El Salvador

The Gaithersburg company that employed the three workers who drowned in a flash flood Wednesday in Woodlawn had been cited for more than 30 workplace safety violations, state and federal records show. A crane operator for Concrete General Inc. was killed on the job in 1988. Another employee's arms had to be amputated after he was shocked by a power line in 1982, and a Concrete General worker was rescued after a trench collapsed in 1995. Most recently, in 2000 and 2001, the company was cited six times for trenching violations, according to Maryland Occupational Safety and Health records.

ANTIGUO CUSCATLAN, El Salvador - On a Sunday evening, Jose Ramon Delgado runs from the outdoor community bathroom, past crypts and crosses in the narrow walkway, to receive an urgent call from his mother in San Francisco. She has just watched a report on the Spanish-language news there about problems brewing in his neighborhood. Delgado lives in the cemetery at Antiguo Cuscatlan, a town a few miles west of San Salvador. A barbed wire fence suspended between trees and tombstones separates a sprawling mass of houses, all capped in corrugated metal, from the rest of the graveyard.

A Millersville man apprehended in Central America under a false identity admitted yesterday killing a man after a 1997 dispute at a local bar and, under terms of a plea agreement, will be sentenced to 17 years in prison and five years of probation. Nathan G. Brown III, 30, pleaded guilty in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court to manslaughter and felony assault in the fatal shooting of a Gambrills man and for firing at his companions. Originally charged with murder, Brown faced a potential life sentence in the Oct. 16, 1997, killing of Jeffrey Watson, 19. The prosecutor and defense lawyers said that issues with the 6-year-old case, including that witnesses had been drinking the night of the slaying and that Brown was so drunk that the defense could have contended he was reasonably acting in self-defense, led to the negotiated plea.

In Baltimore City Two men's deaths put homicide count in city at 224 Baltimore's homicide tally grew Wednesday with the deaths of two men from earlier violence, police said. Angelo Hill, 41, of the 3200 block of Hayward Ave. died at Sinai Hospital from stab wounds suffered when a man attacked him in the 4600 block of Reisterstown Road on Oct. 20. No arrest has been made in that case. The other victim, Samuel T. Hill, 68, had lived at the Abbey Schaefer Hotel in the 700 block of St. Paul St. He died at an area hospital from the effects of smoke inhalation suffered in a fire Aug. 2, 2001.

NOW ROLANDO Sanchez is supposed to go away. He has had his 15 minutes of attention. He got beat up by Baltimore sheriff's deputies for the crime of looking like their image of a bad guy. He was then embraced by Baltimore City Council members, who know a blunder when they see one. And now he is supposed to disappear. But this happens only at the peril of a community's conscience, which vanishes when we have no memory. Sanchez is anybody who ever got knocked down for speaking an unknown language, or having the wrong background, or falling into somebody's stereotype.

Mauricio Vargas was afraid to return to his wife and two young children in El Salvador. Not because he didn't miss them, but because the Silver Spring resident was worried he couldn't take care of them. "The economy, the state of the country, is terrible right now," he said in Spanish. "It would be harder to give them a good life." But after filling out a few forms and getting his photograph taken yesterday in Columbia, Vargas' worries subsided, at least temporarily. The 35-year-old pizza delivery man signed up for a "temporary protected status" extension, which will allow him to remain in the United States legally for another year.

WASHINGTON - Federal officials said yesterday that they had broken up a huge child-smuggling ring that preyed upon the desire of desperate illegal immigrants in the United States to be reunited with their children. The ring smuggled hundreds of children, from toddlers to teen-agers, into the country from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras at a cost of $5,000 each, the Immigration and Naturalization Service said. The agency said its agents arrested three suspected smugglers in Houston on Friday.

He is used to small spaces. He is comfortable, now, with the way his legs curl into the stirrups of his wheelchair. He knows how to get it around the stiff corners of his basement room. Back up a little, turn. Back up some more, turn again. He comes from a place that is smaller. "Muy chiquita," he says, pointing at El Salvador on a map. He lifts his hand, measuring the size of his country in the space between his forefinger and his thumb. His country is this big. The job market there was small, so small that his family was almost always hungry.

PRESIDENT Bush likes to remind the foreign policy establishment that his ideas are good for business. He believes, as he argued on behalf of China's inclusion in the World Trade Organization, that "free trade supports and sustains freedom in all its forms." This simple sloganeering often sells many on the idea that commerce creates democracy. The intertwining of these concepts is an effective way to silence critics of policies that have little to do with democracy but a lot to do with economic power.