From Talks To Tear Gas

It took five months for the custody battle over Elian Gonzalez to build to a tense standoff. It took federal agents less than three minutes to end it.

In a cleanly executed predawn raid that caught Elian’s Miami relatives off guard, armed U.S. Border Patrol officers pushed aside a handful of demonstrators to batter in the door of the Little Havana home. At gunpoint, they took the boy from the grip of his Thanksgiving Day rescuer, fisherman Donato Dalrymple.

“We’re taking you to see your papa,” a Spanish-speaking female agent, Betty Mills, told the terrified boy as she carried him out of the house to a government van.

“What’s happening? What’s happening?” Elian said in Spanish as he was taken away. “Help me. Help me.”

Before most of Miami awoke Saturday to what had occurred, Elian had been reunited with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C.

Gonzalez, who asked U.S. officials for five minutes alone with his son, boarded the airplane that brought Elian from Homestead Air Reserve Base. He emerged carrying the boy, who held his father in a bear hug, arms and legs wrapped tightly around him, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials said.

The government said Elian, his father, stepmother and half-brother would spend “a couple of days” at base housing to allow them time together in private.

As stunning images from the raid were almost instantly and repeatedly broadcast on TV here and across the world, angry protesters began roaming Miami’s Flagler Street corridor, upsetting trash bins and setting tires and debris afire at scores of locations.

Riot-clad police showed little tolerance for the disruptions, gassing those who defied orders to clear out, and arresting at least 290 people. Three officers were injured when a demonstrator attacked them with a bat.

By late afternoon, the protests had dwindled to sporadic outbursts. At an evening news conference, Miami Mayor Joe Carollo and Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas urged calm. Cuban exile leaders called for a general strike on Tuesday.

In Washington, President Clinton expressed firm support for U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno’s decision to send the agents into the house.

“I believed that it was the right thing to do,” the president told reporters outside the White House. “I hope that with time and support, Elian and his father will have the opportunity to be a strong family again.”

The reunion does not put an end to the Miami relatives’ efforts to keep Elian in the United States. A federal appeals court in Atlanta has set a hearing for May 11 and ordered the boy to stay in the country until it rules on a pending appeal by the relatives.

The relatives want to force the government to give Elian an asylum hearing, but the chances of that occurring would seem in doubt with the child back in his father’s custody.

Elian’s relatives, looking shell-shocked and exhausted hours after the 5:15 a.m. raid, boarded a midday flight to Washington, where they hoped to be allowed to see Elian. The family showed up at the military base gate at 6:45 p.m. in two vans. They were turned away. Elian’s father said “no, for now,” an INS official said.

However, the official said, an adjacent house at the base is ready if the father agrees to a visit from his relatives.

The attorney general ordered the boy’s removal by force after all-night negotiations mediated by local civic leaders failed to resolve the central issue in the impasse - how the Miami relatives would turn over Elian to his father, who two weeks ago flew to Washington from Cuba to await a promised reunification.

The raid was a scenario federal officials had for weeks gone to great lengths to avoid, a posture that brought Reno criticism for perceived inaction.

But it was the end that seemed more likely once Elian’s great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez defied a direct government order to surrender the boy.