I’ve just finished reading Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, by Jonathan Blitzer. I highly recommend it: in-depth reporting, deeply personal storytelling, and painfully accurate analysis of U.S. involvement in Central America and immigration from Central America. Instead of a summary of today’s (very few) news articles on immigration, here is a review of this important book.
Picasso’s Guernica vividly shows the 1937 bombing of Guernica by Germany and Italy at the behest of the Spanish Fascists—a historical atrocity captured in surreal images of screams and death and pain. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here reminds me of Guernica. Jonathan Blitzer’s book delineates a deadly and painful history of U.S. Central America and immigration policy. Like Picasso’s painting, the book focuses on individuals, whose stories create a textbook of tragedy.
The story of Juan Romagoza begins in the 1960s, when he was a boy growing up in the Salvadoran province of Usulután. He thought first of becoming a priest, but left the seminary and became a doctor. Right wing repression against the people of El Salvador touched his life repeatedly. In 1980, he was arrested and tortured for weeks. Rescued by the influence of a family member, he escaped the country and became a refugee, leaving behind his family, his partner, and their five-month-old daughter.
The violence and repression that drove Juan Romagoza out of El Salvador were intimately and integrally connected with U.S. foreign policy. The United States supported and funded the government that tortured the doctor, as it backed other right wing dictatorships in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. When refugees from violence and genocide managed to escape, the United States deported them.
Elliott Abrams was Reagan’s Central America guy in the 1980s. His title: Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, a brutal irony in the face of deadly U.S. Central America policies that he helped design and carry out.
“[Abrams] was also denying another growing body of evidence that began to dog the US government: an ever-larger number of Salvadorans being deported from the US were being killed upon their return. … Soldiers lay in wait for planes to touch down. The bodies were discarded along highways near the airport.” (p. 100)
Today’s U.S. deportation practices continue to return deportees to danger and death, whether from their governments or from gangs acting with no restraint by those governments. In 2020, Human Rights Watch documented deaths of deportees in El Salvador. In 2024, the U.S. government warns U.S. citizens “Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and poor health care infrastructure.” At the same time, the U.S. government continues to deport Haitians to that violence and chaos.
Blitzer weaves together deeply reported life stories with clear descriptions of history and government policies. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here brings alive the deep-rooted connections between U.S. Central America policy and the governmental and gang violence that drives desperate asylum seekers to the United States.
As someone who has closely followed U.S. involvement in Central America and immigration issues for decades, I found Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here a skillful exposition of a complex history. New details emerge in familiar stories of martyrs like Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and Myrna Mack in Guatemala. Blitzer traces twists and turns in U.S. refugee policy from Hungary to Vietnam to Cuba to Central America.
His detailed reporting and analysis demonstrates the depth of U.S. complicity in creating the current “immigration crisis.” As political posturing places immigration at the center of the 2024 election cycle, this book offers much-needed historical context.
Immigration news 