The Flight of the Iguana (27 page)

The entire Border Patrol, Austin stresses, comprises fewer personnel than the Baltimore Police Department. Yet in 1983 the Patrol apprehended one million illegal aliens—of whom the vast majority were Mexicans. Meanwhile, as of 1984 only three hundred Central Americans (by Austin's rough estimate, which is lower than some others) successfully made the passage into sanctuary. Austin suggests (and despite some disagreement over numbers, the point is generally persuasive) that, as far as the immediate INS mission is concerned, the traffic of undocumented Central Americans represents little more than a biting mosquito on the arm of a man who is about to be trampled by a rhino. For the State Department, however—and for the White House—it is another matter.

Especially now, after the election of Napoleon Duarte as President, the Reagan Administration cannot afford to admit that E1 Salvador remains chaotically violent—a place from which innocent people must sometimes flee for their lives.

•   •   •

“Here's the spot where we saw the Gila monster last week,” says Jeff. He points to a small undercut ledge in the wall of the narrow gulch. The journalist inspects it distractedly while the others catch breath.

Last week was a dry run, an innocent day hike in from the U.S. side to scout a path through these connecting canyons. This particular gulch, a water-cut gash into the desert floor, tight as a big-city alley, with a few cottonwoods gripped thirstily into the sand and stony shoulders rising on each side, seemed a good route, deep and sinuous enough to offer cover. In Arizona you
call this sort of thing a “wash.” It's cooler and more pleasant than the bleak open hills, though a bad place to get caught during a rainstorm. Also prime habitat for
Heloderma suspectum.
That might seem to recommend it or not, depending on your predisposition. But no, no Gila monster is cooling itself under the ledge today. A small disappointment for the journalist.

Heloderma suspectum
in its native environment can go a great while without food or water. During good times it stores away fat in its long dragging sausage of a tail. With weeks or months of starvation and drought, the tail thins away and the whole animal shrinks down to a scrawny lizard shape inside the flaccid bead-work skin. Reduced to that minimal existence, not eating, not moving, unseen, it still tends to be a survivor. Seems to have no natural enemies except the coyote, various raptors, and of course the cruel and acquisitive
Homo sapiens.
Not much traffic by any of those three taxa, through a woebegone drywash like this.

Humans in particular are poorly engineered for the terrain. As the morning wears on, the Salvadoran woman is moving a little more slowly. She needs help climbing up and down these rocky shoulders. Advance word to Helen and Jeff said that the Salvadoran husband and the children should be capable of an arduous hike, the woman perhaps less so; but no one was sure whether to credit that warning or to dismiss it as a sexist assumption.

Now it turns out that the woman is suffering from mumps. She knows the symptoms, because she is a nurse.

•   •   •

John Fife says, “The whole function of public sanctuary is to encourage as many churches—and people—as possible to have to deal with this moral, legal problem. To make a decision and then communicate it to the legislative bodies.”

In some measure, it seems to be working. With surprising speed, the sanctuary idea has taken hold in other consciences, other congregations, other cities, and become a national movement.

Immediately after the Southside declaration, Fife and his compatriots began getting calls from religious people of every denomination all over the country. What could they do to help? How could they take the same step? There were also calls from Salvadorans and Guatemalans who had themselves escaped to the U.S. but who had relatives still in danger. Could those relatives be rescued by the underground railroad? The Tucson people were swamped beneath a huge volume of inquiries; at the same time they were still also trying to move refugees northward, and to cope with those people's immediate physical needs. At last came a call from a group called the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, a confederation of forty religious organizations in the Chicago area, who asked for information that they could pass on to their members—and as a result of that contact, Tucson gratefully turned over its central communications role to the Chicago Task Force.

