On January 3, 1943, Libia Yamamoto was just seven years old when local police arrived at her home in Chiclayo, Peru, to arrest her father, Saburo Maoki, who had been a respected member of the community and ran a general store alongside his work on a sugar plantation.
“They banged on the door and they took my father to jail. And my father couldn’t understand why because he had not done anything wrong,” Yamamoto recalled during an interview with Radio Diaries in 2019.
The arrest came as a shock to the family. Saburo Maoki, who had immigrated to Peru from Japan in 1914, was the epitome of a hard-working entrepreneur, firmly planted in his community with a family of five.
Yamamoto vividly remembered accompanying her mother to the police station, where the atmosphere was chilling. Every man detained was Japanese, and some were friends of her father.
“I asked my mother, ‘Where is he going?’ And she said, ‘Don’t know.’ It was like he was being kidnapped.”
While many may be aware of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in relocation camps during World War II, few are informed about the U.S. government’s parallel efforts to detain and deport thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants from Latin America.
These targeted actions involved not only immigrants but also their native-born spouses and children, driven by a U.S. strategy to exchange detained individuals for American citizens captured by enemy countries.
The backdrop of this campaign began to take shape as early as 1939, amidst growing concerns that Axis powers could extend their influence into the Western Hemisphere.
In an effort to curb this potential risk, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the FBI to position agents at U.S. embassies throughout Latin America to monitor individuals suspected of having pro-Axis sympathies.
As early as January 1939, the State Department identified more than 100,000 U.S. citizens living abroad who were at risk of being captured if the U.S. entered the war, as outlined by Jan Jarboe Russell in her book “The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II.”
As the U.S. prepared for war, the administration faced a dilemma: they needed prisoners of war to negotiate for American captives, but without a deployed military, there were no POWs available for exchange.
History professor Teresa Van Hoy, from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, explained that the government sought out Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants in Latin America as substitute detainees.
The U.S. ultimately forged agreements with over 15 Latin American nations, employing local authorities to help detain 6,600 individuals, confiscating their passports, and shipping them back to the U.S. for incarceration under the Alien Enemies Act of 1789.
This act, which allows for the detention of nationals from enemy countries in wartime, was rarely invoked throughout U.S. history until the Trump administration used it to expedite deportations of alleged gang members from Venezuela.
Latin American countries experienced various pressures to comply with U.S. orders. While some of their leaders, often supported by the U.S., complied willingly, others faced economic duress. The result was sweeping arrests that primarily targeted immigrants who had committed no crimes.
“No Latin American laws nor even U.S. treaty agreements permitted this. It was nothing less than kidnapping,” Van Hoy emphasized, reflecting on the moral implications of the U.S.’ actions.
As the U.S. entered the war following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the internment of Japanese Americans escalated. By March 1942, Lt. General John L. DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 4, allowing the military to forcibly remove and detain anyone considered a national security threat.
This broad order resulted in the detention of 122,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, along with 11,500 people of German descent and 3,000 people of Italian descent across various camps nationwide.
While this was happening domestically, U.S. agents and local officials were simultaneously executing arrests across Latin America. Ultimately, over 6,000 individuals from countries like Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador were deported to the U.S.
A declassified FBI report from 1942 stated, “A gratifying note is the fact that not one Japanese remains in Ecuador to the best of knowledge and the majority of the most dangerous Nazi agents have been deported.”
However, the arrests targeted innocent individuals as well as suspected enemies. For instance, Gertrude Harten, a German internee in Ecuador, detailed in her diary how her husband, Wolfgang Harten, was taken from their home by two soldiers in December 1943.
“Terrified. I saw in the vehicle a couple of our German friends … suddenly I felt an enormous emptiness. They had taken away my Wolfgang and I stayed behind alone with my three small children,” she wrote in her poignant reflections.
Wolfgang Harten had emigrated from Hamburg, Germany, to Ecuador in 1928 for work. Despite the hardships of living in a small, rural town, he was recognized for his contributions as vice president of an exporting company.
Yet, he had never appeared on any list identifying him as a security risk, and the couple had built a life and community that they believed was safe from the realities of the war raging across the ocean.
