Operation Underground Railroad and the Problem of Historical Analogy

Diverse Unfreedoms Conference / Rutgers-Camden / March 2017

Since 2013, nonprofit organization Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.) has conducted sting operations and extraction missions around the globe in places including India, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Thailand in an effort to combat child sex trafficking. Constrained “red tape and bureaucracy,” O.U.R.’s founder, former CIA and Homeland Security Agent Tim Ballard, left government service in 2013 and now leverages his training and connections to orchestrate missions across national, regional, and cultural boundaries. Members of an O.U.R. jump team are typically comprised of former CIA operatives, Navy SEALS, volunteers, and often, celebrity guests. Team members pose as sex tourists, establish contact with traffickers, and stage spectacular stings in conjunction with local authorities. Such an approach, energized by distinctly American conceptions of freedom and personal liberty but carried out independently of (and at times positioned oppositionally to) US Government oversight, is exemplary of what Orlando Patterson has identified as “the paradox of freedom in America,” whereby public or civic notions of freedom are increasingly imagined as disconnected from understandings of personal freedom.[i]While O.U.R.’s ideological orientation and operational model do not differ dramatically from similar NGOs, such as The Exodus Road and The International Justice Mission, Operation Underground Railroad is distinct in its rhetorical appeals. O.U.R.’s organizational philosophy and brand identity draw upon a complex combination of the symbols and apparatus of American military intervention and Christianity, all centrally framed as a contemporary movement analogous to that of the nineteenth-century abolitionists in America.

 This paper critically considers O.U.R.’s appropriation of this iconography and historical narrative, from frequent references to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in press interviews to the sale of merchandise featuring stenciled images of Abraham Lincoln. I examine these analogies and allusions alongside a 2016 feature-length documentary, The Abolitionists: A Mission to End Child Trafficking (Dir. Darrin Fletcher and Chet Thomas), which profiles the organization’s work, including one mission in Cartagena, Colombia. Using O.U.R.’s media and rhetorical strategies as a case study, I explore several core problems with the practice of homogenizing diverse practices of unfreedom through a specific historical lens. Although such a strategy attempts to render disparate networks of global child sex trafficking legible to US-based economic supporters, it erodes distinctions critical to addressing these networks at a structural level, deploying complex combinations of symbols laden with meaning, which, when overlaid onto other contexts, diffuse specific cultural and historical information. Thus, while such strategies effectively mobilize US donors, who are invited to participate at varying levels, from following the group’s efforts in video footage to special invitations to join jump teams, these participants’ engagement is inextricably bound up in the logic of this paradoxical understanding of American freedom and “marketized philanthropy.”[ii] O.U.R.’s media and merchandising efforts, moreover, are representative of how visual and material cultures serve as sites where ideas about freedom (and its inverse) are perpetuated and reinforced.

[i] Patterson, Orlando. “Freedom and Disenchantment:  Rationality and Irrationality in American Political Culture,” working paper. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/patterson/files/freedom_and_disenchantment.pdf

[ii] Nickel, Patricia Mooney and Angela Eikenberry. "A Critique of the Discourse of Marketized Philanthropy," American Behavioral Science 52:7 (March 2009) 974-989.