The violence in El Salvador has come to American attention with the deportation of accused gang members to a notorious prison there. Viet Thanh Nguyen, professor of literature at the University of Southern California, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his trip to El Salvador, which coincided with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip, and how their versions of American greatness differ immensely as they look to immigration and violence in the region. His article “Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades” was published in The Nation.
Transcript
Krys Boyd: [00:00:00] People who live in the United States, we call ourselves Americans, right? Despite the fact that there are 34 other countries in North and South America, when we refer to being Americans, we sort of expect the world to not just understand what we mean, but to accept that we are the real Americans among two continents worth of also-rans. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. If all this were just a matter of naming privileges, it probably wouldn’t be that take a deal. But my guest sees a pattern, an unofficial but deeply consequential project he refers to as greater America, by which the United States assumes its preferred policies in countries throughout North and South America are simply our prerogative. Viet Thanh Nguyen is professor of literature at the University of Southern California. His novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016. His essay for the nation is titled, Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades. Yet welcome back to Think.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:01:01] Hi Krys, thanks for having me again.
Krys Boyd: [00:01:03] So when you write about this project you refer to as Greater America, there’s nothing spelled out in so many words as a U.S. Objective. So what does Greater America aspire to?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:01:16] Well, I think it speaks to this deeply held American mythology that so many of us as people of the United States have, which is this idea that America is great. We’re an exceptional country. We are a country with a particular destiny that makes us unique in this world. This vision definitely goes back to the very origins of the country, but accelerated during the 19th century when the United states grew into its current continental shape. Yeah, I think someone like Donald Trump does evoke this idea when with his narrative of make America great again. And of course, we all have to confront what that means, especially as I started thinking about this article in the earlier part of this year. Donald Trump was talking about things like annexing Panama and Canada and Greenland and these kinds of gestures definitely go back to this idea of an unrestrained great and greater America of the 19th century that has made us what we are today.
Krys Boyd: [00:02:09] Yeah, you remind us that although the focus is very much on President Trump at the moment, this is a continuation of a series of decisions dating back to U.S. Presidents in the late 19th century.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:02:21] We’ve been an expansionist country since the very beginning, obviously starting with the 13 colonies, expanding ever westwards. This has been fundamental to the narrative of the United States that the continental United States has been ours for the taking and that we have the legitimate right to do things like engage in wars with Mexico, for example, which led to the western half of the united States coming into American possession. But, you know, that idea of expansion went well beyond the edge of California into the Pacific, south of the United States. And this has been a goal of the of the united states government and the people for now a couple of centuries at least to keep on expanding as far as we can, if not just territory and certainly through influence and power.
Krys Boyd: [00:03:05] You live in California today, I live in Texas. Every once in a while I think about how different my life would be if prior history had not happened and the U.S. Had not annexed these places we now call home.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:03:18] Obviously, it would be a very, very different country, but I think that is, again, part of the logic of the of the United States. One of the ways by which we’ve distinguished ourselves as different from the so-called old world of Europe is that we’re not an empire, unlike France or Germany or Great Britain. But in fact, we are an empire that we would not exist as a country. California and Texas would not exists as United States as part of United States if it hadn’t been for various kinds of wars and conquest. And so we are, in fact, imperial in our nature, but what makes us a little bit different than the European imperial power is that we deny calling ourselves an empire. Now, the other countries of what I call greater America, these other parts of North and South America, I think distinctly recognize the imperial power of the United States because they have been subject to that imperial power for quite a long time.
Krys Boyd: [00:04:11] What made you choose to visit El Salvador in the Central American portion of North America as part of your reporting for this essay? Why El Salvador specifically?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:04:21] I’ve been aware of El Salvador ever since I was a young child, 9 or 10, 11 years old, reading about El Salvador in the early 1980s and reading about things like the Iran-Contra affair, which is not in El Salvador, but certainly was very close to it in Nicaragua. And I was just always puzzled by what was going on in Central America. Like many Americans, I was not very. Geographically well-informed or geopolitically well informed. But I was curious in reading Newsweek magazine and seeing images of Salvadoran soldiers dressed up exactly like American soldiers doing things like carrying out massacres and so on. And so that was always on my mind. And I’d been south of the United States, but never further south than Mexico, like a lot of U.S. Citizens. And so when the opportunity came up to visit El Salvador as part of my work as a board member for the International Rescue Committee, which works with refugees, I took that opportunity to go at the beginning of February.
