Japanese-Americans seek redress for imprisonment

[Judi Lynn]

Source: International Herald Tribune/Associated Press

Japanese-Americans seek redress for imprisonment
The Associated Press
Published: August 10, 2008

LIMA, Peru: Augusto Kague was only 12 when the U.S. government reached far south to his Peruvian farming town and tore his family apart.

It was January 1942 — a month after Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,400 and drawing the United States into World War II. The roundup of 110,000 Japanese-Americans had begun.

But internment efforts went far beyond U.S. borders — a little-known fact to this day.

Kague's father, a Japanese immigrant in Peru, was whisked away by security agents, one of 2,264 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry arrested in Latin America and shipped off to U.S. camps. They were interned under the guise of securing Western Hemisphere interests, including the Panama Canal. About 800 were used in prisoner swaps with Japan, turned over to a country that some — as Latin American-born descendants of Japanese immigrants — had never seen.

Now, 20 years after Japanese-Americans won redress for their imprisonment, a small community of Peruvians continues to seek justice with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and a grass-roots activist effort based in Northern California.



Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/08/10/america/LA-FEA-Peru-US-Internment-Camps.php

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[ancient_nomad]

2. KnR!

I did not know this. Thank you for the post!

[Judi Lynn]

3. Just discovered davidnc76 posted this in G.D. at 10:06 p.m. Didn't see his & copy it, however.

Here's his thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3767657

Have never heard it mentioned ANYWHERE that American power reached all the way to private lives of Peruvian citizens in the 1940's.

Why is it the U.S. could reach out and grab Japanese people from Peru in the 1940's to throw into prison, and permently destroy their way of living, removing them from their livelihoods, their homes, their businesses, their friends, neighborhoods, causing them to loose all their savings, investments, and still assist Nazis fleeing prosecution as war criminals, enemies of the U.S., helping them to find sanctuary in South America? How DOES this work, anyway?

Mengele, Eichmann, Klaus Barbie? Barbie even held government positions when he lived in Bolivia:

What saved Barbie in 1972 was the greed of Hugo Banzer, the military dictator who ran the Bolivian government from 1971 to 1978. Not only was Barbie one of Banzer's most valuable henchmen, he was a potential form of currency. In essence, Banzer wanted to sell Barbie to France for increased political leverage, money, and weapons and because Barbie was valuable to both Banzer and France, the price was quite high.14 So high, in fact, that the Pompidou administration refused to play Banzer's game. The relatively conservative Pompidou administration had another reason for not purchasing Barbie, they were perfectly content with Barbie staying in Bolivia where he could not dredge up any unwanted memories.

http://members.aol.com/voyl/barbie/4chapter.htm

Mengele was close to Paraguayan dictator of over 35 years, Alfredo Stroessner. Here's a short video which may seem jolting, and provoke an urge to look more deeply into this material:

Dr. Mengele, Stroessner , and Uncle Sam
In the 1960's and 1970's escaped Nazi war criminals and racist right wing American missionaries teamed up in Paraguay. Their unholy assignment was to ethnically cleanse the Aché Indians from their ancestral home in Paraguay's Chaco jungle for their host that nations brutal Dictator General Alfredo Stroessner.

http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DbJCslh8MTD0

Here's an interesting page with many articles discussing Nazis who fled to South America:
http://hitlernews.cloudworth.com/how-and-where-nazis-escaped-after-the-war.php

[rucognizant]

4. I guess this is further proof..............

that OUR FASCHISTS, have been lurking there all along!~
I went to high school with the kids of some of the interred J A in this country. A Quaker Farmer sent a recruiter to the work camps out west to hire them to work the vegetable production in South Jersey. ( formerly done by German Prisners of War, who were sent home after the war ended/ contrast that with bin Laden's driver)
I never heard of S American Japanese immigrants, and I had learned to count to 10 in Japanese by age 10!

[Vidar]

5. They certainly deserve it. That was one of FDR's very few mistakes.