The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas by Roberto Lovato

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas by Roberto Lovato Robertolovato.com An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time—and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten. The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the most barbaric massacres and crimes against humanity in recent history. Roberto returned from war-torn El Salvador to find the United States on the verge of unprecedented crises of its own. There, he channeled his own pain into activism and journalism, focusing his attention on how trauma affects individual lives and societies and began the difficult journey of confronting the roots of his own trauma. As a child, Roberto endured a tumultuous relationship with his father Ramón. Raised in extreme poverty in the countryside of El Salvador during one of the most violent periods of its history, Ramón learned to survive by straddling intersecting underworlds of family secrets, traumatic silences, and dealing in black-market goods and guns. The repression of the violence in his life took its toll, however. Ramón was plagued with silences and fits of anger that had a profound impact on his youngest son, and which Roberto attributes as a source of constant reckoning with the violence and rebellion in his own life. In Unforgetting, Roberto interweaves his father’s complicated history and his own with first-hand reportage on gang life, state violence, and the heart of the immigration crisis in both El Salvador and the United States. In doing so he makes the political personal, revealing the cyclical ways violence operates in our homes and our societies, as well as the ways hope and tenderness can rise up out of the darkness if we are courageous enough to unforget.

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Today I'm really excited to have this guest on. We've been having kind of this serendipitous moment going from James Baldwin, and for some reason, it's all kind of fallen into Black Lives Matter and dealing with the racism in this country and the questions we're asking ourselves as to what we contribute, what we need to change, et cetera, et cetera, the breakage of our culture and our society. You know, coronavirus has made a lot of stuff worse, and of course, we've seen different things. We just saw recently another shooting of an unarmed black man,

and it's creating riots in the streets. And so, you know, we're dealing with these questions and what's going on with our society. His name is Roberto Lovato. The book is Unforgetting, a memoir of family, migration, gangs, and revolution in the Americas. We just got a copy of it, so you can take and order this book up. Roberto was born in San Francisco to Salvadorian immigrants who raised him in the city by the Bay's historic Mission District, home to the highest concentration of murals of any neighborhood in the world. Lovato is an educator, journalist, and writer based on the writer's grotto. He is also the author of Unforgetting, as we mentioned, a book today from HarperCollins, a recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center.

Lovato has reported on the drug war, violence, terrorism in Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France, and the United States. Welcome to the show, Roberto. How are you? I'm as well as one can be in a state that's smoked, literally smoked out, where you wake up in the morning and it's got, you smell smoke and it's just, you know, difficult, especially when you have like family, like my father who has asthma. But, you know, we are nothing if not resilient people as Salvadorans. There you go. There you go. And San Francisco's too.

You guys are used to earthquakes and fires, but yeah, it's tragic what's going on there. I look at the fire map and I just go, oh my God. And it's destroyed so many beautiful monuments and stuff that we had of great trees and forests. Yeah, I just drove across the state to help a friend out in a little emergency he had. And literally, the whole drive along Highway 5, which crosses from San Francisco to L.A., was a cloud of smoke. This whole year? Like, I've had friends that they already have the mask for coronavirus, so they're using it in San Francisco for the mask to, you know,

weed out the smoke smell and stuff. This whole year, man, I hope this is, like, the bottom because I don't want to know what 2021 is. So let's get to your book. You've written this excellent book. Can you give us the plug so that people can order this book up on the interwebs? Yeah, they can find it anywhere books are sold. I'm encouraging people to go to Bookshop, which is on the web, and order HarperCollins,

and you can see the list of different places to buy the book. Okay. And give us, why did you write this book? What is it about? Give us a, why did you write it, and what's the overview? Well, I started writing it in 2015, by which point it was already clear the direction the world was going in. And I had, you know, for like almost 30 years been sitting on this experience of war, extreme violence by governments and gangs, mass grave sites, and family secrets that I didn't even know about for all these years. And I feel like, I felt like, well, I've got a story of resilience to tell in a time where we need stories of resilience of how

to, I mean, people are talking about apocalyptic well salvadorans in particular have been talking about it for a very long time in terms of just being one of the most the most violent place on earth when i was there in 2015 when there were death squads during the war where 80 000 people were killed in a tiny country the size of massachusetts so these are the kinds of and there's an adventure in it. There's a love story in it as well. And you know, I want to share a story of resilience and love and of humanity because quite frankly,

the image of Salvadorans in the United States and, you know, around the world is that of the MS-13, the gang, which, you know, I've had students go and duke on the internet for stories about Salvadorans. Inevitably MS-13, the gang, which, you know, I've had students go and duke on the Internet for stories about Salvadorans. Inevitably, MS-13 comes up. So I wrote it because I want to set the record straight about how complex we are as people and as anyone else is. That's brilliant. I mean, that's the real story of human beings. I mean, we're not just subjugated to, you know, one certain label or whatever the case may be.

And I think what we're finding in through this, like I say, the serendipity discussions we've been having, learning a lot of different history, having a lot of different book authors that have published recently that, you know, we're talking about the Reagan years. We're talking about all the different factors that are going in. You know, we've even gone back to the Puritan thing of the city on the hill where people came here in white privilege and white exceptionalism or perceived white exceptionalism, let's put it that way. And kind of this extraordinary way in how we've built different racist societies, racist policies, redlining, et cetera, et cetera, and, you know, coming back from from Baldwin 200 or 300 years ago. And your story weaves into that with gangs in California

and then, of course, El Salvador and then, of course, what we're seeing in the White House now with people using MS-13 as a strawman and everything else. Do you want to get the MS-13 out of the way? Should we talk about that as to how big of a deal that really is or isn't? Let's put it that way. Can I talk about a point I think you made is really sharp, Chris, about not just California but about our history right now

and our history still remaining in the interviews you're doing, in the books and stuff. You're still hearing this stuff about the past i just want to speak to that if i may so i think that the reason that you you're very astute observation that history is still coming back to bite us and it's coming by to bite us in the form of Donald Trump, of the policing, of a lot of different things that come from California. Okay, Donald Trump isn't from California, but he benefited from California's contribution to the White House, which is Ronald Reagan. and neoliberal economics and the policing and military models that we're living with now, that we're trying to abolish and do away with because of the way that they kill people and jail people. And so a lot of this has to do with california and reagan and so i just happened to grow up in the 70s uh and 80s i was a lowrider i was in a little group we called ourselves los origin originales the originals which is not a very original name we weren't really a clique

you know we weren't really hardened because there weren't really hardened gang salvadoran structures my friends were puerto rican and chicano and other and we were basically stealing cars doing drugs um dating girls and stolen cars and uh you know doing doing the crazy thing listening to oldies and low riding and stealing etc so um. So I grew up in that, but I actually got on my knees. Speaking of going back to it, I actually had to get out of that lifestyle, and I became a born-again Christian. I was a right-wing. And you could say kind of a neo-fascist right-wing evangelical because that's kind of a lot of what has happened to evangelical churches right now.

So what motivated you to flip the switch on that, if you don't mind me interjecting? To get out of the church? No, to flip the switch from going into, you know, being in little gangs and, you know, stealing cars and stuff that you mentioned there. Was there a moment that made you flip to go into religion? There's a number of things. You know, the thing about history, whether it's world history, national history, or individual history, it usually doesn't come in the way that they tell us that, for example, Hitler just came down out of nowhere.

