Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

They were far from home and farther from their destination. Most had previously been deported from the United States, but none of them could stay in Honduras, so they were making the journey again. Their reasons varied. One was being hunted by criminals. Another had been going hungry.

Honduras was no longer home. Home had become the route they had to tread, and retread, through Guatemala, Mexico, and the US detention system. The migrants in Tapachula may have been Honduran, but more important, they were deportees and asylum seekers with very low odds of being admitted to the United States.

Their immigration status had become a defining, immutable fact of who they now were. In news stories about “surges” or “floods” of migrants massing toward the US, these were the people whose faces were blurred and anonymous. Eventually, they would become numbers on government spreadsheets and talking points at election time. They were “removables,” in the cold bureaucratic language of homeland security. Those who managed to traverse Mexico and cross the US border would earn yet another new status for their trouble. By law, they would be repeat offenders, and thus felons.

The group went around in a circle to introduce themselves. Where they came from, no one was untouched by immigration, even those who stayed behind. Some could afford to remain at home only because family members had already emigrated, sending money back to pay for necessities. But these were the lucky ones. The families I sat with in Mexico saw a single, stark possibility. The people they knew who were still in Honduras were either infirm, trapped, or resigned; anyone with any sense was leaving.

For more than a century, the US has devised one policy after another to keep people out of the country. For more than a century, it has failed. The past decade has proven the futility of this ambition and laid bare its incalculable human cost. More people are on the move than ever before, uprooted by war, famine, persecution, natural disasters, pandemic, climate change, corrupt regimes, and economic collapse. A new era of mass migration is well underway. Politicians have won elections by stoking fears of open borders and irreversible demographic change.

Immigration, a White House official recently told me, has become a “democracy issue”: if liberal-democratic governments across the world fail to address the situation, it will continue to fuel the rise of populist authoritarianism.

The legal standards were exacting and esoteric. Fleeing a gang, for example, was legally distinct from fleeing a repressive government, even if the gang controlled a country like a shadow state. Leaving a country that had become too dangerous wasn’t the basis for asylum; leaving it under specific threats of imminent death or torture was. Fending off starvation didn’t count as a form of persecution. Immigration law didn’t align with the muddled exigencies of the region, and most applicants, however sympathetic, would find their entry barred.

In 2009, when Barack Obama took office, there was a backlog of half a million asylum cases. By the end of the Trump administration, the queue had reached 1.3 million. On average, it took about twenty-four months to resolve an asylum claim. In the meantime, more asylum seekers arrived. Some were allowed to enter the country on the grounds that they would eventually appear before a judge; others were jailed, summarily deported, or expelled straight into Mexico. The randomness of the system was a cruelty all its own.

Immigration policy is governed by a politics of permanent crisis, with the border as its staging ground. One of the core premises of US immigration policy—true under Democrats as well as Republicans—is deterrence: turn away enough people, and others will stop trying to come.

The practice is called the Consequence Delivery System, a term with an Orwellian charge. In 2018, the Trump administration decided to separate parents and children who arrived together seeking asylum. The idea originated from a furious government brainstorming session during a border emergency in 2014, but top officials had dismissed it as inhumane. Under Trump, the government delivered the most brutal conseque...

That was the year the US first codified refugee and asylum law, while also deepening its involvement in two major civil wars in Central America. The first asylum seekers were escaping regimes the US was arming and supporting in the name of fighting communism. American immigration policy still largely focused on legalizing the undocumented and dealing with the arrival of Mexicans at the border. But US foreign policy was changing that.

The government was creating new categories of immigrants and, in turn, reshaping American life from Los Angeles to Washington, DC. Immigrants have a way of transforming two places at once: their new homes and their old ones. Rather than cleaving apart the worlds of the US, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the Americans were irrevocably binding them together.

Politics is a form of selective amnesia. The people who survive it are our only insurance against forgetting.

At around five p.m. a gurney came crashing through the doors of the emergency room. On it was the bloodied, unmoving body of a student protester. Juan later learned the identity of the patient. He was the leader of an association of high school students called the Movimiento Estudiantil Revolucionario Salvadoreño (MERS), a junior offshoot of the teachers union. It frequently mobilized in anti-government demonstrations around the capital.

The student had been strafed in the neck and stomach by police gunfire and rushed by his friends away from the scene of the shooting to his parents. But they had all been reluctant to bring him to a hospital. The state security forces had a reputation for searching hospitals after violent incidents and dragging out injured protesters. Often, these protesters would never be heard from again, or else their mutilated bodies would be deposited a day or two later on a street corner as a warning to their confederates.

