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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Corbett approached a group called the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, an association of lay activists that formed in January 1981, after members of the Salvadoran National Guard had raped and killed the four American churchwomen. The task force represented two dozen humanitarian and religious groups in the Chicago area. It was a powerful engine for signing up participating churches and enlisting activists across the Midwest. Within two years, owing to appeals made by the task force, another two hundred churches, synagogues, and Quaker meeting houses opened sanctuary spaces. The activists in Chicago also published and distributed some thirty thousand copies of booklets and instruction manuals on sanctuary.