Escape From El Salvador

Central American refugees paid the price for Reagan's Latin American proxy wars.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi listeners, just a quick heads up out of the
shadows tell stories of people fleeing and living in sometimes
violent environments. There's a photo of my dad standing on
the rooftop of a building in Los Angeles. He's wearing

(00:20):
a baseball tea and crisp dark jeans with sharp creases.
He has his thumbs in his pockets, and he's staring
at the camera with dark shades. On the background is
a city skate of eighties l A, where he spent
his wild teenage years. It's honestly one of the coolest
pictures I've ever seen of my dad. He looks rebellious, fearless.

(00:44):
It's like he's on top of the world. After leaving
in a fifteen, l A became his second home. He
had a girl fast, but he still kept a sense
of adventure. When I was growing up, he got so
excited talking about his childhood and Las Deliciastan it sounded idyllic.

(01:08):
That's where he climbed tall mango trees to pick the
juiciest ones, where he swam against the tides of the
flowing rivers. In his colonna, where he helped harvest and
cultivate coffee with his bare hands. He was also kind
of mischievous, like when he used the slingshot to kill
iguanas to roast and eat them. He loved to tell

(01:30):
tall tales about the elaborate pranks he pulled on his friends.
Recalling these stories always filled him with childlike joy. But
that place, it's just a memory now because my dad
hasn't been back to a Santrador since the nineties, before

(01:50):
I was even born. I always hope to see the
paradise he described. He promised me and my whole family
that he would show us one day. That day has
yet to come. When I interviewed my dad for this podcast,
I accidentally revealed something that I don't think he ever
really thought about. See, my mom is Mexican, and most

(02:13):
of the culture I inherited, like food, music, and traditions,
came from my mom. She learned to make bussas, pan guomboyo,
and salvitamalis to expose us to a piece of my
dad's culture. So when I told him that culturally I
identified more with my Mexican side, I caught him off guard.

(02:34):
I could see the frustration move across his face. I
think I wounded him. He didn't necessarily avoid introducing me
to his culture. I just think he was guarded. It
took me a long time to understand the cultural shame
associated with being Central American in this country. It was
dangerous to be Salvadoran when he was growing up. To survive,

(02:56):
he traded climbing mango trees for climbing tall building thousands
of miles from home. He had to shed who he
was and become a new person in America. It was
easier that way. Growing up path Salvie and Mexican was
a little confusing. I felt like I didn't know a
part of myself. My dad's stories gave us an idealized

(03:20):
version of polished to focus on the good parts. I
think he was doing it to shield us from the
brutality of the Civil War or how unwelcome he felt
being Central American in the US. But interviewing my dad
for this podcast, I was able to witness his real
feelings about leaving home, growing up in our own country,

(03:43):
and how he was forced to hide parts of himself
from his family from me. I'm Karen Garcia and I'm
a child of eighty six and this is Out of
the Shadows, a podcast about the legacy of the Amnesty
Bill known as Urka. Immigrants and their children have long

(04:06):
lived in the shadows of America. Their destinies aren't just
shaped by where they come from, but by their particular
place in history. In the lives of millions of immigrants
and their children were changed by one lucky stroke of
a pen by an unlikely allied President, Ronald Reagan. This

(04:26):
podcast examines the ripple effects the bill had on first
generation kids of immigrants, who are navigating intergenerational mobility and
transforming the cultural landscape. This is an untold story of luck, timing, triumph, opportunity, survival,
and of course hope. My dad goes by many names.

(05:04):
I didn't even know his name was us until I
was eight. Chungo is what they called him in the States.
They didn't call him us or Chewi, but Jesse that's
what my mom called him. My dad migrated from Rador
to this country in ninety nine, about a year before
the Civil War started, and it was by pure luck

(05:27):
that he managed to escape that violence. Julio, If you
ask him why he came, he'll tell you a bunch
of different reasons. One of those was that his family
was too poor to pay for school books, but he

(05:56):
heard from a cousin who was in the police force
that the government was forced to enlisting kids into the military.
Daniel and la policia. You may say, um, jo let
me say I think we star can say as you

