Diaspora Diaries

Eusebio Garcia could have ended up like thousands of other teenaged El Salvadoreans: apprehended in the streets, forced into the military and dying in El Salvador’s brutal 12-year civil war. He chose not to and in 1984 Garcia and two of his brothers left their homes in the City of San Marcos, San Salvador and fled first to Guatemala, then across the Mexican border into the United States.

Garcia had managed to escape the dreaded right wing junta of then President Napoleon Duarte, but his freedom would be short-lived. He had no immigration papers and soon after arriving, he was arrested by US immigration near San Antonio, Texas.

Garcia would spend three months in jail before being released on a $1,000 bond. Fortunately, for the then twenty-year-old Garcia, one of his brothers had made it to Canada and gathered enough information for him and his brothers to start a process that would allow them to enter the country as landed immigrants under a refugee program.

Since arriving in Canada in 1985, Garcia has turned his attention to helping refugees and immigrants as well as some of the neediest members of the country where he was born.

“El Salvador is my birthplace. I know the country,” says Garcia. Working with my community in Canada, I see the connection to the things I can do there.”

Garcia first began working with Toronto’s El Salvadorean community through the Religious Society of Friends, a Quaker organization with a long history of involvement with the Latin American community in Canada and abroad. He still works with the organization today, as a Refugee and Settlement Worker, and is responsible for helping people who have fled their countries and have been detained by Canada’s immigration department.

“We all have as human beings a conscience. As time passes, you realize injustices are happening all over the world and you do the little work you can with pleasure,” says Garcia.

For almost two decades, Garcia has dedicated thousands of hours to volunteering, leading the Board of Directors for the Centre for Spanish Speaking Peoples from 1999 to 2002, while also serving as board president of the La Paz Housing Cooperative.

Between 1987 and 2000, he added to his board duties serving the Canadian Multilingual Literacy Centre, the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, Access Alliance Community Health Centre and AMERCT, an organization providing support to Central American refugees in Toronto. He recently stepped down as president of the Salvadorean Canadian Association, but remains its Secretary.

In 2004, Garcia turned his attention to helping children in El Salvador who have been driven by poverty into working to provide financial support to their families.

Eusebio Garcia with other delegates in Morelia, Mexico - May 2007

“A couple of friends came back from El Salvador and told members of the Salvadorean Association the story of a day when they went to the beach and there was this 8 year-old boy selling things on the street. They were saddened this little boy had to do this and befriended him. They checked his marks at school and found out he was doing very well. This is how we came up with the idea of getting scholarships for kids like him,” says Garcia.

Today the Salvadorean Canadian Association, ASALCA, supports 20 high school students with funding from Brock Solutions, an engineering company based in Kitchener, Ontario. For $5000 a year, the students receive uniforms, shoes, schoolbooks and their monthly fee at school. The program first started with ten children from Guadalupe, in the Province of San Vicente, a town that lost more than 80% of its homes during the 2001 earthquake.

The other 10 students come from Arcatao, Chalatenango, a town repopulated by victims of the civil war and Garcia’s birthplace. The children must attend school regularly, show a desire to continue their studies and maintain a grade point average of 70%, says Garcia. With this project, he hopes to reduce illiteracy and provide hope for a better economic future for families.

This year, through the Association, he plans to expand services to El Salvador with the help of a group of Canadian doctors and nurses, who will provide free health care for two weeks in the fall, to needy people of all ages.

Garcia’s work with the El Salvadorean community in Canada has taught him much about the issues of concern to people there. While Canada has been supportive of efforts to alleviate illiteracy and poverty, as well as promoted the development of democracy in El Salvador, he says Canada could be much more effective and gain efficiencies if Ottawa engaged more members of El Salvador’s migrant community when implementing programs.

“There should be an official channel of communication between Canadian representatives abroad and representatives of the Diaspora,” says Garcia.

While the civil war of the 1980s is a part of El Salvador’s history, in many areas of the country, people are devastatingly poor, and health care, education and other social services are inadequate. “There is a lack of everything back home,” says Garcia. Also he says, El Salvadoreans still do not enjoy the level of democracy they expected with the signing of the 1992 peace agreement.

As a member of Salvaide, an organization dedicated to promoting social and economic development in El Salvador, Garcia is aware of much of what goes on in the country at the grassroots level. “[In 2007], people went to protest about the privatization of water services and the government sent the police. Many got arrested and were put in jail,” says Garcia, who worked with other Salvadorean Canadians on a campaign for their release.

He also points to Canadian and other international mining companies polluting the country in a way they could not in Canada. Garcia hopes through dialogue with El Salvador’s diaspora community the Canadian government will be able to persuade Canadian mining companies and their investors to adopt safer standards of operation in Latin American countries.

“We should all enjoy the same things we have here in Canada and not have these inequalities around the world,” says Garcia.

Garcia believes global inequalities, and the absence of democracy, leads often, as history has shown, to human rights violations and the kind of brutal dictatorship that killed 75,000 El Salvadoreans, and forced more than 25 percent of the country’s population to seek refuge abroad.