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Wilbur A. Velarde, US Coast Guard Reserve, whose promotion from Commander to Captain becomes effective starting in April.
Panama native, former PanCanal pilot rises
through the US Coast Guard officer corps
Wilbur A. Velarde was born in Panama, got some of his formal education at the Colegio Episcopal de Panama, worked as a Panama Canal pilot, lived in Gamboa (where his first child was born) and has immediate family members in Panama City and Las Uvas de San Carlos. He’s one of those Panagringos who has achieved distinction serving the United States and continues to do so. A diplomat in his “regular job” and an officer in the US Coast Guard Reserve, effective April 1 Velarde will be a Captain (O-6) when he wears the uniform.
After Colegio Episcopal, Velarde studied at the Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific, where he got his international baccalaureate. In his higher education he got his bachelor’s of science degree in marine engineering at the US Coast Guard Academy and got master’s degrees from Eastern Connecticut State University (organizational management) and the Naval War College (national security and strategic studies).
With the Coast Guard Reserve Velarde works at the Office of International Affairs and Foreign Policy Advisor. In his civilian job at the US State Department he is a foreign service officer assigned to the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.
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This decree — found online at https://www.gacetaoficial.gob.pa/pdfTemp/25986/9070.pdf — is Panama’s basic immigration law. However, there are many regulations and policy interpretations that shape the way that this law is implemented.
US Embassy message for US Citizens in Panama
March 15, 2017
The US Embassy in Panama would like to inform all US Citizens in Panama that on March 6th 2017, the Panamanian Immigration Authority (Servicio Nacional de Migracion-SNM) announced new guidance for Panamanian immigration officials on the enforcement of pre-existing regulations. According to the SNM, immigration officials have been instructed to be stricter about the enforcement of the regulation that foreigners entering Panama with tourist status prove that they are in fact entering Panama as tourists and not residing in Panama. Since the announcement, the Consular Section has received many questions from US citizens about this new guidance. Below are the most frequently asked questions along with the responses the Consular Section received from the SNM. Should you have further questions, please reach out to the SNM directly via phone at 507-1800 or visit their website at: http://www.migracion.gob.pa
In order to re-enter Panama on tourist status, does a US Citizen need to return to their country of origin (the country from which they came into Panama) or can they return from a third-country (example: Costa Rica)?
Answer: In the new guidance SNM does not specify if the tourist needs to return his/her country of origin. What is being implemented is that, in most cases, the person needs to leave Panama for a minimum of 30 days before reentering as a tourist.
In order for a person to re-enter Panama on tourist status, what is the minimum amount of time the person needs to spend outside of Panama?
Answer: The new requirement that is being implemented by SNM in reference to time spent out of Panama is a minimum of 30 days before applying for admission, in most cases.
In order for a person to re-enter Panama on mariner visa status, what is the minimum amount of time the person needs to spend outside of Panama.
Answer: According to SNM, mariner visas are valid for 90 days and must be renewed on the 90th day, or the day before, from the date of the previous mariner visa stamp. Mariner visas can only be renewed once before the visa- holder needs to exit Panama. The amount of time the person with the mariner visa needs to stay outside of Panama is not specified by SNM.
If entering Panama on tourist status, does the method of entry need to match the method of exit (i.e. can a US Citizen enter Panama on a plane and use as proof of exit evidence that they own a boat in Panama and plan to exit via boat)?
Answer: The method of entry and exit into and out of Panama does not have to be the same so long as the entries and departures are met legally by using established Ports of Entry – land, maritime or air and admitted by a Panamanian immigration officer.
Do US Citizens with legal Panamanian residency status also require a roundtrip ticket when entering Panama?
Answer: No. A foreigner with legal residence in Panama does not need to show proof of exit from Panama.
Is a person applying for Panamanian residency required to stay in Panama for the entire duration of time required to complete the residency process? If so, what happens if the process takes more than the allotted six months for tourist status.
Answer: If the person has an ID that shows that his/her residency is in process, the person is fine to leave and return to Panama. If there is no ID, then the person should exit as a tourist (i.e., before the sixth month approaches).
How long does the FBI Identification Record process, required for purposes of obtaining residency in Panama, take? Can this process be expedited?
Answer: For information on the FBI identification record process, individuals may visit https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/identity-history-summary-checks. According to the FBI website, the current turnaround estimate for these records is 12 to 14 weeks plus the amount of time the results may take to arrive in the mail. Currently there is no option to receive the response electronically. For questions on this topic, individuals may call (304) 625-5590 or write an email to identity@ic.fbi.gov
Tourists are only allowed to drive in Panama for 90 days. Is there an exception for this given that tourists are allowed to stay in Panama for 180 days?
