In the United States, the bedrock foundation of Our Freedom is the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It guarantees that:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated”

No other phrase in the Bill of Rights does so much work in such a succinct way.

As a public defender, I have found that it is one of the most powerful constitutional protections against the Government’s infringement of ordinary citizens’ Liberties.

Usually, when a law enforcement officer acts more like a tyrant than a representative of civil government, the one protection we can rely on most frequently to stop the abuse of power is the 4th Amendment.

That is why every Fourth of July, I like to remind people that the freedom we celebrate on Independence Day does not come from patriotic speeches, fireworks, or abstract ideals.

So yes, honor Independence Day, but don’t forget that your freedom wasn’t codified by the Declaration of Independence!

The Declaration announced a desire for liberty.

But our freedoms were and are enshrined in the 4th Amendment, and the Rest of the Bill of Rights, plus the later amendments that helped extend constitutional liberty beyond the privileged few.

Thank You, 4th Amendment!

I will honor you by fighting for you on behalf of every single one of my clients!

Even though the Dubs didn’t win the 2019 NBA Championship, they showed the character and heart of true champions. They battled through injuries, showing their grit and resilience in the face of adversity. Never once did they use injuries as an excuse for not winning. And when they ultimately lost to the Toronto Raptors, they handled it with the grace and dignity that only real champions can muster in defeat; congratulating the Raptors with a full-page ad in a leading Canadian newspaper. But all those examples are less telling of the Warriors’ championship character than a story that flew under the national media’s radar.

Earlier this spring, as the warriors began their latest push to win another NBA Championship, the organization took the time to make an important gesture… they hosted a group of falsely accused and wrongfully convicted exonerees & members of Northern California’s Innocence Project (NCIP) to be their guests at one of their games against the Los Angeles Clippers.

These incredible and inspiring people have overcome so much and now fight to help others in the same or similar plight. Check out the video of the exonerees at the game here, including a brief clip with my friend and mentor Joe Diaz (also pictured below with my daughter and me).

As great as the Dubs’ victories are, and I love every single one of them, the NCIP’s legal victories to exonerate the wrongfully convicted are FAR more meaningful!

Here’s a recent example of what this kind of victory looks like… https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/15/man-exonerated-after-17-years-in-prison-for-2002-san-jose-shooting/

I am passionate and dedicated to educating people about the importance of fighting for due process and providing zealous legal defense to prevent wrongful convictions.

That’s why I have decided to dedicate my life to fighting against the social, political, and legal evil of wrongful convictions, and to ensure that anyone who suffers that injustice will have access to the resources necessary to win exoneration, and to guarantee that anyone accused of a crime, no matter how reviled, has access to top-notch legal defense.

This right is most important when it comes to high-profile clients that everyone “knows” are guilty. For example, think of the “Exonerated 5,” formerly called the “Central Park 5,” when they were first arrested; remember the social outcry and media feeding frenzy calling for their blood so well documented in When They See Us.

Can you imagine the pain and despair of being in prison or on death row trying to unsuccessfully convince the people who hold the fate of your life in their hands that you are innocent of the crime for which you are wrongly convicted?

To understand a tiny fraction of that suffering I highly recommend reading the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, checking out his Ted Talk, and visiting his organization’s website.

But most of all, I highly encourage you to read the story of Walter McMillian, who was falsely accused of a crime he did not commit… not by just one person, but by multiple people. These people’s self-serving accusations became the “official story,” which was repeatedly echoed in the news and by local officials to the point that nearly everyone who heard it “knew for sure” that he was guilty. As a result, Walter ended up serving 6 years ON DEATH ROW for something he did NOT do before finally being exonerated.

Walter’s story is a cautionary reminder that injustice takes many shapes, including condemning and passing judgment on a person based on accusations without knowing all the facts, weighing all the evidence, or providing the due process required for a fair hearing.

