Survivor of migrant massacre returns to Ecuador

The sole survivor of last week's massacre of 72 migrants in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas has refused a humanitarian visa from Mexico and returned to his native Ecuador, officials in Mexico said Monday (link in Spanish).

Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla, 18, was recovering under heavy guard after the massacre, in which suspected gunmen with the Zetas criminal organization captured, blindfolded and killed the migrants execution-style. Reports said the migrants had refused to pay ransom or work as drug runners for the Zetas. Lala managed to survive a bullet wound and escaped.

The massacre has become an international incident. When the citizenship of the survivor was discovered, Ecuador immediately requested that Lala receive extra protection while he recovered; witnesses or survivors to major crimes in Mexico often are hunted down later and killed (link in Spanish). Four countries have sent consular representatives to Tamaulipas to help identify the victims. Thirty-four of those have been identified so far: 16 Hondurans, 12 Salvadorans, five Guatemalans and one Brazilian.

Lala, the survivor, returned to Ecuador on Sunday night after Mexican diplomats turned him over to their Ecuadoran counterparts at a military hangar at Mexico City's international airport, Mexico's Interior Ministry said in a statement. In images posted with the official report, the faces of the survivor, doctors and military personnel are blurred to conceal their identities.

The massacre highlights the risks and dangers that Central and South American migrants face as they travel to the United States through Mexico, where their path increasingly intersects with the brutal warfare associated with the drug trade. A group of migrants from several countries reportedly demonstrated Saturday against the violence in the city of Saltillo, in Coahuila state.

Violence continues unabated in Tamaulipas. On Friday, car bombs went off at a Televisa station in Ciudad Victoria and outside a police station in San Fernando, the town where the bodies were discovered, and a top investigator into the migrant massacre was reported missing. On Sunday, a mayor in Tamaulipas was shot to death.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: The survivor of last week's migrant massacre in Tamaulipas is loaded onto a flight to his native Ecuador. Credit: Secretaria de Gobernacion, Mexico

Pressure mounts on Mauricio Funes in El Salvador

A year after taking office as El Salvador's first leftist president since the country's civil war, former journalist Mauricio Funes has come under fire for what is perceived as lack of progress on promises to improve security and economic conditions in the country, The Times reports.

A brazen attack against buses in San Salvador on June 20 left 16 people dead and resulted in more political discord for Funes. The country has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America and is terrorized by transnational gangs with roots in Los Angeles.

The president, who took office in June 2009, also faces charges that he has not attacked corruption more forcefully. His agriculture minister recently resigned in frustration, citing the persistence of corruption in the government as his reason for leaving.

Funes has defended his efforts. Corrupt police officers have been investigated and dismissed, gangs have been dismantled, and thousands of murder charges have been filed, Funes said. El Salvador's army is now patrolling prisons, where much of the country's crime is said to originate, notes Tim's El Salvador Blog.

The president also argues that his government is generating jobs and attracting foreign investment.

But an unidentified security official told Alex Renderos, The Times' special correspondent in San Salvador, that Mexican drug trafficking cartels are making inroads in El Salvador, challenging Funes' ability to govern. "With the inexperience of this government in terms of security matters, and its cowardice to stand up to organized crime, you have the ingredients for a criminal state," the official said.

After the shocking bus attack, Funes called on leaders of El Salvador's political parties to come up with a new anti-gang strategy this week, reports the online newspaper El Faro. The paper also notes skeptically that the president's anti-gang strategy "recycles the formula" used by previous right-wing governments.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency

A poet's death lingers bitterly in El Salvador

Who killed the celebrated Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton? And should those accused of executing him be brought to justice now, or be granted unofficial clemency under President Mauricio Funes' "philosophy of change"?

The questions are challenging El Salvador after a month of commemorations examining Dalton's legacy, reports L.A. Times special correspondent Alex Renderos from San Salvador. A "bitter and very public spat" emerged, reminding us that El Salvador's decades-long leftist resistance was never neat and unified. One of the fellow guerrillas believed to have ordered Dalton's killing for insubordination is now a senior member of the Funes administration, elected a year ago as El Salvador's first leftist government. 

Dalton's sons, a journalist and a filmmaker, are asking that prosecutors try Jorge Melendez and Joaquin Villalobos, two former members of the People's Revolutionary Army, or EPR, for the 1975 killing of their father. The Catholic Church in El Salvador and a university human rights institute are calling on the government to fully investigate the killing. Funes has said he won't dismiss Melendez.

The EPR eventually merged with other guerrilla groups to form the FMLN, which later morphed into a political party, and in 2009 led former journalist Funes to his election as president. Dalton, who once wrote, "To have faith is the best audacity and audacity is beautiful," would have turned 75 on May 14.

