I’m reeling about what’s going on the Middle East, all the destruction, bloodletting and a way out right now looking bleak; the US hasn’t helped with it’s backing of Israel in its bombing of Lebanon to take out Hezbollah. The attack was planned well in advance, Dick Chaney and Elliot Abrams had much to do with pulling it off. Abrams always appears in tragic news, yet most people hardly know who he is, it’s as though he’s forgotten. He lives in the shadows even as he has so much influence on US policy. I remember a couple of years ago Maine Public Radio interviewed him: not one hard question to him surfaced, it was as though he was a celebrity coming to Maine to be treated with kid gloves.

Abrams pushes a lot of memory buttons for me. I think about my experience in El Salvador: as the then Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs during the Reagan Administration advocated for opening up the region to market logic, i.e. letting the hidden hand run everything, no state market intervention, reduce salaries, open sweatshops and export to earn dollars to pay debts to bankers and brokerage firms that have so much to say over economies now, twenty-six years later.

So here I am, Jim Harney, remembering. It’s memory-booting coming as a result of hearing Seymour Hersch, on the Democracy Now! news program, mention Elliot Abrams. And it’s my memory, fashioned out of my experiences in a region of the world known as the “Backyard of the US”. And who has the right to remember? Whose memory counts? Who speaks? Who listens?

I raise all these questions after I read an article in the Bangor Daily News, our local newspaper, about five Mexicans arrested by Ellsworth police hear in Maine, about twenty-five minutes from the house. Police picked them up because they were in a car without a license plate. They spoke little English. They were transported to the county jail practically in the shadow of my house.

A friend and I tried to visit them, four days had transpired since their arrest. The article about them took three days to make it to the local newspaper and it was on Saturday. We went down on a Monday and were told that we had to call back the next morning to talk with an official who could advise us on the matter. When I did a woman told me that they were no longer at the facility: she didn’t know where they were taken, perhaps they were deported she told me.

I called Home Land Security – Customs falls under its umbrella. A woman answered the phone with an unwelcoming voice. I asked who I could talk with about the Mexicans that were arrested and was given the voice mail of an official who never got back to me after I’d asked in the message if those arrested were still in Maine somewhere; I’d like to visit them, perform the “corporal works of mercy”. For all intensive purposes the five disappeared. I never got a chance to be in their presence. I never met Roman Gonzales-Lopez, 22, Lucio Medina Montoya, 33, Javier Santo-Javier, 29, Freddy Juarez-Salas, 18 and Francisca Ortega-Robles, 19.

I spend time thinking about their voices, their memories, the risk-filled world they traveled to make it to Maine and work in agriculture up here; most tourists who visit this ‘paradise’ part of the world in the summer never get a chance to meet them, never mind see the sweat on their bodies after they’ve picked our food. What of their memory? What of their voice? And who gives two hoots about them? Then enter the Gospel, the narrative of a peripatetic preacher who privileged the oppressed, excluded, all the vulnerable ones the society in which Jesus walked could care less about. The Gospel narrative takes issue with the structural, dominant one in place these days that allows the powerful to cobble the poor, push them further to the edge of the world.

I gave a talk not long ago at Salem State College and a professor had done some amazing research and he shared with me this chart.

I thought of the five Mexicans in the 32% of migrants prosecuted. When I see the red of the chart I think of my time with undocumented people headed north last year. The red area illustrates to me how there is a “profiling” taking place, the most vulnerable sought out and what does that do for me when I think of who I am, Jim Harney, living in the 21st Century when there is so much upheaval going on in countries south of us in Mexico and Latin America. How do I begin to even imagine faces behind the red, behind bars, handcuffed, sent back to their homes where they almost immediately begin a dangerous journey north? Who brings us to where they are so that we see them, push our imaginations so that we ponder our common humanity with them, even imagine ourselves in their positions, leaving families on the edge of starvation with multiple members out in the workforce earning $2 a day, if that. And their voices, the tradition out of which we come tells us that we strengthen our voices when we’re able to hear theirs – its called a gift of grace, could I even call it miraculous this connection with the oppressed that allows us to see a world dominated by market values in a different way, and supports love, mercy, generosity, justice and peace as power words meshed in our language and flesh that no imperial power can take away from us. It permits us to act, stand in the middle of the fray, argue a point that contradicts a perspective that three-quarters of our fellow citizens affirm: the undocumented need to be sent back.

