Flight Factor. Millions are fleeing their homelands and seeking the protection of the rule of law

• Author: Amanda Robert
• Pages: 52-58

Raquel Aldana’s interest in the

cause and effect of inter-

national migration is both

personal and professional.

She was born to a Guatemalan father

and a Salvadoran mother and raised in

El Salvador. They  ed the country in

1980, at the start of the 12-year civil

war between leftist revolutionaries and

government forces that left more than

75,000 Salvadorans dead.

Aldana was a child, but she remem-

bers seeing bodies on the streets when

her family walked to the market. She

heard later that her father was ques-

tioned about his literacy work, during a

time when students and community ac-

tivists were shot as a warning to others.

“My father felt unsafe in El Salvador,

and because he was from Guatemala, I

know that we moved fairly quickly to

Guatemala, escaping El Salvador,” she

says.

But Guatemala was embroiled in its

own civil war—one that would last 36

years and kill more than 200,000 Gua-

temalans. Aldana and her family stayed

only two years, leaving for the United

States in 1982 in a wave of Central

American migration.

Her mother considered crossing the

U.S. border with her three children

without authorization when Aldana’s

brother was conscripted at age 12 for

military service. Her father was a pas-

tor, so her parents succeeded instead in

securing a religious worker visa.

“In all honesty, had asylum or

refugee status been available to us, we

might have quali ed,” says Aldana,

who was 10 at the time. “We probably

had enough to establish a case; but of

course, then and now, the protections

under law were not being given to this

population.”

They went  rst to Florida, where

her father worked in a church, but they

then moved to Los Angeles to be near

family. Her parents worked in clothing

factories until her father got a job as a

pastor in Phoenix.

Aldana graduated from Arizona

State University and Harvard Law

School, and worked for the Center for

Justice and International Law, a non-

governmental organization in Washing-