CENTRAL AMERICAN CHILDREN WILL CHANGE US
By David Bacon
Social Policy, Fall 2014
"When I heard Father Romero was killed I began to
weep," Bishop Bobadilla told me.
"I saw that the forces of evil had won. He wanted change, but not
through violence. The bitter truth
today, though, is that in Guatemala we are still living the legacy of that
violence."
Rodolfo Bobadilla was the bishop in Huehuetenango when I
last saw him. During the civil war he'd
been a hero to poor Guatemalans in the indigenous Qanjobal and Mam towns where
the worst massacres took place. He was a
friend of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in San Salvador, when Romero headed the church
at the beginning of El Salvador's civil war.
When Romero denounced the death squads, soldiers from the U.S.-trained
Atlacatl Battalion charged into the capital's cathedral and gunned him down.
Bishop Bobadilla visits Guatemalan meatpacking workers living in Omaha.
For thirty years I've worn a button with Romero's picture
on my old Irish tweed cap -- the one I take with me when I go out to photograph
marches and demonstrations. On the other
side of the cap I've pinned a button with the face of Jose Rizal, the Filipino
revolutionary nationalist executed not long before the U.S. took possession of
the Philippines in 1898. Both buttons
remind me of the long the history of the American empire, that there have
always been people who resisted it, and of the price of their resistance.
I went to Guatemala with my friend Sergio Sosa. His father and mother still lived in
Huehuetenango at the time of that visit -- it's where he grew up. But Sergio wanted us to stay in the diocese
rather than at home, so we could talk with Bobadilla. He also wanted me to see first hand what his life
had been like as a seminarian in the church there. I'm not a religious person really, but I
respect Catholics who hold to liberation theology, like Romero and
Bobadilla. Sergio was not only brought
up in the church -- as a young man he was on his way to becoming a priest. Even today there's more than a little of the
priest about him -- the way he listens so intently, his moral certainty, his
enormous capacity for beer late at night.
So one morning we were having coffee with Bishop
Bobadilla and Father Maco. The evening
before we'd spent a long time talking about the civil war of the 1980s, and the
fact that the massacres of tens of thousands of indigenous inhabitants of the
mountains above Huehuetenango were carried out with guns that came from the
U.S., by soldiers whose officers had gone to the School of the Americas in
Georgia. Yet in all the talk I felt no
anger towards me as someone from the U.S.
Why not? I asked that morning over the coffee. "Because we know you have as little
control over your government as we do over ours, probably less," Maco
answered. "But you're interested in
us. You want to hear about what
happened, you know it was wrong and you want to take some responsibility for
it. That's true of most Americans, I
believe."
Today when I read about the children from Guatemala in
detention at the U.S./Mexico border, and see their photographs, I think about
what Mario said. It sounds so
unbelievably hopeful -- this idea that as people here in this country we want
to take responsibility, and recognize the history of all that's happened
between us and the people of Central America.
But do we really want to know? How did these children come to be here, after
all? And what does taking responsibility
mean? It's not just that all children
should be valued and cared for with the greatest tenderness and love. You can't get more basic than that. But it's not enough. We need to know why they're here, in such an
obviously dangerous and painful situation, enduring separation from their
families and the adults in their lives.
I don't expect anything from the vituperative shouts and
placards of the Tea Party. One sign in
the demonstration that protested busses carrying these children in Murrieta,
California, read "Send them back with birth control!" After the Hobby Lobby decision this was
probably an unfortunate slip, since it implied that the sign's holder might
actually favor birth control, even if only to prevent the multiplication of brown
Spanish-speaking children from the south.
But you don't hear much discussion of responsibility or
acknowledgement of history in the discourse of our national leaders
either. Actually, the more disturbing
remarks came from President Obama and Vice-President Biden. The President told mothers not to send their
children north, as though they were bad parents. "Do not send your children to the
borders," he said. "If they do make it, they'll get sent back. More
importantly, they may not make it."
He made some acknowledgement of the poverty and violence that impelled
them to come despite his warning, but drew the line at recognizing this
migration's historical roots, much less any culpability on the part of our
government. Then he called the
presidents of three sovereign countries -- Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala
-- to Washington to discuss what he wanted them to do to stop the flow. Vice-President Biden traveled south carrying
the message that immigration reform is dead, and anyone coming north will be sent
back.
Sergio Sosa, after a union election victory in a meatpacking plant.
It's not hard to see the imbalance of power in this
imperial relationship. It's always been
there. It's so much a fact of life that
it merits no mention at all in the pages of our largest national newspapers. But it's obvious to anyone born south of the
Mexican border.
To Sergio, migration is not just a journey from one point
to another. Migration is a form of
resistance to empire. "People from
Europe and the U.S. crossed borders to come to us, and took over our land and
economy," he points out. " Now
it's our turn to cross borders.
Migration is a form of fighting back.
We're in our situation, not because we decided to be, but because we're
in the U.S.' back yard. Not only that,
people have to resist to keep their communities and identities alive. We are demonstrating that we are human beings
too."
While the faces of the children in detention or caught at
the border are all over the U.S. media, one other obvious fact has escaped
mention. They are overwhelmingly
indigenous youth -- that is, they often come from communities where people
speak languages like Qanjobal, that were already old when the Spanish
colonizers arrived in the Americas. Even
where the language has been lost, as it has been in many communities, the
people who spoke it remain. Some of
those communities became integrated with other marginalized people, like former
African slaves along the Caribbean coast.