A thumping sound jolted him awake a few minutes later. The intensive care ward was in the eastern wing of the hospital, and the emergency room and parking lot were on the western side. It took Juan a few seconds to realize that he was hearing the rhythm of soldiers’ boots marching the length of the hospital, down the colonnaded archway, toward where he sat with his patient.

“They’re coming for you,” he found himself saying aloud to the boy sleeping beside him. He rose and spotted the nurse, who was standing up, ramrod straight. Before either of them could do anything, there was a loud, guttural shout. Juan wheeled around to see a group of a half dozen men masked in balaclavas and armed with rifles and pistols coming through the door. Some wore the green uniforms associated with the national security forces; others were dressed like civilians.

“Get on the ground. We’ll shoot you if you try to get up,” one of them yelled. Juan dropped to the floor. He kept his eyes on their boots as the men walked toward his patient, stopping right in front of the bed. They knew their target. A member of the hospital staff had likely tipped them off. Without saying a word, the men opened fire. Spent cartridges rained down around him, pinging off the floor. The bed rocked and rattled from the fo...

On January 22, 1932, agricultural laborers in the western part of the country, armed with machetes and hoes, staged an insurrection against the nation’s coffee-growing elite, which had been subjugating the rural poor for decades.

In the late 1870s, much of the arable land in El Salvador had been in public hands. It belonged to individual communities whose population depended on it for their survival. The rise in global coffee prices, together with the need for an exploitable labor force, prompted the government to seize and privatize these holdings. There was too much money to be made, so it began auctioning off the plots to the wealthy owners of large plantation-style estates known as fincas. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were dispossessed, then forced to work for nothing on land that used to belong to them.

cobbler and labor organizer named Miguel Mármol founded the Salvadoran Communist Party in 1930, a year after the global financial crash. He traveled the countryside to survey the damage, finding that peasants were “being treated like slaves, by slaveholders on plantations and estates,” and were forced to endure “starvation wages, arbitrary and inconsistent wage reductions, massive unjustified firings, evictions…and direct and fierce repression by the national guard in the form of imprisonment, expulsions from homes, burning of houses.”

The revolt in 1932 sputtered in a matter of days, but the repression it provoked went on for weeks. The military intervened on the side of the landowners. They were joined by members of the National Guard, who had been suppressing labor disputes for years. Together the soldiers slaughtered some thirty thousand people—roughly 2 percent of the Salvadoran population.

Anyone who looked vaguely Indigenous or dressed like a peasant was branded a rebel and executed. Corpses were dumped in public or left hanging to instill terror. In one town, troops rounded up prisoners in...

La Matanza froze the country in time for the next four and a half decades. The government replaced the real story of what had happened with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off bloodthirsty communist hordes. The National Library removed references to the events from its records. Newspap...

What remained, the American historian Thomas Anderson wrote in 1971, was a “paranoiac fear of communism that has gripped the nation ever since. This fear is expressed in the continual labeling of even the most mod...

By the time Juan Romagoza went to the seminary, in the early 1960s, it was estimated that seventy-five people from twenty-five families controlled 90 percent of El Salvador’s wealth.

When campesinos from the countryside visited Juan’s home city, he noticed that their fingers and hands were almost always purpled, gnarled, and bruised.

Their battered limbs and missing digits were a sign of torture. They had demanded higher wages, tried to organize a union, or simply struck the authorities as suspicious. The state security forces had identified broad categories of people whom they considered to be a threat to the social order, including rural schoolteachers, Catholic catechists, and residents of a zone of the country populated by known political activists.

All of them received training and weapons from the United States. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, American military advisers helped restructure the Salvadoran police academy. They also wrote a manual for the Treasury Police, and trained members of the National Guard and National Police in riot control.

The Kennedy administration created a military command center, called SOUTHCOM, to coordinate so-called counterinsurgency operations carried out by special forces throughout Latin America. Modeled on American maneuvers in Vietnam, these activities were conceived as “guerrilla” actions “in support of the state.”

The American paradigm posed an immediate dilemma for ordinary Salvadorans. The state itself was wildly repressive, but the US advisers who were training and arming it considered any public opposition to be grounds for a militarized response.

“Insurgency,” the US Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote in 1962, was defined as any “illegal opposition to an existing government.” In El Salvador, that included worker strikes, u...

