These weren’t typical borderland travelers. The women wore skirts and heels, and the men carried suitcases. They were middle-class professionals, university students, housewives, a cobbler, some factory workers. Most of them had had direct confrontations with Salvadoran security forces or the death squads, and the others had watched as their livelihoods crumbled in the blur of strikes, shutdowns, and violent chaos that roiled the country. Smuggling operations had cropped up in El Salvador during the months before the official outbreak of civil war.
