Ihave lived in America for most of my life, but i had rarely traveled outside of that portion of America that is the United States, except for short trips to urban Canada and to Mexican resorts. That changed this past February, when I went farther south than I had ever been before, to El Salvador. My timing was perfect, for I arrived on the same day as Marco Rubio. The rumor was that Rubio stayed at the Hilton on his first international trip as US secretary of state, while I stayed two miles away at the less glamorous Sheraton. We were both in San Salvador as part of a project that I think of as Greater America: Rubio was there to build it, and I was there to criticize it and to excavate, for myself if no one else, a small piece of it.

Signs of the United States’ presence in San Salvador were unavoidable, from the fact that the national currency is the US dollar to the sight of the American servicemen and -women in uniform in my hotel. They were Air Force personnel, part of a band that was there to play at an air show at the nearby Ilopango air base. My hotel was itself enmeshed in the troubled history of the country: It was at the Sheraton in 1981 that two masked Salvadoran Army officers entered the hotel coffee shop and shot to death José Rodolfo Viera, president of El Salvador’s Institute for Agrarian Transformation, and Michael P. Hammer and Mark David Pearlman, two US labor lawyers providing technical assistance for a land-reform effort.

My vicarious sense of being immersed in history evaporated, however, when my translator told me that Rubio’s Hilton had once been a Sheraton, and it was there that the murders took place. So did a siege in 1989, carried out by leftist guerrillas of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in their final offensive against the government during the civil war that ran from 1979 to 1992. That siege trapped civilians and a contingent of US Special Forces on “temporary duty,” who would eventually escape after the Catholic Church reached an agreement with the guerrillas.

I was disappointed not to be closer to the history that I had come to investigate—a bloody and terrible one of which land reform was a part. But at least I arrived in time for an event whose full historical import has yet to be determined—but whose immediate impact has already been felt: Rubio’s signing of a deal with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, to use a Salvadoran prison to incarcerate alleged criminals from the United States. The agreement already seemed ominous, for Bukele had been reelected in 2024 with nearly 83 percent of the vote after he imprisoned more than 81,000 people without due process as part of a campaign against gangs that began in 2022. While crime had plummeted, the price had been a tightening of Bukele’s authoritarian grip via what the Catholic bishop of El Salvador called a reign of terror. Not to mention that many of those imprisoned were not actually gang members: At least 7,000 were later released, but many more are said to be innocent.

Less than six weeks after Rubio and Bukele signed the deal, the United States sent 238 alleged Venezuelan gangsters to El Salvador, where their heads were shaved and they were frog-marched by heavily armed and masked prison guards into a massive detention facility reserved for gang members. Most of these men had no criminal records; none had been given due process. At least one was a gay hairstylist caught up in the sweep—possibly because he was brown and tattooed.

All of this might have seemed tragicomic in a Joseph Heller kind of way, but it wasn’t funny, because the hairstylist and all the others remain trapped in their own Catch-22, dispatched by a US government exercising absolute authority—but now claiming it had no power to get them back from Bukele’s prison. And though 36 years have elapsed since the Sheraton siege, the thought of the American advisers, barricaded at the end of their hotel corridor, lost its comic aspect when I recalled that not long after that farce, US-trained Salvadoran armed forces murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at Central American University (UCA)—only four miles from the old Sheraton.

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The Salvadoran military tried to frame the FMLN for those murders, but that fiction did not last. I visited UCA to see the modest house where the Jesuit priests had been awoken early in the morning, taken to the garden outside, made to lie face down, and shot in the head. The Centro Monseñor Romero next door had a small gallery dedicated to the memory of the priests; among the items on display were the blood-stained clothes they were wearing when they were murdered. A young undergraduate volunteer showed me a slideshow of photographs of the dead priests that were taken on the morning they were found. I knew then that I would never forget what a rifle bullet does to a human face.

