REVIEW: Everyone Who is Gone is Here

US funding and complicity in Central American disruption, crisis, and genocide

Written by Jonathan Blitzer and published this year, this book aims to take the US “border crisis” right back to the people who fueled it: the so called US government.

“[The US] had long treated [Central America] as its geopolitical laboratory. The CIA had overthrown the Guatemalan government in 1954 at the behest of an American corporation that, among other things, wanted bigger tax breaks abroad. Honduras had come to be known in the region as the USS Honduras, a de facto American military installation. For years, the US’s man in Nicaragua was a dictator.”

There is so much great information in this almost 500 page book, but as an honest review I feel that it could have been shorter and more concise. The personal stories added narrative, but maybe too much narrative to an already complicated and long history spanning many regions and I got lost sometimes. This review will highlight revelations I had into a more concise word count for those who aren’t able to read the whole book, and attempt to break my thoughts down into a few different countries impacted.

US corporation running Guatemala

“There were two powers running Guatemala after the Seond World War, and only one of them was the government…”

Blitzer explains that an American corporation called United Fruit Company (known in Guatemala as the Octopus for its reach) controlled the only Atlantic port in the country, was the largest employer and landowner in the country, controlled almost every mile of railroads and all the telephone and telegraph facilities in the country at the time.

There were grassroots labor movements against United Fruit’s practices in Guatemala, and because of this in 1953 Eisenhower’s National Security Council said “we should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism”.

“US State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of [United Fruit Company in Guatemala]. Senators held stock. Running United Fruit’s publicitiy department in New York was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of 25,000 journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call. They formed, in his words, ‘an invisible government’ with ‘true ruling power’ over the US, to say nothing of the countries under American sway.”

Over the next year, “the CIA and United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a ‘Liberation’ force against the government… and landed on Carlos Castillo Armas… His chief qualification was his willingness to do whatever the Americans told him. In June 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the US ambassador, he was rewarded with the presidency.”

The Guatemalan army received extensive training from the US (napalm, radar technology, planes) and “a good deal transferred to the country directly from US installations in Vietnam…”

“By the end of the decade the [Guatemalan] revolutionary movement was in shambles… The military and death squads [backed by the US] had murdered almost the entire leadership of the labor movement as well as the upper ranks of the moderate political parties.”

Methodical killings of civilians by the US backed Guatemalan military targeted parts of the country with the most Indigenous residents with the worst of the massacres happened 1981–1983.

“…the military killed, tortured and raped as many Maya as it could to instill terror and diminish support for the guerrillas.”

The American military knew about operations like these as they had put the government and military leaders in power, but “looked the other way”. (I wrote a piece about the School of the Americas years back (how the US trained Latin American militaries for its own economic aims abroad). The Guatemalan military also created a “civil patrol system” forcing neighbors to surveil one another around this time.

Similar practices happened in Columbia when labor activists tried to stand up against United Fruit with the Banana massacre. Please feel free to comment if you can help fill in the history I’m missing, or if you have a book recommendation about United Fruit’s fucked up history and the US mainlining it. United Fruit is now known as Chiquita in stores.

El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam

“During the height of funding the US spent roughly $750,000 a day in aid — some $2 billion over the course… and the money went directly to military and business holdings”.

The US propped up a war in machine in El Salvador. In some circles there was a saying that “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.”

“Ronald Regan was planning to send a formal notice to Congress announcing that El Salvador was ‘making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.’ Every six months, the president needed to provide an official reassurance, known as ‘certification’ to lawmakers; in exchange, they sent millions of dollars of aid money to the Salvadoran government. The back and forth was pure theater.”

The US was also exporting executions by sending migrants back across the border:

“The new US Refugee Act- designed to help immigrants persecuted for their membership in a ‘particular social group’- was marking the Salvadorans who sought protection under it. To have set foot in the US, then been cast back out into a war zone, led straight to government-sanctioned murder.”

Recently in the so called US

While Obama ran on a ticket to protect the undocumented and reign in ICE, “deportations increased steadily during his first two years in office. An average of a thousand immigrants were being removed every day” a large share of them parents of Dreamers with no criminal records.

Blitzer writes about the ED for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles confronting Obama about how deportation didn’t deter her family from trying again and again to cross the border. When she asked him how he slept at night he replied:

“You know, I don’t really sleep at night, but let me tell you why. It’s not just that I worry about these kids from El Salvador. I also worry about kids in Sudan, andin Yemen and in other parts of the world. And here’s my problem: we live in a world with national states I have borders. You may believe that it’s inherently unfair that a child born in El Salvador has a completely different set if opportunities available adn a completely different set of dangers than a child born in the US. And that’s because it is unfair. I can’t fix that for you.”

While Obama was known as the “Deporter in Chief”, Trump’s campaign was the first winning presidential campaign to make immigration its defining issue.

Blitzer writes that it’s “much easier to deport someone than it was to convict him of a crime” and actual proof would never have to be shown before deportations because they were already guilty of entering the country undocumented. In 2017 ICE launched “Operation Raging Bull” to target migrants with “MS-13 associations” based on such things as “wearing a Chicago Bulls or Brooklyn Nets hats” or “performing a gang handshake” or being seen with a confirmed member of a gang.

Conclusion

I was looking for summaries, so I don’t think I was the right audience for this almost 500 page book, and might not have had the time or background necessary to get the most out of it. I did learn a lot and it’s peaked my interest and empathy to continue learning about this topic, however. There’s a lot of really fucked up shit the US did and propped up in Central America and is still doing, and takes no responsibility for it when migrants from these Central American countries show up at the US borders. In fact, based on history, it looks like the US could still be exporting executions abroad of labor and environmental rights activists to protect US corporate interests abroad.