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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Commanding troops in the Cabañas Department, near the Honduras border, was an officer named Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez. The Americans loved him for his fierce reliability. “He has the best organized patrols in the country, loyal to a man and tougher than lizard lips,” a US Army senior adviser to the Salvadorans said at the time. On November 11, Ochoa led twelve hundred troops into the hamlet of Santa Cruz on the pretense of rooting out guerrillas. Over the next two weeks, they annihilated multiple villages in the area. Women and children fled en masse, hiding in the surrounding hillsides from helicopter and airplane fire. Scores of innocent villagers were killed, and dozens more crossed into Honduras. The American military knew about operations like these—it had assigned at least ten military advisers to monitor the actions of the Atlacatl Battalion—but looked the other away.

It was around five in the morning, on December 11, when the soldiers began rounding up the villagers of El Mozote and separating the men from the women and children. The men were marched to the village’s lone church and eventually lined up and executed; the women were taken to the hills, where they were raped and burned alive. On Monterrosa’s orders, the soldiers advanced to the other villages over the next two days, killing everyone they encountered and setting fire to the homes. Monterrosa had a word for such an operation—it was, he told his subordinates, a limpieza, or cleansing. By the end of the campaign, at least 978 people were dead, including 477 children under the age of twelve.

The Democrats had been too timid to challenge the White House on foreign policy, so they had never pushed for a legislative veto of the president’s determination.

He attacked the veracity of the Times and Post stories and questioned the credibility of the reporters who wrote them.

But when Abrams assumed control, the human rights bureau adopted an overtly political mission.

By the end of 1981, stories were beginning to appear in newspapers and human rights digests that government soldiers were murdering deportees. Soldiers lay in wait for planes to touch down. The bodies were discarded along the highway near the airport. Abrams rejected the claims as supposition.

It was much more common for the military to kidnap teenagers right off the streets, often outside movie theaters or eateries, and then to torture them on army bases until they agreed to serve. Anyone who didn’t was killed on the spot.

The new US Refugee Act—designed to help immigrants persecuted for their membership in a “particular social group”—was marking the Salvadorans who sought protection under it. To have set foot in the US, then been cast back out into the war zone, led straight to government-sanctioned murder. Whatever Elliott Abrams told Congress or the press, the Reagan administration knew the reality.

There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other was an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, known inside the country as the Octopus because it had tentacles everywhere. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, controlling the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. US State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company. Senators held stock. Running United Fruit’s publicity department in New York was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call.

They formed, in his words, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the US, to say nothing of the countries under American sway.

The start of the Cold War made American officials into easy marks.

In June 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the US ambassador, he was rewarded with the presidency.

“The counterinsurgency campaign is out of control,” a US intelligence report acknowledged in 1967. At the same time, a State Department official praised the Guatemalan military for its “successful use of terror” in disappearing “real and alleged communists.”

The military and its death squads had murdered almost the entire leadership of the labor movement as well as the upper ranks of the moderate political parties.

Activists from the department of El Quiché were joined by students from the University of San Carlos, the country’s flagship public university; together they had alerted members of the Spanish embassy ahead of time. It was supposed to be a nonviolent event, but when Lucas García learned of it he called for the immediate extermination of the participants. (“Take them out as you can,” he told his interior minister.) The police locked the building’s doors from the outside and attacked the structure with grenades and firebombs. Nearly everyone inside was killed: thirty-nine activists, embassy staff, Spanish diplomats, even the Guatemalan foreign minister who’d been sent inside as a negotiator.

From the pulpit, Méndez Arceo sounded a lot like Romero. He spoke passionately about biblical imperatives to help the poor, assailing the traditionalism that walled the church off from the wider world. “In our brothers and sisters we encounter God,” he once said. “It is toward them that our true pilgrimage should move.”

The Lucas García government adopted a policy that one general called “blindness and madness,” in which the military killed, tortured, and raped as many Maya as it could to instill terror and diminish support for the guerrillas. “The great Indian masses,” as the army called them, were the “social base” of opposition to the military. The premise followed from American counterinsurgency doctrine, but the execution exceeded even the US government’s capacity for geopolitical rationalizations. The Carter administration had cut off aid to the Guatemalan military in 1977; Reagan was trying to restart it.