Today these people of indigenous and African roots make up the bulk of
migrants, especially from rural areas.
"Mams and Qanjobales are facing a situation of
exclusion," Sergio explains.
"Their communities are poor and isolated, which is why they are
coming here to begin with." While
the young people in detention are mostly looking for family members in the
U.S., he reminds us that families are part of a larger social structure. "We're not just individuals. We're communities, with hometown
associations, unions and sports leagues.
We use our identity, skills and traditions to organize, wherever we
are." Even the gangs that have
become the media symbol for Central American violence are social
organizations. "Of course,"
Sergio cautions, "not every kind of organizing is positive - coyotes and
drug traffickers do the same thing. It's
all become internationalized."
When Sergio and I first went to Guatemala together, his
plan was to use those international networks to link churches in Huehuetenango
to parishes of immigrants in Omaha, where he's lived for many years. Sergio frames his perspective in religious
terms, but to me it is also a profoundly human vision, and offers human answers
to the migration of children -- and adults as well. "I come from a faith tradition," he
says. "Borders are for countries,
not for Christians. Faith crosses
borders. It says this world is our
world. It's for all of us. If you open markets and economies, why can't
they be opened to people too? We have to
open our own internal borders, and let strangers into our lives."
Sitting in the Huehuetenango diocese, I remembered the
first time I thought much about Central America, over twenty years
earlier. I was working in an electronics
plant in Silicon Valley, where we were trying to organize a union. That activity eventually cost me my job and put
me on the valley's blacklist. I thought
we were facing the worst the industry could throw at upstart workers --
psychological profiling, massive propaganda, a rumor mill that had everyone
believing that you'd be fired if you joined up, and actual firings for those
who didn't get the point.
Then I met Ana Martinez.
It was the early 1980s, just as the civil war in El Salvador was getting
hot. Some friends in the solidarity
groups that were just starting asked us if we'd be interested in meeting
someone who'd worked in an electronics plant in El Salvador. Maybe we could raise some money and help her
out. So one Sunday morning we were
holding our regular monthly meeting in a classroom at Sacred Heart church in
downtown San Jose. That church and its
priest, Father Cuchulain Moriarity, had offered sanctuary to refugees fleeing
Chile after the fascist coup in 1973. It
seemed like every progressive group met there.
When we got our union committee going, we did the same.
Ana was twenty-four when she walked into the room. I've always thought of her as one of the hard
ones. She didn't smile much. She told her story in a flat voice, with no
flourishes. Her affect was almost
unemotional, but this gave her words even more power. And what she recounted shook us.
Ana Martinez, on the picket line with the workers' committee at Cal Spas in Pomona, CA.
"I started as a worker in 1974 in El Salvador,"
she began. She was 19. Along with a thousand others, mostly women,
Ana got a job at Texas Instruments, a giant U.S. electronics company that
operated an assembly plant in Ilopango, on the outskirts of San Salvador. Workers in the factory assembled computer
chips, spending long hours at benches, peering through microscopes, attaching
tiny wires to the circuits.
In 1976 her first son was born, and then another in
1978. The pressure of growing families
led many of the assembly workers to begin organizing a union in the plant. "Ninety-five percent of us were women,
and our children didn't have adequate supervision," Ana recalled. "We were risking our eyes working with
the microscopes, and we had problems with the chemicals." Their fledgling union demanded wage
increases, nurseries for the children, and treatment for the workers'
deteriorating eyesight. Ana called it a
revolutionary union because workers also had a vision of larger changes beyond
the problems in the plant. "We
learned, not just to fight for our union in the factory, but for a more just
society."
Those were dangerous years. Because her union and most others advocated
social change beyond bread and butter, the country's generals and business
leaders accused them of being allies of the guerilla groups in the
countryside. By 1980, many unionists had
been killed by the rising death squads, including two from the Texas
Instruments plant. In response,
Salvadoran unions called a general strike.
"On the day of the strike I worked in the calculator
department," she recalled. "I
kept asking myself what I was going to do, and how I was going to get my
department to stop. I thought that if I
went to each person and said 'Stop!' they would be too afraid to do it. My compañeros just gave me the job and left
it up to me to find a way. A mechanic
told me where to find the button that turned the machines off. So I told my coworkers that at 8 AM the
strike would start, and the whole country was ready.
"When the moment came, I pressed the right button
and all the machines stopped. We looked
around and saw that the workers in the other departments had stopped too. It was very emotional, and very scary. The army came into the factory."
The head of plant security walked up and down the rows of
machines, a pistol in each hand.
Outside, soldiers grabbed two workers who'd come from the printing plant
next door to help, and shot them. The
next day Ana and her friends from Texas Instruments went to their union office
to hold a memorial service for one of the murdered workers. The army arrived and arrested everyone. "They shot up the union office, and two
compañeros died that day." She was
held by the soldiers for hours, and then fired for helping organize the
action.
Three days after the general strike, a death squad sent
by Colonel Roberto d'Auboisson entered the national cathedral in central San
Salvador, and assassinated Archbishop Romero.
The civil war had begun.
Ana's activity made her a target. She decided to leave the country, but felt
enormous conflict over her decision.