In that 32% - red area, I see customs people stopping people walking in the streets, asking for identification; chasing mostly young people running through deserts after they’ve jumped fences; helicopters with flood lights beaming down on them, sophisticated IT technology monitoring their moves and the occasional bullet that downs someone running. A dream, for many, turns into a nightmare.

I’m troubled by the red area. I’m challenged to grapple with a history that lies behind it; a US history of sticking with dictators in Central America that wreaked havoc and death; the US’s war on the poor that ultimately meant the loss of hundred’s of thousands of lives and the ultimate imposition of an economy that implied human beings facing inhuman conditions that would force them to leave their homes to find work in the states, and many of them ending up in the 32% red zone. So the dictators and a market driven economy that eclipse human beings helps push imagination to understand why it is that migrants feel enraged at the lack of recognition of their humanity; considered un-American; as things. A famous helicopter video scene filming police chasing a van filled with Mexicans on a turnpike somewhere in Los Angeles leaps out of that red area. I’m terrified by the logic embedded in it that forced human beings to leave their homes, loved ones, all the hard discussion with those who would be left behind as to the urgency of a family member having to leave home, risk death, and to face being hunted by customs in the United States of America, jailed and then deported; then a repeat of this violence happening over again. Without the economic dimension meshed in the red, it can’t be understood, dealt with or changed. A Catholic priest in Aqua Prieta, across the border from Douglas, Arizona, told me that migratory flows won’t let up; on the contrary they will increase.

I was down in Boston when many undocumented people came out from under the shadows and gathered on Boston Common. Jamaica Plain, a section of Boston with a high Latina/o population was almost shut down of May 1: something extraordinary is happening in our country. The people who rallied in the Common don’t go unnoticed by those who control financial capital: Latin Americans send back billions each year to their country of origin and it’s women who send back the largest chunk of hard earned money to their families.

A New York Times article brought home some of this energy to the surface. When I read it I was challenged: what do I do to respond to a woman by the name of Elvira Arellano coming out from under the shadows and a faith community in Chicago taking her in and giving her sanctuary.

Arellano says while in sanctuary she’s on “holy ground,” she “will know that God wants me to be an example of the hatred and hypocrisy of the current policy of this government.”

James Galbraith notes in Mother Jones magazine that people like Elvira didn’t want to leave their homes: “They were forced to, by the Latin American debt crisis, by NAFTA and the liberalization of trade in corn, which threw millions of poor Mexican farmers off their land. (Now the same will happen in Central America, with CAFTA.) It was predictable. Food goes south, people come north; the migrants are the victims, not the architects, of globalization.”

With little space to create a situation where families can be taken care of with a job that meets basic needs, health care and education then family members take the risk of coming north and facing a border that has been militarized. A border where money-making contracts go to Halliburton, little has been learned from the companies corrupt experience in Iraq; its milking taxpayers and a powerful connection to Dick Chaney who has done well by the company he was once CEO of. At the border coincidentally on the fifth anniversary of 9/11,” writes Paul Taylor, the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) is scheduled to announce the winner of an ‘unusual invitation’ to adapt military technologies to building a virtual fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. In May, large defense contractors were given two weeks to develop proposals for what promises to be a $2 billion contract running into the 2010s. It is the damnedest way to fund research and development or technology transfers -- considering the federal government has very little to show for the $425 million it spent on border technologies in the last decade.” It’s the Bush Administration taking care of its own.

I haven’t forgot about “Operation Jumpstart” 6,000 National Guardspeople President Bush ordered to our southern border to cuddle up to the right as he was loosing in the battle to win the hearts and minds of his own party.