At the same time, hundreds of villages were destroyed, and two hundred thousand people were killed and disappeared. More than a million Indigenous residents were displaced, with tens of thousands fleeing to Mexico. At one point, after the military burned down entire forests to make whole swaths of the highlands uninhabitable, villagers reported changes in rainfall patterns and climate.

First, there was a difference between Americans and their government. Second, very few people in the US seemed to know what was really happening in El Salvador and Guatemala. Juan showed them his own scars, and thought, “If the tools of war are flowing from the US, maybe these are the people we should be setting straight.”

Hutchison was twenty-seven years old, tall and slender, with an air of coiled intensity. Originally from the Bay Area, in California, she had come to Tucson a few years earlier, to work in the border ministry for the desert southwest conference of the United Methodist Church.

They’d hike through the mountains, snaking along a patch of New Mexico before emerging in Arizona, on the fringes of a bird sanctuary. Hutchison and the others would be waiting, posing as birders.

By the winter of 2020, Trump could duly claim to have curbed immigration in all forms, his biggest campaign promise of 2016. His administration had done it through brash executive action, relentless politics, and bureaucratic sleight of hand.

For as long as Stephen Miller had been in the White House, he harbored the ultimate ambition of closing the border entirely to asylum seekers. MPP was effective, but people still made it through. Miller wanted a policy free of exceptions and legal qualifications. The key was to portray immigration as a direct threat to American public health. It had long been a talking point on the far right—immigrants brought diseases—but Miller sought to convert the claim into an actual policy prerogative. In 2018, when a large group of migrants in federal detention became gravely ill, including two small children who died, Miller felt the president should take advantage of the opportunity to seal the border. Immigrants, he liked to say, were “vectors of disease.”

In multiple cases, US officials knew that they were spreading COVID but didn’t seem to care.

Guatemala’s health minister, Hugo Monroy, announced that between 50 and 75 percent of deportees who had just arrived in the country were found to be infected.

The United States, he added, had become “the Wuhan of the Americas.”

an ICE official conceded, “The rights and interests of detainees were not a factor. You had the department making up a reason to move them.”

In the final weeks of December 2021, after ten months of negotiations, the Biden administration withdrew from settlement talks with the ACLU to provide financial compensation to the families separated at the border. The move was a shock even to administration officials. Previously, the president had left little room to doubt what he thought of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy. In November, he had said of the parents, “You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what.” What had changed his mind? In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that advocates were asking the government to consider giving $450,000 to each family member who had been separated. This number wasn’t final; the DOJ hadn’t agreed to it, and the government’s opening bid in the negotiations was substantially lower. But the GOP wasted no time using the figure to attack Biden. Already, Republican attorneys general in several states had filed lawsuits to block every immigration initiative that the president had issued since taking office. In virtually all cases, they were succeeding.

On November 3, a Fox News reporter asked Biden about the Wall Street Journal story at a press conference. It was “garbage,” Biden replied, dismissing the reports as inaccurate. But the figure had come up in the settlement talks. A few days later, Biden corrected himself. He reasserted his belief that the families separated by Trump should receive some form of compensation; he just wasn’t sure what an appropriate amount might be. Privately, though, officials at the White House argued that moving ahead with a settlement had become a greater political liability than any potential fallout from a broken promise.

By then, many of the president’s top immigration advisers at DHS and the White House had quietly left the administration.

It was an echo of the war years, but Salvadoran voters, who loved the president and despised the gangs, supported the policy by an overwhelming margin. Enforcement consisted of crackdowns in mostly poor neighborhoods, populated with people who were seen as having dudosa confiabilidad, or questionable trustworthiness. As one human rights advocate told me, “You hear people say, ‘Surely they must have been doing something if they’re being taken away.’ ” Prior to the state of exception, Bukele’s government, like its predecessors, had also secretly negotiated with imprisoned gang leaders. When the talks failed, however, the force of Bukele’s response forestalled the criticism that he had mismanaged the situation. Everyone who was arrested faced a minimum of six months in prison, but most languished longer, often without being charged. Innocent people were being swept up in large numbers. Jealous neighbors called in tips; bread sellers working in gang-controlled neighborhoods were locked up because they were found with small amounts of cash. Dozens of people died in custody.

When the prisons were filled, Bukele built another one, which he called the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, with a capacity of forty thousand.