The missing children of El Salvador

[AlphaCentauri]

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, after years of wrangling and a complete failure to locate the Serrano Cruz sisters, that the El Salvador authorities had violated the girls' human rights by failing to investigate their disappearance.

The government was ordered to take a series of measures to aid the search for disappeared persons, including establishing a national commission, a DNA database and a web database. Three years after the ruling, very few of these obligations have been fulfilled.

Amnesty International is concerned at the lack of political will to move forward with this case. It has called on the Salvadorean authorities, in particular the President and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, to take measures to fully investigate the cases of the disappeared children, including that of the Serrano Cruz sisters.

Until the government fulfils these obligations, the families of El Salvador's missing children will continue to be deprived of the justice they deserve.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/missing-children-el-salvador-20080328

[EFerrari]

1. Mi pobre gente. Me parte el alma.

:cry:

[Judi Lynn]

2. God, it happened during the Reagan-Bush years. Figures, doesn't it?

700 kids simply vanishing? You don't even want to guess what on earth has happened to them.

Thanks for posting this. People need to know what hideous impacts these filthy proxy wars and covert ops have on populations.

From: El Salvador 1980-1994
Human rights, Washington style
excerpted from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum

~snip~
Officially, the US military presence in El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military and CIA personnel played a more active role on a continuous basis from as early as 1980. About 20 Americans were killed or wounded in helicopter and plane crashes while flying reconnaissance or other missions over combat areas. Moreover, the American program for training Salvadorean pilots, bombardiers and gunners could easily serve to conceal the advisers direct participation in these operations while accompanying their trainees.

Considerable evidence surfaced of a US role in the ground fighting as well. There were numerous reports of armed Americans spotted in combat areas, a report by CBS News of US advisers "fighting side by side" with government troops, and reports of other Americans, some ostensibly mercenaries, killed in action. The extent of American mercenary involvement in El Salvador is not known, but Lawrence Bailey, a former US Marine, has stated that he was part of a team of 40 American soldiers of fortune paid by wealthy Salvadorean families living in Miami to protect their plantations from takeover by the rebels.

During the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, it was disclosed that at least until 1985, CIA paramilitary personnel had been organizing and leading special Salvadorean army units into combat areas to track down guerrillas and call in air strikes.
These bit-by-bit disclosures pointed to a frequent, if not routine, American involvement in the ongoing combat. In September 1988 another news item related that US military advisers were caught in a gun battle between Salvadorean army forces and guerrillas and that, in "self-defense", they opened fire on the rebels.

The degree of overall control of the military operation by the United States is perhaps best captured by an excerpt from an interview given to Playboy magazine in 1984 by President Duarte, one of the few Christian Democrat leaders of the earlier days still working within the government.

Playboy: Do the American military advisers also tell you how to run the war?

Duarte: This is the problem, no? The root of this problem is that the aid is given under such conditions that its use is really decided by the Americans and not by us. Decisions like how many planes or helicopters we buy, how we spend our money, how many trucks we need, how many bullets and of what caliber, how many pairs of boots and where our priorities should be-all of that ... And all the money is spent over there. We never even see a penny of it, because everything arrives here already paid for.

In Duarte's previous incarnation as a government opponent, his view of the Yanquis was even harsher. US policy in Latin America, he said in 1969, was designed to "maintain the Ibero-American countries in a condition of direct dependence upon the international political decisions most beneficial to the United States, both at the hemisphere and world levels. Thus {the North Americans} preach to us of democracy while everywhere they support dictatorships."

More:
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/ElSalvador_KH.html