WUNRN
Link to Film Segment:
EL SALVADOR - CHILDREN DISAPPEARED
DURING THE CIVIL WAR -
CHILDREN OF MEMORY (Niños de la Memoria) - FILM
A
film by Kathryn
Smith Pyle and María
Teresa Rodríguez
US/El
Salvador, 2012, 64 minutes, Color, DVD, Spanish, Subtitled
Hundreds
of children disappeared without a trace during the Salvadoran civil war. Many
were survivors of massacres carried out by the U.S.-trained Salvadoran army.
Taken away from the massacre sites by soldiers, some grew up in orphanages or
were "sold" into adoption abroad, not knowing their true history or
identity. The film follows Margarita Zamora, an investigator with human rights
organization Pro-Búsqueda as she traverses the Salvadoran countryside probing
memory, swabbing DNA samples, and searching for disappeared children -
including her own four siblings.
In the United States, Jamie Harvey, adopted from El Salvador in 1980, dreams of
locating her birth family; but with no information, no contacts and no access
to the Salvadoran military war archives, she is losing hope. CHILDREN OF MEMORY
weaves together separate yet intertwined journeys in the search for family,
identity and justice in El Salvador.