This is a continuation of the Associated Press series, Exporting Crime, which looks at the impact of deporting convicted criminals from the United States to their countries of origin.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — With US$170 in his pocket and no place to go, Hugo Omar Barahona knew he needed a plan. Instead, he went for a drink.

Barahona knew it was foolish, but after losing his family and his country all on the same day, he saw no point in staying sober. By the time he got off the bar stool to begin his new life in a foreign land, his grubstake was down to US$20.

For the next three years, Barahona said, the neighborhood cantina in a San Salvador barrio was his home. Except for the four or five hours a day the cantina was closed, he rarely stepped outside.

Between what his parents could scrape together to send him and what he was able to beg, he said, his hand was around a shot glass from the time the cantina opened at 5:30 am to the time he got thrown out 19 hours later.

“I’d get a tortilla, maybe a bag of chips. But mostly it was pure alcohol,” he said. “I was so weak. I’d have to use my hands just to get up.”

Many details of Barahona’s story are known only to him, but its outlines were confirmed by Matthew T Eisen, who runs a small job-training programme in the barrio and has helped nurse Barahona back to health.

It’s been two years since “Sad Boy” Barahona, 26, has had a drink, though he’s not sure his wife in Las Vegas really believes him. He married his son’s mother two years ago, when she came down for a visit, but the honeymoon was over when he refused to return with her to the States. He hasn’t seen her since.

He remembers how she taunted him: “Your son needs you. C’mon. Once we get to Mexico it’ll be easy.” But Barahona knew better. He tried returning illegally once and got caught by the Mexican police. And others he’s heard about weren’t so lucky.

“For myself, I wouldn’t care,” he said. “But I didn’t want anything happening to her. If she went with me she could get killed. She’d probably get raped.”

Barahona was four when he first arrived in the United States with his parents. Eventually, he got involved in a gang, and was deported in 1999 after a robbery conviction.

“Sometimes I don’t even want to talk about it. Sometimes it makes me mad at myself,” he said. “I went to school, you know. Some people don’t think that. But I know how to add and all. I could say it’s ’cause I didn’t have a mom or a dad, or because they split up. But that’s (expletive). My mom and dad were always together. They always treated me good.”

With a look that did his nickname justice, Barahona spoke in a voice that trailed off, then deepened: “The first thing is my kid. My wife used to show him my picture. I used to talk to him on the phone. And he used to say, ‘Hey, that’s my dad.'”

But Barahona hasn’t spoken with either of them since April 28, the day he walked into the cantina to buy cigarettes. It was 3:30 pm, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw a minibus roll by slowly, two men inside staring at him. He had the sinking feeling they’d notice his tattoos — the last, indelible remnant, he swears, of his gangster days in Vegas.

Barahona remembers the next half-hour in freeze-frame images. One of the men in the doorway of the cantina, pointing an automatic at him. The other, with a revolver, trying to draw a bead on him. Then the popping sounds — nine in all, someone told him later — and he was standing in the street, bleeding, waving his arms, pulling his shirt off to show people he’d been shot.

The vigilantes had driven off, Barahona said, apparently content they had eliminated another despised deportee. Still, no one helped. No one would stop, not even the taxis.

One bullet grazed his nose. Another hit him in the leg. A third ripped into his back. It was a half- hour before the police showed up and took him to the hospital, he said. It took him a month to recover.

He called his wife to tell her he’d been shot, but “she never called me again,” he said. “My son was four when I saw him last. My wife used to live with my mom. And then one day she just left.

That’s what happens after a while, he said. People back home just forget you.