The Flight of the Iguana

by David Quammen

  Political asylum, though, seems for one reason or another to be almost completely unavailable to Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Statistics from a representative recent year show that asylum applications filed by Afghani and Iranian individuals were granted at a rate thirty to forty times higher (as a percentage of the total applications from each nationality) than the rate for applications from Salvadorans. Applications from Poles were granted at almost fifteen times the rate for Salvadorans. Guatemalan applicants, on the other hand, have generally fared even worse than Salvadorans. The pattern within these statistics is obvious: If you flee to the U.S. from a regime in disfavor with Washington, your chances of being officially welcomed are much better than if you flee from one of Washington’s clients. Thus denied almost all chance of asylum, denied even temporary exemption (in the form of “extended voluntary departure” status) from deportation, Salvadorans and Guatemalans have no legal protection in the one country on Earth that prides itself most stentorianly as a haven for refugees.

  So they must live here as fugitives, with the help of sanctuary. And in the meantime our Border Patrol tries hard to prevent them from entering the country at all. So they must get over the border by stealth.

  One method of crossing is to pass through an official port of entry, bluffing fearfully with false or borrowed identity papers, masquerading as a U.S. citizen or a day-labor Mexican. Another method, more taxing physically and more risky, is to make a long hike through the desert, trekking out across those remote zones of ragged mountain and dry-wash and thorn vegetation where the international fence is unwatched. Many hundreds of bewildered Central Americans have attempted that desert hike. Such desperation itself might be considered eloquent.

  Some of these hikers have been caught in the act, some have passed over safely, some have died gruesomely. The desert, which often seems beautiful and sometimes benign, can be unforgiving of inexperience and miscalculation. But it comes as a lesson of desert cultures (and not just the Bedouin’s) that where physical ecology is so harsh, so implacable, moral ecology must somehow compensate. That’s what happened in southern Arizona.

  It was no accident that Tucson, a small borderland city surrounded by desert, became the sanctuary movement’s main point of origin and focus. The movement itself has been, in great degree, and from the start, an answer to imperatives of landscape.

  • • •

  Of the four ecologically distinct deserts covering portions of North America—the Mohave, the Sonoran, the Great Basin, and the Chihuahuan—the Sonoran Desert is the most deceptive. It does not appear bleak. It is far from empty of life. Many sensible witnesses consider it gorgeously scenic. Despite being prodigiously dry (less than two inches of rain yearly, in some parts) and prodigiously hot (often around 120 degrees F.), it supports more different species of plants and animals than any other American desert. Most famously recognizable of those species is the giant columnar cactus, the saguaro, representing the Sonoran Desert like a trademark. Also among its natives are the Gila monster, the tarantula, an awesome profusion of black widow spiders, six species of rattlesnake, several dozen species of scorpion, and a healthy population of vultures who police up after fatalities. The Sonoran is a large desert, stretching over more than 100,000 square miles, from below Guaymas on the west coast of Mexico up to Needles, California, and from east of Tucson to the far side of the Baja peninsula. It embraces a long section of the international border. The terrain is mountainous. There are broad sandy riverbeds, usually dry, and saline basins. This is a place of extremity and denial, drought and flash floods, heat at midday that can shatter a rock, frigid nights. The sunsets, silhouetting the raw peaks and the gentler hills stubbled with saguaros, may be as majestic as any in the world. In spring the desert blooms luxuriantly, flowers and green foliage bursting out from among thorns. But springtime is brief. Later, around the middle of summer, come a succession of restorative thunderstorms, brought up from the Gulf of Mexico by the monsoon. In between, for a span of months, the Sonoran is a searing and inhospitable wilderness. That’s what it was when a group of thirty Salvadoran travelers tried to cross, back in early July of 1980.

  For two days the story made the front page in The New York Times. A headline read: “13 Aliens, Cast Off by Smugglers, Die in a Baking Desert in Arizona.”

  The survivors, themselves very near death, had been rescued by the Border Patrol. Along a drywash not far from a paved road, and about twenty miles north of the Mexican border town of Sonoyta, searchers found a trail of discarded clothing, half-naked corpses, and delirious, heat-sick people, some of whom had smeared their faces with toothpaste or makeup as a last desperate measure against the sun. There were few canteens amid the debris—not even empty ones. Evidently it had been a party of middle-class urban Salvadorans, women in high-heeled shoes, men carrying suitcases, misguided and drastically unprepared for an arduous desert trek. They had left El Salvador in the care of a coyote (a mercenary smuggler of humans) and made the long trip across Mexico by bus; just south of the U.S. border, on a bleak stretch of desert beyond the last road, they were told to start walking. Among all the other mistakes, they had failed to carry enough water. Eventually, so the Times reported, they had been reduced to drinking cologne, after-shave lotion, and their own urine. By one account they had each paid the coyote $1,200 (or at least a life’s savings, whatever it came to) for the privilege of being taken north. The survivors were brought to Tucson, where several churches were asked to help them with housing and food.

