Blaming the Victims
Political asylum for Central Americans isn't a favor for the United States to bestow; it's an obligation we have failed to fulfill.
My wife’s dad was a left-wing guerrilla soldier in the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s. He came to the United States — Los Angeles, specifically — as a refugee after his 11-year-old daughter was kidnapped and murdered by a right wing death squad; my wife is named after that daughter. He married an American and stayed for three decades as a permanent resident, before eventually moving back home to El Salvador.
I’d say I owe the lives of my son and daughter to the U.S.’ asylum policy, but my father-in-law never received it. Hardly anyone from that region did — less than three percent of Salvadorans and Guatemalans were granted asylum in the 1980s, versus 60% of Iranians, 40% of Afghans, and 32% of Poles, who, unlike the Central Americans, were fleeing U.S. enemies instead of allies. And even the few who did could hardly be expected to be grateful for it, given that it was the United States that had funded and trained the death squads they were fleeing from in the first place.
Last week, President Biden effectively shut down the asylum system. Under his executive order, asylum is now denied en masse to everyone seeking it, until such time as daily border crossings drop to a level that the administration clearly believes they will never reach.
To anyone who doesn’t understand how the asylum system actually works — which is to say to nearly everyone — the restrictions sound sad but reasonable. Clearly, we have a problem with mass migration: border apprehensions are the highest they’ve ever been. There are new push factors all over the world: the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, turmoil in Haiti, the war in Ukraine, increased repression in China, and the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan, to name a few. Historically, the United States has been generous to people victimized by circumstances such as these, the conventional wisdom goes, but we can’t save everyone, forever.
For most of the examples above, that may be a defensible position. But for Central Americans, who, for the better part of the last decade, and until quite recently, have constituted the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers, it’s an insult and a statement of brazen hypocrisy. The reason the U.S. border has been overwhelmed by Central American migrants is because our government destroyed their countries. It’s that simple.
The moral contours of the Salvadoran civil war were almost cartoonishly black-and-white. For a century before the war began, 20 families controlled two-thirds of the country’s industry, and .01 percent of the population owned more than three-quarters of the land. The vast majority of Salvadorans struggled to survive on subsistence wages that left many on the brink of starvation. When they tried to change these conditions, the government massacred them. In 1932, when machete-armed, mostly indigenous peasants tried to revolt against the oligarchs, the army slaughtered between 10,000 and 40,000 people, which was between two and four percent of the entire population of the country. The military dictatorship used torture, rape, kidnappings, and indiscriminate mass murder as its weapons of first resort to maintain the country’s vastly unequal social order.
In 1979, a a bloodless coup replaced a hard-right government with a marginally reform-oriented but internally divided junta. The reformist faction of the military, however, proved subservient to the reactionary one. When a group of leftist leaders tried to enter into negotiations with the government, state security forces kidnapped, tortured and murdered them. The civilian leaders of the junta resigned in disappointment, and the hard right was back in charge once again. Mutilated corpses began to litter the roadsides, just as they had under the previous regime.
Twelve horrific years of civil war followed, in which the oligarchy, the military, and its paramilitary death squads enjoyed lavish funding and training from the United States government, first under Carter and then, even more so, under Reagan. The brutality was brazenly lopsided. According to a UN report, 85% of the violence of those years was carried out by the state, and only five percent by leftist guerrillas.
What happened to these refugees, and how they shaped the current chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border and the public debate around it, is the subject of New Yorker reporter Jonathan Blitzer’s new book, “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.” It’s also a subject I’ve reported on myself, during the Trump years, for The Intercept.
The current border crisis dates back to the first term of the Obama administration, when children from Central America, both with and without their parents, began surrendering themselves to Border Patrol officers, seeking asylum. Historically, border crossers tended to be working-age men from Mexico who entered the U.S. by themselves, avoiding immigration authorities and seeking jobs. Suddenly, they were women and kids from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who were fleeing persecution and marching straight into US custody. By Obama’s second term, they were arriving by the tens of thousands. “Decades of Central American history were crashing down at the US border,” Blitzer writes of that time.
The war in El Salvador ended in 1992; Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war ended four years later. Central American refugees in the twenty-first century are no longer fleeing their governments. But they’re fleeing something else that is equally a creation of the United States: transnational gangs.
When refugees of the U.S.-financed armies and death squads of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, they landed in the only neighborhoods they could afford: poor, violent barrios in the throes of the crack wars. They found themselves, instantly, at the bottom of an ethnic pecking order that was enforced by black and Chicano street gangs. Kids who were bullied at school and beat up on the street had no choice but to organize in self-defense. Some of them joined the 18th Street Gang, or “Barrio 18,” named after a street in L.A.’s Pico-Union neighborhood, which was one of the few Chicano gangs that welcomed Central Americans. Others started calling themselves “La Mara Salvatrucha,” which means something like “the street-smart Salvadoran gang.”