Krys Boyd: [00:05:26] El Salvador is a country more than 1200 miles from the U.S. Border. What signs did you see, you know, stepping off the plane, out of a cab, of U. S. Influence there?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:05:38] I think the first sign was that the currency was US dollars. That was very interesting to me. Obviously, when we travel to different countries, typically we expect that they’ll have their own unique currencies, but the Salvadorian currency is the US dollar. That was a very striking. I stayed at the Sheraton Hotel, a US chain. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, was staying a couple of miles away at the Hilton Hotel. And in my hotel, there were actually US troops in uniform. I believe they were part of the US Air Force, Therefore. An air show at the Ilopango Air Base, not far away from central San Salvador, where I’m staying. And so these trappings of the U.S. Presidents were definitely everywhere, from the financial to the military dimensions of the United States. And of course, the idea that I could get around San Salvador speaking English and relying on people’s knowledge of what American culture is and what American power is.
Krys Boyd: [00:06:36] Secretary Rubio was there at the time you were there to meet with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. What was the deal they were working out at that point?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:06:46] This was Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first trip in his official function. He’d already been to Panama to discuss Panama and the Panama Canal. That’s another preoccupation of the Trump administration. What Marco Rubia was there to do in San Salvador was to sign the prison deportation agreement with President Bukele. This is the deportation agreement that allowed the United to send within a few weeks in March, over 200. Venezuelan immigrants back to El Salvador and have them put into the mega prison that President Bukele had set up to hold what he alleges to be gangsters and criminals. He had come into power in 2022, promising to take control of the crime rate in El Salvador, and there’s no doubt that there was a serious gang and crime problem in El El Salvador that everyday Salvadorans were terrified about. And Bukele made good on his promise and threw 80,000 people into prison without due process. Many of them were actually innocent. At least 7,000 were released. Many more are suspected to be innocent of these kinds of allegations. But Bukela became very popular because of this action, because the crime rate did go down for at least for a while. His popularity was around 87% at the time that I visited. And I think Marco Rubio and President Trump wanted to have, were impressed by that. And that’s why they wanted to set up that deportation agreement. And we’re dealing with the consequences of that even today.
Krys Boyd: [00:08:21] A lot of people have been concerned about the fates of people deported from this country without due process, sent into that Salvadoran prison. There’s a pretty stunning piece, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, in the Washington Post about conditions there. It sounds as if it is every bit as bad and worse as advocates for justice had feared.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:08:45] The reports are grim, absolutely. And we’re obviously seeing reports about people being beaten, being tortured, being humiliated. That was actually quite public. When those Venezuelans were sent there, it was a public spectacle. I’m sure many people saw the pictures. Their heads were shaved. They were clothed in what looked like underwear. They were forced to frog march by armed guards and just put into humiliating postures. And the reports recently have been that rations were bad, hygienic conditions are terrible, and so on and so forth. And Bukele has used these prisons not simply to punish alleged criminals and gangsters, but also to punish dissidents, including people of his own administration and dozens, perhaps hundreds of people have died in his prisons as well. And so while some Americans may take satisfaction in that kind of spectacle of punishment, Like. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kryssy Noem, who went there and had her picture taken in front of some of these some of these prisoners. The fact of the matter is that it’s also a very frightening situation for the United States as a whole because anybody could technically be deported to this prison without due process, not simply people who are alleged to be criminals.
