the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt ten)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

In relation to repertoire choice on the Olympia album, to some extent, Amália’s voice, as extracted from her live 1956 concerts, was made to sound more “Portuguese” than in the live performances (for example, not including a song she performed in Spanish). David Looseley, in his cultural history of Edith Piaf, notes something similar in relation to Piaf’s performances in New York, where she represents an essentialized American ideal of France. While Piag was becoming the sound of the French for New York audiences, Rodrigues was being shaped as the voice of Portugal. Looseley writes about how Piaf’s image postwar, as the “voice of France,” is an image “refracted through an American lens,” a representation that is then exported back to France. In making this argument he draws on the work of Richard Kuisel, who writes about the ways in which France, during the postwar period, is shaped from the perspective of the United States, as America’s “other.” Piaf’s representation as a French national icon is, to some extent them, “refracted” from the mirror that is the music and culture industry in the postwar U.S. For Amália Rodrigues, as the “voice of Portugal,” the most powerful refractions are cast from a three-way mirror, triangulated between Portugal, France, and the United States and the key cities of Lisbon, Paris, and New York (and Hollywood). At the same time, Amália’s Olympia album launched in a moment marked by “the fastest growth in popular music ever seen in France.” Portugal, in terms of geography, economic resources, and international visibility and power, was on the periphery, and the conduit of France helped to amplify Amália’s celebrity and voice for an international and European public.

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt nine)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

“Barco Negro” became a mainstay of Amália’s repertoire, which she recorded throughout her career in highly varied performances and remains one of the songs for which she is most internationally known. In international markets, the song sometimes stands in as iconic for the genre fado itself. “Barco Negro” has been a key part of the repertoire for some of the most internationally successful contemporary professional fadistas and remains a favorite for amateur and professional fado singers in Lisbon. When the young fadista Mariza broke onto the world music scene in the early 2002s, she covered “Barco Negro” on her debut album. In 2021, she would include it on an Amália tribute album, and perform it in a concert “tour” for New York’s Town Hall, live streamed from a recording studio in Lisbon, during a pandemic lockdown, her instrumentalists in black masks. The fado singer Lina, one of the newest arrivals on fado’s international scene, also included it on her 2020 debut album (on both compact disc and vinyl), produced by Raül Refree, ion arrangement for voice, piano and vintage analog electronic sound effects. (Refree had previously collaborated with the Spanish superstar vocalist Rosalía in 2017, on the debut album that launched her celebrity.)

In multiple covers, retakes, and new lyric substitutions, some artists have turned the table, critically reflecting back on the occluded original lyrics of “Māe Preta (Barco Negro).” He does not only weep in stylized son as Amália does, but as Silva, who examines queer, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian intersections in Matogrosso’s performance, points out, at the end, he actually cries. In this inconsolable weeping, Silva hears Matogrosso as “[making a] space for the black woman of this violent [colonial] history, for the loss and mourning put upon māe preta to be heard.” Alternatively, Lopes and Nogueira hear in Matogrosso’s break into sobs, a protest of Brazil’s dictatorial regime.

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt eight)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

The post-dictatorship reception of “Uma Casa Portuguesa,” both in Portugal and its diaspora, can be understood as one of both/and, not necessarily of either/or. Strong opinions continue to be voice on both sides: the song as regime propaganda versus the song as innocent. Vitor Pavāo dos Santos, in his book O Fado da Tua Voz: Amália e os Poetas (The fado of your voice: Amália and the poets), marks the song as one of the “greatest successes (perhaps the greatest?) in the history of Portuguese music” and writes, “It amazes me: ‘Uma Casa Portuguesa,’ a beautiful poem, so poorly judged by the simpleton intelligentsia reigning in Portugal, that took it for something salazarista (connected to the regime of the dictator Salazar).” He understands the lyrics as following in a poetic tradition of the pastoral or the bucolic and citing the ancient Roman poet Virgil, asks if it would be fair to say that Virgil was salazarista.

