Mother Plans Trip To Bury Daughters In El Salvador

The Associated Press

December 10, 2008

SANTA ANA - Leticia Gonzalez never imagined her long-awaited reunion with her daughters would include two child-sized coffins and a plane ticket to El Salvador.

After getting a call from the FBI, the 36-year old factory worker is planning to go to Texas to retrieve the girls' remains and bring them back to El Salvador for a Catholic burial.

It will be Gonzalez's first trip back to her country since she left roughly nine years ago in search of a better life for her daughters than what she could afford selling soda and pupusas from a school snack stand.

For the last 20 months, Gonzalez has been living a nightmare since she paid an immigrant smuggler $12,000 to bring her Luz Karina, then 12, and Blanca Lilian Campos, then 10, to live with her in Southern California.

Gonzalez said the smugglers called her from Mexico in April 2007 asking for more money. They put her girls on the line so she could hear them chatting excitedly about how they were getting close to crossing the border.

But they never arrived.

Gonzalez said she learned the girls were missing when her brother was picked up by federal agents and put into immigration detention. He had been traveling with the girls and his wife - but the smugglers separated the women from the men during the trip.

Gonzalez went to the consulate for help. When the smugglers called again and couldn't produce her daughters, Gonzalez went to police.

Earlier this year, the remains of two girls and a young woman were found in Texas. But DNA testing wasn't completed until last month, when the FBI was able to match elements of the remains to Gonzalez's daughters and sister-in-law.

"I still hoped that they would show up alive - that I could see them, that I could hug them," Gonzalez said Tuesday at the consulate of El Salvador in Santa Ana, where she applied for her passport so she can make the trip.

The FBI is investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the Campos girls, said Laura Eimiller, an FBI spokeswoman. U.S. authorities have not made any arrests in the case.

Gonzalez must seek special permission from the U.S. government to travel because she is here under a program that grants temporary legal status to Salvadoran immigrants. She must also raise money for her ticket, though the government of El Salvador has agreed to pay to repatriate the girls' remains, said Luis Montes Brito, El Salvador's vice minister of foreign affairs.

For Gonzalez - who has a 4-year old son in the United States and an older teenage daughter in El Salvador - having her girls near her was a dream they all shared. She said the girls pleaded with her to bring them to the United States, but paying smugglers to do so was "the biggest mistake of my life."

"I only wanted to have my daughters here with me," she said, weeping. "That may have been my worst mistake. I wanted for them to study. I wanted to give them a better life."

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