Cabal Goggles: OUR and Sound of Freedom, Part 3

Looking for Kids in All the Wrong Places?

Photo by Patrice S Dorsainville on Unsplash

In my last two articles on OUR and the movie Sound of Freedom, I argued that the story behind the movie – the abduction of Gardy Mardy – is not the clear-cut, cinematic, good-versus-evil rescue narrative portrayed in the movie. Rather, Gardy’s story suggests that, if Gardy actually did make it to an orphanage, Gardy may have been the victim of two forms of child exploitation that American Christians perpetuate without thinking of it as abusive: namely, orphanage tourism and exploitation, and illicit adoption.

OUR has made a lot of content out of the long search for Gardy (including hats), and the story has been liberally adapted into the blockbuster movie depicting it that came out in the summer of 2023. I argued in my last post that, with the information that is publicly available, if Gardy made it to an orphanage, a plausible explanation for what happened to Gardy is that he was illicitly adopted in the wake of the Port-au-Prince earthquake in 2010, possibly by one of the steady flow of American tourists who came through Haitian orphanages.

To my knowledge, this option has never been publicly presented or entertained by Tim Ballard or OUR. This is surprising, since the orphanage that OUR raided — the one by Yvrose — seems to have obviously been involved in illicit adoptions, not labor or sex trafficking. When we compare the case of Yvrose/Refuge des Orphelins with the case studies in Lumos’s file on Haiti, it seems that documented cases of illicit adoptions from orphanages match up with the information with have on Yvrose with astonishing detail – down to the dollar amount that Yvrose was willing to accept for a child.

In my last article, I was extremely cautious to suggest I had thought of an obvious answer to the question “Where is Gardy?” that was missed by people who have worked on this case for ten years. Particularly, I do not want to claim more insight into this case that Gardy’s parents have. Gardy’s father Guesno, in particular, knows Yvrose and Carlos personally, and he knows his own culture and society and presumably what is likely or not likely to happen to children in his community. I don’t want to be part of the true-crime boom of women thinking they’ve solved cases on their laptops, nor part of the white-savior complex of people who think they know better than Guesno. 

However, as I have continued to read material that is available about Gardy and other human trafficking victims from Haiti, I do want to more clearly defend a claim, or really, the claim behind the claim. Namely, I want to argue that it seems plausible that Tim Ballard may have actually overlooked the possibility of Gardy being a victim of illicit adoption — and if Ballard’s followed leads related to this, he’s never posted footage of it (though posting footage of OUR work is a regular habit for him).

The reason why I think this is plausible is extensive evidence that Ballard is, like all of us, subject to the influences of our own cultural narratives. In this case, Americans are particularly prone to imbibing a narrative of what human trafficking is, looking for evidence that supports the cultural narrative we already have about trafficking, and discarding evidence that suggests a different reality. 

I’m going to call this narrative, and the tendency to read experiences through this, “cabal goggles.” Americans overwhelmingly hear the word “trafficking,” and think “international operations kidnapping, shipping, and warehousing humans for the purpose of exploitation” – essentially, chattel slavery with our modern understanding of cartels mixed in. There is a “cabal function” in American heads that absorbs stories about child trafficking and exploitation and reimagines them as stories of powerful, well-connected figures taking children against their will internationally for the purposes of exploitation. This “cabal function,” produced by seeing the world through “cabal goggles,” is clearly living and active in Tim Ballard’s brain, even when publicly available information proves that this interpretation of events is incorrect.

To demonstrate this, I want to look at a different case that was loosely depicted in the movie Sound of Freedom and look at the way in which Ballard interpreted a case as involving international kidnapping and crime syndicates when none of these elements were actually present in the story. Nonetheless, by expecting to see these elements attached to all trafficking situations, these fictitious events become attached to real narratives and severely distort the truth of what happened. 

This is the story of five-year-old “Jose,” or his counterpart in the movie, Miguel. In the movie, Miguel is kidnapped from Honduras and sold to a trafficker who brings him to the United States. (This is the child who gives Ballard the necklace.) The movie version is, by Angel Studio’s admission, dramatically altered from the truth. However, as we will see, even the version Ballard told himself as a true story is markedly different from what actually happened. 

Ch 9: Jose 

Content warning: child sexual abuse

On July 3, 2006, a man named Earl Buchanan was stopped at the Calexico Port of Entry traveling from Mexico to the United States.¹ Traveling with him was a five-year-old boy that US court documents call “Jose M.” Buchanan was asked to provide documentation to prove the child had the right to enter the US. Buchanan could not provide any, and so was deferred. Buchanan said he regularly took Jose with the permission of his grandmother, Petra Navar, to visit Jose’s relatives. (In a secondary interview Navar denied that she had given Buchanan permission to take Jose to Mexico, only to lunch). Buchanan said he knew Jose’s family well and was close with them.