  One of those churches was Southside Presbyterian, a small congregation in the barrio. Southside Church is an aberration, conforming badly to the archetype of comfortable middle-class Presbyterianism; it is based in a little adobe building with a chain-pull bell and one saguaro out front, a modest place that fills up on Sunday mornings with people of many complexions, people in shirt sleeves and with work-calloused hands, and then resounds blessedly with jivey gospel music. It is presided over by Reverend John Fife, another aberration, a tall Anglo favoring denims and cowboy boots and a silver Papago belt buckle when not in his vestments, who came out to the desert from a meanstreets urban ministry in Ohio, never dreaming he would achieve fame as a convicted felon. Back in 1980 he was immersed in concerns of his own, mainly related to pastorhood of a poor congregation of Hispanics and blacks and Anglos and Indians, and he could not then—Fife says now—have placed El Salvador on a map. The episode of the desert deaths changed everything.

  “That engaged my attention,” he has said. Fife had already been aware that some Central Americans were arriving covertly in Arizona, but until this point he had vaguely assumed that they were driven only by the same restless poverty that sent Mexicans north. He had thought of those Central Americans in the same way that the State Department today still wants to imagine them—as “economic migrants,” scrambling northward to the land of opportunity. As Fife talked with the desert survivors, though, that impression changed drastically. He was prepared to hear tales of the hard life in a peasant village, the backbreaking labor for little money, the struggle to feed children. “But these folk from Salvador were telling a different set of stories. They were talking about death squads, and about torture, and about the kind of terrorism and violence that we now know about.”

  Do we all now know? Or does anyone find Reverend Fife’s reference opaque? Is it possible, in 1986, to have remained innocent of awareness of los escuadrones de la muerte and the other aspects of terror and violence in El Salvador and Guatemala?

  True enough, the horrific reports that have been filtering out of those two countries for almost ten years now—the stories about kidnapping, torture, mutilation, and murder, practiced against innocent citizens by paramilitary death squads and the uniformed military—are affronts to the mind, gobbets of reality that strike upon any reasonably sensitive consciousness like spattered blood and gore. Fathers who disappear late at night in the custody of strange men and turn up, decapitated, on body dumps; adolescents tortured and executed
for suspicion of subversive inclination; young children killed to eliminate witnesses—the accounts are reliable, shocking, then numbing, and worst of all, repetitious. They come firsthand from real people, survivors, who have themselves escaped north. Pedro, formerly a photographer for a private human-rights group in El Salvador, who tells of documenting on film the sight of a pregnant woman whose abdomen had been cut open, the fetus removed, and her husband’s head set in its place. Ramón, whose three daughters were raped by soldiers, before his eyes, and then the two oldest taken away to be killed. Brenda, a paramedic who saw one of her co-workers dragged off to National Guard headquarters, there to be gangraped and tortured and then killed with a machine gun inserted in her rectum. Pedro, Ramón, and Brenda are not fictionalized constructs; they are not composites. They are actual individuals, beneficiaries of sanctuary in the U.S. and typical of those “economic migrants” who are being feloniously shielded and abetted. Many more voices offer the same sort of testimony, forcing upon us glimpses of a deep evil vein in the human character that is scary to contemplate and almost impossible to comprehend. Even the next of kin, the widows and the brotherless sisters, the parents who have lost two or three children, the grandmothers who have outlived their whole family, even these witnesses are weary of telling their stories, weary of the pain of remembering.

  But the stories do nevertheless need to be told, and told again, and remembered.

  • • •

  John Fife heard such stories, from those desert survivors back in 1980, and he was moved to act. Others in Tucson began to act too. At first their efforts were modest and quiet: providing food and shelter to those refugees who managed to reach Tucson, helping them pass northward to other cities along a sort of underground railroad, raising money to bond out those who had been caught by the INS, assisting with asylum applications, conducting a weekly prayer vigil. The prayer vigil was held each Thursday at rush hour outside the Federal Building—partly as a protest against the wholesale rejection of asylum petitions from Salvadorans and Guatemalans and, worse, the forcible deportations. Deportation was especially terrifying to anyone who had already fled the death squads. The very act of having gone north could be counted a sign of subversive inclination, or at least of disloyalty, and any deportee arriving back at the San Salvador airport was marked and vulnerable. While the asylum-application process was being pursued almost futilely in Tucson and elsewhere in the U.S., some of the deportees (Santana Chirino Amaya, Walter Garcia Ortiz, and others) had shown up, dead and mangled, on the body dumps. So Reverend Fife and his religious colleagues decided that more drastic action was required.

  They had already tried legal-defense efforts. They had tried underground smuggling. But these meliorist tactics could help only a small fraction of the refugees who were arriving, and had no impact on U.S. asylum policy. Terrified people were still being deported by the dozens and hundreds. The American populace, meanwhile, was almost totally oblivious to the whole situation. So Fife and his colleagues decided that they would need to do something dramatic, resonant, and public. They hit on the idea of sanctuary.

