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Editorial: Victim and refugee A Guatemalan woman was abused by a sexist state Wednesday, July 07, 1999
Rodi Alvarado Pena, a Guatemalan refugee, lived for 11 years with her husband who beat her routinely. He pistol whipped her, broke windows and mirrors against her head, threatened her with a machete and raped her.
When she took her two young children and tried to leave, he tracked her down and beat her unconscious in front of them. When she went to the police and the courts, she was told that it was a private matter and they couldn't intervene.
Finally, when her children were away with relatives, she left her husband and her country. She sought asylum in the United States.
Her claim was approved in 1996, but the full Board of Immigration Appeals ruled 10-5 recently to overturn the asylum. The board did not dispute the facts of the case. It acknowledges the extent of the torture, the unresponsiveness of the society and governmental institutions and Ms. Alvarado's "genuine and reasonable fear of returning to Guatemala."
Yet, despite all that, the board found that she did not prove that she suffered persecution under any of the five categories enumerated in law: race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group.
It is a decision based less on logic and law than on a fear of what would happen if the eligibility criteria for asylum were broadened. Practical considerations are legitimate, but they must be secondary. Justice, decency and legality must be the primary motivators.
In 1995, the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued guidelines intended to recognize gender-based persecution under asylum laws. Two years later, the INS granted asylum to a woman who fled Togo because she feared female genital mutilation, a common and widespread practice in that country and elsewhere in Africa.
That was an appropriate decision, and it is a straight line from that ruling to one that would have granted Ms. Alvarado asylum as well. But the INS does not want to connect those dots because of the flood of people it fears could squeeze into the country between them.
The fear is probably overblown, but it is also immaterial. As long as Congress has decided that this will be a haven for refugees, asylum should not be denied for those who are persecuted, simply because there are potentially so many people suffering the same persecution.
Ms. Alvarado was a brutally abused woman in a society that tolerates such abuse. Under U.S. policy she deserves protection every bit as much as a political prisoner, or a religious dissenter or a member of a despised ethnic group. As the dissenters on the immigration board wrote, she "has a fundamental right to protection from abuse based on gender."
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