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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.

if liberal-democratic governments across the world fail to address the situation, it will continue to fuel the rise of populist authoritarianism.

He was pitching the American government’s latest gambit: a deal that would force any migrant traveling to the US through Guatemala to apply for asylum there instead. Top officials at DHS would soon be having the same conversations with the leaders of El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama. The goal, in effect, was to shift the US border farther south—some called it the “invisible wall.”

By the end of 2019, one million migrants—most of them from Central America—would be arrested at the southern border, a 90 percent increase from the year before and the highest total in twelve years.

In 2009, when Barack Obama took office, there was a backlog of half a million asylum cases. By the end of the Trump administration, the queue had reached 1.3 million.

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.

Each of the last three American presidents dealt with a major humanitarian emergency at the border, and each time the American public experienced it as a separate incident. One came in 2014, the next in 2019, the third in 2021. The latest crisis was always the worst, until the next one. But these were all different chapters of the same story, which went back to 1980.

That was the year the US first codified refugee and asylum law, while also deepening its involvement in two major civil wars in Central America. The first asylum seekers were escaping regimes the US was arming and supporting in the name of fighting communism.

In the 1980s, administrations in Washington saw Central America through the totalizing prism of the Cold War. Over the next few decades, the fear of the spread of leftism morphed into a fear of the spread of people. A straight line extends between the two, pulled taut during the intervening years of forced emigration, mass deportation, and political expediency. Immigration laws draw sharp boundaries around citizenship and identity, casting this history aside. Politics is a form of selective amnesia. The people who survive it are our only insurance against forgetting.

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.

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. What remained, the American historian Thomas Anderson wrote in 1971, was a “paranoiac fear of communism that has gripped the nation ever since. This fear is expressed in the continual labeling of even the most modest reform movements as communist or communist inspired.”

By the time Juan Romagoza went to the seminary, in the early 1960s, it was estimated that seventy-five people from twenty-five families controlled 90 percent of El Salvador’s wealth.

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.

The US government had never taken a serious interest in El Salvador, but after the Cuban Revolution, in 1959, concern over the spread of communism led to a new posture in the region. The Kennedy administration created a military command center, called SOUTHCOM, to coordinate so-called counterinsurgency operations carried out by special forces throughout Latin America. Modeled on American maneuvers in Vietnam, these activities were conceived as “guerrilla” actions “in support of the state.” The American paradigm posed an immediate dilemma for ordinary Salvadorans. The state itself was wildly repressive, but the US advisers who were training and arming it considered any public opposition to be grounds for a militarized response.

In 1972, a coalition called the Unión Nacional Opositora, which represented a broad array of leftists, was leading in the polls when the government abruptly stopped the vote count. After a mysterious delay, an announcement was made that the military’s preferred candidate, from the PCN, had won. A

to organize in El Centro,” Castillo said. The earliest waves of asylum seekers tended to be social and political activists in El Salvador. The skills that had led to their persecution helped stave off deportation.

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. Between 1980 and 1981, this had happened to more than ten thousand of the thirteen thousand Salvadorans apprehended at the border.

The Refugee Act was supposed to standardize the terms by which the INS administered asylum law. But, paradoxically, it also supplied the government with a legal pretext for issuing denials. According to the INS, asylum was available only to individuals facing persecution. A crippled economy and an atmosphere of generalized violence were not enough.

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.

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.” 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.

A thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Rufina Amaya, whose children and husband were killed in front of her, was the lone survivor of the massacre at El Mozote. A month later, she met two war reporters—Raymond Bonner, an American working for The New York Times, and Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto, a freelancer for The Washington Post. Each had traveled independently to El Mozote, where they found scenes of devastation: homes razed, the church destroyed, scattered corpses rotting in the sun. At the center of El Mozote, beside a demolished sacristy, bones, severed limbs, and pieces of flesh jutted from the rubble; the corpses of children were still clothed. The soldiers hadn’t bothered to bury any of their victims, or to hide the evidence of their atrocities. Both newspapers ran the story on their front pages on January 27, 1982, the day before Ronald Reagan was planning to send a formal notice to Congress announcing that El Salvador was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.”

The pushback from the administration was swift and ruthlessly effective. It denied everything, pointing to an obscure cable written by two American embassy officials who, “as the eyes and ears” of the US government, traveled with Salvadoran military personnel to evaluate the reports. The Americans were skittish about visiting areas controlled by the guerrillas, so they didn’t get close to any of the killing sites. Afterward, they wrote that “it is not possible to prove or disprove excesses of violence.” The ambiguous language of the cable served as the justification the administration officials needed.

