The majority of Central American refugees and immigrants to the United States come from just three countries: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which are the same three countries the United States intervened in during, among other decades, the 1980s, on the sides of military governments and paramilitary death squads that killed tens of thousands — and in the case of Guatemala, hundreds of thousands — of mostly Indigenous people. In El Salvador, many soldiers responsible for carrying out the notorious 1981 El Mozote massacre, in which nearly a thousand unarmed villagers were killed, were elite U.S.-trained forces. Between 1980 and ’92, the U.S. sent over $4 billion in economic and military aid to El Salvador’s government — nearly $1 million a day.
Well, today, we follow the story of one man and his family, and why he says the story of El Salvador is the story of the United States. Roberto Lovato is an award-winning journalist. He’s just published his memoir called Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. He’s joining us now from San Francisco, where he was born.
Roberto, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Congratulations on this unforgettable memoir. But let’s start with the title, why you call it Unforgetting.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Before anything, Amy, thank you, as always. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be with Juan and you and the crew once again on this joyous occasion for me, that I’ve worn a red shirt for you that’s in celebration and in solidarity. And I was going to have a gangster lean when you played that song that I used to play, like, in lowriders and stuff. And so…
But the term “unforgetting” comes from the Greeks. The Greeks believed that when you went into the underworld, the dead — when the dead went into the underworld, they had to cross the Lethe river, which was the river of forgetting, before going to either Elysium or Hades. And so, as I was trying to pick out a title for this book, I realized that the journey that I had taken to all these different underworlds for the book, whether it was gang underworlds, the underworld of the FMLN guerrillas, the underworld of my personal family history, that was unknown to me in many ways, or my own psychology, and the underworld of migrants, who have to kind of occupy an underworld existence in many ways — I just thought, “Wow! What a perfect way to kind of bring up and excavate the truths that get hidden,” because in Greek — the ancient Greeks believed that “unforgetting” was also the term for truth, aletheia, which means not Lethe river, unforgetting. And so I am unforgetting a history of not just El Salvador, but of the United States and of myself. And, you know, my book is kind of a coming out for me personally, and I’ll explain that as we go.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Roberto, you begin the book talking about a tour you were giving in 1992 in Los Angeles at the time you were working with the immigrant rights group CARECEN in Los Angeles. And you’re touring around a foundation program officer, one of these people who decides whether to give money to worthy organizations. And you had very mixed feelings taking him around the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles. There’s a sudden shootout at one point. Could you talk about that whole part of your work with CARECEN? Also, what lessons might be drawn for a lot of activists today, Black Lives Matter activists and prison reform activists, who are suddenly being courted by foundations who suddenly have discovered that they haven’t been properly funding antiracism programs around the country?
ROBERTO LOVATO: That’s a great question, Juan. Yeah, the opening, the introduction of the book, is 1992, right after the L.A. riots had hit. We had foundations and corporations come in, along with scholars, and it was just people interested in post-riot L.A. And we were in MacArthur Park touring, like we did. I felt like — and I say at one point I felt like, you know, I was getting tired of being like Virgil to these Dantes, you know, these aspiring Dantes wanting to see the underworld. And so, I’m showing this guy, Leland, MacArthur Park, when I’m approached by the first MS-13 member I ever met, this kid named José. And, you know, we were — and I could tell that Leland was scared out of his wits, like he was in a lion’s den or something, and he was looking to me for security.
And so, I open it that way because it shows kind of the way that the whole issue of youth and urban youth and gangs, even foundations and corporations will kind of shy away from, as do legislators, including legislators of color here in California, where the gangs were born, in fact, where MS-13 and 18th Street were born. And then, after they were born, they kind of adopted the structures of like the Mexican Mafia. And so, I’m there when this is starting to escalate and get more violent.
And then, Attorney General William Barr, again, and at the avatar, from the Bush administration, who’s now in the Trump administration, deployed all these FBI resources to L.A. and other cities to start the gang war, which, you know, we see the products as we speak, right? And so, then he also introduced the INS to then join the LAPD and law enforcement to deport the “problem,” the gang structures, to El Salvador.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You then go on in the book, in the subsequent chapter, to talk about your experience visiting immigrant families in detention in Karnes, Texas. And could you talk about that and also this whole effort of the federal government to put these detention centers in the most out-of-the-way places, so that even journalists have trouble getting to them?
