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

by Jonathan Blitzer

The US preferred to accept people leaving countries that were leftist or socialist, and to ignore dissidents from strategic allies. There were 38,000 Hungarians, displaced by Soviet invasion, in 1956; 240,000 Cubans between 1959 and 1962; 1,500 Ugandans in the early 1970s; nearly 80,000 Soviet Jews in the 1970s; and, in 1975, 130,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees.

Paroling immigrants into the US didn’t automatically put them on a path to legal status. For that, Congress needed to pass an “adjustment act” anytime the attorney general admitted a new population into the country, so that they could apply to stay. Several such acts followed: a Hungarian adjustment act, the Cuban Adjustment Act, a series of Indo-Chinese adjustment acts.

The Department of Defense had space for twenty thousand Marielitos at army bases in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas.

Politically, this was immediately and lastingly toxic. Nineteen thousand Marielitos were being held at a base called Fort Chaffee, in Arkansas. One weekend in May, hundreds of Cubans protesting the prisonlike conditions set fire to the barracks and managed to overtake the gates, escaping down the road. “A lot of those refugees are just thugs,” the sheriff of Sebastian County, which included Fort Chaffee, told the public.

Politicians everywhere were warning their constituents about “undesirable immigrants,” and police departments from Los Angeles to New York blamed Marielitos for rising crime rates. For the first time, city and state law enforcement agencies requested partnerships with the INS, sending along the names of prison inmates who were immigrants and thus might be deportable when their criminal sentences expired.

The imagery of rageful, dangerous killers was more than just a political specter used to scare up votes; it swiftly crossed over into the iconography of popular culture. Soon the young movie star Al Pacino—already known for such seminal roles as an idealistic cop, a brooding mob boss, and a rookie bank robber—added a new character to his résumé: Tony Montana, in Scarface, a snarling Cuban delinquent with a cocaine addiction and a murderous temper, who comes to Florida during the Mariel boatlift.

There was a simple reason Margo Cowan and Lupe Castillo couldn’t find the recently arrested Salvadorans in the county jails and Border Patrol outposts in the summer and fall of 1980. The INS was transferring them five hours west to a detention center in a remote patch of Southern California called El Centro, where 85 percent of the detainees were from El Salvador.

The facility was a sparse complex of low-slung buildings. Inside were barracks with two hundred bunk beds, a television, and a single watercooler. But this shaded space was closed during the day, forcing everyone into what passed for a recreation yard: a small square of dirt, with a partial aluminum awning that left most of the six hundred detainees exposed to the elements. The bathrooms and living quarters were not cleaned. Abusive guards were unsupervised, and basic medical services barely existed.

Some of the detainees had been stuck there for close to two years, but the fate of most of those who passed through El Centro was swift and unceremonious deportation. Two San Diego–based immigration judges heard seven hundred cases a week, issuing rulings in batches of twenty at a time. In the fall of 1981, when a congressional investigat...

The first few times Cowan and Castillo entered the facility, they returned to the parking lot to find the tires of their van slashed. The culprits were INS age...

These same men observed what the young activists were there to do and belligerently thwarted their work. When the women sat down with clients in a small side office, the guards paraded the center’s unruliest detainees outside, making it impossible to talk over the din. Then they crammed so many immigrants inside the room, which was only about a hundred square feet in size, that there wasn’t space for the volunteers and translators. Some days, meetin...

El Centro wasn’t a place that typically attracted visitors. A thuggish order prevailed. Many of the judges who came to El Centro to hear ca...

Every Sunday, a dozen volunteers, led by Cowan or Castillo, would assemble in Tucson and board the Manzo van, a giant Dodge emblazoned with the words Basta con la migra (No More Immigration Police). They’d drive all night to a dilapidated roadside motel in the town of El Centro called the Golden West—a ring of rooms around a grimy pool—where they’d set up workstations.

The rooms and narrow balconies became makeshift offices, with legal papers piled in mounds on beds and typewriters passed around impatiently so the activists could fill out forms. Some sixty volunteers rotated in and out of the motel in shifts lasting up to two weeks at a time.

Deportation wasn’t the only danger Salvadorans faced inside El Centro. There were forms that, if signed, waived the legal right to apply for asylum. Unless they’d been forewarned, the Salvadorans who turned up in El Centro didn’t know to insist on applying for asylum, often in the face of intimidating resistance. INS officers rarely asked the new arrivals if they feared deportation and wanted to apply for relief in the US. Much more frequently, they told asylum seekers explicitly that no such right existed, threatening those who objected with indefinite detention or solitary confinement.

The Salvadorans were handed a form in English with a dense block of small English text and a line at the bottom for a signature. The paper was not an asylum application or some sign of impending relief, but an administrative sleight of hand called a “voluntary departure,” which immediately fast-tracked their expulsion to El Salvador without an immigration hearing. Not realizing they were waiving their rights, many signed the forms. Hours later, they were on a plane back to San Salvador.

