CLOSING THE CIRCLE O
By JAMES GARBARINO, PhD
Senior Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Human Rights of Children and Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology
n May 17, 2010, I arrived in El Salvador as faculty advisor for a group of undergraduate students from Loyola to begin a nine-day immersion program organized by International Partners in Mission (IPM).
I arrived for that immersion program with El Salvador already
large in my thoughts. One of my professional roles as a psycholo- gist is to serve as a scientific expert witness in death penalty cases in the United States. In these cases, I usually testify for the defense in an effort to help judges and juries understand how early experi- ences of abuse, neglect, trauma, family disruption, and poverty can set a young person on the path for involvement in gangs and other violent criminal activities that may lead to murder. The goal is not to excuse the defendant, but to show why the terrible toll of these early negative experiences should be considered as a mitigating factor in sentencing (in virtually all these cases, the choice is between death and life in prison). When we arrived in El Salvador, I had just begun work on a new
case that had its roots in El Salvador. Alfredo Prieto stands convicted of murders both in California and Virginia, but he started his life in El Salvador. Born in 1965, his childhood was marked by domestic violence in his family and was savagely disrupted by the political vio-
A faculty member visits El Salvador and finds connections with work at home
lence of the 1970s and ensuing civil war of the 1980s. With his father in prison for murder, his mother left him behind to seek work in the Unit- ed States, leaving him in the care of other family members. As a child and a teenager, he witnessed acts of grotesque traumatic violence— beheadings, shootings, and beatings. His grandfather was assas- sinated when Alfredo was 15, and with this, his mother brought him with her to the United States. Living as a poor, fatherless immigrant in Los Angeles, he promptly joined one of the gangs that dominated his community and engaged in a reign of violence and drug-dealing. Out of this terrible developmental cauldron he emerged as a killer, was convicted of murder in two states, and, eventually, I was asked to serve as an expert witness in his case. The violence that dominated Alfredo Prieto’s childhood did not
end with the Salvadoran Peace Accords that brought a formal end to the civil war in 1992. By 2010 in El Salvador, the political violence of the 1980s had been replaced by gang violence—in part because of the actions of demobilized soldiers and rebels who were trained in violence but little else, in part because of the 34,000 Salvadoran gang members who had been deported from the United States back to El Salvador, and in part because of the poverty and illiteracy that affects many Salvadoran communities. Unfortunately, American money funded the political oppression of
the 1980s—to the tune of a million dollars a day in military aid to cor- rupt government. In this political environment, it was dangerous to speak up for social justice on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised
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