Giving Refugees Shelter From the Political Storm

The unassuming two-story house seems indistinguishable from the other old dwellings along the residential San Diego street. Inside, photographs of Central American scenes and a poster of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador, a now-legendary figure assassinated a decade ago, provide some clues to the home’s unique mission.

But one needs to speak with the residents to comprehend why this is a special place, a refuge for those fortunate enough to have escaped.

Haltingly, “Mirna” tells how she was imprisoned, tortured and raped, how she doesn’t know which jailer was the father of her youngest child, born last year. “Ernesto” relates the machine-gunning of his parents’ home, the final signal that it was time for him to go. And “Juan Carlos” speaks of spending almost a decade just one step ahead of the police and what he considers certain death.

“Back there,” Juan Carlos says of his birthplace, Guatemala, “back there, one just disappears.”

The three--who requested that they be identified only by pseudonyms--are residents in San Diego’s first shelter for Central American refugees. The facility, which has been operating for a month, is one of fewer than a dozen such shelters nationwide, including two in Los Angeles, refugee workers say. It is a modest home composed of five bedrooms, accommodating perhaps 10 residents. To date, it has housed Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and sponsors say they are contemplating hosting a Peruvian.

For a decade or more, churches and individuals in the United States have provided sanctuary to individual Central Americans fleeing to the north. But a great shortage of such havens exists, particularly of facilities in which the refugees can benefit from their shared experiences and struggles, as they can in the San Diego shelter. Education about events in Central America is part of the charter of the shelter, where an informal atmosphere prevails.

“This way, the people don’t feel so alone; they don’t feel so strange,” said Carol Conger-Cross, coordinator of the San Diego Interfaith Task Force on Central America, an activist group that sponsors the shelter through donations from religious groups and other sources. “We want them to be together in a supportive environment.”

The house is the fulfillment of a longtime dream of the Rev. Margaret N. Suiter, a Lutheran pastor who worked both in El Salvador and San Diego. Suiter, a tireless advocate for refugees, died Jan. 9 after a long battle with cancer. Her death at age 44 coincided with the opening of the shelter. An emotional service was held at the refuge, which will ultimately be named for her. While Suiter’s physical presence is gone, friends say her magnanimous spirit suffuses the still-fledgling shelter.

The facility’s financial position is precarious; it is dependent on donations to meet its monthly operating costs of about $1,000, including rent, utilities, food and other bills. Residents who have found work are asked to contribute 25% of their salaries, both to help pay the bills and to heighten self-respect by diminishing feelings of dependency.

In the San Diego area, immigrant advocates say, there has long been a pressing need for such a shelter.

The region serves as a key corridor for Central Americans, Mexican nationals and citizens of dozens of other nations entering the United States from Mexico for political, economic and other reasons. The great majority of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Latin Americans who pass through each year continue on to Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New York and other areas with a demand for low-wage immigrant labor.

However, observers say that greater numbers of Central Americans and others are remaining in the San Diego area. A significant number of Guatemalans have recently resettled in North County, often living alongside homeless Mexican migrants in primitive encampments in the brush.

But there is a fundamental difference between undocumented Mexican immigrants and their Central American counterparts: Many Central Americans face repression if they return to their homelands. Thus, some are eligible for political asylum, a U.S. immigration status for foreigners who can demonstrate a “well-founded” fear of persecution in their homelands because of politics, race or other factors. If granted asylum, recipients can remain in the United States legally and work.

But asylum is a protracted, complicated and, critics say, highly politicized process that many believe is stacked against those fleeing right-wing, U.S.-based regimes such as those ruling El Salvador and Guatemala, both of which have experienced spiraling violence in recent months.

Historically, U.S. authorities have approved the asylum solicitations of fewer than 5% of applicants from El Salvador and Guatemala, contending that most are economic and not political refugees and consequently not entitled to special benefits. By contrast, officials have typically allowed the asylum applications of a third or more of those from leftist regimes, from Nicaragua to Poland.

With its limited facilities and finances, the San Diego shelter takes in only asylum applicants, a tiny minority of the vast human movement from the south. This is done in part because of space restraints, partially because those fleeing repression are presumed to have the greatest need. The policy also provides a measure of legal protection in case U.S. immigration authorities raid and accuse the sponsors of “harboring” undocumented immigrants; that the immigrants are applicants for asylum might reduce the possibility of such law enforcement action, although it is no guarantee.

The shelter has already hosted a wide spectrum of residents, from campesinos and students to union organizers and others caught up in the protracted Central American conflicts. Some are longtime political activists openly supportive of the insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala. Their views are widely divergent from the pro-government analyses offered by U.S. officials, who have long charged that Central American refugees have been coached to exaggerate their travails in order to strengthen asylum claims.

On a recent afternoon, however, the three residents present at the shelter freely offered their stories to a U.S. reporter, asking only that their names be concealed so that retribution not be taken against relatives and friends back home. Accustomed to the bloodshed of their homelands, all seemed convinced that they would probably not survive if deported back to Central America. While opposed to U.S. policy in the area, they expressed admiration for individual U.S. citizens.

Following the guerrilla offensive that began last November in El Salvador, Mirna, a 30-year-old mother of six, said repression increased dramatically. She decided she had two choices: to leave or to be murdered. Last month, she chose the former.

“I felt the further that I got away from my country the better,” Mirna said, recalling the harrowing trip through Guatemala and Mexico with her 4-year-old. (Her other five children remain in El Salvador.) “Finally, I ended up in Tijuana. I decided to cross and get to know the people of the United States.”

Her activism goes back to her student days, when she painted slogans on walls and handed out leaflets, activities never approved of by her conservative mother. After combat between guerrillas and the Salvadoran government intensified in 1980, Mirna, like many others, left for revolutionary Nicaragua, where she says she spent eight years preparing to return to El Salvador and fight for change. She says she was arrested aboard a bus in San Salvador, the capital, in early 1989 and was not released until July. She says she later gave birth to a child conceived via a rape by a prison guard.

“When I was in prison, there were times when I would have preferred that they had killed me,” said Mirna, seated on the shelter’s living room couch, an eye on her high-strung son, who sports boots and gives his name as “Cowboy.” “There were times that I didn’t want to live.”

Two of her daughters were taken away to a government facility and used as a kind of cruel bait by interrogators seeking information, she said, and she was allowed to see them only a few hours a week.

“They knew my children were my weakest point,” said Mirna, a tall, striking woman, still unshaken in her belief that insurgents will eventually topple the U.S.-backed government. “I ask you: For what woman are her children not her weakest point?”

For Ernesto, a 34-year-old father of two children, who are still in El Salvador, the machine-gunning of his father’s home last spring was the catalyst for his departure. Fortunately, no one was home at the time, but the message was unmistakable. Some years before, he had been jailed and tortured for his role in a union at a milk-products plant, he said. He candidly admits working on behalf of the insurgency in recent years, though he declined to provide details.

After his father’s home was attacked, Ernesto left for Mexico City, destination to thousands of expatriate El Salvadorans; he worked there for several months before heading to Tijuana. He arrived in San Diego last week.

“In El Salvador, I knew they were looking for me,” he said.

Juan Carlos, 24, an Indian native of the northern state of Quiche in Guatemala, where there is much conflict, was later a student leader in Guatemala City. He said his position as an indigenous person who has witnessed murders of his people and spoken out against repression has angered authorities. Juan Carlos has dodged the police for years, but he feared his luck was running out.

“I was afraid that at any moment they might recognize me and arrest me,” he said in explaining his decision to leave. “There is no liberty there; only a constant fear.”