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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress, who saw political corruption as a major driver of drug trafficking and migration, would give close to $45 million to the CICIG in the first twelve years of its existence.

But Lucrecia understood the task more broadly than her predecessors. For decades, doctors and nurses trained in Western medicine had been dismissive of whole categories of diagnoses that predominated among the Indigenous population. Villagers would often visit healers and shamans who treated ailments such as mal de ojo (evil eye), pérdida del alma (loss of the soul), and el susto (the fright). Some of these afflictions dated to pre-Columbian times and went by a range of different names. El susto, the anthropologist Linda Green wrote, was “understood by its victims to be the loss of the essential life force as a result of fright.” In more conventional terms, its symptoms included depression, lethargy, insomnia, nightmares, diarrhea, and vomiting. To anyone mindful of La Violencia of the war years, the connection to post-traumatic stress was unavoidable. These conditions were, as Green put it, “social memory embodied.”

In the summer of 2016, the Health Ministry announced that it would open clinics and hire personnel to treat seven different types of “ancestral maladies” that were contributing to high mortality rates in the countryside. “Independently of whether you believe it or don’t believe in this, we have seen that it’s necessary to be vigilant,” Lucrecia told one newspaper.

If Miller was impatient with the courts, he was incensed by the bureaucratic hierarchy. As with any federal department, DHS staff took orders from the senior leadership at each of its component agencies. Those agency officials, in turn, took their cues from the top DHS brass. To rewire the chain of command, Miller made what others began to describe as calls “deep in the building.” He would ring lower-level officials and give orders directly to them. Not only did he refuse to loop in their bosses; he also instructed the junior officials to shield their activities from the department’s leadership. When he found people he could trust, or bully, Miller would enlist them as informers. Every Friday, he convened a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, to discuss the ways in which federal bureaucrats were falling short of implementing Trump’s agenda. Eventually, career officials stopped attending, and Miller’s audience became the political appointees who were already aligned with him. Often, he harangued them anyway. Since Miller had inserted himself into DHS’s policymaking process, officials felt obliged to keep their work from him. At one point, to prevent Miller from discovering the details of a policy discussion, Nielsen’s replacement, Kevin McAleenan, held meetings in a classified security bunker, known as a SCIF, where cell phones were prohibited and strict rules of confidentiality were in effect. Convinced that a deep-state cabal was ...