Salvador Strife Hits Home in Southland

Nancy Rivera has never been to El Salvador, but this week her family was unexpectedly drawn into that country’s civil war.

Her husband, Mario Rivera, a 28-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, traveled with their two children to El Salvador on a family visit Nov. 1. A few days later, leftist guerrillas entered San Salvador, beginning an offensive that led Wednesday to the evacuation of American diplomats and their families.

Now, most of the U.S. Embassy staff has left the country. And Mario Rivera is stuck in San Salvador without a visa and no prospects of obtaining one soon, despite his wife’s anguished calls to her senators and congressman.

“I feel there’s a lot of injustices here,” Nancy Rivera, 30, a bank manager, said Friday morning as she sat with her children in their Canoga Park home. “Governments can pardon murderers, but they can’t get a family man out of a war-torn country.”

Since the rebel offensive began three weeks ago, many in Southern California’s Salvadoran community of 350,000 have felt much of the same pain and anxiety suffered by that country’s residents.

In the last month, some, like Nancy Rivera, have been separated from their relatives. Others, like Mario Rivas, a 27-year-old employee of La Placita Church whose father has disappeared during the fighting, have seen their families directly touched by the continuing political violence.

For now, Nancy Rivera is still in telephone contact with her husband, who is staying with his mother in San Salvador. She has turned to her elected representatives for help, making almost daily calls to the offices of U.S. Rep. Anthony Beilenson (D-Los Angeles) for the last two weeks.

Rivera believes her husband is the victim of the slow-working bureaucracy of the U.S. State Department. Mario Rivera entered the United States illegally in 1984 and tried to legalize his status after he married her. They met while working at a Van Nuys pizzeria, where he is an assistant manager.

U.S. immigration officials told Rivera he would have to return to El Salvador and re-enter the United States with a valid visa. The American Embassy in San Salvador had not completed the paper work when the new round of fighting began.

Mario Rivera and the two children--Coire, 8, and Jarrett, 2--were trapped for several days in a working-class suburb of San Salvador where some of the heaviest fighting of the offensive has taken place.

“I couldn’t watch the news because every time I saw the news I would start looking for my children,” Nancy Rivera said.

When embassy officials began evacuating Americans from the war-torn city, Mario rushed the children to the airport. More problems awaited them there. The children are American citizens, but embassy officials would not allow them on the chartered evacuation plane because they had no adult to fly with them. Mario Rivera, a Salvadoran citizen, had to stay behind. He then tried to put the children on a commercial flight, but the airline would not honor the return tickets.

With no money to buy new tickets, the children were stranded. Then a group of Americans who were at the airport waiting to be evacuated passed around a hat and collected $450 to pay for the children’s plane fare.

When her children arrived at Los Angeles International Airport late Thursday, Nancy Rivera said, they were thin and weak. Both had lost several pounds because they had gone without food or water for several days.

“We went to the stores, but they didn’t have anything in them,” Coire said. “I saw kids on the street asking for food and clothes.”

Virginia Hatfield, a field representative for Beilenson’s office who has called San Salvador on Rivera’s behalf, said it may be some time before Mario Rivera can return.

“The embassy (in San Salvador) is operating on an emergency basis,” Hatfield said. “The political situation down there is going to determine what happens to his visa application.”

At La Placita Church, parishioners and clergymen have also asked for U.S. government intervention to rescue endangered relatives of a Southern California man. The congregation is praying for 51-year-old Guillermo Rivas, father of Mario Rivas, a community worker with the downtown Los Angeles church.

Rivas said his father disappeared Nov. 21 from his home in Ilopango, a suburb of San Salvador. That day, uniformed members of the Salvadoran Treasury Police arrested his father, accusing him of keeping a supply of arms in the home, Rivas said.

The police found nothing in the home, Rivas said, but they took his father into custody. He has not been heard from since.

In an attempt to pressure the Salvadoran government to release his father, Rivas called the offices of U.S. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Los Angeles). At the congressman’s request, U.S. officials in El Salvador contacted the Treasury Police, a spokeswoman for the congressman said. The Salvadoran authorities said they did not know his whereabouts.

“That fills me with pain and worry,” Mario Rivas said in Spanish. “Because I know that means I may never see him again.”

Rivas said his brother, Miguel Angel Rivas, was kidnaped under similar circumstances in November, 1986, and has not been seen since. After trying to find him for three years, Mario fears that his brother--and now perhaps his father--are dead.

“My heart tells me that my brother is alive somewhere in jail,” Mario said. “But that hope is destroyed by the reality of El Salvador. I know that when someone is arrested and they don’t appear after a month, the person is never going to be heard from again.”