The Case Against Deporting 200,000 Salvadorans

By Erik Ching

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Co-author of Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2007), editor of Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador: A Memoir of Guerrilla Radio (2010), and author of Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory (UNC Press, 2016)

The United States's decision to revoke TPS (Temporary Protected Status) from some 200,000 Salvadorans living in the United States is morally repugnant. The gap between moral accountability and foreign policymaking is wide, even for a country like the United States, whose leaders’ idealistic rhetoric suggests otherwise. But if there was ever a country that owed another country something and one that should be held accountable to a moral standard, it is the United States in its historic relation with El Salvador.

The United States extended TPS to Salvadorans in 2001 after a series of devastating earthquakes. The Department of Homeland Security claims that the earthquake conditions that inspired TPS no longer apply, and thus Salvadorans can return home. Technically, that statement may be accurate, depending on how one chooses to define “earthquake conditions.” But the reality is that the situation in El Salvador has been deteriorating ever since, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for creating those conditions. The United States has had a deep impact on El Salvador in pursuit of its own foreign policy needs going back to the 1970s, and its actions contributed not only to the historic flow of migrants out of El Salvador, but also to the current conditions of violence that prevail there.

The United States had an overwhelming presence in El Salvador in the 1980s. Under the Carter administration, but especially during the two terms of Reagan's presidency, U.S. 

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policy makers defined El Salvador as a foreign policy priority after the Sandinista victory in neighboring Nicaragua in 1979. Although the United States suspended military aid to El Salvador in December 1980, after four U.S. churchwomen were killed by governmental security forces, it reinstated aid in January 1981 in response to the guerrillas' first “Final Offensive,” which more or less formally launched the Salvadoran civil war. Under the successive Reagan administrations, U.S. aid and the role of the United States increased steadily, particularly in 1983 and 1984 when it appeared that the Salvadoran government was on the verge of losing to the guerrillas. Overall, the United States provided on average $1 million per day of aid to the Salvadoran government throughout the 1980s, much of it in the form of military aid.

The justification for these policies was to prevent the supposedly Marxist guerrillas (the FMLN) from coming into power in El Salvador, as the FSLN had done in neighboring Nicaragua. Therein, U.S. policy makers tended to define the situation in El Salvador through the highly circumscribed and deeply flawed prism of the cold war, i.e. that the Salvadoran guerrillas lacked popular support and were a front for Soviet, Cuban, and/or Nicaraguan expansionist designs. One of the most definitive policy statements in this regard was Reagan’s address to the nation in May 1984 to appeal for support in providing more aid to El Salvador. In its framing of the situation in El Salvador and in standing by the Salvadoran government/military as steadfastly as it did, the United States prolonged the war and helped contribute to the brutal human rights record that the Salvadoran military accrued throughout the years.

With the benefit of hindsight and evidence, we now know definitively that the overwhelming majority of killing and human-rights violations being perpetrated in El Salvador were done by the Salvadoran military and/or paramilitary organizations with close military ties. What we also know now, but which we also knew at the time, is the large extent to which the United States either tacitly supported or willfully ignored the actions and activities of its allies on the ground in El Salvador, notably in events like the massacre of El Mozote in December 1981 (portrayed so clearly by the journalism of Mark Danner) and the assassination of the six Jesuits in November 1989, to list just two examples of countless others. Admittedly, at various times throughout the war, U.S. policy makers tried to get Salvadoran military leaders to amend their ways in the face of growing U.S. domestic opposition to the war, such as when Vice President Bush arrived in December 1983 and delivered a rather stern directive to the generals about cleaning up their act. But both sides recognized that the U.S. had planted its flag with the Salvadoran military and that it was unable and/or unwilling to do anything to jeopardize its cold-war inspired foreign policy initiatives in El Salvador. The killings and the torture went on, only beginning to abate after 1983.

In addition to the history of U.S. involvement during the civil war in the 1980s, the United States’s subsequent immigration policies have had adverse impacts on El Salvador, namely the deportations of Salvadorans in the 1990s and 2000s. Many scholars see these various kinds of deportation as giving rise to, or significantly contributing to, the explosion of gang membership and gang-related violence in El Salvador by entities such as MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and Calle 18. Those gangs have their origins in the United States, as young migrants who fled from the violence of the 1980s became subsequently caught up in the desperation of life in the United States thereafter. Although some of the people that the United States deported back to El Salvador were gang members involved in criminal activity, the United States also sent back many young people, some of whom did not even speak Spanish and had no record of gang participation or criminality. When thrust into the alien environment of El Salvador, some of these young people could only find refuge within gangs, exacerbating the problem.

