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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.

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 US government had never taken a serious interest in El Salvador, but after the Cuban Revolution, in 1959, concern over the spread of communism led to a new posture in the region.

Modeled on American maneuvers in Vietnam, these activities were conceived as “guerrilla” actions “in support of the state.”

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

“The guerrilla groups, the revolutionary groups, almost without exception began as associations of teachers, associations of labor unions, campesino unions or parish organizations which were organized for the definite purpose of getting a schoolhouse up on the market road,” an American diplomat observed. “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.”

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. It would be decades before Romero achieved sainthood, but his stature, even then, was unmatched. He was known in El Salvador as the “voice of the voiceless,” for his unyielding defense of the poor.

Romero championed the poor in his sermons and in his writings, yet he was more conciliatory when it came to matters of governance. He was reluctant to openly confront the country’s president or to call for land reforms.

“How much worse can a civil war be than what we’re already experiencing, with people being killed everywhere you look?” Romero continued. He paused to cough, but before he could resume everyone in the church erupted into applause.

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.

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.

“Political power is in the hands of unscrupulous military officers,” Romero said in the sermon, to more applause. Most of those in attendance would have known who he was talking about. Officers on the far right were working directly with death squads to plot clandestine hits on opposition politicians and organizers. But Romero was also referring to the military’s top officials who pleaded ignorance of the worst atrocities.

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.

Several other countries, including El Salvador, chose to reject American aid altogether rather than submit to congressional scrutiny.

In July 1979, left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza, a US ally. Officials in the upper echelons of the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department wondered whether El Salvador might fall next. The view in Washington was that the military needed American support for the center to hold in El Salvador.

Salvadoran soldiers, meanwhile, came up with a new name for an old torture technique. A victim was tied up by his hands and feet, while his interrogators applied intense pressure to the man’s testicles with a wire. They called it “the Carter.”

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 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.

Inside the detention center, the organizers’ most urgent task was to keep people from signing the voluntary-departure documents and to protect those who refused. Cowan and Castillo were developing a broader strategy based on an appropriately jaded appraisal of the INS.

According to the INS, asylum was available only to individuals facing persecution. A crippled economy and an atmosphere of generalized violence were not enough. As the agency’s commissioner went on to say, “Basically everyone in the world would be better off in the US.”

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.

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.

January 1981, Salvadoran guerrillas from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) launched a major offensive to make gains on the battlefield before Reagan—“that fanatic,” they called him—took office later in the month.

The guerrillas had hoped to spark popular insurrections in urban areas throughout the country, just as the Sandinistas had in Nicaragua a year and a half earlier. But the ranks of the military didn’t split apart; while some progressive officers defected the majority stood firm.

In February, when American military advisers analyzed the situation, the Defense Department concluded that the Salvadoran regime was simply “not organized to fight an insurgency.” It had “no hope” of outlasting the guerrillas unless military leadership was completely overhauled.

In El Salvador, the Indigenous population had virtually disappeared with La Matanza in the 1930s. Those who weren’t murdered had assimilated. In Guatemala, the Indigenous Maya didn’t hide, and couldn’t even if they wanted to.

Weakness among the men was derided as a mariconada—“gay shit”—so the pain would get buried under the surface of manful denials and jokes.

that he couldn’t unplug. At first, he tried to banish all thoughts that caused him the worst grief—the torture sessions he endured in San Salvador, or the blurry face of his month-old daughter. But with every attempt, his body, rather than his conscious mind, came roaring back in refutation. There were cramps, migraines, night sweats, body aches. Juan lived in a haze of constant ailments. They flared up the farther away he got from El Salvador, just as he let his guard down, a tether he couldn’t break.

the Verapaces, farther east, were the Achi. The Lucas García government adopted a policy that one general called “blindness and madness,” in which the military killed, tortured, and raped as many Maya as it could to instill terror and diminish support for the guerrillas. “The great Indian masses,” as the army called them, were the “social base” of opposition to the military. The premise followed from American counterinsurgency doctrine, but the execution exceeded even the US government’s capacity for geopolitical rationalizations. The Carter administration had cut off aid to the Guatemalan military in 1977; Reagan was trying to restart it. At the same time, hundreds of villages were destroyed, and two hundred thousand people were killed and disappeared. More than a million Indigenous residents were displaced, with tens of thousands fleeing to Mexico.

