‘Jump Street’ Tackles Plight of the Poor in El Salvador

A fiery Catholic priest is mourning the plight of war-ravaged Central Americans before an auditorium full of college students. “One out of every four babies starves to death in El Salvador,” he says. “One out of four. The U.S. spends $1 million a day down there. (But) U.S. foreign aid doesn’t buy food. It buys weapons. The army has them. The rebels have them. The death squads have them. What do the people have? They have poverty, no sanitation, no land reform and their schools under siege. The victims of the guns are the people.”

The real forum for the speech, however, is not an auditorium but national television. It is delivered at the outset of the “21 Jump Street” episode airing tonight on Fox Broadcasting and sets the tone for the rest of the program, which continues its vehement denunciation of U.S. policy toward El Salvador, especially its treatment of Salvadorans seeking asylum here.

At the show’s conclusion, rock star Peter Gabriel appears in a public-service announcement proclaiming that “men, women and children are unjustly being imprisoned, tortured and killed all over the world.” He asks the television audience to help put an end to the slaughter by calling an 800 number and joining Amnesty International.

“21 Jump Street” is no stranger to controversial issues. Now in its third season, the police series has tackled drugs, child abuse, abortion, rape, AIDS, gangs, racism and many other social problems affecting contemporary teen-agers--its primary audience. But the plight of Central American refugees isn’t exactly the hottest topic on the lips of today’s high schoolers.

“It’s a challenging thing to deal with such a heavy social issue within the context of a high school show about social issues,” said executive producer Bill Nuss. “We think that the refugee issue is an ongoing and important problem. We won’t back off of issues just because they are not real hot in the news right now. This is a problem we think our audience should be aware of. They should know what’s going on down there.”

He noted that there are already more than 2,000 chapters of Amnesty International on high school and college campuses throughout the United States.

Nuss offered no apologies for the strongly slanted politics of the episode, which never once tries to explain the government’s rationale for its policies. The Reagan and Bush Administrations--especially their tough immigration strictures--come off as unmitigated villains.

“We felt we were telling an emotional story,” Ness said. “We’re not trying to get into a political debate. Our sentiments are with the sentiments of our characters.” The story centers on the efforts of the policeman played by Peter DeLuise to prevent the deportation of a Salvadoran refugee portrayed by Kamala Lopez.

At the three major networks, standard operating procedure would generally require producers to temper such a strong political or social position with a character who at the very least espouses the other point of view. But Ness said Fox had no objections to this one-sided presentation.

The only time Fox insisted on a more balanced discussion of an issue, Ness said, was when “Jump Street” tackled abortion. Other than that, he said, the network has never interfered.

After commissioning a script for the episode, Ness said that he contacted Amnesty International to see if the human rights watchdog organization was interested in attaching a public-service announcement to the show. Peter Gabriel agreed to tape the spot and fellow pop star and Amnesty advocate Sting agreed to allow the show to use two of his Latin American-themed songs, “Fragile” and “They Dance Alone.” The money that “Jump Street” normally would have paid to Sting and his publishers for the songs was instead donated to Amnesty International.

Nuss said that “Jump Street” is planning a sequel to Monday’s episode, in which the characters played by DeLuise and Johnny Depp travel by Jeep to El Salvador to search for the woman following her deportation. There--provided the real-life Salvadoran rebels and government don’t negotiate an end to their fighting when they sit down for peace talks in Costa Rica later this month--”21 Jump Street” will become enmeshed in that country’s decade-long civil war.