When customs agents searched the vehicle they found a video camera containing footage of child sexual abuse, as well as Ambien and Lorazepam.

The customs report does not name Ballard as on the scene at the time of the stop, though later he questioned and arrested Buchanan. 

ICE did not interview Jose at the scene. He was interviewed by CPS on July 5, 2007, and again on July 12, 2007.

Jose’s sister, Yanelli, is mentioned as a witness in court documents who affirmed that Navar had given Buchanan permission to take Jose out of the country.

A court document from Buchanan’s trial names Ballard as the officer who interviewed and arrested him. 

A subsequent investigation revealed that Buchanan (this part is going to get really upsetting guys) had rooms in his home equipped with toys and games for children that were wired for filming. He had befriended many local low-income families who lived in properties he owned, abused the children, and filmed them. He was sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison.

How does Tim Ballard tell this story? 

In this interview with Lewis Howes, Ballard tells the story that he had previously been on the search for a man who had been making film content of his abuse of children. Eventually, according to Ballard, his team caught up with Earl Buchanan, who was kidnapping children in Mexico and smuggling them into the United States to bring them to a compound in San Bernardino. In his compound, he would keep kids and film content of him abusing him. Ballard’s report of the rescue is that the child fled the car and ran to him, instinctively understanding he was saved. Ballard reports that this child was “taken as an infant” and had been kept by this trafficker for so long that he chillingly spoke perfect English, despite being from Mexico.

In a 2013 Glenn Beck segment the mythology becomes even more complex because suddenly Jose’s sister (who was previously a witness, not yet named as a victim) was also introduced to the story as a child brought back and forth across the US-Mexico border for the purpose of being sold as sex slaves to members of drug cartels.

Now, there are some actual whoppers in this story. For instance, Jose didn’t run at Ballard, because Ballard wasn’t there. The child was not incredibly grateful to see the customs agents in court documents – in fact, he was terrified because he was separated from Buchanan, who he described as his friend. This opens up the possibility that Ballard is, of course, simply a liar – the events he describes are not consistent with what his fellow officers report at the scene, and Ballard places himself in the midst of events that he wasn’t actually present for. Likewise, the court documents don’t mention drug cartels or the transportation of Jose’s sister because of them. The only drugs mentioned in the Buchanan story are Lorazepan and Ambien. There were no drug cartels.

However, I also want to allow for the possibility that Ballard is not simply lying, but also misinterpreting the information he has in front of him. I think it’s possible that part of where Ballard’s whale of a tale story comes from is that he heard he was being called to the scene of a trafficking incident and already had a narrative in his head of what trafficking looked like – namely, that trafficking looks like chattel slavery when children are kidnapped and imprisoned by an enslaver in warehouse/compound conditions. 

In Ballard’s story, Jose (who later becomes Pedro when Ballard tells the story to Glenn Beck) is a Mexican child kidnapped as an infant, and speaks  perfect English because of his long time in captivity with an American trafficker. 

The reality is, Jose was ethnically Hispanic, but he didn’t live in Mexico, and the question of how he spoke English did not need to be answered with recourse to human trafficking. He spoke English because he was an American child raised in California. In fact, he wasn’t raised by his abuser at all – which is essential for the “chattel” narrative. He was raised by his grandmother.

Likewise, the police weren’t looking for Buchanan because of a hunt for a CSAM-producing kingpin. The evidence of the abuse of the child was found during the search of the vehicle. 

Buchanan was not involved in extensive kidnapping – in fact, he wasn’t eventually convicted of kidnapping given the contradictory evidence about his permission to travel with Jose. Buchanan didn’t kidnap the kids he victimized. He abused children he had access to because their parents trusted him. 

My point is not to exculpate Buchanan. Buchanan’s crimes are severe and monstrous. However, I would argue that Ballard looked at this information and saw what he expected to see – children being kidnapped and warehoused across borders, possibly in connection with international crime. In reality, this story is a much more straightforward, common, no less heartbreaking account of childhood sexual abuse. 

Chapter 10: Truth, Lies, and Tunnel Vision

So what do we do with all this? And what does this have to do with Gardy? 

To start – at least in public presentations, Ballard seems to have a hard time getting facts right. 

I don’t want to brush aside the fact that Ballard has definitely said some things that he really ought to know aren’t true. Ballard has made some claims that all publicly available information indicates are false – like that he was present for Jose’s removal from Buchanan’s car. A related narrative that deserves some attention on this front is Ballard’s narration of the story of trafficking survivor Liliana. “Liliana” was a fourteen-year-old girl who met her eventual trafficker in her home village in Mexico. Liliana moved in with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend to escape her sexual abusers (two male relatives), and her boyfriend’s family subsequently decided to move to the United States. After three attempts the family got past the US border along Arizona in 2010. The family then moved to NYC, where Liliana’s boyfriend imprisoned her and forced her to do sex work. Liliana was victimized with other undocumented women who were forced to work as sex slaves for the family, and were controlled by their fear of arrest and of domestic violence. After three years, Liliana escaped in a taxi cab. 