Abrams was Reagan’s chief combatant. He was a disaffected Democrat, alienated by Carter’s foreign policy, who saw Central America as his proving ground. In the early 1980s, much of Abrams’s work consisted of rebutting, before Congress and in the press, evidence of atrocities committed by the Salvadoran government. He was also denying another growing body of evidence that began to dog the US government: an ever-larger number of Salvadorans being deported from the US were being killed upon their return. 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. But, unlike the evidence of faraway massacres, which was easier for Washington to obfuscate, the proof of the deportee murders came directly from the mouths of Salvadoran soldiers themselves.

At the end of 1979, one of Rosales’s superiors explained the logic to him while they were stationed at the San Salvador airport. Together with a group of soldiers, he was supposed to wait for a plane to land with nine deportees who were being returned from Mexico. If someone was deported it confirmed that he’d first tried to escape El Salvador, which meant he was presumed to be a leftist, an immediate death sentence. The protocol was to take deportees into custody for an “investigation.” A seasoned soldier like Rosales would have understood the translation: forced disappearances, which began with torture and ended in death. A few days later, the body would appear by the roadside and local newspapers would publish photographs that family members used to identify the remains.

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.

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.

By 1952, the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, only the second democratically elected president in the country’s history, was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. Not only had the company been exempt for decades; it had also secured a guarantee to pay its employees no more than fifty cents a day. In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the US government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. It didn’t matter that in a country of some three million people, the Communist Party had only about four thousand members. The start of the Cold War made American officials into easy m...

In Mexico, the Salvadorans could follow the war at home from news broadcasts and underground radio. They were amateur sleuths, cobbling together clues about the fighting in Usulután by reading between the lines of Salvadoran outlets that parroted government talking points. When the battles picked up in the town of Berlin, in 1983, the Salvadorans at the embassy read about the death toll among the guerrillas in the country’s mainstream papers. If there was no mention of military casualties, they knew the damage to the government was steep. While Juan and the others made these basic inferences, the US government could never seem to learn how to penetrate the doublespeak of the Salvadoran military.

Reporters occasionally turned up when Hutchison and the others crossed Central Americans at the border; cameramen sometimes milled around the participating churches. Their presence bothered Hutchison. From the beginning, she had wrestled with what it meant for her—a white woman and US citizen—to intervene on behalf of a group of Central Americans. “I could learn to live with atrocity, or I could stand with the oppressed and the persecuted and respond to these sojourners in my midst,” she wrote in the United Methodist Reporter, in the spring of 1983. But to be an American was to reckon with a guilty conscience. Indirectly but unequivocally, Hutchison’s government was responsible for driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. What she couldn’t figure out personally was how to manage the practical realities of the work (logistics, operations, strategy) without muzzling the people she was supposed to be helping. “They need to be able to make decisions for themselves,” she said. But those decisions depended on factors—such as where and when to travel; if and how to address the press—that the Americans were often in a better position to understand.

Hutchison and another activist once arrived at the border to bring a group of Salvadorans across, only to find two reporters from The Sacramento Bee who were already there waiting for them. “Did anyone ask these Salvadorans if they were OK with this?” Hutchison asked. There was no time to rehash the verbal agreements that had been brokered back in Tucson. The priority was getting the families into the US. The reporters were sympathetic, even valuable to the general cause, but now Hutchison had to make an extra set of arrangements for them. Did they need another car for the crossing? Who would travel with whom? How should they explain to the asylum seekers who these strange men with notebooks and cameras were?

The country was in a recession, which further inflamed the public against immigrants who were seen as competitors for their jobs. The president also had to think about his core political supporters. Growers, industrial farming operations, hotels, restaurants, and manufacturers along the border and in the Sunbelt depended on cheap labor, and already there was a shortage of unskilled workers in the Southwest. In May, a well-connected California farmer sent an angry letter to William French Smith, Reagan’s attorney general, complaining about INS activity in Fresno. Arrests by Border Patrol, he claimed, were costing him an average of seventeen hundred workers each month. He was losing crops. Reagan himself maintained a permissive, laissez-faire view of immigration that put him closer to the US Chamber of Commerce than to the populist wing of his party.

In January 1984, Rayburn’s new boss in Phoenix brought orders from the powerful director of the INS’s western district, Harold Ezell, a Reagan donor who had previously been the vice president of a California hot-dog chain called Wienerschnitzel International.