Trump didn't just come down out of nowhere. There's a process and a history underneath it that make it possible. So in my case, I was an avid reader as a kid to the point where I stole books from the library here in San Francisco. I'm going to pay them back. James Baldwin, I think, did a little bit of the same thing. Yeah, a lot of us poor kids that love reading did. But the book I most read, though, was the Bible. And I did it partly because I liked the writing,

but also because I was the only one in my family that didn't do First Holy Communion and all the Catholic rituals. So eventually when I just had to get out of this lifestyle, I had a friend who was a born-again Christian, who became a born-again Christian, and he left our little clique. And he planted the seeds and he stirred the pot of my own biblical background. And my mom's constantly harping on me about my lifestyle, made me kind of look for a way out of the life that I was in.

And I found Jesus and I found God. And unbeknownst to me, I found anti-abortion politics and Ronald Reagan. And I got on my knees in 1984 to play for the re-election of Ronald Wilson Reagan. I'm just confessing to you and your audience, probably for the first time ever in media. Bless you, my son. Go and, I don't know, I'm not Catholic. Thank you.

Thank you for involving me. That's the closest thing I could do to a priest is confessional. So there you go. No, but this is interesting. This is really interesting. So you went on this journey uh where you flipped your lifestyle and um and you became i mean were you were you uh did you start embracing now when you said you've uh prayed for his re-election was that in california or was that when he became that was for his presidency and and and and and i i i share that story again because I think it's a story of resiliency.

I overcame that eventually. I got out of that. But I share it because the church was where I first learned to be a militant. As people were reading my book, I went on to do things that you could call militant of another more left orientation in a revolutionary context. And the church was where I first learned to be militant though because there's fire in the blood of jesus yeah onward christian soldiers the fight the world is a fight between good and evil there's a certain understanding that i want people to understand right now as we face the election of our lives which is we're dealing with i think a-fascist, highly motivated force of zealots who have God, who believe God is on their side, and that they can do no wrong, and that we have

our work cut out for us, because on our side, we don't have anything anywhere near that kind of militancy. Definitely. So let me ask you this. became a um a born-again christian did you did you start bashing immigrants or your culture or or you know there's some people that i see flip like i see i see people that support trump that are that are not white and and they're they're actually like i'll see people that i immigrated this country and i'm against immigrants like i'll see the interviews i'm and i'll just be, what the hell's going on, right? So did you go through any of that with your morning in Christians? I didn't go through that as much because I think the Latino evangelical movement, because it is a movement, it's massive.

And people should be fearing that and aware of that in their families. Their families are being subjected to this extreme level of mind control using the Bible. And I don't use that lightly. I'm a journalist, but I was subjected basically to mind control with the interpretation of the Bible and the politicization of it. And this is what is behind the kind of lunacy that you see backing Trump. So I, you know, I got in because I was desperate to get out of a thing like anybody. And I, you know, there's nothing wrong with finding solace in the Bible or in God. It's just a matter of the way that it's twisted for political reasons.

So the Evangelical Latino Church is now a very important part of Ray of, of Trump's strategy in the Latino community, along with all those cops that are Latino, all those border patrol agents that are Latino. There's 60 million of us. People have no. And so this is like one of the secret weapons that they're going to use in the elections coming up.

And I want to people to understand how these things came about. I was up early when the main thing was abortion. They use abortion to kind of politicize you and then tell, then feed you Ronald Reagan and everything else that goes with it. But eventually I left. Yeah. And, and,

and getting back to Ronald Reagan and we'll talk about this some more in the book, and William Barr, et cetera, et cetera, did you see the times where Ronald Reagan was coming up as a governor and he would go out and do his racial stuff on immigrants and stuff and Latino families? Did you see any of that? You know, that was my pre-political age. You know, I was my pre-political age. You know, I was stealing cars, man. I was, you know, low-riding.

I was, you know, being a kid, a working-class kid. Because it was interesting to me to read the history. And you mentioned about history and why it's important. You know, we've been talking about this whole arc of what people perceive our heritage is and our culture is and stuff. And white exceptionalism and, you know, the shining city on the hill. Reagan was a big advocate of using that. In fact, he really politicized it. People use religion and the Bible, especially in white Christian churches, to do the most ugliest, heinous things that we've seen done to Indians and immigrants and African-American black people. But I always say the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history, and thereby we go.

You know, and so this historical thing and this discussion of what we've had with the fallout of these crevices that have opened even wider and become so unglaringly unignorable where we can't look away from them anymore because coronavirus has broken everything in our society. So now we're having to look within and go, what the hell is going on? So you talk about this in the book of Unforgetting, A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas. Why did you structure the timeline of this book the way you did? Because you kind of hop around from different things and telling the different stories that are in it.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question, Chris's there's there's three layers in my book it jumps from 2015 the present time to my adolescence from the say from my from my uh you know early adolescence to to 20s and 30s from 1970s to the 2000 and then the early 1930s in El Salvador because it's as much about the story of me and my dad and my dad's story as it is about violence and policing and what brings it about but I try to show this for different reasons one because I want to show the reader how connected and living that history really is. When we see the Republican convention and all the lunacy that's there, that doesn't come out of a vacuum, Chris. It comes out of history. Nothing is not historical.

Everything has a history. So I think the reason I structure it that way is I want to encourage people to do what I did, which is go back and unforgettable things about my past and unlearn them. We have to unlearn the way we've been taught the past. So I want people to pay attention to the way history is structured. And the other reason is I've, you know, I was in a war in El Salvadorador in the late 80s early 90s i witnessed it i was a participant i saw gang violence after the war gang violence that surpassed the killing per day and per month during the war and so that that continues to this day where el sabador still one of the more violent countries on earth.

It's also related to another one of the more violent countries on earth, the United States, who is violent, but is violent in El Salvador's case, not directly, but indirectly through its aid, training, policing, military. You know, we don't see what goes on. So I wanted readers, I structured it that way because I wanted readers to understand not just the violence, but the trauma and the way trauma, you know, breaks up your sense of time and your sense of space. Like I'm here right now talking with you and I look at you and you're wearing your hat and it kind of looks like a military hat to me. And I suddenly freeze up and i start freaking out

right and i and i i'm not in the present i start moving somewhere else oh i want the readers to understand what how deep trauma is and what it works like or bring them as close as i can to it yeah because i've had you know part of the cathartic work i did in the book was uh to deal with my trauma to actually retained a therapist before I wrote this book, precisely because I knew I was going to open up the Pandora's box of the different traumas, not just that I lived, but that I inherited from my father. My father has this heavy secret I cannot reveal, or people will not go to read the book, because there's a heavy secret my dad has, that in my life was nothing short of astonishing. So to read the book because there's a heavy secret my dad has. This, in my life, was nothing short of astonishing.

