Alfaro bore no apparent signs of physical abuse when she was first presented to the press 10 days after her May 20 arrest. She has said that she was not coerced into defecting but that when she saw the police had photographs proving her involvement with the guerrilla group, she defected and sought police protection.
Like most human rights workers, Alfaro used a protective pseudonym at the commission. She was known to her colleagues as Michele Salinas and, by her own description, was a strong-willed and sometimes contentious rebel, too independent for some of her colleagues.
Alfaro said she joined the Human Rights Commission in 1982, about a year after her mother and an aunt disappeared, apparently victims of a death squad.
Alfaro and her 26-year-old sister say they joined the commission because they needed jobs. They say they were gradually manipulated into working for the National Resistance, one of five groups in the Farabundo Marti Front. By March, 1983, Alfaro said she was working for the guerrillas.
In an interview arranged through the government, Alfaro spoke angrily about being "used" by the guerrillas. She repeated her earlier charges, saying she knew of the others she named in the guerrilla organizations because her "bosses" had told her, or because "everybody knows."
Alfaro said she left the commission and El Salvador for six months last year to go to Los Angeles, where she says she was re-recruited by her guerrilla group to return to El Salvador in December.
Attorney Accused
Alfaro charged that the guerrillas have members in international church and refugee programs, such as El Rescate in Los Angeles. She said an attorney, Jesus Campos, the Human Rights Commission's representative in Los Angeles, worked under the auspices of El Rescate and was a member of the guerrilla front.
Roberto Alfaro, who is director of El Rescate but not related to the defecting leftist, said he had no knowledge that Campos ever worked for a guerrilla group. He said Campos had worked for the commission, not El Rescate, and had moved to Northern California for reasons unrelated to Alfaro's charges.
The three women defectors say that thousands of dollars of funds from the multidenominational Diaconia were funneled to the guerrillas. Diaconia, an umbrella group of the Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal and Catholic churches, coordinates the expenditure of about $2 million annually in international donations for social programs.
Campos said that she falsified reports for thousands of dollars that the Oscar Arnulfo Romero Mothers Committee received from Europe for a beauty parlor to employ widows, a project that never existed.
Directors Linked
Syonara Alfaro said she personally falsified thousands of dollars worth of receipts for money that was given to the guerrillas. Luz Janet Alfaro said each of the directors of Diaconia answered to a guerrilla faction.
The Lutheran Church's Gomez, a member of Diaconia, denied the charges.
"It is true we helped the Human Rights Commission, but for its work. She charged we knew that what they received went to the guerrillas. That's false," Gomez said.