(06:23):
have a completely this his face. He was only fifteen
when his cousin advised that it would be best to
disappear and leave in Savador, because when the military sets
stuff like that, they're not bluffing. See okay, says those

(06:43):
condo complain. So he came up with a plan. I
have to stop for a second and say that, to
this day, it's still one of the wildest things my
dad has ever told me. His plan was just to leave.
He didn't leave a note, he didn't say any goodbyes.
He just left. I guess it would be weird to say,

(07:07):
hey mom Um, I'm scared for my life and I'm
leaving forever. No, you can't stop me. What he did say, though,
is the wild part. Hey mom, I'm going to the river.
Words that live in infamy in my house. There's a
lot to impact in that simple phrase. More than anything,

(07:30):
it says a lot about my dad and how bullish
he can be. Once he's made up his mind, no
one can stop him, and sometimes Rio becomes the abridged
version of his migration story. There's another element to this story,
his sense of adventures. He was a kid who didn't

(08:11):
let the looming threat of war stop him from seeing
the world. So he convinced a friend to tag along,
and off they went to see the metaphorical river. First,
they made their way through Gatemala, working odd jobs as
day labors for a few days, then went NORTHWRD to Mexico.

(08:35):
Eventually they hopped on a cargo train into the capital,
Mexico City. That train is now infamously known as Lavestia
the Beast, and it's how many Central Americans travel to
the border. Tempo, it's a temple. No, it's I didn't

(09:07):
have that reputation yet, and my dad says it wasn't
as dangerous as it is now. In Mexico City, he
was able to survive by begging for food and the
kindness of strangers. He met a couple who offered him
work and a place to sleep. Remember how comediaempo you.

(09:40):
On his journey, my dad heard about the wondrous things
that awaited everybody in the United States. He heard that
you can make money just by sweeping. It must be paradise,
he thought, in a guilty and yeah, barriendos los Yeah, yeah,

(10:10):
assume is here. Whenever he was asked, he used to
say he was Mexican, keeping his identity close to his
chest just in case. They left Mexico City and made
their way to Tijuana on a cargo train with little
more than a gallon of juice and a gallon of milk.

(10:31):
On that lonely, bumpy ride, he thought about his mom
and what she must be thinking when perimente is a
moment and a moment. Yeah so it it the way

(11:08):
he rationalized it, and all of his fifteen year old
wisdom was now. His family had one less mouth to
feed out of. The shadows will be right back now,
back to the show. The train ride from Mexico City

(11:35):
lasted about a month, and once they got to Tijuana,
they tried to cross the river not once, not twice,
but three times. The first two times without a coyote,
they got caught and sent back to Mexico. This is
where costs playing as Mexican came in handy. They waited

(11:59):
a few weeks across the third time. They used the
money from panhandling to hire a coyote and it was
pretty smooth sailing from there. After crossing into Sunny Serro,
he made his way to Sunny Los Angeles, where he
met my mom a year later. They had their first
kid two years later and named her Sandy, after the

(12:20):
Olivia Newton John character in Greece, the first movie my
dad watched when he came to the States. The influx
of Salvadoran's really started to grow in the nineteen eighties,
when the region was further destabilized by a civil war.
Many landed in l A, making them one of the
largest Latino demographics in the city, but Salvadorian start the

(12:42):
second most largest growing Latino demographic across the country. The
state of California is home to more Salvadoran Americans than
anywhere else the remit instance, and the economic power between
California and salvador is very real and very tied together.
That's in the Caio. She is a California assembly member

(13:03):
and a Salvadoran child of eight six assemblywoman for the
Northeast and East Los Angeles. Like my dad, she also
had to grow up quickly. She distinctly remembers what crossing
felt like, down to what she was wearing in night
five eight six, crossed over with a coyote from Tijuana

(13:26):
to sanny See Little to San Diego and ended up
in Boil Heights. I was five years old, and I
remember wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt with little red sleeves
back in the day, which was the style, and my
hair was in pigtails, and I remember being told to
be very quiet while we crossed the border. The violence

(13:49):
forced her and her family to leave. My family lost
everything during the Civil War, like a lot of families did,
and it was a matter of you try to survive
and live in a country ats in turmoil, or you
try to relocate your family for their own safety, for
yourself and and it was a really tough choice. It
was a choice that many Central Americans faced. If you

