An Orphanage at a Crossroads

The buildings, painted in the colors of joy, stand out against the doe-skin hills surrounding La Puerta de Fe orphanage. Bright blue and orange, red and pink, the low-slung structures call out for attention, like the castoff children who live inside.

Raul Francisco Vega Salazar’s home, an unpainted 8-by-10-foot shanty on the other side of the valley, is harder to see. And the rough-hewn toolshed that Martin Becerril Meza lives in seems like just another outbuilding in this quiet village about 35 miles north of Ensenada.

Vega, 20, and Becerril, 25, both grew up in La Puerta de Fe. And both ran away. For them, the buildings’ bright colors are reminders of a turbulent past, one tainted by a brother’s suicide, by memories of beatings and of childhood squandered.

Their lives, and the conditions they say they fled, contrast sharply with the intent of a pervasive yet little-known network of Baja orphanages, and the goodwill of Southern California Christian groups that support them.

It is a relationship that requires trust on both sides of the border, and one that took a troubled turn with the conviction--reversed earlier this year--of an American volunteer accused of sexual misconduct with the children.

Each weekend, hundreds of Americans flow south across the border bearing toys and clothes, tools and building supplies, determined to help improve the lives of children clinging to the fringes of Mexico’s inconstant economy.

Few of the children are true orphans. Some were taken by Mexican social services officials from parents who neglected or abused them. Others were dropped off by caring but poor parents who decided their flesh and blood would have better futures without them.

Mexican authorities officially count 44 such orphanages in Baja, most clustered in the north, but American activists say there are at least 57. Most house a handful to a couple of dozen children. La Puerta de Fe, or the Door of Faith, is among the largest, with about 85 children.

Under the Mexican system, La Puerta de Fe and the other orphanages are privately operated but subject to inspections and oversight by local social services officials. But there is no government funding. The orphanages rely instead on the network of international organizations, primarily Christian-based charities.

That network even begat a nonprofit business, Genesis Expeditions of San Diego, which during the last decade has grown from organizing construction of medical clinics to acting as a broker between Baja orphanages and mostly Southern California groups seeking a place to do good deeds.

By most accounts, La Puerta de Fe ranks as among the best of Baja’s orphanages, with its healthy $100,000-a-year budget coming primarily from the Door of Faith Foundation in Irvine. The orphanage is clean, the children well-fed and clothed, the staff attentive.

But the orphanage’s supporters at Door of Faith have been forced to confront some unpleasant revelations about conditions there in the early ‘90s--ones that reverberate today. Allegations that children were abused, that money was misused, and that when David Cathcart, an Orange County benefactor, went to investigate, he was falsely accused of sexually abusing four young boys.

This spring, a Mexican judge ordered Cathcart, 59, released after 61/2 years in prison, concluding that four boys lied when they accused him of sodomizing them--statements the boys came forward late last year to say had been coerced by the orphanage’s local director.

The new developments in the case have sparked a whirl of controversy in northern Baja, with the judge’s superiors eventually ordering her silence after she made a series of public pronouncements about past conditions at La Puerta de Fe. Local media, especially El Cachania newspaper in Ensenada, covered the events and Cathcart’s plight.

Social services officials had already begun monitoring the orphanage more closely following a report of possible improper touching in 1999. Though they found no further problems in their inspections, the resurfacing of the Cathcart case led them this spring to suspend placing additional children at La Puerta de Fe, pending investigation by local prosecutors.

On the U.S. side of the border, the storm raged differently as orphanage supporters, holding on to their affection for what they see as an oasis at the end of a dusty Baja road, tried to reconcile the present with the past.

Couple Opened Orphanage in ’59

La Puerta de Fe began in 1959 as an act of personal ministry.

Curtis and Sylvia Freeze, an American couple, were moved by religious faith to help impoverished Mexican children. They started the original orphanage in Tijuana, and three years later they took over the current site, a remote and mothballed dude ranch dating to the late 1700s, according to supporters.

For the first 30 years, La Puerta de Fe was a family operation as two generations of Freezes looked after the children. They came to rely on a local man named Gabriel Diego Garcia, first as a handyman and then as the local head of La Puerta de Fe, under Mexican laws that require foreign-supported orphanages be directed by Mexican citizens. That requirement meant that La Puerta de Fe had a Mexican board of directors in place south of the border, and an American board raising funds north of the border.

