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

by Jonathan Blitzer

“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.”