(14:12):
lived indor Ga, Nicaragua, you could stay in your home
and live in fear of dying or leave. Compared to
the Mexican experience with immigration, Central Americans are an entirely
different category. They're not recognized as people seeking economic opportunities

(14:33):
or political refugees, but have characteristics of both well and
Whatatemala and Al Salvador. The United States had allies in
the government. Here's cal l a professor of Latin American studies, Alejandro.
They were authoritarian dictators, sometimes military autocrats, right, that the
United States supported financially and ideologically. So when the United

(14:57):
States is supporting their homies in those countries, they can't
acknowledge that the people that are fleeing and coming to
the United States saying that your homies are killing me, right,
They can't say, oh, yeah, you're right, because that would
implicate the United States in the genocidal violence that was
occurring in places like what the Milan. My dad very

(15:17):
narrowly escaped the horrors of that war. A few years
after he arrived in l A, he caught a phone
call that the military had palmed schools in his town.
Yok Those America Midas spoiler. I would h w Colonia,

(15:45):
um um oh Martine La yeah, La Colonia. You're looking.

(16:23):
His schoolmates were bombed, he says, their bodies found in pieces.
Many others disappeared, never to be heard from again. Their
names were Suyapa, Natural and Martin. Hearing my dad retelling
these events and such painful detail was surreal. It was

(16:48):
like as he was saying the words, he was grappling
with his mortality, as if it had just hit him
that he could have been one of those kids. If
my dad hadn't listened to his cousin, he would have
been another tragic death caught in a military bombing. So

(17:15):
will cause Central Americans to start coming to the US.
After World War Two, Central America experienced rapid modernization and industrialization,
which was fueled by foreign investment, and the region has
a history of money and power being held by wealthy
elites or oligarchs. This aggressive industrialization displaced impoverished Campesinos and

(17:40):
indigenous peoples. Any form of protests or organizing was met
with government suppression and in tens of thousands of cases death.
People were kidnapped out of their homes, tortured, and murdered
by death squads. Sympathy of your resistance groups swelled and

(18:01):
death tools mounted, leaving citizens little choice but to join
the resistance and fight, or abandoned their homes. The seventies
marked a long decade of government assassinations of progressive priests, journalists,
and anyone pleading for basic human rights. Large scale massacres

(18:24):
took place in Guatemala in that same period. Bodies of
victims were piled in mass graves, left in ditches, or
dumped on the side of the road. In Nicaragua, the
Sandinistas replaced a dictatorship with the socialist government, and the
US didn't like that because it was fighting the Cold

(18:44):
War against communism. In America's eyes, the Sandinista victory started
to feel a lot like the Cuban Revolution. They feared
that Central American countries would be infected with ideas communism.
The US government invested billions to stop the spread, especially

(19:06):
in the eighties. Once Ronald Reagan was elected president, his
administration supported the right wing contras who opposed the elected
Sandinistas and Nicaragua, all while funneling arms and money to
the Salvadoran government fighting its own citizen rebellion. Some of
that financial support came through congressional funding, but not all

(19:29):
of it. In Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials secretly provided aid
to the contrast by selling arms to Iran against its
own embargo. In Guatemala, Reagan's people continued to supply weapons
and training to the Guatemalan army, covertly supporting acts of

(19:51):
genocide against indigenous people. Since I have been so closely
associated with the cause of the Contras, the big question
during the hearings was whether I knew of the diversion.
I was aware of the resistance was receiving funds directly
from third countries and from private efforts, and I endorsed
those endeavors wholeheartedly. But let me put this in capital letters.