I had heard about the murders of the priests when they happened, just as I had heard about the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero in 1980 and the rape and murder of four American churchwomen that same year, all carried out by the Salvadoran military. A somewhat precocious child, I read Newsweek at the dentist’s office, which is where I learned about the Iranian hostage crisis, the Iran-contra affair, and the El Mozote massacre. I remember Ronald Reagan describing the Soviet Union as an evil empire and calling for a Star Wars missile defense shield, although I do not remember whether I read about the 1983 speech in which he said El Salvador was on the front line of a communist encroachment into Greater America.

“The problem,” Reagan said, “is that an aggressive minority has thrown in its lot with the Communists, looking to the Soviets and their own Cuban henchmen to help them pursue political change through violence. Nicaragua, right here, has become their base. And these extremists make no secret of their goal. They preach the doctrine of a ‘revolution without frontiers.’ Their first target is El Salvador.”

“A revolution without frontiers” is a good way to describe the project of Greater America as well—a world in which the American revolution turns the United States into the Greatest Country on Earth. Such greatness justifies the American prerogative to transgress the borders of other countries at will, as happened when the United States took over France’s colonial mission in Indochina after the Viet Minh defeated the French in 1954. Reagan cited Laos as a country where the US pressure on the Laotian government to negotiate with the Pathet Lao in the early 1960s had been a fatal mistake. The Pathet Lao were “the armed guerrillas who’d been doing what the guerrillas are doing in El Salvador…they didn’t rest until those guerrillas, the Pathet Lao, had seized total control of the Government of Laos.”

The falling dominoes of Indochina, toppled by communism, had extended to Central America. Here, Reagan continued, “we had a common heritage. We’d all come as pioneers to these two great continents. We worship the same God. And we’d lived at peace with each other longer than most people in other parts of the world. There are more than 600 million of us calling ourselves Americans—North, Central, and South. We haven’t really begun to tap the vast resources of these two great continents.”

Reading this speech more than 40 years after its delivery, I had not expected Reagan to proclaim an American unity across borders, premised on Christianity, capitalism, and anti-communism. Many people living in Central and South America have certainly asserted their claim to being American, but usually by arguing that they were overshadowed by a United States that had seized the name of America for itself, not because they were willing to be led by Reagan in a Greater America.

Trump’s rhetoric about annexing Canada, Greenland, and Panama can also be understood within this idea of a Greater America, which is what drove the creation of the United States, built on conquest, from the 13 Atlantic coast colonies to the Manifest Destiny of expanding to the Pacific and the Rio Grande, to the seizure of Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and, for nearly five decades beginning in 1898, the Philippines.

Marco Rubio’s country of ancestry, Cuba, is a part of this project of Greater America as well. The United States had dominated Cuba in the first half of the 20th century, and Fidel Castro’s revolution against the plantation class in Cuba was also directed at the US. Rubio’s parents, who had been living in the United States before the Cuban Revolution, returned to Cuba briefly under the Castro regime. However, they quickly came back to the US, where they were not naturalized until 1975. This makes Rubio, born in 1971—the same year as me—a birthright citizen and the son of noncitizens.

Trump is now flirting with eroding or ending the very right that allowed Rubio to be born a citizen. Birthright citizenship is arguably part of what makes the United States great, and whatever greatness the US might claim is premised at least partly on documents like the Constitution and its amendments. American greatness also stems from our willingness to say:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-­tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus wrote those words for “The New Colossus,” the Statue of Liberty given to the United States by the French, and they apply as much to Rubio’s parents as to mine—and to me personally, since I was born in Viet Nam and came to the United States as a homeless refugee from the tempest of war and colonialism, communism and anti-communism.

But in Greater America, the new colossus is the strongman, foreshadowed by Reagan and embodied fully by Trump, determined to extinguish the lamp that had brought too many migrants, documented and undocumented, into the United States. Many of them came from El Salvador, and in visiting that country, I wanted to understand more intimately how the United States had gone from fighting communism in Viet Nam to doing the same in Central America, and how this global counterinsurgency effort was intertwined with my own journey from Viet Nam to the United States of America as a refugee. This war against communism had ultimately produced me as an American. What had it done to Salvadorans?

