Two Acquitted of Smuggling Salvadorans

A Lutheran minister and a free-lance journalist were acquitted Tuesday of smuggling two pregnant Salvadoran women into the United States.

A jury deliberated 4 1/2 hours over two days before acquitting the Rev. Glen Remer-Thamert and Demetria Martinez on all counts in what the defense billed as New Mexico’s first sanctuary case.

The sanctuary movement is a grass-roots effort that has been working since 1980 to aid refugees from Central America.

Remer-Thamert said he hopes that immigration authorities grant the women refugee status and allow them to stay in the country.

The women, Ines Campos-Anzora and Cecelia Elias-Alegria, were the chief prosecution witnesses in the two-week trial.

Conspiracy, Transport Charges

Remer-Thamert, 44, was charged with one count of conspiracy and two counts each of transporting, harboring and inducing the women to enter the United States. Martinez, 28, was charged with one count of conspiracy to violate immigration laws and two counts each of transporting and inducing the women.

Prosecutors alleged that Remer-Thamert schemed with a Salvadoran attorney to bring the women to the United States in order to give their babies up for adoption and then return the mothers to El Salvador.

They contended that Martinez helped Remer-Thamert to get the women into the United States from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Prosecutors said the defendants knew that they were acting illegally because Remer-Thamert paid a Juarez family to get the women from Mexico into the United States and the group took back roads on the way to Albuquerque to avoid U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints.

Remer-Thamert’s defense portrayed him as a religious man who believed that he could legally help two refugees under then-Gov. Toney Anaya’s March, 1986, proclamation declaring New Mexico a sanctuary state.

First Amendment Cited

Martinez’s attorney had contended that her client went along solely as a journalist on the August, 1986, trip to bring the women to Albuquerque and was protected by the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press.

“We felt there was good evidence the (Salvadoran) women entered illegally and were transported illegally,” U.S. Atty. William Lutz said after the verdicts. “I don’t think anyone can argue with that.

“But the question was one of intent, and the jury disagreed with our position on what the intent was.”

At an impromptu news conference in the lobby downstairs from the courtroom in the federal building, Remer-Thamert criticized the U.S. attorney’s office and U.S. involvement in Central America.

He called the verdicts a victory for the sanctuary movement, which he said was born in the United States because of the desperation in El Salvador.

Martinez, who writes for the Albuquerque Journal and the National Catholic Reporter, said she hoped that “the victory will encourage other reporters to get out and find out what the government has to hide in its role in the situation in El Salvador.”