  Within Judeo-Christian tradition the general concept of sanctuary dates back at least to that record of a tribe of desert-dwelling nomads, the book of Exodus. It came forward through Roman and English law and eventually turned up, slightly transmogrified, in the form of the original underground railroad, helping fugitive slaves escape northward from Dixie. When the U.S. Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, making it criminal to shield or abet runaway blacks, many churches in the North played a role in the nexus of humanitarian defiance. As reinvented in latter-day Tucson, the notion of sanctuary differs from that American precedent chiefly in being more determinedly public. Reverend Fife and his congregation not only decided to harbor Central American refugees; they decided to do it openly.

  On March 24, 1982, John Fife announced at a press conference that Southside Presbyterian Church (joined by a handful of congregations in other cities) would henceforth be providing sanctuary to certain undocumented Central American aliens. They were pledging themselves to support and defend the refugees, and daring the Justice Department to make arrests.

  Most of America remained oblivious to these events in Tucson, but the Justice Department did respond. Within less than three years Reverend Fife and a dozen co-workers had been indicted. During the same course of time, though, that early commitment by Southside Presbyterian Church had dovetailed with similar actions by other American congregations and grown into a national movement, now including those hundreds of churches and synagogues and Quaker meetings, all united in a new nexus of humanitarian defiance.

  Of course none of this—not the indictments, not the growth of the movement, not even the prolonged need for such a movement—had been foreseeable in 1980. Back then, during the year that followed the desert deaths and on into summer and autumn of 1981, it was all just an extemporized effort, informal and local, conducted by a few well-meaning church folk and lawyers. But the larger need was already apparent then, as deportations continued, and as more and more refugees arrived in Tucson. Many of these were brought up through the desert by a man named Jim Corbett.

  • • •

  Jim Corbett would later be a co-defendant with John Fife in the Tucson trial. He was acquitted, thanks to an almost accidental absence of evidence against him. Because Corbett performed his own role rather solitarily, the prosecution’s star witness (a middle-aged Mexican named Jesus Cruz, who had infiltrated the movement and worn a tape recorder to sanctuary meetings) had little to say about him. Corbett for his own part has talked openly about smuggling refugees but, like Fife and the other defendants, maintains that his acts are in compliance with U.S. law.

  Jim Corbett is an arthritic Quaker with a degree in philosophy from Harvard and the backcountry stamina of a red wolf. Having ranched cattle for years in southern Arizona, he knows the Sonoran Desert like a cab driver knows the back roads to the airport. Beginning in 1981 and continuing until his face became infamous to the INS, Corbett’s chosen role was to guide refugees across the border. Sometimes he cadged identity cards and took the people through a port of entry, the route that was precarious but physically undemanding. More often, if the particular individuals seemed hardy, they walked the desert. Corbett was familiar with the terrain and capable of using it to advantage, traveling the washes under cover of vegetation, dodging the Border Patrol planes and eluding the agents in cruisers and on horseback, laying up at night without a fire, crossing the fence, following the natural warps of the land, then getting up to a road and out of the area inconspicuously. By one estimate, he has personally brought in seven hundred souls.

  Like Reverend Fife, but in very different ways, Jim Corbett is an anomaly. He is firmly (if politely) antiliturgical, a real Quaker to his soul, suspicious of organized churches and certainly not born to found a popular religious movement. He is also an intellectual, a complex thinker and a prolific writer, who has chosen to avoid academia while spending much of his life at the hard physical labor of ranching cattle and sheep. For five years he has been one of the most visible exemplars of the sanctuary movement, making a huge contribution directly and exerting a farflung influence, yet the path that brought him to this work has been very peculiarly his own. Most other representatives of the movement trace their concept of sanctuary to a European historical basis in Roman law, medieval canon law, and English common law, and to a theological basis in Exodus, Numbers, and Isaiah. Jim Corbett is aware of those sources but he talks more personally about Buddhist ideas of stillness, the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, the anthropology of pastoral nomads in Tibet, and the practical details of goat husbandry. Most other representatives of the movement—the nuns and ministers and priests and rabbis who are now playing conspicuous roles—have come out of clerical backgrounds, especially from missionary orders and social-action ministries. Jim Corbett has come, literally, out of the desert.

  For almost two decades he has had a special intere
st in the spiritual uses of wilderness. The Buddhist and Hindu and Taoist traditions all include a theme, Corbett says, of the person who goes off alone into wilderness (often a desert wilderness) for some stretch of time, to strip away those aspects of misguided worldly concern that Corbett calls “the social busyness.” The Hebrews’ Sinai sojourn as described in Exodus served a similar purpose, he says, though in that case it was not a lone individual but a whole community seeking purgation. During the early 1970s Corbett began to experiment with the same kind of sojourn himself. He was teaching ecology and anthropology to students from a Quaker school, and at the end of each semester he would lead those teenagers out for a two-week stay in the desert. This was not “survivalist training,” he stresses. He hoped these students would learn how to be at home in the desert, not how to conquer it; and he hoped that, in the process, they might discover the spiritual value of quietude.