A Mom's Approach to Deadbeat Dads

Salvadoran Official Tracks Child Support Cases in U.S.

Chubby-cheeked, perpetually smiling and eager to share photographs of her baby girl, Sylvia Montalvo de Aquino seems ill-cast as the Salvadoran consulate's designated enforcer against deadbeat dads.

But the immigrant fathers -- and occasionally mothers -- whom de Aquino summons to her Washington office know otherwise.

"My husband often jokes that he'd hate to be in their shoes, because, the truth is, I can get really harsh," de Aquino said, giggling. "I'll say to them, 'Did you just somehow forget that your child needs to eat three times a day? You think nothing of wasting a dollar on a candy bar or a beer here, while with that dollar your kid could be having dinner back in El Salvador!' "

De Aquino, 29, has a stern approach out of necessity. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans leave their children for the United States each year to earn money to support them, but the Salvadoran government also receives more than 125 complaints a month about children whose parents abandon them after heading north.

Such cases often stem from the same causes of child support disputes everywhere: A resentful father is convinced that any money he sends for his children will be used by his ex-wife and her new boyfriend. Or an irresponsible mother neglects her children because she figures that relatives will take care of them.

Still, with as much as a fourth of El Salvador's citizens living in the United States, Salvadoran officials say, the stress of immigration frequently plays an exacerbating role. Years of separation heighten tensions in Salvadoran couples or increase the partners' sense of estrangement from each other. Or the immigrant parent meets a new partner in the United States and starts a family that competes for his love and his paycheck.

Mario Arturo Flores, a 44-year-old handyman living in Rockville, said he intended to support the son born to his then-girlfriend shortly after he left El Salvador in 1985. But after he met the woman who became his wife in the United States and started having children with her, he said, the boy's mother became jealous and threatened relatives in El Salvador through whom he was sending her money.

"It was like she wanted me to be with her or with no one," he said. "I was too far away to do anything about it. And finally, the situation became so hostile and scary that I said better to break all communications with her."

Since 1999, guardians of neglected children have been able to file claims with El Salvador's attorney general's office that are automatically forwarded to the consulate serving the area where the parent has relocated. A designated consular official such as de Aquino is empowered to call the parent in and set an amount of child support to be paid each month. The parent is supposed to send payments to the consulate in the form of a money order that the consulate sends to the judge advocate general's office in El Salvador.

Although El Salvador's system is unusually aggressive -- apart from Mexico, none of the governments representing Washington's other major immigrant groups have anything like it -- in practice, de Aquino and her colleagues have little power to punish parents who refuse to comply.

Just finding the parents is often impossible. Addresses provided by relatives back home are frequently out of date. And immigrants who are recent arrivals, poor or in the United States illegally don't generally register in the phone or driver's license records typically used to find people.

Also, although de Aquino is careful not to tell parents why their presence is requested at the consulate, she thinks that some figure it out and ignore her.