Michael Simms: Blowtorch Bob And Other Particulars Of My Politics

In 1970 I went to my first anti-war demonstration. I was sixteen and my cousin Michael Ashie (People introduced us as “This is my friend Michael and this is his cousin Michael,” an introduction guaranteed to evoke snickers) invited me to go to Hermann Park not far from where he lived with our grandparents in west Houston. 

There were about 40 college-age people sitting in a circle on a hillside. They all had long hair and wore beads, jeans and tie-died shirts. Smoldering joints of marijuana, which I was already far too fond of, were being passed around. The conversation was sparse and desultory, of course, although I did hear a couple of college girls talking about guys they were “balling.” I had no idea what balling was, but I was eager to learn. I vaguely remember there was a stage at the bottom of the hill, a crowd, and someone at a microphone talking about Nixon and the war, but with my being stoned and new to being an anti-war activist, I was pretty clueless.

Let’s see, getting high, listening to music and meeting college girls who talk openly about balling. Yep, this anti-war stuff was definitely for me. And in the next few months, I let my hair get shaggy which gave my Republican banker father sufficient reason to punch me a couple of times and got me sent to the principal’s office at my suburban high school. So, did I want to rebel against authority? 

Oh, hell yeah.

About this time, I started writing sappy poetry and acting in school plays and skipping math class, getting high often and generally being a pain in the ass to my parents, but they needn’t have worried about my becoming a radical. I had the political consciousness of a Boston terrier. A stoned Boston terrier.

Bugs

Despite my naiveté,  I knew from a young age that war is not heroic, but brutal, cruel, filthy, terrifying and soul-destroying for everyone who experiences it. I learned this principle when I was eleven from my Uncle Blake, my grandmother Red Cook’s brother-in-law, who’d been a Lance Corporal in the Marines during World War Two when the Americans were taking the Pacific one island at a time. 

One morning when the women had gone shopping and I was left alone with Uncle Blake in my grandparents’ beach house, he told me to sit down at the kitchen table because he had something he wanted to tell me. He took out his glass eye and placed it on a saucer in front of him and looked at me with his one good eye, green as the sea outside the window. 

Boy, he said. I wasn’t sure whether he knew my name. There were a lot of children around the house in those days, but that morning they were down at the beach playing. 

Boy, do you know how I lost my eye? I shook my head, wanting to run from the room, but afraid of making him angry.

My unit was stranded for three months on a small atoll island south of Guam. The enemy knew we were there, so they were hunting us. When the planes flew over, we had to go under water in the swamp. It was the only place to hide. My eyes got infected from the putrid water. After the first week, we ran out of rations, so I started eating bugs which were all over the place. Ants under rotten logs. Earthworms. Squiggly crawling things. I ordered the men to eat them too, but they refused. Half-blind, weak from hunger, burning with a fever, I knew I couldn’t make most of them eat the nasty things. 

But one of them was a skinny kid, only seventeen, who’d  barely made it through basic training. So on the second day of eating bugs, I tripped the kid, sat on his chest, pinning down his arms. I pried open his mouth and forced him to eat what I was eating. I told him, I’m not tough enough to make these other guys eat, but I’m tough enough to whip your ass if you don’t. He agreed. And every day, he and I feasted on bugs, frogs, snakes, dead birds, tadpoles, green leaves and whatever else we could find. 

By the time our guys took back the island and found us, every marine in my unit was dead but me and the kid. After the war, his mother wrote me a letter thanking me for saving her son’s life. But all I could think about was I should have made the others eat the bugs as well. 

Uncle Blake looked at me with his one green eye and said Boy, you do what you gotta do to survive and you help who you can and let the others die. You understand? I nodded and we sat in the kitchen for a few moments. He looked out the window at the sea pushing against the shore, a ship sailing by in a distant haze. Then the old marine went to the cupboard, pulled down his bottle of Johnny Walker Red and took a long draught.

