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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.”