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt seven)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

Portugal joined NATO in 1949, included in the alliance even though António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo (New State) regime was a dictatorship. From the perspective of the U.S. and NATO, two possible motivations for Portuguese inclusion: (1) Portugal’s Azores Islands are in a strategic location, halfway between the United States and Europe (and Allied forced had already made use of a base in the Azores during World War II, although Portugal officially began the war as “neutral”); (2) through legitimizing and aiding the Estado Novo, NATO inclusion might help to suppress communism in Portugal. “Antipathy to communism” was something also shared by the Portuguese regime and helped to fuel Portugal’s political cold-war engagement with the USA. In 1974 when a bloodless coup led by the Portuguese military toppled the regime, communist organizing would play a key role. The city of Lisbon would host a critical meeting for the restructuring of the alliance in 1952 (and in 1955, Portugal joined the United Nations). “Introducing Portugal” is one of several documentaries on individual countries in the alliance produced as part of NATO’s information campaign to introduce member states to one another.

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt six)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

During the later decades of the regime, the state increasingly appropriated fado as Portugal’s national song form and simultaneously promoted it in relation to Portuguese tourism. Along with the Catholic church, fado served as one of the three cultural pillars that bolstered the regime (fado, football, and the cult of the Saint of Fatima), sometimes referred to by Portuguese as simply as “the three Fs.” In the final decade of the regime, fado lyrics shifted more and more toward themes of saudade, romantic love, and fatalistic loss and away from expression of individual suffering, life story, or anything that might be read as critique of the regime. This tendency is reflected in the repertoire included in Amália Rodrigues’s 1957 Olympia album. Under censorship, lyrics proliferated that celebrated Portugal, the city of Lisbon and its quintessential fado neighborhoods, and Portuguese colonialism through a sentimental and romantic gaze. Some of these lyrics teach moral lessons, sometimes romanticizing poverty, extolling the moral virtues of humility and the nuclear family. Many lyrics from this period also implicitly or explicitly teach lessons about gender, how to be or feel properly feminine or masculine, woman or man, and what sentiments are appropriate in heterosexual romantic love. As a diverse and powerfully expressive poetic and musical genre that spanned multiple social strata while retaining deep roots in the working class, fado existed in a slippery and ambivalent relation to the state. While the dictatorship did much to control fado, censor it, and shape its message, some fado musicians and poets continued to sing and write fado, behind closed doors, that escaped the censors and critiqued ideologues and practices of the regime, sometimes singing and writing lyrics that listeners would understand by listening “in between the lines” (entrelinhas).

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt five)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

Fado is customarily sung by one singer (male or female), called a fadista, and accompanied by one or two instrumentalists on the Portuguese guitar (guitarra portuguesa) and by another instrumentalist on the six-string Spanish acoustic guitar (viola). Sometimes a bass guitar or (less common) a stand-up bass joins. Fado instrumentalists are almost always male. The guitarra and viola improvise “in dialogue” with the fadista and the bass line of the viola provides the harmonic and rhythmic grounding and propels the rhythm forward. The guitarra, with twelve steel strings strung in six double courses, and plucked with fingernail extensions, is the defining instrument of fado sound, known for its shimmering, harpsichord like timbre and for its expressive power, at time almost approximating the human voice. Some of the words that fado musicians and listeners use to describe the techniques and sounds of guitarra playing reflect this likening of the instrument to the human voice. Fado lyrics might describe a guitarra that sings (cantar) or that sobs (soluçar) and some lyrics gender the instrument as female. Fado is a genre of the night, traditionally, when sung in intimate venues, is performed in semi-darkness with candles on the tables or a dim lamp in the space. The darkness helps to direct the attention of the listeners to the sound of the voice, and inwards, to the realm of feeling. While fado has origins in dance, in contemporary performance, fadistas are often remarkably still, feet firmly planted, grounded to the floor, head thrown back, eyes closed; sometimes they might sway a bit from side to side, sometimes using the hands and arms to gesture, sometimes with an almost complete stillness in the body with the exception of the movement of breath and sound, and dramatic facial expression while singing.