"We had one foot on earth and one foot in the grave," she told
our group in the San Jose church classroom. "We didn't know if the next
day we would wake up alive. It is a
horrible trauma that marked all of my generation. I had small children, and I was afraid for
their future. Others were hard enough to
be able to say 'I'm here, and here I'll stay.'
Many made that decision, and many died.
I thought I was more concerned with myself than with the struggle of our
people, and I called myself a coward."
The strike took place March 21, 1980. She left the country on April 21, leaving her
children behind, hoping to bring them later.
When she spoke to our union committee she'd arrived in California just
weeks before. After listening to her, many
of us joined what later became the Committee in Solidarity with the People of
El Salvador. President Reagan called
CISPES a terrorist organization, but we knew who the real terrorists were. We could also see that Reagan's support for
El Salvador's military was driven by at least one strong economic motivation --
making the country safe for Texas Instruments, and ensuring that the workers in
the plant there had no union. Just like
us, we thought. Electronics workers in
the U.S. still don't have unions.
The workers' committee at Cal Spas holds a meeting in a Pomona park.
Twelve years later I met Ana again. Both of us found ourselves on a picket line
in front of a giant sweatshop in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los
Angeles. For six weeks we practically
lived under a tree at the corner of Ninth and East End in Pomona, from five in
the morning until nine at night. For
Ana, that tree marked one end of a road that had its beginnings in Ilopango,
then took her through the immigrant experience in Los Angeles, and finally led
to a job as a union organizer for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE),
trying to put into practice the same ideals that forced her from her native
land.
On Ninth Street, immigrant workers from Mexico and
Central America had gone on strike against Pomona's largest employer, the Cal
Spas factory. Cal Spas' products are
symbols of the good life in southern California, conjuring up images of warm
evenings in the breeze on the patio, bathing in a hot tub's warm turbulent
water. But the 530 workers who labored
in the sprawling factory were far removed from suburban homes with patios and
tubs. Earning minimum wage with no
holidays or vacations, most lived in cramped apartments. The $5000 price of a spa made it as
inaccessible to them as a TI calculator was to the strikers in the Ilopango
factory.
Immigrants in Los Angeles and laborers in a Salvadoran
maquiladora are all workers on the bottom.
They produce the luxury goods they can never hope to own, clean the
luxury hotels where they will never stay, and nail up the drywall in the dream
homes where they will never live. That
was the reality Ana found when she exchanged work in El Salvador for work in
Los Angeles. With a little prodding, as
we sat under the tree on Ninth Street, she told me what had happened to her
after she'd visited us in San Jose.
Her first job was in a garment shop. Sewing on piece rate she was paid $5.00 for a
day's work. "I thought, my God,
I'll never be able to do anything here," she remembered. Then she got a job as a domestic worker. Cooking and cleaning for a family, she earned
more than she could in a garment factory, but still hardly enough to eat. "I carried my clothes and possessions
around with me. I would go to the house
of friends, who would give me a place to sleep.
Sometimes I would sleep in a closet.
Sometimes there were five of us sleeping on the floor in a
hallway."
She began to get jobs cleaning houses, but that had its
dangers for women. She explained: "We were in a strange country where we
didn't understand the language, and our culture was very different. When people offered to help us, we didn't
know if they were honest or not, and we had such a great need to survive. Sometimes we would go to a certain place, and
men, really bad men, would tell us they would take us where there was
work. I had friends who were tricked by
men who said they'd find them work, and later raped them. It was so dangerous, and we were so
poor."
Ana kept looking for other Salvadorans who were involved
in supporting the movement back home.
Finally she found people who helped her bring her children to the
U.S. It took four years to save enough
money. Today many who argue for
restrictions on immigration claim immigrants bring their children to the U.S.,
or have children here, to take advantage of social services and supposedly a
better life. Yet Ana's attempt to
reunite her family in the U.S. had bitter results, and was ultimately
unsuccessful.
Her sons stayed with her for five years, while they lived
in the MacArthur Park neighborhood downtown.
In the 1990s this neighborhood was the focus of the Ramparts scandal,
which exposed massive corruption in the Community Resources Against Street
Hoodlums (or C*R*A*S*H) anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police
Department. In the name of combatting
gang activity, especially among young immigrants from Central America, cops
dished out unprovoked shootings and beatings, planted false evidence, framed
suspects, stole and dealt narcotics themselves, robbed banks, lied in court
and, and covered up of evidence of their crimes. It was one of the most extensive cases of
police misconduct in U.S. history.
In the end, Ana sent her kids back to live with their
father in El Salvador. "I tried to
ensure they got an education," she lamented, "but I began to see that
Los Angeles wasn't a healthy place for them to grow up. Even though I was trying to give them good
values at home, how could I control the corruption they were exposed to
outside? The gangs, the drugs, how? Our neighborhood, in the center of the city,
was a lost and corrupt place. I don't
think any parent could do it."
A poor barrio in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
When Ana sent her children back voluntarily the formation
of Central American gangs in Los Angeles had just started, as had the
deportations of gang members by the U.S. government. Ten year later it had reached a flood. Steven Dudley, on the InSight Crime website,
writes that these gangs, now painted in our media as the source of the violence
in Central America forcing people north, had a U.S. origin. "Thousands of refugees and economic
migrants fled to the United States and settled in big cities such as Los
Angeles. Feeling vulnerable to other gangs in these cities, some members of
these new enclaves formed their own gangs," he says. "Gangs' emergence in the mid-1990s
coincided with state and federal initiatives in the United States that led to
longer and higher incarceration rates for gang members and increased
deportations of ex-convicts. The number of gang members deported quickly
increased, as did the number of transnational gangs operating in [Central
America]."
