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

Juan Romagoza grew up in Usulután, El Salvador. In 1970, he received a scholarship to study medicine and moved to San Salvador. At the time, Salvador’s business elite was allied with the armed forces, but the public was beginning to rebel, creating an “increasingly turbulent” environment. Protests and strikes followed by government crackdowns were common, and the university often closed for months at a time.

During these closures, Juan volunteered in hospitals across the country, focused on his goal of becoming a heart surgeon. Near the end of his education, he was working in a hospital outside of San Salvador when an injured anti-government student protester was rushed in. The surgery was successful. Juan sat by the patient’s bed until masked and armed soldiers entered the ward and shot the patient. They killed the student, and Juan picked up the shotgun cartridges so he would always remember what had happened.

Until the 1870s, much of Salvadorian land was held by Indigenous farming communities. However, as coffee prices rose, the government seized private land and auctioned it off for plantation-style coffee estates. Salvadoran peasants were forced to work in brutal conditions on land that used to be theirs. The “inevitable” revolt happened in 1932, lasting just a few days but provoking a lengthy and violent response from the government called La Matanza. This massacre resulted in the death of around 30,000 peasants, approximately 2% of the entire Salvadoran population.

Later, the violence was covered up by the government, replaced with stories of how the military had squashed a dangerous communist uprising. La Matanza led to a hyper-concentration of wealth among El Salvador’s elite and an enduring fear of communism. The state security forces, which all “received training and weapons from the United States” (15), were known for their continued brutal abuse of peasants from the countryside.

After the Cuban Revolution, the United States took a greater interest in Central American countries, including El Salvador. The Kennedy administration organized a military command center to support government activity against counterinsurgents; however, the Salvadoran state “was wildly repressive” (15), and everything from strikes to public protests was met with violent militarized responses.

After the death of the student protester, Juan shared the information with Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who was known for championing the poor. Since 1977, Romero had been an outspoken critic of the government, calling for land reforms and an end to the violence. During his sermons, he would list the state’s victims in “the most definitive [account] of the ongoing repression” (20). Romero complained that the country was run by “unscrupulous military officers,” referring to Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, the head of the National Guard, and José Guillermo García, the defense minister and “de facto president.”

On March 24th, 1980, the military launched an attack on San Salvador, assassinating Romero and ushering in a new level of violence. Juan treated torture victims and activists, but the work put him in danger. He learned that his name was on a military hit list, and he began traveling to and from the hospital in disguise. He also began a relationship with another medical student called Laura, who soon became pregnant.

Archbishop Romero’s funeral was held on Palm Sunday, and tens of thousands of mourners, along with hundreds of clergymen, gathered to pay their respects. Juan and other medical students gathered with supplies in case of violence. Sure enough, Romero’s service was interrupted by an explosion and gunfire. Hundreds were injured, and at least 40 were killed.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president, and the Salvadoran far-right military celebrated as he ended the Carter administration’s human rights policy. Soon, guerrillas, non-guerrilla leftists, and those accused of being sympathetic were being indiscriminately kidnapped, murdered, and tortured. On December 2nd, 1980, four American churchwomen were pulled over by a National Guard truck and were arrested, raped, and murdered. General Vides Casanova denied involvement, but his cousin had given the order to murder the churchwomen.

Several days after these murders, Juan was shot in the ankle by government soldiers while conducting medical examinations in a rural village. He was taken and brutally tortured for nearly a month. His captors destroyed his left arm so he could no longer practice medicine. One day, Juan was visited by Vides Casanova, who questioned Juan, and the torture continued to intensify until the soldiers placed him inside a coffin.

In April 1976, Margo Cowan was fired from her job as head of the Manzo Area Council, which provided a variety of services in Tucson, Arizona. Immigration work was generally outside of the Council’s scope because most of the Mexican American community belonged to binational families that moved freely between the United States and Mexico.

However, by 1974, the number of illegal border crossings had risen to nearly a million per year, and policymakers in Washington worried about the border being “overrun.” Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents began appearing in Tucson and arresting undocumented individuals. People descended on the Manzo Area Council for help formalizing their status. The Council was soon accused of harboring undocumented immigrants, and INS seized hundreds of client files and immigration applications in a raid.

Cowan and her partner and fellow activist Lupe Castillo were called to help when a number of Salvadorian migrants were rescued from the US desert. The recovering Salvadorians had escaped death squads and a repressive military regime; it was not a demographic the women were used to working with, but soon hundreds more Salvadorians were arriving in Tucson.

Although famous for being a “nation of immigrants,” the United States didn’t have an official refugee or asylum policy until the Immigration and Nationality Act passed in 1965. However, the law was far from comprehensive. In 1980, Congress passed the Refugee Act, which ended “the policy chaos” (48) surrounding immigration. The Act defined a refugee as someone who could not return to their homeland due to fear of persecution on the basis of “race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group or political opinion” (48).

Doris Meissner was involved with the “marathon meetings” for the Refugee Act as officials tried to find the best system for admitting asylum seekers. At the time, around 2,000 asylum seekers per year entered the United States, and Meissner suggested they be “really expansive” with the new policy and allow for 5,000 asylum seekers to be admitted.

