El Salvador Perspectives

Today, August 30, is the International Day for Victims of Forced Disappearances.   In El Salvador it is a day for remembering the missing and for making commitments to search for truth and justice.  There are a myriad of reasons why a Salvadoran family may be left with the gaping hole of a loved one who has disappeared. Thousands are still missing from El Salvador's civil war.   Some were kidnapped; others killed and their bodies never found again. The wall in to Truth and Memory in Cuscatlan Park  contains the names of thousands missing during the civil war. The Salvadoran military also had a cruel practice during the war of kidnapping children who were subsequently put for adoption by families outside of the country..   Despite efforts of organizations like ProBusqueda, many children have never been found and reunited  with their families. But disappearances did not end with the conclusion of the civil war.   Hundr...

There was progress against impunity in El Salvador this week as a court handed down sentences against soldiers involved in "disappearing" three youth in the town of Armenia, El Salvador. The events in the case took place in February 2014 and arose from the military's role in patrolling El Salvador in support of the police in battling the country's gangs.  A group of youth were talking in front of their houses in the municipality of Armenia. Six or seven soldiers on patrol approached the group and at gunpoint forced five of the boys to accompany the soldiers.  They were taken from a zone controlled by the Barrio 18 gang to a zone controlled by MS-13.   Two of the youth were released, and they went off to wait for their three remaining friends.  Their friends never appeared, and to this date have never been seen again. Parents of the youth, including one father who was a member of the police, immediately began questioning the military, petitioning the police,...

A new documentary airing on public television in the US this week, highlights the search for children "disappeared" by the armed forces during El Salvador's civil war.  As soldiers carried away children from their homes in conflict zones, a corrupt system of adoption lawyers, orphanages and officials placed children for adoption both inside the country and as far away as Italy. The documentary is Niños de la Memoria . Niños de la Memoria is the story of the search for children who disappeared during the Salvadoran civil war. These missing children, who survived massacres carried out by U.S.-trained Salvadoran Army battalions, never knew of their true identity or history. Many of the survivors were even “sold” into adoption in the U.S. and Europe. This film weaves together the journeys of investigator Margarita Zamora, adoptee Jamie Harvey and farmer Salvador García as they search for family, identity and justice in El Salvador, and asks the larger question: How can a p...

The Associated Press ran a lengthy story this week about the abduction of children by Salvadoran armed forces during El Salvador's civil war.  It's not a new story for readers of this blog, but it brings attention in the US to one of the uglier chapters of El Salvador's civil war.  The AP story focused on the case of Gregoria Contreras, a young girld kidnapped by solders in 1982 as part of a counter-insurgency operation. One of Gregoria Contreras' first childhood memories was the moment she last saw her parents. Fighting between government troops and guerrillas had broken out around the 4-year-old girl's family home in the countryside of this Central American country. The soldiers took advantage of the confusion and seized Contreras and her two siblings, who were under the age of 2. "We all fled the house and suddenly it all ended because they captured us and our parents disappeared," said Contreras, now 35 and living in neighboring Guatemala. Con...

Almost twenty years after El Salvador's civil war ended, efforts to reunite families go on, as described by the LA Times : "They took my girl and said, 'Go, old lady!'" recalled her mother, Enma Orellana. The woman ran in fear, looking back just once, when the girl cried, "Mama!" That was 29 years ago, when El Salvador waged war with itself and left hurts that have never healed. In the turmoil, more than 800 children disappeared, often into the hands of Salvadoran soldiers who used brutal tactics to battle leftist rebels and sympathizers. The youngsters, including some whose parents had died, often ended up in orphanages under made-up names. Many were funneled by unscrupulous lawyers into a lucrative international adoption market or kept by the same military officers who took them. At least 400 remain missing. Two decades after the end of the civil war, many Salvadoran parents — and, often, the children themselves — still search for loved ones, ...

The story of American missionaries arrested in Haiti as they attempted to bring Haitian children to sanctuary outside of the quake-stricken country continues to be front page news in the US. El Salvador has also had difficult times when parents might feel compelled to give up their children to foreigners. A recent BBC story tells about adult children, given up for adoption during the civil war, now reunited with their birth parents: Baptised Janet Ruiz, Martina was just 18 months old when [her mother] Graciela last saw her. It was 1982 and El Salvador was engulfed in a brutal civil war. A year earlier, the family had been driven out of their village in the east of the country by left-wing guerrillas who had also killed Martina's father. Left alone to bring up four young children, her mother did not know where to turn for help. Then a brother mentioned a lawyer he knew who arranged adoptions abroad for Salvadorean children. At first Graciela refused to listen, but later acquie...

Amnesty International released this this statement today: Sixteen years after the end of El Salvador's civil war, the whereabouts of hundreds of children who disappeared during the conflict remain unknown. 29 March has been designated as the "Day dedicated to the children who disappeared during the internal conflict" in El Salvador. Yet the country's government has done little to reunite the missing children with their families, despite an international ruling obliging them to do so. Of more than 700 children who disappeared in the conflict (1980-1992), around 330 have been located, largely due to the work of a local human rights organization. The rest still remain unaccounted for. Ernestina and Erlinda Serrano Cruz, sisters aged 7 and 3, are two such victims. They were captured by the Salvadorean army on 2 June 1982. After the war, the girls' mother submitted a complaint about her daughters' kidnapping. The Inter-American Human Rights Court ruled in 2005, af...

