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.
