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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.