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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Within hours of the coup, however, a cadre of conservative senior officers wrested control of the new junta. At least one of them was on the payroll of the CIA. When it became clear to the far right that the top military brass was reconsolidati...

The one that replaced it was arguably worse. Brokered by the US State Department, the new junta was a union between the military and a center-left party known as the Christian Democrats, whom the Americans liked because of their outspoken anti-communism.

The Christian Democrats were divided over whether to enter a government that was effectively run by the military. Half the party distrusted the arrangement, while the other half, hungry for power that had eluded them for years, wanted to forge ahead. The skeptics were proved right: with the patina of legitimacy conferred by the Christian Democrats, the military soon redoubled its repression.

There was Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, the clever, wealthy head of the National Guard, and José Guillermo García, the brasher minister of defense and de facto president. Both knew that members of the military were participating in extrajudicial killings. And each, in his way, condoned them by stonewalling investigations and refusing to punish the officers involved.

Such violence was too useful for them to try to stop. The far right was doing their dirty work by exterminating their political rivals. At the same time, the rising death toll served as the military’s pretext for preserving power. Without the military hierarchy intact, they claimed, the country would succumb to chaos.

Without consulting the civilian members of the junta, the US had been giving direct aid to the military. The latest waves of killings hadn’t dissuaded Washington. American money went toward gas masks, bulletproof vests, and other supplies, which the US president rationalized as forms of “nonlethal aid.”

Romero wanted to correct Carter’s misapprehension. Now the security forces were simply better equipped and “even more violent in repressing the people,” he said, quoting his letter in progress. If Carter truly cared about human rights, Romero went on, he could do two things. The first was “to forbid that military aid be given to the Salvadoran government.” The second was to guarantee that the US would not interfere in the “destiny of the Salvadoran people.”

Earlier that year, legislators required the State Department to issue annual reports on human rights in each of the countries receiving American military aid. If any of them displayed a “pattern of gross violations,” Congress would freeze the money.

“If they can get to Romero, no one can be saved,” Juan’s neighbor said, her voice flat. She was too stunned to cry. Juan didn’t know it at the time, but American officials shared her assessment. Cables sent from the US embassy in San Salvador had described the prospect of Romero’s killing as the likely end of a “moderate solution” to the country’s political crisis; all that remained was a “military solution,” the prospect of untrammeled terror.

The assassination marked the beginning of a crisis that was profound even by the country’s macabre standards. More patients showed up at the clinic in critical condition with torture wounds. A female professor had been left for dead in a dumpster, having been covered in hot tar, with burn marks all over her body and bleeding from her nipples, vagina, and rectum. A high school student turned up with scarring over his genitals from an electric prod. He was too traumatized to speak.

At a certain point, he and his colleagues got word that their names were on a hit list assembled by the death squads and distributed among officers in the military. As one American official put it at the time, “If your name happens to be on the list and you are taken prisoner, your future life expectancy is about one hour.”

Between January and March, government forces had killed at least nine hundred civilians, more than in all of 1979. Late in February, the country’s attorney general, a Christian Democrat named Mario Zamora, was murdered at home, in the middle of a dinner party. Several days afterward, civilian members of the government resigned in protest.

The far right had hatched an especially sinister strategy: because the military brass needed the top leaders of the Christian Democrats to remain in government for political cover, the death squads selectively assassinated members of the party’s rank and file. It was a plan to “domesticate” the party, according to a former officer; Zamora was one of sixty-four Christian Democrats killed that year.

On the night of the US election, November 4, the American embassy hosted a watch party at the Hotel El Presidente, in San Salvador. The American diplomats were dejected as the returns came in, but their Salvadoran guests celebrated.

In attendance were members of the business community and military officers, who took turns firing their guns into the air outside in jubilation. When a group of American envoys left to go home, the wife of one businessman in attendance accosted them. “Get out of here, Communists,” she shouted. Others chimed in, “Death to White. Viva Reagan!”

Attitudes on the Salvadoran right were already hardening when a group from Ronald Reagan’s transition team made its first official visit to El Salvador and Guatemala to announce the end of Carter’s human-rights policy. The military would n...