Yeah. So to understand the way that my dad's history and my dad's past influenced my decisions to be a crazy kid that did what I did, whether it was, you know, in a little, you know, my little group of friends as a teen, or whether it was going into the insurgency in El Salvador, you had to understand my dad. So I structured it in these three different layers that go back and forth because that's the way trauma, that's the way memory works. We don't, you know, at any moment you can go back and think about your ex-girlfriend or a childhood memory or something bad that happened to you.

You know, and it's important to learn the history of the people. I grew up reading a lot of history books as a kid, and I would read about, you know, how America would go around the world going, we're democracy and funding democracy. And I would see the failures of what we would do, the CIA assassinations, the Cuba, what was it, Pinochet in Chile, the different things that we would back some of these real monsters.

And we would do it, and they weren't the best leaders, and we'd be like, well, this is the best we have to work with. But we would back them, and the ugly and horrific things that they would do to their people, and we would still stand behind them, that they would do to their people. And we would still stand behind them and they would become to represent us. Even Castro reached out to us as a child and adored the United States. But we, you know, we were just like, hey, we're dancing with somebody else. And, you know, he's bad for the people. And but we're going to stick with him. And and we didn't see the whole thing coming.

Well, we did. We, you know, did we you know whatever you know but we oh there's all these different examples if you look at our history of america where we we try to put our thumb on the scale and we end up either influencing the slaughter of just millions of people uh cumulatively throughout everything we've done uh even obama's um you know bombing of of of of droning and stuff, the fallout from that was just sickening and extraordinary. We talked before the show, and I became aware of this recently

when we were having this conversation with one of my guests, the El Mazote Massacre. And this is pretty interesting, and it encouraged me to want to know more about what was going on in El Salvador, and this is during the Reagan years where literally we trained the Salvadorian army under Reagan, and they just went in and started slaughtering just citizens, the people. One of the things I do in my book is I show up close and personal in interviews and people I got to know over the 30 years that I was describing mostly in the book and uh I got to know death squad operatives

the part is you go through a track back to El Salvador and you go through I you go through a line of graves or a there's so many graves I many graves, I guess, in El Salvador. And so you track through it and you get to, you go back to your history and, and, and, and start understanding it better yourself. Is that correct? Yeah. Those mass graves are, are symbols. They're symbols of impunity of, of people that got away with murder literary because most of the mass graves in El Salvador and the individual graves, whether it's the gangs or whether it's government or whether it's death squads or the military in El Salvador,

most of those graves that are littering the country, literally, thousands of graves, are undug, unstoried, uninvestigated, and therefore, they're the perpetrators of all that mass murder that's in your death squad operatives, military people, gang members, they're living, they're enjoying impunity. So they're a symbol of impunity. They're also a symbol of trauma and memory, mass graves, because I interview those families and those families who, if you lost a member of your family they're one of those mass graves and you don't know where they are you're basically almost becoming yourself a hungry ghost yeah because you you're unresolved about your loved one who's missing and you want to know at least that they're how they died and they died and you and you're just there's this

word in spanish called luto prolongado, prolonged mourning. It's one of the great sufferings that there is, is not to know what happened to your loved ones and to live with that and to carry that cross. So I went to these different mass grave sites and there's mass graves that go from El Salvador all the way to Texas and Arizona, right? In Texas, I found mass graves that, you know, justice of the peace, we don't know any better, would see bodies of migrants who were dying in the deserts of Texas, put their remains of children and mothers in plastic bags and milk cartons and put them in mass grave sites in places like Brooks County, Texas.

So, yeah, and so the people that have perpetrated a lot of this murder, I've interviewed them, and I've gotten to know them. And, you know, I have to report that I actually found humanity in them. Yeah. They're an expression of the human race. They're not a good part of the human race, but they're human. And I think when we paint people as monsters solely, it really doesn't help the process of healing and understanding and policy based on healing and understanding, instead of policies based on policing, criminalizing people, which as we see in the case of the young man that was shot in Wisconsin, you know, that's just somebody who's dehumanized, shot in the back eight times in

front of his kids. That's from military training that the police in Wisconsin, in Los Angeles, and other police have gotten over the years. And check this out in my book. Some of the trainers, I found out that some of the trainers i found out that some of the trainers from el salvador that trained the dead squads to kill 80 000 people wow they came back to la wisconsin and police departments throughout the country to train the police in what we call what i call counterinsurgency policing yeah it's astounding, really, when you think about it, that if you look at the uniforms of our police, they've gotten more militarized.

They have more equipment. This was thought out, and I have parts about that in my book, The Way El Salvador Influenced Policing in the United States because of the trainers. Yeah. You know, the militar because of the trainers. Yeah. You know, the militarization of the police in our state, you know, we first really started seeing the results of that with 2014. I had the name and it just went by me.

It was in, but we saw the huge outburst. That's really where Black Lives Matter came out of. It was the, I want to use the name lives matter came out of um it was the i want to use the name brown but in 2014 it was during obama and we saw the militarization the police i remember seeing when uh i think it was uh it was either the early obama years or late bush years where they're shutting down the iraq war at least you know shutting down the scale of it and they had cut this deal deal where they were going to distribute all the extra

militarization gear and give it to all the police departments. And me and a lot of friends went, that's wrong. That's going to go in a bad way, man. We don't need to be giving those boys military toys. Recently we learned that the LA School District

Police Department had rocket launchers. You're just like, why do you guys need rocket launchers? Like, what's going on in your school, man? But, yeah, a lot of this goes into the same patterns and things that we're trying to resolve right now with racism, with trying to understand one another, with trying to, the history of everyone and what leads them. You know, unfortunately, our politics try and create this two-dimensional straw man sort of thing. Trump and Stephen Miller really pushed the MS-13. As we talked in pre-show, there's only maybe 10,000 MS-13 members here in the United States. They're not taking over cities. I mean, we'd be seeing that on the national news if somebody was,

anyone was taken over a city. Really? Yeah. Yeah, no. You know, Donald Trump and Bill Barr figure a very important figure in my book. Attorney general William Barr and Donald Trump had a press conference last month in July and it was basically how they were going to destroy MS-13. And they had all these mugshots and about a dozen lawyers in the Oval Office. And they were painting this threat that they're now calling terrorist. And, you know, MS-13 has a history of being called the most violent gang in the world. I've challenged journalists, my fellow journalists, to show me a single statistical, any statistical evidence that shows that they're somehow the most violent. Nothing.

So they're most violent because they have tattooed faces. And early on when MS-13 started in LA, when I was living there, they were using machetes to defend themselves. Why were these immigrant kids using machetes? Because they were poor immigrant kids who didn't have any connection to the drug trade at the time or the money to buy the Uzis or AK-47s or M-16 or other semi-automatic weapons that the Crips, the Bloods, the Mexican Mafia, and other gangs in L.A. So these kids, because they got the machetes, LAPD started looking at them as being somehow more violent, as if hitting somebody with a machete is more savage than shooting them in the face with an Uzi. I hate to be so graphic, but I kind of make my point.

And so this image of MS-13 as this extraordinary threat is continued from, say, the L.A. riots when Attorney General William Barr came to L.A. and he did the most massive redeployment of FBI resources in U.S. history at that time. He deployed 300 FBI agents away from pursuing foreign agents and foreign threats to pursuing MS-13 in LA and other gangs. And this was during the Reagan years?