When the second generation of Freezes retired to the U.S. in 1990, they handed control of the American board over to Latin American Child Care, an international relief organization tied to the Assemblies of God church. But within months, Latin American Child Care was ready to abandon the project, according to Homer Purdy Jr., the Freezes’ son-in-law. They were concerned, Purdy said, that Diego was ignoring their requests for accountings of how donations were being spent.

A letter Diego wrote to Purdy at the time framed the dispute as a matter of local control. “I want to make this very clear to you: That the decisions and changes and all involve[d] in the direction of this orphanage is only mine, and the Mexican board,” the letter states. “No one else has the authority to interfere with the business of this orphanage. The only person who will give the orders is me.”

Fearing the orphanage would close, Freeze family members--including Purdy--and other supporters took over the American board in 1991. They ran into similar problems with Diego, said Purdy. “We had a hard time feeling confident that we could vouch for the way things were being managed.”

Other groups had similar concerns. The Laguna Niguel Rotary Club, for example, scrapped its 20-year practice of sending $2,000 to $3,000 a year to the orphanage after club officials became concerned about how the money was being spent, said Carlos Saenz, the liaison between the club and La Puerta de Fe.

Meanwhile, Cathcart, a Laguna Niguel travel agent and grandfather active in the men’s club at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church, began to take the plight of abandoned Mexican children as his personal mission.

He made regular trips and matched children with American families with whom they would spend time on both sides of the border. One girl, diagnosed with leukemia, moved in with her patrons in Orange County and remains there still, her disease in remission.

Cathcart also became close to the children at La Puerta de Fe. Sometimes he would bring kids to his family’s home in Laguna Niguel. Cathcart and the children describe the outings as harmless slumber parties marked by television-watching and popcorn-eating.

Vega, who went on several of the outings, said Cathcart “was kind and cared about us. He wanted us to experience some better things in life

Cathcart eventually took over from Purdy control of the group of U.S. supporters. Like the others, Cathcart had his suspicions about how Diego used the U.S. donations. Cathcart pressed the issue, refusing to send Diego money for such things as utility bills, opting to pay them in person during his regular trips to La Mision.

Cathcart believes his focus on the orphanage’s finances led to the charges being brought against him. In 1994, as Cathcart was pressuring Diego to account for expenses, Diego was taking some of his wards to local authorities, where they told stories of sexual relations with Cathcart. Some, such as Vega, say they refused. “I told [him] I wouldn’t do it, because it wasn’t true,” Vega said recently.

Diego has steadfastly maintained that there was no problem with the finances, and that he did not play a role in coercing the now-recanted sex-abuse allegations that sent Cathcart to prison--despite the judge’s belief that Diego was responsible.

Cathcart has always maintained his innocence, a position now backed by a court ruling. “The crime I’m guilty of is loving the children,” Cathcart said in the days before his release from prison. “I had no hang-ups about hugging the kids and telling them I love them.”

Vega said that visiting benefactors such as Cathcart saw eager young faces, but not always the deep pains that were just under the surface. “The Americans who would come and help at the orphanage never had any ideas of what life was like for us there. They never knew about the beatings.”

Diego has denied the children were beaten, although he acknowledges that corporal punishment was used.

“The [social service] officials themselves told me I could spank them to teach them discipline,” Diego said, adding that he stopped using corporal punishment several years ago when a change in Mexican law forbade it.

For Some, Bad Memories

Hundreds of children have been raised within La Puerta de Fe, and while no one has tracked them into adulthood, it is clear that some have flourished and some have foundered.

Vega is among those who’ve struggled. The young man living in a shack across the valley from La Puerta de Fe entered the orphanage when he was 4 months old. Some of his sharpest memories are of being beaten by Diego.

“He began beating me when I was 4 years old, usually with a belt but occasionally with sticks and slaps to the face,” Vega said. His description of life at the orphanage was echoed by five other former residents, including Martin Becerril.

Like Vega, Becerril entered the orphanage when he was an infant. The painful memories of beatings are overshadowed by one of suicide: His older brother hanged himself just outside La Puerta de Fe’s walls.

At age 15, Becerril ran away, but he had nowhere to go. For a time he lived under an old camper shell on the other side of the valley. Now he lives in the converted toolshed behind a small hardware store in La Mision.

