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WASHINGTON She’s called the president of Honduras a narco. The president of El Salvador, she said, was a “narcissistic dictator.”
Norma Torres, the lone member of Congress from Central America, is not afraid to speak her mind sometimes in surprising ways about immigration, corruption and the land of her birth. Her blunt talk has drawn so much anger from one Central American leader and his followers that she sleeps with a 9-millimeter pistol at her side.
Torres, a Democrat from Pomona, brings a unique perspective on what drives people to flee their home countries.
When she was a toddler and civil war was raging in Guatemala, her parents had used her as something of a human shield on perilous roads, holding her up to the windshield in hopes that seeing a tiny child would stop gunmen from firing into the family car.