Visa Dispute Threatens Honduran’s New Start

It was a chance encounter that ended up saving a life.

Peter Speicher was a San Antonio ophthalmologist visiting Maya ruins in Honduras. Isaias Arita Bueso was a teenage tour guide. Their meeting blossomed into a friendship, and the eye doctor arranged for the onetime street kid to attend private school in Texas.

When the young man suffered kidney failure, Speicher offered one of his own organs for a transplant. Drug companies now donate the pricey medicines that keep Arita Bueso’s body from rejecting the new kidney.

But now the nation that helped Arita Bueso beat the long odds is pointing to his medical problems as a reason to keep him out of the United States.

In June, Arita Bueso returned to Honduras from Texas for what he thought would be a brief reunion with his family before starting community college in San Antonio. Once there, he discovered he would need a new student visa to return to the United States. But officials at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras have turned him down twice, based on comments Arita Bueso made about his need for continuing care in the U.S.

The dispute centers on the rules governing student visas, which require foreigners to leave the U.S. after completing their studies. In July, a consular officer interviewed Arita Bueso for the visa and asked him how long he intended to stay in the U.S.

“I told them, ‘I’m not sure. I need to check with my doctors.’ ” said Arita Bueso, who requires regular checkups and blood analysis and must take anti-rejection medicine for the rest of his life.

Kidney treatment is hard to come by even in urban areas in Honduras, much less Arita Bueso’s village in the west of the country. The five-mile hike down the mountain to the nearest paved road can take up to four hours during the rainy season. Arita Bueso recently made the long journey to his nation’s second-largest city, San Pedro Sula, to discuss his situation with a reporter.

U.S. law requires consular officials to deny student visas to foreigners they believe are high risks to stay on in the United States. The applicant must show he has strong ties to his homeland and is likely to return there.

“There is really no wiggle room,” said Ian Brownlee, consul general in Honduras. “The law is pretty clear.”

Arita Bueso polished his story on a second try in August, saying that he intended to stay 46 months to complete his education. But he was again denied the visa.

Brownlee declined to discuss the specifics of Arita Bueso’s case on the record. But an August letter sent by the U.S. Embassy in Honduras to Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who intervened on Arita Bueso’s behalf, said that among the factors leading to the Honduran’s rejection was that he “admitted that he needed long-term medical care in the USA and that he believes that care is only available in the USA.”

The letter went on to say that “we remain sympathetic to Mr. Arita Bueso’s medical situation, however, we are bound by the limits of the law.”

Immigration expert Mark Yoshida said Arita Bueso’s initial statement about his need for medical care and his uncertainty about his length of stay would be difficult to overcome.

“If you make a comment like that, no matter what your age or how unsophisticated you are, the government will have that record and continue to use it against you,” said Yoshida, an attorney with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles. “It’s not always logical. It’s not always reasonable. But that’s the system.”

Arita Bueso’s inability to return to the United States has set off a scramble to keep him supplied with anti-rejection medicine in an impoverished nation where patients with kidney disease often die for want of treatment. Speicher, who serves as Arita Bueso’s financial sponsor in the United States, has flown to Honduras twice to deliver the pills in person after a batch went missing in the mail.

Speicher is disgusted with consular officials, who he believes denied the visa in retaliation for his own public criticism of what he said was a slow response to Arita Bueso’s plight.

In addition to Smith, Speicher enlisted the help of two other Texas congressmen, Democrats Henry Cuellar and Charlie Gonzalez, who have asked President Bush to intervene. Speicher has contacted religious leaders, human rights organizations and complained to the State Department.

“The many small miracles that gave a boy a chance at an education and a second life might be nullified by the small fiefdom of bureaucrats at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras,” he wrote to the State Department in August.

Speicher and Arita Bueso first crossed paths in 2000, when the doctor traveled to Honduras to do volunteer work among the poor. A day off took the American to the Maya ruins near the town of Copan Ruinas, where he encountered the Honduran working as a tour guide and speaking broken English. The two began corresponding thereafter by letters and e-mail.

Speicher said he was impressed with the young man’s persistence and determination to make something of himself, even though Arita Bueso had quit school early, run away from his village and had lived for years on the streets of Copan Ruinas.

Speicher said he arranged for Arita Bueso to come to the United States on a student visa to study at a private high school in San Antonio. When the young man fell ill in 2003, the doctor battled with Arita Bueso’s insurance company to get his student policy to pay for dialysis. He later donated one of his kidneys.

“I had this critically ill person whose life was in my hands,” Speicher said. “Nobody else was going to do anything.”

Speicher promises to continue the fight to get Arita Bueso back to the U.S. He is looking into applying for a medical or humanitarian visa while he is lobbying officials to approve the student visa.

“I don’t accept no for an answer unless there is a very good reason,” he said. “He has my kidney, for God’s sake. This is a matter of him staying alive.”

In the meantime, Arita Bueso is using his time and some money from Speicher to help other ill people in his village. A feverish boy whom he carried on his back to a doctor an hour and a half away survived. Three others did not. He recently bought a tiny coffin in San Pedro Sula and paid to transport a grieving father and his dead child home from the hospital there.

“God gave me a second chance,” Arita Bueso said. “I promised him that I would try to help these children.”