In recognition of the Day of the Disappeared Child in El Salvador on Sunday, March 29, Unfinished Sentences is proud to release two videos and a written report on two civil war-era massacres in which children were taken from their families by government forces and subsequently disappeared. In one of these cases, two now-adult children have since been located in the United States and will meet their biological mother for the first time later this year, thanks to the efforts of the Salvadoran human rights organization Asociación Pro-Búsqueda.
The documentary videos, “Still Searching” and “We Never Stopped Looking For You,” can be viewed and shared individually on YouTube, or via the below playlist, along with “Taken By Force, Reunited by Hope,” a previous Unfinished Sentences video about a family reunification in the community of Arcatao, El Salvador.
The videos and report are the fruits of a recent collaboration between Asociación Pro-Búsqueda and the UW Center for Human Rights. Ten undergraduate students participated in the course — part of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies’s Task Force program — under the guidance of Professor Angelina Godoy, director of the UW Center for Human Rights, and graduate assistant Alex Montalvo, Puffin Fellow in Human Rights and Digital Media at the Center.
Students conducted vigorous primary-source research and collected witness testimony from survivors of the Canoas and Quesera massacres during a weeklong trip to El Salvador led by Asociación Pro-Búsqueda. Their report and video documentaries convey the stories of seven massacre survivors whose loved ones were forcibly abducted during assaults by government forces. The videos will be used to increase Asociación Pro-Búsqueda’s national and international outreach capacity via television and social media.
During El Salvador’s civil war from 1980 and 1992, over 75,000 civilians were killed—the majority at the hands of state forces—and many more were detained, tortured, or disappeared. Thousands of children were forcibly separated from their families, many adopted to other parts of the country or sent abroad under false identities. Approximately 2,354 Salvadoran children were adopted into the U.S. throughout the conflict.
In the 1980 Canoas massacre, the Salvadoran army attacked a house of displaced people who had gathered to distribute food and clothes, resulting in the death of 23 people and at least two cases of disappeared children. During the Quesera massacre in 1981, between 350 and 500 civilians were killed by the Salvadoran military and 24 children were disappeared. Read the report here (PDF).
Asociación Pro-Búsqueda was founded in 1994 in an effort to locate disappeared children and promote truth, justice, and reparations for those affected by the practice of forced disappearance. Despite setbacks, including the government’s refusal to provide access to military or passport documents that could contain clues about where they were sent, and a 2013 attack in which its office was burned and crucial documents destroyed, Asociación Pro-Búsqueda has successfully reunited over 200 families. However, hundreds of cases remain unresolved, as families tirelessly work with the organization to search for their loved ones. We hope that these materials contribute to the struggle for truth, justice, and reparations in El Salvador.