Children of War

The ongoing story of Central American children at the border reminded me this morning of the time I spent in that area as a correspondent for the Gannett News Service in the early 1980s where I covered the civil war. Besides covering the fighting, military men and some politicians I also spent some time visiting the refugee camps. The stories of horror melted away any kind of journalistic distance that I sought to establish. While the military reign of terror was indiscriminate when it came to gender and age, the tales of children being killed was the worse. Mothers--the camps were filled with women as most men had been killed or recruited into the army or insurgent groups--talked about the feared "knock on the door" after dark. It meant the death squads had found another victim and those taken would not return.
I remember one case in particular. A young girl, possibly 15 or 16, who was part of a Catholic reading group was dragged out of her home in the middle of the night. The government considered these reading groups subversive because they were discussing human dignity and the need for societal change in their country. These groups were nonpolitical and in fact were not very well liked by the guerrilla groups in the country because they sought peaceful change. The young woman would be missing for days until they found a "part" of her body in a nearby community. Over several days they would find other parts of her body scattered about in the region. Once put together the autopsy revealed gang rape, mutilation of her organs, torture and eventual dismemberment. Hers was the most vivid of the crimes but there were many others. The people in these refugee camps were traumatized, some left with almost no emotion.
El Salvador's military government was similar to those that the U.S. supported in places like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina and Panama. These governments were ruthless in the oppression of their people, many of their military men having been trained in the School of the Americas in Panama. In fact, most of the military dictators and others accused of war crimes graduated from that school and one in Bennings, Georgia.
A few years before I went to Central America I visited Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon where I saw similar trauma though there the defiance against Israel and its Lebanese allies was simmering just below the surface. I remember going to a PLO school where the children were being taught how to handle a rifle and to sing revolutionary songs. A committed PLO doctor, nonetheless, told us how worried he was about what war and anger would do to these children. Would they also engage in violence?
War is destructive, so is oppression and when you mingle it with poverty, social dysfunction and hopelessness you get either violence--radical Islamists or Mara Salvatrucha--or you get societies that move in massive numbers desperately seeking something better. Time will tell whether our leaders' hearts are large enough to embrace these children or whether we will succumb to the typical fears of "illegal immigrants". Eventually we will also have to find ways to help resolve the problem that sends them here.