Just a few weeks later, boats filled with Cubans began arriving in South Florida, and the state was soon overwhelmed by more than 15,000 refugees. Lawmakers struggled to manage the influx “without immediately undercutting the principle that migrants had the right to seek protection” (51). Many of the refugees had no family in the United States. They were housed at army bases, sometimes in “prisonlike conditions.” Violence broke out, creating “lastingly toxic” political consequences and associations between migrants and rising crime rates.

Most of the Salvadorian migrants that crossed the border were housed in an overcrowded rural California detention center known as El Centro. Migrants were deported as quickly as possible, often after they signed their own “voluntary departure” form that was only available in English. Cowan and Castillo were determined to stop the deportations. They set up a team of volunteers in a nearby hotel to process paperwork.

One day, Castillo found a boilerplate description of the situation in El Salvador in a client’s file. It concluded that “a crippled economy and an atmosphere of generalized violence were not enough” (57) to qualify for asylum. An official in El Centro told Castillo that they printed the document in bulk to “reject Salvadorans’ asylum applications en masse” (57).

Meanwhile, in Tucson, pastor John Fife also stood up for immigrant rights. When the Salvadorian migrants were rescued from the Arizona desert, Fife went to the hospital to fulfill the migrants’ request for a pastor. Instead of simple prayers, the survivors shared their stories of death squads and persecution. Following the advice of the local INS district director, he began to help Salvadorians fill out asylum applications.

Cowan, Castillo, and Fife joined forces with James Corbett, a Quaker rancher who began traveling across the border to help Salvadorians cross into the United States to claim asylum. Corbett believed that Border Patrol was illegally denying Salvadorians the opportunity to seek asylum at ports of entry, so he began to shuttle migrants across himself and deliver their asylum applications to the Tucson INS office.

By the summer of 1981, however, all the asylum applications the team submitted were being rejected. One day, the migrants Corbett brought to INS for asylum applications were detained on sight. Distressed, Corbett suggested they “go underground” and start a “pro bono coyote operation” (60), smuggling migrants into the country and transporting them away from the border.

In El Salvador, US-trained officers led battalions of troops through the countryside “on the pretense of rooting out guerrillas,” committing atrocities while the US “looked the other way” (63). One town, El Mozote, was completely demolished, and an estimated 978 people, including 477 children, were murdered. One woman survived and told her story to two war reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post. The reporters’ stories ran on the front pages of their respective papers on January 27th, 1982.

That same day, President Reagan was meant to assure Congress that the Salvadorian government was trying to comply with human rights observations to continue receiving military aid from the United States. El Salvador dismissed the massacre as “guerrilla propaganda” and continued to receive US funds. Meanwhile, Salvadorians being deported from the United States were often murdered by the military as soon as they touched down in El Salvador.

Back in Tucson, INS began cracking down on immigration activists. Cowan, Castillo, Fife, and Corbett met and agreed that they should go public with their smuggling operation to generate public interest and outrage. Fife remembered a story about a Salvadorian boy in California who was dragged out of a church by INS. The congregation was furious that the agents had violated a sacred space meant to be a sanctuary. Fife proposed the idea of making the church a public sanctuary space to his congregation; they approved the proposal, and other churches in the area and across the country joined in. On March 24th, 1982, Fife sent letters announcing the church as a sanctuary space to the local and federal government and held a press conference introducing a Salvadorian man as the first to take sanctuary there.

After two days in the coffin, emaciated, in pain, and disassociating, Juan was released to his family. They worried the military would come back to kill him, so Juan moved frequently between safe houses, and he could not seek anything but superficial treatment for the festering bullet wounds in his ankle and forearm. This went on for two months.

Finally, a family friend agreed to smuggle him to Mexico for emergency medical treatment. Before leaving, Juan spent one last night with his parents. His girlfriend, Laura, and their five-month-old daughter had been stuck in a combat zone and were unreachable.

In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company was “an invisible government” in the years following World War II. The banana corporation was the country’s largest employer, controlling much of the nation’s infrastructure, including ports, railroads, and phone and telegraph facilities. When Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz attempted to make the company pay taxes, the United Fruit Company convinced the US government that Árbenz was a communist sympathizer. Together, the CIA and the United Fruit Company selected a new candidate and “staged” an invasion to put Castillo Armas into power. Armas was assassinated in 1957 and replaced by another US-backed candidate. In 1963, the CIA prevented Árbenz’s mentor from running for president, and in 1966, the agency helped the Guatemalan military execute a violent “social cleansing” to do away with “real and alleged communists” (78).

This military crackdown inspired armed resistance, not from leftists but from officers within the government who worried “that the regime had sacrificed the country’s sovereignty to the US” (79). In response, the military became more violent and repressive. The United States supported the Guatemalan government with training, weapons, and technology. The country was in one of the most violent periods of civil war when Juan passed through in 1981. However, the fighting wasn’t as apparent as in El Salvador. Much of the war was being waged out of sight in the countryside, where the government was committing genocide against the Indigenous Maya population out of fear they would side with the guerrilla forces.