This was in 92. So that was in the transition from the Bush to the Clinton era. Bill Clinton, candidate, actually came to visit our communities in South L.A. during the riots. Some of my people that I work with, and they're in the book, met Bill Clinton. And we were talking about the problems, but nobody seemed to really want to hear our story. Because you haven't seen Central Americans tell their own story. Everybody talks about MS-13 except Central Americans in public. So Bill Barr deploys his resources to fight gangs.

And you look at his language and it's the same language he used last July, except it's been escalated. And so when they did that press conference last month, I went around and I called, okay, let's, this is a big terror threat. Let's call the police departments where MS-13 operates in the Virginia, Long Island, here in San Francisco, LA, Houston, and a few other places. I called all of these places and I talked to police officials. Some of them didn't want to talk with me because there's, they're cops that are pretty kind of pro-Trump quite frankly, all of these places. And I talked to police officials. Some of them didn't want to talk with me because there's,

there are cops that are pretty kind of pro-Trump quite frankly, and they're trying to cover for him. But the ones that did, like here in San Francisco, you'd think with a terror image that they've killed a lot of people. And guess how many people were killed here in San Francisco in 2019 by MS-13? I wouldn't know. Two. Two. This year, well, but this I wouldn't know. Two. Two.

This year, well, but this year it's zero. Yeah. In Long Island where Trump has, you know, basically based most of his MS-13 crusade with the help of local law enforcement and federal law enforcement officials, sadly, under Bill Barr, have created this, you know, image of MS-13 threat that has even made the State of the Union. It was talked about in the Republican Convention last night.

And so how many people were killed in Long Island when they sent it? Well, you can see it in an article in Newsday. There's something like 5.5 people per year killed in that part of Long Island per year. So basically, you have 10,000 members of MS-13 killing piecemeal numbers, tiny amounts of people, and you have basically a handful or less than a handful of white supremacists with semi-automatic weapons in a matter of minutes, killing more people than all 10,000 MS-13 in one year. Just think about it. And when you look at the way that the image is projected, it's obscene. The imbalance, the lie, the myth-making.

Yeah. The history of politics goes back, you know, thousands of years. And what every politician has always done is created the straw man and the immigrant, no matter who it was. I mean, even Jesus was a wandering, you know, his parents were wandering immigrants. They, you know, had to go find a place to give birth. And it's always been that way. And we never learn from this like people

just never learn and go oh there's a politician you know making blaming immigrants for everything and all our problems whatever uh yeah we've seen that movie yeah we're not going to fall for that but we do and and unfortunately we keep regurgitating this hellhole of racism and everything else that still you know know, needs to be resolved. And I said to Gladden that when he was on the show, I said, I said, are you and I still going to be talking about how we didn't learn from James Baldwin 55 years from now? And he goes, I hope not. And I hope not, too. But but it's important for stories like yours to be told so that we can get to know the El Salvadorian people, the experience and everything else.

And so that we can learn more about each other, what our histories are and where we come. And the other thing I encourage a lot of my white friends, whatever you want to call them, white people, my white people, to start learning about their history. You know, we've talked about the city on the hill and the ugly things that we've done and what we've done done you know a lot of it's been religious based like we need to save those indian heathens with our god bible and you know they're unwashed and you know filthy and you

know all that racist sort of stuff that we did that we we literally murder and enslave those people under that the guise of, well, we're saving them. And so, you know, we have to learn how this goes into it and how it plays into it. And a lot of, you know, one thing I've been learning, especially with the Reagan years and everything that we did, like with NAFTA, NAFTA helped create a situation where a lot of South American farmers and Mexican farmers couldn't compete with the subsidized corn. So they were forced to start growing poppies or doing drug farms instead of what they were doing before normal farms. This is an example of how America, we contribute with policy to destroy other countries, and then we create the hell holes and havoc havoc that go on in them and they're

a direct result of what we're doing and then when the folks come here because they you know we've we've contributed to the the the insanity that's gone on like el salvador we we trained all those all those military that went and killed those civilians funded them trained them politically protected them yeah and then when they come here then we're like well we don't want you and you're like well you're the ones who helped to get us you know what i mean it's the the insanity and stupidity of this american ideal or exceptionalism just makes me mental when you look at the creation of it i mean you can even look at osama bin laden and we created the monster who came and gave us 9-11. We built that machine. And we funded it, you know, the same sort of crap.

So anyway, it's really interesting to talk about your book. One symbolism that you use throughout the book, and this is part of El Salvadoran culture, and I thought it was interesting, the background of it because like you like you say that the machete is used as a as a racial um as a racial item in in in the thrust of you know perception of violence uh tell us what the machete actually means to in el salvadorian culture well any salvadorans right now they're listing no either have or no salv Salvadorans who have a machete, a souvenir machete in the house. And so somehow that became a symbol of our savagery, which is the language that Donald Trump uses.

But in fact, it comes from agricultural society. You know, you cut the cane and you're in the country. It was primarily an agricultural society up until about 15 years, 20 years ago. So, you know, we have these, you know, now people are mostly urban. And so this machete was always a part of our, I grew up with a machete on our mantle. It was like a source of like, wow, you know, our roots in the countryside.

And that's been turned into something else for political reasons. That's why I wrote the book, because I want people to come back understanding the complexity that is simplified behind these racist manipulations and machinations and stuff. And so, like, I hate to go back to him, but Bill Barr is a critical persona in my book. He not only started policing and the heavy policing of gangs in the United States, including MS-13, after the LA riots. He also then, remember the Immigration and Naturalization Service was a part of the Justice Department under Bill William Barr.

So the LAPD, federal law enforcement, including the INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service, came together to deport gangs to El Salvador, a country that had no history of U.S.-style gangs. So I interviewed these kids. I was with them during the riots and after the riots. And I also saw what Bill Barr was doing. And it's just the cynicism to see him 30 years later continuing this enterprise of racial hatred and politics and scapegoating.

And Christian bigotry, too, as well, because he plays in that whole white christian thing that's why i that's again that's why i came out as a born again christian in the book because i'm not anymore but yeah we have to understand these people we are people they've taken the bible and turned it into an instrument of neo-fascist ideology in many ways so i learned i guess this is the other really important thing for me that i want to share that you know i was went to to El Salvador during the war and I joined the opposition to the fascist military dictatorship that perpetrated El Mosote, for example, where a thousand people were killed in a matter of hours.

Yeah. By the U S trained elite at the cot battalion supervised, according to my journalist colleague, Mark Danner at Berkeley, supervised by U.S. troops that not only trained, but they were supervising there the commander of the operation, Diego thousand people were killed. And it's taken forensics experts that I've interviewed decades to figure out who was who. And now we now know that half of the almost a thousand people killed at El Mozote were children under 12. Yeah. And the women were raped, if I recall. And the women were raped.

And half of the children under 12 were under age six. Yeah. So that's not fascism so we were supporting that so i decided when it came time when i was down there in the late 80s early 90s that i was going to join the opposition to fight the military fascist military dictatorship and so uh something i guess a plug for the book is hey it's you have all this war, all this genocide, all this gang violence. You'd think it's a downer of a book, but in fact, it's not. It's a story that's hopeful.

