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VVAW Member Helps Refugees, Arrested For Saving Lives

By VVAW San Antonio

On Friday, April 13, U.S. marshalls and members of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) anti-smuggling unit moved onto the ground of Casa Oscar Romero and arrested VVAW member Jack Elder. Elder, along with his wife Diane and their children was working at Casa Oscar Romero, a temporary shelter for Central American, named after the assassinated Salvadoran archbishop, since August 1983.

Released on a $20,000 personal recognizance bond, Elder pleaded not guilty to three counts of transporting illegal aliens and expects to go to trial in early June. Since the arrest there has been mounting interest on a national level on the issues of sanctuary, refugee rights and our foreign policy in Central America.

"We're motivated by a reverence for life in the face of a foreign policy that destroys innocent lives in Central America," says Elder. "The hour is late. It's time to strip away the myths and lies that Reagan uses to mask the real issues. If my trial and possible jail sentence (a maximum of 15 years) make more people aware of the U.S. role in sponsoring official terrorism in Central America, maybe U.S. Involvement in a land war there can be averted," he continues.

The stage for what Elder hopes will become a major debate on Central American foreign policy was set modestly enough back in mid-March. Elder had driven three Salvadoran refugees from Casa Romero to a bus station in nearby Harlingen, Texas. The Salvadorans, all feeling from La Union, one of the most war-filled parts of El Salvador, were later picked up by the Border Patrol and detained because they had no papers authorizing their entry into the U.S. Questioned by the Border patrol they identified Jack Elder.

Casa Romero, founded in December, 1982, has served over one thousand refugees from Central America. The Casa provides food, shelter and orientation to the refugees who are now arriving at the rate of 150 per month. The refugees cross the Rio Grande and walk to the Casa or are referred there by local churches, residents of the border area, or by cab drivers. They often arrive broke, exhausted, hungry and discouraged. Once at Casa Romero they can rest, but they must still clear a final hurdle—making it safely out of southern Texas.

The existence of huge numbers of refugees from El Salvador is embarrassing to the Reagan Administration. Not only does this human torrent underscore the fact that our southern border is practically an "open" border, it shows that while Americans sit back and swallow the "elections=democracy" equation, Salvadorans are leaving their country in record numbers. They flee a country wracked for a century by injustices wrought by private capitalism. During the 1970's the government and the right wing death squads turned the streets red with the blood of demonstrators every time the people asked for justice. The '80's have become the decade of the armed struggle and now, midway through 1984, it appears that the forces of national liberation are destined to defeat the U.S.-trained and armed military. Salvadoran army morale is eroded daily—the army is drafting 13 and 14-year-old boys; it provides minimal training; its officers are corrupt; and it is fighting rebels, "los muchachos," whose strength lies in the cooperation they receive from the civilian population.

If some of this Salvadoran reality, and our government's response to it, seem familiar, it's because we're about to make the same mistakes we made in Vietnam. Because we really don't believe that self-determination is for everyone, because ware is profitable, because we refuse to learn about the futility of opposing wars of national liberation, because we have a large number of young people who have a romanticized notion of war, and because most teachers and church people and other natural leaders prefer to be silent rather than outraged over the atrocities committed daily in our name in Central America, we face the prospect of blundering into another land war by summer's end.

There will be thousands of women and kids blasted apart by our bombs, guilded by our technology, all in the name of anti-communism. U.S.-trained "Hunter Patrols" will roam the hills at night listening for the murmur of a child or the cry of a baby in order to slaughter yet another group of "subversives."

The lives of these terrified, starving children and those of their desperate, long-suffering parents are the real stakes in the confrontation shaping up between refugee workers like Jack Elder and the U.S. law sanction refugee assistance efforts like those ongoing at Casa Oscar Romero, and yet the government indicts, arrests, and threatens with imprisonment those working with refugees, we might ask who the real criminals are. It shouldn't surprise us to learn that the same power brokers who dragged us into Vietnam are even now calculating acceptable American casualty figures in the upcoming Central American "conflict."

"Vietnam—Never Again" should be more than just a slogan. The time has come to join forces and denounce our foreign policy in Central America, and to resist the implementation of more war (the essence of the Kissinger Report) in the region. Nearly ten years after the end of the Vietnam conflict we find ourselves at the edge of another storm. It is our duty to read the signs of the times and use our credibility to help avoid another Vietnam: more KIA's, MIA's, POW's, wasted lives, obscene profits, empty promotions, and a country—our own—nearly rendered in two.

VVAW San Antonio