Some 129,726 people convicted of crimes were deported to
Central America from 2000 to 2010.
"With the deportations, the two most prominent Los Angeles gangs -
the Mara Salvatrucha 13 and the Barrio 18 - quickly became the two largest
transnational gangs," he adds. In
El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, U.S. law enforcement assistance pressured
local police to adopt a "mano dura" or hardline approach to gang
members. Many young people deported
from the U.S. were incarcerated almost as soon as they arrived. Prisons became
schools for gang recruitment.
Today El Salvador, with a leftwing FMLN government, at
least has a commitment to a policy of jobs and economic development to take
young people off the street, and to providing an alternative to migration. Even there, conservative police and military
forces continue to support heavy enforcement.
"Under one of the more recent pilot programs in El Salvador, the
FBI released lists of suspected gang-member deportees to a special unit within
the Salvadoran national police, which then disseminated the list across the
country's law enforcement," Dudley says.
In Guatemala and Honduras, the U.S. is supporting
rightwing governments that exclusively use a heavy enforcement approach. U.S. funding for law enforcement and the
military still flows, two decades after the wars ended, through the Central
America Regional Security Initiative.
Marine Corps General John Kelly, commander of the U.S. Southern Command,
frames migration as a national security threat, calling it a "crime-terror
convergence." He describes "an
incredibly efficient network along which anything - hundreds of tons of drugs,
people, terrorists, potentially weapons of mass destruction or children - can
travel, so long as they can pay the fare."
Of the last decade's deportees of alleged gang members,
44,042 wound up in Honduras. Recently
the Border Patrol created a graphic that was reproduced in articles in many
mainstream newspapers. It purports to
show which cities in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras send the greatest
number of unaccompanied minors to the U.S.
Topping their list is San Pedro Sula, in Honduras, which is touted as
"murder capital of Central America."
This city, by no coincidence at all, was the site of one
of the largest programs of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the
years after the wars ended, in the mid 1990s.
Under the rubric of economic development, USAID set up export processing
zones where working conditions became even more regimented than those at Texas
Instruments in nearby El Salvador, although in place of killings, factory
owners used mass firings to keep workers in line. Financing from USAID paid for road
construction, sewers, buildings, transportation, and the basic infrastructure for
manufacturing. U.S. companies were then
wooed to either directly invest in plant construction, or guarantee work to
contractors who operate factories for them.
Workers
pile on the back of a pickup
truck while it's still dark,
on their way to work in a
factory in San Pedro Sula.
As a result, today San Pedro Sula is very much a factory
town. Lining its main arteries are
tilt-up concrete buildings housing enterprises that sew garments, pack shrimp,
or run injection molding machines churning out plastic parts. At shift change young women stream through
the gates, while men pilot the trucks that carry containers full of merchandise
for export down to the nearby docks in Puerto Cortez.
Several years ago I met one of San Pedro Sula's working
women, Claudia Molina when she came to California. In front of a microphone at our local
community radio station she described conditions that sounded like the stories
I heard as a garment union organizer, when the old timers talked about
sweatshops and the big strikes that gave birth to the International Ladies
Garment Workers Union. "Our work
day is from 7:30 AM to 8:30 PM," Molina said, "sometimes until 10:30,
from Monday to Friday. On Saturday we
start at 7:30 AM. We get an hour for
lunch, and work until 6:30 PM. We take a
half hour again to eat, and then we work from 7 PM until midnight. We take another half hour rest, and then go
until 6 on Sunday morning. Working like
this I earned 270 lempiras per week [about $30 at the time]."
Molina worked for a company, Orion, which sewed garments
for big U.S. clothing lines. Orion used
terror to beat back efforts by its workers to change conditions. On June 10, 1996, a company security guard
shot a worker three times in the head.
He'd gone into the plant without an ID card to collect his paycheck. Workers stopped work. "We demanded that the company give the
worker's family the pay they owed him, and that they recognize our union,"
Molina recalled. Instead, Orion fired
over 600 people.
Molina came to the U.S. with a young Salvadoran woman,
Judith Viera, who'd been fired at Mandarin, a similar garment plant in San
Salvador. "Our workday started at 7
AM and went to 9 PM, Monday to Thursday," Viera said. "On Friday we went from 7 AM to 5 PM,
and then started again at 7 PM, and worked until 3 on Saturday morning. Then we went to sleep on the dirt floor of
the plant, and woke up to start working again at 7 AM, and worked until 5 PM
Saturday evening." For this she got
750 colones a week - about $43. There
too workers organized in response, and the company fired 350 of them. When those who remained struck in protest,
company managers called the police, who pulled the organizers out of the
plant. Police kidnapped the general
secretary of the union, threatening and beating him. According to Viera, "they told him to
turn over the names of the members of the union's executive board, and that if
he didn't, they would kill his family."
The National Labor Committee, which organized support in
the U.S. for the fired workers, eventually convinced The Gap, Mandarin's main
client, to insist that the fired worker be rehired. But Molina and Viera exposed conditions that
existed in all the export processing factories, which were the result not just
of the avarice of the owners, but of U.S. policies.
