One for the Book: The U.S. bars a foreign reporter

Since getting her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1980, Patricia Lara, a citizen of Colombia and a reporter for her country’s leading newspaper, El Tiempo, has returned often to the U.S. Last week she was headed for her alma mater to attend an awards dinner. Instead she landed in a New York City jail cell, where she was held for five days before being put on a plane and sent back to Bogota. Lara, 35, had been detained upon arrival at New York’s Kennedy Airport by immigration officials who discovered that she was in their “lookout book,” a list of some 40,000 people suspected of “subversive, Communist or terrorist activities.”

Asked to explain why Lara’s visa was revoked, Immigration and Naturalization Service Spokesman Charles Troy said the agency had reason to believe she had entered the country to take part in subversion. But he refused to offer further details, saying only that the charge was based on “classified information” from other Government agencies.

Lara, author of If You Plant Winds, You Will Harvest Storms, a 1982 book profiling three leaders of the Colombian rebel group M-19, told reporters she had no idea why she was detained. “Maybe they didn’t like the book,” she shrugged. From mid-1983 to early 1984, Lara worked as a correspondent in Havana for Caracol Radio, a Colombian station, leading some to speculate that the INS suspected her of ties to the Castro government. But Lara pointed out that she entered the U.S. earlier this year on the same visa, which was issued last fall in Paris. Immigration officials say the issuance of the visa was the result of a slipup.

Journalists and civil libertarians have long decried the provisions under which Lara was detained as a remnant of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, a piece of McCarthy-era legislation that permits the expulsion of visitors on the basis of their ideas as well as their actions. It also allows the Government to keep to itself the reasons for its action in such cases. Complains Columbia President Michael Sovern: “What you’ve got is a statute that permits the U.S. Government to keep people out of the country without telling them or anyone else the offense they are alleged to have committed.”

The INS insists otherwise. “We’re not just keeping people out based on their ideology,” protests INS Spokesman Verne Jervis. “We keep them out based on solid information that they are coming to this country to commit serious mischief.” Lara’s attorney, Arthur Helton, of the New York City-based Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, says he plans to seek out the basis of the charges against her through requests under the Freedom of Information Act. “She questions whether she wants to come back,” he says. “But it is important for her to obtain the right to come back.”