Salvadoran mother's loss renews debate over role in Iraq

Her petition to withdraw troops gives nation an anti-war heroine
By HECTOR TOBAR and ALEX RENDEROS, Los Angeles Times

GUAYAMANGO, EL SALVADOR - The only thing Herminia Ramos wanted from the army was her dead son's pension — $200 a month. She figured she deserved as much, seeing that he died wearing an army uniform, fighting in a war halfway around the world in Iraq.

The Salvadoran army said no.

Ramos said she felt abandoned. Left alone with her thoughts in her sparse cinderblock home, she quickly came to a conclusion: No other parent should have to feel this way.

She signed her name to a letter demanding that El Salvador remove its troops from Iraq. Then she personally delivered it to the national legislature and the offices of conservative President Tony Saca. In the process, the quiet peasant woman has become the most potent symbol of this country's small anti-war movement.

"There are other mothers who have their children there, and I didn't want them to suffer the pain I did," Ramos said, and began to weep. "Those troops that are over there don't have any need to go suffer so far away."

El Salvador is the only Latin American country with troops still in Iraq. About 380 troops from the country's elite Cuscatlan Battalion have been stationed there since 2003.

Two Salvadoran soldiers have died in Iraq. Ramos' 19-year-old son, Natividad Mendez Ramos, was the first, falling in the southern city of Najaf on April 4, 2004, when supporters of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr assaulted Salvadoran and Spanish troops stationed at a barracks there.

Natividad joined the army at 15, having somehow gotten around the minimum-age requirement of 16. Pictures on the wall of Ramos' home show a young man with coffee-colored skin who looks older than the teenager he will always be.

Ramos remembers the last time she saw Natividad, when he came home on leave, just before heading to Iraq, and the pain of one of their last conversations together:

"He told me, 'Mama, I think this is the last time we're going to see each other.' And I answered him: 'No, no son. You don't have to go. You're not going to go. I don't want you to go!' ... My son was disconsolate. He told me, 'You're going to be left all alone.' "

Although polls here show a majority of Salvadorans oppose the presence of their country's troops in Iraq, anti-war protests are almost nonexistent.

"Herminia's actions have reopened the debate about our troops in Iraq, an issue that had almost been forgotten," said Maria Silvia Guillen, who runs a legal rights center in San Salvador. Activists here call her "the Cindy Sheehan of El Salvador."

When Ramos contacted a local minister about her concerns about the war, peace activists drafted a letter of protest in her name.

"I consider her to be one of our Salvadoran heroines," said Bishop Medardo Gomez of the Lutheran Church of El Salvador. "She is a poor woman of few words whose pain led her to speak out. She's dared to stand up to the powerful, to our government and, above all, to the military."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/3715945.html