Their accounts were strikingly similar of the intense
preoccupation by the companies, both in El Salvador and Honduras, with the
sexual lives of young women workers.
Many of the maquiladoras had a company doctor, whose main function was
to see to it that workers didn't qualify for disability payments. At both Mandarin and Orion, they handed out
contraceptives. "When we complain
that we're sick, he gives us contraceptive pills," Viera said. When the doctor's pills made one woman on her
line feel ill, she went to the public social security clinic. "At the clinic they told her that she
was pregnant, which she hadn't known, and that the pills she'd been given were
to produce an abortion."
It is more than ironic that the placard held by the
protestor in Murrieta advocated a measure that was actually implemented years
earlier. Distribution of birth control
pills in factories was not motivated by a concern for the reproductive rights
of the women who were required to take them.
The wholesale administration of contraceptives is described in two
studies made by Price Waterhouse, a large U.S. accounting firm, under a
government contract to evaluate USAID programs.
Its mandate was to identify problems hindering the growth of offshore
plants in the Honduran export processing zones, the largest being San Pedro
Sula. These studies, in October 1992 and
May 1993, identified the main problem faced by employers as a potential labor
shortage. Not only would this restrict
growing production, Price Waterhouse said, but it would exert an upward
pressure on wages.
In the Honduran EPZs, 50 factories had been set up and
were in operation in March 1992, employing 22,342 workers. Price Waterhouse predicted that in a year 287
factories would employ 105,000 people.
Consequently, the report concluded, "EPZ's labor demands could not
be met by natural population growth."
The most important way to solve labor needs, it said, was through
"an increase in the labor participation rates of young women," that
is, by drawing more young women into the workforce and keeping them there.
Women made up 84% of the workforce in Honduran
maquiladoras at the time. In almost
every country where U.S.-owned garment and assembly plants have been set up,
this same general proportion holds true to this day. Over 95% of the women in the Honduran plants
were younger than 30, and half were younger than 20. As might be expected, many of the young women
in the factories were at the point in their lives where they wanted to begin
their own families. But Price Waterhouse
noted with disapproval that "the pregnancy rate among women of
childbearing age was 4% in June 1992, up from 2.5% six months earlier. This is regarded as too high (3% would be the
maximum acceptable)."
The
home of a dockworker in
Puerto Cortez, the port for
San Pedro Sula.
Therefore, to keep women from getting pregnant, and
leaving the factory to have children, USAID funded the Honduran Association for
Family Planning. Following the example
of a similar association set up by USAID in the Mexican maquiladoras, the
Honduran association established "contraceptive distribution posts staffed
by nurses in three EPZ factories: Monty,
and Hanes...and MAINTA (Osh Kosh B'Gosh)."
The report noted that the Mexican program "claims spectacular
results in higher productivity, lower staff turnover and training costs,
reduced absenteeism and reduced costs for maternity leave...and medical
care." The report concluded,
"USAID officers would favor the establishment of distribution posts for
pills and condoms in every EPZ factory."
The studies looked at every aspect of workers' lives that
might affect an adequate labor supply, from the number of stoves and bicycles
per household and the size of families, to the amount of each family's budget
spent on food and transport. And they
examined the age of the workforce. As
the companies began to run out of girls in their late teenage years, younger
and younger girls were drawn into the plants.
One study featured a table showing that children between 10 and 14 made
up 16% of the women either employed or seeking jobs. A footnote claimed "the legal minimum
working age in Honduras is 15, but in the rural economy it is normal to work
from ten onwards."
This was the alternative to migration in the worldview of
policy makers in Washington DC. The U.S.
government promoted EPZ construction in the interests of providing low-cost
labor to U.S. corporations, and in promoting economic development policies that
tied the economies of Central American countries to U.S. corporate
investment. Since these countries have
little capital for export-oriented industrial development, the U.S. provides
it. This assistance ranges from the
construction of the infrastructure for manufacturing to the supply of labor
itself. With U.S. expertise paving the
way, it's not coincidental that the industrial parks look the same, that the
demographics of their workforce are virtually identical, and that the working
conditions in the factories are carbon copies of each other.
Even as the war in El Salvador was winding down, apparel
imports by U.S. garment companies surged from $10 million to almost $398
million by the mid-1990s. But Salvadoran
wages, adjusted for inflation, fell from 382 colones per month to 180 colones,
according to the New York-based National Labor Committee, quoting from USAID
and business sources.
As a migration-preventing strategy it was a bust. By the end of the 1990s the number of
Salvadorans in the U.S. had reached 2 million.
Migration from Guatemala and Honduras was not far behind. But preventing migration was a pretext
anyway. Not only did the policy of
maquiladora development continue, but it evolved into an even larger strategy
of encouraging foreign investment through privatizing state utilities, services
and assets, and negotiating free trade agreements, first in Mexico, and then in
Central America.
When the Central America Free Trade Agreement came up for
a vote in the U.S. Congress in 2005, its supporters claimed this kind of
economic development would produce jobs in new maquiladoras and slow migration
down. In Central America, progressive
social movements wouldn't drink the Kool-Aid, however. When the Honduran Congress took up
ratification, over a thousand demonstrators filled the streets of Tegucigalpa,
angrily denouncing the effort. The
Honduran Congress ratified CAFTA anyway, but the crowd was so angry that
terrified deputies quickly fled.