Fado performance links story, life experience, emotional expression, musical improvisation, creativity and interaction, and poetry. Many fado musicians learn to sing and to play through traditions and practices that are passed down orally, historically in small venues where amateurs gathered to sing or in professional casas de fado. Listeners also learn how to listen to fado in these contexts. Fado recordings also serve as a pedagogical resource for learning how to sing and to play fado instruments, and also for listeners to cultivate knowledge of fado repertoire.

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt four)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

Fado, which translates literally as “fate,” developed in Lisbon in early decades of the 1800s as sung poetry voiced from the city’s margins, from its brothels, its prisons, its hardscrabble working-class neighborhoods, from its dispossessed. It rapidly gained favor amongst the more well-to-do and elites and traversed multiple strata of Lisbon society. Fado reflects a convergence of multiple influences and styles, most likely Afro-Brazilian, European, and regional Portuguese. While fado’s origins still remain fiercely contested by many fado musicians and fans in Portugal, scholars make persuasive arguments for its hybrid roots, particularly for the influence of Afro-Brazilian musical and dance forms the fofa and the lundum and from a form of fado that was danced in Brazil. When Napoleon’s troops invaded Portugal in 1807, members of the Portuguese royal court fled to Brazil, bringing many with them and temporarily settling in Rio de Janeiro; the number of people who fled Portugal, may have been as high as 14,000. The Portuguese court remained in Brazil for over a decade, and when they returned, they brought musical and dance styles back with them to Lisbon. The development of fado was likely also influenced by the song genre of the modinha which circulated in Brazil and then became popular in Lisbon.

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt three)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

On the cover of the French release of Amália Rodrigues’ first Olympia LP (Columbia FSX 123) (1957) is a black-and-white photograph of Amália in the spring of 1956 on the Olympia stage. (The same photograph appears on the cover of this book) Her head tilted slightly upwards with eyes half open, the photograph captures her in a moment of song, of focused attention, of expressive force. The Swiss-French photographer Sabine Weiss took this photo in her early thirties; she would become one of the most celebrated photographers of the twentieth century. She is known for her street photography and photojournalism, but also for her work in fashion photography, and for her portraits of musicians, artists, and writers. Igor Stravinsky, Benhamin Britten, Maria Callas, Pablo Casals, Ella Fitzgerald, and Charlie Parker were among her subjects.

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt two)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

The printed Olympia program points to excess, a flooding or distraction of the senses. In the risqué framing of the program with photo cut outs of scantily clad women’s bodies, and the language (one French singer is framed as having the “figure of a pin up girl”) of sexualized objectification for the pleasure of the gaze, there is something vestigial of the Moulin Rouge or of the Olympia’s earlier (1893-1920s) history (“with their sequined, feathered, and bare-breasted dancing girls.” The Olympia, when it re-opens in 1954 under the management of Bruno Coquatrix as a music hall, is a kind of variety act pleasure house of performance, where one form of consumption (for example, the live musical performance) prompts other forms of pleasure wrought through consumption (the pleasure of ownership of a recording, the pleasure of being cosmopolitan, the pleasure of listening as a cosmopolitan, the pleasure of being in the know about the latest musical trends, the pleasure of tourism). Listening to the periphery is framed in this context as a form of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, local specificity regarding this periphery is omitted (but rather referenced with stereotypes). In addition to the radical juxtaposition of performance forms, there is also the juxtaposition, combination, and inclusion of a multiplicity of places or nations as referenced through performers, who sometimes stand in as their icons. In the midst of this excess of variety, in between acts by aerial acrobats and by dancers, coming right after the acrobats Les Akeff, and followed by the dance duo Darvas and Julia, is Amália Rodrigues in her Paris Olympia debut. She is thirty-five years old.

