Sanctuary

In July 24,1982, Rev. David Chevrier risked felony , by declaring the Wellington Avenue Church in Chicago a sanctuary for a young Salvadoran refugee. The congregation was jubilant when the young student stepped into the knave of the church. A bandana and a straw hat covered his face, except for his eyes. As clamorous congregational applause exploded and continued, his dark eyes filled with tears.

Juan is an "illegal alien," wanted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). But Chevrier and the congregation want him also--enough to risk a five-year prison term and/or a $2,000 fine for harboring a fugitive. Juan greeted the crowd, whispering to an interpreter, "Thank you, my friends, for this safehouse. I am glad to be among you."

Knowing the Wellington congregation had sent the INS a letter of intent to break the law by providing sanctuary, I asked Chevrier after the welcome service what would happen if the INS came to arrest Juan.

"We will do all that is humanly possible to prevent them," he replied. "Our resistance will be nonviolent." Chevrier stared through a stained glass window in the now-quiet church and seemed to reconsider or think out loud: "But it's his life if they take him--deportation and likely death. I know he'd be one of thousands they've sent back, and that our interference is a small distraction. But we can't let it happen. They'll have to take him from our arms.

"This is only a beginning; they can't arrest all of us. And if they do, there are 59 churches and synagogues supporting this sanctuary. Others will come, and others will harbor them."

Upstairs in a makeshift room where the congregation was barely able to coax back the plumbing, Juan spent his days with a 24-hour companion. I visited him there.

He was asleep when the interpreter and I knocked, exhausted from his overnight ride on the "underground railroad" from Tucson to Chicago. My first impression was of a child awakened too suddenly. Clearly he was bewildered--the long trip, a tumultuous reception, strange surroundings, and then gringos waking him. But even a couple of hours later when he had warmed to us and told us his story of eight months of torture and a two-year journey to this precarious freedom, there remained a certain innocence. He was a shy country boy from La Libertad.

It was during his student days at the University of San Salvador that Juan was picked up. One day after class, while he was waiting for a bus, a security policeman came up behind him, yanking his hair and throwing him to the ground. At first, because he wasn't "political," he was bewildered and hoped for mistaken identity when his papers were checked.

But the police didn't ask for his papers. They threw him on a jeep floor, and a soldier pressed one boot against his head and another on his back. When he tried to move, one of them slammed a rifle butt against the side of his face.

Next they blindfolded him, and he felt terror lock a muscle in his neck. He began to breathe deeper to loosen the cramp. Like a drowning person, his life spun before his eyes. But in El Salvador such desperate scrutinizing is focused. Had he been a subversive? But how? Of what was he accused? Juan was never to find out. No charges. No trial.

He felt the thud of two more bodies jar the jeep floor. "They piled us up like potato sacks, only they respect the food a little more." When the jeep started, he felt terrible sorrow for his mother, then stabbing anxiety when he remembered the pattern of arrest, followed by raid and murder of the arrestee's family.

During Juan's imprisonment, his father "disappeared." Neighbors saw the security forces come to the house. Three months later his mother died of a heart attack. Juan never has located any of his six brothers.

When Juan began telling about his first day of torture, I felt him distance slightly; his voice flattened. I was sad suddenly that all we offered was horrified silence--none of us knew, we could barely imagine. Though safe, he was still alone. He seemed to know it, so he smiled a lot to reassure us, except when he told of his parents' deaths.

They began his torture in a place that was not a jail. He remembers hallways and torture rooms. He never saw other prisoners because he was always blindfolded when taken from his cell-room, but he heard the screams daily. For eight months he endured, when others went mad or committed suicide. Near the end he was delirious, and his hope was waning.

They pounded his hands with heavy metal rods, demanding responses to questions he couldn't answer. They asked for names, names. When he wouldn't answer they hit him in the chest over and over. He still has continual pain in his chest and occasional lack of sensation in his spine. They used electric shock, pulled out his fingernails, hung him by his wrists, burned him with acid, broke his arms.

"But what were they after," I asked, "was it your student activities?"

"No, it wasn't that. It's true I was part of a student movement demanding curriculum change, an overhaul of the educational system, and student participation in university decisions. But their interest was in my truck-driving years before the university. I had a route that ran into Guatemala toward the Atlantic coast. In both El Salvador and Guatemala I saw many cadavers lying in the roads. Back then, when they bothered to disguise things, they threw the bodies in the road so that high-speed trucks or cars would run over them, making their deaths appear to be accidents. But if you stopped you could see the bodies had been tortured. I think they thought I knew something from my travels."