"We chased them out, and then we went into the
chambers ourselves," said Erasmo Flores, president of the Sindicato
Nacional de Motoristas de Equipo Pesado de Honduras (SINAMEQUIPH), the union
for Honduras' port truckers. "Then
we constituted ourselves as the congress of the true representatives of the
Honduran people, and voted to scrap Congress' ratification." While admittedly an act of political theater
by the leftwing Bloque Popular, the protest showed how dramatically unpopular the
agreement was in Central America among workers and farmers - those people most
likely to become migrants.
Guatemala's National Civilian Police sealed off the
streets around the Guatemalan Congress after it voted to ratify CAFTA, and then
used clubs and teargas against almost 2000 demonstrators. Following the vote, popular organizations
began mounting highway blockades throughout the country, effectively halting
commerce and travel. At a blockade in
Colotenango, at the Puente Naranjales crossroads, police and the army fired on
the crowd. Juan Lopez Velásquez was
killed, and nine others wounded by bullets.
CAFTA reinforced the transformation of Central American
economies, using a low standard of living as a means to attract investment in
factories producing, not for an internal market, but for export to the
U.S. Hundreds of thousands of Central
American jobs were already tied to export production. The George W. Bush administration used them
as bargaining leverage, threatening economic disaster by raising the specter of
import barriers against countries that wouldn't adopt the trade treaty and the
economic model behind it.
Erasmo
Flores, head of the union
for port truckers in
Honduras, talks with
drivers about the impact
of CAFTA.
Then the U.S. administration turned around and made the
opposite threat to keep people from electing governments that might not go
along. Right-wing Congressman Tom
Tancredo (R-Colo.) put forward a measure in 2004 to cut off the flow of
remittances (money sent back to Salvadoran families from family members working
in the U.S.) if people voted for a leftwing party, the FMLN, in El Salvador's
national elections. Otto Reich, a violently anti-communist Cuban who was the
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said the U.S.
government was "concerned about the impact that an FMLN victory could have
on the commercial, economic, and migration-related relations of the U.S. with
El Salvador." The U.S. embassy
later admitted it had interfered in the election. Salvadoran papers, especially those on the
right, were full of the threats and the FMLN lost.
In 2009 a tiny wealthy elite in Honduras overthrew President
Manuel Zelaya because he raised the country's minimum wage, gave subsidies to
small farmers, cut interest rates and instituted free education. All of these were measures that, by raising
living standards, would have given people a future at home. Nevertheless, after a weak protest, the Obama
administration gave de facto approval to the coup regime that followed. If
social and political change had taken place in Honduras, we would see far fewer
Hondurans trying to come to the U.S.
One of the most devastating effects on workers has come
from privatization, enforced by the free market mandate to create investment
opportunities for foreign corporations.
As national enterprises get sold off, sometimes for just a fraction of
their worth, new private owners cut labor costs by slashing jobs and gutting
union contracts. Honduras' longshore
workers' union twice beat back government efforts to privatize the docks of
Puerto Cortez, mobilizing the whole town in the process. "We put our union's assets, like our
soccer field and clinic, at the service of the town," explained Roberto
Contreras, a union officer and Honduran representative for the International
Transport Federation. "When the government tried to privatize our jobs, we
told people that if we didn't cooperate to defeat it, the whole town would
lose, not just the port workers."
Despite that opposition, however, the Honduran government
finally did privatize the shipping terminals in Puerto Cortez last year, and
gave a contract to a company from the Philippines, ICTSI, to run them. As an incentive, it gave the company the
freedom to fire workers who belonged to SGTM, the General Union of Dock
Workers. After dockers saw newly hired
laborers in jobs they'd done for generations, they protested. The coup government that replaced Zelaya sent
in the army and arrested 129 people, charging them with
"terrorism." Last September
attackers tried to break into the home of the union's general secretary, Victor
Crespo, shouting that he should "stop making noise about organizing
stevedores." Following that, a
truck mysteriously hit and killed his father, and injured his mother, in front
of their home. Crespo had to leave the
country.
Crespo's future as an exile has yet to unfold. But it may be like that of Ana and many
Central Americans. We owe a great debt
to them, not just because of the loss and separation they've experienced, but
because of what they've given us in spite of it. If you take a look at the leaders and
organizers who've changed the political face of Los Angeles, for instance,
Salvadorans in particular number among them in outsize proportions.
When they began pouring into the city as war refugees, a
few unions realized the resource Central Americans represented, in terms of
hard experience organizing workers under conditions far more difficult than
those in California. Eliseo Medina, a
Mexican farm worker who became a national union leader, once told me, "if
you've lived in a world where going on strike may cost your life, getting fired
for organizing a union doesn't seem so threatening."
One union that saw the possibilities was the United
Electrical Workers. It's Los Angeles
leader, Humberto Camacho, began giving organizer jobs to people like Ana, who'd
organized unions in San Salvador and then had to run for it. He brought in others from the left in Mexico
who'd fled the repression after the massacre in Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968, who
saw the huge numbers of Mexicans in the LA workforce as their natural constituency. His union became an early school in tactics
for organizing immigrants. Camacho
himself was for many years the strongest voice in the city's labor movement
advocating the unionization of undocumented workers, rather than seeing them as
interlopers and job competitors, or even just "unorganizable."