Answer: According to the Transit authority foreigners that enter Panama as tourists are not permitted to obtain Panamanian drivers’ licenses and are only allowed to drive with a foreign license for 90 days. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Can SNM waive the FBI Identification Record process if a person does not exit Panama for two years? If so, would there be an exception to the 180 day stay limit for tourists for a person trying to obtain this waiver?
Answer: If a person stays in Panama for more than two years then the FBI requirement does not apply. The waiver of the FBI requirement applies to those people that stay in Panama two years, without exiting. In these cases, a fine is paid by the person for overstaying their tourist visa and the person is only required to present a PNM police record rather than the FBI check.
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Weni Bagama, in the yellow nagua dress, under arrest. Archive photo by Chiriqui Natural.
Latest news about Barro Blanco
by Osvaldo Jordan — Alianza para la Conservacion y el Desarrollo (ACD)
Last week, on the twentieth anniversary of the Comarca, the Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress (delegates) ordered the resignation of its entire board for signing an unauthorized agreement with a Chinese company last year. This means that the new board will now have to start from scratch examining the Barro Blanco situation.
This breaking news had been completely silenced by the national media until Weni Bagama went onto prime time national TV to explain the situation two days before the hearing at the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) in Washington, DC.
At this point, we should probably zero in on this hearing expecting the Government of Panama to give an official response to the M10 proposal of lowering the Barro Blanco reservoir before the Comarca level. Please try to watch this hearing live and engage international media to break the blockade that has been imposed in Panama.
Unfortunately, I also need tell you that we are still short on funds to cover all of the travel expenses.
You can pitch in for travel and other expenses by depositing money this this bank account in Panama:
Alianza para la Conservación y el Desarrollo (ACD) Banistmo Cuenta #0101183912
or see
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Some people who attain high public office grow in their position of trust. Some, however, just bloat.
Bloat has been on spectacular display in the first months of Donald Trump’s presidential tenure. He had a disastrous start, choosing a cabinet and staff mostly made up of ideological quacks, incompetents, and Wall Street grifters.
Yet, buoyed by his explosive ego, Trump pronounced his start historic: “I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we’ve done,” he boasted at a recent news conference.
Sadly, he’s right.
For example, they made a reckless, unconstitutional attempt to ban millions of Muslim immigrants from our land. They had to ax the kooky guy Trump chose to be his national security adviser. And they’ve apparently been caught colluding with Russian meddlers in our politics.
Some record!
And now Trump has embraced a GOP replacement of Obamacare, hailing the “Trumpcare” substitute that will jack-up our health care costs, cut benefits, and eliminate coverage entirely for millions of working-class and poor people — while also sneaking in yet another underhanded tax cut for the rich.
It’s so awful that even hordes of Republican lawmakers have gagged, refusing to swallow it. Yet, lost in self-deception, Trump calls it “wonderful.”
We have a president who’s detached from reality, careening from one mess to another. But who will say: “The emperor has no clothes”?
He’s so far gone that when he read his recent address to Congress straight off the teleprompter, without his usual pugnacious ranting, Republican enablers of his antics and even the media establishment applauded him for being “presidential.”
Huh? The speech was a nasty wad of lies and right-wing nonsense. If the occasional appearance of sanity is all we ask of Trump, then his reign of insanity will be our fault.
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Panamanian immigration law is a disorderly mess that Ricardo Martinelli’s ill-intended changes made worse. Panama’s immigration bureaucracy is one of the more sordid parts of a generally corrupt government. Driven by the collapse of the oil economy, climate change and political and economic upheavals, human migration is a growing and disruptive force in much of the world. Of course Panama is unable to go on as before.
The problem is that Panamanian immigration policy is forever a reaction to this or that problem of the moment, forever structured for the benefit of lawyers and corrupt public officials, forever driven by base passions and never based on a solid plan of where Panama and its economy want to go. It’s worse when the president is unpopular and on the downward slide of the second half of an administration, in which lots of money gets typically spent in futile efforts to return a ruling party to office in the next elections.
