“Linea Directa,” the Washington area’s longest-running Spanish language public education show, debuts tomorrow on a new television station, in a new time slot and with a new, more upscale look.

Its mission, however, is unchanged. The target audience, said Arturo Salcedo Martinez, the show’s host, is still new or recent immigrants from Latin America who face obstacles because of language barriers and immigration status. The program’s goal is to provide immigrants with information on their rights as well as on health, legal, social services and educational issues.

“They come here because they want to improve their lives, and they’re doing the best they can,” said Salcedo, 41, who emigrated from Colombia in 1984.

A decade ago, when “Linea Directa” began as a monthly television program, the show concentrated on explaining the area’s 911 emergency telephone service and the importance of participating in the U.S. Census–even going through the survey question by question for viewers.
Since then, the Latino community in the metropolitan region has grown to an estimated 400,000. It has evolved and matured and is facing more systemic problems of adjusting to life in the United States, the show’s producers say. These days, “Linea Directa” discusses topics such as the academic gap between Latino students and their white, African American and Asian American counterparts, and what Hispanic parents can do to help bridge that chasm.

The program also has explored the future of the Latino community in terms of the presidential election, the devastating prevalence of domestic violence in Latino households and the problem of racism between light-skinned and dark-skinned Latinos. “We have to discuss serious issues, but on another level,” Salcedo said.

The new home of “Linea Directa” is on the local Telemundo affiliate, WZDC-TV, which broadcasts in the District on Channel 64, and cable channels 34 (for those with digital service from District Cable) and 77 (Starpower Communications). The show also can be seen in Fairfax, Arlington, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, and in Alexandria and Fredericksburg.

Starting tomorrow, the show will air at 6 p.m. Fridays, with a rebroadcast at 9:30 a.m. Sundays.

“Linea Directa” is the first Spanish-language program to enter into a permanent public service partnership with a major news organization, WRC-TV (Channel 4), the NBC affiliate in Washington. The station is providing “Linea Directa” with technical personnel and state-of-the-art studio facilities where the weekly series is videotaped.

“Linea Directa” marks the third time WRC has collaborated with Telemundo in two years, said Linda Sullivan, WRC station president and general manager. She called the partnership part of a “long-term effort in support of enhancing the quality of life in our region.”

Wendy Thompson, Telemundo’s general manager, said that adding “Linea Directa” to the station’s lineup “reaffirms our dedication and commitment to bring quality educational programming that is geared toward the needs of the Hispanic community.”

At a recent taping of “Linea Directa,” in WRC’s studios in Northwest Washington, Salcedo and his guests met on a sleek set with five cameras, four of them handled by a robotics operator, a cameraman, an audio technician and a stage manager. Down the hall in the control room, executive producer Eduardo Lopez watched the taping with a director and technical director in front of a wall of television monitors. An audio specialist worked in the room next to them. The tape was edited and ready for airing within hours.

Quite a change from the days, not so long ago, when “Linea Directa” was run on a shoestring budget.

Until this summer–and for the past five years–Salcedo and Lopez produced the program by themselves out of a basement at St. Paul’s College in Northeast Washington. Their makeshift studio was in a roped-off area with a black curtain. There was one camera, mounted on a tripod, fixed on the set. Lopez pushed another camera on a dolly track to focus in on Salcedo, then focus out on the guests–giving the illusion that three cameras were at work. The host and guests sat on beat-up wooden chairs. It took Lopez two or three days to set up the show and, working alone, almost a week to edit it.

“We were doing what we do best: doing the most with the least,” said Lopez, 43, who emigrated from El Salvador in 1967. Comparing WRC’s professional studio with the old setup, Salcedo said, “It’s like when you jump from a donkey to a jet.”

Salcedo and Lopez have worked together since 1986 when they were city employees of the Mayor’s Office of Latino Affairs. They saw a need to educate the Latino community, Lopez said, and produced Spanish-language public service announcements about such topics as preventing fires and an immigrant child’s right to enroll in public school regardless of legal status.

Hundreds of Hispanic parents began calling school headquarters to ask about enrolling their children, saying they had heard on television that they could, Lopez said. “That’s when [we] realized the idea of using TV to communicate with people was really working.”

By 1989, the two men had created “Linea Directa,” which first aired Jan. 25, 1990. District Cable donated the use of its studio facilities. The program was broadcast monthly on District Cable’s Channel 16 and on the local affiliate of the Spanish-language network Univision.

Dramatizations–which mimicked to a certain extent the popular Spanish-language telenovelas, or soap operas–were used to drive home educational messages about such subjects as the dangers of drinking and driving, teen pregnancy and how to deal with police officers and the U.S. judicial system.

In 1994, Salcedo and Lopez lost their jobs in the Office of Latino Affairs because of budget cuts, and “Linea Directa” lost its D.C. government funding and went off the air. Determined to keep the show alive, the two formed a nonprofit corporation called Educational Videos in Spanish (now EVSCommunications) and sought grants to support the program. It went back on the air in August 1995, buying broadcast time on Univision.

The new partnership with WRC and Telemundo will let Salcedo and Lopez boost the number and quality of shows they produce. “It’s also recognition of the importance of the community in terms of the greater life here in Washington,” Lopez said. “Latinos are a big part of the community in Washington, and we will continue to be.”

To remind him of the impact “Linea Directa” has had on viewers, Salcedo keeps three crumpled dollar bills that a Salvadoran woman gave him years ago to help support the show. She recognized Salcedo in a restaurant and told him that her son’s life had been saved because the one-time heavy drinker watched a program about the criminal consequences of driving drunk in the United States.

“She told me he was scared when he saw the police put this guy in jail,” Salcedo said. “I told her, ‘I’m glad the show changed the life of your kid.” If one show changed the life of one person, it was great. That is what we need.”

