Salvadoran

Call it the Chinese-Salvadoran connection.An ethnic marriage of convenience is flourishing in the Baltimore area's Chinese restaurants. Chinese restaurateurs are hiring Salvadorans as busboys, dishwashers and sometimes waiters and cooks.Miguel Angel Rivera, 39, was among the first Salvadorans to make the connection. In 1986, he came to a Chinese restaurant in Randallstown as a busboy."The first six months here I didn't see another Hispanic," Mr. Rivera says."I worked amid 10 Chinese guys.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Two army officers convicted in the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter were ordered released from prison yesterday as part of a new blanket amnesty sponsored by President Alfredo Cristiani.In response to U.S. pressure, however, government officials now say the amnesty, decreed last month for all Salvadorans guilty of war crimes, will not be granted to leftist guerrillas who killed U.S. servicemen during the conflict.The officers convicted in the Jesuits' murders, Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides and Lt. Yusshy Rene Mendoza, had been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

SONSONATE, El Salvador -- Leftist presidential candidate Ruben Zamora, flanked by former guerrillas who until recently were waging civil war, gazed out yesterday over the smattering of red flags waving in this town's central plaza.The left's opponents "want to look at a past of suffering and explosion . . . a past that must be left behind," he told the small crowd. The leftists, he said, "want to walk to the future . . . a future that we dreamed of, fought for, year after year."In their first foray into civilian politics, El Salvador's former guerrillas have positioned themselves as the country's second major political force going into elections next Sunday, polls show.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Salvadorans from all walks of life reacted with quiet satisfaction to the murder conviction of Col. Guillermo Benavides in the 1989 army massacre of six Jesuit priests and two women at the Central American University.Many people said yesterday that the televised criminal trial of Benavides and seven subordinates, as much as the jury's verdict against him, was a major step forward for a country whose dominant military establishment has been immune to civilian authority.

Before the 1992 peace accord, Rene Cajura was a member of a guerrilla army in El Salvador that the United States was spending millions of dollars to help defeat.Yesterday, Mr. Cajura, a member of the political party that evolved from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was in Baltimore with a delegation of 22 mayors visiting this country to study the nuts and bolts of democracy and bureaucracy.After a day and a half in the United States, Mr. Cajura, who is mayor of Nejapa near San Salvador, said he was taken with the wealth here as compared with El Salvador, which is trying slowly to rebuild after the ravages of more than a decade of civil war. Looking out the window of his hotel near Baltimore-Washington International Airport, for example, he was impressed by the landscaping and the sea of green he saw stretching to the horizon.

BARSTOW, Calif. -- A compact pickup truck crammed with 20 people apparently heading from Mexico to Los Angeles drifted off a freeway and crashed into a drainage culvert near here early yesterday, killing 12 passengers and sending the other eight to hospitals with serious injuries.The California Highway Patrol said the driver apparently fell asleep at the wheel after driving all night from the Mexican border town of Nogales, Ariz.Most of the victims were flung from the wreckage and scattered across the rock-strewn desert in what the CHP described as one of the most deadly single-vehicle accidents in the state's history.

Here's a fresh take on trendy East-meets-West cuisine. Salvadoran immigrant Miguel Rivera had worked in Chinese restaurants for years before deciding to open his own place in a storefront on Broadway. He painted the pressed-tin ceiling and walls salmon and peach, kept the crystal chandelier, added an extra-large bottle of Tabasco sauce to each table, and there you go: Baltimore's first Salvadoran- Chinese restaurant.There's no melding of cuisines here; you simply have lots of choices. Tamales or spring rolls?

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Sparking new controversy in one of the most publicized cases in the prolonged, costly U.S. involvement in Central America's civil wars, Salvadoran authorities yesterday authorized the parole of three of the five soldiers convicted of killing four American religious women in 1980.Reports that the ex-guardsmen were due for release renewed debate over the case in the United States and El Salvador. Prosecutors here tried and failed to keep the men in prison via appeals that lasted for three months.

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. -- Grocery bags with a 9-year-old Salvadoran boy's story of how he illegally reached California are headed for a shredder this week, after enraged residents succeeded in getting the bags withdrawn.The incident is the latest evidence of the growing disdain for illegal immigrants in California. Gov. Pete Wilson has blamed the undocumented aliens for the state's laggard economy, saying that the immigrants drain the budget by clogging welfare rolls and medical clinics.Tensions have been particularly high here in Marin County, a wealthy San Francisco suburb that in recent years has become a refuge for thousands of immigrants, including many who work as gardeners and construction laborers.

WASHINGTON -- Peace in El Salvador will extract a price from the American taxpayer.Administration and congressional officials said yesterday that while the U.N.-mediated New Year's accord will allow the United States to cut military aid to the Central American nation, some or much of that money may be absorbed by other costs of the pact."