Krys Boyd: [00:10:05] Fiat, a minute ago you mentioned that, at least in the immediate aftermath of imprisoning 81,000 of his own people without due process due to alleged gang activity, and we should say this is in a country of 6.3 million, so not a huge population, he had an 87 percent approval rating, but not every Salvadoran supports this approach. A Catholic bishop there has dubbed it a reign of terror, and it’s not necessarily historically a safe thing for Catholic bishops to speak out in El Salvador.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:10:36] One of the things that I was reading about in the early 1980s was, of course, the assassination of Archbishop Romero, probably the most popular man in El Salvador at the time, because he was standing up for the rights of the poor and the peasants and the exploited and the oppressed. And he was living in El Salvatore at a time in which it was a very anti-democratic country. It still is an anti-democratic country. There has been a long history of exploitation of the peasantry by the landed oligarchy. The country has been ruled by an oligarch and by the military for many decades throughout the 20th century. And there’s been a history of massacres of the peasants by this powerful class. So Archbishop Romero was standing up to that class and he was assassinated in 1980 by the army. That’s pretty much indisputable. That became a cause celeb obviously in El Salvador, but also globally as well and in 1989 You know also in 1980 by the way for American church women were raped and murdered by Salvadoran security forces That was also something that I was reading about at the time and in 1989 six Jesuit priests of international backgrounds were taken from their beds at the at the University of Central America, which is a Jesuit university, and murdered in the garden outside of their rooms. That also became international news. So there’s been a long history of violent suppression of the Catholic Church in El Salvador because many of the priests there, not all of them, but many of them took the side of the peasants and the idea of liberation theology, the use of Catholic doctrine to stand with the poor and the oppressed was. Very powerful in El Salvador and the government and the military took a very dim view of this and interpreted what this meant to be that even the priests, the archbishop and the Jesuits were themselves aligned with Marxism and communism. And this gave the military and the police the excuse to inflict great violence against the priests and the peasants. And unfortunately, the United States government supported this.
Krys Boyd: [00:12:49] You were a precocious kid. I mean, not very many 9, 10, 11-year-olds waiting to see the dentist are going to pick up Newsweek and peruse an article about something like this. But what I think about, Viet, is your ability to put any of this in context at that age. You hadn’t presumably learned much about these things in school. You didn’t necessarily know all the geopolitics that played into this. How did you try and make sense of what you were reading at the time?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:13:17] I was raised a Catholic by very devout Catholic parents. I’ve spent most of my life in Catholic schools. And so the idea of Catholic, the Catholic narrative of sacrifice and struggle and martyrdom and so on that’s so core to Catholic identity was already there with me. So I think just seeing these reports of nuns and archbishops and priests being murdered was so incendiary for me that I understood there was something terrible happening there. And I was also coming out of a background where I myself was a refugee, having been born in Vietnam and coming to the United States with my parents, fleeing the end of the Vietnam War, of which my family was on the losing side. And so I had an intuitive sense of what it meant to be a refugee and of what war meant. So again, inarticulate, but certainly emotional for me and enough for me to take the side or to feel instinctively that I should be taking the side. Of the poor and the oppressed in this situation.
Krys Boyd: [00:14:15] Now, the United States, as we’ve said, has signed on for a taste of what that one Catholic bishop calls a reign of terror. How does the arrangement work that some alleged gangsters in this country are sent to one of President Nayib Bukele’s most notorious prisons without due process? What is the process for getting them out again once they’ve served their time?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:14:40] Well, first of all, there’s no sense of what their time is. I don’t believe any of these people who were sent, who were deported, if that’s the right word. Other people are using the words like rendition since the Venezuelans in this case are not being sent back to Venezuela, but instead being sent to a third country. But in any case, once they are sent to El Salvador, there is no conviction. There is no judge handing down a sentence that says they should be there for 10 years or 20 years and so on. And according to the reports that have been coming out, these prisoners, when they show up, are being told by the prison warden, you’re never getting out of here, this is hell. So it’s an indefinite, can it be called a sentence? It’s an definite condemnation to this particular place. Now, how it works on the United States end, that’s obviously a matter of great controversy. Does the Trump administration have the legal authority to simply deport people, especially in the face of lower level judges saying, no, you should not be doing this. Now, this is a matter that’s being handled by the lower courts, but also by the Supreme Court as well. And every American should be concerned because part of the lessons that we have learned as a country, supposedly, after the Civil War and the creation of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments is that we were very definitely an imperfect country with unequal rights for different people of different backgrounds, by which, of course, what we’re talking about are. Enslaved black people who are not getting due process rights and things like this. The United States tried to correct some of these issues in the middle of in the late 19th century with these amendments and things I do process the right to people right for people to have their day in court and to go through the appeal process and so on. These are precisely what is being are is being contested by the Trump administration through these types of deportations of people. Without having their appeals heard in a proper fashion. And while it could be argued by some Americans that this is the right thing to do because these people are supposedly illegal and so on, again, the threat is that the suspension of due process, this experiment with suspending due process is something that could eventually be extended, not simply to immigrants of various kinds of legal backgrounds, but anybody that the Trump administration considers to be a dissident or opposed in any way, to Trump jump in policy.
