Salguero-Castro

dissenting.

Because Salguero-Castro established past persecution by the military on account of an imputed political opinion, I would reverse and remand for additional findings on changed country conditions.

I.

Neither the Immigration Judge (IJ) nor the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) made a negative credibility finding; therefore we must accept Salguero-Castro’s testimony as true. Lim v. INS, 224 F.3d 929, 933 (9th Cir.2000). Salguero-Castro testified that after the guerillas ambushed soldiers on his father’s land, an army officer approached Salguero-Castro and his father and demanded that they clear the brush in the area where the ambush occurred. After his father explained that Salguero-Castro would be responsible for the clearing, but that he would also need to help with the harvest, the army officer said that Salguero-Castro had to keep the area clear or he would take SalgueroCastro as a guerilla, “and you know very well what it is that we do to guerillas.” Salguero-Castro testified that he knew this meant he would be killed “because it is known that every person that they take to be a guerilla they kill.” Furthermore, after the officer’s threat, Salguero-Castro and his…

MEMORANDUM **

Ladislao Salguero-Castro is a native of Guatemala who entered the United States without inspection in 1991. He petitions for review of an order of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) denying his application for asylum and withholding of deportation. Because deportation proceedings were commenced before April 1, 1997, and the final order was issued after October 30, 1996, we have jurisdiction pursuant to former 8 U.S.C. § 1105a(a), as amended by the transitional rules for judicial review in § 309(c)(4) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). See Kalaw v. INS, 133 F.3d 1147, 1149-50 (9th Cir.1997). We deny the petition.

I

Salguero-Castro points to an incident in 1991 when he was shot at by a military airplane in the vicinity of a guerilla camp that he was riding by while running an errand on horseback, threats by soldiers in the Guatemalan military, and the death in 1995 of a friend he had met in Los Angeles who had returned to Guatemala. However, these incidents do not compel a reasonable factfinder to find past persecution. INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 481-84 , 112 S.Ct. 812 , 117 L.Ed.2d 38 (1992).…