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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.