The heart of Jonathan Blitzer’s new book about Central America is a heart doctor. Born in the 1950s in El Salvador, Juan Romagoza was drawn to medicine by something like a religious calling. By the time he finished his education, his tiny but storied nation was drowning in state violence. In 1980, he witnessed a patient, a student activist, coolly executed in a hospital bed by national security forces. He made a mission of treating activists and campesinos brutalized by blood-crazed soldiers—a choice that set him on a path to being brutally tortured, followed by forced emigration and a life of activism in the United States. Romagoza’s biography is the story of an era, a region, and a great debt that remains unpaid. He is history in the flesh.
“Politics is a form of selective amnesia,” writes Blitzer, a journalist who covers immigration for the New Yorker, in his introduction to Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. “The people who survive it are our only insurance against forgetting.”
Those lines, a touch opaque at first, are something of a raison d’être for Blitzer’s 500-page journalistic history, set for release in January. The current immigration debate in America ping-pongs uselessly between an increasingly ethno-nationalist right wing and a lesser-evil Democratic Party, politically fainthearted and sometimes hamstrung by the courts. Migrants never stop coming but are subjected to needless cruelty, while our politics grow poisoned. “For more than a century, the US has devised one policy after another to keep people out of the country,” Blitzer writes. “For more than a century, it has failed.”
At best, American politicians today voice humanitarian concerns and pay homage to our “nation of immigrants” mythos. But outside of certain leftist and immigrant rights activist circles, one hears little talk of the U.S. role in causing emigration from Latin America. For the last decade, asylum-seekers from Central America’s “Northern Triangle”—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—have defined the migratory flow to our southern border. We often speak of them as needy or as dangerous, as frightened mothers or as gang members, but rarely as the product of decades of U.S. policy in the region. This is the debt that history imposes, one that more welcoming immigration policies might help repay.
Blitzer’s answer to our country’s willful ignorance is a character-driven chronicle of 40 years of transcontinental violence and displacement.