From the Front Lines to Forgiveness

The former Guatemalan army lieutenant sat within striking distance of the ex-revolutionary, two men who, in their previous lives, would have been at each other like scorpions in a jar.

The retired soldier, Julio Villasenor, was an explosives expert who cleared paths through rebel-dominated jungles during Guatemala’s long civil war. Rafael Castillo, when he was a rebel, used to kidnap men like Villasenor. He spent years avenging the torture and killing of his uncle and grandfather by army death squads.

These days, however, Villasenor and Castillo are partners in business suits. Out of an office in east Hollywood, they run one of the largest legal counseling and job training agencies for Guatemalans in the United States. Only a few years after civil wars killed more than 200,000 Guatemalans and roughly 75,000 people in El Salvador, the two former enemies marvel at the forgiveness spreading through Southern California’s Central American community. Reconciliation seemed impossible during the bloody Central American campaigns of the Cold War.

But, the men boast, that is now what distinguishes their community from, say, Bosnian Serbs and Croats. “People are realizing we are not enemies anymore,” said Villasenor, 49. “We come from the same country,” agreed Castillo, 54. “All of us are Guatemalans.”

They and other former enemies among Southern California’s 700,000 Central American expatriates have become allies in the economic fight for a claim on the middle class. Evidence of unity among Central Americans could be seen in the strike by janitors in April and the rally for general immigration amnesty that drew 20,000 to the Sports Arena in June. A pragmatic spirit has kindled a host of new relationships among onetime civil war adversaries from Guatemala and El Salvador--alliances that might have previously been thought of as betrayals.

Former leftists who once fought to overthrow the far-right National Republican Alliance government of El Salvador now host visiting party officials at local investment forums. Right-wing Guatemalan politicians solicit campaign contributions from immigrant professionals--including those who fled the country--in exchange for a chance at business opportunities in the postwar rebuilding effort.

Among the chief supporters of immigration amnesty for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees are the same governments whose oppressive regimes drove thousands to the United States. Why? To keep much-needed remittance dollars flowing into Central America. To understand the changes, consider the old Spanish folk saying: “With money, even the dog dances.”

“We’re in this paradigm-smashing moment, where the left is not the left and the right is not the right anymore,” observed Roberto Lovato, director of a Central American studies program at Cal State Northridge.

*

This crumbling of old barriers can be seen in places like L.A.’s Guatemalan Unity Information Agency, where Guatemalan immigrants flock to educational, vocational and legal counseling programs overseen by Villasenor. He seems an unlikely candidate to lead such an ambitious social service program. The eldest son of a restaurant owner in Guatemala, he spent most of 1973 at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, later recognized as the training ground for soldiers accused of horrendous human rights violations. The institution, located in Ft. Benning, Ga., has since changed its name to the Center for Inter-American Security Cooperation.

Villasenor enjoyed praise from his army superiors until his honorable discharge in 1977, after 11 years of service. But when he came to Los Angeles with his wife and three children in 1981, his resume made him a target of suspicion.

At that time, protesters marched through the Westlake and Pico-Union neighborhoods west of downtown Los Angeles, lugging black coffins to symbolize the Guatemalan villagers killed by soldiers. Signs reading “Keep U.S. Out of Central America” decorated street corners.

“I never approved of what the army did in some places,” Villasenor said during a recent interview. Charming and energetic one moment, solemn the next, the former soldier often uses his hands while speaking, slicing and gripping at the air to emphasize his points. His sea-green eyes and pale, slender features rarely betray any emotion beyond bemused interest.

Villasenor said his unit’s mission of making way for roads and bridges made it “more like a construction company. We created small towns. We were working with the people, not against them. They liked us.”

For that reason, Villasenor said, “I never felt guilty. I don’t have blood on my hands. I never had anything to hide.” His military experience opened doors here. Shortly after he arrived, a U.S. Army general who knew him from the School of the Americas in Panama helped Villasenor win approval for a contractor’s license. It wasn’t long afterward that Villasenor earned his U.S. citizenship.

In 1984, he started a delivery service, mostly transporting gasoline to support his family. He eventually started selling real estate. Around that time, Villasenor started volunteering for small Central American community groups in his spare time. The socially graceful entrepreneur doesn’t volunteer his past to new acquaintances, especially when acts of vengeance are sometimes only a few beers away. But he also doesn’t deny his role in the war.

His partner, Rafael Castillo, joined the surging revolutionary movement when his uncle and grandfather were hauled away by government troops in the early 1960s. He first spread propaganda, then helped plan attacks and transported ammunition. Eventually, he assisted in kidnapping government officials.

Castillo left for the United States in 1974, after growing disillusioned by infighting among the rebels. “It started to become the kind of fight where everyone was against each other,” he said.

After earning a real estate broker’s license in New York, where he became a U.S. citizen, Castillo moved in 1990 to Los Angeles. In 1998, Villasenor--whom Castillo did not know at the time--helped bring Castillo’s cousin into the United States to escape death threats in Guatemala.

Villasenor was by then the head of the Guatemalan information agency. The group started when Rafael Salazar, then the Guatemalan consul general in Los Angeles, summoned Villasenor and other business leaders into his office a few months after the civil war ended in 1996.