(20:16):
I did not know about the diversion of funds. Indeed,
I didn't know there were excess funds. Things heated up
with the assassination of Bishop Oscar Rometro Frometo, spoke out
against the death squad slaughters and fought for the rights
of poor Salvadoran people. He was publicly shot while saying

(20:37):
mass in the Savadoran army killed more than eight hundred
civilians in the town of venost These events represented the
Salvadoran government's forceful retaliation against anyone pleading for human rights,
all underwritten by the US. In a slick spokesman for

(21:05):
anti communist resistance in Central America, was elected president with
full support of the Reagan administration. It's always a pleasure
to welcome President Duarty, a close friend the United States
will continue to working with President Duarty to build peace, prosperity,
and freedom in his own land and to bring stability

(21:28):
throughout Central America. It's been a great pleasure to exchange
views with him today. In what thea a civil war
began percolating in the sixties and lasted over thirty years,
devastating the country. I believe the number is the famous
number is eight of the people who were killed during

(21:49):
the US backed and supported civil war in Gatemala were
indigenous people. More than half a million indigenous people were
killed de plassified. US documents show that the CIA collaborated
in training pro government troops to target, torture and eliminate

(22:11):
civilian dissidents. Right, those numbers are are are absurd. You
know the result is was a genocide. When everybody's favorite
President Ronald Reagan comes into office, he just starts rolling
over and forking over mad money to the Watermelond military
and the Watermelond government. The US government under Regan led
to seven point nine million dollars in military funding, despite

(22:33):
the mounting reports of human rights violations. Margarita Valencia fled
Guatemala for the United States. In her plan was to
use a borrowed green card to cross, but her odyssey
veered off course when she landed in a Tijuana jail
cell Inmala and I don't there are two ways to cross,

(23:04):
she says, one by plane and the other by bus,
which was longer and more dangerous. She flew to Tijuana
and she tried to cross that day, pero the sae no.
Sadly they were caught. She had to spend the night

(23:25):
in jail, where she told people she was Mexican, but
someone cut on don't isn't American guy? And then Aligasna.
She recalls the cell being packed and full of children.
There wasn't even a place to sit dar Ea Guando Embarrassed.

(24:00):
One of the guards came and asked for a hundred
bucks in exchange for letting her go, So she paid
and she was free. After that, she just waited in
a hotel until the coyotes helped her cross the border.
She remembers a visceral image being on the other side.

(24:23):
Ela had just rained, she says, so the gusts of
wind were so powerful that they stretched out a giant
American flag. She took the billowing flag as a symbol,

(24:49):
saying welcome. Three years later, she raised enough money to
bring her children to the US. She used money from
a gundina, which is like a money lending agreement where
each person agrees to pitch in the same amount of
money and you take turns receiving it. It's like the
Latino version of crowdfunding. Using those funds, she was able

(25:12):
to pay to cross her kids. Her son, Elmer Roldan,
an education advocate, remembers how desensitized everyone was to the
war in Guatemala. The war is something that was so normalized.

(25:33):
For Elmer, the sudden loss of his mother is still
palpable today. I remember the day my mom left. I
remember her saying words to me and kneeling and being emotional,
and me understanding that I wasn't going to see her
for a long time. I didn't understand that that long

(25:53):
time would mean three years. Elmer, his cousin, and his
niece all journeyed together to cross the border. I remember
once being inside of a trunk for Lord knows how long.
It felt like an eternity. It could have been thirty minutes,
but you know, when you're nine years old, everything feels
like forever. But two days into their journey, they were

(26:14):
robbed of everything. I remember the military stopping the buzz
and two soldiers getting in and basically telling people, you
give us all your money now or owls, we take
you in. Right And the military was feared, and a
lot of it. It goes back to the earlier topic
of the war, right Like, everybody knew you don't mess

(26:35):
with the military because they were killers, right Like, that's
what they did, right Like, they were trained to do
one thing, and that was to kill, and so you
wouldn't think twice about giving them your money if they
asked for it. They had no one to turn to
for help. They had to sleep with pigs, suffering the smells.

(26:57):
And at that time, I guess the still a law
that if you were a miner, you could be crossed
into the US with the with a birth certificate. And
it was like maybe six am. My, you know, my
aunt and uncle went. They picked me up, They gave
me my cousin's clothes and then put me in the
back of an astro van. We crossed the border, and

(27:18):
I remember falling asleep on the journey here and then
waking up and ban around the city. Fortunately, once they
got to the border, they were able to cross without
any more pitfalls. It's one thing to cross and leave
your home, but it's an entirely different thing existing as

(27:38):
a Central American in the US. Out of the Shadows
will be right back now, back to the show. Growing
up here, Elmer felt pressured to erase is true heritage.

