A member of the feral Salvadoran gang, MS-13, Guandique was convicted in November on the testimony of a cellmate who told jurors that Guandique admitted he killed Levy. Guandique was in prison for attacking two other women in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park, where a man’s dog found Levy’s skull and other skeletal remains a year after she disappeared.
After Levy disappeared, tabloid journalists smeared Rep Gary Condit (D-Calif.) cavalierly fingering him as a prime suspect who may have murdered Levy because he had an affair with her. He lost a primary election as a result of the negative publicity.
But it wasn’t just Guandique who killed Levy. The federal officials who crafted the immigration policy that allowed him to stay here are accomplices.
Condit, described as a conservative Democrat, supported those policies.
Smearing Condit
Though Condit obviously erred in dealing with police and the press during the frenzy of speculation after Levy was murdered, and his DNA was found in a pair of Levy’s underwear, he never could have killed her. He was meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney on May 1, the day Levy disappeared.
But that didn’t stop the media from targeting Condit, Jeffrey Scott Shaprio reported last week at BigJournalism.com:
It didn’t take long after Levy’s death for the press to shine a light of suspicion on Condit after the Washington, D.C. Metro police inappropriately leaked to the media that Condit may have had an affair with her.
There wasn’t a single piece of evidence linking Condit to Levy’s death, but that didn’t stop mainstream media from suggesting Condit’s involvement in her disappearance while the supermarket tabloids repeatedly published cover stories that outright accused the Congressman of having her kidnapped and murdered with specific “shocking new scenarios,” that were pure fantasy.
Cable television news shows featured so called "experts" and attorneys, none of whom had any actual link to the case who espoused their personal theories on how Condit could have abducted Levy and had her murdered.
In 2001, Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne said that he found a well respected source in the Middle East that had personal knowledge Levy had been sold into sex-slavery there, and in 2002, a prominent criminal defense attorney said he found “proof” that Condit had Levy murdered and disposed of her corpse into Baltimore Harbor.
Unsurprisingly, Condit sued Dunne and other media outlets. A judge dismissed the case against Dunne and Condit settled others out of court. But the damage was done. Condit’s reputation was gone, and he lost his primary in March 2002.
Condit Couldn’t Have Done It
Guandique was the obvious suspect from the beginning, given that he was in jail for attacking two other women at Rock Creek Park on May 14 and July 1, 2001. He was arrested 45 minutes after the attack on July 1.
As syndicated columnist Sam Francis reported May 2002, the idea that Condit killed Levy was silly on its face, and not just because he was with the Vice President:
Personally I find that explanation silly. I have never met Mr. Condit, but I do like to think I know something about the American political class of which he seems to be a fairly representative member, and I find it all but impossible to believe that anyone in that class has the strength of character to commit this kind of murder.
These people can pinch their secretary's bottoms all day and pocket bribes from whatever crook happens to walk through the front doors of their offices, but it takes a certain amount of character or what Machiavelli called “spine,” guts, whatever you want to name it — to kill someone face to face, clean up the evidence, and then dispose of the body so it won't be found.
In Renaissance Italy political leaders possessed such qualities; ours don't.
I have no idea who killed Miss Levy or why, but I'd take a long, hard look at the chap known as Ingmar Guandique, a Salvadoran now in prison for attacks on two other young women in the same area not long after Miss Levy disappeared.
Question is, why did it take police eight years to arrest Guandique? A prison informant told investigators in August 2001 that Guandique admitted the killing, and that Guandique had admitted that he saw her at the park.
Case solved? Not quite. "While [police] investigated Condit and his romantic links to Levy and other women," the Washington Post reported in 2009 when Guandique was arrested, "they failed to fully investigate Guandique.”
No wonder it took a decade to convict him.
U.S. Immigration Policy Partly to Blame
That truth aside, no one wants to discuss the indirect role federal officials and their weak immigration policies played in Levy’s death.
Reported Human Events in 2009:
In a statement released in response to questions from HUMAN EVENTS, the Eastern Region Office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service said: Our records indicate that Mr. Guandique entered the United States illegally but was eligible for an immigration benefit because of the designation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for nationals of El Salvador. He filed for that benefit and received work authorization while that application was pending. The application has subsequently been denied because Guandique failed to submit fingerprints.
President Bush decided to grant TPS status to illegal aliens from El Salvador on March 2 of last year after meeting with Salvadoran President Francisco Flores. According to a 1990 immigration law, the attorney general can certify illegal aliens as eligible for this status whenever he determines “they are temporarily unable to return to their homelands” because of a war or natural disaster. In January and February 2001 there were earthquakes in El Salvador that killed hundreds of people. Bush determined that TPS status should be extended to Salvadoran illegal immigrants as a means of providing additional financial aid to the stricken country. “This will allow them to continue to work here and to remit some of their wages back home to support El Salvador’s recovery efforts,” Bush said at the time.
A few days after the President’s decision, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft issued regulations indicating that any Salvadoran who had been in the United States before February 13, 2001 could apply by September 9, 2002 to stay in the U.S. under TPS. While their TPS application were pending, they could apply for permission to legally work in the United States. Ashcroft estimated there were 150,000 potential applicants for the program.
Guandique was one of them — and, although the INS will not say when he applied, it must have been within weeks of beginning his crime spree.
Condit supported those policies, VDare.com reported in 2009, when Guandique was finally booked for Levy’s murder:
Condit voted against putting troops on the U.S. border, which could have stopped Guandique from entering the country…. In 2000, he signed a letter to then President Clinton urging him to sign The Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, which would give amnesty to virtually [all] Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans living in the country. The talk of such an amnesty no doubt encouraged Guandique and other Salvadoran illegal aliens to break into our country in time for the amnesty that they ended up getting in part from Bush.
So Condit’s leftist immigration ideas, not just his libido, helped drive him from office. He was wrongly fingered for a crime one of the beneficiaries of his position on illegal immigration committed.
Problem is, the real victim of U.S. immigration policy in this case was Chandra Levy. She is just one of thousands who suffer at the bloody hands of illegal aliens federal authorities permit to roam the United States freely.
Photo of Chandra Levy: AP Images