Today
²
about 140 congregations and religious communities in over sixty cities have officially declared sanctuary, in defiance of U.S. law as interpreted by the INS. More are adding themselves each week. The variety is striking: a Mennonite church in Illinois, a Presbyterian church in Minneapolis, a Friends' Meeting in Cincinnati, a Lutheran church in Palo Alto, a Unitarian Universalist in upstate New York, a temple in Wisconsin, a Catholic parish in Louisville, a Brethren Discipleship group in Indiana, a Sisters of St. Joseph community in Concordia, Kansas, a monastery in Vermont. The total membership of those sanctuary support groups runs close to 50,000 people, and each responsible member who has partaken of the decision faces the prospect of prison, if the Justice Department should choose to prosecute.

But sanctuary, in the sense of these declarations, is not just a church building, not just a place; it is not even
mainly
a place. What the declaration of sanctuary really represents is a pledge of
a community of support: shelter, food, medical care, if possible a job, concealment, legal help, and, as the last resort, a readiness on the part of many of these churchgoing Americans to accept a jail sentence for their trouble. The actual church or synagogue is for the most part just a symbol of that pledge.

In the three years since Jim Corbett began smuggling refugees, by Corbett's own estimate, roughly a thousand Central Americans have come across the Arizona border and passed through Tucson, to be relayed surreptitiously onward to their host congregations in Kansas or Vermont or wherever. Meanwhile, other conscience-driven smugglers have been assisting other crossings into California, New Mexico, and Texas. From the city of first refuge, a car relay for one typical family to their ultimate destination might involve two hundred U.S. citizens, members of that underground network of concerned citizens that Corbett had hoped for early on. A young mother with kids might drive the refugees for a one-day stretch in her own car. An elderly Quaker couple might give them lodging in a guest room that night. Next day, a nun might drive another leg of the trip in a minibus registered to the bishop. Lodging that night at, say, the home of a female psychology professor who is active in her synagogue. Next day, a smiling long-haired young man with a camper-back pickup truck, or a balding retiree in a porkpie hat driving a Chevy wagon, or maybe a Unitarian matron with a Volvo. That night, the spare room of an affluent yuppie couple or a cot in the church basement at a Lutheran congregation. And so on, to the final sanctuary. Each of those helping acts have been, by the government's view, felonious.

Eliott Abrams is the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs,
³
head of that branch which effectively determines who is or is not accepted as a refugee.
Abrams says: “My sense is that from the Caribbean and Central America, the majority of people emigrating to the United States are
not
refugees. They are people seeking to build a better life for themselves by finding better employment.” Abrams admits having heard reports of torture, murder, and mutilation committed against Salvadorans deported back from the U.S. (and calls those reports, dismissively, “horror stories”), but he adds that “the fact remains that not everybody in E1 Salvador has the right to live in America [merely] because that [E1 Salvador] is not a nice country. It is
not
a nice country right now. It is one of a
hundred
not-nice countries—and not everybody has the right to live here.”

Then again, we are a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants, with an ideal of welcoming the beleaguered refugee. Certain words have been carved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, after all. But there are ambiguities of the optical sort: One person's political refugee is another's brown wetback.

A rabbi in Tucson says: “My own father was an illegal alien. A stowaway. Consequently I have strong feelings on the subject. I believe in the Biblical principle
Thou shalt not oppress a stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
It's the highest expression of Judaism to help people who are legitimately refugees. And the government claim that these people are ‘economic migrants' is hogwash.”

•   •   •

At a point heartbreakingly near what should be the end of their crossing, the hikers stumble into a serious problem.

They are within two hundred yards of the junction where this wash pays out into another wide canyon, a remote but accessible bit of country along which runs a gravel road. At that junction they are supposed to meet their American-side pickup. But Jeff has walked ahead down the wash to see whether the way is clear, and he returns with bad news: Between here and the junction,
parked, temporarily abandoned, is a Jeep. It may or may not be the Border Patrol.

Helen leads the group to a hiding place just up the west hillside, beneath a mesquite thicket, where they will be invisible both from the wash bed and from the high open ridges above. Jeff goes back down toward the Jeep, nosing his way tentatively in search of a little more information. If it is a Border Patrol vehicle, the hikers are already in trouble and might need to make a desperate retreat up the wash. If it belongs to picnickers or rock hounds or local cowboys, which is more likely, they need only wait and be very careful.

