The ABCs of Freedom : Volunteers Try to Spread Word of New Asylum Rule to Guatemalans

One by one, the men descended from the hillsides of northern San Diego County to voice their concerns: Several feared forced recruitment into village militias, others had received threats from the military or the guerrillas, while others spoke of relatives or friends who had “disappeared,” never to surface anew.

“I’m afraid they’ll kill me if I go back,” said Miguel Alfonso Martin, echoing a general preoccupation.

He was among about 100 Guatemalan men--almost all Kanjobal-speaking highland Indians, their Mayan heritage unmistakable in their faces--who had hiked or bicycled to a clearing in the chaparral to sign up for the program known as el ABC , a onetime opportunity for some to apply for political asylum under much improved chances of success.

The ABC appellation is legal shorthand for a complex national class-action lawsuit, American Baptist Churches vs. Thornburgh, which was formally settled last January in San Francisco.

The settlement followed five years of often-acrimonious litigation pitting more than 80 religious and refugee assistance organizations against the U.S. government, particularly the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The groundbreaking settlement, approved by U.S. District Judge Robert Peckham, provided hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans and Salvadorans residing in the United States with a new, reformed opportunity to apply for political asylum--even if they have previously been denied such protection and ordered deported.

Applicants under the ABC umbrella are automatically entitled to so-called “work authorization,” allowing them to work in the United States while their asylum cases are pending, a process that can drag on for a year or more.

It may be a propitious time. Earlier this year, the immigration service revamped its often-criticized asylum adjudication procedure, creating a new corps of specially trained hearing officers--schooled in human rights matters--and adopting other reforms that immigrant advocates say should render the system more equitable. But there are no guarantees.

Under U.S. refugee law, foreigners living in the United States may be eligible for asylum if they can demonstrate that they would be subject to persecution--or have a “well-founded fear” of such abuse--based on their national origin, creed or political opinion.

For instance, past asylum seekers have asserted that their lives would be endangered if they returned home because of past confrontations with military or insurgent troops. Others have expressed fear that they may be accused, upon return, of being “subversives” because of past friendships, affiliations or jobs.

In practice, critics have long charged that asylum policy was thoroughly politicized, the result being that refugees from U.S. allies such as Guatemala had a 1 in 10 chance, or less, of attaining the protected status, while applicants from the onetime socialist bloc--such as Eastern European countries and (formerly) Sandinista Nicaragua--were routinely given asylum and permitted to remain.

That perceived disparity was at the heart of the ABC lawsuit, which grew out of the so-called “sanctuary” movement, composed of church groups and others who have offered refuge to Central Americans fleeing their troubled homelands.

The Bush and Reagan administrations have long contended that the vast majority of Guatemalan exiles, like Mexican expatriates, came north for economic reasons, and are only seeking asylum as a way to secure legal residence. Immigrant advocates disagree vociferously, contending that many do face persecution if they return.

In recent weeks, attorneys and volunteers throughout California have been attempting to alert tens of thousands of Guatemalans--particularly field and day laborers--of the prospective benefits of ABC.

In San Diego and elsewhere, advocates have been conducting charlas-- informal discussions--designed to spread the word to hillside and canyon-hemmed migrant camps, settlements for many Guatemalan Indians, who are generally at the bottom of the immigrant-labor social ladder, performing the lowest-paying jobs.

There is some urgency. The registration period for Guatemalans began July 1 and is slated to close Dec. 31. For Salvadorans, the registration period ends Oct. 31, the same as the deadline for those registering for temporary protected status, a provision enacted by Congress last year to allow “safe haven” for refugees fleeing war-ravaged nations.

Sign-ups among Guatemalans have been slow, for several reasons: A general paucity of information about the ABC opportunity; fears of high costs (although registration is free), and the well-conditioned hesitancy, especially among rural Guatemalans, to discuss politically related difficulties.

“We want to make sure no one squanders the opportunity,” said Claudia E. Smith, regional counsel in Oceanside for California Rural Legal Aid, a migrant-assistance organization that is spearheading the sign-up in San Diego County, relying largely on volunteer private lawyers to pursue the complicated asylum cases.

As of Oct. 4, according to government figures, only about 5,100 Guatemalans nationwide had signed up for ABC. Yet advocates say the eligible ranks likely number tens of thousands, perhaps more than 100,000 Guatemalans.

“Many simply do not have confidence in the system,” notes Marilu Camarena, an outreach coordinator for El Rescate, the Los Angeles-based immigrant-assistance organization, which plans to dispatch Kanjobal-speaking workers to inform the city’s growing Kanjobal Guatemalan population about ABC. (There are also significant concentrations of Guatemalan migrants, especially highland Indians, in the Central Valley, Oregon and Florida.)

Although Salvadorans are also eligible for ABC benefits, most have applied for temporary protected status under a provision of the sweeping Immigration Act of 1990 that provides up to 18 months of legal residence for refugees fleeing war zones.

Salvadorans enrolled for protected status--and more than 160,000 already are signed up--enlist automatically for ABC benefits. (Guatemalans are not eligible for the safe-haven designation, although activists have been lobbying Congress to include them.)

As always in the rumor-filled shadow world of immigrants, distorted accounts of ABC and its prospective benefits have been circulating furiously.

Confusion is rampant, advocates say, opening the way for self-styled “immigration consultants” and unscrupulous notaries public to charge prospective applicants hundreds of dollars, promising legal residence via el ABC. Consultants ill-advised on asylum inevitably submit thin applications.

For instance, one Guatemalan man arrived at a recent ABC sign-up in San Diego’s rural San Pasqual Valley with a former asylum application featuring the kind of terse, generalized responses not likely to convince INS officials.

