With the recent return of figures such as Abrams and Bolton to the public stage, this analysis remains relevant. And yet it also does not seem fully fitting today. In the Trump era, the administration’s stance toward Latin America has followed a jumbled set of cues, but has tended toward xenophobic isolationism. In March, Trump announced that he was cutting US aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. “We’re not paying them anymore,” he stated, “because they haven’t done a thing for us.”

This is a far cry from the era when conservatives manufactured elaborate schemes to ensure that funding would flow unimpeded, so they could shape the region to their design. For the current occupant of the White House, El Salvador is not a sign of freedom won but a symbol of another kind: it represents the places and peoples that America must wall out. Should a more coherent isolationism become the defining stance of the Republican Party, El Salvador will be emblematic of the distance traveled between Reagan and Trump.