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, this is an example of those underworlds I’m trying to get at. Like, a lot of people don’t realize that those immigrant prisons — I refuse to call them “detention centers.” It’s a travesty to call them that. And, all my fellow journalists, it’s a travesty. You know, they put these prisons down in southern Texas precisely because immigrant rights groups won’t go down there. It becomes harder for them to go down there. And it becomes harder for journalists, say, in San Antonio, to drive all these miles down south to visit these places. And there are actually ICE memos.
And so, my journey, my own journey, begins when I meet a child and a mother who are plotting, along with other immigrant women and children and youth, to stage a protest against the awful conditions, that moved some, for example, to — mothers to slit their wrists, or some children to try to hang themselves. And so, I mean, I was reluctant, because my friends Ursula and Felipe invited me to go to this prison, and I was kind of reluctant because I had this whole story from the war and other trauma I didn’t even know that I had kind of stirring up in me, and I knew I would eventually have to tell my story. And basically, my bubble burst when a child tells me this really horrific story of what he saw in El Salvador. And at that moment, I realized, “You know what? It’s time to tell my story. It’s time to come out,” so to speak. And I do. I come out about things that I had known and things that I would learn and things that I needed to tell about myself, including my participation in the revolutionary process in El Salvador.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that, Roberto? Can you talk about your involvement with the FMLN? You’re a well-known journalist in the United States. Talk about who the FMLN were. Of course, now they’re part of the regular political process and a party in El Salvador today. But what decisions you made early on?
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, Amy, you know, you, as a journalist, and Juan know very well that I wouldn’t get Pulitzer grants if I said, “Hey, I was an urban commando with the FMLN.” You know, that’s just not how it works. You don’t — what you have in journalism, and in literature, I would argue, are not representative of the full spectrum of political, ideological, even racial, if you look at like Latinos and — not even, Latinos aren’t a race, but all the different subracial groups of Latinos are like less — occupy like 1% of U.S. literature.
So, I made a decision, after doing work with refugee communities in the war zones and working with refugees here in San Francisco with CARECEN, Comite de Refugiados Centroamericanos and other groups, like CISPES, etc., here to do solidarity and sanctuary work. I was becoming more conscious. I fell in love. There’s a love story in my book, which is part of the point, right? Because all you hear is, like, terror is the given of the place, like Joan Didion. And I’m like, “Actually, no, I grew up Salvadoran. Love is the given of the place, as well.”
And so, I’m in Chalatenango, El Salvador, one of the most difficult places I’ve ever seen in my life, in terms of war. And I saw really terrible things, including things done to children. And I eventually say it’s not enough for me to just do kind of like what Juan’s talking about, like nonprofit work and having all this language and getting all this funding, like people do here and in other parts of the world to be officially representing communities for very high salaries. I wasn’t really feeling that, so I decided I needed to do something else.
And I had some friends that introduced me to people in the FMLN, and they thought I could be useful working with urban commandos in logistics and things. And so, at that moment when I see this home that was bombed with all these children is the moment I stop being “American.” I stop. You can go and look at most of my journalism. I avoid using the word “American,” since 1991, because of I didn’t want anything to do with that. And so, I became an Américan, with an accent on the E, and a citizen of the United States of América, which is kind of the revolutionary imaginary taking hold of me to want a better place.
AMY GOODMAN: And the FMLN, again, for people to understand, was the rebel fighting force at a time when the U.S. was pouring millions into the military regime and the paramilitaries responsible for everything from the killing of the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, to the El Mozote massacre of 1981?
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yes, yes. The FMLN was organized against the fascist military dictatorship backed by the U.S. government, beginning with the Carter administration. And, you know, if you’re an historian like my friend Joaquín Chávez, whose excellent book Poets and Prophets of the [Resistance] is a must-read, you know, you’ll see that the U.S. involvement dates decades back. They started supporting El Salvador’s military dictatorship starting in around 1934, when they finally recognized Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who perpetrated La Matanza of 1932, which some historians will tell you is one of the most violent episodes in not just Latin American history, but in world history, in terms of the numbers of people killed per day, per week, in a concentrated place.