Joel Ochoa, a refugee from Tlatelolco who today is a
leader in the Machinists Union, says of that period, "Central Americans
were a positive influence. They came
with experience in labor organizing and politics, which they transformed into
action here." It was, and still is,
a powerful combination -- workers on the bottom with not much to lose in
minimum wage jobs, and politically sophisticated organizers hardened in a war
zone. That should inspire progressive
movements in the U.S. to look at immigration in a different way. Simply being an immigrant may not bend a
person politically to the left. But many
immigrants bring organizing skills and working-class political consciousness
with them, depending on where they come from, and their previous
experiences.
In the past few years I've thought about what might
happen if more people came here from Iraq.
Both in Baghdad and Basra I met veterans of that country's long leftwing
labor tradition. Today those leaders and
organizers have lived through experiences like those of Central America. If the door opened for Iraqi refugees, it's
not hard to imagine that people with experience in its social movements would
be among them. We would benefit. Perhaps that's one unspoken reason why the number
of people admitted is so low. Yet even
with that restriction, today Qasim Hadi, for instance, who organized the union
of the unemployed when the occupation first started, lives in California. Perhaps he'll use his knowledge and
experience to organize Arabic-speaking workers here, despite what must be great
bitterness over the destruction visited on his homeland.
Yanira
Merino talks with workers
doing asbestos removal on
the campus of California
State University
Northridge, urging them to
join the Laborers Union.
That possibility was certainly realized in the life of
Yanira Merino. Like Ana, she also came
to Los Angeles from El Salvador at the beginning of the war, in 1979. During her first years here, she was an
outspoken supporter of the FMLN when it fought the government in the mountains,
long before it became a political party and eventually, today, the country's
government. In the 1980s, however,
supporting the guerrilleros was dangerous, even in L.A.
Her father in El Salvador was not sympathetic to her
politics, but the military there nevertheless threatened him because he
couldn't stop her. In 1987 her car was
forced off the road by people who tried to abduct her and her son. When that didn't produce a big enough scare,
a month later two Salvadorans kidnapped her on a Los Angeles street at
knifepoint. She was driven around in a
van, tortured and raped. Her tormentors
burned her with cigarettes and cut the letters E M into her hand, which stand
for Escuadron de Muerte, or Death Squad.
Finally she was pushed out onto a freeway ramp. No one was ever caught in her case.
Yanira's ordeal had precedents among activist migrants
living in the U.S., who also got on the wrong side of U.S. policy. Former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and
his aide Ronni Moffitt were murdered by a bomb blast in Washington DC in
1976. Subsequent investigations and
trials revealed the perpetrators had been working for Chile's secret police
with the knowledge of U.S. intelligence agencies. At the end of the Vietnam War, a rightwing
terrorist group of former South Vietnamese soldiers, nicknamed The Frogmen,
operated from a southern California military base. They murdered several Vietnamese activists
living in the U.S. as well as Professor Ed Cooperman, because they all called
publicly for normalizing relations with Vietnam.
Yanira and I have been friends for many years, since I
interviewed her after her kidnapping ordeal.
Later we both spoke out for the rights of immigrant workers in unions
where we worked as organizers. She is a
remarkable woman, and was able to transform the brutality of her terrifying
experience into the hard determination organizers need.
"I'm part of the workforce in this country,"
she told me long ago. "I worked in a shrimp-processing plant when I first
came here, and experienced the terror employers use when their workers say
they've had enough and start organizing. Coming from a third-world country like
El Salvador, I never thought I'd see that in a first-world country like this.
But even though you put your life on the line to organize a union back home,
you have to fight for your rights in either place. I don't see much of a
difference."
Yanira became an organizer for the Laborers Union, one of
the few unions in construction with a large immigrant and African Americans
membership. It was a good fit -- the
union understood the resources she was bringing. She headed a national campaign to organize
chicken plant workers in the South, and then worked to bring asbestos removal
workers, who do one of the world's most dangerous jobs, into the union in
southern California and New York. She
rose through the hierarchy, no small achievement for a Spanish-speaking woman,
and eventually was put in charge of immigration policy. She convinced the union to start seeing
immigrant day laborers on street corners, not as cheap competition in the labor
market, but as potential allies and even members.
Today Yanira coordinates immigration policy at the
AFL-CIO. It is a difficult job. Not all unions want to welcome immigrants as
members. Others want to take whatever
immigration deal is on the table in Washington DC, regardless of how many more
detention centers get built or how many workers stand to lose their jobs to
immigration enforcement. Unions and
progressive social movements need someone with her experience in that job.
In her most radical days Yanira's favorite writer was Che
Guevara. She'd say things she'd probably
get in trouble for today. But her words
inspired me, as did her confidence that immigrant workers would produce a new
generation of leaders, and would expect a lot more of their unions. "That's
the challenge the labor movement has to meet here," I remember her
declaring. "Are the leaders of this
movement ready for it? Are they ready to fight at the side of these
workers? Because if they're not,
somebody else will. This fight is going
to happen, with or without them."
Like Yanira and Ana, Sergio too became a working class
activist. In Omaha he first got a job as
a community organizer. He organized
Omaha Together One Community from a base in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in
South Omaha. There the city's Latino
barrio is populated by hundreds of meatpacking workers. When I met him, he was trying to build
resistance to Operation Vanguard, the largest Federal effort in modern history
to drive undocumented workers from their jobs.