The diplomat complained that there were no organizations specifically serving Guatemalans in the area. The two largest Central American social service groups, El Rescate and the Central American Resource Agency, were dominated by Salvadorans.

Guatemalans should be able to fend for themselves, Salazar said, adding that the government was willing to help. So Villasenor and others created the agency in a tiny consulate office. The agency has since moved to West Beverly Boulevard and recently added a second office in Washington, D.C.

A practical man, the baritone-voiced Castillo said that when he learned of the organization, he saw it as a way to fulfill his desire to help disadvantaged Guatemalans.

Castillo joined the agency’s 10-person staff and befriended Villasenor before learning of his past. When Castillo--by now a real estate broker--heard Villasenor’s story, however, he thought back to 1972, when he was jailed and tortured by Guatemalan soldiers. It would not have been unheard of for him to consider ambushing the ex-soldier on a dark street corner, Castillo said. “There are people here whose families were hurt and [who] have found out about someone’s past and have gone after that person” out of revenge, he said.

But by then, the bonds of friendship had overcome any thought of revenge. “Maybe, if [Villasenor] was involved in the government raids, I wouldn’t be here,” Castillo said. “But I see he’s a good-hearted man. Julio has always been clear about what his duties were during the war.”

It is not always easy to work with Villasenor, said Castillo, who now teaches classes and high school equivalency exam courses for the agency. “Sometimes we have business disagreements,” he said. But nothing that conjures up old resentment.

Villasenor is a driven and idealistic man, eager to build an organization that will link immigrants and postwar Guatemala. His aggressive leadership style has chased away some Central American associates, particularly those who could not see beyond Villasenor’s military past. “I wondered: ‘How can he possibly understand my situation?’ ” said one former associate who requested anonymity but nonetheless praised the agency’s efforts. “Julio used to say: ‘You do what I say so.’ And I couldn’t take it,” especially from a former army officer.

The group’s continued relationship with government officials in Guatemala, where reports of human rights abuses persist, sends shudders through some in the community. “We cannot trust them,” said Julio Reyes, a member of a hometown organization called Asociacion de Guatemaltecos Los Angeles. “People here should not associate with groups like GUIA when they are headed by someone with a past like Mr. Villasenor’s.”

Economic Concerns Fuel Conciliation

Villasenor considers himself a link between immigrants here and a new Guatemala rife with investment opportunities. He meets routinely with visiting officials from his homeland in hopes of getting them to support local social service programs and business ventures both here and in Guatemala. “I have to convince the people here that the consulate is not their enemy anymore,” he said.

The logic behind the government’s willingness to support its expatriates is simple: Guatemala needs them to thrive in the United States so they can continue to send money home. So does El Salvador, whose consulate also cultivates ties with local activist groups.

Expatriates in the United States are a leading revenue source, sending an estimated $1.4 billion a year in remittances to El Salvador and about $800 million to Guatemala. Much of the money is spent on hospitals, sewage systems and schools, government officials said.

“We recognize the community here supports our economy,” said Oscar Benavides Gutierrez, the Salvadoran consul general in Los Angeles. “We know the people want to stay here. They have more opportunities here, and we want to help them.”

In exchange, politicians in Guatemala and El Salvador seem willing to give expatriates more say in the futures of their homelands, frequently visiting Southern California during election campaigns to seek votes and campaign donations. Current federal legislation in El Salvador allows expatriates to vote in elections back home.

Hoping to wipe away civil war resentment altogether, Francisco Flores, president of El Salvador, has been giving speeches about building “bridges” from his party to the far left and immigrants abroad, Benavides said. Both Guatemala and El Salvador have joined a campaign to lobby Congress to reform the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act of 1997, a proposal that is currently part of federal budget deliberations.

The immigration law sprouted from U.S. policies during the Cold War, providing blanket amnesty to Nicaraguan and Cuban refugees, but not to Salvadoran, Guatemalan or Haitian immigrants who fled U.S.-backed, right-wing regimes.

Angela Sanbrano, executive director of the Central American Resource Agency, predicted such change will soon come, given that the community now has roughly 75,000 registered voters.

“The Central American community in Southern California is becoming a force that now has to be taken very seriously,” she said.

However, many say that, despite the benefits that a unified Central American community could reap, it is too soon for the kind of redemption Villasenor wants.

That is particularly so among those who lost loved ones during the wars. Carlos Vaquerano, who heads the local Salvadoran American Legal and Education Fund, said it is hard for him to forget the three brothers he lost to death squads when he works with former government party officials on youth leadership projects. Even though he considers several of those former officials his friends, Vaquerano said: “I can forgive. But I’ll never forget.”

Even more than Salvadorans, San Francisco-based activist Edgar Ayala said, many Guatemalans “are not ready yet to engage in the reconciliation process.” He recalled how Villasenor inadvertently stirred resentment at a 1998 Guatemalan activist conference in Chicago when urging others to form a national political action committee.

“He kept saying: ‘We have to form a PAC,’ ” Ayala recalled. In Spanish, “PAC” is the nickname of an army vigilante group widely believed to have carried out some of the worst atrocities in the ‘80s.

But for government officials like Benavides, the larger considerations are clear. “The global economy is here,” Benavides said. “If we don’t work toward taking advantage of it, we’ll get left behind.”