Irrefutable Images | The Lighthouse

From the time Donald Trump took office in January until mid-October, when El Faro visited the Center for the Reception of Returnees in Guatemala City, the Department of Homeland Security had sent 398 deportation flights to the country, carrying 34,539 people. On one flight was Alicia Hernández, the woman on the cover of this magazine. She was sobbed as she learned that she had no family in Guatemala — everyone she knew was already in the United States.

Some men were spattered with paint, having been snatched from their jobs in Chicago or Orlando with no time to say goodbye to their families. Everyone was distraught, confused, or angry. “I don’t want to go back to that country until that president leaves,” said one man, taking off his stars-and-stripes cowboy boots and leaving them on the curb. “For me, that dream is over for now.”

Photojournalism is at the heart of El Faro English. It’s why we’ve featured it on each magazine cover and published over three-dozen photo essays in six years. In her iconic book of photography from the brutish 1980s, “Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny,” Jean-Marie Simon wrote that pictures don’t generally change the repression that they captured, but they do offer irrefutable evidence that it took place.

Carlos Barrera’s photo essay, Guatemala’s Tarmac of Tearsleaves little doubt that US sports aren’t receiving much more than breakfast upon landing in their country of birth — poles apart from the Guatemalan government’s perennial promises of reintegration.

When Guatemalans flip the coin of abandonment, they too often find brutality on the other side. In August, eight years after the Hogar Seguro children’s home fire killed 41 teenage girls and left 15 survivors, a court condemned six officials, including the director of the facility, for locking the girls in their room and refusing to let them out as flames consumed them.

Edward Grattan, who interned with us this year with the gracious support of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, spent months engaging with the women who survived. In his photo essay, Nine Minutes in the Fire, Eight Years for the First LightGrattan observes that the facility’s name itself speaks of a place that never was: “Safe Home.”

This kind of depravity, according to Regina José Galindo, a world-renowned performance artist born in the seventies, must be viewed through the lens of almost four decades of armed conflict in Guatemala, which ended in 1996. “The war is the reason we live the way we live today,” she told Ramiro Guevara in an interview for this issue in her studio. “In Guatemala,” she says, “we don’t live with the truth.”

The second section of this issue turns to El Salvador, where Bryan Avelar reveals the existence of Halcón 32, a death squad operating between at least 2015 and 2018 on the payroll of a sitting mayor, Salvador Menéndez. One agent who flipped on his fellow police officers confessed to 97 murders, and accused the majority of paying around one thousand dollars for each of three-dozen of them.

Among their victims, according to the cooperating witness, is parish priest Ricardo Antonio Cortez, rector of the San Óscar Arnulfo Romero seminary. In August 2020 he was ordered out of his car and executed on the side of the road, on the order of a local drug trafficker known as Chepón.

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There were at least 37 members of Halcón 32 from the ranks of the National Civil Police, but only three have been convicted. Menéndez denies involvement and told El Faro that he has never been summoned by any authority.

“True psychopaths operated and continue to operate in uniform,” writes the editorial boardbuilding on its last comment on the rings of prison guard torturers in Salvadoran prisons. “Protection for police officers has increased under the ongoing state of exception. Impunity is guaranteed from Casa Presidencial.”

For years in El Salvador, authorities have shown little interest in getting to the bottom of mass killings, whether perpetrated by gangs or the police themselves. From 2010 to 2013, Óscar Martínez followed the long-suffering excavation of a well in Turín, a town in western El Salvador close to the Guatemalan border. Forensic experts knew there were many bodies.

But as bureaucratic wrangling dragged on, each rain season wiped away the gains of the last dig. “This is the story of a well,” Martínez begins, “and of the country that surrounds it.”

In a special podcast episode for this magazine, we examine how Nayib Bukele went from conservative darling in Washington during Trump’s first term to pariah under the early Biden years’ anti-corruption agenda. Then how, outlasting the Democrats, Bukele bet on Trump’s return, catapulting him back to the seat of US power. Listen to Bukele and Washington: Honeymoon, Breakup, and Back Together.

Last, we close with a special essay in The Tertulia from Nicaraguan academic Mateo Jarquín of Chapman University. He looks back on how the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990 “ushered in the dramatic end of an era in Central America.”

“As revolutionary movements wound down in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador,” he writes, “Central Americans were left asking why the armed struggle had been fought, what it had wrought, and whether it had been worth it. They’re still asking.”

A final note: The image in the backdrop of this letter is the sweeping police repression of protesters in Honduras in 2017, as the Juan Orlando Hernández government brazenly stole an already unconstitutional reelection.

The picture from El Faro’s Víctor Peña, widely picked up across Honduras in the aftermath, offers irrefutable evidence of acts committed not even a decade ago. In two weeks, we’ll be back in Tegucigalpa for the national elections on November 30. We’ll have our cameras ready.