Guatemalans

In a case that has already sparked much confusion and outrage in the heavily immigrant neighborhood of Westlake, Los Angeles County coroner's officials announced recently that the Guatemalan day laborer who was fatally shot by an LAPD officer went by several different names. Since the Sept. 5 shooting, relatives and acquaintances have identified the dead man as 37-year-old Manuel Jamines. However, coroner's officials identified him as Manuel Ramirez based on a fingerprint match with U.S. Department of Justice records.

A Westlake resident who said she witnessed the fatal shooting of a Guatemalan day laborer by a Los Angeles police officer said Thursday that she saw no knife in the man's hands, contradicting the Police Department's account. "He had nothing in his hands," said Ana, who did not give her last name and asked that her face be obscured in photos and on television because she feared being harassed by the police. "At the moment when the police were shooting, he had nothing. " Ana said she was across the street Sunday afternoon when bicycle officers with the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division approached 37-year-old Manuel Jamines, who police said was wielding a knife and threatening people in the crowded shopping district.

Tensions flared Monday in the immigrant neighborhood of Westlake as dozens of protesters and Los Angeles police faced off at the site where a day laborer was fatally shot by police a day earlier. The angry crowd gathered at 6th Street and Union Avenue, a bustling corner where Los Angeles Police Department officers said they were confronted Sunday by a knife-wielding man who refused commands to drop his weapon. The protesters, claiming the man was unarmed, used a bullhorn to shout in Spanish — "Assassination!"

A Guatemalan woman who argued in an asylum case that she would be in danger if she were to be returned to her native country because of the high rate of murders of women there can have her case reviewed, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday. The court sent the case back to the Board of Immigration Appeals to consider whether Guatemalan women make up a "social group" and should be eligible for asylum based on that. In the ruling, the court ordered the board to determine whether Lesly Yajayra Perdomo has demonstrated a fear of persecution based on her membership in that group.

Were it not for a surveillance camera, Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax's death may have passed as anonymously as his short life. Instead, as he lay crumpled outside the doorway of an apartment building, bleeding from a stab wound to the chest, the camera recorded every excruciating minute: Tale-Yax staggering after being attacked, collapsing, then lying on the sidewalk for more than an hour as one person after another walked by without calling for...

The military-backed coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya last year left behind a bitterly divided country that remains dangerously tense. This month, a five-member, internationally backed Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formally installed, amid much fanfare and low expectations, to investigate events before, during and after the coup. Presiding over the panel is Eduardo Stein, an experienced diplomat and former vice president of Guatemala who helped negotiate an end to his nation's brutal civil war. Stein spoke to The Times from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, a day after the commission was sworn in — and it's already being criticized by both sides of the political divide.

Booker Wade is an old civil-rights warrior from Tennessee. He's got some dramatic stories to tell, including one that involves some angry Memphis police officers. In the early 1960s, his mom put him on a bus for a long ride to Los Angeles and a new life in California. No one is writing Booker Wade's name in grade-school assignments for Black History Month. But in my Guatemalan American family, he's a living legend. "Booker, thanks for taking my mother to the hospital," I told him when we met in Palo Alto last week, and it was hard not to say it without tears welling up in my eyes because I've been waiting four decades for the chance.

It isn't every day that a 50-year-old family secret comes tumbling out of the closet. A week ago, my father read the second of my columns on illiteracy, about the struggle of three Latino immigrants to learn to read and write. He came to talk to me. The look on his face as he stood on my deck was pained. "You can't tell anyone this," he said in Spanish. "I've never told anyone." "What?" I asked. "What is it?" When he finally spoke, the words came out quickly and seemed to drain him of breath.

Just north of the traffic-tangling intersection where Beverly, Temple, Virgil, Commonwealth and Silver Lake merge sits Amalia's Restaurant. Secreted away in a refurbished bungalow on a shady stretch of Virgil, it's a surprising oasis where Amalia Zuleta's longtime dream, one that began with her arrival from war-torn Guatemala in 1984, is finally being realized. The little house has been opened up to create an airy dining room. There are fine wood tables, a modest chandelier over the long service bar and specialty herbs growing outside the kitchen.

A slain lawyer's videotaped and posthumously broadcast accusation that President Alvaro Colom ordered his slaying threw Guatemala into an uproar Tuesday and prompted the government to call for a United Nations agency and the FBI to investigate the killing. Colom vehemently denied the allegations made in a videotape left by lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, who was shot to death Sunday by unidentified assailants while riding his bicycle.