Are there scandals about foreign influence? A Brazilian-based multinational corporation has bribed many leading figures of every major Panamanian political party, but the president isn’t strong enough to take a stand against that. The nation’s legal profession, rather than zealously defending a just society for the people who live here, is mainly oriented toward helping rich foreigners evade their country’s taxes — and it doesn’t help that the president’s right-hand man was one of the most notorious offenders. We still have a racist immigration regime, which keeps us from building a high-tech industry based in large part on becoming the land of opportunity for well educated Asians who have little chance to get ahead where they are. The North American who has stolen a lot of money from whence she or he came and seeks to continue a crime wave from this isthmus has a much easier time getting into Panama and staying than does the North American of modest means and working age who has skills that this country badly needs.
And so it is that a weakened President Varela caves to pressure from xenophobic demagogues, takes the course of least resistance and attacks the easy targets. Never mind that the immigrant who runs the arepa stand or juggles at the traffic light not only doesn’t take anybody’s job but actually adds to Panama’s economy and culture. Never mind that the immigrant who has been allowed to continue the border-hopping permanent tourist may own a home, have family responsibilities and play important roles in community projects. Without consideration of equities or the wealth of communities, these people have become the scapegoats for a broken system.
Rational immigration reform presupposes leaders who will slap down ugly hatreds and uphold the national interest. Maybe that’s too much to ask.
Panamanian history tells us that we are about to see the looting of properties owned by those who are being kicked out. Perhaps the ethnic communities whose members are being dispossessed can thwart the hoodlums — who will surely include lawyers and public officials — by creating trusts to preserve the assets of those whom Varela is foolishly running out of Panama.
Russian bots?
For many years, The Panama News has had to deal with the consequences of online crime while not understanding very much about it. Often the editor could see some of the effect without knowing much about the why and how. Back in 2006 it was observed on the front page of The Panama News:
Some of you had trouble connecting to this website in September, as on a few occasions I did as well. My web server told me of several attempts to hack into the website, some of which got so far as to put things on the index page. Security measures have been upgraded. On one night I got a series of some 3,000 computer generated spam emails to my yahoo.com email box — they were a pain to clean out, but it’s a large box so it was not shut down. My other email box … was repeatedly shut down by email bombs with large attachments, emails asking me to confirm subscriptions to “Belarus Babes” and other such things that someone signed me up for and more “ordinary” spam bundles.
One curious feature of those attacks on The Panama News email boxes was that much of the spam was in the Cyrillic alphabet.
Several months later this reporter went to Parque Omar to observe and interview some folks from a local chapter of Falun Gong who would regularly gather there for exercise, meditation and discussions about the state of humanity. At the time went without notice, but the resulting article was widely copied. Later that year a bot coming from China got into The Panama News website and, without registering a single visit, ran up huge amounts of bandwidth to the exent that the website was shut down. It was the first time this reporter had heard about a bot, a bit of computer code that adds function much as if it were somebody with permission to do so reprogramming the website. This one was easily traced back to China, but as was explained at the time, it could have been sent by anyone from anywhere and just routed through someone or something in China.
Only years later was it discovered that by far the most-read article ever published by The Panama News was that little Falun Gong piece. But upon further inspection, there was no spike in unique visitors at the time, just tens of thousands of connections through London and Prague to the article. As in, a swarm of bots hurling that article in circuitous fashion at and most likely through, past or over China’s Internet firewall. So was the bot attack that shut down The Panama News for a few days the work of the Chinese government? Or was it an indignant Chinese citizen striking back at a medium in Panama that gave scandalous coverage to what he or she thought to be an evil anti-Chinese cult?
As things were explained, the good reasons for the Pentagon establishing a cyber command made ever more sense — as did the reasons to fear such a thing.
Now it turns out that there is a big political controversy in the United States, with charges of “treason” being inappropriately hurled about, that’s about Russian bots. People who hacked into the Democratic Party’s emails and databases used a Cyrillic keyboard and some known Russian software code to do what they did. Now The Guardian tells us that the ultra-right data operators of the Brexit and Trump campaigns used Russian-made bots for three nefarious political purposes:
They scour the social media to see what people say they like, identifying their personal hot-button issues and the lies that they are ready to accept without much question, so that personally-tailored propaganda pitches can be made to these millions of individuals;
Every time some bit of information — often of the whole cloth fake news — that’s derogatory to a person whose character these alt-right operators seek to assassinate appears in the social media, it gets promoted and geometrically propagated with a great many “likes” and “shares” that are not by real people but by bot-created pages; and
Bots are used to fake the popularity of preposterous positions so as to give them higher rankings by the Google algorithms, such that, for example, what the creepy little underground of Nazi Holocaust deniers publish is treated as more legitimate that the accurate story about the millions of people who were systematically murdered by the Third Reich.
