El Salvador

The conflict emerged from a decade of political volatility during which the military establishment confronted a largely landless agrarian population. The murder, by a right-wing death squad, of Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980 reflected the brutality that characterized the following decade. 

Unofficial estimates put the number of those who went missing during the 1980-92 conflict at 8,000 to 9,000. A significant number of victims were children, many of whom are believed to have been adopted through irregular procedures by families in El Salvador, the US and Europe.

A 1993 amnesty law, approved just five days after the UN-backed Truth Commission had issued its report (an integral part of the peace agreement) on wholesale human rights violations during the conflict, allowed perpetrators of disappearances and other crimes to go unpunished.

A generation after the end of the conflict, the casualty rate from gang violence exceeds 1980s levels. Today’s violence is sustained by competition among narco-gangs. In August 2015, after the end of a controversial truce between government and gangs under the presidency of Mauricio Funes (2009-14), the Supreme Court classified two of the most powerful gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, as terrorist organizations.

During the “truce”, the official homicide rate did go down, but critics argue that this was because gangs simply murdered more discreetly, burying victims in clandestine graves. The disposal of cadavers in secret locations is now well established as a precaution against possible prosecution.

In November 2015, El Salvador became the sixth country to sign the ICMP Agreement. As a signatory state, El Salvador is able to bring its own experience to bear on the international response to the global challenge of missing persons.

Organizations that have been created to address the problem of missing persons in El Salvador include the Pro-Búsqueda NGO, formed in 1994 to search for children who disappeared as a result of the conflict.

In 2012, ICMP signed an agreement with the Human Rights Center of the University of California, Berkeley and Pro-Búsqueda to begin a project funded by the US Government, to generate kinship information and DNA profiles from biological reference samples received from El Salvador.