No Diplomacy in This Word War

Their “he says, she says” tale rivals any Latin American soap opera, with allegations of marital infidelity, diplomatic intrigue and ruthless revenge.

She says he is an unscrupulous diplomat who arranged to get her a fraudulent passport and visa when they were lovers, then had her arrested when their affair ended badly.

He says she’s a manipulative beauty queen who made up the affair and other outrageous accusations as part of a scam to avoid getting kicked out of the country.

He is Fernando Castillo, 35, Guatemala’s Los Angeles-based consul general, one of the country’s top government officials in the Western United States.

She is Julia Arana, 29, a third-place finalist for the title of Miss Guatemala in 2000.

They are locked in an unusual public dispute, with his reputation and her ability to stay in the United States swaying in the balance.

“Fundamentally,” said Judge Ronald L. Mullins, an Immigration Court judge in Las Vegas, “this is a lovers’ quarrel. They had a dispute and the fallout from that dispute has been quite ugly.”

Mullins now is weighing their stories as he decides whether to deport Arana, an illegal immigrant caught with an allegedly fraudulent U.S. passport. Arana has argued she is entitled to asylum, saying that Castillo’s influence with the Guatemalan government would leave her vulnerable to retaliation in her homeland.

Mullins has tentatively ruled that she must leave the country.

The complex claims and counterclaims are laid out in a thick court file in Las Vegas Immigration Court, including emotional e-mails that detail the highs and lows of their relationship.

Their conflict is more than just a salacious tale. The U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City is investigating possible fraud in how a U.S. diplomatic visa was issued to Arana. And U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking into whether its agents acted properly when they arrested her in March 2004 for alleged passport fraud and other violations. The agencies confirmed their inquiries but would not comment further.

On this much the two sides agree: They met in fall 2001. Over the next two years, they were photographed together around the country. They had a falling-out in spring 2003. In a fit of anger, she sent copies of a nude photo of him to the Guatemalan Consulate in Los Angeles. He sued to get a restraining order forbidding her to contact him, then dropped the case.

On just about everything else, they part ways.

‘I Was Excited’

Arana says she was immediately impressed with Castillo when she met him in September 2001 at a Las Vegas reception in his honor.

He was just 31, young to be named to such an esteemed position. He gave her his business card, she said, and mentioned a possible internship at the consulate. At the time, she was, she admits, an illegal immigrant, studying political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and working as a waitress.

Here is her account of how the relationship evolved, then came undone, according to an interview at her Las Vegas home, tapes of Immigration Court hearings and allegations in the court file:

She called Castillo about three weeks after they met. He asked if she had a boyfriend, explaining that he was divorced and that his ex-wife and twin daughters lived in New York. They began an “intimate” relationship, she testified in court.

As the months passed, Arana testified, she began attending official Guatemalan events with him throughout the country, in Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Washington, D.C. Photos of them together in various locations, arm-in-arm, are part of the court file. One shows them lying together on a beach in Hawaii, where she had gone to compete in the Miss Hawaiian Tropics pageant in 2003.

She often visited him in his Los Angeles home, she testified, flying here on his dime. He charmed her with cards and flowers, she said; he phoned and e-mailed often.

“The truth is that we love each other,” reads one e-mail in the court file -- translated from Spanish -- that he allegedly wrote to her. “And we are both a great catch for each other and I miss you and I want you here as soon as possible.”

She met his friends. He met her family. “I was excited,” she testified. “I was thinking I was going to marry him.”

Then, in March 2003, immigration authorities arrested Arana. A former friend had reported Arana for allegedly using her identity years ago to make a false U.S. passport -- a contention Arana disputes.

She called Castillo, who found her a well-known immigration attorney.

The attorney, Enrique Arevalo, later withdrew from the case, citing an alleged misrepresentation by Castillo. In court documents, he said that though Castillo had initially described Arana as a “close friend” of the family, the attorney later discovered the pair “had a personal relationship that went sour.”

Arana, facing possible deportation, was afraid to travel anywhere outside the U.S. But that, she testified, put a crimp in a plan of Castillo’s to take her to Europe. Castillo came up with an elaborate scheme, Arana testified: He would make her a Guatemalan passport, then prepare a work contract naming her as his domestic helper. She would go back to Guatemala and, with the signed contract as evidence of her employment by Castillo, obtain a diplomatic visa from the U.S. Embassy, allowing her to come and go freely from the United States.

The documents would be under a false name, she said, to avoid raising the suspicions of U.S. authorities, who already had a record of her pending deportation case.

Arana was nervous, but, she said during the interview, “he made me feel confident.”

In May 2003, she testified, Castillo made her a Guatemalan passport under the name of Maria del Carmen Sanchez Cruz -- using the fingerprint of a homeless man who was paid $100 for his trouble. She flew to Guatemala City, got the visa, then reentered the U.S. with no trouble.

Everything seemed to be going well. But the next month, Arana discovered that Castillo was still married and living with his wife and children in Los Angeles. They broke up.

“I came home devastated,” she said in the interview.