Still more powerfully, Walter’s story is a tribute to the resilience of people fighting for exoneration and an inspiration to anyone facing a similar challenge. In his own words…

“… I know it may not matter to you, but it’s important to me that you know that I’m innocent and didn’t do what they said I did, not no kinda way.” -Walter McMillian

As for the Golden State Warriors, now in the middle of a team rebuild after the departure of KD, Iggy, & SDot, their gesture of support to the NCIP and its exoneration work this season is not just a one and done situation. It is part of the organization’s commitment to excellence on and off the basketball court. It is yet another exemplification of Golden State Warriors’ championship mettle — from players to staff, to ownership, the organization consistently embodies excellence.

Check out Warriors’ head coach, Steve Kerr, in a past pitch in support of legal advocates fighting for the exoneration of innocent people!

https://youtu.be/OKVFQidbE4k

For all these reasons, I am proud to be a part of DUB NATION and applaud the Golden State Warriors for their support of the passionate and devoted people at NCIP who work to exonerate people accused of crimes they did not commit and give them a chance to rebuild their lives. I look forward to supporting their continued efforts to educate the public about the need to defend everyone's rights to due process, especially the right to a zealous legal defense and the right to be judged innocent unless proven guilty.

For more about me: www.hectorperla.com

(This is a free preview of my book published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. If you are interested in purchasing the book you can do so here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/sandinista-nicaraguas-resistance-to-us-coercion/FEA9A716E750EBEDBF5A5EA38661C9FE)

Abstract

How was the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua able to resist the Reagan Administration’s coercive efforts to roll back its revolution? Héctor Perla challenges conventional understandings of this conflict by tracing the process through which Nicaraguans, both at home and in the diaspora, defeated U.S. aggression in a highly unequal confrontation. He argues that beyond traditional diplomatic, military, and domestic state policies, a crucial element of the FSLN’s defensive strategy was the mobilization of a transnational social movement to build public opposition to Reagan’s policy within the United States, thus preventing further escalation of the conflict. Using a contentious politics approach the author reveals how the extant scholarly assumptions of international relations theory have obscured some of the most consequential dynamics of the case. This is a fascinating study illustrating how supposedly powerless actors were able to constrain the policies of the most powerful nation on earth.

Preface

I began to write this book without realizing it during my first quarter in graduate school. That quarter I took a course on strategic interactions. As I read through the literature, I immediately found “red flags” going up because Latin America — with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis — was completely missing, and even in that case the scholars exploring it focused on U.S. and Soviet actions to assess its outcome. Although there were some case studies on conflicts involving African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries, the majority of the cases covered involved the major powers, such as the United States, USSR, China, Japan, or European powers. Unfortunately, as I’ve subsequently discovered, this focus on the great powers is not limited solely to qualitative case studies but is often the case in the International Relations (IR) field generally.

At the time, I was perplexed by the fact that so little of the scholarship focused on Latin America or U.S.–Latin American relations. I found even less on Latinos’ role in the U.S. foreign policy formation process. Interestingly, no one else seemed to find this problematic or even notice. This really puzzled and troubled me, because I was committed to becoming a serious IR scholar, keeping my regional specialization on Latin America and thematic focus on U.S. policy toward revolutionary guerrilla and social movements, as well as on exploring how Latinos influence U.S. foreign policy. So, over the next few weeks, I searched through the IR literature until I came across a few chapters and articles on Reagan’s failed efforts to oust the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) from power. At first, I was just happy to read anything involving Latin America, but I soon found that something was missing: in these studies, the Central Americans had no agency. On the contrary, they were passive actors (objects) in the explanations, which instead focused exclusively on the strategies and actions of the Reagan Administration (subjects) to explain the cases’ outcome. And yet, this went against everything I knew to be true. Throughout my life I had personally witnessed tremendous transnational political activism on the part of Central Americans — primarily Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Guatemalans — in the United States. I found it hard to believe that their activism played no systematic role in the course of political events that unfolded between Central America and the United States during the 1980s.

Identifying these three voids in the IR literature — (1) the relatively limited work on U.S.-Latin American relations; (2) the lack of Latin American agency in IR accounts of strategic interactions between the United States and Latin America; and (3) the lack of scholarship on Latino/as’ participation in and impact on U.S. foreign policy — led me to reflect on three moments from my childhood, which illustrate why I responded so viscerally to challenge these absences in graduate school. The three moments correspond to my earliest political memories. The first, from when I was about five years old, is of marching (while holding my mom’s hand as she carried my younger brother on her hip) on the 24th and Mission Streets, in the heart of San Francisco’s Latino barrio, to protest Anastacio Somoza’s bombing of Nicaragua’s cities where innocent civilians were victims of the carnage.