People were dancing and playing music, throwing homemade firecrackers that popped in short, staccato bursts. Their candidate had defeated his opponent from the Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN), the party backed by the military government.

A few days later, the winning mayoral candidate was replaced by a member of the PCN. In 1972, a coalition called the Unión Nacional Opositora, which represented a broad array of leftists, was leading in the polls when the government abruptly stopped the vote count. After a mysterious delay, an announcement was made that the military’s preferred candidate, from the PCN, had won.

National protests followed in which the military shot and killed two hundred demonstrators, while the opposition candidate was taken into custody and beaten. By the time he went into exile, a few days later, his nose and cheekbone had been shattered.

One of the ironies of the government repression was that it galvanized, rather than cowed, the opposition. Before the 1972 elections, the public still had some measure of faith in the electoral process. As a result, armed elements of the far left drew few adherents. There was just one guerrilla organization, and it was too smal...

But as the government interfered with elections and committed further abuses against the public, the ranks of guerrilla groups and grassroots organizations grew, pulling in university students, labor ...

“When they tried to use their power of association to gain their ends, first they were warned and then they were persecuted and tortured and shot.”

Juan carried the bullet casings in his pocket for the rest of the week. He knew the risks. If a police officer stopped and searched him on the street, under even the flimsiest pretext, he was doomed. Either he would be identified as the witness to a military murder or would stand accused of being a subversive himself. In San Salvador, in 1980, people were killed for much less. On Sunday morning, he set out to deliver the bullets to the one person he thought could help: Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador.

Right next to the university in San Salvador was a series of slums that had filled with campesinos who’d fled their homes in the countryside because of the worsening repression.

Juan joined a group of medical students who opened a clinic to give them free health care. The patients had been tortured and maimed by state security forces and by the death squads of the far right. They’d lost family members to disappearances and assassinations.

In 1977, when Romero became the archbishop, state violence was spinning out of control. Hundreds of priests and Catholic workers across the country had been murdered, injured, or threatened, including one especially prominent victim: a forty-nine-year-old Jesuit priest and celebrated advocate for the poor, named Rutilio Grande. A close personal friend of Romero’s, he was gunned down by right-wing assassins a month before Romero moved to San Salvador.

Grande’s assassination disabused Romero of the promise of gentler diplomacy with the government. Romero never sounded the same afterward. His speeches were forthright and bold, delivered in a voice that rumbled with an otherworldly drum of urgency. He decried the violence and called for a national land reform to give the rural poor a fighting chance at survival.

When Romero learned of the work that Juan and the other medical students were doing, he requested a meeting. “I want you to help me tend to this population,” he told a group of them. “And I want you to help bring me information a...

The medical students started to drop by the church every few weeks, bringing pages of handwritten notes replete with the names of people who’d been tortured or killed. Working at the clinic gave them direct access to the victims, and the archbishop...

Each Romero sermon was a virtuoso literary feat in three sections. The first was the most directly theological, a ranging biblical exegesis interspersed with contemporary commentary. Next came a section that he called “The Life of the Church,” with announcements about church initiatives and activities, many of which were coming under direct threat from the death squads. But it was the final part, which Romero titled “The Events of the Week,” that drew the most attention. Part forensic analysis of state terror and part legal indictment, it was, above all, an impassioned personal plea to the government for mercy. Here the sermon grew dense with information about the violence and mayhem overtaking the country. For half an hour, sometimes longer, he would methodically list the names of people who’d been killed or disappeared, the dates of murders and mass arrests, and the locations of recent crackdowns.

These reports were widely seen as the most definitive accounts of the ongoing repression, and they drew notice around the world. For those who couldn’t attend in person, the sermons were broadcast by radio. They reached three quarters of the population in the countryside and nearly half of all city residents. During his Sunday sermons, which could run up to two hours, a person could hear every word while strolling down the street. Each home would have it playing loudly on a transistor radio.

The previous several months had been the most violent in decades. State security forces had killed hundreds of civilians—159 in October 1979, 281 in December, and 320 in January 1980.

On October 15, 1979, dozens of junior officers staged a coup to force some of the most extreme hardliners out of the military and to establish civilian rule for the first time since before La Matanza. A ruling council, known as the junta, would then replace the government and restaff the upper ranks of the cabinet.

In theory, their demands were straightforward. They called for the abolition of ORDEN, the country’s most notorious death squad, which had ties to senior officials in the military; the recognition of the rights of campesinos to organize; and the passage of an agrarian reform law that could facilitate, in their words, an “equitable distribution of national wealth.”