The Flight of the Iguana

by David Quammen

  But sanctuary, in the sense of these declarations, is not just a church building, not just a place; it is not even mainly a place. What the declaration of sanctuary really represents is a pledge of a community of support: shelter, food, medical care, if possible a job, concealment, legal help, and, as the last resort, a readiness on the part of many of these churchgoing Americans to accept a jail sentence for their trouble. The actual church or synagogue is for the most part just a symbol of that pledge.

  In the three years since Jim Corbett began smuggling refugees, by Corbett’s own estimate, roughly a thousand Central Americans have come across the Arizona border and passed through Tucson, to be relayed surreptitiously onward to their host congregations in Kansas or Vermont or wherever. Meanwhile, other conscience-driven smugglers have been assisting other crossings into California, New Mexico, and Texas. From the city of first refuge, a car relay for one typical family to their ultimate destination might involve two hundred U.S. citizens, members of that underground network of concerned citizens that Corbett had hoped for early on. A young mother with kids might drive the refugees for a one-day stretch in her own car. An elderly Quaker couple might give them lodging in a guest room that night. Next day, a nun might drive another leg of the trip in a minibus registered to the bishop. Lodging that night at, say, the home of a female psychology professor who is active in her synagogue. Next day, a smiling long-haired young man with a camper-back pickup truck, or a balding retiree in a porkpie hat driving a Chevy wagon, or maybe a Unitarian matron with a Volvo. That night, the spare room of an affluent yuppie couple or a cot in the church basement at a Lutheran congregation. And so on, to the final sanctuary. Each of those helping acts have been, by the government’s view, felonious.

  Eliott Abrams is the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs,3 head of that branch which effectively determines who is or is not accepted as a refugee. Abrams says: “My sense is that from the Caribbean and Central America, the majority of people emigrating to the United States are not refugees. They are people seeking to build a better life for themselves by finding better employment.” Abrams admits having heard reports of torture, murder, and mutilation committed against Salvadorans deported back from the U.S. (and calls those reports, dismissively, “horror stories”), but he adds that “the fact remains that not everybody in E1 Salvador has the right to live in America [merely] because that [E1 Salvador] is not a nice country. It is not a nice country right now. It is one of a hundred not-nice countries—and not everybody has the right to live here.”

  Then again, we are a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants, with an ideal of welcoming the beleaguered refugee. Certain words have been carved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, after all. But there are ambiguities of the optical sort: One person’s political refugee is another’s brown wetback.

  A rabbi in Tucson says: “My own father was an illegal alien. A stowaway. Consequently I have strong feelings on the subject. I believe in the Biblical principle Thou shalt not oppress a stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. It’s the highest expression of Judaism to help people who are legitimately refugees. And the government claim that these people are ‘economic migrants’ is hogwash.”

  • • •

  At a point heartbreakingly near what should be the end of their crossing, the hikers stumble into a serious problem.

  They are within two hundred yards of the junction where this wash pays out into another wide canyon, a remote but accessible bit of country along which runs a gravel road. At that junction they are supposed to meet their American-side pickup. But Jeff has walked ahead down the wash to see whether the way is clear, and he returns with bad news: Between here and the junction, parked, temporarily abandoned, is a Jeep. It may or may not be the Border Patrol.

  Helen leads the group to a hiding place just up the west hillside, beneath a mesquite thicket, where they will be invisible both from the wash bed and from the high open ridges above. Jeff goes back down toward the Jeep, nosing his way tentatively in search of a little more information. If it is a Border Patrol vehicle, the hikers are already in trouble and might need to make a desperate retreat up the wash. If it belongs to picnickers or rock hounds or local cowboys, which is more likely, they need only wait and be very careful.

  For an hour, huddled in the brush, they wait. They share water and oranges and a bag of bologna sandwiches. They also talk. The journalist wants to know more about this family—about why specifically they left E1 Salvador.

  The wife—call her Lupe—has been a nurse for twelve years. She worked at a children’s hospital in the capital city, San Salvador. Because of the war and the murders, thousands of newly orphaned children are living street lives in San Salvador, she says. Sick and starving children. Even in the hospital, she saw many of them die for lack of medicine.

