Escape to New York

I first learned of Central American Legal Assistance in the fall of 2009, from a letter mailed to my Brooklyn address that I read months after it was posted, having just returned from a long summer in Mexico. The letter was written by Betsy Plum, a CALA caseworker, and described the situation of a Guatemalan woman living in the metropolitan area who was in deportation proceedings while also seeking political asylum. In Guatemala, the woman had discovered that her romantic partner had been involved with men previously linked to the 1998 murder of the Guatemalan bishop and human-rights activist Monsignor Juan José Gerardi Conedera; in a 2001 trial, some of those men were sentenced to prison for that crime. The woman had unwittingly, though at close hand, overheard a conversation implicating at least two of them, including her partner, in a prison murder. (One of the men, Captain Byron Lima Oliva, was murdered in prison, on July 18th of this year.)