The Washington Post - 20.10.2019

(Darren Dugan) #1

A24 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019


ID card.

A discovery brings
new hope, and fear
The call came that day. It had
been six months since the middle-
aged plumbing worker vanished.
Now his family was being sum-
moned to the Justice Ministry.
Maybe, at last, they’d have an
answer. But they couldn’t even
grieve in peace. They begged re-
porters not to release his identity.
“We don’t want to make a lot of
noise,” s aid one of the man’s rela-
tives. “The neighborhood is really
dangerous.”
Another relative was more
blunt: “Saying the wrong thing
could get you killed.”
The legacy of fear in El Salva-
dor is profound. Three decades
after the war, there are people
who are only now revealing the
disappearance of a relative
in that conflict. Back then the
scourge was death squads. Now
it’s gangs and rogue police.
“There’s silence — exactly like
during the armed conflict,” said
Eduardo García, who heads Pro-
Búsqueda, a group searching for
war victims.
Te n days after the discovery at
El Limon, investigators still were
trying to match the corpse with
the DNA submitted by the plumb-
ing worker’s relatives.
The families waited.
For Karen, the news had gener-
ated a brief flicker of possibility.
Then authorities told her the
corpse wasn’t her husband. “I am
not going to stop calling the attor-
ney general’s office,” she said.
Maybe they’d discover some sign
of him, somewhere.
Daisy hasn’t g iven up, either. In
her son’s bedroom, she unlatched
a suitcase stuffed with neatly fold-
ed shirts and slacks.
“Here are his clothes,” s he said.
“I’m keeping them here so they
don’t get all dusty.”
She has vivid dreams of her
son. In one, he was trapped in a
room. “I couldn’t g et h im out,” s he
said. One day she heard her 3-
year-old grandson shouting out-
side the house. “Edwin is coming,”
he yelled, pointing at the dirt
path. No one was there.
By Day 145, Daisy was thinking
of paying another visit to the
attorney general’s office.
“God willing, they’ll have some
news soon.”
[email protected]

Fr ed Ramos in San Salvador and
Gabriela Martínez in Mexico City
contributed to this report.

in the homicide index,” s aid Celia
Medrano of the human-rights
group Cristosal.
Arnau Baulenas, legal coordi-
nator of the Human Rights Insti-
tute at the José Simeón Ca-
ñas University of Central Ameri-
ca, said Melara’s initiatives were
positive but insufficient.
“The attorney general has a
very small team,” he noted.
There are so few forensic crimi-
nologists that one of them —
Israel Ticas — has become a celeb-
rity for helping mothers find the
remains of their children.
Melara knows he lacks money,
equipment and expertise. It
sometimes seems the only thing
that’s not in short supply is fear.
“In Mexico, the families of the
victims are visible,” he told The
Washington Post. “They’ve gener-
ated social pressure.”
El Salvador is different. Indeed,
at El Limon, as the investigators
shoveled dirt, a mother in blue
flip-flops approached. Her son
vanished a year ago, at age 14.
“I’m going to find him,” she
said, weeping, in a TV interview.
“Even if he’s not alive, and it’s just
to bury him.”
But she begged the cameraman
not to identify her. He filmed her
feet.
There was no sign of her son.
On Day 2 of the dig, though,
investigators discovered a tanta-
lizing clue near the body.
It was a wallet. Inside was an

Melara scrambled up a nearly
vertical dirt path alongside a dy-
ing cornfield, trampling vines
and brushing through shoulder-
high grass. A quarter-mile up lay a
clearing, with mounds of freshly
dug dirt and a body.
It had been a man in jeans and
work boots.
More bodies would probably be
dug up in the coming weeks,
Melara told journalists. The new
government, he said, was com-
mitted to finding the disappeared
and punishing the culprits.
“This is a phenomenon that, in
past years, was hidden. They
didn’t want it to be visible,” he
told the TV c ameras. “But we’re all
seeing it.”
In just a few months, Melara
had made some aggressive
moves. He’d formed a team of
prosecutors to focus on the disap-
peared. He’d promoted tougher
penalties for those involved in the
crime. He was working with the
police to produce more accurate
numbers.
Some were skeptical. It wasn’t
until 20 17 — a quarter-century
after the civil war’s e nd — that the
government finally created a
commission to search for the dis-
appeared from that conflict. And
locating the more recent victims
could be politically unpalatable in
a country obsessed with the mur-
der rate.
“Finding and identifying these
bodies will inevitably imply a rise

torment. One of his brothers was
so terrified that he considered
migrating to the United
States, like tens of thousands of
Salvadorans in recent years.
Whenever Daisy thought of her
missing son, she’d lose her appe-
tite.
“I can’t live like this, learning
nothing,” s he said.
But in recent months, there
was a new reason for hope.
Nayib Bukele, the charismatic
young mayor of San Salvador, was
elected president in February on
promises of change.
“They say the president, now,
he’s helping people,” Daisy said.
“A nd that if you go to the attorney
general, he’s helping to find the
disappeared.”