On a recent weekday afternoon, in the crowded waiting room of La Clinica Del Pueblo, a man with a clipboard was frantically trying to find a patient. Any patient would do, he explained, as long as she was a mother with a small child.

With a winning smile and an offer of $50, Arturo Salcedo finally persuaded a shy Salvadoran immigrant to bring her son to one of the clinic’s examining rooms. There, Juan Romagoza, director of this “people’s clinic” for low-income Latinos in Columbia Heights, stood ready with a stethoscope.

Then, with a camera whirring, Romagoza pretended to check the boy’s heart and lungs, repeating the staged examination a dozen times until the cameraman declared the scene perfect.

At 6 p.m. Sunday, the mock exam will appear as a 30-second scene in “Linea Directa,” a half-hour public service show on Univision’s Channel 48, which is seen each week by nearly 100,000 Spanish-speaking viewers throughout the Washington area.

“It’s often crazy like this. . . . We have so little time to shoot,” said Salcedo, 38, the host and executive director of the show, which hires members of the community as actors whenever possible “to make it seem more real to people.”

“Linea Directa,” now in its eighth year, is a nonprofit, shoestring operation, based at St. Paul’s College in Northeast Washington. Salcedo’s business partner, Eduardo Lopez, functions as cameraman, director and editor.

This spring, with the help of several foundation grants, they are putting together a series that will examine health issues such as tuberculosis, nutrition, cancer prevention, drug abuse and the lack of health insurance among Latinos.

The clinic’s Romagoza, who is helping to develop the series, said many of his Latino patients lack basic information on health care and don’t follow through with prescribed treatments. For example, he said, a person may come in for a tuberculosis test but then fail to return several days later for the results — or stop taking the medicine too soon, making the tuberculosis strain stronger and more resistant.

“When people see me talking on `Linea Directa,’ they pay more attention. It’s a magic vehicle to wake up their interest and sense of responsibility,” Romagoza said. “In this community, where so few people have money and medical insurance, we don’t have enough resources for cures, but we do have enough for prevention.”

Television shows that present modern medical information in Spanish are needed, Romagoza said, to offset the many ads on Spanish-language television stations featuring psychics and healers who promise to cure everything from from baldness to depression — for a fee.

For Salcedo and Lopez, who have cobbled together at least 200 videotaped programs since 1990, including shows on gang violence and immigration laws, the key is to relate directly to Latino viewers, without histrionics. If the staged presentations or hastily written scripts lack pizazz, at least the information is getting out to people who often have few other sources.

“Every show [in the series] will push the same message: the importance of preventive health care,” said Lopez, 40. “People don’t find out they have hypertension or TB until they end up in the emergency room, with no insurance and no way to pay for treatment, when their condition could have been detected with primary care.”

After several hours of shooting at the clinic, where toddlers nearly upended the light stands, the “Linea Directa” crew moved to an apartment in Petworth, where another obliging patient had agreed to let them shoot a scene in his living room.

This time, the Salvadoran mother, Blanca Majano, 34, was instructed to comfort her sick “husband” — another recruited patient named Lorenzo Cardoso — as he sat in a chair. She blushed as Lopez suggested that she give him a kiss.

Lopez then rummaged through the kitchen, found a leftover pot of beans and asked Majano to serve Cardoso, 40, who was told to look sick and refuse to eat. There was no dialogue to memorize: the scenes would be used with Salcedo’s voice-over explaining the symptoms of tuberculosis.

“People love to volunteer, and it helps that we can pay something, but they are always amazed that so many hours of shooting can end up as a few minutes on tape,” Lopez said as he sprinkled water on Cardoso’s forehead so it would look like he was sweating — and made him swallow Tic-Tac after Tic-Tac to look as if he was taking medicine.

With shooting completed, and the borrowed apartment now strewn with rearranged furniture and filming equipment, Majano rushed off to fetch her other children at school. Salcedo, however, was still on the phone in the kitchen, lining up “patients” for the next day’s scenes.

The video clip shows a Latina riding in a car through Mount Pleasant, with her small daughter perched happily on her lap. Suddenly, the scene shifts to another front seat, where the dummies of a woman and a little girl are hurled into the windshield of a crash-test car at 30 miles an hour.

The message could not be more graphic, but it is one many Latino immigrants in the area have never seen or heard explained in Spanish until now. To make sure the lesson sinks in, the next scene is an interview with a middle-age Salvadoran man named Mario Rivera, his face recognizable to all his Mount Pleasant neighbors.

“I never liked wearing a seat belt, because it was uncomfortable. I only started using one after a policeman stopped me and fined me $75, and now I thank God he did,” the man says in Spanish, describing a recent accident in which his car was smashed but he emerged unhurt. “If it wasn’t for that policeman, I might be dead.”

Eight months after losing its District government funds and disappearing from view, “Linea Directa” — the only Spanish-language public service television show in the Washington area — has fought its way back onto the air. The return premier, which was shown Saturday night on Channel 48 (Univision), focuses on traffic safety; similar half-hour segments will appear at 6 p.m. Saturdays.

The struggle to save “Linea Directa” has been grueling for its longtime co-producers, Eduardo Lopez and Arturo Salcedo. For five years, they operated out of the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs, producing 50 low-budget but popular shows on topics ranging from AIDS prevention to fraudulent psychics. Local Latinos acted in dramatizations, presented testimony and asked audience questions.

Then last winter, both men lost their jobs to the city’s budget cuts, and their program was canceled. But Lopez and Salcedo, determined to save the show, formed a nonprofit corporation and started banging on doors for support.