“I’m afraid of the war and violence that exists in Guatemala and threatens (sic) the lives of local villagers like myself,” the typewritten solicitation stated. “Life is too dangerous in Guatemala at the present time.”

It was filled out by a tax-return specialist doubling as an immigration consultant.

Many Guatemalan immigrants are peasants from hardscrabble mountain zones that were devastated during a brutal Guatemalan military counter-insurgency campaign during the early and mid-1980s that left tens of thousands dead, hundreds of villages destroyed and sent entire communities into exile, according to studies by Americas Watch, Amnesty International and other human rights organizations.

Indians fled en masse to neighboring Mexico, and, ultimately, to the United States, particularly California.

Since 1980, about 1 million Guatemalans--about one in eight citizens--have been driven from their homes, many to foreign exile, according to church estimates.

Many Guatemalan refugees speak Spanish haltingly, are illiterate and are generally hesitant to talk to foreigners about anything, much less sensitive matters involving the tortured history of their homeland. “A lot of them worry that anything they hear is going to get back to the government,” noted Steven Seick, a San Diego attorney who has taken on several ABC cases.

Indeed, for many of the prospective ABC beneficiaries, silence has long been a pivotal self-defense mechanism.

“The fact is, these people survived by being invisible, and never saying anything to anybody,” said Alberto Saldamando, an attorney with Catholic Charities in San Francisco, who was among those recently providing ABC charlas to Guatemalans in northern San Diego County. “My role is to tell these people what asylum is about: It’s not about being poor, it’s not about coming north for a better life. It’s about persecution.”

Now, Saldamando notes, it is critical that the Guatemalans open up and detail their fears, thus helping to craft persuasive asylum cases. “This is a matter of stories, of life histories, of relating to people,” said Saldamando. “You’ve got to get into the guts of someone’s story. . . . We’re trying to draw them out.”

In an address to a group of about 25 attentive Guatemalan men in the San Pasqual Valley, Saldamando endeavored to outline the ramifications of ABC and political asylum. He attempted to reduce the labyrinthine legalisms to terms comprehensible to the listeners, almost all of whom were Kanjobal-speaking natives of two rural towns, Santa Eulalia and San Pedro Soloma, in northwestern Huehuetenango state, site of intense guerrilla activity and fierce military repression during the 1980s.

“You may have a family member, a friend, a neighbor, who has been ‘disappeared’ or assassinated, and you may be afraid the same will happen to you,” Saldamando told the group. “We recognize that, unfortunately, to be an indigenous person in your country is to give license to people to come and kill you.”

Afterward, one man explained that he fled from his home via a rear exit one night in August, 1989, after armed men arrived looking for him. He didn’t wait to ask questions and hasn’t been back since, said the man, 31, who, like a number of others interviewed, declined to give his name or provide other details.

He said he had paid a storefront notary public in Escondido $95 to file asylum paperwork this spring, but he had never heard anything back.

Another man, Alejandro Gonzalez, 31, said his uncle had been killed in 1982, apparently by leftist insurgents, although he was unsure of the exact assailants. “We’re always caught in the middle of the war, between the army and the guerrillas,” said Gonzalez, of San Pedro Soloma, who has been in the United States for four years. “Either way, it’s easy for them to kill us.”

A seemingly universally dreaded duty is forced conscription into so-called “civil patrols,” village militias that the Guatemalan army began setting up in the 1980s as part of its anti-revolutionary strategy. The assignment is risky, and may mark participants for retribution from guerrillas or others, they say. But refusal to serve can be a death sentence.

“They make us patrol against our will,” said Basilo Gomez, 18, from Santa Eulalia, who has been in California for a year. “No one wants to go.”

There is an ABC caveat, of particular relevance in the U.S.-Mexico border zone: Recent arrivals need not apply. Eligible for ABC consideration are Guatemalans who were in the United States on or before Oct. 1, 1990, and Salvadorans who were here on or before Sept. 19, 1990, Excluded completely are certain serious felons, notably those convicted of crimes of violence and drug trafficking.

New arrivals can still file, of course, for political asylum, but they do not have the advantage of ABC benefits, especially the automatic grant of work authorizations awarded to those in the ABC pipeline.

The new opportunities bring some ironies: For years, many Central Americans have pretended to be Mexican nationals, the better to avoid being deported all the way back home if apprehended. It may now be advisable to acknowledge their true origins.

“Now the Mexicans will be all saying they’re Guatemalans!” Smith, of California Rural Legal Assistance, herself a native of Guatemala, jokingly told the group of Guatemalan men gathered in Escondido recently. “Now it’s the Mexicans who will be learning the Guatemalan national anthem!”

As many as 1,000 or more Guatemalans, mostly men but including some women and children, live across northern San Diego County, from Encinitas to Ramona, often residing as squatters in makeshift outdoor camps. Most make a living with assorted day-labor tasks, including yard work and construction.

In San Diego, activists seeking legal assistance for Guatemalan asylum-seekers--be they eligible for ABC or not--have been attempting to enlist lawyers, a number of whom have agreed to participate, often free or for minimum fees.

Among those responding have been Centro de Asuntos Migratorios, a San Diego-based nonprofit organization that receives considerable funding from donations and church groups; Catholic Charities, under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego; the San Diego Volunteer Lawyers Program, consisting of attorneys from firms, and lawyers from the large firm of Luce Forward Hamilton & Scripps.

“With ABC and the new asylum procedures, things should certainly be a lot better for Guatemalans than before,” said Richard Garcia, executive director of Centro de Asuntos Migratorios. “At least that’s what we’re hoping.”