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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.”