The second memory is from a few years later as the Salvadoran Civil War raged and the human rights violations of right-wing death squads intensified. My parents, like many other Salvadoran families (as documented in the classic Fragmented Ties, by sociologist Cecilia Menjivar), began taking in refugees fleeing the war. At first, these consisted primarily of family and then friends of the family, but soon the deluge of refugees necessitated that our family begin taking in strangers connected only by a network of transnational religious, humanitarian, and/or diasporic civil society organizations in which my parents were active. Among the refugees we housed were five teenage and early twenty-something-year-old Salvadoran guerrilla fighters and social movement activists from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberación Nacional — FMLN). They had all been physically wounded and/or psychologically traumatized and needed to recover, but to me, they were larger-than-life superheroes. Their bravery and willingness to challenge injustice despite the danger and impossible odds modeled a different vision of what it meant to be Salvadoran than the disempowering images most frequently portrayed at the time. Being around them, I felt proud to be Latino in a way that contrasted sharply with the shame I was usually made to feel in association with my ethnicity in my typical interactions with mainstream U.S. institutions and society (e.g., school, TV, movies) at the time.

The third moment occurred shortly after these young men arrived at my house, during one of Ronald Reagan’s televised speeches to a special joint session of Congress on the political situation in Central America. In that speech, the president decried the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and Salvadoran guerrillas for exporting communist revolution and held the Russians responsible for Central America’s political problems. But as I looked around my living room, instead of seeing the threatening, well-funded Soviet menace described by Reagan, I saw these young men, barely past adolescence, mostly from poor rural peasant families like my father, who were nothing like the president depicted. Not only were they not evil, but on the contrary, they were happy, fun-loving young men who played basketball and soccer with me and my little brother during the day. At night they talked with my parents not of Russian communism or even Nicaraguan Sandinismo, but of daily Salvadoran realities facing government-sponsored violence and repression that drove each of them to take up arms. More than anything they talked about making a difference, and they spoke with a conviction that inspired me! Even at that young age I immediately and intuitively understood their unflinching commitment and willingness to risk everything to change the unjust conditions in El Salvador. At the same time, my young mind couldn’t reconcile why President Reagan was accusing Russians and their supposed Nicaraguan proxies for Central America’s problems. All the testimonies I heard from the countless refugees who passed through my house told of the Salvadoran government’s brutality and violence, the very same government President Reagan was funding (or supporting). But, what really stood out was that these young men weren’t Russian or even Nicaraguan; they were Salvadoran like me, and if the president could demonize and justify killing them, then he could do the same to me and my family! It led me to ask my mom a prescient question: why would anyone in the United States believe him?

As I grappled with the concepts and theories presented during that first quarter of graduate school, these memories came flooding back and informed how I analyzed U.S.–Nicaraguan relations during the 1980s. Specifically, they led me to note that this was one of the most important and salient international conflicts at the end of the Cold War; that the Sandinistas, like my Salvadoran immigrant activist parents and their social movement networks, actively resisted the U.S. government’s efforts to defeat their respective movements, and that many of their resistance strategies were transnational, noninstitutional, ideational, and were not documented by IR scholars’ explanations.

Thus, in what would eventually become the first draft of Chapter 3, I sought to (1) understand and document what the FSLN did to defend their country from external aggression; (2) explore what effect their response had on the two countries’ strategic interaction; and (3) argue that it was the Sandinistas’ transnational defensive strategies that caused the failure of Reagan’s coercive efforts to oust them. When I began the project I didn’t know it would become so fruitful. It began as a simple qualitative case study of U.S. relations with Nicaragua, seeking to explain why the Reagan Administration could not oust the Sandinistas before leaving office. I sought to correct for the extant literature’s exclusive focus on U.S. actions by concentrating completely on what the Nicaraguans did to defend their revolution. This fit perfectly with my Latin Americanist sensibilities.

