Oscar’s Crash Course in Democracy

The nightmare that Oscar Cabrera banishes by day returns to haunt his dreams at night.

He is driving with relatives through his homeland of El Salvador when they pass a man who sits, propped up against a cemetery wall. His limp body is riddled with bullets, his lifeless eyes stare vacantly.

Suddenly, the two change places. Now it is 15-year-old Oscar who sits, propped up like a rag doll. He sees his family drive by but can’t move. His mouth gapes open, but he can’t speak.

When he wakes, it is to the numbing reality that his father is dead. Juan Amadeo Cabrera, a political activist, schoolteacher and poet in the small town of Jocoro, was murdered in 1980 by a Salvadoran death squad as he stepped from the shower.

Oscar’s sorrow over the act shadows most of his waking hours. But, out of his bleak past, the senior at the Webb School of California--a prestigious, college-prep boarding school in the Claremont foothills--is forging a promising future.

When he arrived in this country five years ago, Oscar was a confused 10-year-old who spoke not a word of English. Today, he is an articulate young leader who can cite chapter and verse of the U.S. Constitution and maintains a B+ average.

Late last year, Oscar was one of 350 students nationwide selected to attend the 1989 National Young Leaders Conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Congressional Youth Leadership Council. He won a full scholarship to the conference as the student in his congressional district who best demonstrated academic excellence, school and community involvement, strong leadership and financial need.

In Washington, Oscar met with Cabinet secretaries, senators, federal judges, foreign diplomats, lobbyists and journalists and attended a State Department briefing.

The experience caused him to ask why the principles of democracy he studied in his civics classes do not work in his country.

In El Salvador, “they don’t like people messing around with their institutions,” Oscar says. “Standing up for freedom, for justice, that’s the sure road to death. You go the same way as Archbishop Romero or my father,” he says, referring to Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was gunned down in 1980 as he said Mass. Romero’s killers were never arrested.

Intense for someone so young, Oscar wants to become a doctor so he can open a clinic to treat the poor in El Salvador. He has applied to enter premed studies at UC Davis.

“Oscar’s personal experience is a testimony to his survival skills,” says Kathryn Hasse, the academic dean at the Webb School. “He has an incredible interest and aptitude for history . . . and is eager to learn and assess political documents, events and processes.”

When Oscar was growing up in El Salvador, he had no idea he would wind up in America. His mother was head nurse for the hospital in La Union, a Salvadoran city. His father was active in El Salvador’s national teachers’ union. Juan Cabrera was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1972 and 1977, only to have the government declare the elections invalid.

After his father’s death, Oscar and his family moved in with relatives. But Oscar says Marta Cabrera soon realized that the people who killed her husband were now stalking her. So in 1981, she fled to Los Angeles, where, three years later, she had earned enough money as a registered nurse to send for Oscar and his sister, Jenny, now 21.

In Los Angeles, the boy quickly learned English. He skipped the fifth and sixth grades, earned the highest grade-point average at his junior high school and graduated as class valedictorian.

With help from his mother’s employer, a now-retired teacher who lives in Palm Springs, Oscar was able to get a scholarship to Webb, whose $16,300 annual board and tuition exceeds that at many universities.

Today, Oscar devours everything from politics and literature to history. Isabel Allende, niece of the deposed Chilean leader and author of the novel “House of Spirits,” is a favorite. So is the autobiography of Anne Frank and the biography of Farabundo Marti, the Salvadoran rebel peasant leader who led a revolution against military rule in 1932. Marti was killed but his name lives on in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation front (FMLN), the leftist group waging a guerrilla war against the Salvadoran government.

“In a school where his fellow students drive cars that cost at least twice as much as his mother makes as an annual salary, Oscar has found a niche,” says Hasse, the academic dean.

But Oscar avoids typical teen activities such as school dances, saying they are too frivolous. He picks his friends carefully. If he seems older than his years, it’s because maturity has been forced upon him.

He can recite a litany of facts about El Salvador: 70,000 in a nation of 5.5 million have been killed by military or paramilitary death squads during the country’s 10-year civil war; most of the agricultural land is held by a tiny percentage of rich families; elections have been declared invalid when the military didn’t like the results.

“There’s stuff I don’t talk about, that I keep bottled up inside me. If I distract myself, I can forget about it, at least for a little while,” he says.

But Oscar tries to keep the memory of his father alive. At home, he listens to poems his father tape-recorded.

At times, Oscar displays the emotions of a hotheaded teen-ager. Consequently, his mother won’t discuss his father’s death or politics with him until he is 18. She is afraid he may go back to El Salvador and get himself killed.

“She doesn’t want me to go the way of my father,” Oscar says.

School officials also try to drive home the idea that he would be more valuable to his country as a physician.

“He has very strong opinions and feelings of commitment about his country,” says Greg Lawson, Webb’s director of public relations. Someday, after he has received his training, “he might go back . . . and become a public figure there and be very outspoken.”

The idea appeals to Oscar.

“People here are born with freedom, and no one can take it away,” Oscar says. “I wasn’t born with those freedoms. I don’t take them for granted.”