In mid-November, General García, the minister of defense, summoned the civilian members of the junta to the Casa Presidencial, where he delivered a long presentation detailing the resul...

All the nuns and priests in Chalatenango, a volatile region north of the capital, he said, were in league with the guerrillas and needed to be dealt with accordingly. A few weeks later, a man arrived at a Chalatenango parish late one night with a message: everyone there, including four American missionaries doing re...

On November 27, six leaders of the non-guerrilla left—formally called the Frente Democrático Revolucionario (FDR)—were preparing to deliver a statement at a Jesuit high school in San Salvador. They had decided to negotiate with the junta, which was significant, because the Christian Democrats in the government had been struggling for support from the country’s leftists.

Before the leaders could speak, however, two hundred officers from the state’s combined security forces surrounded the school, while two dozen men stormed the building and kidnapped them. Soon afterward, their bodies were found near Lake Ilopango, just east of the capital, showing signs of torture. CIA cables at the time cited intelligence that García and other high-ranking military officials had backed the operation. Ambassador White sent a message to Washington: “The military have explicitly rejected dialogue and heralded a policy of extermination.”

On the evening of December 2, Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary, arrived at the San Salvador airport. They were picking up two Maryknoll Sisters in their forties named Maura Clarke and I...

The four women had just merged onto the highway outside the airport when a truck full of National Guardsmen pulled them over and placed them under arrest. They were raped and murdered later that night, ...

The head of the National Guard, General Vides Casanova, denied any knowledge of the murders. But it was inconceivable that lower-ranking soldiers would commit such a crime without an order from superiors. Vides Casanova’s own cousin was the colonel in cha...

Jeane Kirkpatrick, a political science professor at Georgetown, already notorious for her unapologetic neoconservatism, was one of President Ronald Reagan’s top foreign policy advisers. After the assassination of the FDR leaders, she quipped to journalists that their slaying was a “reminder that people who choose to live by the sword die by the sword.” When asked the views of the incoming administration on the brutal murder of the American churchwomen, she replied, “The nuns were clearly not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.”

A dozen federal officers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol, and the US Attorney’s office had just arrived at the Manzo Area Council’s office, a single-floor stucco building that used to be a grocery store on Tucson’s west side. “Some of the guys here are wearing suits,” she said. They were carting off ten boxes of documents. Inside were nearly eight hundred client files, including five hundred immigration applications. The assistant US attorney was accusing the council of harboring undocumented immigrants and helping them sign up for welfare. A few of the agents had taken brooms and were sweeping stray papers off the floor, to be sure that nothing had escaped their attention.

Daily tasks included brokering meetings between the community and local police, preparing welfare and other social-service applications, and helping senior citizens.

The group’s activism tended to be higher profile. Members of the council staged protests at a private golf course to have the mayor turn it into a public park. When a group of high school students held a walkout to improve bilingual education in neighborhood schools, members of Manzo were on hand to assist.

In a city like Tucson, just sixty miles north of Mexico, most families had deep binational ties. They switched easily between English and Spanish, speaking both with a lilting border accent. The two countries weren’t separated by an enforceable dividing line so much as linked by a revolving door, crossed unthinkingly and often, in both directions, for work, school, shopping, and family visits. Physically there was little separating the two countries or marking the border itself, beyond some bands of concertina wire that local authorities had fastened to wooden posts next to the port of entry between Douglas and Agua Prieta.

In 1974, this all changed: Border Patrol agents began showing up. In their green uniforms, with holstered revolvers, the patrolmen were an unfamiliar presence in Tucson. In the past, they’d kept to their scattered checkpoints along the interstate, or roved around the austere border towns of Ajo and Douglas.

But now they were sitting outside in parked cars, waiting for mass to let out at St. Margaret’s church, in a neighborhood called Barrio Hollywood. When the parishioners filed out, the agents were ready with handcuffs. They broke up neighborhood soccer games, leading the players into the backs of green trucks. One morning, an immigration raid took place at El Rio ...

INS did know one thing: most of the people crossing the southern border were Mexicans coming north for predictable reasons. Mexico’s population was surging past seventy million people, well beyond what the country’s anemic economy could sustain.