The Courage of Teachers

            In the 1980s, I was teaching at Southern Methodist University where Bill Clements, the President of the Board of Trustees who was also the Governor of Texas, had been caught doing a number of unsavory things, including paying football players under the table to sign with the team, and SMU had been suspended from the Southwest Conference for one year pending further investigation. The entire university community was outraged. Football is like a religion in Texas, and our team had been excommunicated. Insurrection was in the air. 

            On a Friday afternoon, students gathered in front of the admin building angry over the mismanagement of the university and the corruption of the board. The crowd was getting ugly. I was a young teacher standing to the side, listening to the speeches, watching warily as the crowd grew. Someone shouted Take Over the Administration! and the crowd chanted Take Over! Take over! Take Over! 

            The crowd, now a mob, started moving toward the oak and brass doors of the building where the Board of Trustees, old white men protecting their interests, were meeting. The mob was milling, readying itself to storm the building where Dallas Police, known for brutality, stood in their black uniforms holding batons ready, blocking the way. The mob was moving in my direction, so I stepped behind a stone stairway, afraid of being trampled, but Vickie Hill, a young professor, leftist, feminist, no friend to the old white men in the building, stepped in front of the rising wave of angry students, planted her feet firmly on the stone steps, her arms akimbo and shouted NO! her strong jaw pointed at the leaders of the mob. NO! She repeated, shaking her head. The mob, faced with the resolute firmness of this one woman who was not afraid of them, nor sympathetic to the corrupt trustees, stopped, hesitating in front of her. As she shouted NO! Others echoed her, shouting NO! drowning out the ones chanting Take Over! Take Over! and the crowd quickly lost momentum. I could feel the anger dissipating like air out of a balloon. A riot — possibly beatings, arrests, shootings — had been prevented.

            Later, I asked Vickie how she found the courage to stand up to a mob the way she did. She thought for a moment and answered, When I was a student, I was part of a protest that turned violent. Friends of mine got hurt. In that moment when I saw the students, my students, moving toward the police line, all I thought about was stopping them. It didn’t occur to me I was facing down an angry mob; instead, what I saw was a group of young people about to do a foolish and dangerous thing. I knew that if the students got past me, the police would certainly beat them, or worse, so I did what I could to stop them. 

            She shook her head slowly, tears in her eyes, and said, I just didn’t want them to get hurt. 

A Brief History of Blowtorch Bob

As one of his last acts as president, Jimmy Carter sent advisors to El Salvador to support the oppressive government of that war-torn country, and once Ronald Reagan took office, United States involvement in the country escalated quickly. It was clear to almost everyone that the US was on the wrong side of history in supporting the oligarchs, five families who had been using assassination, torture, rape and mass murder to keep the indigenous peasants in line for generations. 

There were two incidents in particular that radicalized North American clergy to become involved in the revolution. 

On  24 March 1980, Bishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while giving mass at The Church of the Divine Providence in the capital city of San Salvador. A lone gunman simply walked into the church and shot the bishop while he was administering holy sacraments to the poor because he had dared to speak out against the oppression of the people. Clergy, as well as most governments around the world, condemned the murder of Bishop Romero who was a devout man who condemned poverty, torture and rape and who was said to believe in God the way the rest of us believe in rain. Editorialists in the US disagreed on whether the unidentified gunman was a true believer in his cause or just a hired assassin of the corrupt oligarchy. And many of us wondered what other crimes he had committed in the name of the greater crime of enslaving a nation. And the US government’s commitment to keeping the oligarchs in power made me wonder why is my country tis of thee always on the wrong side of history? Though no one was ever convicted for the murder, investigations by the UN-created Truth Commission for El Salvador concluded that Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a death squad leader and later founder of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) political party, had ordered the killing.