Between 1980 and 1981, this had happened to more than ten thousand of the thirteen thousand Salvadorans apprehended at the border.

In October, a woman named Doria Elia Estrada, who’d been arrested near Calexico, California, demanded time to read the full form before signing it. When she was done, she refused to pick up the pen shoved in front of her by the INS agent.

In response, he told her that she would be stuck in jail for “a long period of time” and left to fend for herself in a cell filled exclusively with men. It didn’t matter what rights she thought she had, he said. Her application for asylum would eventually be rejected anyway, and the US g...

Central America was new to Fife. But in the summer of 1980, he received a call about the disaster at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The survivors at the hospital in Tucson wanted to speak to a pastor, so he went, expecting to say a few prayers and offer generic words of condolence in broken Spanish. Instead, the survivors shared the stories of why they’d fled El Salvador. It was the first time he’d heard about the death squads and the state security forces.

Appalled, he returned to Southside determined to learn more. Through a contact at the Presbyterian church, he located a Salvadoran minister based in San Francisco, who gave Fife a tutorial by phone every few weeks. The conversations revolved around the heroism of Óscar Romero and the tenets of liberation theology, a religious movement within the Catholic Church that took root in Latin America in the late 1960s; at its center was a fierce defense of the poor and an embrace of grassroots activism.

The two men struck an agreement. If Fife could file asylum applications on behalf of apprehended Salvadorans, Johnston would release them from custody and allow them to stay in Fife’s church while they waited for a hearing.

For months, the arrangement worked as planned, and Southside began to fill up with Salvadoran asylum seekers. It started slowly, with Fife opening a small apartment situated in the back of the church building; as the numbers grew, many slept on the floor of the chapel. While Cowan and Castillo were working to spring Salvadorans from detention, Fife became their conduit to the religious community in Tucson and to a coalition of clergy called the Tucson Ecumenical Council. With their help, he raised thousands of dollars for bond, and found churches and religious centers that could house the Salvadorans who’d been released from custody.

Corbett found hundreds of Central Americans who’d been caught in Northern Mexico. Mexican authorities would automatically send them to the Guatemala border, even though some had valid travel visas. In a few instances, Corbett met Salvadorans whom Border Patrol agents had apprehended within a few miles of Mexico and simply handed off to the Mexicans for swifter deportation.

The Carter administration had been full of reluctant Cold Warriors—officials who envisioned a human rights–driven foreign policy but still had conventional fears about the rise of socialism. Reagan had no such ambivalence. He entered office spoiling for a fight in Central America and wasted no time filling his administration with hardliners and ideologues who would declare total war against communism in the president’s name.

His choice for secretary of state, the brash, barrel-chested general Alexander Haig, had been a commander in Vietnam and an instigator of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. He saw Soviet diplomacy as a “test of wills” that the US had been failing since the fall of Saigon.

The two countries of greatest concern to Haig were Nicaragua and El Salvador. In Managua, it had been more than a year since the leftist Sandinistas had overthrown the dictator. The White House wanted to dislodge them from power. Three hundred miles west, in San Salvador, American allies were in charge, but at war.

Haig was so frustrated that he entertained the possibility of invading Cuba to disrupt its support for the FMLN. “You just give me the word,” he told the president. “I’ll turn that fucking island into a parking lot.” It took the secretary of defense and the joint chiefs of staff—unlikely voices of restraint—to override him.

By the fall of 1981, the National Security Council had come up with a temporary solution: the US would give up to $300 million in economic aid to governments in Central America and the Caribbean, as well as a large share of emergency military funds to El Salvador and Honduras, which was becoming the staging ground for military operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The US would increase its military training program in El Salvador and bring Salvadoran troops and officers to the US for further instruction.

One recipient of this infusion of money and advisers was an elite unit inside the Salvadoran military called the Atlacatl Battalion. US personnel trained the outfit in counterinsurgency operations, making it the first of its kind in El Salvador. The Atlacatl’s stated mission was to serve as a “rapid deployment infantry” brigade that crisscrossed the country in response to guerrilla incursions. But Salvadoran military officials saw the matter in grander terms. “The subversives like to say they are the fish and the people are the ocean,” one g...

Commanding troops in the Cabañas Department, near the Honduras border, was an officer named Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez. The Americans loved him for his fierce reliability. “He has the best organized patrols in the country, loyal to a man and tougher than lizard ...

On November 11, Ochoa led twelve hundred troops into the hamlet of Santa Cruz on the pretense of rooting out guerrillas. Over the next two weeks, they annihilated multiple villages in the area. Women and children fled en masse, hiding in the surrounding hillsides from helicopter and airplane fire. S...