  Her husband—call him Roberto—is a poet of some reputation. His poems have been published in Brazil and Peru, and a book of them will appear soon from a press in Belgium. Yes, he says, his poetry tends to be political. This was part of the reason for his troubles.

  Roberto was also a high school teacher in San Salvador. Literature and history were his subjects. In June of 1983, apparently because he was already suspected for his ideas, men from the National Guard came to search his house. They found certain books (books any teacher of history and literature might own, says Roberto: one novel by a Cuban author, a volume entitled The Fight of the Campesinos, others by the Brazilian author Paolo Freire) that were considered “subversive.” Roberto was taken away.

  For a week, says Roberto, he was held in solitary confinement, kept blindfolded, repeatedly beaten and interrogated. “What group are you in?” the Guardia demanded. “Who are your comrades?” No group, Roberto told them. No comrades. He was simply a schoolteacher.

  After that week he was transferred to Mariona Prison (the main men’s prison in E1 Salvador) and evidently forgotten about by his captors. He remained in Mariona, in what was called “the political section,” for seven months. He talked with many of the other prisoners. Professors, arrested for their “subversive” ideas. Doctors, arrested for helping the poor. Also a large number of illiterate campesinos. Roberto began teaching some of these campesinos to read.

  Meanwhile Lupe, who knew that Roberto was still alive and had even been allowed to visit him, got legal help. Roberto had never been charged with a crime. His case went to the Salvadoran Supreme Court, says Roberto, and in January the judges ordered his release. But that court decision did not mean he was safe—rather the contrary. “After release, often,” says Roberto, “is when the death squads come.”

  Taking the son, he left immediately for Mexico City. Lupe and their daughter followed as soon as Roberto had found a safe haven there. The haven was only a temporary one, because Mexico deports Salvadorans even more stringently (if that’s possible) than does the United States. It was in Mexico City, late this spring, that the family made contact with a branch of the sanctuary movement.

  Most of this information passes through Helen, as translator, because the journalist is ignorant of Spanish.

  Jeff doesn’t reappear. As the waiting drags on, they all grow gradually quieter. Midday in early summer in the Sonoran Desert, and the heat is audible in the thin shrill buzz of cicadas. Finally the people beneath the bush are limiting themselves to an infrequent, elliptical whisper. Otherwise they listen.

  The two children are silent. Their eyes are wide.

  • • •

  Then the arrests began.

  On February 17, 1984, a car was stopped by the Border Patrol just north of McAllen, Texas, a border town in the lower Rio Grande valley. The car was registered to the Catholic diocese of Brownsville, which also sponsors an institution called Casa Oscar Romero (after the murdered archbishop) that provides emergency shelter and other assistance to Central American refugees. Inside the car were a nun, another woman named Stacey Merkt, a reporter, an
d three undocumented Salvadorans. Four weeks later a federal grand jury issued indictments against the nun and Stacey Merkt. They were charged with transporting and conspiracy to transport illegal aliens.

  On March 7 another car was stopped, on a mountain road east of Nogales, Arizona. The Border Patrol detained temporarily, then released, a pair of Tucson residents named Phil Conger and Katherine Flaherty. The four undocumented Salvadorans who had been with them were held, charged with entry into the U.S. without inspection, and eventually bonded out. Phil Conger is an employee of the Tucson Ecumenical Council (a federation of local churches), whose task force on Central America he directs. He is fluent in Spanish and has been active in what church people call “the refugee ministry” for three years. He works out of a tiny cluttered office across the hall from John Fife’s tiny cluttered office at the rear of Southside Presbyterian Church.

  In Tucson—with a community of sanctuary activists much larger and more visible than the one in the Rio Grande valley—the U.S. Attorney’s Office dropped charges against the Salvadorans (though deportation proceedings were still in motion) and filed none against Flaherty, who had only been a passenger in the car. Phil Conger on the other hand had been driving; also, he was known to be a principal figure in the local efforts to house and feed Central Americans. Still, it can be assumed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not approach this prosecution blithely. There would be media attention, an airing of the broader issues, political fallout. It was “just a routine smuggling case,” according to Don Reno, the special assistant U.S. Attorney in Phoenix who handled the Conger case. According to scuttlebutt, though, a deal was offered. Federal officials proposed not to prosecute Conger—says a source who asks not to be identified—if he would promise to cease assisting illegal aliens.