(28:02):
I understood that later on, but at the time, as
a child, all it felt like was Mexican hegemony is
being forced upon me, and my own Central American identity
isn't welcomed in that because unless I'm willing to fully
identify as Mexican and let go of my roots, then

(28:22):
I don't really fit into Matcha and fit into um
whatever is being created over here south Central. It was
just easier to you know, to gravitate towards Black culture
than it was to gravitate towards Mexican culture. At the time,
he wasn't alone Grian Guatemalan in South Central, Alejandro noticed

(28:47):
that Central Americans were treated differently. I remember specifically that
the reason that a lot of the Latino kids would
bully him is because he was from O Salvador, and
I remember that being a lesson for me as a
kid to be like Yo, this is what a moling thing,
and this whole thing that like how my mom talks
and how my family talks. We gotta keep that stuff
in the house, you know. That stuff don't don't belong

(29:08):
out here, because these Mexicans they're mean. The social threat
of being Central American was deepened by the larger political
context driven by Reagan administration rhetoric. The first kind of
interpretations and introductions of Central Americans to the United States
on television, to the popular American media was through Ronald

(29:29):
Reagan's presentation of how dangerous we were right as communists
and leftists, you know, leftist socialists right like, who were
seeking to overthrow democracy in Central America, and that we
were so close to the United States. Right. So the
figure is already imprinted in the national imagination of US
as threats right like and then communist stress at the
at the height of the Cold War. My dad has

(29:52):
sus was one of those he doesn't like to talk
about his first few years in the States. He was
a teenager with out any parental supervision, forced to grow
up in a country that didn't see him as a kid,
but as a threat. It was a normal Friday night

(30:15):
my dad had just finished a long shift working in
a sweatshop making jeans. His friends invited him out and
they were going to meet up at a friend's house
in Koreatown. But this friend was taking a while. Five
minutes turns to ten minutes, and he still won't come out.

(30:35):
They noticed an empty parked car with the windows rolled down,
and my dad's friends dared him to haunt the horn.
Always looking for an opportunity to make his friends laugh.
My dad agrees, just as it hanks the horn that

(31:02):
he's shouting from a nosy neighbor, not wanting to get caught.
My dad and his friend's book it just as they
started running. The cops cool. They didn't see him as
a kid playing a dumb joke. They saw a brown
kid running away from a potential grand theft auto, a thug,

(31:23):
a gang member. They shouted at him with guns drawn,
put him and all his friends and handcuffs and took
them in at the station. He was scared and alone,
desperately trying to tell the cops that he was a miner,

(31:45):
he was in the wrong place. The cops didn't care. Instead,
they jammed a baton in his stomach, knocking the air
out of his lungs. My dad had never so alone.
His parents were so na thousands of miles away. While

(32:07):
he was alone, gasping for air in a jail cell,
he was assigned a public defender who only spoke broken Spanish,
advising him to plead guilty so he could be released.
He had no one to call, no one to turn
to for help, no one to even post bail for him.

(32:32):
It was his only choice. If I plead guilty, I
can leave, he thought, not considering how that would impact
his future. He didn't know that he was signing away
his freedom. The irony is my dad didn't even know
how to drive. But that arrest resulted in a felony

(32:56):
that he forcibly pleaded guilty too. That felony still haunts
him today, like a shameful shadow, following him wherever he goes.
By the time IRKA came around a few years later,
that felony, well, it automatically disqualified him. He heard that

(33:17):
if you were a felon, you couldn't apply. He was
scared that if he did, he would be deported. The
struggle for a lot of Central Americans to get IRKA
was real. You remember Margarita, the Guatemalan refugee, well, she

(33:39):
didn't get IRKA either. In fact, she didn't get her
legal status until almost a decade later, when she could
finally come out of the shadows. Mistis. She felt really
happy and calm, she says. The first thing she did
buy a ticket to go back to Guatemala. But there

(34:00):
were Central Americans who applied for IRKA and got it,
like Sonja Escobar who came from Servador. Oh, I can't
believe in myself. I was, I was grateful. I was crying.
I was. I remember, I want to meet President Ringer.