Krys Boyd: [00:17:03] The Trump administration now says, once it has handed over alleged gangsters to Paqueli’s prisons, it has no authority to get them back. Does that strike you as true or disingenuous or something in between?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:17:17] Oh, I think it’s completely hypocritical because obviously part of the premise of the Trump administration is that there is enormous amounts of power reserved for the executive branch. And in fact, what’s obvious to everybody is that the Trump Administration is trying to expand executive power as much as possible at the expense of our other branches. So on the one hand, part of appeal of President Trump is his argument that he can do everything that he that he needs and should have unlimited power. And that he can use the authority of the presidency and the United States to push through any kind of policy idea that he desires. And that’s certainly what he’s trying to do with tariffs, for example. And so all of a sudden for the Trump administration to say, on the one hand, we can do whatever we need to do to expel or deport people, but then we have no power to get those people back is obviously completely facetious.
Krys Boyd: [00:18:10] Aside from gang activity, we’ve referred to this a little bit, El Salvador has a painful history of military and guerrilla violence. There was a really devastating civil war. What role has the United States played in that over time?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:18:24] So this is actually very personal for me because, as I mentioned, I’m a refugee from the war in Vietnam, which the United States had a very considerable role in perpetuating and in instigating. The United States saw the war, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which the United states calls collectively the Vietnam War, as necessary to intervene in what Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed to be the domino theory, which is that if any one country failed to communism. Then there would be a chain of dominoes falling that would eventually reach the United States. And so the war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was the first test of this domino theory, which is why the United states put such enormous effort in the 50s, 60s, and 70s in terms of blood and treasure into stopping communism. Well, that effort obviously failed by 1975, and immediately what the United State did was to pivot to Central America. So… In 1983, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he said, well, we lost in Laos, for example, because we did not sufficiently see the threat of the path at Laos the communist Laotian army there. And we will not make that same mistake again. We have already lost Nicaragua to communism by 1983. El Salvador is now the next front and we’re gonna do everything we can to stop communism in El Salvador. And in this in this very important speech Ronald Reagan basically put forth the greater America argument without necessarily using those terms, but he said from North to the South were all one great expanse of America were united by Krystianity, capitalism and anti communism, and it was that kind of global vision of these kinds of principles around religion around the economy around politics that led the United States to basically see El Salvador. As a very hot spot in the Cold War, and that if insurgencies and communism was not stopped here, it would spread north to the United States. And so this led the United States to completely back the Salvadoran oligarchy and its military in a very intensive civil war that cost 80,000 Salvadoran lives.
Krys Boyd: [00:20:32] In that same speech, Reagan went on to tip his hand in a quite revealing way. He talked about tapping the vast resources of North and South America. What resources was he referring to and what would give us the right to tap anything outside of our own borders?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:20:50] Well, I think there’s a lot of resources throughout the Americas. I mean, this is what the new world meant to the old world, that there was this vast, gigantic expanse of land in which there was obviously people to be exploited, the indigenous peoples of this vast region, but also everything else that was embedded in the earth as well. So this was what we’re literally talking resources, obviously initially gold and silver, but also other things like coal, coffee. Anything that can be grown from the ground, bananas, fruits of various kinds. You have to remember, you know, things like the United Food Company, this American corporation, even though the commodity was simply various kinds of fruit. I mean, that commodity required plantation labor that was incredibly exploitative and brutal. And that kind of economy had to be enforced by a local oligarchy with a repressive military and police apparatus. That the United States was training and supporting. And when things really got bad, the United State simply literally sent in the Marines to places like Nicaragua. So that was what was happening in El Salvador as well. It’s a rural economy that the Salvadoran oligarchy benefits from. I mean, in fact, there’s so few families in this oligarchy that they’re simply called the 14 families that have historically run the country. And again, even though the United States itself is supposedly a democratic country, we have been perfectly willing, in fact, eager to support non-democratic authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes throughout Central and South America, so long as they supported American corporate and political and military interests.
