Doctors who assessed him after his return described him as mentally fragile, which is an accurate clinical descriptor for someone at a specific point in psychological recovery from extreme trauma and isolation, not a permanent characterization of his mental state. Jonathan Franklin, who met him approximately six months later, described a very different person — one who was reconstructing a social life, engaging with humor and storytelling, adjusting to the return to civilian existence. The mental fragility of February 2014 was not the endpoint; it was a specific moment in a recovery process.
The fear of water that doctors noted — a response that is, in clinical terms, understandable as a conditioned aversion developed over 438 days of experiencing the ocean as a threatening environment — was another time-specific response rather than a permanent feature of his psychology. Someone who has experienced the ocean as the source of everything frightening in his life, for more than a year, will have a different relationship with water than they did before. Whether and how that relationship evolves over time is not well documented in the available reporting.
He was also, by multiple accounts, a celebrity in El Salvador. A man from a small coastal municipality in Ahuacapan had become the most famous Salvadoran on earth for a period of weeks, and the resonance of his story in a country where many people had personal or familial experience with difficult crossings and precarious survival was considerable. El Salvador is a country with a long history of people making impossible journeys under dangerous conditions. Alvarenga’s journey was different in its nature but not entirely unrecognizable in its essential character — a man alone, going somewhere, making it through.