Then, she admits, she got mad. She sent a lengthy letter to his wife, detailing their alleged affair, and sent the nude photo of him to the consulate, with this caption: “The Future President of Guatemala and His Political Power.”

Castillo responded with threatening e-mails and phone calls, she testified. Arana told the court that Castillo demanded she return the Guatemalan passport. In one e-mail in the court file that she ascribed to him, he accused her of being a prostitute and threatened to have her deported.

“Understand that if you meddle with me I am not alone. I have an economic and political power behind me,” he allegedly wrote. “I don’t have any feeling for you, and if I have to give everything to see you behind bars, I am going to do it.”

In February 2004, Castillo filed a lawsuit against her, saying that she was harassing him and threatening to make “false and scandalous allegations.” He dropped the suit earlier this year.

In March 2004, six immigration agents with guns showed up at her house and arrested her a second time, she said in the interview. Official documents related to her arrest, part of the court record, cited the already pending charge that she had a fraudulent U.S. passport. But the documents added new allegations -- that she had subjected the consul general to “continued harassing/threatening mail, faxes and telephone calls” and that she had overstayed her diplomatic visa.

Though she had previously been released on her own recognizance, her bond was set at $50,000.

“I was in custody because they believed him,” Arana said in the interview. “He was using the system to get even in a personal matter.”

‘We Tried to Help Her’

Fernando Castillo tells a decidedly different version of events.

In a recent interview at the consulate, he acknowledged becoming friends with Arana after meeting in Las Vegas. He thought of her as a young, bright Guatemalan trying to make something of herself in the U.S. Arana came to his home and his office, he said, but they never dated.

“We tried to help her, my wife and me,” he said. “We opened the door to her, to my house.”

After Castillo and Arana had known each other for a while, Castillo said, she asked for his help in trying to get a visa to stay in the United States. He referred her to an attorney.

Then, in spring 2003, Castillo and his wife, Jacqueline Duvivier, decided to hire a nanny for their daughters. Arana told them that she had a cousin in Guatemala who would be perfect for the job, Castillo said. So Castillo wrote a work contract and did the paperwork necessary so the cousin could get a diplomatic visa.

But the woman, Maria del Carmen Sanchez Cruz, never showed up. Castillo said he then realized that Arana had lied -- that she was the one who wanted the visa. So Castillo wrote a letter to Guatemalan government officials, dated Oct. 28, 2003, asking that the visa be canceled.

“That is when she got really mad,” he said.

He said she called him several times threatening to ruin his reputation. She allegedly sent irate letters. One of those, in the court file, states in part: “YOU HAVE NO IDEA what I am capable of.”

Castillo and his wife, who have been married for 15 years, filed for a restraining order in early 2004. More than a year later, they withdrew the suit, concluding that such legal action would not be appropriate for a foreign diplomat.

Duvivier said in an interview she never doubted her husband’s fidelity, even when she saw the photographs. “Fernando takes snapshots with anyone and their mother,” she said, calling Arana a “pathological liar.”

Castillo’s attorney said that if his client were having an affair, he certainly would not have brought her into his home. “Fernando is not stupid, you know,” said the attorney, Mariano Castillo. “His wife will kill him.”

Castillo said that Arana must have accessed his computer at his house, then fabricated the e-mails that he supposedly wrote to her. As for the nude photo, Castillo said that she must have stolen it from him.

Castillo said Arana’s lies were retaliation for his refusal to be part of her illegal scheme. He said he spoke to a U.S. government attorney about the alleged threats she had sent, but didn’t ask anyone to arrest her.

“It’s just amazing how she can lie,” he said.

Nevertheless, the case has embarrassed him and threatened to derail his political career. He traveled to Washington earlier this year to tell the Guatemalan ambassador about the allegations and to give his side of the story.

“There is nothing that I did wrong,” he said. “There is nothing that could even look suspicious.”

Ambassador Guillermo Castillo said that he doesn’t believe the consul general did anything improper but that if he did, “No one is going to pull any strings to protect anybody.”

Waiting for Word

As U.S. authorities look into some of Arana’s allegations, she waits in Las Vegas for word on whether she will be deported.

During Arana’s immigration hearing, which took place earlier this year, Arana’s attorney argued for asylum.

“If Fernando Castillo is able to manipulate the government of the U.S. so easily to have her arrested and put on a $50,000 bond, certainly he would have more power in his own country,” the attorney, Joseph Sandoval, said in an interview.

Castillo received a subpoena, but did not have to testify because he declared diplomatic immunity.

At the end of the hearing, Judge Mullins, who is expected to issue his final ruling this summer, said it wasn’t surprising that the U.S. government would want to do what was necessary to protect a foreign diplomat.

But Mullins said he did not believe Castillo was the “puppeteer pulling the strings and manipulating the immigration authorities here in the United States.”

The judge also said he doubted that Arana would be harmed if she returned home to Guatemala. Just because she did not get to marry a diplomat, Mullins said, does not mean she should be allowed to stay in the U.S.

“Everyone has felt betrayed at some time,” Mullins said. “This is part of the human condition.”