the last book I ever read (Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe), excerpt one)

from Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (33 1/3 Europe) by Lila Ellen Gray:

The Olympia Music Hall, under the directorship and curatorship of Bruno Coquatrix, from 1954-1979, was key to the shaping of international musical stardom during the mid-twentieth century. Coquatrix was responsible for reviving the late nineteenth-century theater as a music hall in 1954 and internationalization was key to his mission. To perform at the Olympia in Paris was, in a sense, to arrive. The importance of an Olympia debut would possibly be even greater for a performer from a country on Europe’s periphery singing in a genre that was still not well understood outside of Portugal. At the same time, celebrity performers (or performers with the potential for high prestige) were the financial lifeblood of the Olympia in the mid-twentieth century.

The album is framed by Amália’s rendition of a classic dictatorship-era song at the beginning, “Uma Casa Portuguesa” (A Portuguese house) and the fado song “Amália” at the end, one that casts her as the protagonist in the song, as diva of the genre of fado. Some of the repertoire included on this album would become central to her career. Many of these songs endure in the repertoire of contemporary fado musicians, and some continue to be covered and creatively reimagined in other languages and by non-Portuguese musicians. The live performances and the album played a key role in defining the genre of fado, in translating and framing it, and most importantly, in amplifying it for export for select mid-twentieth-century international markets and listeners.

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt ten)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

He could only remember the British flyer they had found by chance under the ruts of a village road – and then reburied in the exact spot where they had found him.

Then he remembered the diary soldier. He certainly measured six foot one. The general began to imagine what it would be like if they were to substitute that soldier’s remains for those of the colonel. He pictured to himself the reception that the colonel’s assembled family would accord to the remains of that simple soldier, the grandiose funeral service, the solemn obsequies, Betty in deepest mourning, weeping while the dead man’s old mother on her arm went on talking and talking relentlessly about her son to anyone who would listen. Then the poor fellow’s bones would be transported to his murderer’s magnificent tomb, the bells would ring out, a general would deliver a funeral oration, and the whole thing would be an outrage against nature, the whole thing would be a perversion, a cheat, a profanation. And if ghosts and spirits really did exist, then the soldier would rise from his tomb that very night.

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt nine)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

The first of us was killed on the bridge, while he was on guard duty one night. Apparently the partisans had made an attempt to blow the bridge up, but our sentry had prevented them by giving the alarm. In the morning we found him dead beside the parapet. He was lying in a very strange position, with his mouth open. Did you ever see that film Death of a Cyclist? Well when I went to see it I almost yelled out right in the middle of it. The body, on the screen, was so much like that vision I still have engraved in my mind.

Scarcely two weeks went by before it was the second one’s turn. The circumstances were identical you might say. We were pretty sure the village people were shooting at us themselves, but we had no proof. We’d stopped bartering out cartridges with them by now of course. But it was too late.

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt eight)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

“Why is this grave on its own like this, so far from all the others?” the general asked.

“It’s because this soldier was killed in extraordinary circumstances,” the old monk said in a deep, muffled voice, “by a man called Nik Martini.”

At the name, the general glanced over questioningly at the priest.

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt seven)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

“The predominant themes of their songs are destruction and death. That is characteristic of all their art. You find it in their songs, in their dress, in the whole of their existence. It is a characteristic common to all Balkan peoples of course; but it is even more pronounced in the Albanians than anywhere else. Look at their national flag: simply a symbol of blood and mourning.”

“You speak with great passion on the subject,” the general observed.

