Adios, Eduardo by Dean Gloster

 

            You can be important to someone, even if you’re really a stranger, not a friend.

             (Shoutout to the reader who last year discovered my debut YA Dessert First and then said on Goodreads it was her favorite book “I have ever read in my life. I’m being so serious on that.” Thank you.)

            Back when I was starting out as a lawyer, a whole career ago, I represented immigrants in several pro bono political asylum cases. It was the late 1980s, when El Salvador was in turmoil, with a leftist insurgency in the hills and a brutal right-wing government in the towns, bent on exterminating anyone half as liberal as Ted Cruz. Every night, headless bodies of students, teachers, journalists, human rights workers, and labor organizers were tossed into the El Playon gorge by the Army, the National Guard, the Treasury Police, and their shadowy associated death squads, Escuadrón de la Muerte (generic death squad), Mano Blanca (the white hand of, you know, death), and the even more evocative Brigada Anticomunista Maximiliano Hernández Martínez.

Members of the Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Anticommunist Brigade, circa 1982 

            That last was named after a long-dead former Salvadoran President, whose murderous reign a half-century earlier was a surrealistic real-world rampage out of magical realism: A Brigadier General and occultist with wacky beliefs, Maximiliano was a Central American cross between RFK Jr., and Pol Pot. (But to his cadre of more modern death squad devotees, he was apparently a symbol of the Make Salvador Great Again days of La Matanza, mass peasant liquidation.)

 

       General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, who did specific bad things   

     My first case was Eduardo, a man in his late 20s from El Salvador, who figured (for pretty good reasons) that if he was sent back home, he would die.

El Playon body dump 

            It’s completely legal (even today) under U.S. law to come to this country without a visa and claim political asylum—if you have a well-founded fear of persecution in your home country based on your race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. But then you have to prove it. At a hearing. With, generally, no money to pay a lawyer.

 

            Then, as now, there was something of a bias against granting political asylum to refugees from countries with brutal regimes that the U.S. was extensively funding. So you really had to prove your case.

            We did. We put in declarations, offered testimony, and had a hearing binder with hundreds of pages of supporting documentation about relevant conditions in El Salvador. Eduardo was granted asylum in the U.S. and the Administrative Law Judge went out of his way after the hearing to thank me for putting on such a thorough case—he could be certain that the grant of asylum would not be overturned on appeal. 

            I felt great about doing the work and about getting that result. And I didn’t lose touch with Eduardo, at least not for a couple more decades. 

            For at least 15 years after I helped Eduardo get political asylum, when he had a legal-related question (this was long before Google or AI), every three or four years, he would turn up with his entire small family, including both young children, in the reception area of the law firm where I worked, because he had some minor problem that touched on the law (a car accident or fix-it ticket he didn’t understand), or he got a legal notice of some kind which seemed ominous. I was the only lawyer he knew, and in fact I could solve most of the problems, or reassure him that it wasn’t a problem, or put him in touch with a specific lawyer at legal aid who I’d called, who could help him with the more elaborate solution.

 

            Eventually, I lost touch with Eduardo, and then left the law to write full time.

 

Happy to be done with that

            But I still feel good about doing that political asylum work, despite my country’s more recent turn toward emphasizing racism and terrorizing immigrant communities instead. It felt good to help give a family a chance to be safe and to flourish.

 

            Along with namaste (which in some areas means “the divine spark in me salutes the divine spark in you”) one of my favorite non-English expressions is adios. It’s used as goodbye in Spanish, but it literally means “to God.” It’s an abbreviation of older expressions, I commend you to God, or go with God.

            The last time I saw Eduardo and his small family, my final word to him was adios.

            This world and these times are uncertain, and sometimes sharp-edged. I hope he and his family are safe. Adios, Eduardo. Be well.

Dean Gloster is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. His YA short stories “Death’s Adopted Daughter” and "Proof of the Existence of Dog" are in the anthologies Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop and Spoon Knife 7: Transitions from Autonomous Press. His SF story with Jay Cherrie "Numbers Guys" is in the anthology Spoon Knife 9: Numbers. He is at work on two more YA novels, and the one he's wrapping up now. JUST DEAL is about opposing evil. (Which we should all do.) He makes periodic anti-authoritarian posts on Bluesky, where he is @deangloster.bsky.social