Guatemalans Here Seek Refugee Protection

As jubilant representatives of Los Angeles’ Salvadoran community praised the Clinton Administration on Tuesday for extending a refuge program, other local Central American advocacy groups intensified their efforts to get the same protection for Guatemalans in the United States.

The push on behalf of Guatemalan immigrants came in the wake of the suspension of that country’s constitution, the dissolution of its Congress and fears of a coup by the nation’s powerful military.

Guatemala’s political convulsions sent a collective shudder through the Guatemalan community in Los Angeles.

“Guatemalans are reacting with fear to yesterday’s events,” said Robert J. Foss, a staff attorney at El Rescate, a Central American community organization.

A majority of Guatemalans are here illegally, community leaders said, and face deportation.

The current haven policy has allowed 200,000 Salvadorans to remain and work in the U.S. legally since late 1990. It was set to expire in June, raising the specter of mass deportations.

Instead, the so-called Deferred Enforced Departure program will allow 74,000 of the 400,000 Salvadorans living in Los Angeles to qualify for the extension, according to the Central American Refugee Center. Most are refugees of a 12-year civil war.

“This is a victory for the Salvadoran community,” Roberto Lovato, the center’s executive director.

But Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based immigration group, has condemned the extension.

Guatemalans, whose civil war has left more than 100,000 dead, have been rebuffed in previous efforts to attain the same protected status.

But at a meeting scheduled for Tuesday night, members of the Southern California Inter-Faith Task Force on Central America planned a renewed push to get haven status for Guatemalans.

A coalition of Central American advocacy groups had already filed a petition last October with the Justice Department to extend the status to Guatemalans, said Carlos Gutierrez, director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Guatemala support network Atanacio Tzul.

With Tuesday’s news, Dorys Arriaza’s fears doubled. Arriaza, an officer in Guatemala’s largest union whose political asylum case is pending, said she has watched as two democratically elected governments turned out to be puppets of the all-powerful military.

In 1990, six of her union colleagues “were disappeared,” she said. The next year, the director of a women’s group for which she volunteered was gunned down. Two days later, she began receiving menacing calls.

Times staff writer Elston Carr contributed to this article.