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,
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