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When 14 year-old Fernando Alvarez woke up
bloody and beaten in a pool of ice water at an army base in
rural Guatemala, he was happy. Happy that the men who jumped
him, beat him, and kidnapped him in the market where his mother
had sent him to buy lemons for her weren't criminals or
gangsters but government soldiers. Happy to be alive.
In Guatemala this is the way the government
"drafted" young men to fight, and they put Fernando in a
counter-insurgency unit fighting against the leftist "Guerrilla
Army of the Poor" in the hills of Guatemala. He was made a radio
operator and given a cyanide pill to put between his teeth and
cheek in the back of his mouth--to swallow if he were captured
by the rebels.
Many of Fernando's friends, still no older
than an American 9th grader, didn't survive the fighting in the
hills. Fernando did, and after several months he was transferred
to the Army's Intelligence Center. He expected to work in
intelligence analysis but was instead ordered to work alongside
American CIA officers in interrogating rebel prisoners.
"Interrogation" techniques included placing sewing needles in
prisoner's eyes and blowtorches in body orifices.
Fernando, a decent boy, at first refused.
"God sees what we are doing here," he told his superiors. They
laughed in his face and told him "You're not in Sunday school,
you're in the army. You do it to the prisoners or we will do it
to you." Seeking only to survive, Fernando obeyed the orders. He
became a torturer.
And a good one. He tortured and he enjoyed
it, or so it seemed. He swore and stabbed and beat the prisoners
and got the information that the army wanted. He became one of
them, and, a few months later, he was even promoted. One day he
was sent to a subterranean prison cell with a guard with
instructions to "interrogate" three rebel prisoners. The
prisoners were tied up, bound and gagged, anticipating torture,
hoping just to die. Fernando fired up the blowtorch but it
didn't seem to work. He struggled with it and swore at it and
finally asked the guard to go back upstairs and hunt down
another one. The guard left and Fernando decided, as he had
planned, to make a run for it.
It would have been easier for him to leave
alone.
He didn't.
Stumbling to their feet, untied for the first
time in who knows how long, disbelieving their eyes and ears,
and fearing a trick, the rebel prisoners followed Fernando down
a corridor and ran out of the building. Watchtower guards fired
at them but missed.
Once in the hills the four of them exchanged
clothes, and went their separate ways. Fernando felt liberated
and began to plot his way home. But, at age 15, he was in a lot
of trouble. He had planned his escape, but he had not thought
through what would happen next. Now he was a deserter from an
army which routinely tortured and killed the deserters it
caught. Not only that, but several rebel prisoners who had
escaped a couple of months earlier had identified Fernando to
their superiors as one of the regime's torturers and he was put
on a rebel death list.
Facing death from both sides, Fernando, with
the aid of a friend who was a coyote (smugglers who take
immigrants up to the US), came to the United States where he was
granted temporary asylum.
Talking to Fernando today it is hard to
believe that such a kind, hardworking, gentle man could ever
have had two armies seeking his death. He lives a different life
now, a very hard one by American standards but one which he'll
tell you is the best he's ever known. He is a day laborer,
putting in long hours on construction sites and picking up money
on the side doing weekend gardening. He sleeps on a couch and
has practically no material possessions. He's in English class
four nights a week and computer class every Friday, continuing
an education that had ended in 4th grade.
Fernando has no illusions about the United
States. He knows that many Americans don't want immigrants like
him here. He knows that it was the Americans who engineered the
1954 Guatemala military coup which overthrew a
democratically-elected government and set in motion the wave of
terror which 30+ years later would swallow and almost destroy
him. His asylum ran out a few months ago and he is now, once
again, a "mohado", a "wetback", an "undocumented worker", an
"illegal alien". His asylum judge told him that if he wants to
stay in the U.S. legally he must go back to Guatemala and apply
for a visa to visit the United States. Fernando's not going.
"There's no point," he says, "if la migra catches me I'll get a
trip back to Guatemala anyway--for free."
Like many immigrants, Fernando is intensely
interested in the amnesty program being discussed by the Bush
administration, even though he knows it may well not include
Guatemalans. Like others, he's surviving the best he can and
hoping that someday he can become legal.
America profits enormously from immigrants'
cheap labor and their willingness to do the dirty, dangerous
jobs we don't want to do. At the same time, however, we
indignantly reject the suggestion that these same immigrants
upon whom we depend should be allowed to live here legally and
enjoy the benefits of our society. Perhaps someday America will
end this hypocrisy.
Hopefully it won't come too late for
Fernando. If Fernando had done what he did in the service of
America or captured American prisoners he'd be a hero with
medals pinned all over his chest and an honored guest at this
month's Veterans' Day memorials. Maybe, like Senator and former
Vietnam POW John McCain, he'd even be a well-known leader who is
respected and admired. Instead, this magnificent man is an
outlaw here and an outlaw there, a man caught between two
countries, neither of which wants him.
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