Los Angeles – An immigrant aid organization called El Rescate (Rescue) is preparing to mark a quarter century of work helping newcomers since it grew out of the need to assist those fleeing the civil war racking El Salvador in the early 1980s.
“The Salvadoran diaspora emigrated mainly to the United States,” El Rescate director Salvador Sanabria told EFE. “There were hundreds of persons who came fleeing the civil war or who went into exile.”
El Rescate was “expressly created” to help the displaced population by providing legal aid and defending their human rights.
The founders of the group were the Ecumenical Council of California, several lawyers specializing in civil rights and a group of displaced persons.
At the beginning, the Refugees Committee was named after Salvadoran Santana Chirino Amaya, a refugee – Sanabria said – who in the early 1980s asked U.S. authorities for political asylum.
The request was denied and he was deported. A few hours after arriving back in El Salvador, he was captured by a death squad, one of several military-spawned or -supported organizations that kidnapped and killed leftists – and beheaded.
With the establishment of El Rescate, in 1983 it began a project to create the Monsignor Romero Clinic to provide free medical care to the Central American refugee community.
Oscar Arnulfo Romero was a Roman Catholic prelate and archbishop of San Salvador who in the late 1970s became a champion of the poor and politically repressed. On March 24, 1980, he was killed by a rifle shot from a death squad assassin while saying Mass at the chapel of a San Salvador clinic.
In 1987, El Refugio was established in Los Angeles with the aim of providing temporary housing for persons who have recently arrived in the United States.
“In its first phase, El Rescate opened a social services program that provided basic food, general orientation on how to get along in the city and even tokens with which to pay for public transport,” said Sanabria.
The head of the non-profit organization also said that in the beginning, the group got involved in a legal battle to get then-President Ronald Reagan to extend refugee status to Central American immigrants.
“He never did that, because the Reagan administration felt that Central Americans were not political refugees, because in Central America human rights were respected,” Sanabria said in an ironic tone.
Sanabria also denounced the ongoing campaign by U.S. conservatives to criminalize illegal entry into the country and the immigrant community.
The list of El Rescate’s community projects is long.
In 1991, the organization helped 60,000 persons request Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, as a way to ensure the recognition of Salvadorans’ refugee status.
The signing of the peace accords after more than a decade of civil war in El Salvador on Jan. 16, 1992, marked for El Rescate the beginning of a new phase of its work. It began collaborating with aid committees set up by Salvadorans from various towns in their homeland.
Twelve years had passed since the arrival of the first Salvadoran refugees in the United States and it was calculated at that time that the community had grown to a million persons, or a sixth of the population of El Salvador.
“Then, many people could still go to El Salvador and return, but many didn’t stay there because the country did not offer the conditions of security and economic stability,” Sanabria said. “And many people decided to stay here as immigrants and permanent residents to get ahead in this country.”
