America’s Forgotten Internment - The United States confined 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. They’re still pushing for redress.
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What Shibayama, by then a resident of California, told the OAS in person and in legal documents, was that he was brought to America by force.In1944, during the height of World War II, a 13-year-oldShibayama was living with his family in Lima, Peru, where his grandparents had immigrated from Japan years earlier. On March 1, Peruvian police arrived at the family’s home in broad daylight to round them up and hand them over to U.S. authorities. For 21 days, the Shibayamas traveled below deck on a U.S. naval vessel with dozens of other Peruvians of Japanese descent, bound for New Orleans. From there, armed U.S. military personnel would take them to a camp in Crystal City, Texas, where they were held as candidates for a hostage exchange program with Japan, even though Shibayama was born in Peru and a citizen of that country.
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Most Americans today are well aware that, during World War II, the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps on no other evidence than the fact of their heritage. They know of the wartime hysteria that cloaked the government’s logic, and the racism and xenophobia Japanese Americans faced. But one chapter of this history has remained much more hidden, much less acknowledged by public officials: The United States simultaneously ran a parallel internment system that confined some 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent, kidnapping individuals from countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Colombia — whose political leaders were in on the plot — and confining them on U.S. soil.
Most Americans also probably think the Japanese internment chapter was closed decades ago, when the U.S. government approved the largest reparations program it has ever enacted: the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, a historic law that gave $20,000 and a formal apology to victims of Japanese internment who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents.But as the country praised itself for righting that historical wrong, it excluded those it had kidnapped from abroad. Although many of them were exiled to Japan after the war, the Japanese Latin Americans who remained in the United States were ineligible for the reparations program. They later received some compensation through a court settlement, but the sum was so much lower and the apology so formulaic that some decided not to accept.
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