As a US cable put it, “the rural populace is ordered to move to villages where the army has outposts. A scorched earth policy is then applied to the surrounding area.” The military also created a “civil patrol system,” in which villagers were forced to conduct sweeps of their own neighbors, responding to tips and insinuations about who might harbor antipathy toward the government. Years later, a truth commission run by the Catholic Church would attempt to quantify and catalog the full scale of the devastation. But there was no taxonomy for everything they found. “In what category does being forced to kill one’s own brother fall?”

returned from his weekends in Cuernavaca. When the topic of the war in El Salvador inevitably came up, they asked questions that led Juan to two conclusions. First, there was a difference between Americans and their government. Second, very few people in the US seemed to know what was really happening in El Salvador and Guatemala.

Later that month, a Salvadoran bishop announced that the pope would be visiting El Salvador in February or March of the following year. Catholic missions from across Latin America arranged trips to the country for the pope’s visit. Seeing an opportunity, Juan devised a plan.

If he traveled north, maybe there was some chance of doing something, however slight, that could pressure Washington to help wind down the conflict. Of the two lives he began to imagine for himself—as an undocumented immigrant in the US or in Mexico—the American one seemed to involve a fight. He came to think of it as the only true path back home.

By the mid-1980s, there were close to seventy thousand members of the sanctuary movement in the United States. One of its strengths was that membership could take a range of forms.

“The sanctuary movement seeks to uncover and name the connections between the US government and the Salvadoran death squads. . . . To stop short of this is to betray the Central American people and the refugees we now harbor.”

When Reagan became president, his administration effectively ignored the 1980 Refugee Act. The result wasn’t just a legal and political jumble but also a kind of operational vacuum that the sanctuary workers tried to fill. Both

The ambiguity between “economic migrants” and legitimate asylum seekers was the most obvious area of confusion.

Juan Romagoza had never met a Salvadoran or Guatemalan who received asylum in the US, and by the time he was running CRECE very few immigrants bothered to ask about it. The prospect of winning a case was too remote. The close ties between the US and Salvadoran governments scared away anyone who hadn’t already been put off by the odds.

was November 6, 1986, and the atmosphere was collegial and congratulatory. The president was there to sign the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)

Iran-Contra Affair, a window into the White House’s continued obsession with Central America. In contravention of Congress and an explicit arms embargo, the administration was covertly selling weapons to Iran in order to send the proceeds to the Contra forces fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

“What is Vides?” a former member of the Salvadoran government asked around that time. “A reactionary, a progressive? He is a soldier who has to preserve his institution. He’ll do what he has to. So you can’t classify him politically very well.” During the 1980s, the Americans tried and failed to classify him. Vides Casanova had spent the start of the decade leading the National Guard when the government was killing more civilians than at any other point in the war. Yet by the spring of 1983, when the Americans tired of the country’s then defense minister, José Guillermo García, they accepted Vides Casanova, who was forty-four, as the next in line. He was a “gentleman,” one FBI informant had put it. “His eyes do not have the ferocious kind of look that many commanders have.”

While García had openly ignored the human rights concerns of the Americans, Vides Casanova was careful to plot a stealthier course. He cared just as little as his predecessor had about the military’s abuses, but he knew he had to navigate between the US and

The Salvadoran military had its own equivalent of political parties constantly forming alliances and jockeying for primacy. What defined them was the system put in place at the country’s military academy, where each graduating class was known as a tanda.

Eddie was ten years old. He thought he was Mexican, because that’s what you were if you weren’t Black in his corner of the city. But he had been born in El Salvador. Seven years earlier, when he was three and his brother Carlos was two, their mother, Victoria, brought them with her to San Francisco.

The boys with the long hair were newer to the neighborhood. They went by a name that Eddie had heard for the first time only recently: Mara Salvatrucha, or MS. This was Salvadoran slang—a portmanteau meant to convey scrappiness and savagery. Mara referred to a gang or group of close-knit guys; the word first became popular in El Salvador in the 1950s, as part of a loose translation of a widely seen Charlton Heston movie called The Naked Jungle. Salva was a nod to the country,

In Eddie’s neighborhood, anyone worth emulating was Black or Chicano; there were no white people where he lived, and the Central Americans, who were now arriving by the thousands every month, were unassimilated newcomers at the bottom of an already vicious racial hierarchy. Black and Mexican street gangs brutalized many of them.

The same could not be said of the Mara Salvatrucha. In the early to mid-1980s, MS was a band of outcasts and misfits populated with new arrivals from Central America. Members

The war officially ended on January 16, 1992, in a ceremony in Mexico City.