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  1. #1
    Senior Member swatchick's Avatar
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    Guatamalans Face Expulsion From S. Florida

    http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/ ... 9358.story


    Guatemalans who fled 1990s civil war face expulsion from S. Florida

    By Tal Abbady
    South Florida Sun-Sentinel
    Posted February 5 2007


    Juana Tomas resolved to forget the ghosts of San Miguel Acatán.

    She fled her native Guatemalan village, tucked in the rural highlands where civil war raged, and headed north in 1991.



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    In the United States, Tomas sought political asylum. She was 17. Adolescence turned into adulthood. She gave birth to two sons and made a home for them in Lake Worth, joining a large, Qanjobal-speaking community of Mayan farm workers and day laborers in Palm Beach County. Raising her children and working in a nursery, she waited for a response from the government.

    Fifteen years later in 2006, Tomas, now 33, learned that federal authorities denied her asylum claim. An immigration judge recently ordered her deported to Guatemala, a country still reeling from the effects of a war that ended a decade ago. Advocates say she is one of roughly 250,000 Guatemalans whose asylum claims from the 1990s U.S. authorities rejected. All could be deported.

    U.S. officials say Guatemalans no longer qualify for political asylum because their country's civil war ended in 1996. Due to a massive backlog, the government only last year began notifying applicants that they must leave the country, immigration lawyers say.

    During her long wait, Tomas took refuge in her new home and put the war behind her. A childhood memory of the great-aunt she saw dragged and decapitated slowly faded. So did the image of a neighbor whose body she found hanging from a tree one night while gathering firewood with her father. Every year, she renewed her work permit, raised her sons, and had little idea that her newfangled American life was built on borrowed time.

    "The memories are less now. But I can't go back. We have a life here. There's only poverty in Guatemala, and crime," said Tomas in a dimly lighted apartment she shares with U.S.-born sons, Alex, 14, and Jesus, 10, and another family.

    Now Tomas finds herself challenging the government whose protection she sought. She and other exiles in Florida, home to 28,650 Guatemalans, plan to join a California lawsuit against the Justice Department, said her attorney, Aileen Josephs.

    Attorneys for the nonprofit group Casa de Cultura de Guatemala in Los Angeles are preparing a lawsuit demanding a halt to pending deportations of Guatemalans who entered the United States before the end of the civil war. The suit, which will seek class-action status, also will ask for legal status for Guatemalans who applied for asylum after 1990 but before that country's 1996 peace accords. Those who applied in the 1980s are protected under a federal program.

    South Florida Guatemalan activists also have mobilized. Members of the Miami-based Coalition of Guatemalan Immigrants in the United States met with representatives of Congress in late January to press for a moratorium on deportations.

    "Just when Congress is about to renew the push for immigration reform, immigration authorities decide to dump all these Guatemalan asylum cases," said Marlon Gonzalez, the coalition's president.

    Government officials restricted their comments because of the pending lawsuit.

    "We look at every case diligently before we let someone know they've been denied asylum," said Chris Bentley, spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

    Tomas, who was 8 when she says soldiers burned her house and jailed her father for one year, lived among villagers caught in the crossfire between leftist guerrillas and government militias that fanned out into the country's highlands. Roughly 200,000 Guatemalans died in the 36-year war, many of them indigenous farm workers.

    "If the soldiers saw you speaking to the guerrillas, they killed you. If the guerrillas saw you speaking to the soldiers, they killed you. You spoke to no one. You locked yourself up inside your house," Tomas recalled.

    In 1997, the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act allowed Guatemalans who applied for asylum in the 1980s to seek legal residency, but it did not grant benefits to those who fled during the last years of the war.

    Advocates argue that because the U.S. government had a role in the civil war that displaced about 1 million Guatemalans, all asylum seekers from that era should be allowed to stay here.

    "The government that provoked this war is forcing us back to a country that we no longer know, a country where people now live in anarchy, amid gangs," said Byron Vasquez, director of the Case de la Cultura de Guatemala.

    Vasquez referred to the U.S.-backed ouster of democratically elected leftist president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954, an event that was followed by years of instability and, in 1960, the rise of successive right-wing governments that, with U.S. support, waged decades of war against leftist guerrillas.

    Despite the peace accord between the military and an umbrella leftist group, kidnappings and gang-related crime have overwhelmed parts of Guatemala.

    "You could say, in quotation marks, that the war ended. But the war's legacy is the gangs. They'll murder you over a cell phone," said Reyna Valenzuela, a Hollywood housekeeper who left Guatemala in 1983 and is now a U.S. resident. Her nephew, Lester Betancourt, 17, was shot and strangled in the town of Villa Nueva last year by gang members, she said.
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  2. #2
    Senior Member gofer's Avatar
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    "You could say, in quotation marks, that the war ended. But the war's legacy is the gangs. They'll murder you over a cell phone,"
    The same thing happens every day in American cities, so I don't see the problem! It's probably safer there than it is in Washington, D.C. Heck, it's safer in Iraq than it is in Washington, D.C.

  3. #3
    Senior Member swatchick's Avatar
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    Same thing in South Florida. There have been illegals killed here for their money as they are known for carrying cash. In fact when they go to rob them they call it doing Guat.
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