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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Their immigration status had become a defining, immutable fact of who they now were. In news stories about “surges” or “floods” of migrants massing toward the US, these were the people whose faces were blurred and anonymous. Eventually, they would become numbers on government spreadsheets and talking points at election time. They were “removables,” in the cold bureaucratic language of homeland security. Those who managed to traverse Mexico and cross the US border would earn yet another new status for their trouble. By law, they would be repeat offenders, and thus felons.

For more than a century, the US has devised one policy after another to keep people out of the country. For more than a century, it has failed. The past decade has proven the futility of this ambition and laid bare its incalculable human cost. More people are on the move than ever before, uprooted by war, famine, persecution, natural disasters, pandemic, climate change, corrupt regimes, and economic collapse. A new era of mass migration is well underway. Politicians have won elections by stoking fears of open borders and irreversible demographic change. Immigration, a White House official recently told me, has become a “democracy issue”: if liberal-democratic governments across the world fail to address the situation, it will continue to fuel the rise of populist authoritarianism.

The goal, in effect, was to shift the US border farther south—some called it the “invisible wall.”

Some were allowed to enter the country on the grounds that they would eventually appear before a judge; others were jailed, summarily deported, or expelled straight into Mexico. The randomness of the system was a cruelty all its own.

Immigration policy is governed by a politics of permanent crisis, with the border as its staging ground. One of the core premises of US immigration policy—true under Democrats as well as Republicans—is deterrence: turn away enough people, and others will stop trying to come. The practice is called the Consequence Delivery System, a term with an Orwellian charge.

Under Trump, the government delivered the most brutal consequence imaginable, but migrants were undeterred. Staying home was worse than leaving and facing the punishment.

The latest crisis was always the worst, until the next one.

The first asylum seekers were escaping regimes the US was arming and supporting in the name of fighting communism.

“One less mouth to feed and one more saint in the family,” his mother said.

El Salvador’s politics were dominated by an alliance between the business elite and the armed forces, which grew increasingly turbulent during the 1970s as the broader public rebelled.

The True Identity of the People of God

A single event, known as La Matanza, or the Massacre, defined modern Salvadoran history. On January 22, 1932, agricultural laborers in the western part of the country, armed with machetes and hoes, staged an insurrection against the nation’s coffee-growing elite, which had been subjugating the rural poor for decades. In the late 1870s, much of the arable land in El Salvador had been in public hands. It belonged to individual communities whose population depended on it for their survival. The rise in global coffee prices, together with the need for an exploitable labor force, prompted the government to seize and privatize these holdings. There was too much money to be made, so it began auctioning off the plots to the wealthy owners of large plantation-style estates known as fincas. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were dispossessed, then forced to work for nothing on land that used to belong to them.

The revolt in 1932 sputtered in a matter of days, but the repression it provoked went on for weeks. The military intervened on the side of the landowners. They were joined by members of the National Guard, who had been suppressing labor disputes for years. Together the soldiers slaughtered some thirty thousand people—roughly 2 percent of the Salvadoran population. Anyone who looked vaguely Indigenous or dressed like a peasant was branded a rebel and executed. Corpses were dumped in public or left hanging to instill terror. In one town, troops rounded up prisoners in groups of fifty and brought them before firing squads.

La Matanza froze the country in time for the next four and a half decades. The government replaced the real story of what had happened with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off bloodthirsty communist hordes. The National Library removed references to the events from its records. Newspaper accounts were destroyed. Government files from the time were hidden or burned.

“We were all born half dead in 1932.”

The state security forces had identified broad categories of people whom they considered to be a threat to the social order, including rural schoolteachers, Catholic catechists, and residents of a zone of the country populated by known political activists.

All of them received training and weapons from the United States. 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.

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. He opened churches to thousands who’d been displaced, and exposed acts of aggression by the government and its right-wing allies. In a country darkened into total indecipherability by oppression and misinformation, his clarion statements became a national and international reference point. They showed the reality of a country descending into civil war.

Grande’s assassination disabused Romero of the promise of gentler diplomacy with the government. Romero never sounded the same afterward. His speeches were forthright and bold, delivered in a voice that rumbled with an otherworldly drum of urgency. He decried the violence and called for a national land reform to give the rural poor a fighting chance at survival.

Each Romero sermon was a virtuoso literary feat in three sections. The first was the most directly theological, a ranging biblical exegesis interspersed with contemporary commentary. Next came a section that he called “The Life of the Church,” with announcements about church initiatives and activities, many of which were coming under direct threat from the death squads. But it was the final part, which Romero titled “The Events of the Week,” that drew the most attention. Part forensic analysis of state terror and part legal indictment, it was, above all, an impassioned personal plea to the government for mercy. Here the sermon grew dense with information about the violence and mayhem overtaking the country. For half an hour, sometimes longer, he would methodically list the names of people who’d been killed or disappeared, the dates of murders and mass arrests, and the locations of recent crackdowns.

“I am in no way attempting to practice politics,” he said, by way of introduction. The church was silent, the attendees rapt. He started to speak louder; his cadence quickened. “If I shed some light on the politics of my country because the moment calls for it, I do so as a pastor, using the light of the Gospel.”