A brief survey of the history of El Salvador may be helpful at this point. In 1932 a donkey was worth more than a campesino, so the people rose up and demanded fair treatment. The oligarchs sent in soldiers who slaughtered 30,000 people and arrested the leaders, cut off their hands and raped their wives and daughters. In 1944 university students brought down the government but couldn’t hold on to power, so most them were imprisoned and tortured and power was returned to the oligarchs. After the student massacre of 1975, civil war broke out lasting 12 years with the US on the side of the oligarchs calling the leftist guerillas terrorists, but this propaganda was an outright lie because it was Death Squads trained at the School of the Americas who massacred mourners at the Oscar Romero funeral and committed the Sumpul River massacre in 1980; the 1981 El Mozote massacre; the 1982 El Calabozo massacre followed by the Tenango massacre of 1983; the Guasilinga massacre of 1984, and 27 other massacres of civilians during the 1980s carried out by American-trained soldiers. Ignoring all this blood, the US gave millions to the oligarchs who hired men like Roberto D’Aubuisson, a.k.a. Blowtorch Bob, for his favorite tool of torture.

On December 2, 1980, nine months after the assassination of Bishop Romero, a second incident further radicalized North American clergy. Four Catholic missionaries from the United States working in El Salvador were sexually assaulted and killed by five members of the El Salvador National Guard. Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan were dragged behind a jeep, beaten, raped, and murdered. The Salvadoran Guardsmen were convicted with their sergeant and went to prison but the generals who ordered the atrocity never faced justice. So let me say their names here: head of the national guard Carlos Vides Casanova; and Minister of Defense José Guillermo García. May they burn in Hell.

My friend Gary Cooper, a lanky poet with long blonde hair and a strong sense of social justice, convinced me to join the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) shortly after its founding in 1980. Our leader was Sister Linda Hajek who lived in Bethany House attached to Holy Cross Church in South Dallas. The congregation of the church, which was almost entirely African-American, had approved the use of the church as part of the Sanctuary Movement which was taking hold among Christian churches across the country. 

Sister Linda recruited a number of people — teachers, clergy, lawyers, students, and community members of diverse backgrounds including Latino — to help organize marches and demonstrations, write editorials, and help refugees, including illegally transporting them from South Texas to Oklahoma. We would pick up the Salvadorans at the border, bring them to Dallas where we provided them with food, warm clothes, and small amounts of cash. Then we would drive them north to introduce them to good-hearted people who would provide for them before transporting them to the next station on the underground railroad, as we liked to call it. Eventually, the migrants would find a home in Canada.

Sanctuary 

One scorching afternoon in August, Sister Linda and I waited in a borrowed Subaru among the small mesquite trees that had managed to push up through the cracked asphalt of an abandoned parking lot five miles north of the border. The Montgomery Ward’s sign was faded, and the building hadn’t been occupied in years. I thought, this is what America will look like in fifty years, a collapsing civilization, people scavenging among the ruins. Then I realized that I was describing the country as it existed now, right in front of me. 

“I think that’s them,” Sister Linda said, looking at three figures, an adult and two children moving slowly toward us. As they came closer, Linda started the car and rolled slowly toward the three people. “Reach in the back and get a water bottle, would you?”

I twisted the cap off the two-quart plastic bottle and instinctively lifted it toward my mouth, then stopped myself. These migrants would need water more than I did, so they should get the first drink. 

“Is it unusual for a woman to be coming across the border with children?” he asked.

Linda shrugged. “She’s lucky. INS separates the children from the parents. So far she’s managed to avoid the patrols.”

“Why would the government have a policy like that?” This was my first time to be transporting migrants, and the INS policies toward migrants baffled me.

“The US government wants to discourage migrants from crossing the border. Having a policy of taking their children away from them provides a deterrent.”

“But they come anyway?”

“Yep. Where the migrants are coming from is so horrible that even the threat of taking away their children doesn’t stop them from coming north.”

Linda rolled the car close to the woman whose round face was covered in dirt. Her traditional white cotton dress was damp around the neck and under her arms. She was exhausted, but smiling. A boy about eight held her hand, he was looking suspiciously at me, a thin white man with prematurely gray hair. His little sister looked at Linda, who was dressed in jeans and a green t-shirt, and gave a big smile. 

