EL SALVADOR'S WEALTHY NEW PRESIDENT SURVIVED ON MONEY SENT FROM U.S.

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/world/8477603.htm

BY HUGH DELLIOS

CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Posted on Tue, Apr. 20, 2004

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - (KRT) - From the looks of his hilltop
retreat outside the capital, newly elected President Tony Saca is not
exactly the average Jose his campaign made him out to be.

As the wealthy owner of nine radio stations, Saca has a comfortable
retreat for the weekends. It is a handsome chalet with picture
windows, cool breezes through the pine trees and enough land to host
a circus-sized tent for entertaining guests. The front yard is
decorated with a big wooden wagon that serves as a giant planter.

The obvious comfort brings to mind a question that circled Saca
before his landslide election in March. It's whether he is a self-
made man who will build bridges in this war-scarred and badly divided
nation, as he promised, or whether he is a tool of the big families
that have always ruled El Salvador, as his opponents contend.

One big fan of Saca's who came to the retreat recently to help him
celebrate told a story that suggests the new leader should understand
Salvador's poverty and why the country relies so much on the $2
billion sent home each year by immigrants in the United States.

It was the president's brother, Ricardo Eduardo "Lalo" Saca, who is a
doctor outside Los Angeles, but who once supported the future
president's family with $200 a month he mailed home after sneaking
illegally into California.

Lalo Saca's story is a classic illegal immigrant's tale, except for
the ending.

Now 47, he left home in 1976 after his father went bankrupt in the
cotton business. He flew to Mexico City, then to Tijuana, where he
spent four days in a safehouse playing poker as a smuggler kept
failing to afix his photo to a fake U.S. passport.

At one point, the door opened and a man in a Mexican police uniform
walked into the house.

"I thought we were busted," Saca said. "But he took off his uniform
and said, `Honey, can I get some tacos?'"

Ultimately, Saca sneaked over the border in the dark, walking for six
hours in the cold and at times lying flat in the desert to avoid the
searchlights from Border Patrol helicopters.

Once across, Saca got in a car, where he lay across the floor with
the accelerator pedal in his face. Through a hole, he could see the
nose of another illegal immigrant somehow stashed under the car.

Within days, Saca was working two jobs: one in the kitchen of his
aunt's Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, the other slicing onions in
a police department cafeteria next to a U.S. immigration agency
office.

"I was crying all the time (from the onions)," Saca said.

"I told people I wanted to be a doctor, and they just laughed," he
said. "I was a wetback. I had no support. Imagine thinking I could go
to medical school! Would you have put a penny on me?"

Saca learned English, earned his green card through his aunt and was
admitted to Long Beach College. He paid his way through the
University of California-Irvine medical school by working odd jobs,
including driving school buses.

He did his residency at the University of California-Los Angeles, and
today he is a practicing endocrinologist.

But back in the late 1970s, El Salvador was on the brink of civil war
and his parents and teenage brother had no income. He began sending
money from L.A., paying for the family's $100-per-month apartment in
San Salvador and even a watch for "that little guy who wants to be
president."

But the future doctor stopped sending the cash after receiving a
letter from the future president, who had begun to support the family
by selling radio advertisements.

"He was 18 and he was telling me how successful he had been," the
older brother said. "It was in his own handwriting - `This is my best
year and I'm going to do better.' He was excited, and after that, he
was hard to stop."

On the campaign trail, Tony Saca frequently mentioned how he
understands the value of the money sent home from the U.S. because he
once "lived from" it.

Saca's critics hope those memories will temper his ruling party's
gung-ho adherence to U.S.-backed, neo-liberal economic policies. They
say those policies have raised the cost of living and created other
hardships for poorer Salvadorans, arguably adding to the flow of
immigrants to the north.

The goal, all agree, is for all Salvadorans to be able to stay home
while they pursue their dreams of becoming doctors and presidents.

"I hear people say, `I can't do it,'" Lalo Saca said. "I don't buy
it."

---

© 2004, Chicago Tribune.