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.”