Several papers had feature stories this week about Suzanne Marie Berghaus, who as a baby had been adopted by parents from Massachusetts, who never knew that she had been forcibly taken from her birth parents by soldiers during El Salvador's civil war. This week Ms. Berghaus was reunited with her birth parents in El Salvador: Ms. Berghaus, a 26-year-old from the Boston suburbs, walked into a humble homestead here in rural El Salvador on Tuesday and spotted someone a generation older with a face that resembled her own but whom she did not know. Then, mother and daughter embraced. Soon after, others came for hugs of their own. Confronted with siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews — strangers all — Ms. Berghaus wiped tears from her cheeks. “Hola,” she said, one of the few Spanish words she knows. This was a family reunion of a most unusual sort. Wrapped in it was a profound personal story as well as that of El Salvador’s bitter civil war, which long ago came to a formal end but still...

The British paper, The Independent had this story about efforts to reunite children separated from their families during the Salvadoran civil war: They represent a lost generation - thousands of children kidnapped by soldiers or otherwise separated from their parents during the bloody and chaotic civil war that tore apart El Salvador. Many of them were later adopted and grew up in the United States and Europe, curious about their heritage but knowing nothing of their original families. Many thought their relatives were dead. More than a decade after a ceasefire that ended the fighting, some of those children are discovering their birth families and learning about their past. A recently completed database established by the University of California Berkeley and an El Salvadorean group, Pro-Búsqueda, is allowing young El Salvadoreans trace their families and, if they choose, to make contact. ( more )

An article in the Contra Costa Times describes how DNA technology is being employed to assist in the reunification of families with their children who disappeared during the Salvadoran civil war: With help from UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center and the California Department of Justice DNA lab in Richmond, Perez Navarrete and his group in El Salvador hope to identify more children who were taken from their families by force during the civil war that engulfed the country in the 1980s and '90s. "It's like a rule in this country to forget," said Perez Navarrete, a psychologist with the Asociación Pro-Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos, a group that seeks to reunite kidnapped children with their families. "We're trying to do it for 12 years, especially because the government is always trying to erase all the memories in this country, especially of the war." Pro-Búsqueda has identified more than 700 families who want to locate the "disappeared...

The past two weeks have seen much discussion in the Salvadoran blogosphere about crimes committed during the civil war in El Salvador which continue to have considerable impact on the society. In particular, bloggers explored considerations of impunity and historical memory arising from the assassination of Oscar Romero and disappearances of children during the war. The 26th anniversary of the anniversary of the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero was March 24th. Bloggers Hunnapuh , Jjmar , demander , Tim , and Rebeca all paid homage to the martyred "voice of the voiceless." Just as Romero's assassination in some ways marks the beginning of the civil war in El Salvador, Aldebarán notes that March 24th also marked the 30th anniversary of the military coup in Argentina that brought in 7 years of dirty war, in which tens of thousands disappeared or were tortured by government forces. This year's anniversary was marked by a surprise revelation -- one of the S...

One of the atrocities of the Salvadoran civil war was the abduction of children from their families. Most prominent was the case of the Serrano sisters , abducted by government forces during the early years of the civil war. In the aftermath of the civil war, lawyers for the family sued the Salvadoran government for redress, including requiring the government to search for the sisters as well as the hundreds of other missing children. After years of denials and legal wrangling, the government lost and the judgment of the Interamerican Court of Human Rights in March 2005, among many other things, required the Salvadoran government to make an act of public apology in the presence of high officials and members of the Serrano family. After dragging its feet for more than a year, the Salvadoran government took actions it said complied with the judgment. An account from US-El Salvador Sister Cities, describes what happened: Salvadoran President Tony Saca sent administration representa...

Jesuit priest Jon Cortina, who long worked tirelessly on behalf of the poor and oppressed in El Salvador, died today in Guatemala. His lifelong work was summarized in this biographical sketch on the Seattle University web site: Since he was assigned to El Salvador in 1955 as a Jesuit novice from Bilbao, Spain, Fr. Cortina has been a servant of the Salvadoran people. He attained a Doctorate in Engineering from the Polytechnic University in Madrid, Spain in 1973 and has since taught at the Jesuit Catholic University of Central America (UCA) in the capitol city of San Salvador. In March of 1977, Fr. Cortina was instated as priest of the Aguilares Parish by the holy martyr Archbishop Oscar Romero after Rutilio Grande—the first Jesuit martyr of El Salvador— was killed by the military. Before Fr. Grande was murdered for standing with the poor, Fr. Cortina worked closely with him; he also spent a great deal of time with the four U.S. women martyred on December 2 of that same ye...

This week saw more developments in the struggle for accountability of persons responsible for the worse atrocities of the decade of the Salvadoran war. First, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued its first ever judgment in a case brought against El Salvador. The case involves the disappearance of Ernestina and Erlinda Serrano, who were just seven and three years old when last seen by their family. The two girls were taken away by soldiers on June 2, 1982, during a major military operation in the department of Chalatenango, which had forced the civilian population to flee their homes to escape capture or death at the hands of government troops. Some of the story of the case is available in this article by Margaret Popkin . The government has fought the Inter-American Court prosecution all the way. It suggested that the girls never existed and that their mother was lying. It denied the jurisdiction of the court. It refused to conduct any investigations into the situati...