“It was very hard, but people would recognize me in the street and tell me not to give up,” said Salcedo, 36, who is the program’s host. “One woman came up and said her husband had been a terrible drunk until he saw our show on alcoholism. She said he was scared to death by the part we filmed in prison and he started to change. She gave me $2 and said, Please, you have to keep going.’ ”

Gradually, the team pulled together a patchwork support system, including an agreement with the Office on Latino Affairs to provide a $1,500 monthly contribution and official sponsorship, a low-rent studio at St. Paul’s College in Northeast Washington and pledges of production funds by several foundations and agencies. Each show can cost as much as $30,000 to make.

So far, the money has not stretched far enough to pay either man a regular salary. Lopez is living largely on his severance pay from the city; Salcedo is glad his wife works. Previously, the OLA funded both men’s salaries — a total of about $80,000 — and they raised outside production funds.
For the last month, Lopez and Salcedo frantically have been preparing the auto safety feature: finding accident victims, shooting street scenes, taping voice-overs in a broom closet and editing tape on a console that barely fits in their cramped studio. Last Thursday, they edited until dawn to meet their first deadline.

“There’s a serious problem in the Latino community, especially with men, who say it’s too hot and uncomfortable to wear seat belts or who think it’s macho to put their kid on their lap and teach him to drive,” said Lopez, 37. “That’s why we put real people on the show, to tell their stories and have more of an impact.”

Local nonprofit agencies have strongly supported “Linea Directa’s” return. The auto safety program was paid for with a grant from Mary’s Center for Infant and Maternal Care in Adams-Morgan, which obtained the money through a national auto safety foundation.

There is a more ambitious plan for a fall series on preventing heart disease, funded by the National Institutes of Health. And, if sponsors can be found, the team wants to produce programs on teenage drug abuse, street gangs, changes in immigration law and rights of Latina women.

Lopez and Salcedo plan to continue their successful focus-group format, in which local Latinos are consulted in advance so the programs reflect community concerns and level of knowledge, rather than relying on specialists.

“Linea Directa” was one of the most effective programs I’ve ever seen, and its return is a great joy to us,” said Juan Romagoza, director of the Clinica del Pueblo in Mount Pleasant. “It informed the community in an accessible way. It generated debate about serious problems, and it touched people’s hearts.”

To these believers, every curse has a cure, and Mauricio Zelaya was a believer. Each visit to the little office in Adams-Morgan, each test performed by the white-haired spiritualist, had convinced him that the stiffness in his back was the work of algo malo — “something evil.”

He had plenty of proof. His own $20 bill, folded into a triangle, wrapped in aluminum foil and licked with his own saliva, had burned a blister in the palm of his hand. The cotton swab he rubbed across his chest and his “noble parts” had made water froth and turn blood red. Seltzer, bought around the corner at a market, had turned to a coffee color after he gargled with it.

“You know what?” the healer told Zelaya after the seltzer test, which like the others cost the 33-year-old Salvadoran immigrant $350. “What your wife has in her womb is in great danger.”

Admittedly superstitious and now driven by fear for his unborn child, Zelaya was vulnerable to the self-styled spiritualist and healer.

For $1,000 more, the desperate Zelaya, who said he was a recovering alcoholic who had not had a drink in almost a year, bought into a cure that amounted to five eggs mixed in a $7 bottle of red wine.

Zelaya said the wine cure last April led to a nine-day drinking binge that cost him his job as a building superintendent and landed him in a detox center. After his release, he said, he spent a day bent on revenge, stalking the streets of Queens in New York, where he believed the healer had gone. “My mind,” he now says, “was disturbed.”

The case is unusual only because it produced such extreme results. Although D.C. police are investigating only two cases involving possible fraud by such healers — Zelaya’s among them — investigators caution that crimes of confidence are greatly underreported because many of the victims are non-English-speaking immigrants who are reluctant to go to the authorities.

There is anecdotal evidence — based on the accounts of a doctor, a priest, healers’ clients and healers themselves — that the number of victims in the Washington area is at least in the hundreds.

Believers in folklore and a tradition of herbal medicines, these people make easy prey for fast-talking healers who tell them they are suffering from spiritual or physical illnesses — including cancer and other potentially fatal diseases — and then charge hundreds of dollars for bogus cures.

The presence of spiritualists and healers in the Latino community is neither new nor unique to this area. Based in homes, the underground businesses are traditionally run by women who counsel the lovelorn and occasionally prescribe herbs, charging $25 to $70 for consultations. Community leaders say most are benign, although some have been known to charge hundreds of dollars.

But experiences such as Zelaya’s became widespread only last year, when several organized groups opened storefront offices in Latino neighborhoods and began buying blocks of air time on Spanish-language media, a main source of information for the estimated 400,000 Latinos in the area.

A Church Besieged

There is no way to know how many people have sought out such healers, but their impact has been acutely felt at an unlikely place, the Cathedral of St. Thomas More in Arlington. The Rev. Jose Eugenio Hoyos said that in the last year about 200 people have approached him, some telling him they have been cured of various maladies, but most tearfully recounting how they spent a great deal of money for nothing.

“This is a huge business,” said Hoyos, who first was exposed to such healers in his native Colombia. “It is a phenomenon that must be controlled now. It is destroying our Latino community.”

Especially disturbing for the church is the healers’ practice of using Catholic icons, traditions and teachings. The Friday practice of blessing small bottles of water was suspended in November because too many people were bringing gallon containers, leading priests to believe that the holy water was being used for unholy purposes.

Hoyos said Communion wafers have been spirited out of the cathedral — a sacrilegious act — by parishioners who are told by healers that they are needed to concoct cures. At the Spanish-language Mass on Sundays, which regularly draws more than 1,600 worshipers, priests have stopped putting the Hosts into their hands and instead place a wafer on the tongue of each parishioner, a forced return to an old tradition.

Recently, an usher had to chase a woman who had removed the Host from her mouth and was walking away with it in her hand, Hoyos said.