Ballard’s version, as usual, includes elements not present in the real story. Ballard says Liliana was kidnapped at age 13 across the border (he draws attention to the lack of a wall), and that OUR was involved in helping her escape, though Liliana did not meet OUR until after she was freed. He also assures people that Liliana will become a US citizen after her ordeal, when in fact there is no clear path for her to do so. Ballard ought to know that he didn’t have anything to do with Liliana’s rescue and that Liliana escaped herself, and he really ought to know that surviving sex trafficking is not a shortcut to legal immigration in the US. 

So Ballard does just say some things that are wrong.

Likewise, Ballard does have some obvious – let’s call them “big fish” tendencies. Stories become more cinematic, heroic, and dramatic in his telling. He has a reflexive craving to use “good guy” and “bad guy” language. He exaggerates numbers – in the versions of Liliana’s story he tells, Liliana often gets younger (as young as eleven) and the number of abusers she survived per day doubles or triples. He also renarrates stories not just to fit his good guy/bad guy worldview but also to affirm his political positions – his dolled-up versions of Jose and Liliana, for instance, both play into fears of the “porous border.”

But specifically for our purposes here, it seems that Ballard doesn’t just exaggerate or make stuff up – it’s that he may actually not interpret information correctly or misrepresent it after the fact because of his bias towards seeing what he expects to see. This is what I’m calling the “cabal goggles,” or the narrative by which Ballard seems prone to narrating all trafficking events. There’s a real “merchandising” theme to Ballard’s narration – namely, that children are taken and stored in collections for the purposes of being sold the way other forms of international shipping and commerce occur. This seems to be the image behind the idea that US ports of entry are particular hotspots for trafficking – just as cars, phones, and textiles are shipped into and out of the US, so too are children for sexual exploitation. The reality is that evidence for this kind of trafficking, at least stateside, is incredibly difficult to find, and most reports that suggest such incidents reveal far more complicated narratives or simply outright falsehoods. 

If there’s solid evidence of this happening regularly in the Caribbean, I’m happy to look at it. But even if there is evidence that this kind of exploitation does happen in the Caribbean, surely we can all agree that it’s obviously not the only kind of child exploitation that happens in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, it seems to be the only kind that Ballard ever finds in the Caribbean – at least publicly. Does this mean Ballard only looks for one kind of exploitation? Could it mean he’s missing others?

In the next section, I want to take this problem of “cabal goggles” and apply it to footage and data that is publicly available about Gardy’s alleged traffickers – Carlos and Yvrose. I have not yet been able to find any slam-dunk data that proves without a doubt that Gardy was actually in Yvrose’s orphanage though in the unlikely chance that someone from OUR is reading this I have a list of names of people who might be able to confirm this for you if you haven’t done so. Nonetheless, I think that what becomes clear when you read about Ballard’s sting operation on Refuge des Orphelins is that Ballard is looking for his own narrative of what trafficking is. He might even be missing what is in front of him – namely, other entirely well-attested, documented forms of child exploitation in orphanages in Haiti.

And if this is the case – is OUR missing witnesses? Leads? People who don’t work in organized crime who might have relevant photographs or information?

It seems that there could be a real possibility, given Ballard’s narration of what has happened since – namely, that he’s “digging deeper” into international crime, hunting more explosive leads from gangsters and drug dealers, and “finding more kids” every time he looks for Gardy — it could be the case that OUR may have been looking for Gardy, or other kids like him, in all the wrong places. 

This series is continued in Part 4.

1. For  this section, I found a ton of documents and footage compiled by Lynn Kenneth Packer who writes for the American Crime Journal. I don’t know Lynn Packer so I’m not going to simply use his analysis for this section. (For instance, if you read the comments on the videos in ACR, they’re much more comfortable calling Ballard a conman. The videos are comparatively reserved. I’m trying to be slower in arriving at any single conclusion for Ballard’s motives at least as they pertain to the case of Gardy Mardy. I think, as we’ll talk about in Part 4, there’s a possibility that Ballard is just mistaken about what Yvrose did for a living, even if we can all agree it was morally wrong). That said, no one can say Packer doesn’t show his work. While I’m not going to lean on Packer’s analysis for my own interpretation of these events, I am definitely relying on the clips and documents he’s compiled. I want to acknowledge and thank Packer for compiling this information.