The overwhelming majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans currently residing in the United States on TPS are law-abiding people working diligently to make a better life for themselves, and therein contributing to the collective good. Throwing them back into El Salvador would be a human rights disaster. They will struggle to find their footing, they will be targeted for extortion, and their needs will be an added burden to a nation already short on employment. In 1969, some 100,000 Salvadoran peasants, living across the border in Honduras, were forced by the Honduran government to return to El Salvador en masse. This action helped trigger a subsequent war with Honduras, and the sudden return of this mass of Salvadorans also had a destabilizing effect on the nation’s society and economy, contributing to the downward spiral that led to the outbreak of civil war in 1980. I fear that the mass return of 200,000 Salvadorans from the United States in 2018 would have a similarly destabilizing effect, to say nothing of the consequences for many U.S. citizens who will be separated from their loved ones and family members.

Erik Ching is a Professor of History at Furman University.

Further reading: Erik Ching was quoted in a recent New York Times article with Gene Palumbo as lead author titled, "El Salvador Again Feels the Hand of Washington Shaping Its Fate."

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Our Most-Read Blog Posts of 2017

Despite everything that happened in 2017, it was a great year for University of Texas Press authors on our blog. Here are the 10 most-read posts, spanning topics from gang suppression in El Salvador to Chrissie Hynde, from personal essays to timely commentary by scholars.

We look forward to another year of great reading in 2018!

[ Latin American Studies ]

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The Enduring Appeal of Gang Suppression in El Salvador

On January 16, 2017, El Salvador commemorated the 25th anniversary of the peace settlement that ended the country’s twelve-year civil war. We asked Dr. Sonja Wolf, a CONACYT research fellow with the Drug Policy Program at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, to comment on the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Accords. Her book Mano Dura:The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador examines the policies that undermine human rights while ultimately doing little to address the roots of gang membership. Read the post. →

Eleven Images from Picturing the Proletariat

In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. John Lear's new book, Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940, examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. We asked Professor Lear to pick a handful of images studied in the book to represent the progression and politics of the Mexican proletariat. Read the post. →

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Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Militarization in the Age of Trump

Mexico’s so-called drug war can be characterized, in some way, as a modern war relating to the control of energy production. In the present context, it is possible to identify groups that seem to have benefited the most from a novel criminal scheme (directly or indirectly) introduced by the Zetas organization, the Mexican government’s reaction to it, and the resulting brutality. We asked Dr. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, author of Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico, to comment on the effects of President Trump’s border policy on what she identifies as the beneficiaries of organized crime in Mexico, mainly the US border security/military-industrial complex and corporations. Read the post. →

[ Music ]

Browse the series

Jessica Hopper and Oliver Wang Join American Music Series Editorial Team

Authors and music critics Jessica Hopper and Oliver Wang have joined David Menconi of the Raleigh News & Observer on the editorial team of the American Music series published by the University of Texas Press. “We are at a particularly ripe time within music culture to interrogate what is American music; we're overdue for an expansion of the canon,” says Hopper. Read the post. →

Music from A Perfectly Good Guitar

When photographer and writer Chuck Holley set out to document guitar players talking about their most prized instruments, he thought he was fairly well-versed in professional guitarists. The playlist he has put together for this blog is all about the lesser-known artists he discovered over the eight years he photographed guitarists with their favorite instruments and listened to their stories for A Perfectly Good Guitar. Read the post. →

A Musical Biography of Chrissie Hynde

Curated by Adam Sobsey, the handful of early Pretenders songs that open this chronologically arranged mix are mainly lesser known cuts that dig some of the overlooked but seminal roots out of Chrissie Hynde’s catalog: clues to her worldview and her personal history. The rest are drawn from the largely unexplored riches of her post-stardom phase, which is nearly three decades old now, a vast trove. Read the post. →

[ American Studies ]

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Making America Confederate Again

In 2008, Euan Hague, Edward H. Sebesta, and Heidi Beirich, published a groundbreaking book, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, that described a fringe movement of political activists who promoted an ideology of Confederate nationalism. Given the current state of US politics, Neo-Confederacy is an urgent primer for our new reality. Read the post. →

[ Film, Media and Popular Culture ]

Notions of Genre Soundtrack Playlist

Barry Keith Grant's new edited volume with Malisa Kurtz, Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory, gathers the most important early writing on film genre and genre films published between 1945 and 1969. In the spirit of appreciating genre film, we asked Barry Keith Grant to curate a playlist of iconic music from genre cinema. Enjoy this fun whirl through movie history through its music. Read the post. →