One parishioner recently called Hoyos and asked him to give her a wafer that had been blessed. She said a spiritualist had told her to sprinkle pieces of the wafer outside her door to drive off evil spirits. The charge for that advice was $500, but the spiritualist assured the woman that the money would go to the poor.

From the pulpit, Hoyos has warned that such practices are sinful. But he recognizes that fraudulent healers promise desperate people something he cannot.

“I am not a soothsayer,” Hoyos said. “To them I am a spiritual leader, not a person who will solve their problems and predict their future.”

The healing business began to escalate last year when four principal operations — Bryan International, Grupo Kendur, Maestros Lamas and Centro Naturista la Buena Esperanza (Good Hope Naturist Center) — set up shop in the area and began to advertise, in some cases reading letters from local people and delivering diagnoses on the air.

They first drew public scrutiny in December, when Laura Martinez, a lawyer at the legal aid clinic Ayuda Inc., handled the case of a Salvadoran woman whose complaint against a Bryan International counselor is still under investigation by police. Martinez alerted the D.C. Office of Latino Affairs, which asked the Spanish-language broadcast media to stop airing the ads. At the same time, the office’s “Linea Directa” public service show aired a program in which three victims, Zelaya among them, were interviewed.

According to Zelaya, the healer who promised to cure his backache, Alejandro Ajedrez, also worked for Bryan International. Bryan officials in New York disavowed responsibility for the Washington operation and said they have since sold it. Zelaya said the new owner, Jose Zuluaga, gave him a partial refund in July and told him that other clients had complained about Ajedrez, who was described as “resting” at a monastery. Ajedrez could not be located for an interview.

City officials said none of the four groups had registered with the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs or had permits, including the required medium license. Only one, Grupo Kendur, had the most basic permit needed by a city business, a certificate of occupancy. Managers of the other businesses said they did not know permits were required. Zuluaga said he is seeking permits for his business, which retains the Bryan name.

The consumer department generally investigates businesses only after an individual or another city agency files a complaint, and no complaints have been filed. Operators of the four businesses, all of them Colombians, said in interviews in December that they were not deceiving the public or prescribing cures. They did not respond to requests to talk to their attorneys, and by the end of the year Maestros Lamas, Grupo Kendur and the Good Faith Naturist Center (renamed by a new owner) had closed.

In its wake, the Naturist Center left debts and an unknown number of clients still seeking what they had paid for. The lights inside the 14th Street NW office were left on, three months back rent is due, and a $1,700 telephone bill, almost all in long-distance calls to Colombia, is unpaid, according to the building’s owner.

The cleanup is now left to Angel Lemos, the property manager, who breaks the news to those seeking the healer. Last month, Lemos said, a man who said he had made a $300 down payment for a treatment came to complain because he had never received the herbal medicines he was promised by mail.

A Long Tradition

A large percentage of Latinos in the Washington area emigrated from Central America in the last five years, in particular from the rural eastern provinces of El Salvador, where herbal medicine is a centuries-old tradition. Their views of medicine and doctors have been molded by that experience and their relative lack of exposure to modern medicine.

Juan Romagoza, who received a medical degree in El Salvador, said this cultural background has made many Salvadorans here susceptible to healers who exploit their tradition.

“I am not against natural medicine. I am against charlatans,” said Romagoza, now director of the Clinica del Pueblo in Columbia Heights and one of the first to spot the problem locally. People from rural areas still retain “an almost magical view of life and death,” Romagoza said, and often seek mystical explanations for physical ailments.

U.S. medicine also has confounded many Salvadorans who were accustomed to buying medicines over the counter and going to one doctor for everything — including psychological counseling, Romagoza said. A lack of medical insurance frightens others who have learned that a visit to a doctor can result in expensive tests.

Free clinics, such as the Clinica del Pueblo and another run by the Catholic Center, are in such demand that someone seeking an appointment today will not see a doctor until April. All these obstacles, Romagoza and others said, have led people to seek alternatives — from using medicines prescribed for friends to ordering medical supplies from home to patronizing healers.

The demand for Valium and tetracycline — two medicines sold over the counter in El Salvador — is such that Romagoza said some Latino supermarkets sell it clandestinely. Zelaya said he eventually cured his backache not by going to a doctor, but by buying a wintergreen ointment made in Hong Kong at a Mount Pleasant supermarket.

“What is common in all these cases,” Romagoza said of those who have sought out healers, “is that all these people are desperate.”

The use of water, candles, smoke and prayer is no coincidence, according to Hoyos and others. Before Grupo Kendur closed in December, a counselor at the operation — which also has offices in New York and Houston — said his clients are generally people who have not been treated by doctors and appeal to him because they believe “someone has done something evil” to them.

“Faith is very important,” Victor Galvis said. “It influences things.” On his desk were some of the tools of his trade: a foot-long wooden crucifix, dried flowers, a deck of Spanish tarot cards and a black-bound set of “Los Magos del Siglo XX” and “Ritos y Secretos del Vudu” (“Magicians of the 20th Century” and “Voodoo’s Rites and Secrets”).

Each consultation is $40, and some treatments cost $330, Galvis said. He said he offered full refunds to dissatisfied customers, but cautioned that cures can work only if people believe in them. “People have to come here confident,” he said.

The irony is that many alternative cures are often much more expensive than a visit to the doctor. In December, for example, Milton Del Cid said he drove from Fairfax to the District in search of a quick cure for stomach cramps.

“It is much cheaper if you go to a parchero,” Del Cid, using the Salvadoran term for a country healer, said as he stood outside Jose Ortiz’s Good Faith Naturist Center about a week before it closed. He was carrying a bag containing his prescription: four small bottles of herbs and vitamin supplements for which he had paid $110. A week later, Del Cid said the herbs had produced a bitter tea and did not work. He called his mother in El Salvador and asked her to send medicine by mail.