And so, the FMLN was — you know, there were groups in the FMLN founded by poets. This was one of the things that attracted me to it, was the nondistinction between the poetic and the political, between the revolutionary and daily life, between love and labor. And so, the FMLN was, according to the CIA, one of the most effective political, military and social movements in Latin America in the 20th century, where, for example, you could read NACLA and see that one of every three Salvadorans was organized against the state in the 1980s, according to the Universidad Centroamericana. And, you know, I mean, it taught me what it means to be a poet warrior.
It’s something that I think we need right now, which is part of the reason I wrote the book, was to share — you know, there’s all this dark, heavy stuff, but I think you’ll find there’s a lot of love, tenderness and hope in the book, because that’s the only way we got through as Salvadorans. And I think, in all my experience around the world, in a most intimate way, I’ve never seen a people with such astonishing resilience as Salvadoreños. And —
AMY GOODMAN: Roberto, we have to break, but we’re going to come back and also want to talk about your fraught relationship with your father, and this revelation in your book that he was a young witness to La Matanza of 1932, the peasant uprising in the government massacre, killings of thousands and thousands of Salvadorans. Roberto Lovato is the award-winning journalist. His memoir is just out. It’s called Unforgetting. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Días y Flores” by Silvio Rodríguez. Our guest today is Roberto Lovato, the award-winning journalist, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Roberto, before break, you were talking about, mentioning La Matanza in 1932. A lot of people don’t realize that the FMLN of the ’70s and ’80s took its name, of Farabundo Martí, Agustín Farabundo Martí, who was one of the organizers of the peasant uprising of 1932 and was also one of the founders of the Central American Communist Party. Could you talk about the links between what happened in 1932, in your understanding of it, as well as the development of the FMLN?
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah. I mean, in my view and in the view of historians like Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Erik Ching and Greg Gould, you know, it really — the FMLN probably should have been named the Feliciano Ama — Frente Feliciano Ama para la Liberación Nacional, because it was primarily an Indigenous uprising, right? Indigenous peoples started seeing their kids, the little — the soft part of their heads started sinking in, and watching their kids die. And they rebelled. And there was also communists organizing with them. But really, the core groups of it and the local leadership was Indigenous.
And so, that, you know — and the way history works, oftentimes we erase Indigenous agency. And so, I felt it important to talk about how — you know, what historians have taught us about La Matanza, that people rose up trying to overthrow the government in what was the first communist insurrection. There were communists involved, including Farabundo Martí. And a man named El General, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, saw an opportunity not just to take power, because he was the vice president, but also then perpetrate what scholars at Oxford have told me is one of the single most violent episodes in world history, as far as the number of people killed per day in a concentrated space and per week in a concentrated space. And so, you know, there’s a — the records of La Matanza were buried, burned, destroyed, by and large. There’s some in — some historians in El Salvador are starting to reconstitute them and rebuild the memory and unforget, right? Because, you know, states are nothing if not manufacturers of — mass manufacturers of amnesia.
And so, you know, from that point on, you get military dictatorship, one of the longest-standing military dictatorships in the Americas. But you also get one of the most consistent left oppositions, and effective left oppositions, in the Americas in the Salvadoran people’s struggle, which is part of the reason I wrote my book, because those pathetic images of children crying and mothers screaming, the sounds, the soundbites of mothers screaming in places like Karnes, are the dominant images, along with gangs of Salvadorans, when, in fact, you’ve got this incredible, astonishingly incredible, political capability that Salvadorans have had and still have.
AMY GOODMAN: So, La Matanza, you reveal in your book — talk about your father’s connection as a witness.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, my father, Ramón Alfredo Lovato, Pop Ramón, known to those of us who love him, was 9 years old when this happened in January of 1932. And I didn’t even know this. I was teaching in the country’s first Central American studies program at Cal State Northridge, and we were trying to find books which you can’t find in English, except for a few, like the one by Gould and Santiago. And, you know, I was doing research on La Matanza. Then I realized, “Hey, this town, Ahuachapán, is where my dad is from.” It was one of the major centers. And my dad never said anything for decades. So then I start doing the research, and I finally ask my dad, and he reveals to me that he had seen La Matanza.