But in some ways, even though I was not aware of it, I was biting off more than I could chew at the time. With the limited theoretical and methodological tools then at my disposal, not only was I unable to show that the Sandinistas’ actions had influenced the Reagan Administration’s ability to use all the force at its disposal but also I couldn’t even convince my IR professors that this was a feasible long-term project. In fact, when I handed it in as my first qualifying paper to advance to doctoral candidacy, it failed. I was completely disillusioned and on the verge of dropping out of the Ph.D. program!

Luckily, UCLA had just hired Mark Sawyer, then a new, young assistant professor with a regional specialization on Latin America and a concern for contentious politics, which I define as the use of noninstitutionalized and often disruptive techniques by actors without or with limited access to formal mechanisms of political decision making to redress their grievances, make rights claims, change policy, and/or take power (sometimes in combination with institutional actions by allies). After a fortuitous introduction by a good friend, Mark read my piece and convinced me that not only did it have potential but also that despite not being an IR scholar himself he was willing to work with me to develop it. That’s exactly what I needed: someone who believed in me and could help me elaborate my project conceptually while allowing me to find my own voice to articulate my theoretical contributions.

As I realized later, what Mark was able to see because of his attention to contentious politics, which my IR professors had not, were the ontological assumptions built into much of IR theory and accepted by many scholars in the subfield, which I was implicitly and at the time very clumsily trying to critique. At first, they were nothing more than intellectual intuitions, which I couldn’t quite put my finger on or articulate clearly. But over time through our conversations, I began explicitly identifying why all the red flags were going up. Looking back now, it’s probably more accurate to say that conceptually I started raising red and black flags, the colors of the FSLN — whose agency was missing from the previous scholarship. Ironically, I would later find that this was also the case for much of the scholarship on the U.S.–Central American peace, sanctuary, and solidarity movement that also obscured Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Guatemalans’ agency in mobilizing these networks.

At the time, Mark was working on a coauthored article with John Guidry titled “Contentious Pluralism” for the second issue of Perspectives on Politics. In the piece, they laid out several mechanisms exemplified by diverse historical cases where marginalized people subverted the exclusionary limits of institutional democracy. They did it by pushing for the extension of democracy’s formal boundaries through contentious politics to include and empower those not previously envisioned or intended as its beneficiaries. That article, in particular, served as one of my earliest entry points into the literature on contentious politics. Given its comparative focus and the fact that one of the cases it drew on was organizing by Sandinista women, I began to see the incredible potential the contentious politics framework held if applied in the realm of IR and especially the study of asymmetric conflicts.

As I delved into the scholarship on U.S. relations with Sandinista Nicaragua and IR generally, I came to see that much of the IR security literature, regardless of theoretical or methodological approach, accepts a series of assumptions that define and constrain our analyses in ways that create and reproduce a great power bias in the discipline. In particular, much of IR security theory, whether realist, liberal, or constructivist, is derived from studies of global interactions between materially powerful actors, specifically states engaged in symmetric military conflicts or total wars. The assumptions derived from these cases pervade IR’s canonical literature and have even made their way into the studies on asymmetric conflicts. As a result, scholars working within IR’s mainstream paradigms are neither able to challenge these traditions’ ontological assumptions nor criticize the core theoretical findings of this literature because they hold true in the cases on which they are tested.

On the contrary, the strength of the contentious politics paradigm lies in focusing attention on understanding how materially weak actors (e.g., ordinary people) and their allies confront more powerful adversaries using material and ideational strategies. Although contentious politics studies have been conducted on national and comparative cases, or even on transnational social movements, this paradigm has not been used to analyze militarized interstate disputes, or what we more commonly call wars — traditionally the purview and sine qua non of IR security scholarship. But there is no reason why the insights from the contentious politics paradigm can’t be used to elucidate the outcome of interstate wars, especially asymmetric ones. This is precisely what I do in this study: extend the contentious politics approach into the realm of IR.

