Salvadoran Suffering Goes On--There and Here

A year ago Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas of San Salvador made a daring pastoral visit. He journeyed north into El Salvador’s department of Chalatenango to visit the people living in lands under control of the guerrilla opposition forces. He went as a pastor to attend to the needs of his flock, and while there listened to many stories of deep human suffering. He heard stories of women and children fleeing bombing raids, of how government soldiers entered villages after these raids to make sure that the area was “depopulated,” of life on a guinda --a forced march in which people must travel for days while fleeing the advance of the military.

Two weeks ago the archbishop made another pastoral visit--this time to Los Angeles, the city with the highest number of Salvadorans outside San Salvador. As the four-day visit progressed, again he listened to accounts of the suffering that has driven his people northward to seek safe haven in this country. Different as Los Angeles is from rural Chalatenango, the same fears have caught up with Salvadorans here. A different kind of government “depopulation” program threatens to displace them once again and return them to their war-wracked homeland.

The archbishop arrived one month after President Reagan signed the Simpson-Rodino immigration bill into law, and that one month was enough to ignite those fears. The majority of Salvadoran refugees began to flee their country just a few years ago, after the height of the repression and death-squad activity, after the war had intensified in the countryside, sending many tens of thousands of rural Salvadorans into cities that could not begin to accommodate them. Hence, most of them arrived here after Jan. 1, 1982, and have no hope of qualifying for the amnesty provision in the new immigration law.

It would be a tragedy if the irony of this were ignored. There is a direct connection between what these people have experienced in El Salvador and what they are experiencing now in this country. The double bind is the pressure that the United States exerts through its increasing arms shipments to the Salvadoran government, which prolong the war, and the pressure that the new immigration law exerts on refugees from that very same war.

Rivera Damas saw this connection quite clearly. In his homily at the Mass celebrating the first anniversary of La Placita (Our Lady Queen of Angels) as a sanctuary church, he called attention to the title of the Pope’s World Day of Peace message, “Development and Solidarity: Keys for Peace”: “How we would like to show the industrialized nations our view of what these words mean! The real cause of underdevelopment is the ideological, economic and political dependence of our countries.”

It is time that we Americans exert a new kind of pressure and direct it toward our own policy-makers. We must stop what the archbishop called “the causes which oblige them (refugees) to emigrate.” The first step in doing this is stopping the war. The first step toward that is to promote dialogue and negotiation.

In an interview during the archbishop’s visit he said, “We consider that the differences ought to be resolved in a rational manner, in the manner which is most humane. We believe that the way that is indicated is through dialogue.” In another, he added that the only way the dialogue will take place is if the United States wants it.

Compared to his visit to Chalatenango, the archbishop’s trip to Los Angeles was rather undramatic. Yet it was no less important. He came as a pastor, not a politician, and it was with a pastoral and not a political message that he ended his homily at La Placita and his visit to Los Angeles: “As a carrier of the cries and lamentations of our poor countries, I say to you: We do not want any more armaments, no matter where they come from. What we want is peace--a peace founded on justice, truth, freedom and fraternal love.”