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Can't Prove He Was Openly Gay At 12, Man Denied Asylum In Canada
by 365Gay Newscenter Staff

02.07.2007 3:02 PM EST

(Toronto, Ontario) A 21 year old man who has been fighting for asylum in Canada will be deported next week after an immigration board hearing did not believe he was openly gay when he fled his native Nicaragua at the age of 12.
Alvaro Antonio Orozco maintains he was taunted and beaten beaten by his father from an early age, Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper reports.

"My father called me 'marica' [a derogatory word for gay], and told me he would beat it out of me," Orozco told the paper. "But it's impossible to prove you are gay."

He said that he was artistic as a child and would one day like to become a nurse. But he fears he will be be imprisoned or killed if he is returned to Nicaragua.

In 1992 Nicaragua amended its penal code to make sodomy a criminal offense. An Amnesty International report last year said the law is so vague it could be used to imprison people campaigning for LGBT civil rights or providing safe-sex and HIV/AIDS information to gays.

Orozco told the Globe and Mail that he fled the country just before his 13th birthday, hitchhiking through Central America and Mexico. He said he and a Honduran boy he met along the way swam across the Rio Grande.

Orozco told the paper he nearly drowned in the crossing and was saved by the other teen, but when they arrived in the US he was arrested by U.S. immigration officials and spent a year in a Houston detention center.

He was released when he agreed to return to Nicaragua. At the time he was just 14.

Instead of returning home he ran northward, finally making into Canada and Toronto.

Immigration and Refugee Board member Deborah Lamont, the IRB member who heard Orozzo's case said he was rejected because he was not sexually active during his teen years, and had not been clear about his sexuality he fled Nicaragua.

El-Farouk Khaki, Orozco's attorney, has filed for an emergency stay in the deportation order from Canadian Immigration Minister Diane Finley.

"We are asking the minister to grant him a stay of removal on humanitarian grounds and allow him to stay," Khaki told the Globe and Mail.

"I think the decision shows a lack of understanding of issues facing queer kids from homophobic cultures and what they have to deal with in terms of gender stereotypes," he said.

Khaki said that the appeal to Finley is based on what he termed a breach of natural justice. He said that Orozco is young, uneducated, alone, a victim of domestic abuse and homeless. Because he stutters his communication skills are limited Khaki told the paper.

The federal government has not commented on Orozco's case.