It's just placed against the dark background of the history of not just El Salvador, but of the United States. The history we have to come to grips with. So I actually tell a very hopeful and I would hope inspired story of how to go through the closest thing I know to Dante's circles of hell or the apocalypse or whatever the hell people want to call these things. I've been through it. I've seen it firsthand. And I don't have a bullet in my head. And I'm still in the fight. I think that's the point of what Salvadorans are about. We are in the fight, and we have something to share with people in the United States.

And I think that's an important thing for us to recognize nationwide. I mean, hopefully when we overturn this president, but I think different tomes that have been written about uh steven miller white nationalism the thing we've seen with racism um will hopefully turn on new leaf my biggest worry is that we go back to the bombing years where uh the race is just withdrawn going to the closets and still have their hate um but it's it's important to know uh i was i i liked how you use the machete uh in a way throughout the book like you would you'd tell different stories or antidotes and then you go the machete cuts both ways um you know you'd use different ways of incorporating the machete and i think that's really important for

people to recognize is is is the farming aspect of it the the what the el El Salvadorians were really about. What put the regime in that really started El Salvador's down into, you know, this sort of civil war and everything that was going on? Was it the Reagan administration? Was it prior administrations? How did that come about? Yeah, good question. It goes back deeper. The El Salvador was one of the longest standing military dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere, in the Americas.

And it was started in 1932 with something called La Matanza, the Great Massacre, the Great Killing, in which something on the order of 10,000 to 30,000 people, we don't know, were killed in a matter of about two weeks. And what scholars at Oxford told me in the process of researching the book was one of the single most violent episodes, not just in Latin American history, but in world history, as far as the number of people killed per day in such a concentrated space. Was it an order to seize power? Yes, there was a general named Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez who saw an opportunity in the Indian rebellion to not just wipe out the indigenous people

who were kind of in the way of the big capitalists who wanted coffee land land for coffee wow so they needed to take indigenous land and so why not wipe out the indians while you're at it and establish this mestizo identity right of a nation so uh maximiliano danis martinenez established a military dictatorship and initially was not recognized by the U.S. Of course, that lasted all of some months after which the U.S. couldn't resist and started supporting Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the Somozas in Nicaragua, the people that were doing destruction in Guatemala and throughout the Americas. It was, you know, the United States basically considered this its backyard and established military dictatorships throughout the Americas. So part of my story is the way that revolutionary movements were born

in opposition to the military dictatorship, because we always have to, I believe, tell the story of opposition to extremism and oppression. If we don't, we are screwed. Yeah, and this is an important factor of story to see how we contribute. I mean, a lot of discussions we've been having recently are, you know, even just I think the Washington Post and New York Times put out something today on redlining. And I understood redlining from years ago because I used to own a mortgage company for 20 years, so I understood why the Fair Housing Act was there and why redlining was important.

But we all knew that redlining was still going on secretly at banks. And one of the problems is, as America, with all this racist sort of issues we have and how it's built systematically in our society with policy and everything else that we do, we create, we, I mean, we leave freeways. We create cities that, that, that perpetuate people to live in, in, in hood conditions. We, we don't, we don't put funding into those schools. And so even when people come here or when they're poor or usually they're targeted migrants or they're targeted people of race and color, we put situations in there that keep them either where they're at or put them in situations

where we can constantly point to them and go, well, those are the troublemakers over there because we put them in a place where they don't have anything else. There's no jobs, there's no good education and everything else. And then, of course, we go and back these crazy leaders in like South America or around the world. I mean, look at what we're doing with Saudi Arabia. I mean, what they did to the Washington Post reporter from over there. But we back these people and create these situations.

And then we blame the people when they come here because we've created a situation in South America that's untenable and people can't live. And some people see us as the beacon of hope, which you'd think they wouldn't. They'd be like, these are the days to start this crap. Yeah, you're speaking to what I call the need for an enemy. Yeah, yeah. You can't have a trillion-dollar military budget, a thousand military bases around the world without enemies.

Yeah. You can't justify policing in the United States without MS-13 or black gangs or or enemies internal enemies when these are not actually enemies but they're in fact the product of gentrification displacement de-industrialization of like south los angeles and pico union where i worked for for some years in los angeles and saw the gangs born when they were migrating from the war. They come to these neighborhoods that are deindustrialized, no jobs, no summer programs like what I grew up with here in San Francisco. No, you know, social workers, no, no resources to help.

You know, that's what Reagan did, right, was destroy CETA, what was known as CETA, and other programs of the war on poverty and urban development. And so you have these walking, talking traumas of kids coming to the United States, unresolved trauma, with no jobs, no anything, and they're being attacked by other gangs, and they have to protect themselves yeah and then the police start coming down on them and they you know they start getting more violent and then you start the media kind of coming in on them and framing them a certain way and so you have like this you know with some sociologists called paradigmatic where you have a a set of beliefs reinforced by a community of practitioners

who are reinforcing these beliefs. That's what you see when you see the gang discourse. And it's not just Republicans, but Democrats. The Democrats always say, hey, we're not associated with that evil MS-13, but the Democrats won't touch criminal justice in a serious way where we get away from all the mythology and fakery and get into, okay, most kids in MS-13 are not killers. Yeah.

You know, they're kids. Some of them are 11, 12 years old. They don't have resources to help them kind of succeed in life in the ways that are traditionally perceived as success. So what are these kids to do? Same with the situation in El Salvador, because we export our economic and our policing models to El Salvador. So yeah,

this is a story of like the complexity behind these, these images. And I'd like to think it also points to a spiritual way out, how to overcome extreme extreme we haven't seen people people talk about apocalyptic right now the situation in the u.s and it's bad but i've been walking in areas littered with mass graves i've been in war i've been in the scariest gang hideouts you can find, and I can tell you we're not there yet in terms of the degree of profound,

epic violence that we saw in El Salvador. Yeah. And so that's the story. And I'm from the U.S. I'm born here, so it's a U.S. story. It's a story of resilience. It really is. And it's how we, like I said, it's the whole intertwining of everything that we try and do as we're like the police officers of the world. But, you know, I see one of the factors of racism is that you look at someone and you have a prejudice towards them based upon their look, which normally is about the color of skin.

What happens with racists who use MS-13 in politics is, you know, the tattooing and stuff, there's a pure purism in white religion where they talk about how you shouldn't mark your skin. I recently saw some memes that someone posted about how this person put tattoos on themselves, so they went to hell, and this person didn't. So they're pure, you know, but a lot of it is intertwined with this pureness of whiteness, which is part of a racist theme in white Christian history. But having, you know, the MS-13 folks where they cover themselves in tattoo,

that just adds to their whole racist narrative of looking at somebody. And they seem scary because they have tattoos. And they're like, oh, the scariness of that tattoo. Can I say something about that? I've spent time with gangs for almost 30 years. And I watched when some of the gang members chose to use tattoos on their face. I saw many that didn't even back then. But the media decided that that was the image they were going to use.