And it was an epic moment in my family history and in my own life, because it explained a lot to me about why I was such a crazy kid that used to gangster lean, like in that song, and run in certain violent and kind of dangerous circles or join the FMLN and other crazy things that I’ve done in my life, had this deep undercurrent of family history that I think a lot of us have in our families, family secrets. And I try to connect those family secrets to the secrets of nations, like with the Matanza, which was, again, covered up and buried along with mass gravesites that are still unexcavated to this day.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And speaking of family secrets, you also reveal in your book that your father, who had worked for United Airlines for many years as a ramp service worker, also had his own underground life, basically, in the Mission District of San Francisco selling contraband.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, my dad was, along with Santana’s father, involved in the contraband industry in San Francisco’s Mission District. A lot of colorful characters came out of there. And my dad was at the center of it. And my dad, a very smart guy, created a transnational network of contraband, of jewelry, electrodomestics, calculators, perfume, eventually guns. My dad was running guns between El Salvador — I mean, San Francisco and El Salvador. He wasn’t selling them to, like, the fascists or to the FMLN or anything. This was before, in the prewar era, in the ’70s. He was doing it to anybody who could afford it. But I learned about the construction of criminality at a very personal level. You know, I had shame about my dad, and I didn’t — and my dad’s activities.
And I started excavating the history. I find out that it wasn’t just my dad. It was my Mamá Tey, my grandmother, who made pupusas with me, for me and our family. And with the same hands that she made pupusas, she also transferred — she was actually the originator of this transnational network of contraband that sustained our family. And so, I’m not going to call my abuelita a criminal, or my dad a criminal. I think they were people that were trying to sustain their families by any ways they could and under like — you know, for example, they lived through an El Salvador that didn’t just see La Matanza and the genocide, but a poverty in the Great Depression that made Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath look like a wine festival.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, William Barr, the current attorney general, the attorney general under George H.W. Bush — we just have a minute, but as you wrap up, Roberto, what is his connection to this story?
ROBERTO LOVATO: William Barr, as attorney general under the first Bush, redeployed FBI resources, in the greatest deployment of FBI resources up to that point, taking FBI agents who were fighting foreign — you know, looking at foreign “threats,” and started focusing them on gangs. And then he starts looking at MS-13 and other gangs right after the L.A. riots. You can see he was there in L.A., and he started us on the path to eventually, like, militarizing the police, that we have right now. And then, he then also had the INS deport the gang “problem” to El Salvador, and then he exported, after the war, U.S.-style policing. And then, I found out that military trainers from El Salvador actually came to train LAPD in counterinsurgency, and other police forces. It’s just when you start seeing the Robocopization of cop uniforms — right? — and that we have now. And William Barr had everything to do with — had not everything, but he had a lot to do with this. I had to sing his song, because he deserves all the credit he deserves for what he did to El Salvador and to L.A. and to our national situation long before Trump.
The majority of Central American refugees and immigrants to the United States come from just three countries: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which are the same three countries the United States intervened in during, among other decades, the 1980s on the sides of military governments and paramilitary death squads that killed tens of thousands — and in the case of Guatemala, hundreds of thousands — of mostly Indigenous people. In El Salvador, many soldiers responsible for carrying out the notorious 1981 El Mozote massacre, in which nearly a thousand unarmed villagers were killed, were elite U.S-trained forces. Between 1980 and ’92, the U.S. sent over $4 billion in economic and military aid to El Salvador’s government — nearly $1 million a day.
Well, today we follow the story of one man and his family, and why he says the story of El Salvador is the story of the United States. Roberto Lovato is an award-winning journalist. He’s just published his memoir called Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. He’s joining us now from San Francisco.
One of the revelations in this book, the award-winning journalist, Roberto, was a part of the FMLN, which is now a political party in El Salvador, and was a ruling party in El Salvador, but was a guerrilla movement that took on the military and paramilitary death squads. And Farabundo Martí, for whom it was named, actually was imprisoned a number of times, was imprisoned in the United States, as well, at the San Pedro detention facility, which Roberto will tell us about, and came out of the Anti-Imperialist League of Latin America. The equivalent in the United States, the Anti-Imperialist League, included Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Diego Rivera and Albert Einstein. Roberto Lovato is a poet warrior. Roberto, tell us about this tradition.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Well, Amy, you know, one thing you learn in struggle, under great crisis and adversity, is: How do you sustain struggle or become victim, or not — and not become victimized? And I learned in the course of writing the book and excavating my memory that one of the things that sustained me was poetry, was music, were murals, paintings, artists, creative people coming together to literally bring revolution into reality. You even had organizations in El Salvador, political, military organizations, founded by poets. So, you know, I — there’s a long tradition of this in Latin America, where the distinction between poetry and politics isn’t really like we have it here, where there are these boxes — with the exception of people like Audre Lorde or Adrienne Rich and June Jordan, who I learned from at Berkeley.