In Mexico City, the minimum wage amounted to roughly four dollars a day, half of what a factory worker in an American city could make in a single hour; subsistence farmers in rural Mexico could fetch forty dollars a month for their crops, the same amount of money as one day’s earnings on an American farm.

At one point, in 1975, the Supreme Court ruled that Border Patrol was justified to use a person’s appearance as legitimate grounds to make an arrest for illegal entry, since “the likelihood that any ...

Law enforcement had all sorts of leeway to police the border. The US had been “outmanned, under-budgeted, and confronted by a growing, silent invasion of illegal aliens,” Nixon’s outgoing INS head, a former marine commander named Leonard C...

Immigration officials were not alone in hyping the perils of a porous border. William Colby, the head of the CIA, called the transit of undocumented Mexicans into the country “a greater threat to t...

Residents started coming to Manzo for legal help, and Cowan and the others began a crash course in the immigration system. Mainly, they filed paperwork—hundreds of pages of documents at a time, in dizzying and expensive configurations—meant to formalize the st...

The cost of filing an individual immigration application was typically a thousand dollars, but the staff at Manzo processed them for free. It was arduous, plodding work. By the spring of 1976, only twenty-five applications, of the ...

A few days after the raid, Border Patrol started going door-to-door across the neighborhood, arresting and harassing people w...

A Mexican mother of four, who had a green card, was told she had a week to send two of her children back to Mexico because they didn’t have residency permits. A man in his fifties, who’d lived in Tucson for many years and was married to a US citizen, was given a month to leave the country. A sixteen-year-old who had an American fiancé and had just given birth to a son learned that she had a single we...

These visits and ultimatums seemed like a monstrous breach to the residents who had trusted Manzo, but the head of the Border Patrol’s anti-smuggling unit made no secret of what his agents were doing. “With that information, we are bound under the law to find out what their status is,” he said. “Depending on the case, we apprehend them, process them, and send...

Leonel Castillo, the new head of the INS under Carter, took the additional step of providing Manzo with a formal certification so that they could represent undocumented immigrants in their legal proceedings. The whole protracted, ugly incident, in the end, had ironically liberated Manzo, allowing it to become a licensed outfit for immigrant defense.

On July 4, 1980, temperatures in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a five-hundred-square-mile expanse of desert between Yuma and Tucson, reached upward of 120 degrees. Crossing it, from Mexico, were twenty-seven Salvadoran refugees trying to reach the US.

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.

Each member of the group had seen an advertisement in a small newspaper placed by a twenty-six-year-old coyote who ran his business out of a television repair shop in the capital. The deal was twelve hundred dollars a head for a bus trip through Guatemala tha...

The travelers were disabused of the idea that this was a reliable operation when the bus continued straight through Mexico. It stopped, four days later, at Sonoyta, a dingy border town in Sonora, where a local smuggling outfit called Los Muñecos (The Dolls) was wa...

A day later, having already been paid, their Mexican guides abandoned them. There wasn’t enough food or water for the group to advance any farther. The Salvadorans had reached the US, but they were lost. In every direction, for miles, were scrub brush, ...

Having been exposed to the broader context of US involvement in Central America as part of her graduate studies, Castillo could prime Cowan and the others. The US was propping up a war machine in El Salvador, she told them; it had long treated the region as a geopolitical laboratory.

The CIA had overthrown the Guatemalan government in 1954 at the behest of an American corporation that, among other things, wanted bigger tax breaks abroad. Honduras had come to be known in the region as the USS Honduras, a de facto American military installation. For years, the US’s man in Nicaragua was a dictator. In Castillo’s circles, as the saying went, El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.

When the sheriff gave a statement to local reporters, he said nothing about Orantes, but made his own position plain. “The tragedy unfolding here in the desert is due in part to social and political problems in El Salvador,” he said. “This is not an ordinary illegal entry situation. I don’t think the legalistic approach would be the appropriate response from our government.”

It wasn’t until 1965, with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), that Congress officially contemplated the idea. But the measures were paltry: each year, 17,400 people were given “conditional entry,” as long as they were either fleeing communism or trying to escape a country in the Middle East. The Cold War, rather than any principle of law or humanitarianism, accounted for the narrowness of these terms.