Mary Jo Foley hadn’t thought much about the services U.S. embassies provide overseas travelers. Until, that is, she had to fetch her passport from the depths of a Haitian political prison.
“The government had confiscated my husband’s passport and said, `If you want to get it, come to the military prison and get it.’ The Haitians warned me not to go alone,” she recalled. “So I talked the new vice ambassador into going with me.”
Foley, a reporter at Smart Reseller, a computer publication, and her then-husband, a Haitian activist, were visiting the island during the reign of Papa Doc Duvalier. During their trip, her husband was placed in “the book” for troublemakers.
“The ambassador was sweating bullets,” she recalled. “We were walking down the hall when I turned and heard someone scream. They were beating this guy. He fell to his knees.”
After a tense round of negotiation, the vice ambassador, who had just taken the post a few days before, got both of their passports back, hustled Foley and her husband to the airport in a staff car and sneaked them onto an American Airlines jet.
“Do me a favor,” he told her. “Don’t come back.”
Although most imagine embassies to be fortified encampments bristling with covert agents, U.S. embassies in reality are relatively mundane, yet useful, outposts open to the traveler. Rather than negotiating treaties, foreign service personnel generally act as the handmaidens of vacation disaster. They shepherd dazed Americans through the trauma of lost passports, local bureaucracy, tornado recovery or coup etiquette.
“We group the services into four categories: deaths, arrests, welfare and whereabouts,” noted Katherine Peterson, director of the Office of Overseas Citizens Services for the U.S. State Department.
On a practical level, that means anything and everything. In Laos, the embassy staff once gathered after hours to donate blood for an American who had been in a bus crash. Some people come into the closest embassy to renounce their citizenship. “We give them a questionnaire and then tell them to come back in three days,” she said.
Need the number of a Medivac unit fast? The embassy can provide it.
Of all the duties, fatalities keep embassies hopping most. Approximately 6,000 U.S. citizens die overseas each year. “They get into car wrecks, they drown scuba diving, some die in Laetrile clinics in Mexico,” Peterson said.
Only about 2,000 of the bodies ever get shipped back. The rest are interred locally, leaving the embassy to coordinate between the families’ wishes and native customs.
“In Europe or parts of Asia, it’s not that complicated,” she said. “But in most Muslim countries they have no embalming. They wrap the body in a shroud and bury it within 24 hours,” she said, which may not comply with what the family wants.
Recently, for example, a terrorist-inspired plane crash in the Comoros Islands led to the death of dozens of passengers. Only two coffins could be found on the island where the crash took place. France, Israel and the U.S. got together to place a mortuary team on the islands within a day and later managed to airlift in additional coffins. (Side note: the U.S. embassy in Nepal is the only one of its kind with two chilled body lockers. It went in as a result of drug overdose deaths.)
Surprisingly, there are fewer arrests of Americans overseas. Only about 2,000 to 3,000 Americans tour the insides of a foreign clink each year. Although the crimes range from the serious to the ridiculous, drinking, drugs and disorderly conduct seem to make up the bulk of the arrest reports.
Embassies have their hands tied in most arrest cases because of national sovereignty. When overseas, U.S. citizens are subject to their host countries’ laws, regardless of stiff penalties or the absurdity of the case. “While we can assist them by getting a list of local attorneys, contacting their families or monitoring their case, we cannot get them off,” Peterson explained.
Still, results can happen. A few years back, she recalled, an 18-year-old was arrested in Mexico for having a pistol in the trunk of his car. Because the pistol was above a certain caliber, the charge was boosted to smuggling military weapons, which carried a minimum five-year penalty.
While the embassy could not officially intervene, it began to operate in the background. In this case, the Mexican judge, who did not want to send the kid to prison, suggested a solution. He pushed for an early conviction and, during sentencing, authorized bail. When it was paid, the kid vanished back to the States.
“He was quite a remarkable kid,” she recalled. While waiting trial, he gave chess lessons to inmates.
Overseas prison conditions, she added, are horrendous, Cattle prods, sleep deprivation and other abuses remain part of the interrogation process in some countries. In these nations, the U.S. embassy will try to visit the arrested person right away and file diplomatic protests when applicable.
“But a lot of good that does you,” added “Tom.” An Irish national permanently residing in the U.S. who understandably wants anonymity, Tom filed a diplomatic protest after he landed in a Mexican prison. He was arrested for shooting pictures in Chiapas near the time of the revolt there. The police took his motorcycle and arrested him. The U.S. filed a grievance. The Irish went one step better, he said. They recommended him for bail. He fled.
Establishing the welfare and whereabouts of a person is a fairly straightforward affair. The embassy, upon request, tracks down a traveler by date of entry visa and hotel reservation. This is why foreign hotels ask for passport information. More often than not, “disappearances” are the result of carelessness. Retirees, for example, will tell their families they are going to Central America and then vanish for the winter.
Disasters come in two varieties, natural and man-made, but the solution is generally the same: evacuation. When a volcano, coup or plane crash occurs overseas and Americans are involved, the State Department becomes the primary point of contact. The department, with the assistance of the military, helped clear 500 people out of Albania recently without a hiccup.
The embassy can also help ease generic harassment. Eric Williams, a producer for WBLS-FM in New York, accepted an invitation to participate in a fact-finding mission in Panama during the height of the Noriega crisis in 1988. The group that brought him to the country claimed to be neutral but in fact was heavily aligned with Noriega.
Once the trip sponsors concluded that Williams was not a Noriega believer, they began to make life difficult for him. The group leader accused him of being a CIA agent. When Williams tried to get to the airport, taxi drivers either would refuse to drive him or would make sure that he arrived late for the flight. “Three guys tailed me at all times. I would go into a empty cafe, and suddenly, the same three guys would be sitting right next to me,” he recalled. (He also recalls meeting Noriega’s sister. “Actually, she was kind of attractive,” he said.)
Three days past his original departure day, Williams visited the embassy and explained the situation. The next day, embassy drivers got him to the airport. “I’m basically a lefty guy from New York. The U.S. embassy was the last place I wanted to go,” he said. “But I read the back of my passport: `This passport is the property of the U.S. State Department.’ And I began to think, `Hey, I’m a taxpayer.’ “
U.S. consular offices overseas also provide conveniences for travelers. “Most of them have information rooms, either in the embassy or nearby,” pointed out Bob Fama, a nurse from Reno who spent four years traveling the globe. “They’re air conditioned and you can go in and read old Time magazines. ABC News does a broadcast once a week. It’s great for longtime travelers who don’t get to see much TV.”
Fama recommends the embassies in Asia for their hospitality and magazine selection. The “cinderblock and barbed-wire” embassy in Kenya, however, leaves much to be desired.
But as helpful as embassies might be, they are not travel agencies, he added. “If you just go in to ask for advice, they tell you, `Get stuffed,’ so to speak.”