Ortiz, interviewed after he treated Del Cid, said his price included the consultation. The medicines themselves, he said, were a minimal part of the cost. One of the products he sold was a skin lotion, and Ortiz cited that as an example.

“If you want it for an allergy, I have to give you a treatment,” he said. “It could cost you $50. It could cost you $60.” Asked about a bottle labeled “laxative,” Ortiz first said it helped cure infections.

“It’s a laxative if that’s what you need,” he said when the inconsistency was pointed out. “It depends on your problem.”

On the Air

The diagnosis was quick.

“Your papacito is suffering a chronic illness . . . bronchitis,” Jose Zuluaga said on Radio Borinquen (AM-900), where his paid program on Dec. 11 included the reading of an imploring letter from two sisters who had described their father’s declining health. “Come and I will give you medications.”

The broadcast sales pitch was not unusual. Buying air time on Spanish-language radio was apparently first used by healers in New York about three years ago, according to a radio executive at WADO (1280-AM), one of the country’s best-established Latino stations. Programs by Grupo Kendur and Bryan International have aired in Boston; Paterson, N.J.; and Houston, radio executives in those cities said.

Such ads were made possible by deregulation in the 1980s, which in the mainstream media allowed phone-sex commercials and 900 numbers for psychics. The result, according to federal officials, is a mostly self-regulated industry in which media executives decide whether to run the ads.

Federal law prohibits fraud by wire, radio or television, but regulators only recently have begun paying attention to Spanish-language ads. In the only action of its kind so far, three Los Angeles-based Latino telemarketing firms were charged in 1991 with making false claims about a “Fantastic Girdle” that supposedly reduced weight. The Federal Trade Commission, which filed the charges, now has regional offices in Texas and California monitoring Spanish-language ads. The agency also publishes consumer protection material in Spanish, said Barry Cutler, director of the FTC’s consumer bureau.

Formal complaints against healers are unusual; ads usually are pulled off the air by station managers when people in the community point to a problem. But their claims have drawn some adverse attention.

In Boston, for example, the host of one program said this year that he had cured a case of cervical cancer by prescribing herbs and rubbing a special mud on the woman’s stomach. That claim so alarmed Marcos Ramos, a physician and professor at Boston University’s School of Medicine, that he alerted the Federal Communications Commission and the FTC. Ramos withdrew the complaint after the station stopped airing the program.

But in an interview, he said he and other Latino doctors in Boston recently notified the Massachusetts attorney general about the case, and Carol Dietz, an assistant attorney general, said an investigation is underway. The healer in the case could not be reached.

Doctors in Boston were especially concerned because the ad appeals to a misconception about cancer among Latinos. A study published in December in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that Latinos often interpret cancer as a punishment from God, a perception that affects how and when they seek treatment.

Ramos said some seriously ill patients opt for healers “because this appeals to the mysterious, the magical.”

That was the approach Jose Zuluaga — using the name Jose Bryan — used on his Dec. 11 radio program. Without saying it was directly to blame for their father’s ill health, he told the two sisters that a curse had been put on them when they left El Salvador. “Bring me an egg,” he said, “and I will show you the face of the person who cursed you.”

Asked by a reporter how he could have diagnosed bronchitis, as opposed to pneumonia or another respiratory ailment, when the father was 3,500 miles away, Zuluaga replied: “Well, those things are related.” Asked how he knew that someone in San Miguel — a rural region of El Salvador that has sent thousands of people to the Washington area — had cursed the two sisters, he paused.

“I am speechless,” he finally said. “Certainly I made a mistake there.”

The tiny production company’s first effort, if you can picture it, was recorded in someone’s bathroom. Without access to a real studio, the unusual locale made acoustical sense, and to this day Arturo Salcedo can see himself crouching, speaking into a corner, while Eduardo Lopez played sound man.

The result was a Spanish-language public service announcement on fire prevention, produced in 1986 by the D.C. mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs. Few knew that the man shown sleeping on a bed was Salcedo’s father, a stand-in, or that the sound taping would have been much easier if the upstairs tenant had not flushed every few minutes.

The direct heir to that amateur production is “Linea Directa,” an award-winning public service program that begins its third season tonight with a show on domestic violence (10:30 p.m. on Channel 48). Expanded from one show a month to two, “Linea Directa” (Direct Line) is the only regional Spanish-language television show of its kind and a singular forum for the growing local Latino community.

The show is an unusual hybrid, even in the highly flexible world of government-sponsored public service television. It is produced by the District, recorded free of charge at the independent D.C. Cablevision studios and aired on both Channel 16, the city cable channel, and Channel 48, the regular commercial Spanish-language station. Maryland and Virginia have provided funding for shows, as have labor unions and Amnesty International.

This “partnership,” as Lopez called it, has allowed “Linea Directa” to overcome the parochial reach of most government public service programs. A study for Channel 48 found that 50,000 Latino households tuned in to “Linea Directa” — a figure that could represent a quarter of all Latino residents in the area.

A typical half-hour show costs about $5,000, a fraction of what an independent producer would charge, and the program has been able to tap each year into more public and private funding. City agencies contribute out of their budgets, and a federal grant paid for a program on child abuse prevention. “I think the program is limited only by the amount of money that we can bring in,” said Carmen Ramirez, the Office on Latino Affairs’ new executive director. “The issues, the problems, the concerns . . . are limitless.”

The shows generally focus on issues affecting Latinos and then offer information and advice — crucial for a community where, Lopez and Salcedo say, large numbers of people are still ill-informed about a broad range of available services. Many Latinos are unaware that school systems rely heavily on parental involvement, and the show is credited with trying to break down that cultural barrier with a program on education. That program was aired last season and proved so popular that another segment is planned.

