We Built the Wall. Eileen Truax
are having coffee after dinner, and Carlos gestures forcefully with his hands to compensate for the weakness of his voice. He finds it troubling that since the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for seventy years before losing in 2000, came back into power in 2012 under President Enrique Peña Nieto, the government publicly maintains that everything is just fine in Mexico. The United States has bought the story without question. The media have picked up the message and broadcast it repeatedly, and the narrative has swayed international opinion.1
“People applying for asylum in the United States are having their petitions denied, even though extortion and death threats are still happening there, in the streets, in everyday life,” Carlos recounts, heatedly. “The U.S. authorities aren’t asking why people come here without papers … The reason they came here is fear, to escape extortion.”
We’re about to leave the restaurant, but Carlos pauses to tell me a joke he heard from some men being held in immigration detention: “A Honduran, Salvadoran, Mexican, and Guatemalan are in a van. Who’s driving?” He waits a beat. “Immigration!” He delivers the punch line with a raucous laugh.
Martín Huéramo is nervous. He strides assuredly into Carlos Spector’s law office, but then looks around anxiously for a place to sit. He wrings his hands and shifts impatiently in his seat. In a few days he will appear before a judge who will review his case for asylum. His children’s future and his own will depend on the evidence and testimony that he, Carlos, and others present.
Carlos is tough on Martín as they talk about his case, and focuses on the political aspect of his argument. They sit side by side behind Carlos’s mahogany desk, a statuette of Lady Justice, balance in hand, watching over them. They go over the weak points in his defense, which could jeopardize his asylum case. Carlos demands his client’s complete concentration, and asks him for some documentation. One by one, these cold, impersonal appearances before a judge decide the fate of the exiled.
Even before he was a lawyer, Carlos already thought in the political language he has mastered so well. By the time he enrolled in law school at thirty years old, he had already earned a master’s degree in sociology and held several jobs with organizations involved with the Central American and Mexican communities. It was the eighties, and amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants would soon be passed into law. Also around this time, Carlos met Sandra Garza, now his wife.
Sandra’s family traces its roots back to a time in South Texas “before Mexico was Mexico, when it was a Spanish territory,” as she likes to point out. Sandra was involved in the pro-immigrant movement spearheaded by Humberto “Bert” Corona, the Chicano activist who led movements in support of labor unions and rights for undocumented immigrants—a stance which would eventually cause a rift between him and his longtime ally, the farmworker activist Cesar Chavez. During these formative years, Sandra also worked with students who fled Mexico in the wake of the student massacre of 1968, and another violent attack on students in 1971 in an incident known as “el halconazo.”
“I met Sandra when she was an organizer for the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union here in El Paso,” Carlos recalls with a smile. A year has passed since our conversation over dinner at the Mexican restaurant, and now we’re meeting again in his office, in a building on a corner in a popular El Paso neighborhood. Carlos is a new man: although still lean, he’s put on weight, his hair has grown back, his beard has filled in, his gaze is sharp, his voice strong once again.
“Some friends told me, you’ve got to meet this girl, she’s doing what you’re doing,” he says. “When I was introduced to her, I saw she was involved with the same things. I had met the woman who would accompany me, sometimes follow me, and sometimes lead me in the social struggle that comes at such a high emotional and political cost.”
For the Spectors, that struggle has become a way of life. The first political asylum case Carlos won was in 1991. The petitioner, Ernesto Poblano, was a candidate for Mexico’s conservative National Action Party (PAN), opposing PRI. The mayor of Ojinaga, a town in the state of Chihuahua, Poblano received a message one day stating “that he would not be allowed to win and govern,” Carlos explains. Poblano fled across the border, Carlos successfully demonstrated that his client had been persecuted, and he won the asylum case. That was followed by cases representing other political leaders from PAN or the leftist Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), dissidents from PRI, and labor leaders.
The political landscape since the nineties, however, “has changed a great deal,” he says, because of “massive, large-scale repression. In the eighties and nineties,” he explains, “the repression was clearly aimed at leaders.” But even when, during the presidency of Carlos Salinas, more people began to flee and more leftists were assassinated, “Mexicans weren’t applying for political asylum. If it’s rare for this kind of violence to be acknowledged now, just imagine back then.”
Originally established as a relief measure by the United Nations in 1952, political asylum allows people suffering from persecution to seek refuge in a country other than their own if they can demonstrate that the persecution falls under one or more of five categories: religion, race, national minority status, political opinion, or membership in a social group. The persecution can be carried out by the state or by a particular group from which the state is either unwilling or unable to provide protection for the individual. Political asylum grew out of an accord between nations following World War II, at a time when fascism and Communism were considered the main sources of persecution.
“The law has not evolved along with the social, political, and economic changes of today,” Carlos says. It fails to comprehend the reality of a “failed state” that persecutes Mexican citizens, he says, which “is partly why political asylum is denied to Mexicans.”
Historically, political asylum has been used as a tool to punish the enemies and reward the friends of the nation where asylum seekers apply. For immigration lawyers, the clearest example is Cuba. Because Cuba is ruled by a Communist regime politically opposed to the United States, the U.S. consequently welcomed Cuban immigrants with open arms (until January 2017, when President Barack Obama announced an end to the policy known as “wet foot, dry foot”). “People fleeing persecution in Communist countries or Eastern Europe,” says Carlos, receive a far warmer welcome in the United States “than those trying to escape persecution in countries that are viewed as ‘friends’ of the United States, like Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and Argentina.”
In 1980 the United States Refugee Act officially recognized the right to petition for asylum just as civil wars were breaking out in Central America. Carlos believes these factors created what he calls “the country’s political conscience”: the view in the United States that only a civil war or a national tragedy justified an individual seeking asylum. This meant that most cases from Mexicans were denied.
Despite this, the number of asylum seekers from Mexico began to creep up during Salinas de Gortari’s presidential administration (1988 to 1994). Salinas came into office after a bitter campaign battle against his leftist rival, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, colored by widespread suspicion of electoral fraud on the part of the PRI, the governing party. The most radical leftist leaders were persecuted, and in some cases assassinated, in several states across Mexico during Salinas’s presidency.
Soon, cases of people exiled because of Salinas de Gortari reached Carlos’s office. In response, he crafted a strategy based on cases of exile in other Central American countries, as well as the Chileans exiled from Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in the sixties. Attacks at the time were focused on leaders with very specific characteristics and in particular circumstances. Since power was centralized, repression was also centralized and channeled to a direct object.
Repression and persecution in Mexico have changed since the PRI’s fall from power in 2000: the PAN, the rightist party, now dominates the federal government, and many municipalities are in the hands of the leftist PRD. With power decentralized among three political parties, violence extends indiscriminately, with few limits and concrete objectives. Most cases of persecution originate in small cities and towns, rather than Mexico’s major cities—in areas key to narcotrafficking, near to oil wells or with access to water. Cartels, in league with