Juan was unaware that a general amnesty had been granted prisoners when they blindfolded him and drove him to what was clearly a jail. The next day he was released in San Salvador. It was 1979.

He dwelled on that day somewhat, how friends and relatives came to greet prisoners, but he waited unsuccessfully for one of his brothers to step through the crowd. Then he began a 10-block walk to a friend's house. He laboriously pulled his 96 pounds through the streets. The lonely walk took him six hours. "I was weak, looked awful...When I went to my friend's home he did not recognize me."

He stayed there three days before the National Guard came looking for him. He learned later that four out of the five prisoners released with him had been apprehended and their decapitated bodies thrown in the streets. When the guard came to his friend's front door, Juan leapt out a back window, scampered over a row of rooftops toward Rio Acelhuate, a city drainage river, where he dropped into the water and thus covered his retreat.

He slept on the river banks when he could walk no longer. Under the sun, and under the stars, he pushed himself to walk out toward Aguilares, where friends would feed him and he could move toward the mountains to hide. For months he traveled from town to town in the Chalatenango area, seeking the whereabouts of his brothers. He received brief protection from friends, and then he shuttled back into the mountains' protection, where he healed his wounds.

Juan finished his story, telling of his escape to Honduras, then Mexico, and finally his connection with the underground railroad created by religious groups on both sides of the Mexican-American borders and extending now to Chicago. He made his way out slowly, carefully, because in Honduras and Guatemala, Salvadoran refugees are targets for military and right-wing death squads. In Mexico, Salvadorans are jailed or extorted. Mexican border guards demand payments from families carrying life savings in hidden pockets.

But for Central American refugees, the United States border is the "big round-up." The INS returns to El Salvador an average of 500 refugees a month. These refugees, 75 per cent of whom are women and children, are met at the El Salvador International Airport by armed military.

Some of these deportees meet the fate of Santa Chirino Amaya. After Amaya received a traffic ticket, he begged the INS not to return him to his war-torn country. But he was deported, and a month later his decapitated body was found at a crossroad known as the Road of Death because of the Salvadoran patrols in the area.

According to the State Department, Salvadorans are not political refugees fleeing a genocidal war, though that war has cost the lives of 33,000 of their people in the last two years. Rather, they are considered economic refugees seeking better opportunities. The State Department has not considered the war in El Salvador severe enough to grant general political asylum.

In 1980 none of the almost 12,000 Salvadorans who applied was granted political refugee status. A total of 11,792 refugees were deported, either through "voluntary" or involuntary departure status, according to the Central America Refugee Center. Of 5,559 applications for political asylum in 1981, the INS has granted only two.

According to Peter Larabee, director of the INS detention facility in El Centro, California, Salvadoran refugees "are just peasants who are coming to the U.S. for a welfare card and a Cadillac."

As a final question to Juan, almost as an afterthought, I asked him why he came here, prepared for possible arrest by INS.

"It is because of the children," he says, the same innocence in his eyes. "They don't just die from guns. They are hungry. I want them to grow up, not just to a strong adulthood. I want them to have an infancy. That's part of why I'm here, to demonstrate that all of us must be willing, not just one person, to stop this suffering." He sighs, "It's a call."

Juan was the first refugee to come through the underground railroad. In the more than two weeks that he spent at Wellington Church his presence drew an unprecedented expression of support from many Chicago churches in the form of food supplies and volunteer monitors. He has since been moved into a larger community of support, sharing the fate of many of the thousands of "illegal" Salvadorans and Guatemalans in our cities.

Juan's presence has left an indelible legacy: The gift of a sojourner and the resurrection of a tradition. And his risk paved the way for a refugee family of six to take his place in the safehouse at Wellington.

When the Vargas family was greeted by the congregation's welcoming applause, Senor Vargas, who had kept his family brave during their weeks of clandestine travel, fell to his knees touching the altar floor and sobbing his thanks to God and the community for his family's safe arrival.

Dave Chevrier considers the experience of offering sanctuary one of "overwhelming blessings....There's been a rallying of the community."