And it's still the image, even though gang members, basically the vast majority of them left that behind seven, ten years ago as a practice. But you still look at the news reporting. Even our media is my point my peers i'm ashamed to say in major media are using these fake images i mean these these old images of ms-13 for contemporary stories yeah and those aren't just trump democrats a lot of those are biden or obama liberals in editorial rooms who are still reproducing these racist images that are, you know, used to symbolize not just gangs, but an entire community. And on top of that, there are ancient images at this point in our history.

Gangs don't do that to the degree that they did before. Wow. And that's how they use it. And we've talked about on the show, we've had different authors on there, talked about inclusivity, inclusiveness, unconscious bias, things that we don't realize. And I think a lot of that plays into some of the subtle racism or the unconscious bias of racism as to why people use those images on both sides of the party or different journalists, like you mentioned. You know, it's interesting to me, I learned a long time ago that politicians and people use that, you know, you have to make the straw man or you have to make the person to blame. And, you know, it's the look over there where we steal from you on your back pocket is

usually what the politicians are up to. And they're always, and like you say, there has to be that persecution. There has to be that enemy person. Like one of the things I was really surprised to find when the legalization of pot was going on in California was the two main proponents that didn't want pot to be legalized were prison unions and police unions. Of course. Because it's about the job um you know there's an

interesting thing that goes through america about our capitalism and you know it's been going back a lot of years like you say with el salvador and coffee uh and and different things and i'm sure we were looking at resources in el salvador is like you make some money off that um and uh so we'll train the people to you know get everything in line so we can make some money off that. And so we'll train the people to, you know, get everything in line so we can make some money off of that. You know, that's usually our whole angle on things that cause the trouble. And so this unfettered capitalism, you know, like what you were talking about in L.A. where people were, you know, there was a re-gentrification of cities. And, you know, it's like, hey, we need to move all you poor people out and we need to build some big buildings here so you can make some money you know it's that whole factor of capitalism and

and what we do as a society that causes the problems that we have and then we're like well let's just throw more police at it yeah no there's no balls absolutely i think that's the story i'm trying to tell it's my story is as much about the United States as it is about El Salvador, because I'm born here, right? So I've watched as the Reagan era came into our lives and destroyed, started the destruction of the inner cities and of rural areas that we call neoliberalism. The neoliberalism model is not just an economic model. It's also a model of policing, right? Militarized policing so that elites, I don't think they just said, hey, let's throw police out.

It's standard operating procedure. When they've emptied out an economy in Latin America or Africa or Asia, they've instituted a military dictatorship and a whole policing model. Well, the people understand at some level the injustice of the existing system is hiding the injustice of the military, but how many Democrats voted to continue taking our tax money in a time of COVID-19 and giving more to the military, billions, and not to save our lives or create jobs or improve the education of our children. How many Democrats? All kinds of them. So it's a bipartisan model that we have to destroy at this point because if we don't destroy it, it's going to destroy us. Yep. And immigrants contribute. I think I got this from Gene Guerrero's book,

$86 billion worth of net positive to our society, taxes that people don't realize they shop at stores. They spend money. They're part of the economy. For the billions of dollars that we spend racially abusing immigrants and people of race and color, we could buy everyone in the Rust Belt a mansion. So for what we spend, it's just extraordinary what we're doing. And we do it for money and power of different factions and groups. You know, you've seen the rise of the immigrant. I'm thinking of the groups that have all the private prisons where they imprison the immigrants

and Human Health and Services, HHS of the U.S. government, and the different bodies, the Border Patrol, unions, et cetera, et cetera. There's all these factors that go into it. And you look at the money that we spend which is extraordinary to think well you know and there's plenty of room in this damn country for everyone uh when it comes down to it so you sit and you go why do we have this as a as a corner thing and and speaking to what you're mentioning earlier i think what white people are waking up to is is we're is we're not exceptional anymore when it

comes to the militarization of these police. We saw that in Oregon and in other cities where they don't care that if white people come out and persecute, they're still going to send the feds militarized after us anyway. Absolutely. The abandonment of the U.S. citizenry is no longer just a black, brown, Asian thing. I think the rise of Trump, and I saw here in California where this is really clearer than anywhere before. It was a harbinger. When you started seeing Governor Pete Wilson go after immigrants with Proposition 187, which is the de facto birth of the anti-immigrant movement and the pro-immigrant movement, we already knew that California was in a crisis and that jobs

were being taken out of California, industrial jobs, good paying jobs, union jobs, and were being sent south of the border or to Asia or somewhere else, but not here. And so instead of explaining that to people, the need for the enemy came in and said, oh, it's immigrants. And so white workers are being abandoned and the Democratic Party still hasn't figured out, I believe, how to deal with that, you know, politically. I think the Republicans have capitalized on it you saw it in the republican convention they you know you're you're you're you know people people are being abandoned by their own government that's no lie yeah but but the democrats can't say anything because their policies help to abandon white workers just like they helped to abandon other workers.

Yeah. I agree with you, too. I mean, to watch Biden kind of thread the needle of where he's like, well, we don't want to defund the police, and I'm hoping that on the other side of him winning election, we're going to really do some better extraordinary cleaning up and auditing and especially getting back to some of the things Obama's doing election, we're going to really do some better extraordinary cleaning up and auditing and especially getting back to some of the things Obama's doing with the contracts with the different police departments to get them to clean up.

But we need to do a lot more from what we've seen. But, you know, we've seen in Oregon, white people have got to wake up. We've seen in Oregon, you know, it's the same standard that's on the Jewish Center. You know, when they came for the Jews, I didn't stand up. When they came for the anti-fascists, I didn't stand up. And then they came for me. And that's what we're seeing with the militarization of the police. And that's why it's important that we have these conversations,

that we learn about each other's cultures. And we read stuff like this in your book where we can understand each other's history because it's all of us against kind of like them when it comes to the rich people in the military government i don't mean to sound i don't mean to give that a an illuminati sort of conspiracy field but it we need to realize that power is with us and we need to vote better we need to demand better from our leaders i'm hoping that kamala harris Kamala Harris will, did I just pull a Fox there? Kamala Harris will take in, hopefully be a proponent for some of these things. I don't know.

We're just going to have to, we're going to have to demand more of our leaders and not fall asleep anymore. I guess. I'm not going to, I live in San Francisco. I grew up, you know, I lived in San Francisco during her tenure as a, you know, district attorney and then California attorney general. I'll just say, I don't think it's up to her. I think it's up to us. That's why I wrote this book.

I was privy to a revolutionary movement. And I put the word revolution in my title. I wasn't talking about Bernie's revolution. I was talking about another. I'm not positing armed struggle like what, what we were doing, but I do think we need to think about what does revolution mean? Because what we're facing, not just Donald Trump, not just the Republicans, not just the Democratic Party, not just the powerful interest behind them, not just COVID-19, not just the de-industrialization

of the U.S. and the destruction of our economic lives if we deal with all that then we got to deal with climate change or simultaneously deal with climate change so to face that we're not going to democrat or progressive our way out we need to have a different mindset

that's kind of like on the left like what the crazy Christians have we need something that's you know we need something that's millenarian. It's called sociological and political science circles. We need a kind of conviction for the future of our children that's radical. And I hope it's to wipe out racism and racism policies and the systematic racism.