“It’s a cultural education type of outreach that they are doing,” said Ana Sol Gutierrez, a Montgomery County school board member who has appeared on several shows that focused on education. “I think for a lot of Hispanic people, they will look at this show as the only source of information . . . . It really serves as a cultural translation.”

“Linea Directa” relies on community-based organizations and local experts — doctors, lawyers, educators and social workers — and the show regularly presents Latino professionals who normally would not get such exposure in the mainstream media.

Tonight’s episode on domestic violence includes interviews with three Latino women who explain how they escaped abusive relationships. Specialists include Laura Martinez, a lawyer at the District legal clinic Ayuda Inc.; Ramon Colon, a District police officer; and Sylvia Diaz, a counselor at the Family Place, a District-based social service agency that serves Latinos in the area.

Lopez and Salcedo have broadened their format to include on-site shooting, docudramas and dramatizations, all used in tonight’s show. That formula was tested last season and already has paid off. Three programs recently won awards from the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, and “Linea Directa” was the only foreign-language program cited by the 400-member trade group.

One of the shows is a docudrama about a Salvadoran immigrant’s first year in the region. Written by Salcedo, a Colombian who is the show’s moderator, “Los Ruegos de Andres” (The Prayers of Andres) will debut in the mainstream media Oct. 7, when WETA, Channel 26, airs it as part of its Hispanic Heritage Month programming.

For Salcedo and Lopez, the director and a Salvadoran, the awards vindicated a struggle that began when $13,000 in corporate donations allowed them to buy a used camera in 1987. Now the Office on Latino Affairs is co-owner, with D.C. Cablevision, of an editing studio. The two are self-taught technicians, and the windowless room in the cable station’s Northwest Washington offices is a second home during production.

The show has made Salcedo a star of sorts. He has been approached by people on the street and asked to solve their problems. Once, the kitchen staff of a downtown restaurant came out one by one when word spread that he was there. Another time, Lopez noticed a family sitting in McDonald’s, pointing to Salcedo and whispering.

As the two left, someone whispered in Spanish: “It’s him. It’s him.”

This week it was a black mayor, Sharon Pratt Dixon, who spent an hour Thursday afternoon on the set of Línea Directa (Direct Line), a cable TV show created to give the District’s Hispanic community a chance to speak out. After two days of rioting in Mount Pleasant, Línea Directa featured an Hispanic host — speaking in Spanish — and an Hispanic audience directing its fury — in Spanish — at three black authority figures — the mayor, the chairman of the city council and the local councilman — who listened uncomfortably to a translation of the complaints through ear phones.

In just over 20 years, blacks, long the disadvantaged minority fighting for social and political rights, have become the people in power coping with the anger of a different minority. There could well be more such confrontations ahead in American cities as the Hispanic population grows. By the end of this decade, there will be more young Hispanics in the country than young blacks.

The political irony of the situation is not lost on Washington’s current leaders. “After listening to the Hispanic young people I went home and told my wife it was like listening to myself 20 years ago,” said Council Chairman John Wilson, who was active in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. “The Hispanic people say we don’t see them, we don’t care, but I understand what it feels like to be invisible more than anyone can imagine.”

“I see a picket line, I want to jump in it — it’s in my blood,” said Councilman Frank Smith (D-Ward 1).

Politically active Hispanics, however, are less interested in the twists of history than in wresting a share in the power that blacks have developed in urban politics.

“For blacks, city government control became a reality in the wake of the 1970s, which saw a host of black mayors elected,” said Charles Kamasaki, vice president for research at the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s major Hispanic think tank. “We have not had that concomitant experience in the Hispanic community.”

Although blacks are 12 percent of the American population and Hispanics 9 percent, Kamasaki notes that affirmative action plans are overwhelmingly directed by blacks and run for blacks, “especially on the local level and you can see that in Washington.” The Hispanic population of the District is estimated at between 5 and 10 percent, but less than 1 percent of city employees are Hispanics. Hispanics feel they do not get a fair share of program spending and contracts — and many blame that on the city’s black government.

“There is a certain level of racism against any foreign group by members of the dominant race, and here there is racism by the black community against Latinos,” said Pedro Aviles, chairman of the D.C. Latino Civil Rights Taskforce, which was formed in the wake of last week’s rioting.

“We don’t want problems with blacks or whites, we just want justice,” said Sonia I. Gutierrez, the principal of the Gordon Adult Education Center. “We don’t hate blacks, but blacks discriminate against us. What have we done? In some cases we are coming to this country to escape war.”

From the black perspective, Hispanics may suffer some discrimination, but they were never the victims of slavery or Jim Crow laws. Now, some blacks see them as jumping onto the black civil rights bandwagon just as blacks are starting to gain the fruits of their long struggle.

“I think it’s a fascinating development that the Hispanic community views itself as outsiders whose opportunities are being constricted by a black power structure,” said Milton Morris, director of research for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the nation’s premier black think tank. “Black America is more prosperous than ever, more politically potent but still struggling to come into its own.”

An angrier version of that statement came from D.C. City Councilman H.R. Crawford (D-Ward 7) who said: “If they {Hispanics} don’t appreciate our country, get out.”

But Hispanics in D.C. do appreciate the city and the nation, said Rita Soler Ossolinski, acting director of the Office of Latino Affairs, although, she noted, as a minority in the city “the Hispanic community feels a lack of acknowledgement from the District government.”

Kamasaki of La Raza agrees: “The demarcation line in Hispanic life is language and culture, and when Hispanics look at blacks they see people culturally more like Anglos — the dominant culture.” Blacks have achieved more power in this society than Hispanics, he added, because they have more political representation, both in city hall and nationally, as well as a well-established network of colleges, civic and professional groups and churches.