Read the story in The Times here.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

Thousands displaced in aftermath of Tropical Storm Agatha

Survivors of mudslides and flooding in Central America are still searching for the missing and hoping to ward off a food and sanitation crisis in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Agatha, the first major storm of the region's hurricane season. The death toll rose to 179 on Wednesday, with most of the dead concentrated in Guatemala. Tens of thousands are homeless or displaced in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

The enormous sinkhole that broke in Zone 2 of Guatemala City continues to draw curious onlookers and geologists who are eager to study it. The hole, almost perfectly round and frighteningly deep, goes down nearly 100 feet. Its cause is still a mystery.

"I can tell you what it's not: It's not a geological fault, and it's not the product of an earthquake," a government engineer in Guatemala City told the Associated Press. "We're going to have to descend."

The eruption of Guatemala's Pacaya volcano two days before the storm's landfall confounded the recovery efforts; volcanic ash blocking drains contributed to the flooding. Aid from the United Nations and the European Union began to arrive on Wednesday, Prensa Libre reported (link in Spanish).

More photos of the damage and recovery efforts at the Guatemalan government's Flickr feed.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: A truck caught in mud on Guatemala's Pacific highway. Credit: Government of Guatemala.

Salvadoran gangs akin to terrorists, FBI agent says

Violent street gangs in El Salvador  -- most with roots in Los Angeles -- are a threat to national security in both the United States and Central America, just like domestic terrorists. That's according to the top FBI agent stationed in the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador.

Leo Navarrete, legal attache at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, told La Prensa Grafica (link in Spanish) that authorities are on the lookout for connections between gangs and big-time drug traffickers, whose operations are spreading across Central America as the trade expands southward beyond Mexico's borders.

"Gangs can be seen as a form of domestic terrorism," Navarrete said. "You see them extorting people, bodies in the streets. It is a way to destabilize society."

The numbers of pandilleros in El Salvador began skyrocketing in the 1990s when U.S. authorities deported thousands of Salvadorans to their home country, even though many had lived most of their lives in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, where the gangs developed. Today they are one ingredient in the social crisis that gives El Salvador one of the highest homicide rates in the region. You can see the video "La Vida Loca" by journalist Christian Poveda about the gangs' lives and rituals. Poveda was killed last year, apparently by the very gangsters he portrayed.

Rising violence has chilled life in El Salvador, two decades after the end of a ruthless civil war.

Just Friday, a Mexican official working on security in El Salvador survived an assassination attempt that killed his wife. The man, Guillermo Medina, was identified in Mexico as an officer of the Mexican Embassy in San Salvador who worked with Interpol.

-- Alex Renderos in San Salvador

Photo: Relatives of gang members cover their faces during a recent demonstration in San Salvador. Credit: Frederick Meza via El Faro, http://www.elfaro.net/

frederick meza

Remembering Oscar Romero

Wednesday marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Msgr. Oscar Romero, the revered archbishop of San Salvador who spoke out against social injustices facing poor Salvadorans as El Salvador marched toward a long and bloody civil war.

On March 24, 1980, a gunman shot and killed Romero as he said Mass in a small chapel at a hospital called La Divina Providencia, in the Salvadoran capital. Days later, massive crowds attended Romero's funeral, which also resulted in tragedy as snipers shot at the gathered mourners, killing at least 20 people. El Salvador then plunged into a civil war that did not end until 1992, after tens of thousands of deaths.

After his assassination, "Romero became world-famous overnight," writes Christine Allen, a Catholic charity director, in The Guardian. "Over the last 30 years, he has been a guiding light for all Catholics concerned for peace and justice."

Commemoration events were scheduled this week throughout El Salvador and among Salvadoran and Catholic communities in other regions. In Los Angeles, home to the largest Salvadoran community outside El Salvador, the Salvadoran Consulate is screening a film about Romero's life and hosting a panel discussion on his legacy. Local radio outlet KPCC-FM has more, as does L.A.'s Clinica Romero.

Even 30 years later, justice remains elusive for Romero and the thousands of victims of El Salvador's war. That might be changing. The Salvadoran weekly El Faro published this week a detailed interview with the man long identified as a key participant in Romero's slaying, Rafael Alvaro Saravia. "Thirty years and I will die being persecuted for this," Saravia tells his interviewer. "Yes, of course I participated."

Amnesty International released a statement Tuesday calling for El Salvador to repeal a 1993 amnesty law that protects former U.S.-backed death squad assassins from trial for human rights abuses. The inauguration last year of the country's first leftist president, Mauricio Funes, has changed the atmosphere in El Salvador after two decades of right-wing governments, as The Times noted in November. For the first time, the state is commemorating Romero's death, as reported by Tim's El Salvador Blog.

Speaking to Vatican Radio from San Salvador this week, English bishop Arthur Roche said that "an enormous crowd of people" attended a memorial Mass for Romero on Saturday.

"He himself said days before he was assassinated, 'If they kill me, I shall rise again in the people of El Salvador.' And I think that's very clear to see," Roche told the radio program. "It's very touching as you go around not only the city but other places within this country, you know that you're standing on very hallowed ground."

