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

By Justin Reese

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

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

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

 

Jonathan Blitzer's "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here" is a deeply researched account of the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border. The crisis, which has impacted hundreds of thousands of migrants, is a result of decades of misguided policy and corruption. The book tells the story of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by political conflict and violence, as well as American activists, government officials, and politicians responsible for the country's tangled immigration policy. The book delves into the heart of American life and has shaped the nation's politics and culture in countless ways, shaping its future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223854593

Book preview

The Heart Doctor

Juan Romagoza, a boy from Usulután, El Salvador, grew up with the belief that he would become a doctor or priest. His family was pious and religious, and he attended mass and church services. At thirteen, he decided to attend a seminary in Santiago de María, but it felt closed and treacherous. Juan's attraction to medicine was deep, and he watched his grandfather die of a heart attack. He was short and scrawny, with wispy dark hair, olive skin, and alert eyes.

Juan's family could only afford to send one child at a time to college, but he earned a scholarship from the Casa Presidencial in San Salvador. He attended the University of El Salvador to study medicine, a seven-year degree that ended up lasting ten. El Salvador's politics were dominated by an alliance between the business elite and the armed forces, which grew increasingly turbulent during the 1970s. Juan volunteerd in hospitals across the country, including Usulután and Sonsonate, to get some training before school reopened. He chose his subspecialty, heart surgery, and began his surgery residency at the San Rafael National Hospital in Santa Tecla.

Juan spent more time at the hospital than at home, working long hours and taking naps between assignments to assist with surgeries and run down doctors' requests.

A student protester, a leader of the Movimiento Estudiantil Revolucionario Salvadoreño (MERS), was found dead in an emergency room. Juan, the leader of the MERS, assisted with surgery and stabilized the student. At San Rafael, the intensive care ward was quiet, and only Juan and a nurse remained. A thumping sound jolted Juan awake, and he heard soldiers marching towards the patient. A group of armed men approached the patient, warning him to stay on the ground.

They opened fire, causing the bed to rock and rattle. The gunmen left without saying a word, leaving Juan to check for a pulse. The nurse, who was in her fifties, was crying and unsure if the gunmen had left. Juan grabbed the patient's wrist to check for a pulse, and he noticed a fleet of green trucks in the parking lot. Juan began picking up the hot cartridges to remember the incident. The incident highlights the brutality of police brutality and the need for vigilantes to protect protesters.

The True Identity of the People of God

La Matanza, or the Massacre, was a significant event in modern Salvadoran history. On January 22, 1932, agricultural laborers staged an insurrection against the nation's coffee-growing elite, which had been subjugating the rural poor for decades. The government privatized arable land and auctioned off plots to wealthy owners of large plantation-style estates known as fincas, dispossessed hundreds of thousands of peasants. American diplomat Miguel Mármol founded the Salvadoran Communist Party in 1930, finding that peasants were treated like slaves and subjected to starvation wages, arbitrary firings, evictions, and direct repression by the national guard.

The revolt lasted for weeks, with the military intervening on the side of landowners and the National Guard. Together, the soldiers slaughtered around 2,000 people, roughly 2% of the Salvadoran population. Anyone who looked vaguely Indigenous or dressed like a peasant was branded a rebel and executed. La Matanza froze the country for four and a half decades, with the government replacing the real story with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off communist hordes.

By the early 1960s, it was estimated that 75 people from 25 families controlled 90% of El Salvador's wealth. The elite had expanded its reach from coffee to other cash crops, including cotton and sugarcane, and moved into banking. The US government had never taken a serious interest in El Salvador, but after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, concern over the spread of communism led to a new posture in the region.

Juan, a Salvadoran journalist, first encountered state security forces during the 1968 mayoral elections in Usulután. He was at home waiting for the results when he heard shouts and cheers on the streets. He had just joined the festivities when soldiers from the National Guard arrived, setting up a barricade to intimidate the revelers. Some of them started shoving a group of elderly women who were practically sacred in Usulután. Juan and his friends rushed over to intercede, but the soldiers fired their weapons in the air, causing the crowds to scatter.

In 1972, the government abruptly stopped the vote count, leading to a coup in vain. National protests followed, with the military shooting and killing two hundred demonstrators, while the opposition candidate was taken into custody and beaten. By the time he went into exile, his nose and cheekbone had been shattered. One of the ironies of government repression was that it galvanized the opposition rather than cowed it. Before the 1972 elections, the public still had some measure of faith in the electoral process, so armed elements of the far left drew few adherents.

Juan carried bullet casings in his pocket for the rest of the week, knowing the risks of being identified as a witness to a military murder or standing accused of being a subversive himself. On Sunday morning, he set out to deliver the bullets to Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador. Romero was known as the voice of the voiceless in El Salvador, known for his unyielding defense of the poor and exposure of acts of aggression by the government and its right-wing allies.

Juan, a former university student in San Salvador, was deeply affected by the oppressive regime in his country. He joined a group of medical students who opened a clinic to provide free healthcare to the patients who had been tortured and maimed by state security forces and death squads. This led to a more abiding relationship between Juan and Romero, as they were both activists responding to the new state of emergency.

In 1977, when Romero became the archbishop, state violence was rampant, with hundreds of priests and Catholic workers killed, injured, or threatened. The assassination of Rutilio Grande disabused Romero of the promise of gentler diplomacy with the government. Romero became forthright and bold, calling for national land reform to give the rural poor a fighting chance at survival.

