Salvadorans Call for Boycott of Death Squad Suspect’s L.A. Business : Refugees: Southland groups also want police to expand their investigation of alleged right-wing terrorist activities here.

A coalition of Salvadoran refugee groups called Thursday for a boycott of a Los Angeles-based international overnight delivery firm owned by Carlos Rene Mata, a businessman named by Los Angeles police as a suspect in “death squad” threats against Salvadoran refugees living in Southern California.

Mata’s business, Pipil Express, has 80 offices in El Salvador, Guatemala and California, including six in Los Angeles.

At a press conference outside the Salvadoran Consulate near MacArthur Park, representatives of the Central American Refugee Center, the Coordinator of Salvadoran Committees and other groups called for the boycott because of Mata’s alleged links to the right-wing Republican Nationalist Alliance (Arena) party in El Salvador.

“We ask the community not to do business or send packages through Pipil Express,” said Yanira Corea of the Broad Movement of Solidarity with El Salvador, a group opposed to the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government.

An affidavit filed last week in Los Angeles Municipal Court by Detective Steve Spear of the LAPD’s criminal conspiracy section named Mata as a suspect in the Los Angeles death squad investigation. Spear said “confidential, reliable” sources also have linked Mata to death squads operating in El Salvador.

Despite the allegations, Mata has not been charged in the death squad case and his attorney, Donald C. Randolph, has denied Mata is linked to any death squads.

Mata, 35, is being held in Los Angeles County Jail on $500,000 bail after his arraignment last week on charges of making a terrorist threat against a former employee of his business and of receiving stolen property. Mata has also been charged in the rape of a 24-year-old former employee of Pipil Express.

The businessman pleaded guilty last month in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to charges that he used Pipil Express to smuggle aliens into the United States.

The conviction came after an extensive investigation into Mata’s activities by the LAPD, the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

New details of the death squad investigation were revealed Thursday after a judge unsealed three affidavits that Spear had filed in July to obtain search warrants for the Pico-Union office of Pipil Express and Mata’s Walnut residence.

According to the affidavit, a Salvadoran diplomat told police that Mata had organized “a very tight and close group of followers” in Los Angeles and that Mata conducted regular political meetings at his residence.

Mata, the affidavit continued, is a former official in the Salvadoran military with close ties to Roberto D’Aubuisson, a leader of the Arena party and a former Salvadoran military counterintelligence specialist.

Spear stated in his second affidavit that an FBI investigation had linked Mata to Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani. In the third affidavit, Spear included other “unsubstantiated” allegations made by informants about criminal acts allegedly committed by Mata in El Salvador.

The police affidavit extensively cites unnamed sources and presents a wide assortment of allegations against Mata, describing him variously as a drug smuggler, gun runner, importer of illegal aliens and a man “capable of having people killed.”

Randolph, Mata’s attorney, called the allegations “extremely outrageous.”

“I’m in the position of having to respond to allegations made by anonymous sources and information from unnamed informants,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Salvadoran refugee groups that called for a boycott of Pipil Express also are seeking an expansion of the LAPD’s death squad investigation to include other supporters in Los Angeles of the Arena party.

The most prominent Arena party member in Southern California is Jose Mauricio Angulo, the consul general of El Salvador in Los Angeles. At a press conference Thursday, Angulo denied that death squads are operating in Los Angeles or El Salvador. The diplomat said he has met Mata on two occasions but that Mata is not an Arena party member.

He characterized the refugee groups that demonstrated Thursday outside his office as “artists of deception.”

Linton Joaquin, an attorney with the Central American Refugee Center, one of the groups that sponsored the protest, said threats against Catholic priests and refugee activists in Los Angeles have continued in recent months, since leftist guerrillas launched an urban offensive in El Salvador in November.

Joaquin said the most recent death threat came in a telephone call Tuesday to Dolores Mission Parish in East Los Angeles. The threat named two prominent Jesuit priests.