posted by tbogg at 11:59 AM

|

Sunday, May 25, 2003

 

Still on vacation...

But I thought this letter from the local paper was too good to pass up:

Estrada the wrong judge to head for high court

San Diegan Kay Guarino and a host of conservative commentators ask, Why are Democrats blocking Miguel Estrada's nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C.?

As Estrada's classmate at Harvard Law School and a fellow member of the Sociedad Inter-Americana there, I knew him slightly and can recite the nub of Democratic concerns: his blind belief in extreme right-wing rhetoric and equal blindness to empirical evidence contrary to his beliefs.

Though Estrada has been described by promoters as an immigrant who at 17 arrived in the United States without speaking a word of English, he was hardly the abject refugee that description suggests. In fact, he was the son of a high Honduran diplomat and therefore was a member of Honduras' very small and privileged elite. And his political views reflect the comfortable narrowness of that elite.

He and I once had a fiery argument about democracy in Latin America. Two of the issues we discussed remain in my memory. One was his warm approval of Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who had led the coup that overthrew leftist President Salvador Allende and murdered thousands. Part of Miguel's argument was that Allende had won only a plurality of the popular vote and therefore was not legitimate in the first place; he dismissed the Chilean legislature's vote to ratify Allende's victory in a process that accorded fully with Chilean law (Allende's own party was a minority in the legislature).

The second issue had to do with his own native Honduras. I recall challenging the legitimacy of the Honduran government, which was and still is known for its corruption, its exclusion and repression of the lower classes, and at the time had been implicated in numerous human rights abuses (including assassinations), some tied to the U.S.-supported Contra war against Nicaragua. His counterfactual answer stuck with me: "Honduras is a pure democracy, just like the United States."

The court to which Estrada has been nominated is considered widely to be a steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court, so the fact that he could be "possibly the first Hispanic American to sit on the highest bench in the land" actually increases concern. There are many top-flight Latino lawyers in the United States, even from our class of '86. If a seat should be set up for an American of Latin American descent, Hispanics and moderate Republicans would do well to support someone more likely to bring a broader, and more inclusive, definition of society and politics to important decisions.

DANIEL H. WOLF

San Diego