So how bad of a threat are bots to modern democracies? Perhaps only to the extent that those democracies don’t properly teach civics in their schools. But perhaps they swung the 2016 US presidential election.
So does this all mean that we should follow the neocons — who helped to lead us to a disastrous war for a lie in Iraq — into Cold War II against the Russians?
Consider that the code identified in the reports so far about the DNC hack is several years old and can be bought from ordinary criminal hackers, whether or not that code was originally created for the Kremlin. And consider that Russian mafia families are involved in a wide range of computer crimes and vice, from ripoff forex sites to online pornography to the commandeering of websites and email boxes to create email spam lists to sell on the black market or to distribute spam for things like fake viagra pills.
Putin’s rise to power can in some ways be seen as atop the shoulders of factions of the Russian underworld against other Russian gangsters. Trump has long had associations with Russian mobsters, and his international fundraising spam to wildly inappropriate recipients last summer reeks of the use of a spam list purchased from the underworld.
There are some legitimate things to investigate, but those politicians and wannabe White House advisers who pretend that the world political situation is like the US-Soviet rivalry circa 1955 just prove how unfit they are by doing that.
Russian bots? They are out there and defenses must be interposed and forever improved. A simple open-and-shut case to assign blame and obtain convictions is probably not possible by way of any honest proceedings. But the truth is coming out, and if we don’t get hysterical and don’t let demagogues interpret it for us, it will go a long way toward keeping us free.
Bear in mind…
Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you — if you don’t play, you can’t win.
Robert Heinlein
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy. As everyone else, I love to dunk my crust in it. But alone, it is not a diet designed to keep body and soul together.
Bette Davis
You don’t choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be. And you do choose how you think.
Grace Lee Boggs
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Editor’s note: There have recently be a number of town hall meetings by the international leaders of Democrats Abroad, almost all of them supporters of Hillary Clinton in the primary, and it was the intention to balance the above video with Bernie Sanders with one of the DA town halls on this same page. But the current leadership has suppressed the recordings of those meetings. Well, fine. However, hiding and denying access will not give them a free pass on scrutiny in The Panama News.
Meanwhile, Democrats Abroad is choosing country chapter leaders and in May in the Washington suburbs will choose the next regional and international leaders. Internationally, Democrats Abroad voted 68 percent for Sanders in last year’s primary. It was 71 percent in Panama.
Almost all of the international leadership was for Hillary. Their main accomplishment was a shrinkage of Democrats Abroad from 53 country chapters to 40 between 2013 and 2016. Some of these people used their positions to retaliate in various ways against those who supported Sanders. These people are by and large running to retain control of the international organization. There have been several online Democrats Abroad town hall meetings in recent weeks, but the international leadership has not posted the video or audio recordings of these online. If they ever do, these will be posted in The Panama News if for historical value only. But so far this is the extent of the available DA video library.
On the Democrats Abroad international Facebook page, however, they ARE posting “party unity” messages like this one, featuring renowned experts like this guy. Which is a good illustration of why there is a movement to reject the old guard’s attempt to play musical chairs and retain control of an organization that they don’t represent.
Ah, well — Democrats. A rumble under the big tent would have plenty of precedent. But the leadership will change because the games that the current ones at the international level of Democrats Abroad play are unsustainable and the rank-and-file of both the progressive and corporate factions of the party know this. Odds are that Tom Perez is not actually a party leader in the mold of Debbie Wasserman Schultz or the current international leaders of Democrats Abroad. We shall see.
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The Israeli Peace Bloc, steadfast even when they’re way down in the polls. Photo by Gush Shalom.
Perhaps the Messiah will come
by Uri Avnery — Gush Shalom
If someone had told me 50 years ago that the rulers of Israel, Jordan and Egypt had met in secret to make peace, I would have thought that I was dreaming.
If I had been told that the leaders of Egypt and Jordan had offered Israel complete peace in return for leaving the occupied territories, with some exchanges of territory and a token return of refugees, I would have thought that the Messiah had come. I would have started to believe in God or Allah or whoever there is up there.
Yet a few weeks ago it was disclosed that the rulers of Egypt and Jordan had indeed met in secret last year with the Prime Minister of Israel in Aqaba, the pleasant sea resort where the three states touch each other. The two Arab leaders, acting de facto for the entire Arab world, had made this offer. Benyamin Netanyahu gave no answer and went home.
