Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War

7. Retorno: The Grassroots Repopulation Movement

190 7¡Retorno! The Grassroots Repopulation Movement On 9 April 1986, representatives of the Honduran and Salvadoran governments and the UNHCR met in San José, Costa Rica. On the agenda for the day was the issue of repatriation, the return to El Salvador of the more than twenty thousand Salvadoran campesinos who had been living in refugee camps in Honduras for years—some of them for more than half a decade. This particular meeting was historic in many ways. It was the first time Salvadoran and Honduran officials had met face to face speci fically to discuss the situation of Salvadoran refugees in Honduras and the eventuality of their return to El Salvador. This in itself was no small feat given the history of tense relations between the two countries. This was also the inaugural meeting of the newly established, UNHCRsponsored Comisión Tripartita (Tripartite Commission), the overarching goal of which was to lay the groundwork for and promote the voluntary repatriation of Salvadoran refugees. No such commission had ever existed in Latin America despite the near continuous presence of refugee crises in the region since the founding of the office of the UNHCR in 1950 and the subsequent approval, in 1951, of the international Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. In terms of setting a precedent and finding “permanent solutions” to the problems facing Salvadoran refugees, Tripartite Commission members certainly had their work cut out for them. They began their work at this first meeting by setting forth the fundamental bases for the repatriation process. According to reports from the period,
members agreed that (1) repatriation must be of a voluntary and individually expressed nature (2) the process should be nondiscriminatory (each and every person had a right to return and live in his or her country of origin), and (3) it should happen in a gradual manner in order to allow for careful planning, preparation, and execution. Commission members also decided on the need for specific programs designed to facilitate both repatriation and reinsertion into Salvadoran society, although the details of such programs would have to wait for subsequent meetings. In the meantime, unbeknownst to Tripartite Commission members, refugees at the Mesa Grande camp had established their own commission. The Comité de Repoblación (Repopulation Committee) had held meetings, organized work groups, and gained a wide range of allies among groups inside El Salvador and around the world. On 10 January 1987 the Comité members informed the UNHCR of their plans to return home. Their Proyecto de Retorno (Return Project) announced , “We are Salvadoran, and we have the internationally recognized right to return to our country under the conditions presented in this project.” Among the listed conditions were that the campesinos would return en masse to locations of their choosing in El Salvador, on their journey they would be accompanied by international and national support groups, and they would not be detained or harassed in any way. Salvadoran officials and the UNHCR would work together to provide the returnees the necessary immigration and identity documents. And once they were in Salvadoran territory, government and military officials would respect the campesinos’ rights to live and work as civilians, which meant that no military posts would be established in their repopulated communities, repatriates would not be forcibly recruited into the armed forces or be required to establish civil defense patrols, and their towns would not be subjected to bombings and strafings. “These conditions are logical and negotiable,” the Comité concluded. “We hope that the negotiations occur and the project is approved in the shortest amount of time possible.”1 The refugees’ announcement took officials by surprise. The Tripartite Committee had met but twice by that point and had only begun to debate the particulars of a plausible official repatriation program. Although internal documents reveal that UNHCR representatives immediately began making arrangements in response to the refugees’ announcement, Salvadoran authorities were less receptive. The Salvadoran defense minister, General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, argued before UNHCR representatives that the “present moment is not the appropriate for this purpose.” In addition to the war, he said, the country faced a severe economic crisis due to a recent earthquake, price declines in principle export products, and the arrival of thousands of deportees¡ R e t o r n o ! 191 from the United States. Perhaps more to the point, however, Vides Casanova claimed...