“I have given a great deal of thought to these matters,” the priest answered. “Oscar Wilde said that people of the lower classes feel a need to commit crimes in order to experience the strong emotions that we can derive from art. His epigram might well be applied to the Albanians, if one were to substitute the words “war” or “vengeance” for “crime.” For if we are to be objective we must admit that the Albanians are not criminals in the common law sense. The murders they commit are always done in conformity with rules laid down by age-old customs. Their vendetta is like a play composed in accordance with all the laws of tragedy, with a prologue, continually growing dramatic tension, and an epilogue that inevitably entails a death. The vendetta could be likened to a raging bull let loose in the hills and laying waste everything in its path. And yet they have hung around the beast’s neck a quantity of ornaments and decorations that correspond to their conception of beauty, so that when the beast is loosed, and even while it is spreading death on every side, they can derive aesthetic satisfactions from those events at the same time.”

The general listened attentively.

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt six)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

At about noon the groom’s men got up from the table, slung their guns over their shoulders and jumped up onto their horses. Christine’s horse was white. She was crying. Aunt Frosa too. The miller kept his tears back. Then they kissed their daughter goodbye. I wanted to say goodbye to her as well, but I didn’t have the courage to go over to the horses, because of the distant attitude of the men on their backs. I kept in the background. Djouvi, their big dog, staggered slowly about among them, his neck stretched out. I envied him. Christine bent down and kissed him. No one thought of me.

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt five)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

“So this job must bring back a lot of wartime memories for him.”

“It’s bound to,” the priest said. “And at moments like this singing is a spiritual need for these men. Can you conceive of any greater satisfaction for an old soldier than that of pulling his old enemies back up out of their graves? It’s like a sort of extension of the war.”

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt four)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

“Of course there were some people who didn’t want anything to do with a petition like that, and who disapproved of any kind of letter or request at all being addressed to the occupying powers. But we ignored them. We clung firmly to the hope that something would be done for us. You must remember that this was still the beginning of the war, and there were still many things we hadn’t quite cottoned on to as yet.

“But of course no heed was paid to our request. A few days later a telegram arrived: “Brothel to be opened for reasons of strategic order stop.” The old postmaster who was the first to read it didn’t grasp the meaning of the message immediately. Indeed, some people said that it was written in one of those coded languages they were always using then, and that always did seem to be incomprehensible. In the telegram were the words “ethnic Albanian” which was deemed to mean the mayor’s fat wife, and so forth. Someone even said they were all wrong to be making a fuss about the opening of a brother, that it was all to do with the opening of a second front. But such comforting thoughts did not last for long and everything became clear: it wasn’t a second front that was about to be opened but, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a brothel.

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt three)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

A voice emerging from the television in the lounge drew his attention. He turned his head to listen. Albanian struck him as a harsh language. He had heard it spoken quite a lot by this time by the country people who came to help with their excavations in the local cemeteries. And those dead soldiers, he thought, they must have certainly heard it too – a fatal tongue for them. This must be the news now by the sound of it, he thought. And then he did in fact begin to catch familiar syllables: Tel-Aviv, Bonn, Laos …

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt two)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

The general smiled.

“Do you know something?” he said. “I’ve noticed that our conversations during the past three days or so have the oddest way of sounding like dialogues from some of the modern plays I’ve seen. Extremely boring ones, I might add.”

The priest smiled in his turn.

the last book I ever read (The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare, excerpt one)

from The General of the Dead Army: A Novel by Ismail Kadare:

Rain and flakes of snow were falling simultaneously on the foreign soil. The concrete runway, the airport buildings, the soldiers guarding them were all soaking wet. The plain and the surrounding hills were covered in melting snow and the water had made the black asphalt of the road shine. At any other time of year this monotonous rain might have been thought a dismal coincidence. But the general was not really surprised by it. He had come to Albania to search for the remains of his country’s soldiers killed in various parts of Albania during the last world war and to supervise their repatriation. Negotiations between the two governments had begun the spring before, but the final contracts had not been signed until the end of August, just when the first grey days normally put in an appearance. Now it was autumn. And autumn, the general was aware, was the rainy season. Before leaving, he had looked up the country’s climate. This time of year, he had discovered, was usually damp and rainy. But, even if his handbook had told him that the autumns in Albania were ordinarily dry and sunny, he would still not have found this rain untoward. Quite the reverse. He had always felt in fact that his mission somehow required bad weather as a precondition of its success.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt thirteen)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

