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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Juan was one of three plaintiffs, along with Neris González and Carlos Mauricio, who had each applied for asylum more than a decade earlier and now lived in Chicago and San Francisco. González was leading a sustainable agriculture program and Mauricio taught high school biology. Both had been brutally tortured: González in December 1979 and Mauricio in June 1983. Like Juan, neither had been charged with a crime, but their associations had made them suspect. González had been active in a base community through her church, while Mauricio had been a trained agronomist with a university professorship. The National Guardsmen who had kidnapped González from a market in San Vicente had taken an especially perverse interest in her. She was then eight months pregnant. The soldiers repeatedly raped her and pushed her down flights of stairs. They withheld food and made her spend the nighttime hours submerged neck-deep in a tub of ice water. They cut her forearm with machetes and put out lit cigarettes on her skin. At one point, they forced her to lie supine under a metal bed frame, which they balanced over her pregnant belly; they took turns standing on opposite ends of it so that the frame rocked back and forth over her abdomen like a seesaw. She gave birth shortly after being left for dead by the side of a road. Her baby had fractures and indentations on his face. He died two months later.