VIVA LA MIGRA!

According to this Reuters story an illegal immigrant from El Salvador was deported two days ago to his native country.

Liberal outrage? Protests in the streets?

Not exactly.

He wasn’t hurting anyone. He was a humble janitor at a motel, but Gonzalo Guevara-Cerritos, 43, had been a Salvadoran army officer who was convicted of participating in the military's 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests.

Reuters provides this background:

Los Angeles is home to some 250,000 Salvadorans, many of whom fled to the United States during the Central American country's 12-year civil war in which the U.S. government supported the right-wing Salvadoran government and its army.

More than 75,000 people died in the 1980-92 conflict, including 17 priests, most murdered for their leftist political views.

Guevara had served his sentence in El Salvador but he must have wanted to ditch his reputation and start a new life in the U.S.

Guevara, who had been maintaining a low profile for fear of being identified by pissed off Salvadorans, was turned in to ICE by a member of the public, quite possibly a fellow illegal immigrant.

According to the story, former death-squader Guevara was not identified by any public agency. In California, inquiries by public employees about the immigration status of individuals is mostly forbidden.

My city, San Francisco, is a “sanctuary” for people like Guevara, so too, Los Angeles where Guevara was arrested.

Apparently Guevara had broken no U.S. laws except those involving his undocumented status. The only legal reason ICE had to arrest and deport the man was his illegal status.

Yet, who will protest his deportation? Who will tell me that I, acting in concert with my fellow U.S. citizens, do not have the right to kick this mass murderer out of my country?

Viva la Migra!

Click here to go to a School of the Americas Watch pdf showing SOA grads in the news.

My alma mater, St Ignatius High School, sends a contingent to the yearly protests at the now (more ominously) renamed School of the Americas (wikilink). Not only did Guevara and his fellow right wing death-squaders kill the six Jesuits, they killed the housekeeper and the housekeeper’s daughter. This really irked the Jesuits. If a Jebbie dropped the dime on Guevara, good for him!

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LEGAL UPDATE

Last night we had our quarterly review with the head of SF WILLIE’S BLOG’s legal department. Actually my old friend, Bill, IS our legal department. He assures me, however, that he has access to an “A-Team” of negotiators and litigators ready to pounce at any hint of trouble.

Bill isn’t licensed to practice law in California (or anywhere else for that matter) so he’s asked that I not use his last name. This conspicuous prudence is wasted on me.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “with a retainer from SF WILLIE’S BLOG that consists of four meals a year in a moderately priced (but clean) Chinese restaurant, no one’s going to accuse you of ‘practicing law’.”

Because he’s big, with a big voice, and a hearty laugh, which contrasts with his staunch anti-heroic lifestyle, you could call him Falstaffian. (I can’t call him Falstaffian because I’ve never read or seen a play in which Falstaff was a character. Shakespeare could certainly turn a phrase, but, let’s face it, his plays are boring. The plots are so swaddled, so buried, in verbiage, that after a couple of acts it’s like, ok, run on your sword already, or like, take the poison now!)

What qualifies a person to be the legal department for SF WILLIE’S BLOG? A rare combination of erudition and dissolution. Bill is perhaps the most erudite and dissolute person I know.

Growing up non-Mormon in Utah, Bill got his B.A. at Amherst College. Then he studied law at the University of Chicago, where he was articles editor of their law review, earning a J.D.

From there he went to Wall Street where he worked for a big firm specializing in anti-trust law (“actually pro-trust” he quips). Bill was saying last night that while on Wall Street he discovered an inability to dissimulate. He couldn’t keep a straight face while grossly misleading people.

So he went to the University of Virginia law school to be a full professor. This worked well for a while, then it gradually became clear that he preferred the company of beautiful male students to that, say, of his fellow faculty. In those primitive days, mid-1960s, this would have been a tenure issue.

So he chucked it all and drove cross county to San Francisco, where he devoted himself to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Actually, it was sex, a few drugs, and classical music.

For the following twenty-five years he worked out of his home editing law books, classifying and synopsizing new cases. This gave him a very broad view of developments in many areas of the law.

Bill is retired and lives in a Buddhist Dharma Center, located on the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, about as close as you can get to the site of hippiedom’s big bang. I kid him unmercifully about the religious thing. The term “rice-bowl Buddhist” comes up.

Gee, when you put together Bill’s resume with Pud’s, then you look at our fact-checkers and the rest of our crack staff, a theme starts to emerge, “abject.”

It’s a good thing we’re so darn insouciant.

[They video below is dedicated to Bill and all the wonderful people who make SF WILLIE’S BLOG possible.]

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