But so, I see myself and I see the book in this tradition. And I want to pipe it into the United States, because I don’t think right now we have the political culture we’re going to need to face the challenges of this epic moment, like, not just Trump and a sense of fascism here and worldwide, not just the decline of the economy and the continued neoliberal domination, or the kind of the fascistization of and the militarization of the police. Even if we get through that, we’re going to have to face climate change. So, to face all of this, we’re not going to Democrat or liberal or even progressive our way out of this, I don’t think. I think we’re going to need something a little more stronger, a little more millenarian.
And that’s where the revolutionary sensibility comes in, Amy. I think that — and I try to capture it in the book in terms of the revolutionary spirit of the Salvadoran people, that’s hidden behind images of gangs and, you know, soundbites of suffering children or pictures of pain-stricken moms. So, the poet warrior tradition is — it has to be excavated in in Latin America and here. We have poet warriors here, but we just don’t know it.
AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering if you can talk about the trajectory and the connection between the militarization of police here and the U.S. involvement in — now, again, we talked about, in Part 1 of our conversation, but
the U.S. intervention in three countries, the Northern Triangle — Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras — back 40 years ago. These are the countries that have the massive outflow of migrants into the United States, the U.S. supporting the military death squads and the military regimes at the time of the Reagan era, for example, that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of mainly Indigenous people in these three countries. You don’t see this outflow of migration from Nicaragua, from Panama, from Costa Rica. Talk about U.S. intervention and how it shaped what is happening today.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Well, yeah, definitely, Amy. And it’s shaped not what happened — just what happened, but what’s happening here now. And this is through a mechanism that I call the circuits of counterinsurgency policing, following people like Stuart Schrader and others who have looked at, like, the militarization of policing really effectively.
And so, I remember seeing — you know, there were military trainers sent by the U.S. to El Salvador, and they were there training the Atlacatl Battalion and the other murderous battalions responsible, for example, for the El Mozote massacre, where I’ve seen the bones of the children that they’re still kind of processing in the forensics labs 30 years later. And so, you know, a thousand people were — approximately a thousand people were killed, more than half of them children under 12, and more than half of those kids under 6 years old. This is what our military —
AMY GOODMAN: And when you talk about El Mozote, of 1981, the killing —
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — the military killing of up to 1,000 Salvadorans, talk about the U.S.-trained soldiers that were involved with this, and especially for young people who don’t understand this history. It starts for them at the border: “Why are people trying to come into our country?” they may say. But talk about that connection of the violence that was connected directly to the United States.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah. So, the U.S. trained some of the most murderous battalions in the Americas, like the Atlacatl Battalion that perpetrated El Mozote in December 1981, and almost a thousand people killed, most of them children under 12, half of those children under 6 years old. And so, your natural — you have that, was the first, one of the first, and then you had others, similar, with 500 there, here 600, there whole towns wiped out, mostly elderly people — I mean, tens of thousands of people killed, most of them, 85% of them, killed by their own government, according to the United Nations Truth Commission.
So, these are the conditions under which people migrate. They don’t migrate because of the American dream, which is now thoroughly dead. They migrate, in the case of El Salvador in the ’80s and ’90s, because of the war and the aftermath of the war, the destruction of the economy and the circuits of counterinsurgency policing, where the trainers that went to El Salvador after the war came — guess where — to your local police departments, like LAPD, Seattle and others, to train police in counterinsurgency policing. And I’ve got quotes in the book about people that have received training from folks that were in El Salvador and other parts of Central America. And so you see the militarization of police begin and to be theorized and then practiced after El Salvador in ’92.
And then, after that, William Barr then deploys all these FBI agents away from foreign threats to focus on gangs, beginning the “gang war,” and then sending the counterinsurgency police of LAPD and the INS to create and deport the violent, you know, gang “problem” to El Salvador — “problem” to El Salvador. And then, after that, they send kind of this new counterinsurgent policing model to the new Salvadoran police force established after the peace accords.