Rev. Sid Mohn, who officiated at the Vargas family's welcoming service, had his own interpretation of the congregation's newly discovered definition of such presumed concepts as pastoral work: "When the church has to break the law in order to provide refuge for homeless people, the struggle for justice has reached anew stage. Now the pastoral has merged with the political, service is prophetic and love a subversive activity." Such a conviction, according to Mohn, is no longer the theological expression of the church of Central America or the prerogative of liberation theologians but the discovery of the North American church through the experience of giving sanctuary.

Since the first refugee's arrival in July, Chevrier and the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America have received weekly requests from churches all over this country and Canada expressing interest in providing sanctuary or a willingness to become a hospitality stop on the underground railroad. The Religious Task Force launched a campaign in four major midwestern cities to bring refugee families through the underground railroad by December 2, the anniversary of the martyred North American religious women.

The Midwest's preparation for a December 2 "relay" of refugees is part of a national campaign, which has also targeted March 24, the anniversary of Archbishop Romero's assassination, for public sanctuary sponsorship. The unfolding of a national campaign was the conception of Rev. John Fife of the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, and Jim Corbett--known as the Quaker "coyote." A "coyote" is a man exorbitantly paid for his expertise as a border sneak. But Fife and Corbett have become "coyotes" for the people, not profit.

They began the underground railroad because their sanctuary project was so successful that the deluge of refugees was swamping the community's capacity to provide social services. The Southside Presbyterian Church has brought over and harbored 1,600 Salvadorans.

A larger network was needed to absorb the rescued refugees and provide a national religious witness against the immorality of INS practice, with the objective of educating North Americans about the root cause of the deportation policy--the State Department's support of a murderous Salvadoran and Guatemalan military. Fife stressed the importance of this political objective, lest religious groups perceive the sanctuary project as church-sponsored resettlement programs such as were offered to Chilean and Vietnamese refugees.

Corbett underscores Fife's insistence on the political and moral objectives of the sanctuary project. Corbett, who worked with the Tucson Ecumenical Council's legal advocacy efforts, which bailed out many refugees from El Centro [detention camp, was convinced that the religious community must act directly, not simply advocate, when the stakes were the lives of poor peasants. In a plea before the National Council of Churches, he said, "The refugees are right here at our door pleading for help to avoid capture. Actively asserting the right to aid fugitives from terror means doing it...not just preaching at a government that's capturing and deporting them, not just urging legislation that might help future refugees. With people in our midst being hunted down and shipped back, denouncing terror while ignoring the victims simply teaches the public how to live with atrocity."

Corbett's arrest may be simply a matter of time. He's run the Mexican border so many times that he fears his presence will draw too much surveillance against the refugees. The "relays" take him away from home for days at a time. Even at home in Tucson he is often called out in the deep of night to make a starlit run.

Both Fife and Corbett worry about the INS' next move, the possibility of the INS breaking sanctuary as the national campaign gains momentum. But currently the INS dismisses the sanctuary project. "We're not about to send investigators into a church and start dragging people out in front of TV cameras," said Bill Joyce, assistant general counsel to the INS. "We'll just wait them out.... This is just a political thing dreamed up by the churches to get publicity.... If we thought it was a significant problem, then maybe we'd look at it. But there are plenty of illegal aliens out there."

There are indeed plenty out there, and the increase in Guatemalan Indians fleeing wholesale slaughter in the country is taxing the church underground railroad to its limit. "Each week," says Corbett, "we must turn our backs on refugees who desperately need help but for whom there's just not enough time or money. And there are hundreds of thousands in El Salvador whose agonies far exceed the sufferings of those reaching the U.S."

For those who are safe here, like the Vargas family, the underground railroad and sanctuary are a protection and an opportunity for refugees to educate us about the price of U.S. intervention. When press asked Vargas if he felt his family was being used in order to draw attention to the plight of the refugees, he replied, "That is the wrong question; people should be asking, 'Why are we fleeing?' The answer to that would be because of the genocide in my country....This extermination of our people is being made possible with the aid that this government is sending to El Salvador."

The final reason Vargas gave for coming to this country resonated with the poetry of Salvadoran Roque Dalton. Vargas said that he and his family left "because we are all walking around like dead people, and we don't know where to go." The slain Roque Dalton wrote, "To be a Salvadoran is to be half-dead; the thing that moves is the half-lives they left us."

Renny Golden was a founding member of the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America when this article appeared.