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

by Jonathan Blitzer

“The guerrilla groups, the revolutionary groups, almost without exception began as associations of teachers, associations of labor unions, campesino unions or parish organizations which were organized for the definite purpose of getting a schoolhouse up on the market road,” an American diplomat observed. “When they tried to use their power of association to gain their ends, first they were warned and then they were persecuted and tortured and shot.”

Without consulting the civilian members of the junta, the US had been giving direct aid to the military. The latest waves of killings hadn’t dissuaded Washington. American money went toward gas masks, bulletproof vests, and other supplies, which the US president rationalized as forms of “nonlethal aid.” Romero wanted to correct Carter’s misapprehension. Now the security forces were simply better equipped and “even more violent in repressing the people,” he said,

Earlier that year, legislators required the State Department to issue annual reports on human rights in each of the countries receiving American military aid. If any of them displayed a “pattern of gross violations,” Congress would freeze the money.

1976

“If they can get to Romero, no one can be saved,” Juan’s neighbor said, her voice flat. She was too stunned to cry. Juan didn’t know it at the time, but American officials shared her assessment. Cables sent from the US embassy in San Salvador had described the prospect of Romero’s killing as the likely end of a “moderate solution” to the country’s political crisis; all that remained was a “military solution,” the prospect of untrammeled terror.

Having been exposed to the broader context of US involvement in Central America as part of her graduate studies, Castillo could prime Cowan and the others. The US was propping up a war machine in El Salvador, she told them; it had long treated the region as a geopolitical laboratory. The CIA had overthrown the Guatemalan government in 1954 at the behest of an American corporation that, among other things, wanted bigger tax breaks abroad. Honduras had come to be known in the region as the USS Honduras, a de facto American military installation. For years, the US’s man in Nicaragua was a dictator. In Castillo’s circles, as the saying went, El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.

Witnessing the swell of new arrivals, Meissner stared straight at a policy paradox. How did you deal with this, she wondered, without immediately undercutting the principle that migrants had the right to seek protection, a right she had just fought to enshrine in law?

“When the US picks a fight with you, and you’re on the TV saying, ‘We’re not afraid of you,’ then people who are the victims of terrible abuse come to you.”

Deportation wasn’t the only danger Salvadorans faced inside El Centro. There were forms that, if signed, waived the legal right to apply for asylum. Unless they’d been forewarned, the Salvadorans who turned up in El Centro didn’t know to insist on applying for asylum, often in the face of intimidating resistance.

The Salvadorans were handed a form in English with a dense block of small English text and a line at the bottom for a signature. The paper was not an asylum application or some sign of impending relief, but an administrative sleight of hand called a “voluntary departure,” which immediately fast-tracked their expulsion to El Salvador without an immigration hearing. Not realizing they were waiving their rights, many signed the forms. Hours later, they were on a plane back to San Salvador.

This gave Cowan an idea. If the INS was overloaded with applications, the agency couldn’t immediately rule on each case; she could buy her clients time and avert deportations by filing as many as possible, and appealing them to a body called the Board of Immigration Appeals. “The government won’t decide if we win or lose” in individual cases, she said. “We’ll define success for ourselves. We’ll get our clients out of custody” and into the orbit of friends and family members. She called it “moving people off the border.”

The US had been propping up a corrupt and openly repressive officer corps out of fear that reforming the military would risk destabilizing it. The result, one US official wrote at the start of Reagan’s term, was an army “sitting in garrisons abusing civilians” rather than combating the guerrillas.

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.

While Cubans were immediately admitted and set on a path to permanent residency within a year, the Haitians were thrown into detention centers.

detainees were relegated to a separate legal track known as an “exclusion hearing,” an expedited form of deportation predicated on the legal fiction that they’d never, technically, entered the US.

a federal judge intervened, finding that the conditions in Haiti were “stark, brutal, and bloody,” and that deportees from the US were in “substantial danger” of being tortured or killed. The INS, he ruled, had violated the Constitution in denying the Haitians the semblance of a fair hearing.

The Americans were helping to unleash a regional exodus. More than a million Salvadorans were displaced by 1984. Almost a quarter of the country’s population would eventually be living in the US. Tens of thousands of them lacked legal status because the American government refused to recognize their legitimate claims to asylum.

