Colombians search for safe haven

Friday, April 4, 2003 | 2:46 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION: April 5, 2003

Alvaro Rueda, a soft-spoken man who plays the piano at home, cringes when he hears sirens.

When Hernando Amaya sees the war in Iraq on CNN, he flashes back to the bloody scenes of battle he used to watch on video in a dark room with Colombia's military top brass.

And Martha Luque cries when she imagines the faces of the family she left behind in Bogota, Colombia's capital.

They and thousands of other Colombians in the Las Vegas Valley got a boost when Sen. Harry Reid announced during a recent town hall meeting with Colombian Ambassador Luis Alberto Moreno that he planned to introduce legislation to help many of them.

The legislation would grant Temporary Protected Status to Colombians who are in the United States illegally -- an estimated 80,000 nationwide. Las Vegas Colombian Club President Adriana Vargas estimates the local population at between 3,000 and 5,000.

The status, currently given to people from nine countries including El Salvador and Nicaragua, allows people from countries facing ongoing conflict or natural disasters to live and work in the United States for up to 18 months.

Unlike many Hispanics from other countries, Colombian immigrants tend to be better educated and were often wealthier back home. Many Colombians come to the United States fleeing the longest-running civil war in the Western Hemisphere -- not poverty.

In the absence of the protection Reid's legislation would offer, many Colombians in Las Vegas seek political asylum.

Luque was denied asylum on a technicality having to do with the amount of time it took her to file the application. She is awaiting a review of her case.

An English-Spanish translator for multinational companies in Colombia, the 49-year-old fled the country in February 2000 because she said she received a series of threatening messages at her stepsister's Bogota apartment from one of two guerrilla armies at war with the government.

The guerrilla armies, along with a paramilitary army that sides with the government, contribute to thousands of casualties, mostly civilian, every year, as well as the world's highest kidnapping rate -- with more than 3,000 cases per year.

"I wish there were just a few cases like Martha's," Reid, D-Nev., said. "But unfortunately, there are many."

Las Vegas immigration lawyer Jeremiah Wolf Stuchiner, who was also an Immigration and Naturalization Services official for 22 years, said he has seen an increase in Colombians seeking political asylum during the last year.

"This tells me two things: that there is a considerably larger Colombian community than what I thought, and that it is situationally impossible for them to stay in Colombia," he said.

Rueda owned two companies in Bogota. He had to shut down one -- a civil engineering firm that supervised road-building in rural Colombia -- after he could no longer visit the projects for fear of being kidnapped, he said.

Then he started up a computer systems firm that filled government contracts for the police, army and several ministries and utilities.

Four men arrived at his office one day and told him they knew where his two sons went to school and all he would have to do to avoid any problems was share some information, he said.

That was August 2000. One day in October, he said, a caller asked to meet him at a church downtown to talk about something important. When Rueda opened the church's heavy doors, he saw a face somehow familiar, but from his past. He had a hunch that it was an ambush, so he turned to leave the church, saw a policeman and asked the officer to escort him to his car.

Within days he fled to Las Vegas, where a sister has lived for 15 years. He is divorced; one son lives with him and the other lives with his mother in Florida. The stress of living under constant fear contributed to the breakup of his family, Rueda said.

"The situation in Colombia destroys homes. It destroys everything," he said.

Rueda was granted political asylum in June 2002. In five years he can become a U.S. citizen.

Now he makes a living translating and interpreting for the Clark County School District.

"In Colombia, I would have meetings with 20 generals, really intense," he said. "Here I find myself interpreting for an 8-year-old girl, helping her to say the word 'chair.' "

Rueda pointed to signs of a growing Colombian population. The area's first two Colombian restaurants have opened in the last 18 months. A radio program featuring news from Colombia started airing late last year, and a website (colombialv.com), has gone online.

Vargas has seen similar growth. The Colombian Club membership has grown about 20 percent in the last year, she said. "There are Colombians working in the media, opening businesses, trying to get started in engineering," she said.

Hernando Amaya, a candidate for the club's vice president, said before the meeting Saturday that his organization was working to obtain Temporary Protected Status for Colombia even though much of its leadership -- including himself -- didn't need it.

Amaya, a former communications director for the Army, left Colombia in March 2001 after receiving threats from the guerrillas, he said. He wound up remarrying a woman from Venezuela with U.S. citizenship and through the marriage will soon obtain the status of resident, the step before citizenship.

"It hurts to see so many who are capable of so much but can't come out of the shadows because of their immigration status," he said.

Several members of Congress and many organizations, including Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have pushed for protected status for Colombians for several years.

Moreno, the Colombian ambassador, said at the recent town hall meeting that these efforts have struggled because "all of the issues dealing with immigration are very complex since Sept. 11."

Reid's weight as Democratic minority whip may change that in the months to come.

So may the current war in Iraq, Amaya said, noting that a recent car bomb that killed four American soldiers recalled similar tactics used in Colombia's internal conflict.

"We've been living with that sort of thing for at least 20 years," Amaya said.

"And that's why we're here."