All of that to create economic policies that are just yeah to to eliminate racism and the murderous practices that it brings yeah because when when when we see like for instance the police uh killing in wisconsin recently the reason that man gets shot in the back is because that person, and you can say whatever you want about policing and everything else, but somehow that person has a devaluation of that type of person that they perceive them to be. They show up at a situation, there's a bunch of black people arguing, they have a perception of that. They have, whether it's a conscious bias or an unconscious bias i've seen plenty of police training yeah

training is training training training is part of that and and like you say they talk about like i had a conversation recently with a uh a gal who's white who's married to hispanic and she was she was talking to me about how well the, the Hispanic people have been forgotten. You know, it's all about Black Lives Matter, so we're disposable, so I'm still going to vote for Trump. And I was like, oh, my God, seriously? And I'm like, well, do you understand that we don't see – I mean, there are problems with racism.

There are problems with what we deal with Hispanic people and everyone else of color. But we don't see a lot of those people getting shot on the, you know, nine o'clock news. I'm sure there's probably a lot of that going on in different areas, so I don't want to be dismissive of it. But, you know, we're seeing a lot of black people get shot. We have a huge issue with racism. I think the whole broadness of it, we need to take care of. But what I'm saying is, is when that, when that police officer decides to pull that trigger, trigger, he feels that person is disposable. He feels he's not going to be held responsible for it. And, and he makes a decision and a call based internally on those

decisions where he doesn't value that person as another human being. And to me, that's really what I saw, like in videos like that, what I saw with George Floyd and all the other videos. There's a loss that they have internally inside because to kill another human being, to me, I mean, you can be trained in a lot of things. I mean, I grew up in a cult. I've dealt with a lot of the brainwashing that came from that and different things, but there are choices you can make. And to me, when, when we reach a point as human beings where we're dismissive of other human

beings based upon race, culture, heritage, or what, what perceived heritage might be in the case of a white, uh, you know, uh, perceived exceptionalism, um, that's kind of led us down this horrible, ugly pathway, is something we need to deal with and change. Because what is at the core of that guy who pulls the trigger, that white guy who pulls the trigger, is the guy who is dismissive of that other human being, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Absolutely, Chris. And I really appreciate your perspective on this. I hope I said that right, the way I wanted to say it. But there is, you know, like a lot of people, they blame, okay, well, police departments

do this. And there is training that dehumanizes people in police departments, just like the military. And some of that, in the military, they have to take that out of you because they have to turn you into a machine, to a killing machine. I've interviewed, like I said, death squad operatives, people who have gone and dragged innocent men, women, and even children from their homes. Jesus. Slaughtered them and cut them to pieces. I've interviewed them about their training in my book.

I found humanity. There was still a human being there. I hate to break it to people, but they're part of the human race. They're not the best part of the human race. But I found someone who had been poor, working class, isolated, didn't have a future in this poor area, and was offered a future by the policing or by the military. Then once they're in, then they get trained. And I looked at the training. I did the research on the training.

I found documents that were released by the U.S. government showing how they were training them to take – something I learned from El Salvador and something I hope people take away from my book is that you can't really kill somebody unless you do what? You take away their humanity. Exactly. If we manage to see each other as human beings, it's way more difficult to kill each other.

And so the training of the military, and I would argue some of the police, is a training in dehumanization and that um you know so i wrote this book to to that dehumanization had the effect not of just dehumanizing communists or people that were left as opposed to the government that was a military fascist dictatorship or not just gang members but the entire salvadoran people we're we were cast in this there was actually an ins agent in los angeles who told the la times when you're talking about this many gang members that allegedly live in these areas you're not just talking about a small group you're talking about a whole people an entire community and this is what happens with with with the black community and we have to you know kind of support the black community and it's it's it's demand for justice it's demands

for justice and to me when i hear black lives matter it encompasses the full spectrum of racism um it it in in the systematic racism that it's in our society it's in our patterns the the the policy etc etc to me it encompasses everything but i i i can understand how some people look at it and go well it doesn't include me but to me it does i don't know if it includes that to everyone else but we we have to look at that you know i i think it's important what we're discussing with police refunding we're probably should be the better branding for that word, where we look at these communities that you and I have talked about,

and instead we go, hey, how do we build better schools in those communities? Because if you do studies on those communities, we've defunded the schools. You know, there's some of the worst schools in the nation because we don't spend the money for it, because we give the money to the police department. You know, I saw this great political cartoon that showed this guy. He shows up at the door of the school, and he goes, hey, we've got to defund you because we're busy making wars and doing other things. So we've got to take all your money. So you just try and get by with what little you can. And they go to the police, and they hand them the money that they took from the schools and they go,

yeah, here's a bunch of things. You know, make sure those people at the school, you know, they stay in line. And they show the kids coming out of the school and there's this militarized police department going, we're ready for you. And that's kind of what we do. I mean, we create these situations.

We redline these areas. We create free will. We do all this systematic policy racism that's so interwoven in our society. It's just insane how much of it is when you start to really delve into it and look at it. And then we condemn these communities because we help create them by defunding them. And so hopefully what we're going to do is go continue this if Trump isn't reelected and everything else where we put money into these communities. I mean, you look at some of the budgets we spend on police departments and holy shit. I mean, some of them, the police department is the largest budget in the city. And you're like, why don't we just spend it on, you know, gang outreach on, on better schools, better jobs, maybe in different areas, ways to restore urban blight, et cetera, et cetera,

especially targeting these communities. But the sad part is we have this racism. So we're like, well, this is those people. And so we're dismissive of them. And like you say, what's written in your book and the description is, is to create that humanity where we look at each other as human beings instead of from a racial context of what we see. Yeah, I mean, I talk about as much about the police as I do about humanity. The two seem to be sometimes at odds. And so in terms of like the inhumanity of the training and the practices

that we see in the police departments throughout. And sadly, it's not just a white thing. Look at those cops. A lot of those cops in places like L.A. are Latino and black. Okay, and Asian. So you can't. And some of the police chiefs that they're putting up to be the front men are brown black and asian pacific islander and some of the mayors including in los angeles like uh former mayor antonio vio regosa

you know he he was very pro-cop and building up structures that were oppressing brown people in a in a majority brown city of Los Angeles. So it's really complicated. I try to get at some of this in the book to kind of show like, you know, I mean, like I like to say, if we don't shift the way things are going, we're going to enter the age of what I call intersectional empire. In other words, you know, everybody's talking about intersectionality, but you know who else is talking about intersectionality is empire and domination we're going to have brown faces

black faces uh non-white faces and white faces being the face of the police of corporations of the different structures that are dominating and even destroying our lives. So that's why I wanted to tell the story, because I get it. It shows like, you know, some of the more sinister people I've met are not just white, they're Salvadorans. Salvadorans killed when those deaths was. We're not free of that. Salvadorans, you know, are as good as anyone, are as noble and as inspired as anyone. And I think you're right on the training, because one of the things that I was reading about when we started talking about defunding the police is how police are trained with these videos of where any guy can kill you and a guy can hop in,

and they feed them through their training all these scenarios. And I don't mean to devalue them, but they're kind of fed a lot of this, scenes of a guy jumping out, shooting a cop, and cop killing, and murders. On one hand, you kind of look at it and go, okay, yeah, when you come to a car, there can be any sort of situation, you'd be ready for it. But then they put so much fear that's dehumanizing, I think, to the civilians. And, you know, James Baldwin had a great quote, I've been trying to find it, but he says something to the effect that a black man is, once he becomes a police officer, is no longer a black man.