Adriver and translator took me on the five-hour trip from San Salvador to El Mozote, the site of the most infamous anti-communist attack carried out by the Salvadoran Army, when its soldiers killed about 1,000 unarmed peasants, many of them women and children. Most of the people living in the villages of El Mozote had not expressed any support for the FMLN, but the army was in a scorched-earth mood, intent on eradicating civilian support for the guerrillas. Extermination was not a new policy: The oligarchs who controlled the government had been so fearful of communism that when communists and peasants rose up against their rule in 1932, the army and oligarch-sponsored militias killed tens of thousands of people, including much of the Indigenous population. The event is known simply as La Matanza—The Massacre.

State and oligarchic harshness against the peasants, political opposition, and land reform was so extreme in the late 1970s that President Jimmy Carter tried to pressure El Salvador into improving its human rights record. El Salvador responded by renouncing US military aid in 1977, with Israel helping to make up the shortfall. Israel played a key role in assisting Central American governments in suppressing insurgencies in the 1970s and ’80s, selling weapons and providing advisers, surveillance technology, and a counterinsurgency strategy modeled on its ongoing suppression of Palestinians—used to most terrible effect in the Guatemalan state’s genocidal campaign against Indigenous peoples. From 1975 to 1979, Israel supplied about 83 percent of El Salvador’s military needs, including the French-made airplanes that would take off from Ilopango air base to drop American-­made bombs.

An American Mk-82 500-pound bomb was displayed at the Museum of the Revolution in nearby Perquin, which reminded me of the humble War Remnants Museum I had visited in Saigon in the early 2000s and the ramshackle War Museum Cambodia in Siem Reap that I saw a decade later: no air conditioning, single-story buildings, lots of captured weaponry, and curation that appeared crude by Western aesthetic standards, including blurry reproductions of newspaper photos and captions that were untranslated or rendered in faulty English. But what was evident in all these museums was a sincere desire to tell their country’s history from the point of view of the guerrillas and the survivors­—in direct contradiction to the narratives of Greater America, found in the Hollywood movies and slick presidential speeches that portray American interventions in Southeast Asia and Central America as endeavors to defend freedom and democracy.

By the time the Carter administration restarted military aid in 1980, three weeks after the murder of the American churchwomen, El Salvador’s civil war was already brutal. It pitted the oligarchy, its army, and its death squads against an alliance of leftist guerrillas and would kill at least 80,000 people, most of them civilians. The US government was well aware that the vast majority of the atrocities were being committed by the Salvadoran Army that its advisers were training.

Americanization was why the Salvadoran troops that came to El Mozote were kitted out to look exactly like American troops in Viet Nam, which is also how South Vietnamese troops—like my father-in-law, a lieutenant colonel of the paratroops who trained at Fort Benning—were outfitted. Whether they were Americans, South Vietnamese, or Salvadorans, the troops wore olive-green fatigues and M1 steel-pot helmets, wielded M16 rifles, and were transported by Huey helicopters. Photographs of Salvadoran Army operations amid the country’s beautiful green mountains depict scenes that look almost exactly like episodes from the American war in Viet Nam.

In the central square of El Mozote, 
44 years after the massacre, I sat with three men, survivors, two of them about my age. While I was reading about El Mozote in Newsweek as a ten year old, they were running for their lives with their family members, many of whom were killed. Wearing gray polo shirts with the logo of their survivors’ association, they told me about their quest for justice—reparations, yes, but also the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the massacre. Financial reparations to survivors have been slow in coming, while convictions of the killers and their commanders have not happened.

