AFTER THE RIOTS: REBUILDING THE COMMUNITY : In Pico-Union, Refugees Land in a New War Zone : Victims: They escaped Central America’s brutalities. But riots here took away homes, dreams and loved ones.

Ten years ago, Carmen Martinez and her husband, Ricardo, sold their belongings in El Salvador, left the civil war behind and joined the exodus northward. They built a new life in the Los Angeles neighborhood known as Pico-Union, crowding with four children into a one-room apartment, gradually purchasing furniture on credit and saving money to one day buy a home.

In the hours that turned Los Angeles into a combat zone not unlike the one they had abandoned, the Martinez family lost almost everything in an arson fire that also left them homeless.

“We were just beginning to get to where we wanted to be,” Carmen Martinez said as her year-old daughter cried for milk.

“And then this happened.”

Salvadorans and other Central Americans--many of whom escaped civil unrest and political upheaval to rebuild in the United States--face starting over yet again after riots destroyed much of Pico-Union and the adjacent MacArthur Park area, heart of this city’s huge, thriving Central American community. The damage struck body and soul at one of the city’s fastest growing ethnic groups, a group that had already borne the brunt of man-made tragedy.

The pupuseria at 9th Street and Vermont Avenue; the Atlacatl Restaurant, a symbol of the community; La Barata (“The Cheap One”) a discount appliance store frequented by Central Americans; the family clinic that treated up to 60 low-income patients a day--all were destroyed and looted in rioting that followed the verdicts in the trial of officers accused in the beating of Rodney G. King.

La Curacao, a furniture store on Olympic Boulevard so popular among Salvadorans that it has a branch in El Salvador, is now a jumble of ruins. Until the store was burned to the ground at the height of the riots, you could put money down at the Curacao on Olympic, and your mother in El Salvador could pick up a sofa.

To make matters worse, in the days following the riots, after many Central American immigrants lost their homes and businesses, they were pursued by federal immigration agents looking for looters. Some were deported.

And the only person killed by the National Guard was a Salvadoran, a former soldier in the U.S.-financed Salvadoran army.

“The Central American community in Pico-Union is probably the hardest hit because it’s so concentrated, and there was so much damage in a concentrated area,” said Larry Hatler, legislative aide to City Councilman Mike Hernandez, who represents the neighborhood.

“No one in the Central America community was not affected.”

Emelina Montoya’s story is tragic not just for its sadness, but because it has become so common.

She left her 11 brothers and sisters in the Salvadoran village of Santa Teresa in 1984. Five cousins had been murdered after the army accused them of collaborating with leftist guerrillas; relatives were so scared they didn’t attend the funeral. Then the government threatened to seize her family’s corn and yucca farm.

Following three brothers who left before her, Montoya--20 at the time--paid a “coyote” hundreds of dollars and was smuggled into Pico-Union. For several years, she worked in sweatshops packaging cookies until she could put together $500 to buy a cart. The cart was for peddling tamales and fruit.

For the last two years, Montoya has earned her living, about $125 a week, as a street vendor.

On the second day of the riots, fire swept through Montoya’s apartment building in the shadow of the Harbor Freeway at Olympic Boulevard and Blaine Street. She lost the one-room apartment she shared with her husband and two brothers and all her possessions.

The vending cart was also destroyed.

“In a matter of minutes, my work of eight years is over,” said Montoya, seated on the floor outside a Red Cross emergency assistance office. She is eight months’ pregnant, and her husband does not have steady work.

About 200 people lost their homes when Montoya’s building burned down.

Yet like much of the rest of Los Angeles, Montoya is determined to go on. Riding around in an old yellow Datsun, she and her husband spent hours looking for a new apartment last week. Most were too expensive. Finally they found one for $420, $100 more than their previous rent, and planned to move this weekend.

On the day her apartment building burned, Montoya had watched crowds loot, then set fire to, a furniture store next door. When smoke started to fill her room, she grabbed her purse and fled. The chaos in the streets, along with the curfew and armed troops patrolling urban neighborhoods, were a jarring reminder of the turmoil she had witnessed at home in El Salvador.

“There, you saw a lot of killing,” she said. “You saw the bodies of students alongside the roads. Sometimes they’d cut off their hands or their heads. The difference is that here, (the violence) is only for a short time. There, it is permanent.”

Montoya said that returning to El Salvador was not an option. Like many Salvadorans who fled their native country during a decade of civil war, she is skeptical about a peace agreement that went into effect earlier this year. She still remembers how two of her sisters were kidnaped and raped by armed strangers several years after she left Santa Teresa. In her long tale of misery, it is this memory that makes her tremble and cry.

Maria Cecilia Rivas last saw her brother the day before he died. He was asleep on a couch at their sister’s apartment in the Alvarado corridor of Pico-Union. The family was planning a trip back to El Salvador when the riots erupted.

