He was known in Costa Azul as “Cirilo Vargas” — a name he used in Mexico, apparently separate from his birth name, which reflected the circumstances of his life as a Salvadoran working in Mexico without the documentation that would have formalized his presence there. The Mexican official records that identified the missing fisherman used this name, which contributed to some of the initial confusion about his identity when he turned up in the Marshall Islands.
His employer Willy, who had raised the alarm when Alvarenga and Córdoba didn’t return, had presumably written them off after the search was abandoned. The fishing cooperative’s response to a boat’s disappearance in those waters would be grief, perhaps some practical rearrangement of who covered the lost boat’s duties, and eventually the acceptance that the men were gone.
What Alvarenga came back to — after Majuro, after the flight to El Salvador, after the initial disorienting days of return — was a family that had to readjust to the presence of a person they had believed was dead. His parents. The daughter he had not seen. Brothers in the United States whom reporting mentioned but who were not central to the documented reception.
He gave his first sustained interviews in El Salvador as a man who was adjusting to civilian life after fourteen months in one of the most extreme forms of isolation a human being can experience. Jonathan Franklin, who met him approximately six months after his return, described him as a “happy man surrounded by friends” who had adjusted well and who was “an engaging storyteller with a good sense of humor.” He had become a celebrity in El Salvador. He had something he had not had for many years: a stable identity, a story that was his own, and a community that knew who he was.