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112 4 The Politics of Exile On 25 November 1987 retired Honduran army colonel Abrahám García Turcios made a memorable trip to the Colomoncagua refugee camp in Intibucá, Honduras, where thousands of Salvadoran campesinos had been living since 1981. The colonel, head of CONARE, arrived at the camp unannounced in an unmarked vehicle. He spent some time with representatives from the UNHCR, perhaps further dickering about the details of the “Memorandum de Entendimiento” (Memorandum of Understanding) signed by government and UN officials in June of the same year. At the close of the meeting, the colonel climbed back into his car, ready to return to his Tegucigalpa office three hundred kilometers to the east. As he rounded a curve in the dirt road leading to the camp exit, however, García Turcios found his path blocked by several hundred Salvadorans demanding an impromptu meeting. Elected representatives of the refugee community had been trying for weeks, in fact, to arrange a meeting with García Turcios in order to discuss numerous concerns they had regarding plans outlined in the “Memorandum”; of particular concern was the Honduran government’s proposal to replace internationals with government-appointed delegates. García Turcios had already reneged on the proposed meeting several times. As a result the refugees likely interpreted the secrecy of his visit to the Colomoncagua camp on that November day as proof that he had no intention of meeting with them at all. But the refugees would not allow García Turcios to ignore them. So they blocked his exit. While some refugees hoisted picket signs and banners calling for internationals to remain in the camp, others approached García Turcios’s vehicle and urged him to meet with them before he left the camp. Still the colonel refused, and, rather than get out of his car, he attempted to drive straight through the crowd, wrenching down banners and forcing people to  scatter. The Salvadorans remained resolute, however, and they closed in on the vehicle until it barely crawled along. When they began to place rocks around the tires in an attempt to completely halt his progress, Colonel García Turcios flew out the car door, brandishing a pistol. The sight of the gun sparked panic among the refugees, and in the ensuing confusion the colonel withdrew from the camp, threatening immediate action in retaliation for the refugees’ refusal to accept the authority of the Honduran government.1 This incident was not the first of its kind. Nor was November 1987 the first time that García Turcios had uttered such a warning. In fact, concerns about the management and control of Salvadoran refugees had plagued Honduran officials since the late 1970s when campesinos from El Salvador began to illegally cross into Honduras in search of a temporary respite from the violence raging at home. As noted in the preceding chapter, the Honduran government had resisted formally acknowledging the Salvadoran campesinos as refugees for several reasons, including historic animosities toward their southern neighbors and new concerns regarding the international spread of communism. Between 1980 and 1982, however, the UNHCR successfully negotiated a series of agreements with Honduras that allowed Salvadorans to stay in Honduras but placed financial and administrative responsibility on the UNHCR. The Honduran government remained the ultimate authority in all things related to Salvadoran refugees. Because these campesino refugees “endanger the country’s national security,” the Honduran National Security Council announced, “[we must] manage the situation in the most intelligent manner.”2 But if Honduran officials perceived Salvadorans as threats, the Salvadorans in turn perceived García Turcios and other Honduran officials to be in the same league as the Salvadoran armed forces and death squads—in short, as threats to their individual and communal well-being. Salvadoran campesinos had considerable experience with state-sponsored marginalization and repression from the economic deprivations of life in the tierra olvidada to the military ’s scorched earth campaigns to the collaboration of Salvadoran and Honduran soldiers in “cleansing” the border region. Life in exile in many ways continued in the same vein. Campesinos in Honduras faced not only the physical and psychological effects of political violence and war; they also had to confront anti-Salvadoran propaganda, exclusion from official decisionmaking circles, military incursions into the refugee camps, arrests, tortures, executions, and deportations. It was a combination of overt and covert threats that prompted the Colomoncagua representatives to request a meeting with Colonel García Turcios in...

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