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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.