Poet or Smuggler? : Demetria Martinez Says She Was Writing an Article; U.S. Attorney Says She Aided Illegals

The pale hands of Albuquerque poet and free-lance journalist Demetria Martinez trembled as she held the poem that has come to symbolize her status as newest cause celebre of the American Sanctuary movement.

But that first image of frailty changed as Martinez--wrapped in a black rebozo--recited her poem, “Nativity: For Two Salvadoran Women, 1986-1987,” to the audience filling the pews of a former Presbyterian church, now slightly haggard Pacific Symphony Concert Hall in Santa Ana.

Your eyes, large as Canada, welcome

this stranger.

We meet in a Juarez train station

where you sat hours,

your offspring blooming in you like cactus fruit,

dresses stained where breasts leak,

panties in purses tagged

“Hecho en El Salvador,”

your belts, like equators, mark North from South,

borders I cannot cross,

for I am a North American reporter,

pen and notebook, the tools

of my tribe, distance us...

Martinez, 27, was in Southern California to accept a first prize in poetry from UC Irvine’s annual Chicano Literary Contest, but few in the audience were unaware of the larger legal and journalistic furor swirling about her.

The first journalist to be indicted in a Sanctuary case, she is accused of conspiring to smuggle two Salvadoran women across the U.S.-Mexican border under the guise of doing a story about them. Ironically, part of the evidence the U.S. government plans to use against her is the poem she decided to write, in lieu of a story, about her experiences.

They began, Martinez claims, in August, 1986, when Albuquerque Lutheran minister Glen Remer-Thamert invited her to accompany him to Juarez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua to meet two Salvadoran women seeking sanctuary in the United States. Because both women were pregnant and due to deliver in December, Martinez envisioned a Christmas story for the Albuquerque Journal alluding to Joseph and Mary’s flight from Egypt to Bethlehem. Martinez said she walked the short distance across the international border between El Paso, Tex., and Juarez with Remer-Thamert and rode a bus with him to the train station, where they met Cecelia Elias Alegria and Inez Campos-Anzora.

Martinez, who writes a regular column for the National Catholic Worker and is a free-lance columnist and religion writer for the Albuquerque Journal, said she identified herself as a reporter for the Journal and made notes of their conversation.

After the interview ended, Martinez and Remer-Thamert returned to El Paso. Although she acknowledges knowing of arrangements to spirit the women across the border, Martinez claims to have no knowledge of how this was done or who was involved. She said the group later met in El Paso and Remer-Thamert and another individual Martinez claims she could not identify drove the Salvadoran women back to Albuquerque. Martinez said she was driven back to Albuquerque in a separate car except for one hour she rode with the women. Remer-Thamert has acknowledged seeking food, shelter and medical help for the women, who later gave birth in Albuquerque. Alegria gave her daughter up for adoption, but Campos-Anzora, Martinez said, kept her child. Officials with the U.S. Attorney’s office acknowledged that both women remain in the country, but declined to disclose their whereabouts or their legal status here.

The moment Martinez crossed the border, however, she also stepped over the line into controversy and the tough choices a writer must confront when poet, advocate and journalist occupy the same mind and body. On Dec. 11, Martinez, Remer-Thamert and a Salvadoran named Luis Arturo Ventura-Rivas were indicted by a federal grand jury on nine counts of conspiring to smuggle Central American refugees. Their pretrial hearing has been set for June 7.

But the charges against Martinez--who often writes about the Sanctuary movement and those who provide refuge for people claiming to flee political terror and war in Central America--have generated the most heat, giving her notoriety few poets could attract with verses alone.

U.S. Atty. William Lutz, who has acknowledged to the press that he traveled to El Salvador in efforts to personally prosecute the case, has said that the First Amendment does not automatically shield reporters who take part in criminal activities.

Lutz declined to comment on the case to The Times, citing a New Mexico statute preventing prosecutors from discussing a case before trial. But he was quoted last month in the Dallas Morning News as saying, “Our position is that she was an active participant in a crime and that this is not constitutionally protected activity.” Citing the example of a drug dealer who also writes about his crimes, Lutz added: “If that were the case, every defendant would claim to be a free-lance writer.”

Martinez denies abetting any crime. The real crime, she asserted, is that Lutz underestimated her credentials as a journalist because she is a Latina and a woman. The Princeton-educated writer added that the precautions she took in reporting the story were conservative compared with those employed by many other reporters who have accompanied refugees in cars as they were smuggled across the border.

But she never wrote a story. The women gave birth in November, Martinez said, undercutting the story’s premise. She also feared a story would eventually reveal their identities. So she composed a poem instead.

Ironically, Martinez now claims, Lutz may try to use the poem against her. She said a typewritten copy of the poem was either stolen from her home or lifted during her first public reading of the work, and then put into Lutz’s hands.

Martinez said she learned this after the federal public defender representing her received a letter from Lutz’s office stating that the poem had been obtained in discovery and would be submitted as evidence. Lutz also has declined to comment on the poem or how it was obtained.

But Martinez doesn’t hesitate describing the experience with a metaphor usually linked with South American dictatorships: “It shocks me that people are naive about what goes on in this country. For the most part, (government agents) don’t come knocking down your door and disappearing you. But my poem got disappeared.”

