Youths Tell Their Own War Stories

In 1982, when the Guatemalan government had closed the schools as part of a campaign against leftist guerrillas, Marvyn Perez sent a letter that changed his life.

Perez, 14, and his friends wrote to officials, requesting more desks, teachers and blackboards for the Guatemala City schools.

The government responded by arresting them.

Perez was plucked off a public bus by police and jailed. Two of his sisters and more than a dozen of his friends eventually were detained with him in an unknown spot outside the city.

Vanished Without a Trace

They had become some of Guatemala’s desaparecidos , those who vanish suddenly without a trace. But unlike many of the victims, Perez, now 20, survived.

He lives in Los Angeles and works with Children of War, a support group for refugee youths, to tell the world about his experiences.

When he and his friends first were arrested, he recalled, police “put rubber hoods on our heads, tied our hands and feet. We could not breathe. They would ask questions and keep pulling the hood. When they’d see we’re dying, they let it go so we could breathe again. Then they would kick us in the stomach. . . .”

He and his friends, blindfolded and handcuffed, also were subjected to electric shocks. They were burned with cigarettes and cut with razor blades.

They heard the screams of the tortured, Perez said, adding that one of his worst fears was that the cries he heard were those of his sisters.

“Many times, I wanted to die,” he said. “My body was there but I was dead already. We told them, ‘Why don’t you just shoot us? Why don’t you give me your gun, and I kill myself?’ . . . It is better to die than suffer all the tortures.”

Perez was taken to a bathroom, where guards had left one of his friends slumped on the floor, bloodied and beaten so severely, Perez could not recognize him.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” they asked Perez, who replied he hoped to be a doctor.

“They laughed. They shot my friend in the head and told me to take care of him. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t cry.

“He was killed for nothing,” Perez said softly. “He was guilty just because he wanted a better education for the people. That was his only crime.”

With the help of publicity drummed up by his parents, Perez, his sisters and some of his friends were released two weeks after their arrests.

But not before they were forced to “confess” at a press conference that soldiers had caught them in a guerrilla movement, to which they no longer wished to belong.

His family fled to Mexico, then reached Los Angeles, where bespectacled and bewhiskered Perez spends hours in a converted garage at 3rd and Occidental streets, the office housing the Guatemala Information Center and the local Children of War chapter.

The chapter was founded after Perez, who has addressed groups in more than 60 U.S. cities, proposed and helped organize a 1987 national refugee youth leadership conference in Los Angeles.

The chapter, with two adult “support persons,” has 20 youth members, including: Vibol Muk, 17, who escaped to Thailand when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia; and Tamara Oyola, a high school senior who said she fled Puerto Rico after her mother, active in the independence movement, was shunned as a Communist.

Susan Goldberg, 14, of Los Angeles, is a chapter member who has not experienced the hardships that Perez, Muk and Oyola have. But she said she feels “more empowered” after hearing their stories.

“It blew me away, what (Perez) had to live through when he was my age--and he still continues to work for change,” she said. “You think about your life, your problems, and compared to them, we take for granted so many things.”

As part of its work, Children of War this week will sponsor a leadership training conference in Rosemead for 50 Guatemalan, Salvadoran, South African, Eritrean, Cambodian, Chilean and American youths who live in the Los Angeles area.

Racism a Discussion Topic

After hearing Perez speak today, they will discuss racism and their native lands. They will learn about peer counseling, public speaking, fund raising and the media from their peers and adults representing the United Jewish Fund, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Office of the Americas.

The program will be just part of the work of Children of War, said the Rev. Paul Mayer, director of the Religious Task Force, the group’s interfaith, interracial parent organization.

“There are children of war within our own borders and in our own back yards,” he noted, adding, “Refugee youth face a double burden--the trauma of war and persecution in their countries, and then, when they come here, they live as a minority, are culturally alienated and are not feeling good about themselves.”

Children of War tries to help the young discover--or rediscover--their “personal power, dignity, role in the world and personal beauty,” so they have the hope and alliances they will need to become a new generation of leaders seeking peace, he said.

Perez and his family, meantime, have not found all the peace they had hoped for in the United States.

They are waiting for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to rule on their request for political asylum, which they have sought, claiming they face persecution if returned to Guatemala. The family is listed “in somebody’s notebook somewhere” in their native land, said Nicholas Rizza, refugee coordinator for Amnesty International USA.

But the State Department has advised the INS it considers the family’s claim of persecution invalid because the State Department believes Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo, the civilian Guatemalan president who took office in 1986, is “determined to eliminate human rights abuses by his security forces.”

The Office of the Americas, a human rights group based in Santa Monica, disagrees, contending 50 people a month continue to disappear in Guatemala, said director Blase Bontane.

As for Perez, he hopes to finish another year of pre-med classes at Los Angeles City College, then go to Mexico. There, medical school will be more affordable and he can be closer to “my own culture, my own people.”

‘Hope for My Future’

He yearns to eventually return to Guatemala: “I have a lot of hope for my future and the future of my country. We’ll have a new Guatemala, a better Guatemala. . . . The new Guatemalans won’t have to leave their country. No more people will be disappeared.”

His memories and scars--the cigarette burns on his right leg--will remind him forever that he must work for social change and justice: “If this could happen to me, when I’m asking for better education, what could happen to our people?”