Civil War Turmoil From El Salvador Spills Over to L.A. : Demonstrations: Words, not guns, are used by Salvadorans living here. When violence in homeland increases, more protests and immigration are expected locally.

The real battles are being fought with AK-47s and helicopter gunships in the mountain jungles of El Salvador and the working-class suburbs of its capital city. But with anywhere from 350,000 to 500,000 Salvadorans living in Southern California, some skirmishes from El Salvador’s intensified civil war have inevitably spilled over into the Central American barrios of Pico-Union and Westlake.

Words, not guns, were the weapons of choice earlier this week when 200 activists held a rally outside the Salvadoran Consulate near MacArthur Park, a few days after six Jesuit priests were assassinated.

The consul general of El Salvador in Los Angeles, Jose Mauricio Angulo, 40, a cultured man wearing a pinstriped suit, stood at the window of his second-floor office, peeking from behind the curtains at the protesters below.

Angulo, the owner of a cotton plantation in eastern El Salvador, said he is a “proud” member of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), which in the past has been linked by human rights organizations to death squads.

The protesters, aware of Angulo’s political affiliation, shouted a taunting chant up at the diplomat:

“Arena, fascistas, asesinos de los Jesuitas!” (“Arena, fascists, assassins of the Jesuits!”)

The protest was one of more than a dozen organized in Southern California in the past two weeks after Salvadoran army troops and guerrillas of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) battled over poor residential neighborhoods in San Salvador.

Beyond the political confrontations, the intensification of the civil war is likely to have lasting effects on the local Salvadoran community, the largest outside El Salvador. About one in 10 Salvadorans lives in the Los Angeles area.

The battles in San Salvador have left thousands homeless as the Salvadoran air force bombed residential areas to root out guerrilla strongholds. After the Jesuit priests were killed last week, human rights workers began predicting a wave of political turmoil that could once again send thousands of people fleeing the country to the safety of Southern California.

“Whenever there’s been an increase in violence in El Salvador, we’ve seen a renewed influx of refugees,” said Diane Jacoby, director of El Rescate, a Los Angeles refugee assistance agency. “We’ve argued for years that people come (to Southern California) because they’re being pushed here. Now they’re being pushed a lot harder.”

Los Angeles had a minuscule Salvadoran population before the early 1980s. Death-squad killings and the start of the civil war drove hundreds of thousands to Southern California, creating a vibrant Salvadoran community near downtown Los Angeles.

Although Jacoby said it is impossible to say how many Salvadorans will come as a result of the recent fighting, she said a large influx can be expected to have a severe impact on the community. According to refugee agencies, at least 50% of the Salvadorans living in Los Angeles are illegal aliens and living below the poverty line.

“We’ll find more people on street corners struggling for jobs and more competition for the jobs that there are,” Jacoby said.

About 100 people waited to greet some of the first refugees who arrived Wednesday night at Los Angeles International Airport on TACA Flight 510. Maria, a 39-year-old resident of Cerritos who asked that her last name not be published, was looking nervously for her two nephews, Nelson, 12, and Luis, 13.

“I’m rescuing them,” Maria said, explaining that she had paid for their airline tickets. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to them. They’re innocent. They don’t have a thing to do with politics.”

After passing successfully through immigration and customs, Nelson and Luis received a warm embrace from their aunt.

“Instead of crying, I feel happy,” she said.

Maria asked her nephews to say nothing about the fighting because any remark might endanger the life of their father, who stayed behind. But Nelson soon began describing how guerrillas and army soldiers battled for nine days to control his neighborhood in Mejicanos, a northern suburb of San Salvador.

“The people from the (guerrilla) movement were asking for help building barricades, and the army was bombing everywhere,” Nelson said. “The helicopters went up and down; you could hear the rockets exploding. The people scattered like ants. . . .”

Others Salvadorans are expected to reach Los Angeles in the coming weeks after completing the tortuous land journey through Guatemala and Mexico. Most will probably pay a smuggler of immigrants to help them cross the U.S. border near San Ysidro.

Julio, a 24-year-old exiled student activist who earlier this year was granted political asylum, said he and his family were making arrangements to bring his 12-year-old brother from El Salvador along the land route.

“We’re waiting for his papers to come through, but we might not wait that much longer,” he said. “The risks that he might face on the journey are less than the risks of staying (in El Salvador).”

While many Salvadorans were arriving in Los Angeles, one small group feared that they might be sent back.

At a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center in El Centro, about 70 Salvadorans who had agreed to be deported changed their minds after hearing of the FMLN offensive and the killings of the Jesuit priests.

“They don’t know what’s going to happen there,” said Richard Garcia, director of the Centro de Asuntos Migratorios, an immigrant advocacy group in San Diego. Garcia has been in contact with the detainees.

“They’re fearful that with the activity of the guerrillas dying down, there’s going to be a backlash against people,” he said.

Garcia said the detainees threatened to go on a hunger strike if INS officials did not agree to halt or postpone their deportation.

INS officials said Friday that deportations of Salvadorans had been temporarily stopped because of transportation problems caused by the fighting but would resume soon.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the small group of Salvadorans and their American supporters who oppose the government of Alfredo Cristiani stepped up their activity. They have held demonstrations almost daily since the FMLN launched its offensive Nov. 11.

Besides at least two protests outside the Salvadoran Consulate, they organized a rally last Saturday at MacArthur Park and a candlelight vigil Monday night at the Federal Building in Westwood. On Wednesday morning, they staged a mock funeral for the slain Jesuit priests and a sit-in in front of the downtown Los Angeles Federal Building.

For some Salvadorans, the protests are a chance to express their support for the rebel movement. At some of the rallies, protesters have hidden their faces with red bandannas in the style of the FMLN urban guerrilla fighters.

“I’ve been in the struggle ever since it started 10 years ago,” said one woman, an 80-year-old grandmother of 32 who was among the protesters outside the consulate.

The woman, who did not wish to be identified, said she was a trade-union activist in El Salvador. Here, she works as a housekeeper.

“I will be fighting until we win, because we are going to win,” she said. “I have faith in God that we will win.”

Inside the consulate, at the receiving end of the protests, Angulo turned to a reporter and offered a succinct analysis of the situation. The protesters, he said, were merely puppets, “communists linked to an international plot to destabilize” El Salvador.

“They are very unpatriotic people, most of them brainwashed,” said Angulo, who is also the brother-in-law of Roberto D’Aubuission, one of the founders of the Arena party. “They’ve been here too long. They don’t know the reality of El Salvador any more.”

The vast majority of Salvadorans in Los Angeles appear, however, to believe that a show of any kind of political allegiance is potentially deadly, even so far from their homeland.

At Monday’s rally outside the consulate, Luis Martinez, 39, and two of his friends--all from El Salvador--stood on the sidewalk, watching the protest from what he said was a safe distance half a block away.

“You have to be careful,” said his friend, Juan Antonio Gonzales, 27.

Martinez said he and his friends were walking through the neighborhood when they saw the protest, which was being covered by several television news crews.

“We decided to see what was happening,” Martinez said. “But we’re just here watching; we’re not taking sides. We can’t. Life is the important thing.”