As Central Americans have begun streaming across our border seeking asylum, I've followed press accounts with an increasing sense of queasiness. There are, in the opinion pieces, two main schools: that the immigrants are fleeing horrible gang violence, and should be allowed to stay; or that they're economic migrants manipulating our asylum system and should be made to leave.

To Americans used to arguing about Mexican immigrants and talking about the Mexican drug war, these are easy frames for us to fall into. But Guatemala is not Mexico, and in that implied contradiction I see a lack of understanding of what life in that part of Central America is actually like, and has been like for a long time.

In February 2013, I was in Guatemala City doing a story for this magazine on the gangland murders of Guatemala City bus drivers. The driver we were following was getting his bus repaired in Zone 6, an asphalt and concrete neighborhood which would look familiar to anyone who's spent time in the grittier parts of Houston or Los Angeles. The neighborhood was largely what Guatemalans call a “red zone,” or a “hot zone”—gang controlled, a patchwork of territories divided between different bands of the MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang.

Right by the mechanic was the National Police Academy. Which meant there were dozens of black-clad Policia Nacionales walking back and forth, many of them carrying automatic weapons. It should have been the safest place in the city; a protective umbrella over the surrounding neighborhood.

But across the street from the station was a scene that gave lie to that protection. There was a little convenience store—the kind of place that sold beer and gum and phone cards—and in front of the station stood a solitary armed guard, holding a pump-action shotgun, watching the police go by.