The paved road running through the center of town and the cement plaza we were sitting in were some of the most concrete government responses to the decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that the Salvadoran armed forces had committed the massacre and that the state owed reparations. Next to the plaza was a dignified memorial to the victims. Plaques bearing the names of the dead are mounted on a curved stone wall, faced by cutouts of a family of four—two parents, two children—holding hands. A sign in front of the memorial reads: “The remains of 140 innocent children under the age of 12 were found at this site. They are currently buried beneath the monument in El Mozote Square.”

I had read about the horrors of the killings, and so I did not ask the men to recount what happened, and they did not offer to. I took pictures of the memorial, as I had taken pictures of the memorials to massacre victims in the Choeung Ek killing fields of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and in the villages of Ha My and Son My in Viet Nam—the latter better known as My Lai. Refugees fled from those countries, as they also fled from El Salvador; many made their way to the United States. Some of the Cambodian refugees who came as children never got their US citizenship, committed crimes, and were deported back to a country that most of them barely remembered and whose language they could not speak. Some of the Salvadoran refugees became gangsters and were deported starting with the Clinton administration, returning to a country that they barely knew and which was unprepared to deal with them. It was likely some of these gangsters whom Bukele would throw into prison en masse while proclaiming himself as the “world’s coolest dictator.”

Bukele must have been influenced by Trump, as Trump himself now seems to be influenced by Bukele. Sitting before the cameras with Bukele for a White House chat, Trump said that he would like to send “homegrown” Americans to Salvadoran prisons. Neither president mentioned that those prisons already hold criminals forged by the tempestuous violence of a Greater America, from revolution and counterinsurgency to gangsterism and deportation. If the United States of America is the name for the best version of the country that its citizens can imagine—a nation bound by laws and uplifted by ideals—then Greater America is the doppelgänger that has also always existed, feeding on the desire for power and profit.

If the country feels divided now, and even feels changed beyond recognition for many Americans—whether they be on the left or the right—that, too, is due to this Jekyll and Hyde distinction between a United States and a Greater America. The glory of the United States was built on possessing this Greater America, but the danger for the United States is that it has now been possessed by this Greater America—and everything it represents in terms of domination, doom, and potential self-­destruction. This current moment of triumph for the right and crisis for the left in the United States is the logical outcome of a long history of the country exercising imperial power to disrupt other countries, unleashing the very forces that have now returned to unsettle the United States.

Rubio coming to court Bukele, and Bukele coming to pay his respects to Trump, are just the latest but perhaps the most visceral illustrations of this feedback loop that has now turned the long-standing US support for authoritarianism against itself. The list of dictators we have supported is long: from the shah of Iran and President Marcos of the Philippines to the generals of Cambodia, Viet Nam, South Korea, Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, and Panama. While the United States has sometimes done its own dirty work in conquering and absorbing the lands of others, it has more often preferred—particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries—to delegate that dirty work to the dictators of allied countries. Usually that has been done discreetly, so that the American citizenry is not too disturbed by incidents like the Indonesian mass killings (1965–66) or the Gwangju massacre (1980) or the Guatemalan genocide (1970s–80s).

While American-supported leaders and militaries carried out these atrocities, they appeared to be separate from American domestic life. If Americans had been subjected to things like state surveillance through the COINTELPRO program of the 1960s, or mass incarceration as Japanese Americans during World War II, or segregation and lynching as Black Americans, or mass deportation as Mexicans or Mexican Americans in the 1930s, those episodes appeared to be purely domestic eruptions, rather than tragedies overlapping and reverberating with the practices of a Greater America.

But the forced removal of Indigenous peoples and their incarceration on reservations foreshadowed what would be done to Japanese and Mexican Americans, while COINTELPRO in the United States operated at the same historical moment as the Phoenix Program in Viet Nam. COINTELPRO was aimed at the Black Panthers and other domestic insurgents, and the Phoenix Program targeted the Viet Cong; as James Baldwin put it in No Name in the Street, “The Panthers thus became the native Vietcong, the ghetto became the village in which the Vietcong were hidden, and in the ensuing search and destroy operations, everyone in the village became suspect.”

