El Salvador Rising (Page 5)

Tom Hayden has traveled to El Salvador three times, has written extensively about cross-border street gang issues and, as a California state senator, passed legislation authorizing creation of the first Central American studies program on an American campus, California State Northridge, in 1999. Research, translation and photographic assistance for this article came from Jessica Levy and Jason Cross in San Salvador. See Jessica Levy's photos of Tom Hayden, Eduardo Linares and Eduardo Espinoza at tomhayden.com.

The role of solidarity movements

They came on foot, or often in the trunks of cars, separated violently from their families, often in the hands of uncaring coyotes who took the little money they carried. One-tenth of the Salvadoran people became war refugees living in Los Angeles alone. "The solidarity movement had a huge role in this victory," Linares reflects. "Our dreams are the dreams of the solidarity movement."

It is important to remember this movement in its many forgotten strands, for its tenacity, variety, duration and lasting effects. Refugees, most of them undocumented, beginning without material resources, eventually formed service and advocacy organizations such as the Central American Resource Center (CARACEN) El Rescate (the Rescue) and the Salvadoran-American Leadership and Education Fund (SALEF), which became extremely influential.

Carlos Hernandez Vaquerano is the leader of SALEF, which has provided hundreds of scholarships to Salvadoran youth and carried on voter education campaigns. He was in El Salvador with a delegation of longtime allies. His seemingly exceptional profile is like many others. He was born in El Salvador in 1960, and three of his brothers--Marciel, Numan and Osmini--were kidnapped, murdered or disappeared by death squads in the 1980s. Encouraged by his family to leave before he himself was killed, Carlos made his way to Mexico in October 1980 and crossed the Tijuana border while lying face down on an engine block under the hood of a GMC truck. He was 20 years old, leaving behind a mother and several siblings. His father died of alcoholism when Carlos was 4.

He immediately joined the Los Angeles branch of the FMLN, whose offices were on Bonnie Brae street adjacent to MacArthur Park, as a volunteer, supporting himself as a day laborer and factory worker. On Sunday mornings he and his friends made and sold tamales door-to-door to raise money for El Salvador, handing out political leaflets at the same time. Soon he began working with the sanctuary movement, a vast underground railroad established mainly by religious organizations to shield and harbor escaping Salvadoran and other Central American refugees. More than 300 churches and synagogues nationally declared themselves safe havens, and at least 100,000 Americans signed pledges of active support. After years of solidarity work, he went on to lead SALEF, and became a prominent supporter of the Funes campaign.

Another exile was Rosanna Perez, who came to the United States in the 1980s after the authorities repressed the university student movement, disappeared her husband, and kidnapped and tortured her in prison for two years. She crossed the border on foot; her daughter, Sara, 2 years old, was being smuggled ahead. For years afterward, the daughter dreamed about hiding Rosanna in a closed room while a man was trying to abduct her; only many years later, when she was a UCLA student, did Sara call Rosanna to ask what happened. Both started crying.

Once in LA, Rosanna adopted the alias "Sara Martínez," and began working with the Comite Santana Chirino Amaya, named after a Salvadoran deportee who was tortured and killed, and also with El Rescate and a clinic named for Monsignor Romero. At first she thought the war would end in a couple of years and she could return home. Instead, she found herself joining the sanctuary movement, learning English, and speaking before audiences of ignorant but sympathetic church-goers. "Believe me, those were days of meetings, meetings and endless meetings. My kids would fall asleep under the tables." Her son, Tonatiuh, now 22, "learned to walk and talk at meetings, being passed from arm to arm." The process, she says today, was something like community organizing when she was back in the university, going out into the countryside, asking what was needed, and talking with people about how to achieve their goals. It took several years, but a US Circuit Court ruled in favor of the refugees' cause in 1988, and the movement achieved temporary protection status in 1990, allowing Salvadorans facing persecution if deported to gain residential and employment rights in the United States. What was simple asylum for millions of anti-Castro Cubans was a much harder struggle for Salvadorans fleeing persecution from the right.

Other veterans of the US civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements formed groups like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), which prompted the FBI to open a five-year investigation on some 2,000 individuals in 1,000 groups. Others formed Medical Aid to El Salvador to send medical supplies into the war zones. Also targeted by the Reagan administration was the North American Committee on Latin America (NACLA), an anti-imperialist think tank that grew from the 1960s.

According to the historian Walter Le Feber, "not a single shred of wrongdoing on CISPES' part could be shown." But the goal, according to an internal FBI memo, was to "formulate some plan of attack against CISPES and specifically against individuals who definitely display their contempt for the US government by making speeches and propagandizing their cause." According to Le Feber, over 60,000 Americans signed a pledge in the mid-eighties to commit civil disobedience if the United States invaded Nicaragua.

It was a moment of simmering public antiwar sentiment that the national security elites deeply feared. The sentiment even was reaching into the American religious hierarchy. The Robert F. Kennedy family became engaged with Salvadoran women's groups. Congress, still influenced by the Vietnam experience, began asking questions and formulating proposals to cut military aid. Even the ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, began speaking out against the atrocities. Marjorie Tabankin, now a top Democratic progressive, who worked for the Arca Foundation at the time, began organizing trips to refugee camps on the Salvadoran border with actor-activists like Mike Farrell, among many others. Deeply struck by liberation theology priests she encountered, she traveled to El Salvador with delegations five times, spending eight years on solidarity work through the foundation she directed. An offshoot of that work was grassroots pressure in numerous congressional districts to stop military aid, as well as dialogue with Beltway opinion leaders.

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