He has no steady work and gets by doing sporadic odd jobs for the hardware store. He refers to his time at the orphanage as his “internment.” Vega and Becerril’s stories--and those told by others--are supported by a local social worker, Maria Cristina Garcia Rivera, who said she found evidence in 1994 of beatings and sexual abuse among the children at the orphanage. Her request for a full investigation by social services was ignored, she said.

Vega describes seeing Diego recently. “I asked him how he thought he was helping us by beating us. I told him that he didn’t do any of us any good, because look at us. We have no job skills. We have no education. No opportunity to better our lives. Look at how I’m living. We took nothing with us when we left the orphanage except bad memories.”

A New Start for Foundation

Life at La Puerta de Fe underwent a fundamental shift in the mid-’90s.

With Cathcart’s imprisonment, the original American Door of Faith Foundation died. Around the same time, though, a new and unrelated group--but one that chose the same name--came together under the direction of Hilda Pacheco, 38, of Irvine.

Pacheco lived in the orphanage for nearly 10 years. Born in Baja, she moved into the orphanage when she was 7 and left when she was 16, while the Freezes still were in charge. One of the orphanage’s success stories, she is an executive with the California Training Cooperative, a private consulting firm in Irvine.

In 1993, she visited the orphanage and was disturbed by what she has described as dilapidated conditions, and decided to organize financial support. The new Door of Faith Foundation has raised more than $1 million in the past seven years for La Puerta de Fe, mostly through annual galas. The most recent, held at the Marconi Automotive Museum in Tustin in November, drew such Hollywood celebrities as Edward James Olmos and Raquel Welch.

When Pacheco and others organized the current foundation, they decided to have their own person at the orphanage to serve as their eyes and ears. They settled on D.J. and Lynette Schuetze of Yorba Linda, regular volunteers at a series of Mexican orphanages who were considering opening their own facility.

For D.J. Schuetze, trading life as part-owner of an Orange County furniture business for the dusty compound at the end of a dirt road was a step up in life.

“I asked myself what was I going to say about my life when I retired? That I sold furniture?” Schuetze said. “Now, I can say that I really enjoy what I’m doing.”

Schuetze is protective of Diego and his role at the orphanage, but he also deflects questions about the Cathcart controversy, categorizing the crisscrossing accusations as a personal issue between the two men.

In the seven years that the Schuetzes have handled day-to-day operations--and finances--at La Puerta de Fe, its reputation has soared. The facility has been refurbished and has progressed from simply housing children to helping them achieve such things as computer literacy--there’s an on-site computer lab--and getting into college.

And the concerns about possible improper contacts that accompanied the Cathcart case gave rise to new protocols, including tightened security, Schuetze said. “All dorms now have full-time adult supervision by Mexican nationals. No child is allowed to leave the orphanage without being accompanied by more than one staffer.”

Oversight by local authorities has also increased, including a new regimen of rules governing travel by the children, and unannounced inspections which officials say have turned up no evidence of problems.

The new developments in the Cathcart case “have really put Puerta de Fe under the microscope,” Schuetze said. Yet so far, he said, longtime backers have remained unshaken. “They’ve been calling us with their prayers and support.”

Trying to Move Forward

Last fall, as Door of Faith supporters twirled around a dance floor in Tustin and noshed with Hollywood celebs to raise funds for La Puerta de Fe, Cathcart wedged himself onto his cot in an Ensenada prison cell and prayed that his faith would win out. He is back home now, spending time with his family and grandchildren--five of whom were born while he was in prison.

He is struggling with bitterness but trying to move forward with his interrupted life. Though his church held a fund-raiser to help him get back on his feet, he worries about how he will support himself, and how he will pay off legal bills that exceed $200,000. He has begun working with an agent to try to sell his story to a publisher or a film company, but a deal is far from a sure thing.

In Irvine, Pacheco and her fellow Door of Faith supporters are hoping that none of this will affect the work the group does on behalf of the children.

At La Puerta de Fe, Diego remains as director, working with the Schuetzes.

And, in nearby La Mision, where many former wards of the orphanage have built lives for themselves, others struggle.

Vega speaks with bitterness about his years in La Puerta de Fe, as though he was cheated of a future. Becerril, whose memories carry the added darkness of his brother’s suicide, is less open. His dark eyes flatten and words die away when talk turns to La Puerta de Fe. His meager life is defined largely by a place that tethers him to a past from which he can’t slip free.

“This,” Becerril said, sitting on a cement block outside his shack, “is the only world I know.”