The American military knew about operations like these—it had assigned at least ten military advisers to monitor the actions of the Atlaca...

On the morning of December 8, three thousand Salvadoran troops led by the Atlacatl Battalion entered a string of remote mountain hamlets in the Morazán Department, in the eastern reaches of the country. It was part of a counterinsurgency campaign called Operation Rescue, aimed at reclaiming parts of the countryside from the guerrillas. Peasants in rural areas regularly ran the risk of being targeted by the military as guerrilla sympathizers, but in several of the towns, including one called El Mozote, residents felt they were protected. They’d always distanced themselves from the guerr...

It was around five in the morning, on December 11, when the soldiers began rounding up the villagers of El Mozote and separating the men from the women and children. The men were marched to the village’s lone church and eventually lined up and executed; the women were taken to the hills, where they were raped and burned alive.

On Monterrosa’s orders, the soldiers advanced to the other villages over the next two days, killing everyone they encountered and setting fire to the homes. Monterrosa had a word for such an operation—it was, he told his subordinates, a limpieza, or cleansing. By the end of the campaign, at least 978 people were dead, including 477 children under the age of twelve.

A thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Rufina Amaya, whose children and husband were killed in front of her, was the lone survivor of the massacre at El Mozote. A month later, she met two war reporters—Raymond Bonner, an American working for The New York Times, and Mexic...

Each had traveled independently to El Mozote, where they found scenes of devastation: homes razed, the church destroyed, scattered corpses rotting in the sun. At the center of El Mozote, beside a demolished sacristy, bones, severed limbs, and pieces of flesh jutted from the rubble; the corpses of children were still clothed. The soldiers h...

The pushback from the administration was swift and ruthlessly effective. It denied everything, pointing to an obscure cable written by two American embassy officials who, “as the eyes and ears” of the US government, traveled with Salvadoran military personnel to evaluate the reports. The Americans were skittish about visiting areas controlled by the guerrillas, so they didn’t get close to any of the killing sites. Afterward, they wrote that “it is not possible to prove or disprove excesses of violence.”

The ambiguous language of the cable served as the justification the administration officials needed. In their telling, reports about the massacre were little more than guerrilla propaganda disseminated on the eve of the certification process to embarrass the president. There had likely been a “firefight” between the army and guerrillas, but “no evidence” of a massacre, according to Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.

He attacked the veracity of the Times and Post stories and questioned the credibility of the reporters who wrote them. The certification went forward. Within a few months, the executive edit...

In the early 1980s, much of Abrams’s work consisted of rebutting, before Congress and in the press, evidence of atrocities committed by the Salvadoran government.

He was also denying another growing body of evidence that began to dog the US government: an ever-larger number of Salvadorans being deported from the US were being killed upon their return.

By the end of 1981, stories were beginning to appear in newspapers and human rights digests that government soldiers were murdering deportees. Soldiers lay in wait for planes to touch down. The bodies were discarded along the highway near the airport. Abrams rejected the claims as supposition. But, unlike the evidence of faraway massacres, which was easier for Washington to obfuscat...

The death squads, he learned, were referred to simply as military missions; they were routine. When he volunteered for one detail, in March 1980, a National Guardsman gave him his orders and an army colonel conducted the mission.

The man they apprehended was thirty-seven, under suspicion of something, but Rosales was never told what. He watched as the others drove a nail through the man’s nostril, broke all his fingers, and stabbed him with a hypodermic needle. The torture lasted for two hours before they shot him and stole his watch.

Over time, he came to feel that all young men in El Salvador, from teenagers to thirty-year-olds, ran the risk of persecution at the hands of the military. Having volunteered for the army, Rosales was an exception. It was much more common for the military to kidnap teenagers right off the streets, often outside movie theaters or eateries, and then to torture them on army bases until they agreed to serve. Anyone who didn’t was killed on the spot.

The dangers were magnified for deportees. At the end of 1979, one of Rosales’s superiors explained the logic to him while they were stationed at the San Salvador airport.

Together with a group of soldiers, he was supposed to wait for a plane to land with nine deportees who were being returned from Mexico. If someone was deported it confirmed that he’d first tried to escape El Salvador, which meant he was presumed to be a leftist, an immediate death sentence. The protocol was to take deportees into custody for an “investigation.” A seasoned soldier like Rosales would have understood the translation: forced disappearances, which began with torture and ended in death. A few days later, ...

The new US Refugee Act—designed to help immigrants persecuted for their membership in a “particular social group”—was marking the Salvadorans who sought protection under it. To have set foot in the US, then been cast back out into the war zone, led straight to government-sanctioned murder. Whatever Elliott Abrams told Congress or the press, the Reagan administration knew the reality. INS heard it firsthand from Rosales in t...