  Conger refused to make any such promise. On May 17 he was indicted on four counts of transporting.

  Meanwhile, back in Texas, Stacey Merkt pleaded innocent to transporting illegal aliens (though she made no denial of transporting refugees) and was convicted. The nun pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the prosecution; she was given a year’s probation. And then another Texas man—Jack Elder, who is Conger’s equivalent at the Casa Oscar Romero—was indicted too.

  Unlike Conger, unlike Stacey Merkt, unlike anyone else so far, Jack Elder was not apprehended with undocumented aliens in a routine stop at a Border Patrol checkpoint. He was accused before a grand jury first, on the basis of testimonial evidence; then federal officers came onto church property and arrested him.

  Some people suspect that this is the start of a general and coordinated roll-up4 of the sanctuary movement by the Justice Department. Others believe that the government is still groping its way warily, reactively. No one wants to go to prison. But, says Jim Corbett, “If the government gets tough, they’re going to have a lot of people under arrest—and I suppose, ultimately, in jail. But I think that, in terms of what we’re doing, it’s going to go on and grow. Because the need is there.”

  • • •

  At last Jeff comes back. He brings the unsettling news that two cowboys, apparently the same men who parked the Jeep, are at this moment just a hundred yards above on the west hillside, stringing fence. They seem to be working their way down, inadvertently, toward the hiding place; and in the meantime they command an open view of that last crucial stretch of the wash. Since there is every reason to fear that a pair of local cowboys would report any border crossers to the Border Patrol, it is time to move again. Quickly and quietly and invisibly. Staying hidden behind foliage and boulders, all seven people scutter back upstream along the wash.

  Rounding two or three bends, past the Gila monster’s cranny, they retrace their route back toward the border fence, to a point where the cowboys are safely eclipsed. The pace is faster this time, a little panicky, and when they pause for rest the canteen water begins to seem finite. But at least the cowboys showed no sign of having noticed. Now the problem is: How else to get out?

  Jeff and Helen confer. The gravel road on the American side is just not very far away. But there is no other branch to this wash, no other shielded path between here and there.

  So they all leave the wash, scaling the east shoulder on a steep traverse across desert scree that crumbles and slides beneath each footstep. They come up out of the cover of the cottonwoods, slowly ascending, exposing themselves on a bare hillside upholstered only in shin-daggers and prickly pear and the wiry, frazzled tufts of a few ocotillo. Under this midday heat, it would be a hard climb for anyone. Lupe pulls herself along haltingly, looking unwell, lagging behind the others. The boy falls again and comes up with a palm full of cactus spines, which he dolefully but mutely presents to his mother for plucking. Jeff picks an unpromising line, hikes a long way up and ahead until he finds himself again within view of the cowboys, then doubles back to rejoin the group and follow a still more roundabout traverse. Halfway up the hill, Helen stops. She is drastically red in the face. The journalist is alarmed but it’s just hypoglycemia, says Helen, a chronic thing for her; and in a few minutes she is ready to go on. The canteens are passed around after every hundred steps.

  They reach the ridge top. Under a last solitary mesquite (by now it’s a matter of shade, not concealment), they all rest again. The water is gone. At this point they can see—and be seen from—miles away. Nothing to be done about that. Helen and Jeff are quite deliberate about stretching out this final rest. No sense in stumbling on hastily. Nevertheless, Roberto is restless and anxious; so is the journalist.

  They cross the ridge top. Steering their downward traverse away from a ranch building visible to the east, they come slowly and very gratefully down to a stream running clear water beside a gravel road.

  Within a few minutes the Salvadoran family is hidden among a crowd of respectable Anglo faces, in two separate vehicles, everyone headed toward Tucson.

  • • •

  To an outsider viewing the sanctuary movement with even a morsel of dispassion, three points stand out.