A crusading attorney general
promises answers
Attorney General Raúl Melara
hopped out of an SUV and strode
toward the yellow police tape.
“Is it up here?” he asked.
At 47, Melara was part of El
Salvador’s tiny business elite,
with a doctorate in law and years
of leading the National Associa-
tion of Private Enterprise. He had
swept-back dark hair and wire-
framed glasses and favored
starched white shirts. But on this
afternoon, he had donned jeans, a
gray p olo shirt and a windbreaker
to visit the village outside San
Salvador known as El Limon —
notorious territory of Barrio 18.

suspects.
“If there is no body, there’s no
evidence,” said Marvin Reyes,
who spent 20 years in the national
police.
But the disappearances also re-
flect a political strategy. That be-
came evident when El Salvador’s
top two gangs reached a govern-
ment-backed truce in 2012.
The homicide rate — among the
highest in the hemisphere —
plunged. But disappearances
rose.
“If violence needed to be car-
ried out [by gangs], it needed to
be invisible, to avoid attention
from state authorities,” s aid Angé-
lica Durán Martínez, who studies
Latin American violence at the
University of Massachusetts at
Lowell.
Analysts suspect the gangs
and the government hide corpses
to keep the homicide rate down.
For victims’ families, the un-
certainty is cruel: There’s n o reso-
lution, no body to bury, n o hope of
closure. “We have so much stress,”
said Karen, a 39-year-old mother
of three.
She and her kids try to keep
their minds on work and
school, but their bodies betray
them: Karen’s i nsomnia, her son’s
overeating, her daughter’s wildly
oscillating periods.
She believes her husband was
abducted because he refused to
hide a gang’s weapons in the fam-
ily’s home. She is so frightened of
retaliation that she spoke on the
condition that her last name not
be used.
Daisy Flores, 47, also suspects
her son was hauled away by gang
members.
Edwin was perhaps the most
affectionate of her seven kids. The
kind of boy who would sneak up
behind her at the stove and grab
her in a bear hug. Who wasn’t
embarrassed to accompany his
mama to the market.
She doesn’t t hink he was a gang
member. But: “I can’t tell you
what kind of friends he had.”
Everyone knew that MS-13 domi-
nated their hamlet, a woodsy
patch of small, concrete homes
surrounded by fields where
campesinos grew corn and raised
cows and chickens. Nearby villag-
es were ruled by the rival gang
Barrio 18.
Edwin’s absence is a constant

disappeared as right-wing gov-
ernments — many supported by
the United States — fought to
extinguish leftist insurgencies.
These days, countries such
as Mexico, Brazil and El Salvador
are battered by criminal wars.
The governments aren’t fighting
Marxist guerrillas, but gangs and
drug cartels instead.
In Mexico, more than 3,000
clandestine gravesites have been
unearthed as families search
for the 40,000 missing. In El Sal-
vador, few of the burial sites have
been found.
Which is why, w hen the govern-
ment discovered one outside the
capital last month, TV reporters
rushed to the scene — and dozens
of families began to wonder if
their mystery would finally end.
“I know he’s here,” said the
mother of a 14-year-old.
“I am always hoping,” Karen
said.
“They haven’t told me any-
thing,” Flores said.
But for one family, things were
about to change.


Disappearances bring back
a Cold War nightmare


No one knows exactly how
many people in El Salvador have
gone missing. National police say
at least 2,457 people were report-
ed disappeared in 2018, the most
in a dozen years. The attorney
general’s office puts the figure at
3,437 — more than the total of
homicides. Both numbers are
widely seen as undercounts.
For Flores, her son’s disappear-
ance was a new version of an old
nightmare. Her two uncles were
among the at least 8,000 people
who vanished during El Salva-
dor’s 12-year civil war.
That was another era — of
death squads, the Reagan Doc-
trine against communism, guer-
rillas wielding red banners
and AK-47s. El Salvador today is a
democracy, with free elections
and onetime Marxists in con-
gress.
So why are disappearances
back?
One reason is they make it
easier for killers to avoid investi-
gation. That goes both for gang
members killing their rivals
and for cops secretly executing


EL SALVADOR FROM A1


Gangs, drug cartels reprise


disappearances in El Salvador


FRED RAMOS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
A soldier guards a farm in El Limon, a village outside San Salvador, where investigators last month
found a clandestine grave with human remains. Few burial sites of the disappeared have been found.

FREE QUOTES • THOUSANDS OF REFERENCES

CALL TODAY! 1 ( 888 )861-2 797


http://www.CAPITALREMODELING.com

MHIC #39985

AD CODE:

TRUST OUR 25 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE

*Conceptual drawing and 50% off installation sale provides 50% off regular labor portion of remodeling project and
must accompany purchase of cabinets and countertops on a full kitchen remodel at regular prices. Free granite upgrade
is difference in price between granite and Corian. Coupon must be presented and used at time of estimate. Expires
10/28/18. Capital is not a lender. Financing rates and payments vary based on approval, credit, terms, contract amounts
and other factors. Minimum monthly payments are based on minimum size job with one third down. Offers on ad cannot
be combined. All offers exclude previous contracts and orders. Call for more details.

YOU WILL LOVE YOUR

NEW KITCHEN FROM CAPITAL!


  • FREE GRANITE upgrade


from Corian*


  • FREE CONCEPTUAL DRAWINGS*


Yo ur Kitchen Experts

GOODBYE Old Kitchen!


Get Your Dream Kitchen NOW!

FallFallFallFallFallFallFall

50% OFF

KITCHEN INSTALLATION SALE!

NEW KITCHEN FROM CAPITAL!

FREE CONCEPTUAL DRAWINGS*

NEW KITCHEN FROM CAPITAL!

Yo ur Kitchen Experts

NEW KITCHEN FROM CAPITAL!

RP 1020

*Conceptual drawing and 50% off installation sale provides 50% off regular labor portion of remodeling project and
must accompany purchase of cabinets and countertops on a full kitchen remodel at regular prices. Free granite upgrade
is difference in price between granite and Corian. Coupon must be presented and used at time of estimate. Expires
11 /30/ 19. Capital is not a lender. Financing rates and payments vary based on approval, credit, terms, contract amounts
and other factors. Minimum monthly payments are based on minimum size job with one third down. Offers on ad cannot
be combined. All offers exclude previous contracts and orders. Call for more details.
Free download pdf