me the day we meet. “It has to be political to make the case for someone applying for asylum, to make the U.S. government understand what is happening.” When the Reyes family’s case found its way to Carlos, he began to see a pattern in the stories of his clients—journalists and social justice and human rights activists and defenders—and their motivations for fleeing to the United States. He began studying “those individuals who, before the attack, had been working on protecting democracy.” A human rights defender, he says, is someone who works professionally in the defense of human rights, while an activist (e.g., a family member of the disappeared) seeks justice where the state fails to provide it. Within just a few months, Carlos had compiled a list of twenty-one human rights defenders who had been assassinated. Justice had not been served in a single case.
The asylum cases coming from Guadalupe are, for Carlos, personal. Born in 1954 in El Paso, he describes himself as a “pocho”—a slang word roughly translating to “Americanized Mexican”—but strongly identifies with Mexico. His mother was from Guadalupe; his grandfather was mayor of the city. As in all border communities, Carlos’s family home “on the other side” was an extension of his own.
“We knew through our family that things were really bad, that Chapo Guzmán had gotten there in 2008, and they were killing the leaders of La Linea,” Carlos explains, referring to the local cartel in Juárez. Some of Carlos’s relatives were among that group—“a little bit removed”—so they knew the details. Then the Reyes Salazar family was referred to him.
The family’s case, Carlos says, represents the entire system of “authorized crime” in Mexico. “The criminals don’t function without authorization from the state,” he says, “whether it’s on a municipal, state, or federal level.” When criminal groups first arrive in a town, they tend to identify and target the area’s political leadership first as a form of “ideological cleansing,” Carlos explains. Over the course of several election cycles for governor of the state of Chihuahua, Guadalupe was the only place in the entire state where a leftist candidate from the PRD party won. The candidates who prevailed there were from the Reyeses’ party; the family was therefore considered “dangerous.”
Aside from relying on open, obvious repression and expelling its people, Mexico also considers those who seek asylum in the United States to be traitors. “People who are under attack are expected to stay there and fight to the death to defend the country that is pushing them out,” he says.
We are having coffee after dinner, and Carlos gestures forcefully with his hands to compensate for the weakness of his voice. He finds it troubling that since the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for seventy years before losing in 2000, came back into power in 2012 under President Enrique Peña Nieto, the government publicly maintains that everything is just fine in Mexico. The United States has bought the story without question. The media have picked up the message and broadcast it repeatedly, and the narrative has swayed international opinion.1
“People applying for asylum in the United States are having their petitions denied, even though extortion and death threats are still happening there, in the streets, in everyday life,” Carlos recounts, heatedly. “The U.S. authorities aren’t asking why people come here without papers … The reason they came here is fear, to escape extortion.”
We’re about to leave the restaurant, but Carlos pauses to tell me a joke he heard from some men being held in immigration detention: “A Honduran, Salvadoran, Mexican, and Guatemalan are in a van. Who’s driving?” He waits a beat. “Immigration!” He delivers the punch line with a raucous laugh.
Martín Huéramo is nervous. He strides assuredly into Carlos Spector’s law office, but then looks around anxiously for a place to sit. He wrings his hands and shifts impatiently in his seat. In a few days he will appear before a judge who will review his case for asylum. His children’s future and his own will depend on the evidence and testimony that he, Carlos, and others present.
Carlos is tough on Martín as they talk about his case, and focuses on the political aspect of his argument. They sit side by side behind Carlos’s mahogany desk, a statuette of Lady Justice, balance in hand, watching over them. They go over the weak points in his defense, which could jeopardize his asylum case. Carlos demands his client’s complete concentration, and asks him for some documentation. One by one, these cold, impersonal appearances before a judge decide the fate of the exiled.
Even before he was a lawyer, Carlos already thought in the political language he has mastered so well. By the time he enrolled in law school at thirty years old, he had already earned a master’s degree in sociology and held several jobs with organizations involved with the Central American and Mexican communities. It was the eighties, and amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants would soon be passed into law. Also around this time, Carlos met Sandra Garza, now his wife.
Sandra’s family traces its roots back to a time in South Texas “before Mexico was Mexico, when it was a Spanish territory,” as she likes to point out. Sandra was involved in the pro-immigrant movement spearheaded by Humberto “Bert” Corona, the Chicano activist who led movements in support of labor unions and rights for undocumented immigrants—a stance which would eventually cause a rift between him and his longtime ally, the farmworker activist Cesar Chavez. During these formative years, Sandra also worked with students who fled Mexico in the wake of the student massacre of 1968, and another violent attack on students in 1971 in an incident known as “el halconazo.”
“I met Sandra when she was an organizer for the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union here in El Paso,” Carlos recalls with a smile. A year has passed since our conversation over dinner at the Mexican restaurant, and now we’re meeting again in his office, in a building on a corner in a popular El Paso neighborhood. Carlos is a new man: although still lean, he’s put on weight, his hair has grown back, his beard has filled in, his gaze is sharp, his voice strong once again.
“Some friends told me, you’ve got to meet this girl, she’s doing what you’re doing,” he says. “When I was introduced to her, I saw she was involved with the same things. I had met the woman who would accompany me, sometimes follow me, and sometimes lead me in the social struggle that comes at such a high emotional and political cost.”
For the Spectors, that struggle has become a way of life. The first political asylum case Carlos won was in 1991. The petitioner, Ernesto Poblano, was a candidate for Mexico’s conservative National Action Party (PAN), opposing PRI. The mayor of Ojinaga, a town in the state of Chihuahua, Poblano received a message one day stating “that he would not be allowed to win and govern,” Carlos explains. Poblano fled across the border, Carlos successfully demonstrated that his client had been persecuted, and he won the asylum case. That was followed by cases representing other political leaders from PAN or the leftist Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), dissidents from PRI, and labor leaders.
The political landscape since the nineties, however, “has changed a great deal,” he says, because of “massive, large-scale repression. In the eighties and nineties,” he explains, “the repression was clearly aimed at leaders.” But even when, during the presidency of Carlos Salinas, more people began to flee and more leftists were assassinated, “Mexicans weren’t applying for political asylum. If it’s rare for this kind of violence to be acknowledged now, just imagine back then.”
Originally established as a relief measure by the United Nations in 1952, political asylum allows people suffering from persecution to seek refuge in a country other than their own if they can demonstrate that the persecution falls under one or more of five categories: religion, race, national minority status, political opinion, or membership in a social group. The persecution can be carried out by the state or by a particular group from which the state is either unwilling or unable to provide protection for the individual. Political asylum grew out of an accord between nations following World War II, at a time when fascism