By drawing on insights from Latin American studies, American race politics, Latino studies, sociology, and in particular from studies of contentious politics, the framework deployed in this book broadens IR security theory’s traditional framework of analysis, especially on asymmetric conflicts, in two ways. First, it does so by expanding the notion of power to include nonmaterial, ideational forms of power. Although liberal IR scholars have incorporated this understanding into their studies, rarely does it find its way into the security studies literature. On the contrary, while constructivists have developed this insight theoretically on security concerns, they have been slow to deploy political psychological methods that allow us to test their predictions deductively. More troubling realists, liberals, and constructivists subscribe to a dualist conception of power, which posits a false binary between material and ideational power. In contrast, the contentious politics approach allows us to view these two forms of power as interconnected and recursive. In this view, movements’ contentious repertoires are the conveyor belts that transform quite limited material power into ideational power, and when successful, lead to the accumulation of more material power.

Second, the study employs a transnational framework of analysis. This means that the unit of analysis necessarily includes the strategies pursued by governments not only at the traditional interstate level, but also above it — such as at the United Nations and World Court — and, more importantly, below it in civil society, including transnational social movements. But it also means that the unit of analysis incorporates not just nation-states and their governments, but also their civil societies. That is, the study not only analyzes formal political actions by the nation-states involved in the conflict, but also the fluid cross-border contentious political activism of actors outside the state — something that scholars of Latino transnationalism and contentious politics have documented well — but whose actions have typically flown beneath the radar of IR security studies.

Finally, this study inductively highlights some of the repertoires of contention available to revolutionary movements and grassroots activists challenging an adversary within the context of an asymmetric militarized interstate dispute. The contentious repertoires identified inductively in this case push security scholars, especially those concerned with asymmetric conflicts, to broaden the notion of what is relevant for studying, explaining, or predicting the outcome of an asymmetric conflict.

As I began to understand the book’s contributions, I saw that each chapter provided answers to questions that I had not originally foreseen or intended to answer, with implications not only for IR, but also for other subfields and disciplines. For example, of relevance for Latin American studies, it documents the previously underappreciated and untheorized participation of Central Americans in the creation of the Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement (CAPSM). At the same time, for Latino studies and social movement scholars it shows how immigrant activists can deploy a signal flare strategy of transnational activism rather than having to rely on an ethnic lobby strategy of political mobilization. In an ethnic lobby strategy, immigrant coethnics in the United States serve as the primary constituency pressuring the U.S. government on the policies that they as a group (whether in the diaspora or in the home country) care about. In contrast, using the signal flare strategy, Nicaraguan activists — both in Central America and in the diaspora– adversely affected by the administration’s policy, mobilized to have non-Nicaraguan U.S. citizens organize and advocate on their behalf to oppose Reagan’s policy toward Nicaragua. In addition, the book offers a framing theory of policy objectives (FTPO) that is relevant for political psychology. The FTPO makes prospect theory empirically usable in deductive nonlaboratory political settings and has the potential to explain and predict public attitudes toward various government policies more accurately and concisely than normative rational choice models of human decision making. Finally, the study’s process-tracing design makes a methodological contribution by illustrating a way for both IR security scholars and social movement scholars to overcome a central problem in their fields: how to establish a causal relationship between an observed outcome, respectively successful deterrence or movement success (defined as policy impact), and the strategies used by a state or movement to achieve its desired goal.

However, in the end, this book is fundamentally an attempt to recognize the countless women and men like those whose activism I saw firsthand as a child of Central American immigrant parents, growing up in San Francisco’s Mission District during the 1980s. The valiant work of Central Americans, those in their home countries as well as of migrant (and some 1.5 generation and second-generation) activists who worked side by side with U.S. citizens to stop the Reagan Administration’s policy in Central America, has yet to be accurately documented or theorized by current scholarship. It is my sincere hope that this work honors their efforts by beginning to recover this movement’s historical memory so that future generations can embrace it as their own legacy in the same way that I have. But more generally, I hope that this movement’s example inspires new generations of ordinary citizens, turned activists by necessity or vocation, to seek justice, especially against hegemonic international powers. As this story shows, when materially weak groups from the Global South work together in a coordinated fashion with their peers in the Global North they can deter the plans of even the most powerful global actors.