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.

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.”

“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.

Six days after Romero’s assassination, on Palm Sunday, a funeral was held at the Metropolitan Cathedral.

Twenty minutes before noon, a Mexican cardinal was eulogizing Romero when a sudden explosion rocked the far edge of the plaza. Gunfire followed, then another series of explosions. The panicked crowds stampeded for safety. Hundreds rushed the front steps of the cathedral, while the priest and bishops pushed the altar away from the door and dragged Romero’s casket inside. Juan darted among the bodies outside in the square. He reached an elderly woman who’d been trampled and led her to a taxi, which sped off toward the university clinic. The sidewalks were littered with shoes, articles of clothing, and large palm fronds that mourners had brought with them for the occasion and then discarded in their shock. He came upon others who were wounded, with blood spattered on their clothes and around the pavement while they sat, doubled over, in a daze. When there were no more taxis left to carry away the casualties, the students brought them into the cathedral through a side door. There were now so many people inside that Juan couldn’t fit through the main entrance. Someone had to pull, then lift him across the threshold to get him inside. For two hours, dead bodies were carried in and out. When the terror subsided, by the middle of the afternoon, the death toll was at least forty, with hundreds more injured.

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 no longer need to keep up appearances about exercising restraint.

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 relief work, was on government death lists. “This very night, we will begin,” he said.

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 Ita Ford, who were returning from a conference in Nicaragua. The funeral of the murdered FDR leaders was being held the next day. 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, their bodies thrown in a ditch by the side of the road.

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.

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.

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 given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high.”

A few days after the raid, Border Patrol started going door-to-door across the neighborhood, arresting and harassing people who had submitted paperwork to Manzo. 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 week to finalize her marriage papers, even though it took several weeks for the government to process them.

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.

“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.”

The Border Patrol separated migrants apprehended along the border into two categories: Mexicans, who made up 80 percent of all the people they caught crossing the border, and everyone else. Mexico loomed so large for border enforcement that it was built into the agency shorthand for the rest of the world: migrants from anywhere else—India, Brazil, or El Salvador; it didn’t matter—were all known as OTMs, “other than Mexican.”

Throughout the twentieth century, American leaders touted the US as a nation of immigrants, but for most of that time the country never had a formal refugee or asylum policy written in law.

According to the act, a refugee was someone outside his homeland, unable or unwilling to return because of either outright persecution or a “well-founded fear of persecution.” Such persecution was defined as being based on “race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” Immigration lawyers, judges, lawmakers, and government officials would spend decades fighting over the underlying ambiguities. But for the time being, the act represented an unqualified advance in American legal practice. As one congressman pointed out, on the House floor, these definitions identified refugees by “a more universal standard based on uprootedness rather than ideology.”

It was becoming clear that Castro was deliberately flooding the Florida ports. The storming of the Peruvian embassy had initially been an embarrassment to the Castro regime, an unsightly display of dissent. But in the middle of an election year, it was Carter who was most vulnerable.

By early May, there were more than fifteen thousand Marielitos, and American authorities were realizing something even more alarming: Castro hadn’t simply allowed the ten thousand dissidents who’d amassed at the Peruvian embassy to leave. He was emptying prisons and psychiatric institutions, mixing criminals and mental health patients in with the groups headed for the US. One hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans arrived in the ensuing six months, and according to the State Department, some forty thousand of them had criminal records. Fewer than half of all the Cubans who arrived had families to receive them; the rest were on their own, meaning US authorities had to figure out where to send them as the crisis continued. 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. Guard posts and additional fencing were installed on the orders of the governor, a thirty-one-year-old, first-term Democrat named Bill Clinton.

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.

On an early visit to El Centro, she once asked an official at the facility about a sheet that had appeared in a client’s asylum file. It was on State Department letterhead, from an office called the Bureau of Human Rights. The document offered a dry, one-sided synopsis of the situation in El Salvador, with extended references to leftist guerrillas and a besieged government. The information appeared to be based on the American embassy’s sources on the ground, but it was at conspicuous odds with the stories the activists had been hearing from newly arrived Salvadorans.

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. 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.

After years of withholding lethal military assistance over human rights concerns, the State Department reversed itself, freeing up the Pentagon to ready $6 million. Carter invoked emergency provisions in the Foreign Assistance Act to deliver the money without congressional authorization.

The US had been propping up a corrupt and openly repressive officer corps out of fear that reforming the military would risk destabilizing it. The result, one US official wrote at the start of Reagan’s term, was an army “sitting in garrisons abusing civilians” rather than combating the guerrillas.

The Reagan administration did not care about human rights, but it was preoccupied by the operational shortcomings of its Salvadoran partners; the issues were related. Whole divisions of the army were little more than fronts for the death squads, and military conscripts, many of whom were poor teenage peasants who’d been threatened and tortured into joining, were undisciplined soldiers.

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...

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 group of officers told a US delegation in February 1981. “What we have done in the north is dry up the ocean so we can catch the fish easily.”