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Art Shibayama’s first memories of America are full of armed guards and barbed wire.

He was just 13 when his family was deported from Peru to an internment camp in south Texas, part of a U.S. government program that detained more than 2,000 Latin Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

Now the 86-year-old San Jose resident is hoping to shine some light on the dark and little-known chapter of U.S. history. He’s headed to Washington, D.C., next week for a hearing in front of a prominent human rights commission, more than 70 years after he was first snatched from his Peruvian home.

“I think it’s about time they let us testify,” the silver-haired Shibayama said slowly and softly. “Maybe we’ll get justice this time.”

It’s been nearly three decades since the United States formally apologized for imprisoning about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during the war. But the U.S. government also coordinated with 13 other governments to round up Japanese throughout Latin America, essentially kidnapping them and detaining them in a country where they had never set foot. And to this day the U.S. government has refused to grant the former Latin American internees equal compensation for their suffering.

“This was an American war crime, but nobody ever calls it that,” said Roger Daniels, a retired history professor at the University of Cincinnati who has studied the detentions.

The deportations and detentions were orchestrated by U.S. officials worried about a Japanese attack on the Panama Canal, Daniels said. In addition, the Americans used the detainees in hostage exchanges with the Japanese government.

In all, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were deported to internment camps in the U.S., according to the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, a San Francisco nonprofit. The group estimates that fewer than a dozen are now living in the Bay Area. About 80 percent came from Peru.

Shibayama’s parents were among the thousands of Japanese who had left Japan to find work in Peru. His father ran a successful textile company, and the family lived in a five-bedroom house with a maid and chauffeur.

But all that changed in March 1944, when the government arrested Shibayama’s mother and handed over the family to U.S. officials. He remembers being stuck below deck on a U.S. Army transport ship during the 21-day voyage to New Orleans — and being allowed on deck to get a breath of fresh air for only about 10 minutes a day. The Japanese-Peruvians were then taken by train to Crystal City, Texas, 100 miles southwest of San Antonio.

For the next 2½ years, Shibayama lived in the shadows of the camp’s fence, with machine-gun-toting guards staring down from towers. School was taught in English and Japanese, while Shibayama spoke only Spanish. The teenager spent afternoons playing softball and basketball and practicing judo in the dusty camp fields, as he dreamed about going home to Peru and taking over his family’s business.

Once the war ended, however, the U.S. government declared the detainees “illegal aliens,” saying they had entered the country without proper identification. Shibayama learned his family would again be deported — not home to Peru, which refused to take the internees back, but to Japan, a war-torn country he had never seen.

“They brought us here and some of our papers were confiscated, and they still called us illegal aliens,” Shibayama said. “If anything was illegal, it was what they did.”

As Shibayama and his family fought deportation proceedings in court — and eventually won the right to stay — they crossed the country to work in a New Jersey frozen food company that employed hundreds of former internees. Later, while living in Chicago, Shibayama was drafted by the Army and served during the Korean War. He later became a U.S. citizen and moved to San Jose, where he ran a gas station in the city’s Cambrian area.

Over the years, recognition grew that Japanese internment was a “grave injustice,” as a 1980 congressional panel put it. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, offering a formal apology letter and $20,000 in compensation to Japanese-American internees. But when Shibayama applied for his share of reparations, he was denied. The law guaranteed redress to only people who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents when they were interned.

After years of legal wrangling, a 1999 settlement with the U.S. government guaranteed the Latin American detainees their own apology letter and $5,000. Most of the former detainees took the settlement — some had left the country or simply wanted to move on with their lives.

But Shibayama and a handful of others refused, not because of the money, but because of the symbolism of accepting anything less than other internees, he said. The letter he would have received didn’t even come on official letterhead or mention Japanese-Peruvians.

“It was like a slap in the face,” Shibayama said. “Actually, we went through worse than the Japanese-Americans did, because at least they were in their own country.”

After several more failed appeals to get equal compensation in U.S. courts, Shibayama is now turning to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an agency that resolves human rights disputes in North, Central and South America. It’s part of the Organization of American States, an intergovernmental group that typically handles cases such as the 2014 mass murder of 23 college students in Mexico or violence against human rights activists in Honduras.

The commission accepted a petition from Shibayama and his two brothers and is holding a hearing on their case on Tuesday. At the commission’s offices just two blocks away from the White House, Shibayama will tell his story to seven human rights lawyers who will be asked to decide whether he and his brothers deserve the same compensation as the other internees of Japanese descent.

Paul Mills, Shibayama’s lawyer, said he was optimistic about the hearing’s outcome. “Really, the illegality of this under international law is two plus two equals four,” he said.

Mills said he doubted anyone from the federal government will even show up to argue against their case. In commission documents, government lawyers previously argued against the petition being admissible, but didn’t address the merits of Shibayama’s claims. A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the case.

If Shibayama does get a ruling in his favor, it won’t mean much in practical terms: The commission has no power to enforce its decisions. But a commission ruling would be a powerful moral statement and raise awareness of the issue, advocates for the internees say.

“This is unfinished World War II business,” said Grace Shimizu, whose father was taken from Peru and detained in Texas.

Shimizu, who grew up in the Bay Area and founded the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, will also be speaking at the hearing. “This is important not just for historical remembrance, but it’s also relevant for the challenges we face in terms of defending our Constitution and democracy.”

The hearing comes as Japanese internment has resurfaced in modern-day American politics. In a TV appearance the week after Donald Trump’s election, a spokeswoman for a pro-Trump SuperPAC specifically cited the detention of people of Japanese ancestry as “a precedent” for a potential registry of Muslims. In 2015, Trump told Time magazine that he didn’t know whether he would have supported or opposed Japanese internment if he were alive during World War II.

Shibayama said he hopes that by continuing to fight for equal compensation, he can help educate more Americans about what he went through.

“That’s the reason I keep doing something like this, so people will learn from it,” he said. “So these kind of things won’t happen again to any other people.”