Krys Boyd: [00:22:32] Yeah, and you note that it allowed US leaders for a long time to kind of maintain this facade of distance from the ways that these leaders were carrying out policies that the US might approve of, but some of those policies might also harm their own people.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:22:47] Well, absolutely. I don’t think it’s something that the United States necessarily ran around bragging about in terms of supporting regimes that were doing things like disappearing their own people or torturing them in prison. And in some cases, of course, the United States actively fomented and organized coups against democratic regimes throughout Central and South America as well. So all of that obviously goes in the face of the American narrative, our mythology about us being the greatest country on Earth that’s always supporting democracy and freedom. That’s a very selective kind of mythology. We have done that in certain instances, but more often than not, we’ve been very happy to support anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes. And El Salvador is simply one of the worst illustrations of that. For example, again, in the early 1980s, I was reading about the El Mozote massacre, the most notorious massacre out of many massacres that the Salvadoran army committed. Salvadoran army, dressed in American military uniforms, carrying M16s, flown in by Huey helicopters, exactly as in the case of the Vietnam War, went into this area called El Mozote and massacred 1,000 peasants, unarmed men, women, and children, most of whom were not in support of any kind of insurgency, a lot of whom are actually conservative Krystians, because the Salvadoran military was in a scorched earth mood and was not interested really in nuances. The Salvadoran military was trained by the United States. Many of its officers were trained in the School of the Americas, which originated in Panama and then eventually moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. This was a place where Central American militaries sent their officers in order to be trained in counterinsurgency tactics, as they are called, but also in torture as well.
Krys Boyd: [00:24:27] You note that those counter-insurgency tactics are things we imagine happen either at the hands of the US government or perhaps affiliated countries with US training. But these have been turned around on the American population more than once over the course of our history. Can you give us some examples of that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:24:46] Well, the United States has has always been willing periodically to use US troops against US citizens, typically around moments where US US citizens become too rebellious around questions of political and class inequality. But we’ve seen the increasing militarization of the US police forces in the last few decades, whether we’re talking about municipal local forces or whether we were talking about federal forces. And this has been a bipartisan effort that has been domestic blowback of our forever war since 9-11. So we’ve invested huge amounts, obviously, of funding into the U.S. Military to fight post-9-11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s produced an excess of weaponry that has been given back to U. S. Forces, to U S. Police forces throughout this country. And so in places, for example, like the, you know, Ferguson, when black populations become too rebellious for the tastes of local authorities, the police will come out fool. Armor and for armor gear. This has been true in many instances, not even just for the most visible ones like Ferguson, but you know, no-knock warrants and things like this where the police are breaking down doors and coming in using armored vehicles with battering rams and all this. Now on the one hand, you could cynically say, well, we’re used to seeing the United States do this in things like nighttime raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now we’re seeing that being. We have seen that being done for decades now against U.S. Populations, most typically against populations of color, especially Black people, but now in the wake of things like anti-war protests and the spring 2024 encampments on many U. S. Campuses, the police came out in strong force using these kinds of neo-military tactics as well. And so, and finally, now with rates. This is causing so much controversy throughout the United States, but the spectacle of seeing not just the National Guard and the Marines on the streets of Los Angeles, but also seeing federal police forces dressed up exactly like soldiers in camouflage gear and carrying M4 rifles and things like this. These are all consequences of counterinsurgency tactics that the United State has used internationally or has supported the use of internationally. Now being turned back against populations that the Trump administration, but also in some cases, the Democratic administrations have seen as being insurgents against US domestic policy.
Krys Boyd: [00:27:16] Yet you note a certain irony in Marco Rubio being the particular individual to work with El Salvador now as Secretary of State. He was born in the U.S. To Cuban parents. How does Cuba figure into the project of greater America over time?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:27:32] Cuba has obviously been central, very central to this project of Great America. It’s pretty close to Florida, obviously, and it was a place in which, in the 20th century, the U.S. Had considerable economic investments into the Cuban economy. This was all upended by the Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Cascio and Che Guevara, and that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. And so ever since then, Cuba has been a problematic place for the United States. It’s represented, you know, this. Communist haven very close to U.S. Shores that might be used as a launching pad for communist aggression against the United States. That’s part of the argument that Cuban refugees from the Castro regime have used to leverage their political influence and clout in the United States manifest in things like how the Cuban American community in collaboration with both parties throughout the last several decades have been able to blockade and boycott Cuba in various ways. And led to the ascendancy of influential Cuban-American politicians like Ted Cruz in Texas or Marco Rubio. And I find that to be very resonant because the Vietnamese-American community is also very dominated by its anti-communist faction as well. We have not been as successful in leveraging anti-Communist politics, but we’ve been fairly successful in doing that. But the Cuban- American example is especially visible because of the influence of people like Cruz and Rubio And the irony, of course, is that Marco Rubio himself, the descendant of Cuban immigrants, has been extremely anti-immigrant in his policies.