  First, this is not a political phenomenon, most essentially, but a religious one. That is fact, not rhetoric. Religious people are performing these acts—smuggling and harboring refugees, transporting them across America, facing jeopardy of federal indictment—for religious reasons. The proportion of secular humanists, agnostic liberals, political radicals of the Old or New Left variety is startlingly low. What you find are nuns, priests, ministers, devout Quakers, rabbis, serious Unitarians, church assistants, church volunteers, and all other sorts of churchly people, most of whom sound quite convincing when they explain that abandoning the refugees would be equivalent to abandoning their own faith.

  A second point: Notwithstanding the prominence of Fife and Corbett and Conger, this movement is dominantly populated by women. Stacey Merkt has been only the most heroically visible of many. Other unknown but resolute souls like Helen seem to account for an overwhelming female majority among those doing the smuggling, transporting, harboring. Ironically, the fact that males have played a disproportionately large role as the conspicuous spokesmen probably reflects less the real dynamics of this movement than the traditional balance of gender and power within organized Christianity and Judaism, carried over as an artifact into sanctuary.

  The third intriguing point is that this movement—like so many other religious upheavals throughout history—came out of the desert.

  Tucson and Nogales. Calexico and El Centro in California. San Benito and McAllen in Texas. The first battles were fought, the first commitments were made, the first wave of prosecutions have been coped with in these hot, red-rock places. One reason for that geographical pattern is obvious: To Central Americans arriving in dusty buses and on the tailgates of trucks, those desert borderlands are the doorway to America. But another factor, equally crucial, is not so obvious.

  The Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, the Chihuahuan Desert of south Texas, are lands of extremity and denial. Too hot, too rugged, not enough rain, not enough fuel, no
t enough food. When rain does come, there is no carpet of thick vegetation to hold back the flood. Erosion is unmitigated. The earth itself constantly cracks, falls, washes and blows away. Competition for resources is grim. Death is always a vivid possibility. Like Heloderma suspectum, most of the animals and even the plants carry weaponry. The environment offers no respite, no margin of error. The physical ecology is merciless. The moral ecology must therefore compensate, or a species so ill adapted as humanity couldn’t survive.

  Desert tribes like the Papago understand that. Desert transplants like Jim Corbett and John Fife have absorbed the same truth.

  • • •

  After homemade tamales and grape Kool-Aid at another safe house, now on the Arizona side, the border party continues driving. An elaborate set of procedures (involving a prearranged route and clockwork communications by telephone) serve to evade the Border Patrol cruisers and checkpoints. The journalist has not yet relaxed. He carries notes, he is implicated, and, not being so morally pellucid as the others, he has no desire to face the test of a subpoena.

  If Helen can masquerade as a bird-watcher, then our journalist would have anyone understand that he is just along for the reptiles.

  Luck is good, though. Today there are no arrests.

  The two vehicles reach Tucson just as an operatic reddish-orange sunset is silhouetting the hills west of town. Everyone gapes and coos. But to a family of foot-weary Salvadorans, and likewise to their Anglo friends, this panorama of ragged ridges and playas and back-lit saguaros that makes southern Arizona gorgeous, and terrible, is not merely scenery. It is landscape, the theater of mortality.

  DRINKING THE DESERT JUICES

  Diet and Survival in the Land of the Papago

  And behold, in those days the children of Israel had taken their journey into the desert, and they were hungry and they were thirsty and they were sorely vexed, and so they murmured against Moses, saying, What is this nonsense? Moses, we are fixing to die out here and shrivel away like dried chilies if you don’t do something, they said. So Moses cried unto the Lord and the Lord showed him a sweet spring where it flowed out of the rock. Fine, but what about some food? said the children of Israel. So the Lord sent overnight a great host of scale insects of the species Trabutina mannipara and Najacoccus serpentinus, this is true fact, and these insects fed upon the desert tamarisk bushes and then they shat upon the ground; a fine white layer of nutritious excrement, tiny granules that lay over the ground like hoar frost, did they shit. And when the children of Israel saw this stuff, they called it manna, and they did nourish themselves upon it for forty years. But they had nothing on the Papago tribe of southwestern Arizona, who have themselves known the secret of desert provenance for centuries.