(34:21):
I want to go see him. She was so moved
by it that she and her co workers sent Reagan
a personal letter what he did to them and signed him.
We make a letter. I remember, we make a letter
and we all signed the letter and send it to him.
We didn't know he received it, but we were so grateful.
That was It was just the best thing in the

(34:42):
right time. I wish they can do it again for
so many people like me. But there were multiple realities
for Central Americans under IRKA. My dad couldn't apply for
the American Dream because of some ship he did as
a kid. He went from a starry eyed adventurer, hopeful

(35:06):
and excited to watch American movies, listen to rock and roll,
and hang out with friends, to being on the outside
looking in the illusions of a new paradise that he
heard of on his journey started to crumble. It was
like he was in a gilded cage, never allowed to leave,

(35:28):
stuck in a continuous purgatory of being undocumented, never allowed
to show his children where he was born, only sharing
glowing memories of his youth. The promise my dad made
to his kids about showing them as avallor never came true.
He missed growing up with his siblings and friends, and

(35:51):
missed his parents funerals. He's still in that cage today,
still undocumented. So when I think about the shame my
dad feels associated with being Central American, I understand it.
My dad came to this country because of men like Reagan,
who further destabilized and tore apart Central America, then denied

(36:16):
people like my father a chance to build a future here.
Urica was a blessing for my mom, who was able
to apply and get amnesty, but accursed from my dad.
A reminder that he's still in the cage inside Paradise.
When my mom applied and got her green card, it

(36:37):
felt like a weight had been lifted. I felt freer.
She says, like there was more security here, but she
knows how lucky she was. A few years later, she
was able to become a citizen, something that she could

(36:58):
never have imagined in her why eldest streams. She was
able to go back to Mexico and visit her family.
She was able to attend my grandparents funerals and grieve
with their siblings and their childhood home. My dad, on
the other hand, never got to say goodbye to his parents.

(37:19):
As kids, my siblings and I naively thought that my
dad kept us from knowing him and where he came from.
But looking at the photo of my dad on the rooftop,
I still see the kid in him, the one who
swam in rivers and climb mango trees and scaled tall buildings.

(37:41):
Even if he had to leave those parts of himself
in Osa, He's still full of adventure. Now. When I
hear my dad say that he wanted to adventure, I
believe him. It's like he's focusing on the rosy parts
of his youth, because no matter what, they can never
take that away from him. And someday soon, when my

(38:06):
dad is ready and able to go back to it, Sador,
We'll go to the river, except this time not to escape,
but together as a family's coming. Next time I'm Out

(38:43):
of the Shadows, we look at the immediate and long
term impacts of Urka. If you love this podcast, please
help us get the word out by following, rating, reviewing,
and sharing it with your friends. This episode was written
by Caesar Hernandez and me Karen Garcia. I also guest

(39:06):
hosted the episode. It's also written, edited, hosted, an executive
produced by Patti Rodriguez and Eric Galindo. It's produced by Betticrdanas,
Karen Lopez and Gabby Watts. It's sound design, mixed and
mastered by Jesse nice Longer. Our studio engineer is Clay Hillenburg.

(39:28):
Out of the Shadows is a production of Seeing Me,
Other Productions and School of Humans in partnership with I
Hearts Michael Tura Podcast Network. The podcast has also executive
produced by Giselle Bantes, Virginian Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Chad Crowley.
Our marketing and our team is led by Jasmine Mehea.

(39:51):
Original music by a Arenas, and if you loved his
cover of Los Caminos La viva this podcast theme song,
you can live in to it on all music platforms.
Historical audio for Out of the Shadows comes from the
Reagan Presidential Library and the National Archives. Special thanks to

(40:12):
Ian Vargas, Alex and Ali, Caitlin Becker, gob Chavran, Daisy Church,
Angel Lopez Glendo, Julianna Gamis, Ryan Gordon, Brian Matheson, Claudia Marti, Corna,
Oscar Ramirez, John Rodriguez, Juan Rodriguez, Joshua Sandoval, Eric Sclar,

(40:39):
Tony Sorrentino, and Megan tan