He's a police officer. And I think that's true of a lot of different races. And I think a lot of it has to do with power. Once you're in the club, you know, we see a lot of African-American people that once they become rich, they're no longer like, well, I don't have a problem with white people. Everything's working fine for me. You know, and that's really what a lot of this is about is the retainment of power a lot of white people in power who are like yeah we need to fund

the police to keep everyone away from my pile of money um which is really generally what they're doing i mean it's about power control keeping power and control in any semblance and i studied this growing up in cults and religion you know there has to be a group of people that you have to have control over and hold down so that you can willpower over them. I mean, that's just the semblance of, I suppose, a basic power structure when it comes down to it. But we need to reconcile this because, you know, like you say, and like we've been talking about, the militarization, the police, you know, what we saw were they didn't care if they were white moms in the thing. They tear gassed them. They shot at them. They didn't care if they were veterans that were white.

They didn't care. They still went after them. And I think everyone needs to wake up in this country, everyone, and go, we all need to work together. We all need to understand each other better. We all need to quit pointing fingers at each other and go, you're the problem unless you're a racist we can point at you um i don't know i have a hard time singing kumbaya with steven miller it's i'm not sure we're i'm you know him and i are we're gonna have fun at a party together um i might punch him in

the face or uh his other extremities a couple times if i can but then i'm gonna go to jail for sure but i don't know i can't say what i'm gonna do if i can, but then I'm going to go to jail for sure. But I don't know. I can't say what I'm going to do if I get close to him. I'm not threatening the guy. Let's put it that way. We should probably edit this out of the show. I'm doing jokes, people.

So anyway, anything more we need to know about your great book here, Unforgetting, A Memoir of Family Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas, Robert Rubro. Yeah, the revolution I'm talking about is not Bernie's revolution. I think we have now to think about what revolution means in our time. We really have to have something that, for example, the word revolution comes from physics, where the Earth would go around the sun and come back to the same place.

So the earth is out of equilibrium, right? So we have to find a way to bring the earth and the life-sustaining systems back into some equilibrium. So revolution has a lot to do with climate change in a lot of ways, I think. And climate change has a lot to do with what happens with capitalism. And so revolution, you could say also is what the cyclical nature where we keep going through these, you know, we get a few good presidents that, you know, have policy against racism. And then we get these, you know, crazy presidents like Reagan and Trump and Nixon that put us back into it. The whole revolution of not learning from history. We have to have a radical consciousness to face the radical problems that we're facing as a human race.

Sadly, I would have to add, in terms of immigration, there was a president who first caged thousands, tens of thousands of Central American children. I visited those kids. I saw their little scars on their necks when they try to hang themselves. I saw the mothers trying to slit their wrists. I've seen them suffering and trying to protest, and they wrote letters to this president and to his wife. That president was not Donald Trump. It was Barack Obama. And so we have to have any revolutionary sensibilities not going to fear critiquing a president because of their race or their political party.

We have to have the clarity to be able to critique fairly. Right now, we've got to focus on getting Trump out. There's no question. I would be the last person to want anything else. I mean, the first person, we have to getting Trump out. There's no question. I would be the last person to want anything else. I mean, the first person, we have to have him out, but we can't take our eyes off the prize of real justice.

And if the continued policing, the continued economic policies, the continued military policies that are destroying the planet, literally, physically, politically, and and otherwise if they continue regardless of who's in power we are going to continue on the course of worsening our condition so i think a revolutionary mindset is in order right now and i think that's a lot of what

my book's about is asking i don't have the answer to what revolution means now but i do know i do know enough to know that we have to ask the question when i don't see a clarity with respect to dismantling the core things that are dominating us which are economic oppression and military policing so i i really humbly hope that people find something in my book that inspires them because I put all my heart and soul into it and 30 years of trying to do the right thing. I think they will. It's a great book. It's a beautiful book.

And I don't mean our whole discussion here. We've had a few dark conversations, but it's a beautiful book going through telling the story of your family and everything else, the experience of life. This is a catharsis sort of journey, cathartic journey in going through your history, finding out more about you, who you are. We all go through those experiences in life. So I think we have a rapport with the sort of value that goes into it. Just in the final mentioning, you know, we just recently saw the, one of the guys who worked in the White House has been coming out. He was actually on the Daily Beast show

podcast, and he talked about how Trump actually talked about maiming. You know, you're talking about the immigrants with the marks on the necks from hanging themselves. He talked about maiming them. This just came out, I think today, he talked about maiming them this just came out i think today he talked about maiming them or doing extraordinary things we saw you know stephen miller miller's cruelty is the point where they they tore the babies away from their their parents to send a message it's like it's like a sick mafia sort of move where it's like we're gonna send a message we're gonna cut off his dick and put in his mouth and that way everyone won't know the message and you're going to send a message, we're going to cut off his dick and put it in his mouth, and that way everyone will know the message. And you're just like, what a sadistic, just subhuman sort of thing to do.

But you're right, we need to actively stay awake. Even though we get Biden elected, if Biden gets elected, let's cross our fingers, we need to, as a society, talk about these things and keep the conversation going. We can't just go, well, we fixed that thing, so whatever, you know. A lot of people, when Obama came into office, were like, we fixed that racism thing. Yeah, that's all done. We need to hopefully stay actively awake and change our policies. I hope cities across the nation will start recognizing what's going on, and we'll continue, like you say, that discussion and everything else. Roberto, it's been great to have you on. You're welcome to come back on anytime. We could talk

for hours and stuff. And what I love about having these conversations is I hope a lot of my white friends, my white people start having this internal dialogue. And I've been getting a lot of messages about that, so I really am proud and happy about that. I get messages from people that are saying, thank you for having this discussion. We're starting to have this discussion internally because we're seeing you have this discussion and the example that you do from trying to listen through this.

And so I hope a lot of my friends and everybody is having this discussion with themselves, prejudices that they have, racism they may have, unconscious bias that they have, and they're realizing how much this is contributing to the disassembling of our society and destruction of it on a long-term scale. And so like you've mentioned, it's time for revolution.

Let's learn from the past and change the future. Thank you. Thank you. It's been an honor. Thank you very much. It's been an honor, my friend, to have you on, and I'm going to be excited to finish your book. Be sure to check out the book. You can go to amazon.com, and then what's your.com, Roberto? Roberto Lovato, L-O-V-A-T-O, .com..com. Go ahead and check it out. I think you'll like the book, and it's a wonderful adventure. It's beautifully written. It's a memoir of a family, migration, gangs, and revolution in the Americas, unforgettable, and it's important to learn our history.

Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube.com if you want to watch the video version of this discussion. Go to what else is there? Patreon.com for Seth Kerspachcom you can join the book club and also you can tell your friends, neighbors, relatives

learn about your history so you don't repeat it have an internal conversation with yourself learn about your unconscious biases and let's change this world and make it better thanks for tuning in, we'll see you guys next time