“Too often in recent years we have tolerated a double standard, under which asylum has been unfairly denied to legitimate refugees for fear of embarrassing friendly but repressive governments,” said Ted Kennedy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on immigration.

Juan heard constantly that Salvadorans in San Francisco might be risking the safety of their families back home anytime they attended a rally or church event. Most of the time he could reassure them, but applying for asylum involved handing over personal information to a government they didn’t trust.

Los Angeles was at the national vanguard of anti-gang policing, which had more in common with the practices of the US Army than with the protocols of other police forces across the country. This “wasn’t policing,” according to one historian. It was “anti-insurgency run amok.” The idea was to uproot gang members from their strongholds; if that meant decimating whole neighborhoods that gangsters shared with working-class people of color, the collateral damage could be justified in the broader war against crime.

John Brecthel, the assistant district director for INS investigations in Los Angeles at the time, said, “If a gang member is out on the street and the police can’t make a charge, we will go out and deport them for being here illegally if they fit that criteria.” Between December 1988 and April 1989, the effort led to 175 deportations for alleged involvement in “gang and narcotics activities,” including seventy-seven to Mexico, fifty-six to El Salvador, and fifteen to Honduras. The task force claimed to have “decimated” MS-13 leadership.

“The capital of the world” is what Juan called Washington; or, more emphatically, “the capital of the empire that drove me from my home.”

Whatever their means of disposal, everyone had wised up to the same strategy: without a passport to confirm a country of origin, there was no way for INS officials to initiate the deportation process. These travelers requested asylum, and because there was limited space for detention, the INS often released them with a work-authorization form and a future court date.

Between 1983 and 1986, close to a hundred thousand Guatemalans reached the US, but only fourteen asylum petitions were granted.

García. At least a thousand war criminals from all over the world were living in the US at the time, including many Salvadoran military officers. One war refugee bumped into his torturer on a public bus in the Bay Area. The man who had killed Óscar Romero sold used cars in Modesto, California. A colonel implicated in the assassination of the Jesuit priests in 1989 had a job at a candy factory outside Boston.

The Clinton administration was so eager to demonstrate its toughness on crime that it had deported hardened criminals without warning the Salvadoran authorities. Its disregard was even more egregious because the US embassy, more or less simultaneously, had also been dictating whom the government named to top posts in the national police force. Between 1993 and 1996, four thousand teenagers and young men with thick criminal records were sent to El Salvador. Many of them had been arrested for robberies, kidnappings, and homicides. After twelve years of civil war, the country was in no state to receive them. Military weaponry was easily accessible. The economy had cratered, and many former soldiers and guerrillas, with experience in kidnapping and extortion, were turning to street crime. One of the terms of the peace accords was that the government would reconstitute the national police. As a theoretical check against its past abuses, patrolling officers were lightly armed with old pistols and nightsticks, while criminals carried M16 rifles. There were budget shortfalls, recruitment problems, and a shortage of jail space.

Members of the new Salvadoran government pleaded with the US ambassador and officials at the State Department to slow the deportations, or at least to help devise a system for screening the most dangerous elements. But the Americans weren’t interested. In August 1997, the president of El Salvador told The New York Times, “This is a very serious problem. The United States lets these dangerous types out and tells them ‘go back to where you came from.’ But we have no way to try them or jail them . . . and so we must not only let them in but let them go free.”

“A common past of deportation and abandonment unified them,” Martínez d’Aubuisson wrote. “They thought El Salvador was a giant, violent California prison.”

In Latin America, the burgeoning industry depended on US immigration policy, which was uprooting tens of thousands of Americanized immigrants each year.

Of the thirty people on his original deportation flight, fewer than five were still alive.

Obama replied, “You know what? I don’t really sleep at night, but let me tell you why. It’s not just that I worry about these kids from El Salvador. I also worry about kids in Sudan, and in Yemen, and in other parts of the world. And here’s my problem: we live in a world with nation states. I have borders. You may believe that it’s inherently unfair that a child born in El Salvador has a completely different set of opportunities available and a completely different set of dangers than a child born in the US. And that’s because it is unfair. I can’t fix that for you.”

