U.S. Law Dims Hopes of Poor in Central America

SANTA ELENA, El Salvador — In the dozen years of combat connected with this nation’s civil war, this steamy town of cobblestoned streets was racked by violence, poverty and despair. One by one, the teachers college, the coffee-processing plant and the nearby cotton gin all shut down. And soon Santa Elena was left with no jobs and no cash crops.

For many families, migration became the only way to survive. Townsfolk felt they had no choice but to send family members to Los Estados--the United States--to find jobs so they could send money home.

Now, a study indicates, migrants support 42% of the families here in Santa Elena, offering them ways to thrive and rebuild their lives.

But in Santa Elena and across Central America, hope is suddenly fading.

Tighter U.S. immigration laws that took effect April 1, combined with stepped-up American deportation efforts and general anti-immigrant sentiment, are shutting off the escape valve that allowed Central Americans to flee wars of the 1980s marked by U.S. involvement--and the economic upheaval of the decade that has followed.

Salvadorans and Guatemalans in Los Angeles, Nicaraguans in Miami and Hondurans in Texas and Louisiana are being pushed out and are complaining loudly in the United States.

Meantime, the migrants’ home countries are steeling themselves for a twofold economic disaster: Officials envision a deluge of job seekers in nations whose unemployment rates already approach 50%, as in Nicaragua; they also fear the loss of the billions of dollars that migrants send home, sums that represent the biggest single source of foreign-exchange revenue in El Salvador.

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In addition, more than one-third of the Central American deportees in the last six months were criminals, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service figures show.

That means that, in addition to the other woes, the Central American nations must grapple with hardened criminals who will be dumped on their shores--at a time when their police forces already are overwhelmed by postwar crime waves.

Besides the convicted criminals, about 300,000 former war refugees--who have lived in the United States legally while their political asylum claims were processed--face almost certain denial of asylum now that combat in their homelands has ended. (A Miami judge, however, has temporarily halted deportations of former refugees.)

An unknown number of undocumented immigrants also fear deportation as the INS works toward its goal of sending 93,000 foreigners home this year--one-third more than in 1996.

In the six months ending March 31, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala ranked right behind Mexico in the number of citizens returned by the INS. Although Central America accounted for 12% of the total, far less than Mexico’s 74%, the effect of the deportations is much greater in these countries, which are smaller than many American states, researchers say.

“For us, a country with such difficult social, economic and political conditions, the return of these Salvadorans could create a crisis,” said Victoria Marina de Aviles, the Salvadoran attorney general for human rights. “We realize that a country has a right to exercise its sovereignty [by controlling immigration], but what we ask is respect for human rights.”

In his recent meeting with Central American leaders, President Clinton promised that there will be no mass deportations of Central Americans.

But individual deportations are already tearing apart families. Carla Sanabria, for example, lived in Miami for 12 years under the special status given Nicaraguans fleeing the civil war that ended in her country in 1990.

She finished high school and, for the last eight years, worked as a waitress at the Dadeland Mall, supporting herself and her 6-year-old son. “I have never asked the government for anything,” she said.

Two years ago, she married a U.S. citizen. He suggested that his wife change her precarious refugee status for residency as the spouse of a citizen. They hired a lawyer and paid him more than $1,000 to process the paperwork, Sanabria said. But on April 29, when she thought she was going to the INS office to pick up her new resident-alien card, she was deported to Nicaragua.

“I felt like a cockroach,” she said tearfully, adding that she received no explanation of the U.S. government’s action, which her husband--who has custody of her child--is contesting in the U.S.

The INS refuses to comment on individual cases.

The $20 in Sanabria’s billfold barely covered the taxi fare to her hometown of Masaya, about an hour from the airport, where she tried to remember the address of grandparents she had not seen in more than a decade.

“There is a poverty here that I never imagined,” she said of Nicaragua. “What will happen to my son if he comes here?”

As for Central American countries, many of them are fretting about what will become of many of their people who have come to rely on migrants to help relieve the grinding poverty in the region via money they send home--”remittances.”

“Thank God, remittances have started to become a significant source of foreign exchange,” said Leida Samra de Pinto, who heads the economic studies department at Honduras’ Central Bank. “To an extent, they have substituted for foreign aid,” which has dropped sharply since the wars in neighboring countries ended.

Remittances to Honduras doubled from 1993 to 1996, reaching $128 million--but that was still only a fraction of what Salvadorans sent home. In El Salvador, from which as many as 1 million Salvadorans may have fled abroad during the war years, remittances account for 13% of the total economy, providing a stunning sum estimated to exceed $1 billion.

As important as that money has become to the struggling national economies of Central America, it has become critical to communities like Santa Elena.

This town, population 4,621, attracted attention in the ‘70s and ‘80s because it was a port of entry for foreign correspondents to slip into guerrilla territory and was the site of a 1982 massacre in which soldiers marched 27 residents into the central plaza and gunned them down.

The regional tumult took a heavy toll on the local economy, forcing the young to seek freedom and opportunity overseas. Anadesi Quintana, for example, fled to Los Angeles, where she has cleaned houses for 13 years. She has saved enough to buy two lots and build two houses in her hometown, while sending her aging mother--who still lives there--$200 a month.

