In the 1980s, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush supported El Salvador’s military-led government in a civil war against various leftist groups. The government’s atrocities have been well documented, and tens of thousands of Salvadorans died. Hundreds of thousands more fled to the United States. In the mid-’90s, President Bill Clinton allowed the “temporary protected status” of Salvadoran refugees to expire after the end of the civil war there, and many of those who were forced to go back formed or joined the gangs at the core of the current violence in that country. In June 2014, President Barack Obama declared that Border Patrol agents “already apprehend and deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants every year.” In 2017, dozens of suspected gang members were illegally executed by United States-funded Salvadoran security forces.

In January 2018, the Trump administration announced its intention to end temporary protected status for nearly 200,000 people from El Salvador who were in the United States after a series of devastating earthquakes there in 2001. This would cut off the ability of those people to support poor relatives back home, threatening further injury to an already wounded Salvadoran economy. In April of the same year, Border Patrol agents began implementing a “metering” policy that slowed the processing of asylum claims at the United States-Mexico border to a trickle, creating a huge backlog. In June 2019, the United States vowed to provide no further aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador until they reduced the migration of their nationals to the United States — a cruel and counterproductive measure.

How would such a relentless catalog of inhumane policy be photographed? Momentous political decisions, often made by men in suits in quiet, evenly lit rooms, do not tend to generate visual drama. The photographs might only show someone signing a document or in the middle of a speech. They might show a president, a member of Congress, a Border Patrol agent, a lobbyist, a judge, a citizen at a political rally or in a voting booth.

What if these photographs, in all their bureaucratic banality, were presented alongside the photograph of two drowned people? It would be a strange juxtaposition, a strangeness out of which some vital truth might be articulated. And what if the photograph with the dead bodies was omitted entirely and only the policies that led to the deaths were shown? Would we still be shocked and saddened? Or do we need the spectacle of corpses to make the story real?