Her Last Wish Arrives From Salvador

Tears streamed down Sonia Siguenza’s face.

In the early hours of Saturday, her husband, Israel, granted Sonia’s dying wish by delivering her 9-year-old son, Walter, to her bedside. At the sound of her son’s voice, Sonia, who had been in a coma for three weeks, opened her eyes.

It had been almost two years since mother and son had seen each other, since Walter was sent to live with his grandparents in their native El Salvador after doctors discovered that the 25-year-old woman was terminally ill from an infectious blood disease.

Walter arrived at Los Angeles International Airport just before midnight Friday, into the waiting arms of his father and the lights, microphones and cameras of the media. Robert Moscharak, Los Angeles district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who had driven the father to the airport and later accompanied him to the hospital, was also there.

Three weeks after the State Department had denied a visa application for the boy to come to California to see his sick mother, the INS granted him a “humanitarian parole” Thursday that will allow him to be here for three years.

At the airport, the boy, who made the seven-hour flight from San Salvador by himself, was unfazed by the attention. Dressed in a dark jacket over a white shirt, he struggled with his English to answer questions like a grown-up. But a short time later, when he saw his mother connected to tubes and life-support machines at the intensive care unit of Western Medical Center-Santa Ana, Walter’s brave front crumbled.

Sonia has been mostly unresponsive during the last few weeks. Walter walked in and said, “Hi, mami , como estas ?” Sonia opened her eyes and moved her mouth as if to speak.

But the words would not come. Then Walter began sobbing quietly, stroking his mother’s hands over and over as she lay in a blue-green hospital gown, tubes in her nose and IV needles in her arms.

“Don’t cry, my love,” Israel Siguenza told his wife, tenderly wiping her tears. “You’re going to get better now. Don’t cry any more, my son.”

As difficult as it was, it was a moment Siguenza had worked hard to bring about. Three weeks ago, he flew to San Salvador to ask the U.S. Embassy there to grant the boy a visa. But he was told that the boy could get to California only through normal immigration procedures, which could take two years.

Even after Siguenza offered to give up his own permanent residency status, the State Department would not grant him a non-immigrant visa, because U.S. officials feared that the boy would not return to El Salvador.

Finally, Siguenza and his wife’s doctor, Michael Fitzgibbons, appealed to Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.). Wilson intervened, then the INS agreed to grant the temporary right to be in the country.

“I’m glad to know there are still people out there who want to help,” Siguenza said. “One of my wife’s main wishes before she leaves us was for Walter to come and see her.

“But there’s no hope for her any more. I’m afraid that now that she sees her son, she might want to give up.”

Siguenza, a car salesman who lives in Santa Ana and has been in this country for 10 years, said he is overwhelmed by the response to his situation.

“I have a lot of pride, and I don’t like to ask for help,” he said.

But on Friday night, several of those who have been moved by the Siguenza family’s plight accompanied him at the airport.

There was Steve Cates, the pharmacist who befriended the family he met because he prepared medication for Sonia. Gary Lew, an aide to Wilson in Los Angeles, also waited at the airport.

After he learned that Siguenza’s car had been stolen the week before, Moscharak offered to drive him to the airport to pick up his son, and then to the hospital to see Sonia.

Moscharak and Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for the INS Western Regional Office, became involved when Wilson wrote to INS Commissioner Gene McNary in Washington.

On Friday, after the humanitarian parole was issued, they worked frantically, along with Lew, to unravel last-minute problems with TACA Airlines that almost kept the boy from boarding his plane in San Salvador.

“When you think of all the problems this family is going through, all your own problems seem so minuscule,” Moscharak said.

Sigueneza said the boy will spend the next few days between home and the hospital.

“We’re trying to get him here to see his mother as many times as we can,” he said.

“I think probably they’re not going to have that much time left together, so I think it’s good for both of them. All I can do is hope and pray to God that it makes a difference for her.”