Juan attended Romero's mass, where he was greeted by a full church filled with everyday worshippers, campesinos, diplomats, opposition politicians, and news reporters. His sermons were widely seen as the most definitive accounts of the ongoing repression, reaching three-quarters of the population in the countryside and nearly half of all city residents.

Romero's public prominence was credited with restoring Juan's belief in God, which was mirrored and amplified in his actions. Juan began to see himself and his activism differently, becoming a national leader who put everything on the line. His conversion to activism and his ability to speak louder and more passionately about the country's politics gave him the greatest faith.

In 1979, the Salvadoran government faced a civil war with hundreds of civilian deaths. The military had staged a coup to force extreme hardliners out of the military and establish civilian rule. A ruling council, known as the junta, would replace the government and restaff the upper ranks of the cabinet. Their demands were straightforward: the abolition of ORDEN, the country's most notorious death squad; recognition of the rights of campesinos to organize; and the passage of an agrarian reform law that could facilitate an equitable distribution of national wealth. However, within hours of the coup, conservative senior officers wrested control of the new junta, leading to further killings and reprisals. A power struggle ensued inside the junta, and by early January, the government collapsed.

The new junta was a union between the military and a center-left party known as the Christian Democrats, who were divided over whether to enter a government effectively run by the military. The skeptics were proved right: with the patina of legitimacy conferred by the Christian Democrats, the military soon redoubled its repression. Romero, a pastor, wrote a letter to President Carter himself, urging him to correct Carter's misapprehension and forbid military aid from being given to the Salvadoran government.

Carter built his foreign policy platform on the idea that his administration would respect international human rights. He vowed that our commitment to human rights must be absolute, but his administration struggled to define human rights violations and prescribe appropriate sanctions. Billions of dollars of US aid were at stake, and entrenched geopolitics prevailed. In July 1979, left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza, a US ally.

The General and His Boots

On March 24, 1980, Juan was working at a student clinic when he heard the news of the assassination of President Romero. The military and death squads were likely in the midst of a broader citywide assault, and Juan and his colleagues were forced to close their offices. The news reached an elderly woman who had a television, and she was shocked to learn that Romero had been shot in the chest. American officials had described the prospect of Romero's killing as the likely end of a moderate solution to the country's political crisis, leaving only a military solution: untrammeled terror.

The assassination marked the beginning of a profound crisis in El Salvador, with more patients showing up in critical condition with torture wounds. Juan attended protests with a small medical bag, but often found people injured beyond his ability to help them. At some point, his names were on a hit list assembled by the death squads and distributed among military officers. Juan began coming and going at odd hours, frequently in disguise, and sometimes hitched a ride in the back of an ambulance to sneak into the emergency room through the hospital garage.

Between January and March, government forces killed at least nine hundred civilians, more than in all of 1979. The far right had hatched an especially sinister strategy: the military brass needed the top leaders of the Christian Democrats to remain in government for political cover, so the death squads selectively assassinated members of the party's rank and file. The new American ambassador, Robert White, sent a cable to the State Department stating that the major immediate threat to the existence of this government was the right wing violence.

Six days after the assassination of Salvadoran President Romero, a funeral was held at the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador. A group of medical students, including Juan, prepared for the event by arranging with taxi drivers to treat casualties and bring them to safety. The explosions and gunfire followed, and panicked crowds stampeded for safety. The death toll reached at least forty, with hundreds more injured.

On November 4, the American embassy hosted a watch party at Hotel El Presidente in San Salvador, where American diplomats were dejected. Attitudes on the Salvadoran right were already hardening when Ronald Reagan's transition team announced the end of Carter's human-rights policy. General García, the minister of defense, summoned civilian members of the junta to the Casa Presidencial, claiming that all nuns and priests in Chalatenango were in league with the guerrillas.

In El Salvador, the political left extended beyond the Christian Democrats and included smaller parties ranging from armed guerrilla groups to nonviolent Marxists, socialists, and unionists whose views fell to the left of the governing junta. On November 27, six leaders of the non-guerrilla left, formally called the Frente Democrático Revolucionario (FDR), were preparing to deliver a statement at a Jesuit high school in San Salvador. However, they were kidnapped and their bodies found near Lake Ilopango, showing signs of torture. Ambassador White sent a message to Washington, stating that the military had explicitly rejected dialogue and heralded a policy of extermination.

Stanley Pimentel, the FBI's top legal attaché in Central America, partnered with an American embassy official to narrow down a list of five suspects in the murders of the American churchwomen. Vides Casanova was ordered to hide the weapons used in the killings and replace them with different rifles to share with the Americans. Years later, a CIA cable confirmed that Vides Casanova's cousin had given the order for the churchwomen's murders.

In December 1980, violence in El Salvador and the US government's presidential transition led to a renewed pall of impunity. American aid money to the military continued, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, a political science professor at Georgetown, was one of President Ronald Reagan's top foreign policy advisers. After the assassination of the FDR leaders, she quipped that the nuns were clearly not just nuns but also political activists.

Several days after the churchwomen were killed, Juan set out with six other doctors and nurses to perform medical exams for villagers trapped by skirmishes between government forces and leftist guerrillas. As they arrived, they encountered two olive-green trucks that looked like military vehicles. A soldier approached Juan, who asked him if he was a guerrilla commander. Juan denied the