Warned by Guerrillas, Rejected by U.S. : Deported Salvadoran Takes Sad Journey Home--and Plans to Try Again

Earlier this year, U.S. immigration officials in Texas cracked down on political asylum applications from Central Americans, calling most “frivolous.” Hundreds of aliens were swiftly ordered deported. AP correspondent Joel Williams in Harlingen, Tex., has covered the immigration crush from his post on the Mexico border. This summer, he accompanied one Salvadoran on the deportation journey home.

The hot, crowded bus stopped at a dirt road. Jose Joel Martinez, freshly deported from the United States, stepped down and started walking the final, dusty mile to his parents’ concrete-walled house.

He didn’t know how long it would be safe to stay.

Martinez, 20, returned to civilian life this spring after four years in El Salvador’s army. But the civil war followed him home, and guerrillas warned him to leave or his life would be in danger.

“I don’t know whether it is safe for me to return,” Martinez said, looking at the mountain range just to the north, where combat recently had intensified between government troops and the leftist guerrillas. “I’ll have to see how things are.”

The journey home is a familiar one lately in El Salvador. Deportations of Salvadorans from Texas, which increased dramatically after a U.S. crackdown designed to plug off a flood of Central Americans, totaled more than 1,100 in the first half of the year.

500 Applicants a Day

The Immigration and Naturalization Service abruptly ended its policy of allowing Central Americans to travel beyond Texas to other U.S. destinations for temporary residence on Feb. 21. New asylum applicants were pouring into southern Texas at a rate of 500 a day by January, and the INS began ruling on applications the day they were filed. Those denied were held in detention camps until deportation.

Only six Salvadorans were granted asylum in Texas from Feb. 21 to the end of July.

Martinez said he didn’t even bother to apply; people told him it would only mean longer detention before he was deported.

Martinez’s homecoming prompted smiles from neighbors as he passed on a road lined with barbed wire and dotted with occasional piles of cattle dung.

“Todo tranquilo aqui (everything calm here),” Maria Emilina Anderson told Martinez when he asked about any local fighting.

Chickens scattered minutes later as he turned down a narrow path, stopped at a cinder-block house and shouted to a smiling woman who was hanging laundry on a rope. “Hello. Lito is back too,” Martinez told Lito’s mother. “He will visit Sunday,” after a reunion with his wife and newborn baby in San Miguel, the provincial capital.

Lito, his next-door neighbor and fellow ex-soldier, was deported on the same TACA International Airlines flight that had carried Martinez from Houston the day before. Out of work and threatened by the guerrillas, Lito had left for El Norte a few weeks before Martinez made his trip in May.

‘I Was a Prisoner’

He and Martinez found each other at the INS detention camp northeast of Brownsville, Tex.

“The food and the bed were better there (in U.S. detention) than I have at home, and it is air-conditioned,” Martinez said. “But I was a prisoner. It was my first time ever to be a prisoner.”

He left for the United States on May 3 and slipped across the Rio Grande at Brownsville on May 14. Four days later, he was in INS custody, having made the mistake of presenting himself to the Border Patrol to ask permission to stay and work in the United States.

He was held at the crowded INS detention camp six weeks, wearing the standard orange jumpsuit and blue canvas slippers and playing soccer and basketball with other detainees.

Many Salvadorans applying for asylum say they are fleeing “la situacion” --a combination of civil war and unemployment exacerbated by war. The nine-year conflict has claimed 70,000 lives, mostly civilians, and displaced 500,000 to 1 million people.

Those able to prove that they are fleeing persecution get asylum and permission to work in the United States. But U.S. officials say most Central Americans come for economic reasons.

Among Salvadorans in the United States, it is not hard to find former soldiers who say they were threatened by guerrillas.

“Immigration to the United States has increased much by soldiers who have completed military service,” said the Rev. Segundo Montes, a Jesuit priest and director of the Human Rights Institute at Central American University in San Salvador. “They don’t want to return to their houses or their towns because they are afraid.”

‘They Kill Them’

In conflict zones, guerrillas might consider former soldiers, public officials and their families to be “ears” for the government and tell them to leave, Montes said.

“If they do not leave, there comes a time when they, as they say, ‘bring them to justice.’ They kill them,” Montes said.

That type of justice is still more typical of the army, he added, “but the guerrillas, I believe, have increased a little this type of repression against the civilian population.”

Martinez spent a good part of the flight to El Salvador quiet and absorbed in violent reports of the civil war in a Salvadoran newspaper left on the plane. He did not join in the idle clowning of some of the 59 Central American deportees taking up the rear half of the airliner, on seats for which the U.S. government paid $288 per one-way ticket.

When he arrived at his rural home near the town of Chapeltique, Martinez’s mother, Maria Angela Sorto, was cooking over a wood fire in the house’s tiny, smoke-blackened kitchen. She stepped out to greet him with a grin of relief.

“Thank God, you returned,” she said. “It worries me when you are so far away.”

He took off his shirt and ate the small plate of eggs, rice and thick corn tortillas his mother served with a plastic tumbler of cool water from the well.

Warm Greeting

His father, Ernesto Martinez, was bathing in the river down a hill behind the house. Towel slung over his shoulder, he returned and warmly greeted his son.

The house has electricity but no running water. A tree trunk in the middle of the floor holds up a red clay roof. A hammock is the principal piece of furniture.

On one concrete wall, Ernesto Martinez had written in chalk the date his son left for the United States.

The father said things had been calm locally but that the week before, in a battle 25 miles to the north, four of Jose Joel’s army buddies had been killed. The younger Martinez, stunned, pulled from a shelf a pile of photographs showing him in battle fatigues with two of the dead, drinking hot pepper sauce as part of “toughness” training.

An hour later, several soldiers, fingers on triggers, marched by the house on patrol.

The next morning, Martinez said he would try to get work at the jute farm where his father earns 10 colones ($2) a day.

“If I had been able to work in the United States,” he said, “I could have lived in a place with a bed and a mattress.”

Later, he added, “Maybe I will return to the United States.”