Joe Moakley's Journey: From South Boston to El Salvador

9. A Most Unlikely Hero

143 9 H H H H H A Most Unlikely Hero Joe Moakley’s first order of business as the next congressional session opened was to introduce hr 822, a new bill to protect the Salvadoran immigrants. John J. Dooling, a former Moakley aide and now counsel to the Rules Committee, crafted the El Salvador Refugee Act of 1985, a modified, more specific version of its predecessor. This one would establish an El Salvador Refugee Commission in the Government Accounting Office, tasked with settling disputed facts such as the number of displaced Salvadorans, their location and current condition, what happened to returnees, and how their situation compared with that of countries to which evd status had been granted. The commission would get $800,000 to complete a report within a year. The bill defined the congressional review process, and mandated a temporary suspension of deportations for those entering the United States before October 1984. The last provision was meant to persuade skeptics that the bill would not attract new economic immigrants. Moakley filed it on January 30; it was referred to the Judiciary and Rules committees.1 In some ways, the situation in El Salvador had improved since Moakley had last raised the issue. In the presidential election of May 1984, Jose Napoleon Duarte, the moderate Christian Democrat, had, with American backing, defeated Roberto D’Aubuisson, the death squad leader who now headed the oligarchy’s political party, known by its Spanish acronym arena. Duarte, a former civil engineer, came to Washington to lobby for more military aid. It helped his cause that the enlisted men charged with killing the American churchwomen had been convicted in a Salvadoran court. Despite continued liberal Democratic opposition, Reagan and Duarte got about $200 million in additional military aid. The money made the situation worse. With their new helicopter 144 H joe moakley’s journey gunships, the Salvadoran Air Force began a terrifying round of destroying villages from the air. The ac-47s could fill an area the size of a football field with machine gun fire in seconds. People fled guerrilla-held areas for San Salvador and the United States. Many of those outside the war zone ran away also. A right-wing assembly ended any hope of land reform , and thousands of peasants were evicted.2 Moakley liked Duarte, but he saw the situation on the ground clearly. “For many Salvadorans, this bill could mean the difference between life and death,” he announced in a press release. “While the election of Jose Napoleon Duarte may be heartening, it is not realistic to believe that he or anyone else can magically end the civil unrest in El Salvador overnight.”3 The Reagan State Department’s Latin America Bureau maintained its view that Salvadoran migrants to the United States came for economic reasons; that those who claimed they were being persecuted could avail themselves of a political asylum remedy; and that the elected government of El Salvador was a democracy and therefore not equivalent to communist dictatorships whose fleeing citizens had been granted evd status. When Moakley requested a review of this opinion, W. Tapley Bennett , the State Department’s congressional liaison, replied that a poll of Salvadorans showed that 70 percent wanted to immigrate to the United States; surely not all of these people were being persecuted, and clearly the United States could not receive them all. Further, the department averred, people deported back to El Salvador were not victimized. The State Department had interviewed five hundred deportees in El Salvador , and none had suffered abuse. The Salvadoran government denied that it pursued deportees, who could easily have been detained at the airport. Finally, the State Department claimed that it was doing what it could to help them.4 Civil society opponents of increased immigration expanded upon the State Department’s position. Responding to an op-ed by Moakley in the Christian Science Monitor, Roger Conner of the Federation for American Immigration Reform argued that because violence against civilians was a global problem, the United States would be acting unfairly to admit some of these victims but not others. Should the Congress adopt Moakley’s bill, Conner warned, a flood of immigrants would wash across the border if El Salvador’s situation deteriorated.5 Duarte’s election changed the atmosphere in Congress regarding El a most unlikely hero H 145 Salvador. Conservative Democrats voted with Reagan in May of 1984 for...