The same year Juliana and her sisters fled El Salvador, some 40,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the border, along with 40,000 families. In 2016, there were 60,000 children and 78,000 families. Deportations generated a separate wave of people, flowing in the opposite direction. In 2015 and 2016, the US deported roughly 42,000 Salvadorans, 42,000 Hondurans, and 67,000 Guatemalans. With this many people in a state of perpetual flux—pushed toward the border, then pushed back again—the dividing line between the US and Central America only grew blurrier.

The US Treasury Department put MS-13 in the company of Mexican drug cartels and the Japanese Yakuza, multibillion-dollar operations. MS-13’s annual revenue, by contrast, was $30 million; its members, on average, made about sixty-five dollars a month, which was half the minimum wage of a day laborer in the agricultural sector.

The best explanation Eddie could come up with for the ferocity of the violence was that teenage gangsters were so drained of hope and vitality that prison wasn’t appreciably worse than ordinary life on the streets.

Extreme weather events were just the most obvious climate-related calamities. There were increasingly wide fluctuations in temperature—unexpected surges in heat followed by morning frosts—and unpredictable rainfall. Almost half a year’s worth of precipitation might fall in a single week, which would flood the soil and destroy crops. Grain and vegetable harvests that once produced enough to feed a family for close to a year now lasted less than five months. “Inattention to these issues,” the report’s authors wrote, can drive “more migration to the United States” and “put at grave risk the already deteriorating viability of the country.”

the deterrent effects of zero tolerance were moot where people were starving.

“If we don’t risk anything, we don’t live,” he said. “There aren’t any other options.” He added, “No one ever wants to migrate. The whole thing is a fight not to become invisible.”

One of the most fearsome figures in the Salvadoran high command was an officer named Nicolas Carranza, who was a point of contact between the military and the death squads. He became a US citizen in the late 1980s—most likely with the help of the CIA, where he’d been on the payroll—and worked as a security guard at an art museum in Memphis.

In 2020, the deportations were spreading an actual virus.

Guatemala’s health minister, Hugo Monroy, announced that between 50 and 75 percent of deportees who had just arrived in the country were found to be infected.

“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.”

Some thirty thousand people were being held in substandard conditions that heightened the risk of contagion. Testing was virtually nonexistent during the spring and summer months of 2020. Many detainees across the country launched hunger strikes and staged protests; some secretly uploaded videos to YouTube to plead for help and broadcast urgent messages, such as “We want to get out of here alive.” An asylum-seeking Cuban doctor who was being held in a privately run facility in Louisiana told the Mississippi Free Press, “There’s no way to ‘distance’ here. We sleep in bunk beds on top of each other, in columns with less than a [few feet] between us, head to toe. We use the same cafeteria as those in quarantine with no cleaning in between. . . . My medical opinion is that many people will die.”

In early June, ICE transferred seventy-four detainees from Arizona and Florida to a facility in Farmville, Virginia. The alleged reason was that the Arizona and Florida facilities were overcrowded, but a DHS official admitted to The Washington Post that the detainees were moved so that ICE agents could contravene department rules on travel and secretly hitch a ride on the planes to help police Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, DC. A super-spreader event followed, in which some three hundred immigrants in the Virginia facility contracted the virus. After one of them died, an ICE official conceded, “The rights and interests of detainees were not a factor. You had the department making up a reason to move them.”

El Salvador and Honduras also had citizens held in US detention centers. Those governments allowed deportation flights to continue. In late April, both Nayib Bukele and Juan Orlando Hernández received a political boost from the Trump administration: large shipments of ventilators, accompanied by enthusiastic presidential tweets. Each was also granted a one-on-one telephone call with Trump.

Republicans had a slogan ready—“Biden’s Border crisis”—which network news mostly adopted. As usual, the Democrats were divided, so the president was largely on his own.

In an uncanny reprise of the 1980s, Central America was once again a place of high peril for US politicians. If Harris was supposed to fly to the region for meetings, where should she go? There were no interlocutors left who could speak in good faith. Years of American interventionism, followed by many more years of indifference, made old allies suspect and new ones impossible to find.