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

Photo: Oscar Romero, former archbishop of San Salvador. Credit: Clinica Monsenor Oscar Romero, Los Angeles

Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes goes to Washington

El Salvador's president, Mauricio Funes, has been making the rounds in Washington this week, another sign of changing times as a Democratic administration welcomes the representative of a party of former leftist guerrillas whom previous U.S. governments tried to annihilate.

Funes dropped in on President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and other members of Congress. He lobbied for an extension of the temporary-protection program that allows nearly a quarter-million Salvadorans to live and work legally in the U.S. And he sought (and said he'd been promised) around $1.5 billion in loans from the World Bank and other institutions.

Funes praised the "new relationship" between El Salvador and the U.S. but also said Washington's focus must go beyond fighting drug trafficking and criminal gangs, the Obama administration's stated top priorities. Underlying causes behind violence, such as poverty and social inequality, must also be defeated, he said.

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Valley Village), at his meeting with Funes, said: "We think about El Salvador 20 years ago, and the terrible conflict, and then the taking hold of democracy. But the real test of democracy taking hold comes when you could have a successful transition of power from one political party to another, and your election last year manifested that indeed in El Salvador democracy has taken hold."

Funes and his Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a former guerrilla coalition that is now a political party, won election a year ago, marking the end of two decades of rule by a single right-wing party.

There is some Spanish-language coverage of Funes' D.C. visit on the Salvadoran website El Faro, and the newspaper La Prensa Grafica opines on the significance of what it calls a "fundamental relationship."

-- Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City

Photo: The cover of El Diario de Hoy, a Salvadoran newspaper, shows President Mauricio Funes greeting Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Credit: El Diario de Hoy.

Latin America Digest: Today's one-line news briefs

Livingston, Guatemala -- Descendants of African slaves who fled to Guatemala two centuries ago honored their ancestors Thursday in a celebration of the Black Carib Garifuna culture that included hundreds of people reenacting their forefathers' arrival by dugout canoe.

Manaus, Brazil -- Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said “gringos” should pay Amazon nations to prevent deforestation, insisting rich Western nations have caused much more environmental destruction than the loggers and farmers who cut and burn trees in the world's largest tropical rain forest.

Tegucigalpa, Honduras -- The Honduran Supreme Court recommended that lawmakers vote against restoring President Manuel Zelaya, concluding that Zelaya, who was ousted in a June 28 coup, should not return to the presidency while he has criminal charges pending against him, a spokesman said.

Havana, Cuba -- Cuba began its biggest military maneuvers in five years, with the state-run press quoting  military leaders as saying the nation needed to prepare for a possible invasion by the United States.

San Salvador, El Salvador -- An earthquake off El Salvador's Pacific coast sent people running from buildings in the nation and in neighboring Guatemala, though officials said there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

-- Times wire reports

Despair and hope: looking back on the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador

El Salvador's government last week honored six Jesuit priests slain by the army in 1989, presenting gold medallions to their relatives for the priests' "extraordinary service to the nation." Los Angeles Times editorial writer Marjorie Miller covered the executions as a foreign correspondent. Miller has written today about the slow healing that the nation has undertaken, in a column titled "In El Salvador, a grim reflection, and a glimmer of hope"

Six Jesuit priests rousted from their beds in the night lay face down on the lawn, arms still stretched over their heads in a futile gesture of self-defense, skulls shattered by bullets. The University of Central America had been an intellectual oasis in El Salvador's civil war, but in the middle of a guerrilla offensive on the capital, the army moved in to kill those it saw as the brains behind the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

As I look back on those executions that I covered as a reporter 20 years ago in one of the last battles of the Cold War, I am struck by despair and hope. Despair, because what we saw in those days as a figurative beheading of the guerrilla movement has become both literal and routine in today's conflicts in Iraq and South Asia. Hope, because this year, nearly two decades after the Farabundo Marti front traded guns for politics, the right-wing party that had long ruled El Salvador peacefully transferred power to the left for the first time. President Mauricio Funes, the Farabundo Marti party's candidate, was educated by Jesuits at the University of Central America.

To read the rest, click here.

From our archives: An account of the priests' slaying in 1989. Also, two pieces by Miller in the aftermath of the bloody civil war in 1992, "Of Peace Accords and Firecrackers: A Christmas in El Salvador" and "Wounds of War."

Los Angeles council members to make donations for El Salvador storm victims

Five Los Angeles City Council members this week pledged to donate $2,000 each to help storm victims in El Salvador.

Council Members Jose Huizar, Eric Garcetti (council president), Ed Reyes, Tony Cardenas and Richard Alarcon promised a donation totaling $10,000 to a local disaster relief agency focused on El Salvador. 

Torrential rains in the Central American nation this month triggered flooding and mudslides that left dozens of people dead and destroyed hundreds of homes, officials said.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in a press release that Los Angeles is home to the largest population of Salvadorans outside El Salvador and that his prayers are with the victims.

-- Paula Diaz / HOY