Justice, Lucia Summary

Gladis Sibrian is the director of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, USA. When she was thirteen or fourteen years old, her relatives would ask how she thought she could change anything in Panama after sixty years of military dictatorship. She would not change anything, they told her. The same question was asked at her school: how can young people change things with their power, faith and convictions? Everyone said she and her friends were idealistic and romantic.

She admits that in the process of change some people died. She had a nom de guerre in those days: Lucia, which means "light". Light is what happened in Los Angeles, she says. Sibrian calls it a "social explosion" instead of an "uprising" because it was unplanned and spontaneous. On one hand, it excited her that people did not let the injustice of...