The total number of the world’s
displaced people is at an all-time high. Fear of persecution
caused by war, race, religion, or political affiliation is a force
that drives these people from their homelands.
El Salvador, a country that lost
about 25 percent of its population to migration during its civil war,
is one of those countries whose name has popped up regarding U.S.
immigration and our DACA program, Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals. DACA involves the future of about 700,000 young
“dreamers,” and El Salvadorans make up the largest number.
DACA represents only a small part
of the quandary of Latino immigration. This conversation has
overlooked the crucial reasons why so many Central Americans have
left their countries of birth. The explanation is straight
forward: broad social inequality, injustice and gross human
rights abuses, much of which has been supported by Washington’s
years of complicity that has crushed the fabric of much of Central
American society.
In San Salvador, the capital of El
Salvador, there is a prominent road named after our own United States
president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This road leads straight
to the most remarkable sight of this Third World nation, to the
monument “El Salvador Del Mundo,” The Savior Of The World. Here
you will see the figure of Jesus standing atop a sphere of the earth
placed high on a pedestal. It’s a reminder of a people’s
profound faith throughout their troubled past. FDR Boulevard is
also a reminder of the powerful scale of our own government’s
foreign policy, and our country’s unrestrained footprint pressed
deeply into the smallest country in all of Central America.
This injustice began five centuries
ago with Spain’s conquest and continues to this very day with the
power and might of the descendants of what is termed “The Original
14 Families.” These families are the ruling authoritarian oligarchs
who, still today, dictate from their local plantations and from their
palatial Miami estates.
Over centuries, how can a handful
of people continue to dominate a country’s population? Firepower
vs. spears, arrows, and machetes is one answer—and a little help
from their friends in Gringoland, the U.S. government.
The year 1932 was one of bitter
unrest in El Salvador. During the Great Depression the market
price of the country’s main cash crop, coffee, had collapsed. The
peasant worker was paid with tortillas and beans, and with scrip that
was good only at the boss man’s company store. (Does that
sound like the Mississippi Delta plantations during slavery and our
own Jim Crow years?)
With “The Original 14 Families”
controlling over 80% of the useable land, inequality and poverty
brought the peasant to rebellion. This insurrection was
instantly crushed, as waves of indigenous people and peasants were
slaughtered. Within the first three days of fighting, an
estimated 25,000 rebels were killed. The worker organizing had
been led by Farabundo Marti, an activist whose goal was to help the
poor. Marti, along with an estimated 30,000 mostly indigenous
people, was killed during this unholy massacre that is now called La
Matanza, the Slaughter.
The 1980s rebellion
Let’s move forward a few decades
and closer to home. Since land reform was nowhere in sight, the
average Salvadoran peasant was still living in misery, and starvation
as was evident in the bloated stomachs of malnourished
children. After years of rule by the “14” and its ruthless
military dictators, the tragedy of this nation was now being played
out on the battlefields of its countryside and in its capital
city. This was an internal peoples’ civil war, a revolt after
so many years of repression. It was not created by outside
agitators.
This Cold War period—with our new
U.S. president, Ronald Reagan taking the helm—was about to sizzle
all of Central America. Reagan’s paranoia of communism had
been inserted deep into the psyche of generations of Salvador’s
military officers who the U.S. government had trained at its “School
Of The Americas” in Panama. As part of the 1977 Panama Canal
Treaty, the U.S. government was forced to move its school from
Panama. The Pentagon chose Ft. Benning, Ga.
The enormity of suffering of the
Salvadoran people was about to expand at a rapid pace.
The rag-tag FMLN guerrilla group,
named after the martyred Farabundo Marti, was overpowering the
U.S.-backed Salvadoran forces. The U.S. government had poured
billions of dollars into arms and training to beef up El Salvador’s
police, its National Guard, its army, and its air force, which was
using savage white phosphorus and napalm jelly bombs. U.S. Special
Forces trainers and the CIA were now playing a major role in creating
paramilitary security forces that in turn led to the Escuadrones
Muertos, the “death squads.”
It was December 1980 when three
American Maryknoll Sisters and lay workers were returning from a
conference. They never reached their destination. Instead
they met their early and unjust deaths. When the bodies of the
four beaten, raped, and murdered women were unearthed from a shallow
grave, our Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, stated that
the nuns may have been armed and were attempting to run the military
roadblock. Years later, low ranking guardsmen were convicted of
this god-awful crime.
