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

by Jonathan Blitzer

In 2009, when Barack Obama took office, there was a backlog of half a million asylum cases. By the end of the Trump administration, the queue had reached 1.3 million.

In the late 1870s, much of the arable land in El Salvador had been in public hands. It belonged to individual communities whose population depended on it for their survival. The rise in global coffee prices, together with the need for an exploitable labor force, prompted the government to seize and privatize these holdings. There was too much money to be made, so it began auctioning off the plots to the wealthy owners of large plantation-style estates known as fincas. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were dispossessed, then forced to work for nothing on land that used to belong to them.

Haig was so frustrated that he entertained the possibility of invading Cuba to disrupt its support for the FMLN. “You just give me the word,” he told the president. “I’ll turn that fucking island into a parking lot.” It took the secretary of defense and the joint chiefs of staff—unlikely voices of restraint—to override him.

On the morning of December 8, three thousand Salvadoran troops led by the Atlacatl Battalion entered a string of remote mountain hamlets in the Morazán Department, in the eastern reaches of the country. It was part of a counterinsurgency campaign called Operation Rescue, aimed at reclaiming parts of the countryside from the guerrillas.

It was around five in the morning, on December 11, when the soldiers began rounding up the villagers of El Mozote and separating the men from the women and children. The men were marched to the village’s lone church and eventually lined up and executed; the women were taken to the hills, where they were raped and burned alive. On Monterrosa’s orders, the soldiers advanced to the other villages over the next two days, killing everyone they encountered and setting fire to the homes. Monterrosa had a word for such an operation—it was, he told his subordinates, a limpieza, or cleansing. By the end of the campaign, at least 978 people were dead, including 477 children under the age of twelve.

There had likely been a “firefight” between the army and guerrillas, but “no evidence” of a massacre, according to Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.

One was an international body created by the United Nations called the Commission for Historical Clarification. A staff of three hundred people spent two years conducting thousands of closed-door interviews, reviewing government documents, and reconstructing information on the atrocities of the war years. The commission would go on to publish a twelve-volume account that supplied some of the most definitive facts of the conflict: 200,000 civilians had been killed; there were 669 massacres; 83 percent of the victims were Maya; 93 percent of the crimes committed during the war years involved members of the military.

By 2015, the legal fight against corruption was reaching its high-water mark. That April, the country’s attorney general, Thelma Aldana, together with the CICIG, announced a criminal investigation into the president and vice president, accusing them of running a huge smuggling operation through the customs offices. The vice president resigned the following month; at one of her legal hearings, prosecutors played a wiretapped phone call that directly implicated the president in the bribery-and-kickback scheme.

In the center of Climentoro, a town in Huehuetenango, a dozen large white houses rose above the village’s traditional wooden huts like giant monuments. The structures were made of concrete and fashioned with archways, colonnaded porches, and elaborate moldings; some even boasted facades decorated with paintings of American flags. Their owners, who lived in the US, had sent money home to build American-inspired houses for when they returned, but few did. One three-story house with a faux-brick chimney was empty. The family of twelve had migrated a few years ago, leaving the vacant construction behind. Vecinos fantasmas, Feliciano Pérez, a local farmer, called them—ghost neighbors.

American authorities recorded twenty-two thousand children from Guatemala, more than those from El Salvador and Honduras combined. Much of this migration was coming from the western highlands, which received not only some of the highest rates of remittances per capita but also the greatest number of deportees. Of the ninety-four thousand immigrants deported to Guatemala from the US and Mexico in 2018, about half came from the region.

Half of the parents who were deported without their children under the zero tolerance policy were Guatemalan; between 10 and 20 percent came from departments where the majority of the population was Indigenous: Huehuetenango, El Quiché, San Marcos.

Only six hundred thousand Mam speakers existed in the world, but it was the ninth most common

language spoken in US immigration courts, out...

In late February 2017, Morales and a group of political aides and influential businessmen had met at a condominium in Guatemala City to hatch plans for attacking the reputation of the CICIG, the anti-corruption body, in the US. Within a few months, this group had expanded to include members of the Guatemalan National Congress. According to an investigation by Nómada, a Guatemalan news site, they began paying tens of thousands of dollars each month to the American lobbying firm Barnes & Thornburg, which was managed by a major fundraiser for Vice President Mike Pence. Another interest group opposing the CICIG retained the firm Greenberg Traurig, which had offices in Florida, the home state of Republican senator Marco Rubio. By April 2018, congressional Republicans were holding hearings on potential investigatory abuses committed by the CICIG; in the Senate, Rubio and the Utah Republican Mike Lee led a push to suspend US aid to the group.

In mid-April, the authorities said that seventy-four cases had originated from just two deportation flights. US officials considered this an exaggeration and sent scientists from the CDC to conduct tests. The results confirmed the Guatemalan government’s analysis: when twelve deportees were selected at random, they all tested positive. By the end of the month, roughly 20 percent of the nearly seven hundred confirmed cases of COVID in Guatemala were people who had been deported from the US. “We must not stigmatize,” Monroy said. “But I have to speak clearly. The arrival of deportees who have tested positive has really increased the number of cases.” The United States, he added, had become “the Wuhan of the Americas.”

Ever since the CICIG had been forced out of the country, in 2018, the attorney general, an arch conservative named María Consuelo Porras, had been charging and arresting lawyers who’d been involved in the fight against corruption. Twenty-two judges and anti-corruption prosecutors had been forced into exile. The claims against them were baseless; in many cases, private lawyers with ties to vested interests brought highly dubious charges that the ministry used as pretexts to launch formal investigations. The State Department issued sanctions against Consuelo Porras, but she wasn’t deterred.