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

by Jonathan Blitzer

At the end of 1979, one of Rosales’s superiors explained the logic to him while they were stationed at the San Salvador airport. Together with a group of soldiers, he was supposed to wait for a plane to land with nine deportees who were being returned from Mexico. If someone was deported it confirmed that he’d first tried to escape El Salvador, which meant he was presumed to be a leftist, an immediate death sentence. The protocol was to take deportees into custody for an “investigation.” A seasoned soldier like Rosales would have understood the translation: forced disappearances, which began with torture and ended in death. A few days later, the body would appear by the roadside and local newspapers would publish photographs that family members used to identify the remains.