At this point, Congress was
becoming reluctant to fund the continuation of this dirty war. El
Salvador’s leaders desperately needed a major military
victory. Hence, the grim reaper began his midnight creep.
El Mozote was a war-neutral, rural
community of around 1000 people, mostly Evangelical
Protestants. Again the human face of another cruel, repulsive
massacre was about to appear.
The Atlacatl Battalion, which the
U.S. government had trained for counter-insurgency, had been fighting
guerrillas in the region. The battalion commander had heard that
some of the villagers had sold food and supplies to the FMLN. During
the next three days of December 1981, over 900 El Mazote villagers
were tortured, raped, and murdered as the U.S. government helped El
Salvador’s leaders chase its common obsession with choking out
communism. This bloodbath was presented to Congress as the
needed military victory.
“When I feed the hungry, they
call me a saint.
When I ask why they have no
food,
they call me a Communist.”
— Brazilian Archbishop Helder
Camara
“BE PATRIOTIC—KILL A
PRIEST”
— a war cry of the “death
squads”
The Peruvian priest, Gustavo
Gutierrez, had written “A Theology of Liberation,” a Biblically
based “preferential option for the poor” that had been taken up
and preached throughout much of Latin America. It was a Christian
approach to dealing with poverty and oppression. The U.S. government
accused these priests of being Marxists and Communist sympathizers.
In 1977, at age 60, the priest
Oscar Romero was elevated to Archbishop of San Salvador. This
new archbishop had many challenges ahead as he became an outspoken
critic of his own government’s years of human rights abuses. Then
orders came from the oligarchs in Miami. During his brief
four-year tenure, Archbishop Romero became the eleventh priest in El
Salvador to be assassinated.
Since those days, it has come to
light that Col. Nicolas Carranza, who headed the Treasury Police,
helped arranged the archbishop’s assassination. Freedom of
Information Act records show that Col. Carranza had been on the CIA’s
payroll, receiving as much as $90,000 per year.
November 1989: The University of
Central America in San Salvador was a highly respected Jesuit
University. The Salvadoran government considered it to be a
refuge for subversives as civil war continued to rage. Several
of the university’s priests were pushing for a “negotiated and
peaceful” settlement to the brutal war that had claimed over 75,000
lives, many being noncombatants.
Darkness had fallen on the UCA
campus as the infamous Atlacatl Battalion, trained at the U.S.
government’s “School of the Americas,” rolled in and to the
Jesuit professors’ modest quarters. Six Jesuits were
executed. Their housekeeper, Julia Elba Ramos, and her
16-year-old daughter, Celina, had been visiting. They too were
executed.
Above is a short list of the
Salvadoran government’s human rights abuses as the U.S. government
supported them in their common goal of defeating the FMLN and to help
the “Original 14” in maintaining the status quo.
A nation of refugees
Today, with unbridled violence and
gangs ruling its streets, El Salvador has become the most murderous
country in Central America. With U.S. government complicity, the
fabric of this country’s society has been shattered, and a nation
of refugees has been created.
The U.S. government does not
apologize for its complicity and dark history of backing right-wing
butchers around the globe. That’s not in its repertoire. But
what our government can do is open its blind eye and heart in
offering a legal path to citizenship for these DACA “dreamers”
who were brought here by their parents and now have settled roots in
America. Among them are people who pick the food we eat, care
for our children and rock them to sleep at night, keep our tech
systems humming, and wear the U.S. uniform on many battlefields
around the globe.
Rather than “thanking them for
their service,” why not offer them the benefits of citizenship?
America is still perceived by
prospective immigrants as an island of hope, the voice for the
voiceless. Approximately 27 states now offer sanctuary, a safe
haven for these young people, hence denying ICE detainers their
gutter tactics in attempting to capture and deport them. And
yes, our country’s bright shining and principled beacon of hope is
still standing tall, representing our nation’s inclusiveness in
action.
As the Southern Poverty Law
Center’s Morris Dees said, “We’re all immigrants. Some came to
this country on slave ships, some on free ships. Our nation’s
strength is in its immigrants.”
Today we have a president who, with
his dehumanizing language, has inflamed a vicious, anti-immigrant
sentiment. We, the people, must not build his Wall, and we must
never hang a “No Vacancy” sign from our Statue of Liberty. To
save the soul of this nation, we can do better. As a people we
must.
>> The article above was written by DeWitt Kennard, a 1994 UN Election Observer in El Salvador. It is reprinted from Socialist Action newspaper.
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