Marvin Rivas was fatally shot by National Guardsmen on May 3, after he allegedly ran his car through a police barricade. Guardsmen fired 14 rounds from their M-16 semiautomatic rifles. Two hit Rivas, one in the arm and one in the head.

“I went to the morgue to see him,” Maria Cecilia Rivas said, “but they wouldn’t let me.”

The Rivas family hails from Chaletenango, one of El Salvador’s most war-weary states. Marvin Rivas, who was 26, had spent nearly 10 years in the Salvadoran military before coming to Los Angeles three years ago.

Part of his stint, the sister said, was with the Salvadoran Treasury Police, a branch often accused by human rights groups of torturing and killing suspected leftists.

“He came here to work, he always said, to try to make something of himself,” Maria Cecilia Rivas recalled.

Marvin Rivas left behind a pregnant Salvadoran girlfriend who lives in Pico-Union, and a child in El Salvador. At the end of last week, the family was trying to collect the money to send the body back to El Salvador, Maria Cecilia Rivas said: “To bury him here is too expensive.”

Even before the fury swept through Los Angeles, Pico-Union was a tough place to live. Congested and tattered, the neighborhood has increasingly been preyed upon by gangs and drug dealers. With unemployment high and political representation scarce, people often crowd five or more to an apartment in old brick buildings, fearful of crime and distrustful of authority. Apartments are interspersed with bakeries, butcher shops and indoor swap meets where merchants sell their goods at cut-rate prices.

Despite a handful of legalization programs, many people entered the United States illegally and do not have proper work documents.

“This community is so stifled,” said Madeline Janis, who heads a legal and social-service agency for Central Americans. The agency had to cancel English classes and emergency food programs in the wake of the violence. “There are no parks, no place to go. The kids have no place but the streets. It’s a real desperate neighborhood.”

The area became the principal port of entry for Salvadorans and other Central Americans in the early 1980s. Especially in El Salvador, war between the U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas, as well as reprisals by right-wing death squads, intensified in 1979-80, driving tens of thousands of Salvadorans to the United States. Most ended up in Los Angeles.

Millions of dollars in riot-related damage and losses to Latino-owned properties or businesses that served the Latino community have been reported in the Pico-Union and MacArthur Park areas. Stores were ransacked both by invading mobs and many of the area’s residents. Unemployment will soar, officials say.

The intersection of Pico and Alvarado, roughly the geographic center of the neighborhood, sums it up. Three corners--the Pico Fiesta mini-mall, a swap meet and a strip of small stores that included Lolita’s Magic Touch Beauty Shop--were destroyed by fire. The fourth corner had already been condemned as part of a city redevelopment project.

Aristides Larin, a Salvadoran and attorney who specializes in legal work with his native country, has an office south of MacArthur Park. It was spared, but just barely.

A group of Salvadoran young men who usually hang out on the corner fought off a crowdof arsonists when they tried to set the block on fire, Larin said. A few yards away, offices in the same complex that houses the Salvadoran Consulate were not so lucky.

“I never expected something so Dante-esque to happen here,” said Larin, who left San Salvador seven years ago because he felt his opposition to the government made him a likely victim.

Larin said that despite the relative lack of organization within the Salvadoran community, he thought Salvadoran business would recover.

“The Salvadoran is very enterprising,” Larin said. “We came here to look for a way to make it, to recover. We will lift ourselves up.”

Andres Argueta, on the other hand, whose restaurant was burned and looted, may rebuild but not in the same neighborhood.

“If I can come up with a place to go from here, I’m leaving,” said Argueta, 44. “If I have to remain, I remain, obliged.”

Though midway between Koreatown and Pico-Union, his restaurant, the Atlacatl, was a visible marker of the Salvadoran community.

After fire hit his restaurant, looters made away with shrimp, clams, pots and pans. He was able to salvage a jukebox and a large painting of Atlacatl, the mythic Indian warrior for whom the restaurant is named. Another restaurant he owns several blocks away was untouched.

Argueta, who lives in Hancock Park and has three children, all born here, said he has insurance and thinks he can reopen. Until then, though, his seven employees are without work.

The Rev. Tomas Lopez, a native of El Salvador, has been ministering to the Pico-Union area for a decade. When Carmen Martinez and her family lost their apartment, Lopez who took them in.

Coordinating with the Red Cross and other religious leaders, Lopez is struggling to organize the recovery. He is pained by those fellow Latinos who joined in the looting, and he worries about deeper social inequities and poverty that fueled last month’s uprising and have left a spiritual void among many Salvadorans.

“In some people, this crisis triggers a fighting spirit,” Lopez said quietly. “For others, it causes more depression. To have left everything behind and then to have lost everything here, this is very difficult.”