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

There were no white people in Eddie’s neighborhood, and Central Americans occupied “the bottom of an already vicious racial hierarchy” (159). Salvadorian teenagers had to choose between the dangers of remaining unaffiliated with any gang or the possible violence of trying to be accepted as an outsider.

18th Street was a Chicano gang that had a reputation for being welcoming to outsiders, and it quickly grew into one of LA’s “more fearsome” gangs. MS, on the other hand, was “a band of outcasts and misfits” (160) who had recently arrived from Central America. They focused on Satanic symbolism, sometimes adding the number 13 to their tags. MS was “outnumbered and outgunned” by other gangs, so they started using machetes to fight. They didn’t have the manpower to deal in drugs or extortion, so they primarily focused on defense and making a name for themselves. In 1984, the LAPD began trying to clean up the streets ahead of the 1984 Olympic Games. They arrested a number of high-profile gang members, allowing MS “to gain some ground” (161).

When Eddie was 11, his family moved to escape the crack epidemic in their South Central neighborhood. He wasn’t drawn to gangs’ “violence and air of malcontent” (163), so he started hanging out with taggers, roaming the city with a can of spray paint. MS-13 was starting to look more like LA’s Chicano gangs, and more of its leaders were being arrested and serving time. However, in prison, there weren’t enough of them to protect themselves from the other imprisoned gangsters, so they had to affiliate themselves with a bigger gang. Soon, MS-13 aligned itself with La Eme, otherwise known as the Mexican Mafia.

Meanwhile, the LAPD was trying to retake control of the city with a new policy called Operation Hammer. Officers entered neighborhoods with high rates of gang crimes and made nearly 1,500 arrests. Although they were meant to be targeting criminals, they “had wide latitude” (167), and many were jailed for the vague crime of being a “gang associate.” As a consequence of dismantling gangs, the police often “decimat[ed] whole neighborhoods” of “working-class people of color” (168).

One MS-13 leader was a former Salvadorian soldier trained by US troops who waged “a full-fledged war” against the 18th Street gang, drawing the police’s attention. Initially, the LAPD focused on Black gangs, but when turning to the Latino gangs, they could deport members, not just arrest them. In 1986, the LAPD began working with INS in a pilot attempt to “obliterate violence by gangs” (169). The city deported a total of 175 individuals with alleged ties to gangs, as well as a number of other immigrants with felony convictions.

Eddie and his family had legal status thanks to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. However, “Eddie took this luxury for granted” (170) and was often in trouble. In 1991, a juvenile judge wanted to send him to reform school or a juvenile facility. Instead, Eddie’s mother offered to send her boys back to El Salvador for one year.

La Clínica was constantly full of immigrants seeking treatment. One day, Juan was approached by a homeless Salvadorian man who confessed that he was one of the soldiers who tortured Juan. In fact, there were a number of ex-soldiers among La Clínica’s clientele. Some volunteers thought they didn’t deserve treatment, but Juan disagreed. The ex-soldiers were often in “the worst shape” of any of the refugees, and Juan organized exclusive therapy circles for them.

In November of 1989, the FMLN launched a surprise attack on the northern neighborhoods of San Salvador. The army responded with force, killing more than a thousand civilians. The guerrillas pulled back, but the army had been spooked, and death squads launched a number of attacks on students, journalists, and activists. On November 16th, a group of soldiers stormed one of El Salvador’s most prominent universities. They murdered five Spanish priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, and left graffiti on a sign implicating the FMLN in the crime. There was an international outcry, and the US assembled a task force to investigate. However, the investigation uncovered only “that neither the Salvadoran government nor the White House sought the full truth” (177). Decades passed before the Salvadoran military was implicated in the killings, and the US was revealed to have had “foreknowledge” of the crime.

The Immigration Act of 1990 was moving through Congress with the goal of creating more pathways to enter the country legally, and a provision was added for Salvadorians to be granted a “temporary protected status.” The status would not be a path to citizenship and would have to be renewed every 18 months. The Immigration Act of 1990 “was the last major immigration reform package the US Congress would pass” (179). Future laws focused only on border enforcement, and Salvadorians who obtained TPS became “permanently stuck with a status that was meant to be provisional” (179).