In the final years of the Clinton administration, over 3000 immigrant
laborers in Nebraska meatpacking plants wound up on the street as a result,
desperate to find a way to feed their families. Sergio was particularly angry
because these workplace firings had targeted the activists he'd brought together
in the meatpacking plants, in committees he hoped would become the nuclei of
union organizing campaigns.
Immigrant
asbestos removal workers
march through the campus
at California State
University Northridge,
protesting the danger of
mesothelioma from
breathing asbestos fibers.
Despite the reverses caused by Operation Vanguard, within
a couple of years Sergio had helped the meatpacking union win an election at
the city's largest beef slaughterhouse.
Today he heads the Heartland Workers Center. In all the small meatpacking towns of eastern
Nebraska, he organizes committees among the Guatemalans and Mexicans, as well
as non-Latino immigrants from Somalia and Croatia. Nebraska may still be a Republican
stronghold, but unions are growing. In a
state where May Day marches would have been attacked as Communist two decades
ago, immigrant workers take to the streets every May 1, as many of them did in
the countries they come from. You can
feel the rumblings of demographic and political change beneath the
surface. Nebraska won't be a
conservative bastion much longer.
But despite finding a place to put his organizing
abilities to work, coming to the U.S. was a painful process for Sergio -- not a
triumphal march. In conversations
through many long nights and bottles of beer, I realized that his migration had
been a very mixed experience, and faced him with many of the same dilemmas Ana
described. Sergio had been more than a
seminarian. I still jokingly call him mi
comandante, which means my commander, or combatiente, which means soldier or
fighter. Even as a boy he carried
messages for the guerrilleros, when Guatemala's civil war started. The war shaped him in many ways, not least by
giving him the anger he carried for years afterwards. "My conscience was born by seeing
injustices every day," he explained, "in seeing the dead, and dead,
and more dead. I saw the murder of a
neighbor who was like my brother, in front of his house. This begins to create something inside that
enrages you. You want to do
something."
Recounting his country's history, he had no hesitation in
placing the blame. "The US was
responsible for the coups that happened in Guatemala in 1944 and later in '54. Our army was trained at the School of the
Americas, and they would come back afterwards and kill our own people. Add to
that all the money that came in, about 2 million dollars every fifteen days,
which were taxes paid by U.S. citizens.
The U.S. used its power and we buried the dead."
Only love could have overcome such anger. Organizing young people from a base in the
church during the conflict, he met a woman who'd come to Huehuetenango, sent by
a Christian foundation in Kansas City.
Working together they fell in love, got married, and had a child. Sergio gave up his dream of becoming a
priest. Still, he would not consider
leaving Guatemala, despite ever more numerous death threats and growing
danger.
"I married Jill with one condition -- that I would
never come to the U.S.," he laughs.
"And the reason was that I hated gringos. But I realized that before being a gringa
Jill was a person. I started to
understand that there was a sector in the U.S. population that had a political
consciousness about foreign policy. And
the other part was love. I loved
her. My wife had lived almost five years
away from her parents and home, and it was no longer just my life I had to
consider. It was her life as well. I felt selfish not to support her by coming
and being here with her. Finally, I
decided to leave for 'Gringolandia.'"
He remembers crying on the plane, feeling he was
abandoning his homeland, unsure of how he would put his values to work in a new
country where he knew no one besides his wife and didn't speak the
language. And a migrant's life in
Nebraska, he discovered, was neither a Guatemalan dream nor an American
one.
"We are becoming acculturated," he
worried. That was one reason he wanted
to return to Guatemala -- to understand what migration meant for those left
behind, beyond remittances. "We
learn other forms of living and rich forms are lost. It creates not only a rupture, but it
accelerates social decomposition. People
from the north come back and we look at them differently because they act
differently. They send money, but years
apart break up families. Those with
remittances might be better off than those without them, but depending on
checks from the north doesn't really give anyone a future, especially the
young. They grow up thinking the only
way to have a future is to leave."
Like millions of others, Sergio did survive. In the process he changed the world he found
in Omaha. When we think of the children
in those detention centers today, we might think of them as change agents
too. Children grow up. If they're treated with respect, as though
they're of value to us, many will live to fulfill our shared ideals. "Latin American immigrants are changing
the social, economic and political structure of this country," he
says. "And this country has had an
impact on us too. We come with documents
or without them, but we're here to stay.
They can try to send us home, but we will be back. Globalization opened the economic borders, but it didn't open the cultural
ones. Sooner or later we will have to
learn we need to open those cultural borders in order to survive. If we don't learn this we will destroy each
other."
When we look at the Central American children in the
detention centers today, the responsibility we have towards them is to give
them a world in which the choice to leave Guatemala or El Salvador or Honduras
is truly voluntary -- where they have a future with dignity if they choose to
stay. The ability to stay home is as
important as the ability and right to migrate.
Mixtec professor Gaspar Rivera Salgado says, "The right to stay
home, to not migrate, has to mean more than the right to be poor, or the right
to go hungry. Choosing whether to stay
home or leave only has meaning if each choice can provide a meaningful future,
in which we are all respected as human beings."
Sergio
Sosa.
That right can't be achieved in Central America
alone. The policies pursued by our
government, whether through war and military aid, or through trade agreements
and pressure to keep wages low, all produce migration. If President Obama had lived up to his
promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and its
corollary in Central America (which he boasted of having voted against), and
had done so out of concern for their impact outside our borders, we might have
made more progress by now in keeping those children out of detention.
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