Border Activist to Get Human Rights Honor

In the past 10 years, during which he has become a prominent advocate for immigrants on the U.S-Mexico border, San Diego County’s Roberto Martinez has been widely quoted, praised and reviled.

Next week, he will be honored as the first U.S. citizen designated an “international human rights monitor” by Human Rights Watch, the worldwide watchdog organization. Martinez will receive the yearly award along with activists from 11 strife-torn nations, including a Haitian Catholic priest, a Yugoslav political prisoner and a community organizer named posthumously after she was slain this year by leftist terrorists in Peru.

Martinez directs the border program of the American Friends Service Committee, a nonprofit group that investigates abuse of immigrants, particularly mistreatment of illegal border crossers by U.S. immigration agents.

A word-of-mouth network on both sides of the border has spread Martinez’s name over the years; dozens of Latinos, from longtime residents to recently arrived day laborers, show up at his downtown San Diego office each week asking for help.

“He is the dean of human rights advocates of the border,” said Ellen Lutz of Americas Watch (a division of Human Rights Watch), who wrote a report this year critical of the U.S. Border Patrol. “We pick people who work in the trenches, who have long and outstanding histories of working on behalf of victims of human rights violation.”

“This is an indictment of the U.S. government, which condemns abuses in other countries and ignores them in our own,” said Martinez, 55, a solemn fifth-generation Chicano who has been the target of occasional death threats. “They say one of the ways you can judge a person’s success is by the number of enemies they have. If that’s true, I’m very successful.”

The award invites controversy by placing the U.S. government on a list with countries whose troops and police forces engage in widespread killings, torture and other egregious practices that are considered rare in this country. Border Patrol officials and groups advocating immigration control dismiss Martinez as a knee-jerk critic of the Border Patrol who makes unsubstantiated allegations.

“His objectivity is clouded by his extreme hatred for the Border Patrol,” said Ben Seeley of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “He has never had a solution; he has never offered anything but condemnation.”

Seeley, who has debated Martinez on immigration in public forums, said Martinez also has an unrealistically one-sided view of illegal immigrants.

“He has a difficult time distinguishing between the truly honest migrant worker and the opportunistic criminal element that exploits our porous borders,” Seeley said.

In an interview Monday, Martinez described his work as a “social justice ministry.” He acknowledged that his intense faith in his clients occasionally leads him to pursue cases that prove to be fabrications or exaggerations.

“I have been burned in the past,” he said. “It has been a problem from time to time. But by and large, the people who come to me are honest and sincere.”

Martinez has been questioned for remaining generally silent on the issue of persistent crimes against migrants by allegedly corrupt Mexican police. He said he focuses on U.S. authorities because of limited resources, but has worked with Mexican advocates, including that country’s national human rights commission.

Lutz said she nominated Martinez because he has heightened public awareness of the plight of immigrants and because her organization has intensified its scrutiny of alleged government abuses in the United States after years of concentrating on Latin America.

Americas Watch has studied police brutality and U.S. prison conditions in addition to the Border Patrol, Lutz said.

She said the first-ever recognition of a U.S. advocate does not imply that violations here compare to those in the countries of Martinez’s fellow monitors, some of whom were selected in hopes that publicity would shield them from persecution.

“Human rights abuses in the U.S. are of sufficiently serious magnitude that we should be concerned,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference whether they are more serious or less serious.”

Martinez grew up in the barrios of San Diego, where he says recurring humiliation and harassment by police and Border Patrol agents instilled in him a determination to fight back. He worked as a technical illustrator and engineer before becoming a full-time advocate in the early 1980s. He said he earns $26,000 a year.

Martinez and his wife have been married nine years; they have four children and he has another five children by his first marriage. He said his family supports his obsessive dedication to his cause, despite the strains and sacrifice.

“It takes you away from the home,” said Martinez, whose gentle manner contrasts with his firebrand reputation. “You become so visible you are called in to handle all kinds of situations. It consumes a lot of time. It is always there.”

Martinez said the international recognition by Human Rights Watch--he will be feted at celebrity-studded events in Los Angeles and New York--inspires him to keep going.

Despite his unflagging capacity to denounce perceived injustice, Martinez said he hates no one.

“What I hate are the crimes, not the people who commit them,” he said.