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.