Salvadoran Refugee Tortured in ’79 Gets Letter Threatening Her, Others in L.A.

A Salvadoran woman refugee who had been kidnaped and tortured in El Salvador in 1979 received a death squad-style threat in her Los Angeles mailbox that also threatened 18 other immigrants, it was disclosed Monday.

The letter, which she said bore an eerie resemblance to written threats she had received in El Salvador before her arrest and torture by National Guardsmen there, was disclosed at a press conference called by about 40 religious activists who said they staged the event to denounce the threats and call for a full investigation.

“I thought when I came to the United States I would be saved from death squads,” said the woman, Marta Alicia Rivera, 37, who was granted political asylum in the United States because of her 1979 abduction by the Salvadoran military. “And now, this.”

Kidnap, Rape Reports

The threat came hours after Spanish-language radio stations carried reports of the kidnaping and rape last Tuesday of another Salvadoran woman, who said she had been tortured for six hours by two Salvadoran men who claimed she was a member of a guerrilla organization.

Los Angeles police detectives said they are investigating both incidents. A department spokesman said its anti-terrorist division informed the FBI of the incidents as a courtesy. The FBI said it is not currently involved in the investigation, however.

The two incidents, combined with recent vandalizing of cars of other politically active Salvadorans here, have raised fears among opposition groups that right-wing, death squad-type groups are conducting a kind of “psychological warfare” aimed at terrifying activists into halting their political activities here.

Rivera, who was one of the first Salvadorans in Southern California known to have received U.S. asylum after war broke out in El Salvador in 1979, said the most curious part of the letter she received was the way it ended, with an unattributed quotation saying, “Flowers do not live in the desert.”

“The two letters I got in El Salvador about a month before I was captured by the National Guard were signed only with something like “a dead flower,”’ she said.

Asked for her opinion about who wrote the letter, she answered: “The people who did this obviously are ultra-rightists. But we don’t know if they have any links to the military. That would be a lot of speculation.”

The letter, scrawled in somewhat primitive penmanship, was addressed in Spanish to “Martha Alicia and her terrorist comrades.”

“Because you are a traitor to the fatherland, you will die along with your comrades,” it read. “You escaped in El Salvador. Here with us you will not achieve that.”

Most of the names of the nine other women and nine men on the list were withheld. All but two were said to be Salvadorans. The other two were described as “Chicanos.” All were described as active in at least one of a variety of local Salvadoran solidarity groups. Two were said to be attorneys working on immigration matters.