by José de la Isla
José de la Isla
It’s said that goldfish have a memory that lasts three seconds. They live in the present all the time.
Human beings, on the other hand, have long-term as well as short-term memories. Our brains are perfect instruments for self-instruction.
We learn from the past and the errors of our ways.
That’s why I can’t get Diego out of my mind.
We met up four years ago when photographer Wilhelm Scholz and I were on assignment in the Arizona desert, south of Tucson, in the Mexican town of Agua Prieta. There my new-found friend Diego told me of his travels north from the highlands of Guatemala to his apprehension when he attempted to cross the line into the United States without papers. Without work or resources, he told me he was trying to find his way back home.
The man cried intermittently throughout the day. “The whole village left their farm plots when the death squads came,” he said as he spilled his odyssey.
Some 2,000 refugees from his area fled across the border into the Mexican state of Chiápas. He and his wife resettled on a plot of land to do the subsistence farming they had known all their lives. His wife bore a daughter. Shortly thereafter, she died.
He was told that a farm worker in the United States could earn up to $60 a day, 663 pesos back then. Able to borrow $1,200 for travel and expenses, he reached the border and paid a smuggler who promised to deliver him to a U.S. job. But he was caught. Stranded in the desert, Diego shared his experience and fears with me. He isn’t a goldfish.
He had no way to pay back the loan or reclaim his land in Chiápas, nor to feed and educate his daughter — not even the price of a bus ticket. Mexican officials told me they feared that Diego didn’t have the street smarts to keep from getting waylaid as he headed south again.
I have heard hundreds of stories from people trapped by similar circumstances.
I’ve also received streams of comments from elements among my countrymen who fervently believe people like Diego brought it on themselves.
They ought not to export their personal problems to the United States.
On March 17 the National Security Archive, a Washington, D.C., institute, disclosed documents confi rming that our government knew all along that the Guatemalan officials we supported with arms and cash from 1960 to 1996 were behind the disappearances and assassinations that led to the fl ight of thousands of Diegos. It is no longer possible for the United States to claim we had no such knowledge — that we are goldfi sh when it comes to Guatemala.
That small nation’s U.S.-backed army battled guerrillas in its highlands.
More than 200,000 persons were killed or reported missing during those years. Most were Mayan Indians, forced to take sides or murdered if they wouldn’t. Death squads ruled. Sometimes vengeful people used the political calamity as a pretext to settle personal scores, leveraging opportunities out of the horrendous situation.
We have been told before about what was happening, but by partisans and ideologues. So have others tried telling us, like novelist Francisco Goldman in his book The Long Night of White Chickens, Sister Dianna Ortiz who wrote about being sequestered and tortured in The Blindfold’s Eyes, and Nobel-laureate Rigoberta Manchu in her autobiographical account about her family and village.
The decades of official denials that have come our way don’t stand up. These new declassifi ed disclosures of old documents simply verify what others have been telling us.
Unless we accept the truth and correct our course, we have missed the value of having a memory.
Migrants who opted to flee their homelands are collateral damage, the human consequence of a script we sanctioned, if not wrote.
If we don’t insist, even now, on full disclosure and appropriate remedy, we become three-second goldfish, endlessly swimming inside the bowl, reinventing reality at every turn, and going nowhere.
[José de la Isla’s latest book, Day Night Life Death Hope, is distributed by The Ford Foundation. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). Contact him by e-mail at joseisla3@yahoo.com]. © 2009