Krys Boyd: [00:29:07] What do you think that’s about people who are immigrants or children of immigrants to this country who firmly believe in their own right to be accepted as US citizens or birthright citizens in some cases or legal residents, but then push back on the same privileges granted to other people?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:29:22] And Marco Rubio is a birthright citizen. And of course now the Trump administration is beginning to do its best to try to erode the protections of birthright citizenship for certain kinds of people who come to the United States. And of of course I think the fear here is that the more successful the Trump Administration may be in eroding birthright citizenship for less popular classes of people like undocumented immigrants, the more there will be the possibility that the Trump administrator will try Road Birthright Citizenship for people such as myself, for example, who was not a citizen when he came to the United States as a refugee, but became one later on. So this is actually quite American. And when we talk about a greater America, there’s a very fundamental contradiction, which is on the one hand, part of our mythology of a greater Americans that anyone can come to this country, make their future here. And we welcome the poor and the wretched of different countries. On the other hand, there’s a very strong nativist, isolationist, xenophobic part of the American tradition as well that has always existed, where certain populations in the United States want to keep certain other populations out of the United states, or if they are in the Unites States, to strip them of as many rights as possible, and as many privileges as possible. So I think to the fact that many of the things that we’re seeing today have already happened in the 19th century, like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for example. Or even earlier in the century, like this idea of deporting various kinds of people. This already happened in the 1930s and 1940s when the United States deported two million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, including citizens. And when I was reading about that in my history classes, I was blown away. I thought, how could this possibly have happened? And we’re seeing how that could happen literally right now.
Krys Boyd: [00:31:09] Yet I do have to ask, is the American effort to build and maintain what defenders of all this might call a regional sphere of influence, does it differ significantly than what happens with other large powers around the world, like, say, China?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:31:29] I don’t think it differs in principle in the sense that I think every country with any sense of power has sought to influence its neighbors in various different ways, exploiting them in different ways for resources or for labor, using them to construct the xenophobic ideas of who they should be opposed to, or simply trying to construct these areas of influence that they can use as buffers and as border states and the like. So of course, we see it with China, we see it with Russia as well. We see it with Israel. What might make the United States different in this regard is simply the exceptional power of the United States. We do have enormous power. And the mythology, again, this myth, this idea that Americans like to tell themselves that they are the greatest country on earth, that they defend, that we defend freedom and democracy. This is our justification. So I think we should be held to a higher standard if. If our narrative was, hey, we’re the United States and we will take everything we want anytime we want it, then there’s less to defend. But if the narrative is that we stand up for the weak and those in need of freedom and democracy, then we should be held accountable for the rhetoric that we’re putting forth.
Krys Boyd: [00:32:41] You note in the article that some U.S. Presidents have tried to use their influence to press El Salvador specifically to improve its human rights record. How did Jimmy Carter attempt to do this? [00:32:51][10.1]
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:32:53] Well, Jimmy Carter, of course, one of the possibly the most liberal president in recent memory, did in fact try to stem some of the worst abuses of the Salvadoran regime. So he tried to tie USAID to El Salvador to its human rights record. El Salvador simply defied Jimmy Carter and refused to accept further American aid. This was around 1977, 1978. And so what happened was that, and this I had not known of before, but Israel stepped in. And then supplied 83% of El Salvador’s military needs for the next few years. And in reading further about Israel, what was remarkable about it was the extent to which Israel had in fact done the same for other Central American countries as well, exporting weapons, military advisors, surveillance technology to places like Guatemala, for example. There was a civil war in Guatemala as well. The Guatemalan government conducted a. Genocide against its indigenous peoples. And that model was allegedly one that was based on what Israel was doing to Palestinians at the time. So whether or not the Carter administration had any idea that when it stopped aid to El Salvador that Israel would step in, I have no idea. But El Salvador’s rejection of that aid was defiant. And the American need for anti-communist efforts in El Salvador outstripped its concerns about what El Salvador was doing in terms of human rights abuses. In any case, Jimmy Carter pretty much reinstated that aid only shortly after the rape and murder of those four American church women in 1980. So even a president like Jimmy Carter did not stand up against El Salvador for very long.
