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Article: Panic Attack: Sex and Terror in the Homeland
- Article from:
- NACLA Report on the Americas
- Article date:
- November 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright North American Congress on Latin America Nov/Dec 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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A FEW YEARS AGO, I SAT IN ON THE TRIAL OF a Salvadoran man - an "illegal alien," as they say - who had worked for years in the construction industry. One sunny Saturday afternoon, he had greeted a 14-year-old white girl, accompanied by a gaggle of her friends, in the green commons of the sprawling apartment complex where they all lived. By every account, the somewhat drunken man stood in the sidewalk and gently took the girl's wrists in between his thumbs and index fingers (with the remaining three fingers on each hand pointed aloft) to exclaim upon how lovely she looked in her summer outfit. And that was the extent of his offense, which involved neither sexual touching nor lewd or ...