What distinguished the activists in San Francisco, beyond their unusual organizational sophistication, was their proximity to power. The Catholic Church wasn’t merely sympathetic to the causes of social justice in Latin America; its archbishop, John Quinn, an eloquent, silver-haired Californian in his midfifties, was at the forefront of the opposition to the American war effort. He also happened to be the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the late 1970s. In

The aim was to level the gross social inequalities that had given rise to the civil war. But now far-right members of the armed forces were openly murdering and threatening American partners in the effort. Officials at the State Department frantically met with the Salvadoran president, whom they had virtually handpicked for the job two years before. But when he tried to talk to the military brass, they rebuffed him. “I have no power, no authority,” he subsequently told the Americans. Reagan, meanwhile, was undercutting his own diplomats. First, he vetoed a bill that would have kept in place the minimal human rights certification requirements in El Salvador. Then, a month later, he publicly defended the death squads. “I’m going to voice a suspicion I’ve never said aloud before,” he said. “I wonder if all this is rightwing, or if those guerrilla forces have not realized that…they can get away with these violent acts, helping to try to bring down the government, and the rightwing will be blamed for it.”

in 1984 the atmosphere was unusually charged. The next day, El Salvador was holding elections. If the Christian Democrats backed by the Americans won, the Reagan administration would be validated; if they lost, the White House strategy would be up for grabs. Juan and the other activists were ambivalent. While the Christian Democrats were politically moderate—a far cry from the violent supremacy of the extreme right—their role in the government gave cover to the military. The generals were still the ones in charge.

When the government issued its indictment, it also submitted a long and detailed request on everything it wanted the judge to exclude from the case—namely, all the context that explained the motivations of the sanctuary activists. They requested that he impose tight restrictions on testimony about the conditions in El Salvador and Guatemala; the likelihood of deportations leading to death; the suspiciously high rejection rates for asylum claims coming from these countries; the US role in the region’s wars; the INS’s glaring record of mistreating asylum seekers; the tenets of international law; and the terms of the 1980 Refugee Act. All the government was bringing before the court was the narrow question of whether the sanctuary workers had helped cross and harbor undocumented immigrants. By the start of November, as the two sides were finalizing jury selection, Judge Carroll announced his decision to exclude any testimony or material that went beyond the most immediate question at hand. As he put it, only the attorney general of the United States had the power to admit immigrants as asylees. All the witnesses the defense lawyers had planned to call—human rights experts, legal scholars, church figures—could no longer testify. There’d be no point in putting any of the defendants on the stand either, because the judge wouldn’t allow them to explain their thinking.

Frequently, after Reno rose to object during Rodríguez’s testimony, Judge Carroll would instruct the jury to forget what it had just heard. This was a metaphor not just for the whole trial, but for the blinkered approach the US took on asylum: the government suppressed any facts that chafed with its agenda. Why, Reno wanted to know, hadn’t Rodríguez applied for asylum as soon as he set foot in the US? Rodríguez replied that he’d needed time to gather documentation. He started to explain what his lawyer had told him: the government was rejecting Salvadoran asylum applications at an exceptionally high rate. But before he could finish his sentence, Reno objected. Carroll stopped the testimony.

For half a decade now, the position of the Reagan administration had been categorical: “It’s not enough to be fleeing a civil war,” Elliott Abrams said just weeks before the lawyers filed the American Baptist Churches (ABC) lawsuit. “You have to show that you, personally, are a target.” But the INS numbers exposed a bias. If the government was preemptively ruling out claims brought by Salvadorans and Guatemalans, then applying for asylum was a foregone conclusion. On average, the US granted asylum to 23 percent of everyone who applied. But the grant rate for Nicaraguans was 14 percent, 34 percent for Poles, and 60 percent for Iranians. For Salvadorans it was less than 3 percent; for Guatemalans, less than 1 percent.

Los Angeles was at the national vanguard of anti-gang policing, which had more in common with the practices of the US Army than with the protocols of other police forces across the country. This “wasn’t policing,” according to one historian. It was “anti-insurgency run amok.” The idea was to uproot gang members from their strongholds; if that meant decimating whole neighborhoods that gangsters shared with working-class people of color, the collateral damage could be justified in the broader war against crime.

