The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
Starred review from November 20, 2023
Blitzer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, debuts with a masterful portrayal of the trauma experienced by asylum-seeking migrants from Central America and the U.S. government’s often inept policy interventions. Blitzer organizes his narrative around four Central Americans, including Juan Romagoza, a doctor tortured in El Salvador for his political leanings who later cared for migrants in the U.S.; Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, who escaped violence in Honduras and was later separated from her children at the U.S. border; and Lucrecia Hernández Mack, a doctor and politician in Guatemala. Interwoven with descriptions of the struggles of these asylum seekers and activists is the tale of America’s chaotic immigration policy, beginning with the Reagan administration’s support of repressive anticommunist regimes in Central America (which led, according to Blitzer, to the gang violence, state repression, and unrelenting poverty that has triggered mass migration from the region). Blitzer has produced a model of long-form journalism that intertwines the personal and the political, describing how drug cartels and street gangs brought harm and death to prodemocracy activists and innocent bystanders, while those in power remained indifferent. This is a powerful indictment of U.S. immigration policy. (Jan.)Correction: A previous version of this review misspelled the name of one of the book’s subjects and incorrectly summarized another’s biography.
Starred review from December 15, 2023
A New Yorker staff writer examines the tragedy of Central America against the backdrop of U.S. immigration policy. From the beginning, the U.S. has meddled in the affairs of Central America's nations, some of them autocracies. This tinkering, particularly in the Reagan years, led to murder, civil war, and, decades later, a stream of migrants desperate to flee rampant poverty and violence. "For more than a century, the U.S. has devised one policy after another to keep people out of the country," writes Blitzer. "For more than a century, it has failed." Jimmy Carter continued Reagan's oppressive foreign policy to such an extent that Salvadoran government torturers called one technique "the Carter," and Barack Obama kept many of George W. Bush's brutal policies in place. Even as American politicians wrestled with developing a comprehensive immigration policy with paths to citizenship, Central Americans continued to enter the U.S., many to be lost to gang violence. "By the early 1990s," writes the author, "gang-related killing accounted for more than a third of all homicides in Los Angeles County." After deportation, gang members and their victims alike became raw meat in the violence that continued to envelop El Salvador and Honduras. In the former country, the MS-13 gang, feared in immigrant communities in the U.S. just as much as back home, killed 87 people in just 72 hours, while a government crackdown reiterated the vicious suppression of the civil war years. Meanwhile, conditions on the U.S.-Mexico border have worsened as thousands of Central Americans clamor to enter the U.S., braving diversion tactics that have included separating children from their families and placing adults in conditions that resemble concentration camps. It's a sorrowful yet urgent topic, and Blitzer navigates it with both journalistic rigor and compassion. A sobering, well-reported history in which no one emerges a winner.
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October 21, 2024
Blitzer, an award-winning New Yorker staff writer, presents an engaging and accessible account detailing the myriad, often brutal ramifications of U.S. foreign policy towards El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala during the past several decades. He employs a conversational tone, effectively balancing in-depth investigative reporting with personal narration as he weaves together the stories of individuals caught up in the evolving turmoil wreaked by both Democratic and Republican policy makers. This historical perspective makes for compelling reading as it brings the lives of people in each country into focus and helps readers make sense of complicated past events that are informing urgent current controversies and actions.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.