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| Subject: Deported woman's conditions to improve |
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Deported woman´s conditions to improve
She may be given mattress, access to bathroom
Maurice Bridge
Vancouver Sun
Friday, July 07, 2006
VANCOUVER - A woman left stranded for the past week at El Salvador International Airport following a deportation from Vancouver may be given a small mattress and access to a shower in an effort to improve her bleak living conditions.
Esperanza Rivera Vaquerano, 32, has been sleeping on the floor and on airport chairs, unable to bathe, change her clothes or get proper meals since she arrived.
Her only support has come from her older sister, a Canadian landed immigrant who has flown to El Salvador to help her from the outside, and who has been allowed to pass her small articles such as a toothbrush and money for food.
But Vaquerano got a break Thursday as a result of international media attention towards her plight when a reporter and photographer from the San Salvador daily newspaper La Prensa Grafica arrived to speak to her.
She said they were kept out for several hours, but shortly before they were allowed to see her, airport security staff promised to improve conditions for her.
"The managers of the airport were afraid they would be judged for the way I am sleeping and my conditions here," she said.
"So before the reporters came in, the manager said . . . it would take two to three days to prepare a place for me with a small mattress and a small bathroom for me to bathe."
She said she sleeps a lot, but remains hopeful she will be returned to Canada soon to continue her fight to stay in the country.
However, her Vancouver immigration lawyer, Rico Rey Hipolito, warned Thursday the process could take a long time.
In a teleconference hearing with the Federal Court of Canada in Ottawa Thursday morning, Hipolito asked the court to order the Canadian Border Services Agency to live up to its promise to return Vaquerano to Canada if El Salvador does not accept her.
He said the court could decide to speed up the legal process to help her immediately, but added he thinks it will stick with the usual procedure, meaning it could take as long as one year to get a decision.
He said he expected a decision later this week.
"Our plan of attack is that if [immediate help] is denied, she would allow herself to enter [El Salvador] and we would continue with the application at the federal court," Hipolito said.
"If we succeed, then they would have to bring her back."
Vaquerano would not comment on that possibility, saying that she plans to continue her fight to return.
"I have to be strong," she said. "I don´t know where I´m getting all this strength from, but I know it comes from God, because it cannot come from anyone else. He´s the one who gives me the strength to keep on going."
Vaquerano was deported from Vancouver in handcuffs last Thursday, accompanied by two immigration officers, and taken via Mexico City to El Salvador on Mexicana Airlines.
Upon arrival at the airport, she was refused entry to the country because she has renounced her El Salvadoran citizenship and will not sign a form saying she wishes to regain it.
However, Vaquerano said because she she was deported without a valid travel document such as a passport, she has been refused transportation back to Canada with the airline.
Margarita Rivera, Vaquerano´s sister, said she has been passing money and small items to Vaquerano by giving them to security staff who can enter the secured international area, but said she cannot keep on doing this indefinitely.
She said she cannot understand why her sister, who works at the church in New Westminster and supports herself, cannot stay in Canada.
"Right now, what we need is that Canada be responsible with what they promised," she said in a telephone interview.
"They said if she is rejected in El Salvador, we are going to bring her back. That was their promise.
"Canada is a very safe place; a beautiful place. I love it, but I don´t understand what is happening now."
Pastor Paul Reynolds of the Emmanuel Baptist Church in New Westminster, which gave Vaquerano sanctuary for nearly a year, says the church stands behind her, and fears her life is in danger in El Salvador.
He said he has been assured by a senior member of the church who has worked in El Salvador that she is to be believed.
Reynolds said she told him her family was accused of helping rebels during the country´s civil war because her father and uncle were forced to bury some bodies on their farm. She said her uncle was later hacked to death with machetes.
"Esperanza was severely beaten up, close to death, and that´s when she fled," Reynolds said Thursday.
According to Canadian government documents, Vaquerano left El Salvador for the United States in October 1996, and came to Canada in June 2000. She made a refugee claim, which was rejected in August 2002, and she was ordered to be deported. Shortly afterward, she went to the El Salvadoran consulate in Vancouver and renounced her citizenship.
In April 2003, she appealed her deportation order on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, but that appeal was denied in March 2004. Before she could be deported, however, she took sanctuary in the church, and remained there until she was stopped by police on June 20 for a traffic infraction during an ill-judged trip to Vancouver.
A last-ditch appeal of the deportation order failed, and she left Canada on June 29.
[04-08-2006,16:07]
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anonymous |
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(in reply to: Deported woman's conditions to improve)
is el salvador that bad? she is out of her mind if she did not accrue enough wealth to retire by now.
[06-08-2006,19:18]
[***.202.54.107]
righteous man |
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