For more than a year after the government instituted its zero tolerance policy, the Trump administration lied about how many families had been affected. In the summer of 2018, the Department of Justice was forced to acknowledge having separated roughly twenty-seven hundred children, but the actual number was more than fifty-six hundred. It took months of litigation to dislodge the accurate tally, because the earlier count had deliberately left out most of what had happened in 2017. The first separations began in two waves that year, and they’d never entirely stopped. There was the El Paso pilot that swept up Keldy, as well as another one, begun slightly earlier, in Yuma, Arizona. That policy, called the Criminal Consequence Initiative, was responsible for the separation of 234 families between July 1 and December 31, 2017. In March 2019, Judge Sabraw expanded the number of eligible class members in the suit, and once he did, the government had no choice but to go back through its data and reconstruct the complete lists of everyone it had separated. The result was that there were now two official troves of names. One was from the summer of 2018, when Sabraw first ruled on the case; the other, which was much more recent, included a fresh accounting of the families separated in 2017. Keldy’s name was second on the list.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt twelve)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

Guatemala had only two large urban hospitals and a regional patchwork of smaller medical facilities; its capacity to contain a virulent pandemic was limited. The government of President Alejandro Giammetti, who was a trained surgeon, suspended international flights into the country, and border transit largely ceased. But could the government persuade the Trump administration to help it limits the spread of the coronavirus? The United States was fast becoming the global epicenter of the pandemic. As of late April, there were some five thousand Guatemalans in US immigration detention, and every week the Department of Homeland Security was sending between one and five flights to Guatemala City, each carrying up to 135 deportees.

Other countries in the region were forced to deal with deportees infected with the virus, including Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, and Haiti, many of which had fragile health care systems, scant hospital space, and a dearth of ventilators. The United States deported eighteen thousand people in March, and nearly three thousand in the first eleven days of April. In multiple cases, US officials knew that they were spreading COVID but didn’t seem to care. A twenty-six-year-old Haitian man who’d become infected in a Louisiana detention center was put on a plane despite two positive tests; he claimed to know four others from the jail who were also sick but getting deported with him.

The irony was not lost on Central Americans. In the 1990s and early 2000s, during earlier waves of mass deportations, US and Latin American law enforcement personal resorted to metaphor to describe what was happening: the gangs were replicating and expanding through the region like a virus. In 2020, the deportations were spreading an actual virus.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt eleven)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

A US ally in the Americas was stealing an election in plain sight. The foreign election monitors raised objections, and the Organization of American States issued an immediate report detailing “irregularities, mistakes, and systemic problems.” Its top official called on the Honduran electoral tribunal not to announce a winner until all “the serious doubts” were resolved. When the tribunal went ahead anyway and declared Hernández the victor, the Organization of American States called for new elections.

The country with the greatest ability to stop the fraud had the strongest sense of loyalty to the fraudster. At first, the US refused to intervene. Eventually, it backed the electoral tribunal. On the same day that the vote count was halted—just before the computers mysteriously crashed—the secretary of state signed a document confirming that the Hernández government had qualified for more aid money. There were twelve conditions that had to be met for such a document to be signed, including that Honduras “combat corruption” and “protect the right of political opposition parties and civil society activists.”

In the next month, as Hernández made a show of vetting the election results, the government flouted the conditions in spectacular fashion. During large public protests over the election, security forces killed twenty-two demonstrators. By the middle of December 2017, the results were officially certified. Honduras had a newly elected president.

The six-month period after the election revealed the American position for what it was. Outright fraud followed by mass protests had barely registered as a cause for concern in Washington. Members of the Trump administration needed to portray Honduras as a success story. Doing so freed up the anti-immigration stalwarts to end temporary protected status for the sixty thousand Hondurans living legally in the US for more than a decade, whom they now wanted to send home once and for all.