While Washington DC’s Latino population was growing quickly, the city remained “overwhelmingly monolingual” and “inaccessible” to newly arrived Salvadorians (181). There was a stark racial division between white and Black Americans, and many Central Americans lived in isolation and fear of deportation. Juan became a cornerstone of the Latino community, encouraging others to seek medical care and recruiting immigrants who had been medical professionals back in their home countries to help. The mix of medical care and community outreach was what Juan had always dreamed of, but the work was unpaid, so he worked nights as a janitor.

On Cinco de Mayo 1991, the Central American community of Mount Pleasant took advantage of the day to unwind. That evening, two police officers arrested four drunk Salvadorian men. As they were approaching the fourth, one of the cops saw the man had a knife and shot him in the chest. The man was taken away in an ambulance and survived, but an increasingly angry crowd assembled, and the English-speaking police officers struggled to calm them. Rioting went on for three days, followed by “a fragile period of collective introspection” (185).

Efforts were made to improve relations between the police and DC’s Latino population. Juan was invited to speak with police officers about why “Central American residents feared men in uniform” (186). Many of the police officers were surprised to learn that the Latino people they were dealing with weren’t all from Mexico.

Eddie was left speechless by the strangeness of Central America. He knew “ghetto,” but what he saw there “wasn’t even ghetto.” It was December of 1991, and peace talks were wrapping up, but rubble and bullet holes marked the nearness of the war. Eddie and his brother Carlos stood out in their baggy LA cholo clothes. They were teased, but the other kids were also curious. To Eddie’s surprise, he saw a number of boys he knew from LA, gang members who had been deported. Back home, they were “hardened criminals” that Eddie tried to avoid. However, in San Salvador, “they hung out because they all spoke English” (191).

After 12 years of war and 75,000 civilian deaths, the FMLN and the Salvadoran government reached a peace agreement in 1991. Juan decided it was finally safe for him to plan a trip home. He spent 10 days on a whirlwind tour of El Salvador with a small group from La Clínica and was able to reconnect with his lost daughter.

The war officially ended on January 16th, 1992. However, a new war was just starting in Los Angeles. On March 3rd, a Black man named Rodney King was apprehended in LA for drunk driving and was violently beaten by a number of officers. The beating was recorded by an onlooker and broadcast on television across the world. When the officers responsible were acquitted, Los Angeles devolved into “pandemonium,” with rioting so extreme the city “looked like a war zone” (196). Eddie watched the violence with his new Salvadorian friends. One boy wondered if Eddie really wanted to go back there because it “sound[ed] dangerous.”

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he offered Doris Meissner a job heading the INS. In her new role, Meissner proposed a three-pronged reform of the US’s asylum system. First, she wanted “to disincentivize frivolous applications” (203) by ending automatic work permits for asylum seekers. Next, INS would attack the backlog of applications by processing the newest ones first, thereby avoiding the time-consuming work of processing out-of-date information. Finally, they would assign a dedicated staff to hear cases and review human rights reports. The plan was implemented and quickly began showing results. However, Clinton’s top advisor was eager for something to be done “about the border.”

Meanwhile, in Texas, a border patrol chief was organizing agents along a high-traffic part of the border separating El Paso from Ciudad Juárez. Their goal was to deter migrants from crossing by pushing them toward more dangerous parts of the border. “Operation Blockade” seemed to be a success. Crossings in the sector dropped by 72%, but in reality, migrants were mostly just crossing in different areas, and more were dying in the process. Nevertheless, Operation Blockade ushered in the “prevention through deterrence” method of border enforcement.

Back in LA, Eddie and some friends were arrested and charged with causing $38,000 worth of damage with their graffiti. Eddie was sent to Juvenile Camp Louis Routh where he fought forest fires instead of serving jail time. He “found the atmosphere intensely motivating” (210), and it encouraged him to think seriously about his future. He earned his GED, bought a used car, and worked at a nearby animal hospital.

One night, Eddie went out for a walk, even though his neighborhood was dangerous at night. He saw a group of officers arresting someone, but he continued walking confidently to his car with a friend. He was about to drive away when the officers stopped him. They found an ounce of weed in the glovebox, and Eddie’s friend had a packet of meth. Both men were arrested for drug possession.