[ Photography ]

"Rexroth's Strawberries" and the Beauty of IOWA

In the early 1970s, Nancy Rexroth began photographing the rural landscapes, children, white frame houses, and domestic interiors of southeastern Ohio with a plastic toy camera called the Diana. Having discovered the Diana camera while in graduate school in Ohio, Rexroth began experimenting with the looseness and spontaneity of the camera and the images it produced. Read the post. →

[ Texas ]

Birding and Writing with Victor Emanuel

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Victor’s memoir One More Warbler shares his journey from inspired youth to world’s top birder including his biggest adventures, rarest finds, and the people who mentored and encouraged his birding passion along the way. We asked writer, editor, and teacher S. Kirk Walsh to reflect on what Victor taught her. Read the post. →

[ Journals ]

Entry Interview with the New Editors of Texas Studies in Literature and Language

The summer of 2016 saw Douglas Bruster and James Cox step in as the new editorial team of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. In this interview, we speak with them about their scholarly backgrounds and the plans they have for TSLL, a journal of literary criticism published quarterly by the University of Texas Press. Read the post. →

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The Enduring Appeal of Gang Suppression in El Salvador

In 1992, at the end of a twelve-year civil war, El Salvador was poised for a transition to democracy. Yet, after longstanding dominance by a small oligarchy that continually used violence to repress popular resistance, El Salvador’s democracy has proven to be a fragile one, as social ills (poverty chief among them) have given rise to neighborhoods where gang activity now thrives. Dr. Sonja Wolf's new book Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador examines the ways

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in which the ruling ARENA party used gang violence to solidify political power in the hands of the elite—culminating in draconian “iron fist” antigang policies that undermine human rights while ultimately doing little to address the roots of gang membership.

Dr. Sonja Wolf is a CONACYT research fellow with the Drug Policy Program at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas. We asked her to comment on the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Accords.

The Enduring Appeal of Gang Suppression in El Salvador
by Sonja Wolf

On January 16, 2017, El Salvador will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the peace settlement that ended the country’s twelve-year civil war. This conflict pitched the guerrilla forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) against the government army, propped up by billions of dollars in US military aid. While for the average citizen it is bound to be a day like any other, the administration of President Salvador Sánchez Cerén will mark the occasion with concerts and other festive events.

It has also announced, however, that it has asked the United Nations, mediator of the earlier peace negotiations, to help produce a new “National Accord”. This agreement is meant to unite all sectors of society, often at odds with each other, in order to tackle major challenges. The invitation comes at a critical time and, compared to the usual official rhetoric that the country is forging ahead, is a recognition that local actors have proved unable to create much-needed political consensus and public policies.

The somber climate stands in stark contrast to the optimism of the early nineties, when Salvadorans were hopeful that greater freedom and prosperity were laying ahead. The war, which had originated because peaceful social and political change was impossible, had left some 75,000 people dead and the economy shattered. The peace agreements mandated a series of constitutional, institutional, political, and socioeconomic reforms. While most transformations advanced only half-heartedly, the last of these never took off to begin with.

The FMLN and the ruling government of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), a conservative party that defended the interests and privileges of the economic elite, embraced fundamentally different views and expectations of their country. Whereas the left felt that a democracy had never existed in El Salvador, and the peace accords were a means to build it, the right considered that the guerrilla had attacked an actually existing democracy and the task ahead was to restore the status quo.

With a powerful part of the population committed to ending the war, but not to pursuing the vision enshrined in the treaty, the country’s future was always going to be uncertain. The peace accords remain a watershed for El Salvador, but their reluctant implementation lies at the root of the problems that have beset it since. To be sure, it was no small feat to terminate the political violence, incorporate the FMLN into the political system, hold democratic elections, and restructure the security sector. But state institutions and the rule of law remain weak, corruption flourishes, poverty and inequality persist, and criminal violence has surged. 

Violence and Central America’s Migrant Children

Unaccompanied minors from Central America migrating to the United States through Texas are making headlines across the country. We asked Donna De Cesare, an Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs (2013), to wade through all the reportage and unpack what she's learned from decades of work with Central American children and gangs. 

De Cesare has documented a history of repression, violence, and trauma, in which gangs are as much a symptom as a cause of trauma, trapped as they are by social neglect. Here she offers her take on the current crisis and how policymakers in Washington should react.