Trump, in his eagerness to conduct search-and-destroy operations against the terrorists he proclaims to see everywhere—from alleged Venezuelan gangsters to alleged Mexican migrant rapists to pro-Palestinian students—has now adapted the techniques and the rhetoric of America’s dictator allies. Where the United States once kept its dictators at a polite distance, Greater America has brought our dictators closer to home—too close for the comfort of many Americans, who can now clearly see that the fate of renditioned brown men, disappeared into a Salvadoran prison, might foretell their own.

That Rubio is the secretary of state overseeing this is ironic—but not surprising. While Rubio’s parents initially left Cuba in 1956 when the dictator Fulgencio Batista was in power, his grandfather left under the Castro regime. As an undocumented immigrant to the United States, his grandfather was almost deported, but this does not seem to have produced any empathy in Rubio for the deportable. Perhaps he views his grandfather as a legitimate refugee from the Castro regime—even as his parents were not—and therefore someone who should be saved. Or perhaps he is cynically simplifying his family narrative to fit into the story of Cuban exile, the pursuit of freedom from communism, and the aspiration to belong to a Greater America. I know some Vietnamese refugees feel the same way, believing that they were the good refugees, unlike the ones coming from the southern part of Greater America. Some of those good refugees made their way to Washington, DC, on January 6 and waved a South Vietnamese flag in front of the Capitol dome. Their anti-­communism aligns with Rubio’s, and that anti-communism remains a part of Greater America—a belief in which the ends justifies the means.

If Trump is intent on erasing the memory of January 6 as a criminal insurrection and transforming it into a patriotic uprising, then my work is the opposite. I want to remember all the ways in which my existence in Greater America connects me with those who also want to remember, rather than to forget or distort. So, after my visit to the memorial of El Mozote, I accepted the invitation of one of the survivors to visit his home in the outlying village of La Joya. The victims of the massacre committed there included many of his relatives, and Señor Martinez wanted me to see his own private memorial, so we drove the next afternoon into the countryside on an unpaved road, following a pickup truck with two dozen schoolchildren standing in its bed.

They were returning home from school in their white shirts and blue pants or skirts, hanging on to the welded-on frame around the bed until the pickup paused and let them off by twos and threes in front of their homes. After half an hour, we reached a small gray house of stone walls and a tiled roof. A picture of Archbishop Romero hung on the front of the house next to a rack of potato chips, which indicated the convenience store inside; it was run from a single room, all the goods stacked on a table.

Next to the house, behind a chain-link fence, is the memorial that Martinez built under a corrugated tin roof. There is a stone wall, and on it are a crucifix with Jesus Christ draped in a loincloth and 17 black plaques bearing dozens of names of the dead. Martinez tells me of how 24 of his relatives had been killed, pointing to their names. Among them is his mother.

I see someone as old as 76, a child of 2, another who is zero—killed in the womb. I do not know what to say to Señor Martinez, so I tell him of the Vietnamese saying that we utter when confronted with another’s grief. I tell him that we like to chia buồn. To share sorrow.

My translator translates. Martinez nods. We are quiet, and then I give him all the American dollars I have on me as a donation to his memorial.

Sharing sorrow is not enough, but it is a beginning—as well as an obligation for all those Americans who would like to believe that there is something great in America, a greatness that would allow us to unite America rather than to divide and conquer it. That greatness would be based on grief rather than profit, on sharing sorrow rather than monopolizing power.

I think of how there are not enough memorials in the world, of how many massacres have no markers to commemorate them, no survivors to remember the dead, all amounting to an untold history of massacre. Martinez is one of the lonely keepers of these memories of massacre, of whom there are so many scattered throughout Greater America. For those Americans of the United States who would like to save their country, I would suggest that we listen to the stories of Martinez and those like him. Their reminder of the inhumanity done in our name forces us to prove our humanity, rather than to assume that it already exists. They are the witnesses to the worst of us, and for their existence and persistence, we should be grateful.