For an hour, huddled in the brush, they wait. They share water and oranges and a bag of bologna sandwiches. They also talk. The journalist wants to know more about this family—about why specifically they left E1 Salvador.

The wife—call her Lupe—has been a nurse for twelve years. She worked at a children's hospital in the capital city, San Salvador. Because of the war and the murders, thousands of newly orphaned children are living street lives in San Salvador, she says. Sick and starving children. Even in the hospital, she saw many of them die for lack of medicine.

Her husband—call him Roberto—is a poet of some reputation. His poems have been published in Brazil and Peru, and a book of them will appear soon from a press in Belgium. Yes, he says, his poetry tends to be political. This was part of the reason for his troubles.

Roberto was also a high school teacher in San Salvador. Literature and history were his subjects. In June of 1983, apparently because he was already suspected for his ideas, men from the National Guard came to search his house. They found certain books (books any teacher of history and literature might own, says Roberto: one novel by a Cuban author, a volume entitled
The Fight of the Campesinos,
others by the Brazilian author Paolo
Freire) that were considered “subversive.” Roberto was taken away.

For a week, says Roberto, he was held in solitary confinement, kept blindfolded, repeatedly beaten and interrogated. “What group are you in?” the Guardia demanded. “Who are your comrades?” No group, Roberto told them. No comrades. He was simply a schoolteacher.

After that week he was transferred to Mariona Prison (the main men's prison in E1 Salvador) and evidently forgotten about by his captors. He remained in Mariona, in what was called “the political section,” for seven months. He talked with many of the other prisoners. Professors, arrested for their “subversive” ideas. Doctors, arrested for helping the poor. Also a large number of illiterate campesinos. Roberto began teaching some of these campesinos to read.

Meanwhile Lupe, who knew that Roberto was still alive and had even been allowed to visit him, got legal help. Roberto had never been charged with a crime. His case went to the Salvadoran Supreme Court, says Roberto, and in January the judges ordered his release. But that court decision did not mean he was safe—rather the contrary. “After release, often,” says Roberto, “is when the death squads come.”

Taking the son, he left immediately for Mexico City. Lupe and their daughter followed as soon as Roberto had found a safe haven there. The haven was only a temporary one, because Mexico deports Salvadorans even more stringently (if that's possible) than does the United States. It was in Mexico City, late this spring, that the family made contact with a branch of the sanctuary movement.

Most of this information passes through Helen, as translator, because the journalist is ignorant of Spanish.

Jeff doesn't reappear. As the waiting drags on, they all grow gradually quieter. Midday in early summer in the Sonoran Desert, and the heat is audible in the thin shrill buzz of cicadas.
Finally the people beneath the bush are limiting themselves to an infrequent, elliptical whisper. Otherwise they listen.

The two children are silent. Their eyes are wide.

•   •   •

Then the arrests began.

On February 17, 1984, a car was stopped by the Border Patrol just north of McAllen, Texas, a border town in the lower Rio Grande valley. The car was registered to the Catholic diocese of Brownsville, which also sponsors an institution called Casa Oscar Romero (after the murdered archbishop) that provides emergency shelter and other assistance to Central American refugees. Inside the car were a nun, another woman named Stacey Merkt, a reporter, and three undocumented Salvadorans. Four weeks later a federal grand jury issued indictments against the nun and Stacey Merkt. They were charged with transporting and conspiracy to transport illegal aliens.

On March 7 another car was stopped, on a mountain road east of Nogales, Arizona. The Border Patrol detained temporarily, then released, a pair of Tucson residents named Phil Conger and Katherine Flaherty. The four undocumented Salvadorans who had been with them were held, charged with entry into the U.S. without inspection, and eventually bonded out. Phil Conger is an employee of the Tucson Ecumenical Council (a federation of local churches), whose task force on Central America he directs. He is fluent in Spanish and has been active in what church people call “the refugee ministry” for three years. He works out of a tiny cluttered office across the hall from John Fife's tiny cluttered office at the rear of Southside Presbyterian Church.