The Violence Unsettling Central America’s Migrant Children

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by Donna De Cesare

Since June of this year an emergency at the U.S. Mexico border has been unfolding. The most immediate cause is a spike in the numbers of unaccompanied children picked up by the border patrol after making the dangerous and arduous journey from Central America to the United States. But the roots of this humanitarian crisis run much deeper. The stories the children tell involve such shocking violence that The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma was prompted to publish an online resource for journalists that references my own work of more than twenty years reporting and photographing the impact of gangs, violence, and migration on children living in Central America.

Gang violence and organized crime mayhem are major factors in the level of citizen insecurity behind the recent migration trends. Although most news stories have focused on Central American children, it is worth noting that rate of unaccompanied children from Mexico—while lower—is also increasing. A recent report by Mother Jones combines data on the magnitude of the surge in numbers of migrating Central American and Mexican children, discussion of the combination of extreme violence and poverty that these children are fleeing, compelling personal stories, and some discussion of the kind of monitoring and trauma counseling those who are able to stay here will need if they are to thrive.

San Salvador, El Salvador, 1989.
In the 1980s El Salvador had one of our hemisphere's worst human rights records. 
This victim was allegedly murdered by government death squads for violating curfew 
during the guerrilla offensive in November. 
Copyright © Donna De Cesare. From Unsettled / Desasosiego.

The crisis and the media coverage have also exposed the fear and fault lines in U.S. communities where emergency shelters for these children are being built. Protestors in Murietta, California, called to mind the ugly confrontations over school busing that plagued U.S. efforts for racial integration of schools in the 1970s. Claims that the Obama administration’s immigration policies are linked to the surge in children seeking asylum have had a polarizing effect on debate. They have little basis in fact, as Carlos Dada, director of the Salvadoran online news service El Faro and one of the best investigative journalists in Central America, can attest.

An excellent research study done in El Salvador last fall involving more than 400 child respondents by Fulbright fellow Elizabeth Kennedy, is available at the American Immigration Council resource page. "No Childhood Here: Why Central American Children Are Fleeing Their Homes" provides clear and incontestable data that child migrants are ignorant of Obama administration policies and are leaving because they are terrified to stay at home. To those who say, “If they are refugees, why aren’t they going to Costa Rica?,” the answer is quite simple. Many are going there, too. The UNDP has reported steep spikes in the numbers of unaccompanied minors flooding into Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Belize from the violence-afflicted nations of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The reason that so many more children from those countries choose the life-threatening journey to the United States is that the vast majority of them know someone here. Ever since the Central American civil wars in the 1980s unleashed a flow of migrants fleeing for their lives, the trail has become a well-worn groove and a safety valve response to surges in economic and citizen security crises.

El Salvador / Hondoras border, El Poy, El Salvador, 1988.
Salvadoran families make their way to the village of Guarjila in a caravan of buses,
after leaving the Mesa Grand refugee camp in Hondoras.
Copyright © Donna De Cesare. From Unsettled / Desasosiego.

My book Unsettled/Desasosiego published by UT Press in 2013 chronicles the stories of war refugees and describes how deportation policies spread L.A. gangs to Central America. The stories are as chilling as the stories we are hearing from children at the border today. What has changed is that the explosion of crime and violence, related to the inability of the U.S. war on drugs to influence the enormous profits made selling drugs in the U.S. market, has exposed many more children who live in the trafficking nations to a ticking time bomb. It is impossible to make staying at home a safe and desirable option until the violence unleashed by current drug policy failure is addressed.

Despite the opportunism and shrill partisanship dominating the debate in Washington over the amount and allocation of funding needed to address the child migrant emergency, for the first time in a very long time the governability woes that have been worsening in Central America have made it onto Washington’s radar. Americans are taking notice. A recent poll published in Newsweek shows that most Americans want to treat the children arriving at our border as refugees. And as I write, Time’s Lightbox blog has published a compelling set of images documenting the exodus of children leaving Honduras—currently the world’s most violent country.

Certainly Central American nations bear responsibility for weak and often corrupt state institutions and for failure to make any significant progress on the impunity, which renders their judicial systems more decorative than functional. But many Central American citizens feel they have been held hostage to a drug war designed in Washington that can only exacerbate the levels of violence in the context in which they live. If we in the United States fail to recognize that this humanitarian emergency is a symptom of our own failed vision and drug policies, a crisis that requires a thoughtful collaborative long-term response in partnership with our neighbors to the south, we will ensure an even greater crisis ahead.

Soyapango, El Salvador, 1989.
During the rebel offensive in November, civilians in a zone held by insurgents 
flee their working-class barrio after three days of aerial bombing and strafing by the Salvadoran air force.
Copyright © Donna De Cesare. From Unsettled / Desasosiego.

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