So did the Messiah.
Donald Trump, the comedian-in-chief of the United States, some time ago gave his answer to the question about the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two-states, one-state, whatever the two sides agree on, he answered.
He could just as well have answered: “Two-states, one-state, three-states, four-states, take your pick!”
And indeed, if you live in la-la-land, there is no limit to the number of states. Ten states is as good as one state. The more the merrier.
Perhaps it needed a total innocent like Trump to illustrate how much nonsense can be talked about that choice.
On the fifth day of the Six-day war, I published an open letter to the Prime Minister, Levy Eshkol, urging him to offer the Palestinians the opportunity to set up a state of their own in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Immediately after the war, Eshkol invited me for a private conversation. He listened patiently while I explained to him the idea. At the end he said, with a benevolent smile: “Uri, what kind of a merchant are you? A good merchant starts by demanding the maximum and offering the minimum. Then one haggles, and in the end a compromise is reached somewhere in the middle.”
“True,” I answered, “if one wants to sell a used car. But here we want to change history!”
The fact is that at the time, nobody believed that Israel would be allowed to keep the territories. It is said that generals always fight the last war. The same is true for statesmen. On the day after the six-day war, Israeli leaders called to mind the day after the 1956 war, when the US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Soviet President Nikolai Bulganin compelled David Ben-Gurion to give back all the occupied territory ignominiously.
So there seemed to be only one choice: to give the territories back to King Hussein of Jordan, as the great majority advocated, or to give them to the Palestinian people, as my friends and I, a tiny minority, suggested.
I remember another conversation. The Minister of Trade and Industry, Haim Zadok, a very clever lawyer, made a fiery speech in the Knesset. When he came out of the plenum, I admonished him: “But you don’t believe a single world you just said!” To which he replied, laughingly, “Anybody can make a good speech about things he believes in. The art is to make a good speech about things you don’t believe in!”
Then he added seriously: “If they compel us to give back all the territories, we shall give back all the territories. If they compel us to give back part of the territories, we shall give back part of the territories. If they don’t compel us to give back anything, we shall keep everything.”
The incredible happened. President Lyndon Johnson and the entire world did not give a damn. We were left with the entire loot, to this very day.
I cannot resist the temptation to repeat again an old joke:
Right after the foundation of the State of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: “You have done good by my people. Utter a wish and I shall grant it”.
“I wish that Israel shall be a Jewish and a democratic state and encompass all the country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan,” Ben-Gurion replied.
“That is too much even for me!” God exclaimed. “But I will grant you two of the three.” Since then we can choose between a Jewish and democratic Israel in a part of the country, a democratic state in all of the country that will not be Jewish or a Jewish state in all of the country that will not be democratic.
That is the choice we still face, after all this time.
The Jewish state in all of the country means apartheid. Israel always maintained cordial relations with the racist Afrikaner state in South Africa, until it collapsed. Creating such a state here is sheer lunacy.
The annexationists have a trick up their sleeve: to annex the West Bank, but not the Gaza Strip. This would create a state with only a 40 percent Palestinian minority. In such a country there would rage a perpetual intifada.
But in reality, even this is a pipe dream. Gaza cannot be separated forever from Palestine. It has been part of the country since time immemorial. It would have to be annexed, too. This would create a state with a slight Arab majority, a majority bereft of national and civil rights. This majority would grow rapidly.
Such a situation would be untenable in the long run. Israel would be compelled to give the vote to the Arabs.
Utopian idealists would welcome such a solution. How wonderful! The One-state solution! Democracy, equality, the end of nationalism. When I was very young, I too hoped for this solution. Life has cured me. Anyone actually living in the country knows that this is totally impossible. The two nations would fight each other. At least for the first one or two hundred years.
I have never seen a detailed plan of how such a state would function. Except once: Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant leader of the Zionist far-right, wrote such a plan for the Allies in 1940. If the President of the state will be Jewish, he decreed, the Prime Minister will be Arab. And so on. Jabotinsky died a few months later, along with his plan.
Zionists came here to live in a Jewish state. That was their dominant motive. They cannot even imagine an existence as another Jewish minority. In such a situation, they would slowly emigrate, as the Afrikaners do. Indeed, such an emigration to the US and Germany is already happening under the radar. Zionism has always been a one-way street — towards Palestine. After this “solution,” it would go the other way.
Truth is that there is no choice at all.
