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. Approximately 2 million Salvadorans live in the United States, according to the 2010 Census, 60 percent of them foreign-born.

The organization Unfinished Sentences has released two videos to coincide with the Day of the Disappeared Child in El Salvador on Sunday, March 29, as well as a written report on two civil war-era massacres in which children were taken from their families and disappeared by government forces. In one of these cases, two now-adult children have 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 videos and report were produced as a collaboration between Asociación Pro-Búsqueda and the UW Center for Human Rights. Led by the director of the UW Center for Human Rights, Angelina Godoy along with graduate assistant Alex Montalvo, 10 students from the Henry Jackson School of International Studies Task Force program 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.