The outbreak of Hispanic anger comes at an especially difficult time for a budget-strained city government which is already cutting programs important to many of the needy among its black constitutency. Still, the mayor and other city leaders are quick to acknowledge a special bond between the black community and other struggling minorities.

“I don’t know if we {blacks} have an extra burden to bear,” said Mayor Dixon in an interview after her Línea Directa TV appearance, “but certainly there is a sensitivity that we ought never to lose. And having gone through those painful experiences one ought not just bring scars but hopefully a sensitivity, a humanity that could benefit others.”

That concern was on display in the measured response the mayor authorized police to use against the demonstrators. Her restraint prompted complaints from businessmen, but Dixon defends it as prudent and justified because there was no loss of life. The mayor did not want to “surrender to violence but I don’t want to ignore legitimate concerns and {the Hispanic community’s concerns} are legitimate,” she said, adding that she was also dealing with “people who had experienced terrorism in other countries,” and might have reacted with panic.

Critics complain that Dixon’s approach may legitimize rioting as a way to get a response from the city government. But Dixon heads a government and leads a city filled with people who were involved with protest, if not riots, to get the attention of the establishment.

“Personally,” she said, “I try to remember, and easily remember, what it is like to be where they are. And try to respond as I wanted the system to respond to me and didn’t always respond to me . . . . I know there was a risk in responding as I did to what I thought were legitimate concerns and some may have perceived that as an invitation {to continue rioting} . But I think we were aggressive once we realized there was pure vandalism.”

“The Hispanics see the police department as an occupying force the same way black people saw the police department as an occupying force in ’68,” said councilman Smith sympathetically. “We have a black police chief now and a mostly black department and they want Hispanics on the force, in positions of authority and I understand that.”

But empathizing with the Hispanic community’s concerns may be far easier for the city government than addressing them.

Council chairman Wilson observes that the real problem is not black attitudes towards Hispanics, but that the D.C. economy has little room for unskilled people of any race. In addition, he said, the city government is fighting a budget deficit, a recession and the federal government’s on-going withdrawal of funds from state and local governments. In response to the complaint that Hispanics do not get a share of city dollars commensurate with their proportion in the population, Wilson replied, with some irritation, that the city does not allocate spending on the basis of race.

Smith notes that although his ward has the largest share of the city’s Hispanic population, the ward with the largest number of Hispanic voters is Ward 3 in upper northwest. “As Hispanics get education and money they move out of Mount Pleasant,” he said.

Adds Wilson: “We are dealing here with people living in poverty, in crowded apartments . . . . We are creating a society with too many people, too few skills and nothing to lose. I don’t know how much more we can absorb here . . . . Ultimately, we’re playing one group of poor people against the other.”

In fact, Dixon was worried that the violence could easily have spilled over from Hispanics in Mount Pleasant and Adams-Morgan to blacks in Columbia Heights and along 14th Street. Federal and local budget cutbacks, she says, have resulted in “levels of discontent throughout this city.”

As for the notion that Hispanics, especially the illegals, don’t belong in the city, Dixon said such sentiments are rife in the black community but calls them “very counter-productive.” “When people are under pressure and frustrated sometimes they surrender to their own worst instincts,” she said. “We in the African-American community certainly can’t afford to do that . . . . We are a community still struggling to get our fair shake in the system. What happens is you end up being threatened by others who are fighting for the same crumbs. And that ought not be the focus. The focus ought to be for all of us to get a fair shake.”

Morris of the Joint Center noted that when blacks rioted recently in Miami, a city with a Hispanic government, there was far more violence and loss of life because of aggressive police tactics. But Kamasaki, of La Raza, said that is “the only example of that,” and it is far more common to see “cities with black mayors where you have 25 percent of the folks eligible for housing assistance are Hispanic but only 2 percent of Hispanics get housing assistance.”

However, Dixon faults Hispanics for not engaging the city government to let their ideas, needs and problems be known to city officials. “I do think in order to become a part of the community here you have to make an effort,” she said. “Hispanics are not involved in ANC or town meetings.”

The Hispanic refusal to adjust to American culture is an additional problem, Dixon said: “They say when in Rome do as the Romans do and that, too, must be the order of the day. It’s to everyone’s advantage to learn how to speak English . . . . You cannot have people drinking liquor in public because that is an inappropriate and criminal activity. You cannot have people urinating in public. That is not allowed. And you have to respond to that symbol of authority in whatever form it takes in our culture, including a woman who is a police officer . . .” — and a woman who is mayor.

The mayor, who is coping with bureaucratic and budget problems left unattended for years because of the troubles of former Mayor Barry, pointed a finger at the business community for not doing enough to help the city at a time of crisis.

“They have got to get involved in the fabric of this community,” she said. “They’ve got to start start hiring more, getting involved with the schools more, training people so they achieve a better partnership.”

Is the black mayor blaming whites — the majority of city’s business owners?

“No, it’s the business community generally,” she said. “I realize they are going through a recession. But it is in everyone’s interest for them to be better corporate citizens. Some are — but they need to do it in more significant ways, such as summer jobs . . . . People are going to have to give a little more — the affluent, Anglo, African-American and Hispanic. Ultimately it is in everybody’s best interest to do it.”

Juan Williams writes frequently for Outlook on politics.

THE DISTRICT
Hispanic Heritage Awards Given

The D.C. court system has presented 1999 Hispanic Heritage CORO Awards to the founders and producers of a public service program aimed at educating the Latino community and to a nonprofit group that provides assistance to victims of domestic violence.

CORO stands for Community, Outreach, Recognition and Opportunity. The winners were honored for their service and dedication to the Washington area and, in particular, to the area’s Latino community.

The recipients included Eduardo Lopez and Alfredo Salcedo, both of Educational Videos in Spanish, who for the past 15 years have produced informational videos in Spanish about issues in the Latino community such as child safety and health, police relations and race relations. Their program, “Linea Directa,” is telecast weekly on the local affiliate of the Spanish-language network, Univision.