“We should just build a bomb and blow up a police station,” Frank Varelli said. He was a tall handsome guy with broad shoulders and curly black hair in his late twenties who’d been showing up at meetings of CISPES for a month or two. There was something a little odd about Frank with his stiff brand new blue jeans, unscuffed work boots and flannel lumberjack shirt as if he’d ordered the “leftist ensemble outfit” from L.L. Bean. He often made rash statements that sounded out of step with the rest of the group. Linda and the other sisters who led the organization ignored him, but this time he’d gone too far. There were about ten of us sitting in metal folding chairs arranged in a circle.

I was outraged. “NO!” I shouted, standing up and turning to face Frank. “This organization will never do anything violent.” I glanced at Sister Linda like a puppy eager for her nod of approval.

“Why not?” Frank said shrugging his shoulders nonchalantly, as if his proposal were perfectly reasonable.

A number of people in the group looked at Frank with incredulity and disgust.

“Because it’s immoral and illegal,” I said and sat down.

I wasn’t aware at the time that Sister Linda strongly suspected we had an informer in our group. Someone had broken into the trailer we used as a stopover near the border. Also, Leland Smith, a member of our group who worked as an attorney for the US Labor Department, said he’d been tipped off by colleagues that the FBI had its rheumy eye on us. So the provocation by Frank at the meeting confirmed her suspicion that he was the rat. 

As I learned much later after I’d left Dallas and moved to Pittsburgh, the nuns had taped the meeting in which Frank had tried to instigate violence. Then Linda set up a sting of her own. She let Frank overhear a conversation in which a fictional major operation by CISPES was revealed involving a dozen refugees. 

She and a few of her trusted lieutenants drove to the border and waited a good distance from the trailer. At the appointed day and time, the INS and FBI kicked in the door of the trailer and found only Leland, the Labor attorney, and one of his colleagues, also an attorney, waiting for the agents.

Leland then filed suit against the FBI claiming that CISPES’s members’ constitutional rights of free assembly and free speech had been violated. The judge ordered the FBI to turn over all tapes and documents related to the investigation. What was revealed shocked everyone. Even the judge had never heard of anything like the crimes that the FBI had perpetrated against CISPES.

According to the notes of the investigating agent, Frank Varelli had walked into the Dallas FBI office on a Friday afternoon in spring 1981 and volunteered to infiltrate CISPES and serve as a paid confidential informant. He said his father was a Salvadoran Army officer fighting Communism, and Frank wanted both Salvador and his adopted country of the United States to be purged of leftists. In the course of that first conversation, it would be clear that Frank was a racist who hated the dirty little indios who scraped a life out of tiny plots of maize and beans and could barely speak Spanish. Frank, on the other hand was a white man, educated in the United States, fluent in two languages and, in his mind, clearly superior to his brown countrymen. 

The most shocking revelation was that the FBI had paid Frank to break into Sister Linda’s apartment near the Holy Cross Church where he’d hid a video camera and a microphone. The FBI planned for him to seduce Sister Linda, videotape the two of them having sex, and then blackmail her into revealing the identities of clergy and lay people active in the sanctuary movement. Frank did indeed break into Linda’s apartment and install the surveillance equipment, but did it so ineptly that the equipment didn’t work. Linda, of course, rejected his sexual advances.

The case was a slam-dunk for CISPES. The FBI couldn’t afford the embarrassment of having the details of the case revealed, so they made a large cash offer to CISPES on the condition that their operation not be made public. Although Gary Cooper, who told me about the settlement after I moved to Pittsburgh, didn’t know the amount of the settlement, he said it was substantial. Linda and the sisters were under a vow of poverty, so they used the money to expand their efforts to provide sanctuary to Central American refugees.

So, in the end the FBI financed the expansion of the very organization they had illegally tried to destroy.

Despite the odds, sometimes the good guys do indeed win. 

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Copyright 2024 Michael Simms. From a memoir-in-progress.

Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi. His newest collection of poems is Strange Meadowlark (Ragged Sky, 2023). His latest speculative novels comprise The Talon Trilogy (Madville 2023, 2024, 2025).