"On June 27, 1980, Jose Artiga was 23 and two semesters shy of an engineering degree when his family received word that far-right death squads were coming for him and four other college students in his hometown of San Martin, El Salvador. Leer en espanol El Salvador was a year into a civil war that pitted the paramilitary death squads, funded in part by the U.S. government, against Marxist-Leninist guerilla forces and the civilians who supported them."
"It took Artiga three months to get to Austin, Texas, and another year-and-a-half to get to San Francisco, where he was given sanctuary at the Most Holy Redeemer Church in the Castro and devoted himself to the solidarity movement in his homeland. In March 1982, Artiga participated in a hunger fast at St. Boniface Church in downtown San Francisco to draw attention to the Salvadoran crisis, making the local news."
Jose Artiga fled San Martin, El Salvador in 1980 after receiving a death order from far-right paramilitary death squads during the Salvadoran civil war. The civil war pitted U.S.-funded paramilitary death squads against Marxist-Leninist guerrillas and civilians who supported them, and the United States classified those who fled as economic migrants rather than refugees. Artiga escaped a massacre that killed other college students whose bodies were dismembered. He reached Austin, then San Francisco, received sanctuary at Most Holy Redeemer Church, joined a hunger fast in 1982, and helped establish East Bay Sanctuary Covenant with Berkeley churches to shelter and advocate for asylum seekers.
Read at www.berkeleyside.org
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