Imagine being tortured by one fascist regime, finding a new life in a different country, living quietly there for 38 years, and then being tortured and deported by another fascist regime to a third country because you happen to speak the language of that country.
And then imagine if your family was told you had been killed by the secret police of that second country, when really you'd just been disappeared to a black site and then shoved out the door there when they got bored with you.
Family of Allentown grandfather Luis Leon, 82, said they were headed to a Guatemala hospital to reunite with him after he was taken into cus
Below the cut you'll find more nauseating details about something that's more and more common in America: forced disappearance.
(Written by Matt Mikalatos)
An 82 year old man was taken by ICE at a green card replacement appointment. His family was never informed where he was or how to get ahold of him until he was in a foreign hospital... despite the fact that he was a permanent legal resident of the US.
Luis Leon came to the US 38 years ago.
He had been tortured in his native Chile by the administration of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. The US gave him political asylum and he came legally to the United States in 1987.
Luis built a life here in the US. He worked at a leather manufacturing plant, raised four kids, and eventually retired.
He’s well-loved in his neighborhood in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He likes to garden and fish and do small repairs for the neighbors.
In June he lost his wallet, which had his green card in it.
No problem. Luis and his wife made an appointment to get it replaced.
But when they arrived for the appointment, Luis was handcuffed and taken away, and his wife was held for ten hours until her granddaughter showed up to get her.
His family couldn’t find him for a full month. The immigration detention tracker never showed him as in ICE custody. Immigration officials had no answers they were willing to give, despite multiple calls. The family called local prisons and hospitals and even morgues but couldn’t find anyone who knew where Luis was.
A relative in Chile called the family yesterday to let them know that 82-year-old Luis was now in a hospital in Guatemala… apparently deported to this country by the US government, though ICE still won’t even confirm that Luis showed up for his green card replacement appointment, let alone that they had him in custody and deported him.
Now that the family has found Luis, ICE says they are “investigating” what happened.
Sometimes when I share these stories, people push back and say something like, “If he was here for all these years, why didn’t he become a citizen.” It’s a really weird and ignorant question for a variety of reasons, but more importantly it’s off topic to this post. So before we change subjects to why someone might not get their US citizenship, let me pose a few counter questions: Do you think legal permanent resident of the US should be taken into custody at what should be a normal administrative appointment? Do you think people should be held with no access to lawyers or family? Should permanent legal residents be deported to a country other than their home country and put in a hospital without ever informing family or legal representation? Because that’s what we’re talking about.
Meanwhile, we have no idea if ICE deported a legal, permanent resident of the United States on purpose or somehow “by accident.”
Certainly since ICE’s tripled quota for arrests they’ve had a lot more “mistakes.” And I’m not just talking about the more famous moments, like “administrative errors” that involve illegally deporting someone to El Salvador.
We also have things like:
* A US marshal being mistakenly detained by ICE.
* ICE apologized for detaining US citizens because it caught them… speaking Spanish.
* ICE claims assaults against agents had increased between 500-700% but then released statistics that showed — despite the huge increase in ICE arresting people — ICE’s own self-reported stats of assaults barely increased at all. Probably because they’ve been arresting people on bogus assault claims and then never charged any of them because it was just an excuse to put bystanders in handcuffs.
* ICE accidentally sent a 15 year old to the Everglades Concentration Camp because they didn’t verify his age or identity.
Meanwhile, Luis — a permanent resident of the US who came here legally, had legal status and doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket — has been taken from his family, kept from legal counsel, deported to a country he has never been from, and put in the hospital.
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So Chile just elected a far-right President, and when I mean far-right I mean someone whose immigrant father was an actual lieutenant of the Wehrmacht and Nazi party during World War II. The icing on the cake is not only that his brother held 2 government positions during the Pinochet military dictatorship but that he also expressed a positive assessment of the latter and supported the option to extend Pinochet's rule for eight more years during the 1988 Chilean national plebiscite electoral space.
It seems historical AMNESIA is the rule of the day everywhere in the world.
Shame on you Chile! I fear for the lives of the indigenous population and LGTBQI people.
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50 years ago, today, the "other 9/11" took place in Chile
It was on this day that the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende and his government was overthrown by C.I.A backed fascists, led by Augusto Pinochet.
Pinochet's regime would play straight into the hands of U.S imperialists and businessmen, implementing neo-liberal reforms that drove millions into poverty, persecuting leftists and labour activists, imprisoning and torturing and murdering tens of thousands of innocent people.
Remember the victims.
Remember those who knew and supported what was being done.
Remember that this is what spreading "freedom" and "democracy" means to the United States.
I hope that no one takes the posts that I reblogged as meaning that I don't care about what happened on 9/11 in the USA. I remember being 3 years old and watching television and not understanding what was happening but crying when I saw so much suffering.
However, I do believe that it is important to give MUCH more visibility to the military coup in Chile than what the media gives it on this date (Both happened on the same day, different years). It is worrying how the entire world only talks about what happened in the USA while many, including the gringos themselves, do not even know what their own government did not only in Chile but throughout Latin America. The millions of dead and missing people that affect us to this day. Look for Operation Condor if want to know what happened here not that long ago.
"Never forget" seems like a phrase only applicable to the United States and the rest of the "first world", while the crimes committed here by their imperialist governments seem irrelevant in their school history books.