Initially, only men and their sons over the age of 18 were arrested. Van Hoy recounted how U.S. authorities began sending transport ships to collect these men, stripping them of their passports and classifying them as illegal aliens upon arrival in the U.S.
As conditions for their families worsened back home, desperation arose among the detainees. Many men, like Gertrude’s husband, refused to sign documents for exchange unless their families were allowed to accompany them.
In response, the U.S. government offered wives the chance to join their spouses at an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas, a unique facility established specifically for families, so long as they shared the same fate.
Gertrude, compelled by the hope of reuniting with her husband, followed through on the offer. “So, we closed our farm in Cuenca, leaving so many things behind,” she wrote.
Women like Libia Yamamoto would have similar experiences. She recalled boarding a ship where U.S. soldiers lined the gangway, their rifles terrifying.
Upon arriving in the U.S., families were subjected to processing in New Orleans before being sent to the Crystal City camp. The U.S. authorities took their passports and stripped away their identities, leaving them feeling bereft.
“The first thing the American authorities did to us was to clean us, putting us into hot water and disinfecting us using DDT,” a sentiment shared in Harten’s diary as she anticipated the reunion with her husband after ten long months apart.
The internment camp itself spanned 290 acres surrounded by towering, ten-foot barbed wire fences, with guard towers and spotlights casting a constant reminder of their imprisonment.
Kazumu Julio Cesar Naganuma, a former Japanese Peruvian internee, indicated that upon arrival in the camp, his family was relieved to see other Japanese families, alleviating some fears that they would meet a dire fate upon capture.
Life inside the camp, while inundated with reminders of their status as prisoners, also reflected the resilience of those detained. Families participated in operations, undertaking farming, teaching, and various roles necessary for maintaining the camp’s day-to-day functions.
Despite the sterile portrayal of camp life in government films—portraying activities akin to suburban life in 1940s America—there existed a stark juxtaposition of normality and confinement.
“There was one incident when they were playing baseball and the ball went out of the fence,” recalled Chieko Kamisato. “And this little boy wanted to try and retrieve the ball. That’s when the gunshot went up.”
As a continuous carousel of families arrived and were exchanged for American prisoners of war, others endured an unsettling limbo. There was consternation and worry as individuals awaited their turn to be exchanged for captives held abroad.
Glimpses of what awaited many families were starkly highlighted in Gertrude Harten’s writings—lists of hostages known to be exchanged made it clear that their names were not present. Many faced the uncertainty of being sent to war-ravaged nations in Europe as hostages in exchange for American prisoners.
Naganuma reflected that the ongoing conflict and the exchanges had drastically changed their lives, leaving them to ponder their future long after the cessation of hostilities.
As the war concluded in 1945, the detainment of innocent families transitioned into a new dilemma: where could they go once released from camp? With over 3,000 internees remaining in Crystal City, uncertainty loomed.
“We are still in the camp in Texas, behind walls and barbed wire. After the terrible end of the war, we asked daily what will become of us?” wrote Gertrude in her diary, articulating a sentiment that echoed through the hearts of many.
In the aftermath, families faced three evolving options: return to their original countries, be sent to post-war Italy, Germany, or Japan, or choose to stay in the United States.
Gertrude’s family eventually returned to Ecuador, motivated by the conditions reported by relatives in Germany facing starvation and extreme cold.
In contrast, the Peruvian government refused to accept its citizens back, leading many families, like Yamamoto’s, to confront an uncertain future. “I don’t know why they wouldn’t take us back,” she remembered, reflecting on the complexities surrounding the geopolitical dynamics of the time.
To secure residency in the U.S., many families sought sponsors, which was necessary for their transition out of Crystal City. The Konko Church of San Francisco, led by Reverend Yoshiaki Fukuda, sponsored some Japanese families, including Naganuma’s.
Others, like Chieko Kamisato, found opportunities through Seabrook Farms, a fruit and vegetable processing factory in New Jersey that employed many who had been detained.
Their struggles did not conclude with their exit from the camp; for many, it required restarting entire lives from scratch in the wake of their detainment.
As Naganuma poignantly stated, “My parents, they suffered through this, we were kidnapped from another country and yet, they hardly complain. Part of this is the Japanese culture. You might have heard the term ‘gaman.’ You just deal with it. You live through it. Gaman is just ‘suck it up.'”
image source from：npr