All this contention has made Martinez a focus for civil rights and press groups who see her indictment as an attack against First Amendment protections for journalists who commonly write about individuals involved in criminal activity.

A United Defense

Sanctuary followers have formed new defense committees, the Village Voice and the Albuquerque Tribune have published editorials in support of Martinez. The Washington-based Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press has criticized the indictment as a stab at creating a dangerous precedent that would hobble reporters who write critically about refugees fleeing war and economic chaos in Central America.

The indictment also has opened old wounds at home. The five-member Albuquerque coalition known as the Hispanic Round Table supports Martinez and denounces the Reagan Administration’s Central American refugee policy, a step that has pushed some Latinos in the state closer to the Sanctuary cause.

“She’s become a catalyst for informing more Latinos about Sanctuary,” said Maximo Martinez (no relation), round table member and state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). What has disturbed coalition members most, said Martinez, is the selective way they say Lutz has hounded a Latina journalist they respect.

“Why is Lutz taking such a personal interest in (prosecuting) this case?” Martinez asked. “The perception in the community is that there is a hidden agenda behind Lutz’s tactics. It has the flavor of retaliating against Hispanics in general for the stance (former) Gov. Toney Anaya took” in late 1986 when he declared New Mexico a Sanctuary state. (Soon after being inaugurated in 1987, new Gov. Gary Caruthers rescinded Anaya’s decree.)

The slight, brown-haired writer, however, doesn’t deny that controversy has helped her literary career. Her poetry readings are in demand now (a theatrical reading of her poems is planned for June 9 and she’ll read with Allen Ginsberg in Albuquerque on July 2.)

“The indictment,” she added, “has also stirred up interest in my book”--a three-poet collaboration tentatively titled “Three Times A Woman” to be published by Bilingual Review Press this fall.

The idea of spending up to 25 years in prison for practicing her profession, she declared, is nevertheless sobering. “I went through all the stages of death when I was indicted. For a month I was in shock. What’s scary to me is that there are people who would like to burn you at the stake, not for what you do or didn’t do, but for who you are.”

Until the events of last year, however, dull is the word Martinez would have used to describe her life and upbringing as the child of middle-class parents. To be sure, she said, growing up under her grandmother’s and mother’s religious tutelage indelibly marked her education.

“My grandmother and mother passed on the traditions, a kind of New Mexico Catholicism with Sephardic elements, the lighting of the candles and so on,” she added casually.

Descendants of Sephardic Jews

But it was Martinez herself who sparked interest in this obscure chapter of New Mexican history--covered in a 15-minute, National Public Radio broadcast in March--by writing about Latinos who had only recently discovered that they were in fact descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain during the Inquisition.

Still, her formation as a writer didn’t begin in earnest until 1978, when she left home for Princeton University.

“Demetria had always kept her own journal and read way beyond her age,” said Loy Sue Siegenthaler, who has known Martinez since age 12. Siegenthaler said that Martinez, even then, was particularly sensitive to human injustice. She also was more introverted and untested by difficult challenges, she said.

“Going to Princeton made this little Hispanic girl from Alburqueque grapple with intense competition from the vast majority of students who’d come out of prep schools,” Siegenthaler said. “She had to learn to stand up for herself.”

She also met exciting new people--among them roommate Elizabeth Mailer, Norman Mailer’s daughter--and attended writing workshops with Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Stanley Kunitz and Maxine Cumin, among others. “That was when she got her first reinforcement of what a good writer she was,” Siegenthaler said.

In her final year of undergraduate studies in public and international affairs, Martinez was named a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, which permitted her to specialize in creative writing and the study of religious ethics.

“She has a great deal of intensity of seriousness,” began Thedore Weiss, a now retired professor and author of “From Princeton One Autumn Afternoon: Collected Poems of Theodore Weiss” published by Macmillan.

‘Shy, but Strong’

“She was a very honorable person,” continued Weiss, who supervised Martinez’ senior project, the writing of a book of poems. “She is shy, but strong. She is a woman of some religious interests. She has become a considerable poet. All that is reflected in her work.”

Martinez said her poems reflect her feminist vision of the Gospel, with language steeped in unusual Christian and erotic imagery. Her political passion, she says, comes from Liberation Theology:

“Fundamental to Christianity is anger. I think the unique part of it, when it’s not middle-classed away, not fluffed away, is that righteous anger you saw in Christ’s life, that willingness to undertake suffering in order to see that justice be done.”

At the same time, however, her willingness to express her outrage against the treatment of Central American refugees and write for a partisan publication like the National Catholic Worker has put her in the difficult position of defending her integrity as a journalist.

Martinez said she is not a Marxist. “If anyone ever questioned my objectivity,” she said, “all they would have to do is read my articles. It’s real interesting that the question often gets asked of women. (It assumes) that a woman can’t have passionate ideas about spirituality and politics and be able to maintain an objective distance when it comes to reporting.

“Well, I say nonsense. I’m a whole person, and a gifted person. I’m not trying to beat my own drum, but I know plenty of other men who (are both journalists and writers of fiction). It’s not so unique.”