In order to understand current events, history teaches us that we must know and understand the causes that have brought us to this terrible situation we are living with today, i.e., the southern border immigration crisis.
The civil war in El Salvador ignited in 1979-- a decades long-standing conflict between the seven feudal families that controlled the country for centuries and a rag tag group of rebels the FMLN (Farabundo Marti de Liberacion Nacional) the Farabundo Marti for National Liberation.
Farabundo Marti was a rebel leader that raised a peasant army in the 1930's in a futile attempt to gain land from the seven families. It was brutally put down. Little changed among the majority poor in the country when a new uprising erupted anew over 40 years later.
In 1980 Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was shot through the heart as he lifted the host during the eucharist at the Carmelite convent in San Salvador. The assassin was in the employ of the seven families. Romero had openly accused the powerful of their human rights abuses and their impunity. In that same year, four American Catholic missionaries were raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers when their van was ambushed on the road between the airport and the capital city of San Salvador (Saint Savior).
The United States was already supporting the corrupt government and army funded by the seven families. Our government imposed its policy of "containing communism" and declared that the FMLN was communist and therefore a threat to the status quo in the region and US security. This policy was being prosecuted concurrently in the neighboring countries of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala as well. In all instances, the US supplied right wing military dictatorships with funds, advisors, and weapons. The Reagan administration launched the “Reagan Doctrine” against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua by creating and funding a Contra insurgent group (Contra – Against the Sandinistas). So determined was the Reagan administration to overthrow the Sandinistas it became embroiled in the so called Iran/Contra Scandal (selling rockets to Iran to fund the contras.
In 1985 I made my first of five visits to El Salvador, witnessing the impact of the war on the urban and rural poor, as they were violently denied their human rights. At the end of the conflict, over 40k civilians were killed, many from torture and rape, mostly by the government soldiers and the death squads.
During one visit, I met Maria Cristina Gomez, a women's rights promoter, labor leader, elementary school teacher - a Baptist Christian with the NGO I worked with. Later, I received the news that she was dragged from her classroom by heavily armed men in civilian clothes, witnessed by her horrified students. The next day, her body was found on a trash heap.
The war produced over 2 million internal refugees, while thousands fled the country, many taking the same route by land as those arriving at the US border today.
Many Salvadoran youths found their way to Los Angeles and other cities, fleeing the military draft and the violence, not unlike similar motivations for fleeing today. It wasn't too long before they joined street gangs or created their own such as the “Salvatruchas,” and others.
The immigration authorities rounded up and deported a number of them back to El Salvador as well as to Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.
Since there were no options for education and employment these same young men reorganized their gangs in their home countries.
My last visit to El Salvador was in 2003 I was hosted by missionary friends. They took me to a new low-income housing project that their NGO was helping to finance. But there was a problem. My friends explained as we walked through the neighborhood. Gangs were invading this neighborhood as well. Young toughs would knock on doors and leave threatening notes that unless the residents paid protection money they would be violently attacked or their children would be taken away from them. The boys would be forced into the gang and the girls would be sold into sex trafficking. Sometimes gangs would take over residences, leaving families in the street.
I met a “campesino” (farmer) who taught me how to plant beans on the side of a hill, using an age old method. He handed me a long stick pointed at one end and put some beans in my hand. He said, “dig a small hole with the stick, then drop three beans in the hole, then push the dirt over the hole with your foot.” Then he said, “I’ve tried to get into your country three times, and failed. Here I am barely living.
A similar situation exists today, perhaps worse. The poor can’t find work. They are landless and depend on peonage farming. They are threatened with violence, especially to their children from the gangs and the drug cartels. El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua are failed states, their governments embroiled in corruption. The gangs and the cartels have become the de-facto rulers of these countries. Immigrants are so desperate that they are willing to trek over 1,000 miles, facing corrupt “coyotes,” guides who abandon them on the road, taking their money, and gang violence. They arrive at the border believing that they will be safer their, willingly turning themselves to the US Border Patrol.
A few of the lucky ones are designated as Asylum Seekers and allowed to cross the border into the US. They are given a court date when a judge will determine whether their claim of violence if returned to their home country is legitimate. Then a local agency such as a church or community will shelter, feed, clothe, them and arrange passage to their families or hosts while waiting for their court date. The judge’s ruling can go either way – stay or return. El Calvario United Methodist Church (www.resiliency.org) in Las Cruces NM is one of many shelters along the border receiving Asylum Seekers. I recently served as a volunteer there and will return in March.
Making sense out of this scenario won’t happen until Congress passes a comprehensive immigration law, which is predictable and functional. The chances of this happening are slim at moment until Congress regains its sanity and returns to working across the aisle.
