...Someone pointed out that even Robo-Cop had received a proclamation...
...Smith's boycott may yet earn the blacks in Miami some taste of justice, but only if he moderates his understanding of what justice consists in...
...Some of the looters had towels pulled up over their faces and others had paper bags pulled down over their heads, so that it appeared as though a pack of intifada desperadoes had hooked up with a horde of football fans in the throes of a serious grievance...
...Blacks have even lost out on the lower-paying service jobs, although they had filled most of them before the 1960s, when the Cubans arrived...
...For blacks [Miami is] Selma, Alabama...
...The Mandela business is intractable, an excuse for perpetual bickering...
...The policeman maintained that Mercado had gone berserk and it had required extraordinary force to subdue him...
...one lawyer dubbed them "Teenage Mutant Ninja Sotos...
...His corpse, loaded with cocaine and marijuana, bore forty-four bruises and lacerations...
...Now two of the acquitted officers were Cuban, three black, and one white, while Mercado was Puerto Rican, so it was Mercado's old neighborhood of Wynwood, a Puerto Rican stronghold, that went up in flames...
...The rioters got as much help from the law as they deserved...
...Behind the talk of Mandela is a surprisingly sensible and attractive request for admission to the city's more desirable economic purlieus...
...In a pre-trial statement, however, Pedro had said that he'd been coming in through the window and the policeman had simply pushed him back out, like a wingless criminal buffoon...
...The verdict was the signal, long familiar in these preAlgis Valiunas, a Chicago writer...
...On a local television talk show he had the opposition begging to know what it can do to bring the thing to an end...
...Law had become the enemy, and still they called to the law for help, speeding things along with the help of a little gasoline...
...Miami is a town slow to buy a case like the one for Mercado...
...Mercado paid for his lapse in judgment with his life, such as it was...
...The police officers, known as the Jump Out Gang, went on trial in Miami this past November, charged with conspiring to commit murder, violating Mercado's civil rights by murdering him, and violating Mercado's teenaged stepsons' civil rights by beating them...
...T t is the intention of a black Miami I lawyer, Mr...
...The witnesses for the prosecution, taken from Mercado's troops, affronted simple decency and grated it raw...
...Although the Puerto Ricans are well represented in Miami's professional class, Wynwood is poor, and last year it had the city's highest crime rate...
...but then, the coming of Robo-Cop to Miami is precisely comparable to the coming of Christ anywhere else...
...Signs read, "Viva Castro" by Algis Valiunas and "Cubans Back to Cuba...
...H. T. Smith, that all America be made to appreciate the singular foulness of Miami...
...For there will not be any justice in this town so long as everyone demands his own above everyone else's and self-righteousness shades readily into hatred...
...The city's Cuban mayor, Xavier Suarez, took an immediate dislike to Mandela's longstanding fondness for such statesmen as Castro, Qaddafi, and Arafat...
...Smith laughs darkly at the "mysterious mathematical coincidence" that the convention industry employs no black lawyers, no black accountants, and only a handful of black vendors...
...The Mandela wound was still fresh in early July when a fight between a Cuban storeowner and a Haitian customer inspired a thousand Haitians to demonstrate outside the Rapid Transit Factory Outlet clothing store in Little Haiti...
...What provoked the boycott was the chill welcome that Miami gave to Nelson Mandela last June...
...Finally, as the demonstration was into its fifth day, police riot squads attacked the Haitians when they refused to disperse...
...They knew law wasn't good enough to get the job done anymore, and if some measure of justice was to be done, one shouldn't be appalled that it was shadowy and not quite clean...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