“She has never forgotten me, not a single month,” Rosa Maria Parada, 71, said proudly, rocking her chair in the spacious living room of one of her daughter’s houses.

Quintana and her common-law husband now have two U.S.-born children, and she has told her mother that she soon expects to win legal resident status in the United States.

Success stories like that have inspired others here.

For six years, Jose Paulino Ramirez farmed a rented field that could not provide him enough to pay for his son’s school supplies, much less allow him to move his wife and two children out of his parents’ home.

Ramirez decided that his only hope of getting ahead was to make the trek north.

But his experience has been unhappy. For six months, he has been stuck in Beaumont, Texas, barely earning enough as a day laborer to cover his rent and food. He has not sent money home or begun paying off $2,000 in debt he ran up getting to the U.S. And he worries constantly that he will be deported soon.

“Now, with the way the laws are there, we don’t know whether he will be kicked out before he even earns any money,” his wife, Ana Osorio, said softly, fighting back tears.

Although Salvadoran government figures show that remittances continue to rise, many Santa Elena families are beginning to feel the pinch as cautious relatives send less money home, said Jose Antonio Aparicio, who runs a courier service between Los Angeles and Santa Elena.

He said that remittances here have dropped 50% since the beginning of the year as overseas Salvadorans worry that “they may be deported any minute, so they are saving their money.”

The Friends of Santa Elena--a group of immigrants in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston who donate to civic projects here--also has noticed a decline in overseas support, he said. The group has built a playground and donates about $600 a year to the community health clinic to buy medicine. Normally, group members give about $18,000 a year, Aparicio said, but so far this year, donations are running about 40% behind.

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In her first two weeks in office, Santa Elena’s new mayor, Miriam Zelaya, has divided her time between getting a new well dug and trying to find financing to create a source of jobs--such as a factory--for the anticipated deportees.

“This will greatly affect the economy of our town,” she said. “We have to create jobs for the people who will be arriving. The U.S. government has deported them, so it should help us find them jobs.”

Without jobs, they may be forced to turn to crime, she said. In fact, 45% of the Salvadorans returned in the six months that ended March 31 had already been jailed in the United States, INS records show.

“They have master’s degrees in crime, there is no doubt about that,” said Deputy Commissioner Julio Angel Castro of the Borders Division of the Salvadoran National Civilian Police.

Because criminal deportees have done nothing wrong in Central America, police here can only fingerprint and photograph them.

The most troubling aspect of the imminent return of the migrants is how little anyone knows about the effects, observers say.

“There are all these details we don’t know, so when these big changes happen in the United States, there is a lot of fear here about what can happen and what will happen,” said Kay Eekhoff, a researcher at the National Development Foundation in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital. “What will happen to remittances? What will happen to family members up there? Will they be deported or not? If they are deported, what does that mean for remittances? In terms of having to reabsorb these workers into society? We don’t know.”

Darling was recently on assignment in Santa Elena.

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Bracing for the Worst

Central America, a region with more than a dozen years of U.S.-supported civil conflicts and strife, is bracing for a new period of tumult, linked to American immigration policy. With more and more people from the area--some dangerous criminals--being deported from the United States, Central Americans also fear that the huge, important sums that overseas residents sent home also will vanish.

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Honduras El Salvador Guatemala Nicaragua Deportees* 1,527 1,509 1,282 242 1996 remittance $128.4 $1,086 $375.4 $200 (sent home from U.S., in millions) 1996 exports $1,276 $1,789 $2,030 $670 Remittance as % of 10% 60.7% 18.5% 29.9% exports Unemployment and 40% to 50% 20% to 25% 35% to 45% 50% underemployment

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* Six months ended March 31, 1997

Sources: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, central banks of respective countries, Central Intelligence Agency, economist estimates

The Wars They Waged

* Honduras: Staging ground for guerrilla, antiguerrilla and spy activities aimed at neighboring countries in the 1980s and early 1990s. Experienced some isolated guerrilla activity. But brutal military received $523 million in U.S. aid from 1978-93, mainly for terrorizing those suspected of collaborating with leftists in nearby countries and providing training facilities for U.S.-supported groups.

* El Salvador: Twelve-year civil war between Marxist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and U.S.-backed government cost an estimated 75,000 lives before ending with a negotiated peace in 1992. The country received $1.1 billion in U.S. military aid from 1978-93.

* Guatemala: Central America’s longest civil war_--36 years of fighting between Marxist guerrillas and U.S.-backed military and civilian governments_--ended in December 1996. Despite direct CIA involvement in 1954 coup that led to the prolonged fighting, U.S. military aid was minimal, about $34 million from 1978-93. More than 100,000 people died in civil war, most of them Indians living in impoverished rural areas.

* Nicaragua: After pro-Cuban Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, former Somoza supporters organized counterrevolutionary groups. They became known as Contras and were joined by other Nicaraguans disillusioned with Sandinista rule. Their camps in Honduras and Costa Rica were openly (via congressional allocations) and covertly (via Iran-Contra) backed by the United States, which funneled at least $322 million in direct assistance to rebellion from 1978-90. Civil war ended with 1990 elections that removed Sandinistas from power.