The only real solution is the much-maligned “Two States for Two peoples,” the one declared dead many times. It’s either that solution or the destruction of both peoples.
So how do Israelis face this reality? They face it the Israeli way: by not facing the reality. They just go on living, day by day, hoping that the problem will just go away.
Perhaps the Messiah will come after all.
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Is that a Venezuelan look on your face? Do you dress like a gringo?
Police roadblocks all over Panama look for fugitives, teenagers and foreigners without proper papers
by Eric Jackson
The National Police are sending out Twitter messages about how they are setting up roadblocks on “all” streets and road in all of Panama, at every hour of the day and night, without regard to the traffic problems that they may create. They say that they are looking for people with warrants for their arrests and foreigners with “irregular” papers. In Chiriqui they have also been rounding up minors found out and about after curfew.
It’s the old-fashioned “prophylactic social action” that Panamanian police stage from time to time. If you are a foreigner, or a citizen and also a member of an ethnic group whom the police might consider non-Panamanian, be prepared to have all of your identification in order. If you are a dual citizen of Panama and somewhere else, hand them your cedula, not a foreign passport. If the past is any indication, those Panamanian citizens who speak with foreign accents may be held for questioning on suspicion of being in Panama illegally.
It’s hard to say. The crackdown is surely intended to prompt those will questionable or illegal immigration status to leave Panama, but how long the roadblocks will be up and how severe the policy shift will be remain to be seen. Security Minister Alexis Bethancourt Yau is part Chinese himself — related to a long-established community with a lot of illegal immigration with a lot of citizens who have over the years been treated as suspects because of their race. But he’s an appointed official, carrying out the policies of an elected president. Whether or not he has any sympathy, figure that the cops at the roadblocks very likely won’t.
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We arrived in Seattle on the afternoon of March 8.
We made our way to passport control with our ESTA, a letter from our American label (in which the label owner declared we would be performing a series of concerts for promotional purposes only and that we would in no way be receiving any form of payment for those shows) and a written invitation on the part of SxSw in hand. The first of us to get through passport control was Ale (our drummer), who disclosed the promotional purposes of our trip to the police officer.
Ale (our guitarist) and Andrea who both explained the exact same thing were held up and escorted to another office. Subsequently, we were all called back and interrogated individually, in three different rooms. We were able to have the agents speak directly to the owner of our American label without any success, however. After almost 4 hours of questions they told us their verdict. They had decided to deport us back to Italy and deny us entry into the United States. They declared us illegal immigrants even if our intention was by no means to look for work in the United States nor never go back to Italy.
We accepted this decision as it seemed final at that point. They took our digital fingerprints and took mugshots of us for their file. They confiscated our cell phones and we were denied the possibility of contacting our families and loved ones. Around 10:30pm, two prison officers frisked us, handcuffed us and brought us to jail in a police car. We spent the night in jail and had been escorted there as though we were three criminals. The following day, after having completed all jail-related procedures (mugshots, declaration of good health and signatures), two other agents came to get us. We were searched, handcuffed and again escorted in a police car.
They took us to the customs office we were in the previous day and we waited for our return flight which was scheduled for around 1:00pm local time. Only a short while prior to taking off were we able to get back our cell phones and bags and we were escorted right up to the airplane. We were relieved to fly back home and distance ourselves from that violent, stressful and humiliating situation. We left Italy headed towards the US with all necessary documents, passports and various declarations in which we clearly explained the purpose of our tour, confirming it is was strictly promotional and that we were in no way going to earn money from it or receive any form of payment. We knew that if we were to receive any compensation we would have had to apply for work visas. This was not the case and the people we spoke to for information told us we would be fine. We had not agreed on any payment whatsoever and the scheduled showcase performance at KEXP was most certainly not a paid performance. The point is that the control agents who did a quick check on the concerts we informed them of noticed that two of the venues were asking for entry fees and this was enough to convince them that we needed work visas instead of an ESTA.
We accepted this situation even if we tried to no end to explain the situation and that we were not receiving any form of payment, but there was simply no way of convincing the officials we spoke to. From that moment onwards, we became three illegal immigrants and were treated like criminals.
This is what happened this past Wednesday and Thursday. We would like to thank the people who supported and helped us throughout this ordeal, including Alessio Antoci, Owen Murphy and John Richards.
We would like to apologize to our fans, the owners of the venues, KEXP radio and the SxSw festival.
We would also like to apologize for having had to cancel our American tour and hope to go back soon.
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