Alabama governor calls for Aruba boycott: Enough Natalee OK?!

The ongoing onslaught of tv time devoted to missing teen Natalee Holloway is driving me nuts. It has to be one of the most overblown, undeserving stories I can ever remember. It is unfortunate she went missing. But an 18yo girl who was supposedly brought up right and has quality friends, does not get drunk and leave a bar with 3 guy strangers in a foreign land. Period. You play with fire and you get burned. Now the Governor of Alabama is calling for Alabama citizens to boycott Aruba until we can get to the truth. He will be calling for other Governors to join the Aruba boycott at an upcoming Governors conference.

As of this writing two months after the fact, there are still approximately 1,300 children either missing or not reunited with their families after Hurricane Katrina. Do you know any of their names? Any of their faces? No. So why does Natalee get all the special treatment? What makes Natalee Holloway more important than, say, Reyna Alvarado-Carerra?

In the United States alone, more than a million people are reported missing each year. The majority of these cases involve minors. The majority of those cases are runaways, but there are also significant numbers of abductions at the hands of both relatives and strangers. This brings us to the case of Reyna Gabriella Alvarado-Carerra.

Have you ever heard of her?

I certainly hadn't until I started doing research for this story. Reyna is a 13 year-old Hispanic girl who is believed to have been abducted by a stranger in Norcross, Georgia. She was abducted just a few weeks before Holloway. A Google search on her name yields a grand total of 6 results.

The same search for "Natalee Holloway" turns up 276,000 results.

But Natalee doesn't just get more Google search results. She's getting airtime, baby. As I mentioned in the intro, American news outlets are awash with a veritable cornucopia of Natalee fever. She also gets assistance from the Dutch Marines and special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who apparently already have enough resources at work battling mundane things like terrorism.

Here's the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, and the reason I am writing this treatise: CNN is now reporting that Holland is sending three F-16 warplanes to assist in the search for Natalee. I was given pause by thinking about the sheer cost of this endeavor. My brother-in-law is a recruiter for the Air National Guard, and I have a rough idea of how much money it costs to even get one of those things off of the ground. How much do you suppose is being spent to equip these planes with the special search equipment and then actually get them to Aruba?

The disproportionate response of Aruban, Dutch, and American authorities to the disappearance of this girl can only be attributed to the disproportionate amount of media coverage. CNN, MSNBC, and (especially) Fox News feature hourly updates on the status of the investigation. They interview family members, law enforcement personnel, and representatives of the Aruban government. The case even features prominently on right-wing talk radio shows, such as the Sean Hannity Show and Bill O'Reilly's Radio Factor. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the coverage: What could possibly be political about this case? Why would Hannity and O'Reilly be interested in taking away airtime from discussions about the immorality of Democrats and spend it on Natalee Holloway instead?

I can guess, and will spend the next couple of paragraphs doing so. This is mere speculation on my part; you have been warned.

The initial Fox News coverage of the story was pretty transparent, particularly on O'Reilly's show. The incident was portrayed as a lesson: "See, this is what happens when you vacation outside of America in nations with swarthy peoples." Initially, two former security guards were arrested in connection with the disappearance. O'Reilly called these two men "slugs" and lamented the fact that Aruba does not have a death penalty that they could be threatened with. Of course, it later turned out that the two had nothing to do with the abduction, and they were released. (As far as I've seen, there was no retraction or apology from O'Reilly, a man who constantly reminds us that he does not "engage in speculation" on his show.)

Things changed when the focus of the investigation shifted to 17 year-old Dutch boy Joran van der Sloot. Since the new culprit was now Whitey, the initial political spin was invalidated. Fox briefly attempted to make the story into an argument for the juvenile death penalty (even going so far as referring to van der Sloot as a "17 year-old Dutch man.") This fizzled, however, and the current focus of the coverage, at least on Fox, is the supposed ineptitude of Aruban law enforcement. O'Reilly's new favorite pastime is lambasting the Aruban authorities for not giving the media enough information about the case and for not having recovered her body yet. This despite the fact that it took over a year to find the body of Chandra Levy (and Washington, D.C. is smaller than Aruba.)

This is another case of politicians getting too personally involved in a personal issue, i.e. Terry Schiavo. Look, the notion is noble but the precedent is dangerous. If they went into Terry Schiavos hospice room, they will go into yours. There are thousands of people who have gone missing overseas and they have not received any press, much less a boycott from their home state Governor. Enough is enough. More time has been devoted to finding Natalee Holloway than Osama Bin Laden. Fuck that. I'm Chaz Atlas and that's how I see it.
CNN.com - Alabama governor calls for Aruba boycott - Nov 8, 2005
- posted by Chaz Atlas @ Saturday, November 05, 2005