Krys Boyd: [00:34:41] We’ve been talking in this conversation about the influence the U.S. Exerts on what happens in other North and South American countries. What evidence do you see that President Trump is being influenced by leaders like El Salvador’s Bukele?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:34:57] I think it’s a circuit of affirmation for these authoritarian leaders in different countries. They are inspired by the model of other authoritarian leaders and then their successors, their successes likewise inspire those other people. So Naipu Kelly, who comes into power in 2022, mob called himself the world’s coolest dictator. I believe that’s a direct quote. And he used his social media prowess to ascend from being a local politician to capturing the presidency. And from then using the power of the presidency to cow his opponents to decrease democratic possibilities that had been hard won during and after the Civil War of the 1980s and early 1990s. So he concentrated authoritarian power specifically through the spectacle of punishing alleged criminals and presenting himself as the dictator who could get things done for the Salvadoran people. Now, I’m sure he was influenced by President Trump. President Trump’s first term was 2016 to 2020. Bukele comes into influence in 2022. But Bukeli’s successes in El Salvador were enough to garner him an invitation to the White House where he sat almost knee to knee with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. And they obviously are resonant with each other. They are both flamboyant, if that’s the right word to describe them. They both try to break boundaries, break decorum, garner as much possible power for the executive office as they can. And they both delight in the spectacle of punishment and the use of social media. And so what Bukele was doing in El Salvador was certainly, I think, inspired by Donald Trump’s successes. And likewise, Donald Trump looked at what Bukel was doing and saw that the suspension of rights and the creation of a mega prison actually accelerated Bukele’s popularity. And I think that must be behind some of the incentives for Donald Trump to make the deportation process so spectacularly visible. It’s true that Democratic presidents like Biden and Obama certainly deported many, many people, but they didn’t try to make that into a spectacle, and Donald Trump certainly has.
Krys Boyd: [00:37:15] Yeah, one thing I suppose that’s different about him is that he is not trying to conceal these kinds of actions in a way that perhaps earlier administrations.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:37:25] Yes, because earlier administrations, democratic administrations were, I think, trying to walk this line between carrying out deportations, but also being aware that a substantial part of their base was Latinos and Asians who themselves were immigrants and refugees. Donald Trump has used a completely different strategy, and arguably one that’s actually been fairly successful because recent polls indicate— Uh, and voting polls and opinion polls indicate that he has swayed a considerable portion of Latino and Asian American vote to him, despite his spectacularly, uh, you know, spectacular anti refugee anti immigrant policies. Um, and so, you part of his appeal is that he will, in fact, uh. Say the quiet part out loud or do the quiet, part invisibly. And so it is an important part of is of his persona and his policy. That not that is not not that he said that his administration simply doesn’t deport people, it will show that to us, and that it will try to to make us take pleasure in watching this happen. And that’s why it was crucial, for example, for him and Secretary Noem, to visit Governor DeSantis in Florida, at the creation of the so called alligator alcatraz, which is basically a deportee, it is explicitly a deportation camp, but arguably a concentration camp where people are, you know, again, this is documented in the news are being subject to really inhumane treatment and again it’s not the administration is not apologetic about that it is using that as a threat but also as a way of mobilizing its base which takes some pleasure in this idea that people will be punished simply for being undocumented or even documented immigrants.
