By John Moreno Gonzales
STAFF WRITER

October 17, 2001

A 15-year-old Guatemalan girl who believes her mother, stepfather and infant brother are among "the disappeared" Latino immigrants from in and around the World Trade Center will be assisted by an emerging nonprofit group.

Asociación Tepeyac de New York has purchased tickets to go to Guatemala City tomorrow to investigate and grant financial assistance to Anita Oraco, whose mother, Gris Oraco, and stepfather, Alejandro Regalado, have not been heard from since Sept. 11.

But even as a Tepeyac volunteer prepares to depart, the case illustrates the less-than-idyllic lives of some immigrants who have had to skirt or break the law in search of prosperity.

The girl and a family friend contacted Tepeyac after the attack and said Gris Oraco worked on the top floors of the center, possibly the 102nd or 105th floor of Tower One.

They added that Regalado usually dropped Gris Oraco off at work in the mornings, with their year-old son, Luis Jose, in tow. The boy was possibly left at a day-care facility near the basement.

However, Tepeyac volunteers are not confident about Regalado's disappearance because the girl says he was involved in smuggling immigrants across the Mexican border.

He may have retreated into that world, never contacting the stepdaughter, whom he had not met.

"We're going to concentrate on the needs of the girl and the disappearance of the mother" and child, said Carmina Makar, the volunteer who is going to Guatemala. "The mother would have contacted her daughter by now. The stepfather, I'm not sure of."

Makar will bring the girl a DNA kit from the Family Assistance Center in Manhattan, plus American Red Cross missing person reports and an affidavit to file for her mother's death certificate. She also will take an undetermined amount of money to the girl, who is now left to care for a grandmother in her 60s without the money from New York that supported both.

The nonprofit also is planning to send a representative to El Salvador to investigate the cases of two men and a woman reported as "los desaparecidos," or the disappeared.

Asociación Tepeyac has counted 65 largely undocumented Latino immigrants as missing in the attacks, as well as 2,866 out of work because their jobs lay behind the barricades of Ground Zero.