And so, you see, Amy, there’s like these circuits of policing, that when we talk about gangs, we don’t hear any of that. But when we talk about gangs, we have to talk about policing. And so, it’s no coincidence Donald Trump, right before Portland, had a press conference in the Oval Office around MS-13, right? He and William — who was next to him was William Barr. Thirty years later, there’s the avatar, William Barr, once again, helping militarize our police days before Border Patrol, militarized Border Patrol of the BORTAC, you know, the paramilitary units of the Border Patrol, picked up protesters in those images, those horrific images, we all saw.
I see that, and I saw El Salvador and the Salvadorization of the U.S. That’s why I came out with my book, because I want to see a Salvadorization in terms of a country where one of every three people was organized against a fascist military dictatorship.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to talk again about what it means to unforget, in every sense of the word, and your point that you raise at the beginning of the book: “The machete of memory [can] cut swiftly or slowly.” Unforgetting “makes us hack at ourselves.” It “chops up our families.” It “severs any understanding that epic history is a stitching together of intimate histories.” Take it from there, Roberto.
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, that doesn’t even sound like me, man. I don’t know. This guy sounds better than me. But, you know, that’s the personality you adopt as an author. I wrote that because I realized, after doing all the research of my family, my dad’s secrets, my family secrets, the violence, the crime, the underworlds, like, “Wow! This is an epic story that the Salvadorans have.” And we don’t know any of it. I didn’t know any of it, so how is the audience or anybody else going to know about it in the English language? But even in El Salvador, like 75% of Salvadorans, in a poll, said that they didn’t even know about La Matanza.
So, unforgetting is as much an individual as a political act and a collective act, of not just remembering, because remembering is just bringing things up. Unforgetting, for me, is a process of bringing up and raising up the memories, the people, the forgotten people, and the stories that the powerful would have us forget. Right? Unforgetting is an act of — a liberatory act, more than anything else.
Because you don’t get a Donald Trump without forgetting. You don’t get a Barack Obama without forgetting. I mean, when I went to these immigrant prisons in South Texas, I wasn’t visiting children separated from their moms or children imprisoned in these horrific jails or children caged by Donald Trump. They were caged, imprisoned, separated by Barack Obama. And the cages were mass produced by Jay Johnson, his head of homeland security. So, you know, we have to — a lot of people are uncomfortable with saying that, Barack Obama. They’re happy to say Trump is a fascist when he cages children and does all these horrific things. But when Obama does it, there’s somehow an excuse.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were, early on, talking about Obama, at the time, as you were saying he was building the structure, the foundation, as many in the immigrant community, his — even his immigrant rights allies, Obama’s allies, called him the “deporter-in-chief.”
ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, Amy, one of the things I love about you and your show is that you give space to things that are forgotten. One of the things that I did on your show, one of the first people that did it on national television, was to start talking about what Barack Obama was doing with things like something called 287(g) and Secure Communities. I don’t know if you remember that, Amy, but that was the first time on national television somebody was actually talking about these issues, that turned Barack Obama, who promised to undo these programs, into the deporter-in-chief, that ended up deporting 3 million people, that ended up caging — instituting mass caging of Central American children, mass separation by the thousands of children, not as a policy, but as a practice — Trump tried to make it a policy — and jailing hundreds of thousands of innocents, under cover of — what do you call.
And we have bad signs today in the news, when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are announcing that they’re bringing on Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top Latina, who gave a Latina immigrant rights face to all the horrific things that Obama was doing under cover of ”Sí, se puede.” So, we have to unforget things like Cecilia Muñoz and Barack Obama on immigration.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up this interview, what surprised you most, Roberto, writing your own memoir?
ROBERTO LOVATO: What surprised me most was the power, the power of the sublime — what surprised me most was the strategic value of the sublime and the beautiful. I didn’t know that I could do what I did in that book. I know there are things that are sublime and beautiful in there, because I put my full heart into it. And I didn’t know that I had that in me, to be quite frank. I surprised myself. And I had the love and support of all these people all over the United States and in Central America, rooting me on to do this. And I didn’t realize that the sublime and the beautiful had been one of the things, along with love, that carried me through the journey of intense trauma that I inherited, of the intense trauma I saw in the war, and of the intense trauma I saw after the war, and that I’m still seeing today. And so, you know, that was the biggest surprise, was the astonishing power of the sublime and the beautiful, that we’re going to need to face the challenges of our time.
_______________
Roberto Lovato
award-winning journalist and author.
— source democracynow.org | Sep 09, 2020