Salvador Worker Tells of Threats : Foreign policy: In L.A. on speaking tour, American Jennifer Casolo says her deportation on arms charges may have been a setup.

Jennifer Jean Casolo, the Connecticut woman deported from El Salvador after 18 days in prison on charges of stockpiling weapons for leftist rebels, said Tuesday that she has received threatening hate mail since her return home.

In Los Angeles to launch an 11-city speaking tour, Casolo recounted details of her arrest on Nov. 25, the night Salvadoran police raided her rented home and allegedly unearthed more than 20,000 rounds of ammunition, grenades and explosives buried in the back yard.

Casolo, who coordinated tours of church workers and congressional aides to El Salvador, reasserted her innocence in a news conference at the First Baptist Church in Koreatown and suggested that Salvadoran authorities may have framed her to discredit all church workers.

“If it was a setup, I was a good person to choose,” Casolo, 28, said. “The work we were doing there was gaining more credibility and breadth.”

Casolo has maintained that she did not know where the arms came from. Her arrest came during a fierce guerrilla offensive and a crackdown by the U.S.-backed government on dissidents and the church.

Citing a lack of evidence, the Salvadoran government ordered Casolo released on Dec. 13 and expelled her from the country. President Alfredo Cristiani said, however, that he remained “morally convinced” of Casolo’s guilt.

As an indication of how the highly publicized case inflamed public emotions, Casolo said that about half a dozen letters--of the several hundred mailed to her --have been hateful or threatening. A couple simply said, “Drop dead.”

In one two-page letter, the writer opened with the greeting, “You ignorant terrorist slut,” and warned her she did not have long to live. Other letters merely urged her to “apologize” to President Bush.

The hate mail, she said, has been outweighed by support. She credits the American public’s outrage at her detention with leading to her release.

Casolo now plans to press her message--that U.S. military aid to El Salvador has backfired--in appearances at churches, community centers and, ultimately, the U.S. Congress, where she will testify later this month.

Casolo conceded that she used her back yard to bury personal items and pamphlets that instructed peasants on how to make posters. She said the items were hidden to keep them from government troops who were raiding the offices and homes of other church workers.

She suggested that her trouble may have started after she telephoned the offices of two U.S. congressmen to complain about the Salvadoran air force’s aerial attacks on poor neighborhoods where rebels took up positions.

The same night she said she received an obscene phone call from a man speaking English with a Spanish accent. A week later, she spotted police staked out near her house, and four days later her home was raided.

Casolo is also scheduled to speak at churches in Pasadena and Westwood, before she travels Friday to San Francisco and other cities.

On Tuesday, Casolo was a guest on a KABC radio talk show with broadcaster Michael Jackson, where she took calls from listeners--split evenly between the sympathetic and the critical, including one man who suggested many of the church workers in El Salvador are communists.

Casolo said she wants to return to El Salvador someday, but added: “If I were there now, I know there would be a bull’s-eye on my back,” she said.