Krys Boyd: [00:39:13] Yet there are people who look at the things that are happening now in the Trump administration, but in prior administrations as well, things that they might broadly disapprove of and say, this is not who we are as Americans. And then there are other people who say, well, evidently this is who we as Americans, where do you come down on this question?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:39:34] I think those are both true, you know, Gerald, the novelist, you know, has the very famous line, and I’ll paraphrase here where he said, you have to hold two opposing, the sign of a first rate intelligence is that you have to be able to hold to opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. And this is true for the United States. And unfortunately, a lot of Americans fail this test because a lot Americans. Only want to believe in what I would consider to be the simple version of the United States. That is, this country is the greatest country on earth. This country right or wrong. This country love it or leave it. This has been a very powerful force in the United states. This kind of very patriotic, very nationalistic, very jingoistic conception of this country in which any kind of aberration from the country, from the countries mythology has to be erased or suppressed. And this is certainly what. What we’re seeing in terms of the Trump administration, but also the larger MAGA movement’s efforts to ban certain kinds of ideas, ban certain kind of books, reshape the school curriculum in very fundamental ways, prevent teachers from talking about things that the Trump administration would classify as DEI and therefore problematic and anti-American and unequal. Now, all of this has to be held in relationship to the fact that The United States has in fact done all these things that are being done now to previous populations from the very beginnings of this country. So in my view, a more complex view of the United States would say, well, yes, we are a country that has proposed great ideas around democracy, equality, rights, opportunities, and so on that have been real and genuine for so many people, including myself, coming to this country as a refugee. And being able to accomplish some incredible things that I think my parents never could have imagined. At the same time, for so many people from the very origins of this country, those great opportunities did not exist. So if we talk about indigenous peoples whose land was taken from them through violent conquest, through genocide and so on, if we talked about Africans who were enslaved and brought to this country. And their descendants. If we talk about women who did not have the right to vote at the beginning of this country for many, many decades, the inequalities of this county have always been with us. And so there is that tension. We should hold ourselves to this greater idea of who we are so that we’re shocked by what we’re seeing today. That’s an important shock that could allow us to ameliorate, to address so many of the injustices that are taking place. And we should be realistic. And acknowledge that in fact, the suspension of rights, the deportations, the putting people into concentration camps, this has all happened before throughout American history.
Krys Boyd: [00:42:34] Do you perceive a fundamental difference between the United States of America and what you think of as greater America? Like, are these fraternal twins pulling us in two separate directions or are they like the same soul?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:42:49] I think the language I used in the article was conjoined twins. So again, it’s sort of necessary for Americans, I think, to recognize the complexity and the contradiction that have always been there from the very beginnings of the United States and are with us today. That another way of imagining this in something else that I wrote is to imagine that, you know, we are both quite Americans and ugly Americans. The ugly American is the stereotype of, you know of the American wandering the world and forcing other countries to do. The bidding of the United States, and Donald Trump embodies that ugly American. But the quiet American embodied by someone like Obama, President Obama, much more polite, much more diplomatic, of course, much more popular in many ways with different countries. But in the end, President Obama also carried out many of the same things, not exactly the same thing, but some of the things in terms of American imperial power, in terms deportations. In terms of using drone strikes at will against other populations, that if Donald Trump was doing it, the Democratic Party would be upset about. So quite American and ugly American, two faces of the same American that have been with us forever, basically. [00:44:02][72.2]
Krys Boyd: [00:44:03] How do we get comfortable acknowledging that those things both exist without worrying that it’s just not patriotic to allow for self-examination?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:44:16] I think it’s actually very patriotic to allow for self-examination. I think some of the greatest patriots of the country have been the ones that have tried to make America live up to its rhetoric. If you think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr., you know, he was very clear in saying that he loved this country, but he was also very clear, in saying that he condemned this country for its racism, for its militarism, for it’s capitalism. And that kind of combination, I think, again, is complex and it’s incendiary. It’s what led J. Edgar Hoover to suspect that. Martin Luther King Jr. Was a communist and to put him under surveillance for many, many years of his life up until the very, very end. And so I think for the United States, the question is, should we simply propose this kind of mythological idea of the United states as an exceptional country, the greatest country on earth, and to leave it at that and to hope that that mythology will make us behave better as the United, as the united states and as Americans, or should we recognize the complexity and the contradictions. And of course, I would be someone who favors the latter because the mythology of American exceptionalism has led Americans to believe that they are incapable of doing wrong and of doing evil. And so whenever the United States does in fact do wrong and do evil, many Americans are shocked. We are not this kind of a country. Or they’re in denial and say, how dare you say that we’re this kind of a county when in fact we’ve always been doing this. And so I think that the American mythology that is so simplified of the US as being the greatest country on earth has in fact led us through our sense of our perpetual innocence to continually, generationally do the wrong thing.
Krys Boyd: [00:45:56] Viet Thanh Nguyen is professor of literature at the University of Southern California. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His essay for The Nation is titled Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades. Viet, thank you so much for the conversation.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: [00:46:14] Grateful to be here.
Krys Boyd: [00:46:16] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, anywhere you get podcasts and at think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening and have a great day. [00:46:16][0.0]
[2699.2]
