Separating Salvadoran families: we’ve done this before
I was in El Salvador on an assignment for the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley when The New York Times reported about 5-year-old José who was taken away from his father at the border and sent to a foster family in Michigan. The foster mother explained how the boy clutched stick-figure drawings of his family, cried himself to sleep, and collapsed on her kitchen floor, crying “Mama, Papa,” over and over again.
As I traveled through gritty San Salvador, I saw dozens of little boys who could be that boy — a boy whose parents cared so much about protecting him from the gang violence that they would risk a perilous journey to the U.S. border.
Coincidentally, I had come here to write about the forced family separations and illegal adoptions funded and fueled by our U.S. government decades ago in El Salvador — a story that is both different from and chillingly similar to what’s happening today.
In 1980, El Salvador was in the midst of a civil war, in the midst of the Cold War. The Reagan Administration was committed to stopping the “domino effect” of communism begun with Cuba’s revolution in the 1950s. We had a long history of propping up human rights abusers in Latin America to defend our economic interests, but the Reagan and then Bush administrations’ policies were especially untethered to human rights.
In 1981, the “elite” Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion trained at the School of the America’s in Fort Benning, Georgia, massacred one thousand people—including babies who had not made their first birthdays—in the community called El Mozote. Only one woman survived to tell what happened, hiding as she listened to horrific screams, including those of her own children.
The Salvadoran military’s strategy of “draining the fish from the sea” (the fish being the guerilla combatants and the sea being the communities that supported them), included mass killing, bombings, and disappearances. In the 12-year war, at least 75,000 people were killed and thousands more “disappeared” in a country the size of New Jersey.
When some Salvadoran soldiers complained about having to kill children — as in the massacre carried out at El Mozote — the military focused more on abducting children during their military attacks on suspected guerilla villages.
I met María Maura Contreras at her home down a dusty road in the Department of San Vicente, where chickens flitted and a small pig scooted across her covered patio. She told me how the military took three of her children — ages 4, 1 and a half, and 4 months — in a raid known as “La Conacostada” in 1982. The soldiers chased the family across hilly terrain, she says, quickly catching the oldest, Gregoria, by the hair.
This terror tactic carried out by the U.S.-backed armed forces involved taking hundreds of children from suspected guerilla sympathizers and doling them out to military families, dropping them in orphanages, or sending them through irregular adoption channels to the United States, Europe, and other Central American countries.
Maura started looking for her children, even in the midst of the war, when it was extremely dangerous to do so. In 1994, the Jesuit Father Jon de Cortina launched the Asociación ProBúsqueda para los Niños y Niñas Desaparecidos (the Association in Search of Disappeared Boys and Girls) to help families investigate the whereabouts of their children. This incredible organization is still finding and reuniting families.
Maura devoted her life to searching for her children. With the help of ProBúsqueda, she found her daughter, Gregoria, 24 years after she was kidnapped. She found her son, Serapio Cristian, 30 years later. And she is still looking for the youngest, Julia Ines — the baby she had to set down in an effort to protect the others.
Today, our policy of forced family separation isn’t carried out by a death squad proxy government but rather by our own American agents. It’s 2018 and we are again forcibly separating children from their parents as a means of intimidation and terror. And while this tactic may not be as physically brutal as what happened during El Salvador’s civil war, it’s just as devastating.
We are again instilling fear and pain in the hearts of mothers, fathers, and young people who are already so vulnerable. And we’re doing it to the same population: Central American families without means who survived devastating civil wars only to struggle to protect their sons and daughters from gang wars.
My drive through San Salvador this week was considerably slowed on more than one occasion as police with faces covered (to protect their identities from the gangs) spread yellow police tape across streets to mark murder scenes. An average of 10 people a day were murdered in El Salvador in 2017.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has now asserted that the U.S. does not consider gang violence or domestic violence as grounds for asylum. And he says that it’s not our problem that parents bring children to the border, citing the Bible to justify U.S. policies.
The reality is that the civil war and gang war in El Salvador are inextricably linked and U.S. complicity flows through both periods. When the war ended in 1992, the peace accords did not prompt demilitarization or result in justice for the perpetrators of violence. The conditions that prompted the war—an extreme disparity in wealth—were not mitigated. Meanwhile, the young Salvadorans who fled to the United States were schooled in the world of U.S. street gangs. Many were deported back to Central America.
Young men and women are caught in the crossfire of this new war—unless they escape. That’s why families are desperately trying to find safety, arriving at the border to be treated as criminals and denied due process.
As Americans watch the horror of family separation unfold on our smartphones or laptops or in person at the border, we should know that we’ve been here before, complicit in forced family separations that instigated decades of pain and suffering for Salvadoran families
When we think about the decades Maura lost with her children, five-year-old José crying out for his parents, the mothers who handed their children off to border agents “for a bath” only to lose them indefinitely, let’s think about what we can do to make it stop.
Organizations responding to this crisis include the American Civil Liberties Union and Families Belong Together, among others.