Also receiving an award was Hermanas Unidas, a support group for women who are victims of domestic violence. Hermanas Unidas is a project of the Ayuda agency in Adams-Morgan. Sylvia Garza, the supervisory community outreach specialist of the victim and witness assistance unit in the U.S. attorney’s office, was another recipient.

Also receiving an award was Claudio Grossman, dean of American University’s Washington College of Law. He is the past president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. The commission judges complaints filed by alleged victims of human rights violations in the Americas.

Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon’s administration, after largely ignoring its Office of Latino Affairs for the last four months, now sees it as a valuable communications channel between the D.C. government and its Hispanic community.

The office was among several agencies that may have felt slighted as Dixon struggled to balance a $316 million projected budget deficit in her first months in office, Dixon spokesman Vada Manager said this week. “There was not a lot of time to deal with a lot of domestic concerns,” Manager said. “We kept saying, ‘Everything flows through the prism of the budget.’ ”

That changed the night of May 5, as young Hispanics erupted in violent anger after a D.C. police officer shot a Salvadoran man. OLA, with its 12-member bilingual staff, served as the Spanish-speaking voice of the D.C. government on radio, television and in print in the turbulent days afterward.

“The premium on that office has risen in terms of its value,” Manager said. “There is a lot of outreach that needs to be done . . . . OLA is the proper liaison between the agencies that exist in government and that {Hispanic} community.”

OLA’s former acting director Rita Soler-Ossolinksi accompanied Dixon on her walks through the Mount Pleasant area during the disturbances, said OLA spokesman Eduardo Lopez. Soler-Ossolinski, who left the job Friday, also spoke on Spanish radio news programs throughout the week, responding to questions and denying recurrent rumors that the Salvadoran man, Daniel Enrique Gomez, had died. Access to the Spanish language media was crucial because a majority of the District’s Hispanic community does not speak English well enough to follow the English language media, Lopez said.

The mayor herself got an earful when she appeared on OLA’s Spanish-language talk show, “Linea Directa,” two weeks ago on Channel 48. Twenty members of the D.C. Latino Civil Rights Task Force questioned Dixon and other city officials for an hour, in Spanish.

When Mauricio Alarcon, president of the Organization of Salvadorans United for the Benefit of Education, asked, “How will you sensitize the whole government so they respect our civil rights?” Dixon received a simultaneous English translation through an earpiece, and her responses were automatically translated into Spanish. “I will see to it, by whatever means it takes, that there are no abuses of that kind ever again,” she said.

Appearing with Dixon were D.C. Council Chairman John A. Wilson, council member Frank Smith Jr. (D-Ward 1), Soler-Ossolinski, and police Inspector Daniel Flores. The program, watched by an estimated 180,000 viewers in the Washington area, was the “first time the mayor of D.C. spoke directly to the Spanish-speaking community,” Lopez said. “It was really an historic event.”

The D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs last month began offering “Linea Directa,” a Spanish-language public-service television series, to inform the Hispanic community about services available from the city government and community agencies.

The series offers information on subjects such as medical and emergency services, education, drugs, child abuse, tenants’ rights, AIDS and the census.

The half-hour, monthly television program on Channel 48 will be one of the country’s few locally produced Spanish-language public service programs and will be taped at locations throughout the Hispanic community.

The next airing will be a program on emergency services at 10:30 p.m. Feb. 22. The show will be repeated at 10:30 p.m. March 3.

“Linea Directa” is produced by Eduardo Lopez, the office’s public information officer.

For information, contact Lopez at 939-8765.

When Línea Directa was first broadcast on Thursday evening, January 25, 1990, there were no local Spanish-language television programs, and Latino families had virtually no access to information on services available to them from government or community-based organizations. The ambitious series was the result of a four-year effort by Línea Directa creators Arturo Salcedo and Eduardo López to serve the quickly growing new immigrant community, and to communicate the message that all persons living in the United States have rights, regardless of their legal status, income, or ability to speak English.

At the time, Salcedo and López were members of the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs (OLA). Their work with the community helped them to reach the conclusion that the city government’s efforts to communicate with Latino families through brochures and flyers were simply not effective. Early on, the pair recognized the tremendous educational potential of Spanish-language television, and began producing the first local public service announcements soon after Washington’s new Univision station began airing its first commercials in 1986.

The success of the 30-second spots helped Salcedo and López convince Citibank and the Washington Post to support their idea for the creation of the Línea Directa series. The companies’ donations provided sufficient funds to purchase basic video equipment, and with the solid backing of then Univision General Manager Antonio Guernica,
Línea Directa began airing each month with programs focusing on such issues as affordable medical services, the 911 emergency system, and the parental role in education.

Línea Directa’s programming accomplishments have been many. In 1991, after two days of riots in the Latino neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, the program’s one-hour community forum allowed Latino leaders to engage D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly in a wide open dialogue about the underlying causes of the violent disturbances. The historic event marked the first appearance by a city Mayor on Spanish-language television.

In 1994, Línea Directa was the first local program to speak openly about the use of condoms, infidelity, and the spread of HIV/AIDS in the
Latino community. The programs broke many traditional Spanish-language television taboos, featuring interviews with men and women living with AIDS, and dramatizing the process of condom negotiation between couples. Línea Directa has also covered such issues as domestic violence, immigrant rights, teen pregnancy, breast cancer, the criminal justice system, traffic safety, and consumer fraud.

In 2000, Línea Directa once again made local Spanish-language television history by establishing a groundbreaking public service partnership with NBC4 and Telemundo 64. The agreement gave EVS access to the NBC4 studio facilities needed to videotape the series on a weekly basis, and secured two of the most coveted time slots in Telemundo’s local schedule.