ouch down. Meet contact at airport. Ride to a house. Rest. Take a bus at 7 p.m. Fight at eight.

It's 1989. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been planning an offensive for most of the year. A 27-year-old Salvadoran with wide, Indian features lives in San Francisco. He finds some friends who are involved in the movement. They ask if he's interested in going back to El Salvador to fight. Wanting to be more directly involved, he flies to the nation's capital, San Salvador--on the exact day of the offensive.

Back in San Francisco six years later, sitting near a hand-painted FMLN flag in a Utah Street apartment and wearing a conservative, pale blue oxford button-down and blue slacks, this mild, soft-spoken ex-guerilla admits he has a story to tell, but says he can't afford to have his name printed.

Exiled at 18, this son of a state-employed electrician was forced to leave the land of his childhood--his home, his family, his people--just to stay alive. He recalls what motivated him to fight and risk losing everything, including his own life.

When he was 15, he went to the countryside with one of his four sisters. He saw children his age, saw that they were different from himself. He was well-dressed; they had no shoes. "Clothes with big holes, and no food to eat," he says. "That kind of situation created in me a kind of conscience, a social conscience."

After the war ended officially in 1992, he stayed in El Salvador, helping communities work with the new government, and only returned to the United States last December. Under U.S. law, permanent residents may only leave the country for periods of under six months or face deportment. As far as the government knows, he never left.

His broad smile and relaxed posture doesn't suggest "fighter," and he admits he was raised in a middle-class family. By the time he returned to El Salvador in 1989, the war was almost over. The FMLN had cut off their offensive because of indiscriminate bombing raids by the Salvadoran government and the killing of several Jesuit priests‹they weren't willing to see the whole country sacrificed for their cause.

But looking back, he doesn't seem interested in talking about fighting. He is an activist. In his eyes light a thousand possibilities, when he speaks of his cause, the cause of El Salvador.

"I'm always interested in changing the situation of the people," he says. "We [Salvadorans] have peace accords but the government hasn't accomplished them. The people have to continually struggle to demand these accords get accomplished."

He says the FMLN, as a political party today, and, as a revolutionary force during the war, is a proponent of "real" democracy. Democracy, for the military juntas and dictators that preceded the present government, he explains, was "to kill people, to kill the whole popular movement."

He rebuffs the U.S. media's representation of the FMLN as communist. "I didn't organize [in 1980] because I called myself a socialist, or a Marxist/Leninist," he says. "I didn't understand too much about that. I was facing a reality.

"I had a lot of friends die in the street just for demanding their rights."

His activities make him a target and he has to go into hiding or be killed. His family arranges his way out of El Salvador. He takes a bus to Tijuana and walks across the border into San Ysidro, just south of San Diego.

He seems reluctant to speak of life in the United States, except in relation to his activities helping fellow Salvadorans. He will say the technology and the size of Los Angeles amazed him when he first arrived, but so, he says, did the way people interacted. "In the neighborhoods in El Salvador, everybody knows you. And here it was like, 'Wow, what am I doing here?'"

Alone in the United States, he works at a car wash. He is undocumented. The Immigration and Naturalization Service conducts regular sweeps and if deported, it is likely he will be killed upon his return to El Salvador.

Realizing he needs to learn English, he enters an adult school in Los Angeles. There he meets some people involved in the "movement," as he calls it. After three years, the local solidarity leadership sends him to Philadelphia.

When he first got involved in L.A., doing things like organizing walk-athons to support the revolution, solidarity was strong between the different revolutionary groups in California, he says, but not on the East Coast. He and other friends are sent to New York, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. They are responsible for setting up an emergency response network. This network combines of all the smaller groups that exist and are already helping. This allows them to more effectively get material and economic support for the people of El Salvador, pressure the Salvadoran government to release political prisoners, and protest U.S. military aid to El Salvador and Salvadoran human rights abuses.

In 1987, he comes to San Francisco. The movement is strongest here, owing to San Francisco's noted political bend, he says. By this time his family lives in L.A. He'd like to be with them, but he wants to be where the action is. Two years later activism in San Francisco gives way to more radical action in San Salvador.

He didn't know it would be that day.

Within 12 hours of landing in his home country, he's firing an M-16 at a government brigade amid mortar-fire in Mejicano, on the outskirts of San Salvador. The fighting goes on for a week before the Salvadoran air force starts bombing. His outfit is called to fight in the center of the city. A week later, government soldiers kill several Jesuit priests. As a result, he says, FMLN leadership decides to diminish their attack. The government, shaken by the offensive, responds by asking for peace talks. An accord is developed.

With the fighting over and the process of rebuilding begining, he slips back into his natural role. He teaches communities how to deal with the new government. He shows them how to navigate the bureaucracy and have their grievances addressed. He says the government resists this empowerment at first, but under the peace accord, "The government can't kill them--they have to listen."

He stays in El Salvador five years, from 1989 to 1994, ten times the maximum allowed by U.S. immigration law. He wants to stay because, he says, the people still don't have democracy. Democracy, he says, is more than elections. "We want food, potable water. We want electricity, we want clinics, hospitals, good education. Good schools, that's democracy."

Now, for the appearance of legality, he's back in San Francisco. He can't go to El Salvador for five years, or further jeopardize his chances of citizenship.

In high school he starts meeting people in the movement. At an age when boys in the U.S. think of little but sex, cars and cutting class, he becomes active in another way. He participates in marches to protest conditions at poorer high schools, marches where trucks run over protesters, while soldiers shoot at those who run away. He lies on the ground, pulling anything he can over his body. People disappear from the neighborhood. The death squad comes to his house, but he's not home. He stays with an aunt for a month, but then she's afraid to harbor him anymore. His dad gives him money--Get out of here, his dad says, I don't want you to be hooked by the death squad.

MAIL PRISM (prism@sfsu.edu)     
©1995, All Rights Reserved.