The Immigration Act of 1990, as the bill was called, was also a chance to resurrect the plan to protect Salvadorans from deportation. Moakley called it temporary protected status (TPS), and while, in theory, it could apply to immigrants from anywhere who were stranded in the US during periods of upheaval in their home countries, Moakley singled out Salvadorans. In the spring of 1980, 92,000 Salvadorans were living in the US, according to the Pew Research Center; by 1990, there were 459,000. Moakley’s measure was immediately opposed not just by conservatives but also by Democrats like Kennedy, who worried that it would doom his broader bill. This time Moakley had leverage, as chair of the Rules Committee and as head of a prominent task force investigating human rights abuses in El Salvador. If the Salvadoran issue “goes,” Moakley told Senate leadership, “then there’ll be no fucking bill.”

The 1990 act was the last major immigration reform package the US Congress would pass. In the following two decades, the only other significant measures to become law involved enforcement: tools to increase deportations, funding bills to expand border security, and an act to overhaul the Immigration and Naturalization Service. TPS holders would become permanently stuck with a status that was meant to be provisional.

After twelve years of fighting, some seventy-five thousand civilians were dead, and more than 20 percent of the surviving population was now living in the US.

Almost all the Indigenous Guatemalans in Florida at the time had come from somewhere in the Cuchamatán mountains, in small groups beginning in the early 1980s, as the repression in the western highlands of the country grew more intense. More than a million Maya fled to Mexico and the United States during those years. But their legal standing was difficult to discern. Carmelina lost an aunt, an uncle, and nineteen cousins to military murders; her father was so traumatized by the killings that he began to drink after the family reached Mexico, and he eventually landed in jail. Yet Carmelina and her mother, like most of the others who reached the US, were reluctant to speak about what they’d suffered. They figured their best move was to prove their willingness to work; the first words in English that many of them learned was the phrase “I need a good work.” This made it even easier for the government to write them off as “economic migrants.” Those who applied for asylum were almost all rejected. Between 1983 and 1986, close to a hundred thousand Guatemalans reached the US, but only fourteen asylum petitions were granted. The denials didn’t stop the flow of people heading north. They simply clouded any understanding of who was coming and why.

The riots in April 1992 changed everything in and around Los Angeles. By the time Eddie returned from El Salvador, there was a new mayor and a new police chief. The anti-gang units of the LAPD were in ascendance, and racial recriminations were all-consuming. Sixty-one percent of the “arrested looters” were Latino, according to the police. The areas hit hardest by the rioting in South Central Los Angeles were Black neighborhoods filled with Latinos. But the destruction also spread to other parts of the city with large populations of newly arrived immigrants from Central America and Mexico: Pico Union, Koreatown, East Hollywood. The more established Latino communities—in East Los Angeles, for instance—had tried to keep their distance from the mayhem, giving rise to other anxieties and resentments. In the Los Angeles Times, a Chicano journalist wrote, “Yes, Central American immigrants and Chicanos might both be termed ‘Latino.’ But the ethnic link between the two groups is thin.” The article ran with the headline, “Should Latinos Support Curbs on Immigrants? A Question Left by the Riots Is Whether New Arrivals Threaten Second- and Third-Generation Mexican-Americans.” Elana Zilberg, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, later wrote, “Whites pointed at Blacks, who pointed at Latinos, who in turn pointed at Central American immigrants.”

Millions of legal immigrants spent years of their lives paying taxes and starting families, only to see the political debate suddenly shift. To Muñoz’s mind, it was as though Congress were telling them, “You’re not us yet.” Muñoz’s parents were already citizens, but when she heard Republicans talk about how noncitizens didn’t “deserve” these protections, she nevertheless thought of her own family. She was reminded of a story her parents had told her about having once been threatened with eviction from an apartment for being overheard “speaking Mexican.”

The government was beginning to send out notices informing legal immigrants that their relief checks would stop coming. One clip in Muñoz’s folder included an account of a seventy-five-year-old Mexican-born farmworker named Ignacio Muñoz. He’d lived in the US for forty years and had been receiving four hundred dollars in supplemental security income each month. When a government letter reached him at his home in Stockton, California, he bought a gun and shot himself

In Washington, Gingrich hadn’t made immigration a central plank of his Contract with America, but Pete Wilson’s victory persuaded him that the hardliners in his caucus should run with the issue. The result was the second piece of legislation that Murguía and Muñoz spent the summer trying to fight off. It was an overweening measure crafted by Alan Simpson, in the Senate, and Lamar Smith, the new chair of the immigration subcommittee in the House. Simpson was still smarting from his lost fight over the 1990 Immigration Act, which expanded legal immigration over his objections. With the Republicans in the majority, he wanted to reinstitute restrictions.