At first, they called themselves “La Mara Salvatrucha Stoners,” or MSS. MSS performed their toughness by listening to heavy metal music and purporting to worship Satan. Their gang sign was (and still is) the headbanger hand gesture for devil’s horns. They smoked pot, dropped acid, and participated in petty crimes.
But over time, life in LA streets and jails shaped them into a more traditional American gang. They dropped the “Stoners” and shaved their heads. They traded in the heavy metal t-shirts for pressed chinos and wife-beater tank tops. They graduated to more serious criminal activity. They joined the ongoing street war with the LAPD. Eventually, they pledged their fealty to the dominant jailhouse Chicano gang, the Mexican Mafia, which also went by the 13th letter of the alphabet: in Spanish, ‘La Eme.’ MS became MS-13.
But the government had a weapon against the Central American gang bangers that they couldn’t wield against African-American and Chicano youth: deportation. With barely a word of preparation for the government of a country wrecked by years of American-instigated war, the U.S. began mass deporting tens of thousands of hardened criminals to El Salvador. These kids, with their LA bling and swagger, with their broken Spanish and American street slang, became an object of fascination and fear in El Salvador, especially after the fires of the 1992 LA riots blazed on TV screens all over the world. “For the deportees and their growing retinue of Salvadoran acolytes,” Blitzer writes of one the experience of one Los Angeles transplant, “LA was the main reference point, eclipsing the heady new moment in El Salvador. One of the boys, looking at Eddie with unusually wide-eyed candor, said, ‘Hey, man, you sure you want to go back there to all that? It sounds dangerous.”
The gangs thrived in El Salvador. The government was broken and the civil war had left guns scattered everywhere. Economic ruin opened the way for a vibrant black market. MS-13 and Barrio 18 metastasized, first in El Salvador and then in Guatemala and Honduras. The two gangs had started beefing in Los Angeles in the late eighties, and they took their conflict to their new countries, where it still rages, dividing the geography and imposing instant death sentences on young men for sporting the wrong tattoos.
The gangs’ American origins were imprinted across the criminal landscape of Central America. Barrio 18 wasn’t the only Salvadoran gang named after a street in L.A. There were the Fulton and the Hollywood and the Normandie Locos cliques of MS-13. The country of El Salvador was being carved up into territories of a distant city most of its Salvadoran-born recruits and conscripts had never set foot in.
The gangs kidnapped, murdered, raped and robbed, but their main racket was extortion. Something like two-thirds of businesses in El Salvador were forced to pay them protection money. Sometimes the gangs prevented the actual government from taxing the businesses that the gangs were already, in effect, taxing. That was just one way in which the gangs developed a parallel state within El Salvador. They set up checkpoints. They controlled when residents of their barrios could come and go, and whether and what visitors would be allowed in. When the Zika epidemic broke out in Latin America in 2015 and 2016, El Salvador was particularly hard hit, because the gangs often prohibited the government from coming into their territories to fumigate.
The tyranny of MS-13 and Barrio 18 unleashed a second exodus of refugees, most of them women and children. They ran from gangs that an American city had forged from children fleeing wars that America had perpetuated. It’s become standard in American politics to dismiss these asylum seekers as economic migrants posing as political refugees. Reagan said the exact same thing in the 1980s about people running from the death squads his own CIA had trained to torture and mass murder suspected “leftists.” But in the last few years, migration from El Salvador has dropped by more than 60 percent. That’s not because American employers aren’t hiring Salvadorans anymore; it’s because President Nayib Bukele has shut down the gangs.
Today, Central American refugees are outnumbered by migrants from other parts of the world. I can’t speak, even generally, to the authenticity of the latter category’s asylum claims. Nor can I argue that the United States is responsible for the persecution they’re fleeing. But I can make that case for Central Americans. And because their claims have been dismissed as fraudulent for so many years, I can’t help but be skeptical of the skepticism of today’s asylum seekers that has congealed into a consensus in the public discourse. Biden’s new asylum policy follows a long tradition in American politics of blaming and punishing our victims.
The ramifications of the Cold War still haunt not just this country, but the entire Americas. I remember learning about this back in college. The Cold War rivalry and our failed drug policy are one of the worst things to happen, not just for the US, but for the Americas. Though I suppose being the only real major power in our hemisphere definitely makes screwing over the whole place easier.
It seems like the obvious (though very hard) solutions are:
1) Create a system of evaluation for asylum seekers that is capable of handling the flow.
2) Attack the problem at its source: help these countries get back on their feet so that there are fewer of both asylum seekers and economic migrants. (I'm not sure how much faith I have that we can "fix" these problems, but can we at least ameliorate them?)