Chicago pastor weakens from hunger strike, but his resolve for immigration reform is strong

Chicago pastor weakens from hunger strike, but his resolve for immigration reform is strong
Doctors advise him to stop, but survivor of torture in El Salvador's civil war wants to keep issue on people's mind
By Antonio Olivo
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
10:24 a.m. CDT, June 28, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-immigration-hunger-strike-20100627,0,4971660.story



For years, the Rev. Jose Landaverde has been a tireless advocate for immigration reform, his insatiable appetite for attention to the cause once leading him to camp overnight outside a detention center in Broadview to show that activists like him won't go away until Congress acts on the issue.

His latest campaign is leaving Landaverde, 42, weak and breathless.

Since June 17, Landaverde has been on a diet of water and fruit juice as part of a planned chain of "hunger strikes" meant to draw more urgency to calls for federal legislators to overhaul the nation's immigration system. Landaverde, who has diabetes, took over from another minister, Rev. Martin Santellano, who, supporters say, went 32 days without solid foods.

"I am not doing this because I think something big is going to happen" as a result from Congress or the Obama administration, said Landaverde from Our Lady of Guadalupe Anglican Mission, the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago storefront church in Little Village where he is pastor. "It is more to create conscience; what I am doing is just raising conscience in the people."

Pushing the immigration issue to the top of the federal agenda has been challenging amid a string of national emergencies — from the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico to turmoil over the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. economy.

While President Barack Obama has expressed a willingness to take on immigration reform, his administration has so far mostly responded with tougher enforcement against illegal immigration, including a request to Congress last week for $500 million to hire 1,000 more Border Patrol agents.

Groups pushing for even more enforcement argue that not enough is being done. Meanwhile, immigrant advocates like Landaverde have grown increasingly frustrated, and anxious.

"I feel powerless," Landaverde said, emphasizing, however, that he has little sympathy for felons in the country illegally. "All of these families come and ask me to talk to immigration or go to court with them, and one can't do anything besides guide them through the logistics."

That nagging sense of ineffectiveness has led to increasingly dramatic methods of protest, including civil disobedience that has led to arrests around the country and the hunger strike.

Along those lines, activists in Chicago and other cities also are planning a rally in Washington next month with children of deported immigrants.

Their hope is that the trip will add symbolic weight to a movement that — after marches in 2006 and 2007 that drew several hundred thousand people to the streets — sometimes appears lackluster as time passes.

A recent news conference inside Landaverde's church announcing the Washington trip brought only a handful of supporters. As the audience sat quietly in the stifling summer heat, one activist coached the kids to chant "born in the U.S.A.; don't take my mommy or my daddy away."

Landaverde said he's unsure how long he'll keep up his hunger strike. A doctor has warned him against continuing, he said, comparing the risk of someone with diabetes going without food to a pregnant woman starving herself.

A survivor of torture in El Salvador's civil war who arrived to the U.S. in the early 1990s as a political asylum seeker, he's used to enduring pain and discomfort, he said.

Both his parents were killed by government soldiers when he was a boy in El Salvador, he said. An uncle took Landaverde to join the guerrilla movement. In 1990, he was arrested, then beaten and left for dead at a river bank with a group of other suspected guerrillas who had been captured. Some Jesuit priests came by and rescued them.

The experience, Landaverde said, colors his work today as an Episcopalian priest and an immigration activist.

"I feel like we are facing a civil war now" over immigration, he said, pausing to catch his breath as his undernourished body worked against him.

aolivo@tribune.com