“OUR COUNTRY IS FULL”
You need a story. That’s what they say, anyway. You need sympathetic characters, a villain, some violence, maybe a dramatic escape. That’s what it takes to gain asylum in the United States. You need lots of other things, too—a principled Border Patrol agent, a competent asylum officer, a good lawyer, a fair-minded judge—but before any of that you need a story, something that can be fitted into the rapidly narrowing margin of American benevolence. You need a man, say, draping his arm around your shoulder, telling you, “We are watching you.”
That’s where the story of Gaspar Cobo Corio and Francisco Chávez Raymundo might begin. “We are watching you,” the man said out of nowhere. “You didn’t even notice that I have been following you. This was not just today. I have always been following you.”
It was not the first time that Gaspar had been threatened, but this time—right after a town hall meeting he’d organized with Francisco, a fellow Mayan human rights activist—was different from the harassing phone calls, the angry texts, the break-ins, and even the stickups the two had endured ever since they’d started challenging Guatemala’s culture of official impunity.
For years, the two friends had been helping their fellow Ixil Maya testify against General Efraín Ríos Montt, the former president who in 2013 was hauled into court on genocide charges for his role as the architect of the bloodiest campaigns of the country’s 36-year civil war. Since Ríos Montt still had many powerful supporters in the military and the government, joining the case against him was a dangerous proposition. Gaspar and Francisco spent time assisting would-be witnesses with whatever they needed—lodging, food, safe passage to the courthouse—so that the darkest moments of the war could reach the light of day.
There are plenty of Guatemalans who still deny there was a genocide. This casual erasure is so common that one of the municipal candidates participating in Gaspar and Francisco’s town hall had been saying it for months: No hubo genocidio. So that night they pressed him on it—after all, it wasn’t some abstraction for the many Ixil Maya who had lost family members.
The man who followed Gaspar after the event, presumably an ally of the candidate, was not happy about this. “We have warned you many times,” he said. “I am going to be clear with you that this is your last chance.” He told Gaspar that they knew where his family and friends lived, and that they were monitoring them at all times. Gaspar, realizing that he’d never seen this man before in his life, asked him why he was doing this.
The man pulled Gaspar’s left hand toward his waistband. He felt cold metal. “Thank you for the warning,” Gaspar told the man. Moments later, he found himself alone. He contacted Francisco with the news of what had just happened. They realized they’d just become characters in a storyline they wanted no part of, and so, after laying low for the better part of a week, they did what they knew they needed to do. They found a coyote, said goodbye to their families, and got the hell out of Guatemala.
checks all the boxes of a successful asylum claim. They belong to an indigenous group that was targeted in a civil war, were threatened with death for their work as human rights activists, and have a well-founded fear of being persecuted if they return home. But when they fled and headed north in June 2019, it was in the midst of the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on the American asylum system. For months, the southwest border had been a no-go zone for asylum seekers: First, Border Patrol agents limited the number of claims they’d process in a given day; then, they started sending asylum seekers back to Mexico to wait out their day in court; when that wasn’t enough, the administration put into effect an asylum ban that gave immigrants a vanishing chance of protection at the
