Between 1980 and 1992, the United States financed, armed, trained, and advised the Salvadoran military dictatorship’s war against a leftist insurgency. The conflict’s toll is usually accounted for in over seventy-five thousand deaths and ten thousand forced disappearances, the guerrilla forces responsible for only 5 percent of that violence. Lesser known are the traumas borne by hundreds, perhaps thousands of families who were torn apart during the violence, mostly by the US-backed military, through abductions of the children of peasants targeted in their scorched-earth campaigns across the Salvadoran countryside.

In the foreword to a forthcoming book by Elizabeth Barnert, anthropologist Philippe Bourgois refers to these abductions as “the demographic crime against humanity of a ‘disappeared’ generation of poor rural children” in El Salvador. These children were often delivered to the Red Cross and placed in orphanages or put up for international adoption. Many were raised by loving foreign families who believed they had rescued victims of the violence. Others bounced between abusive homes and institutions. Most never knew their true names or birthdays and believed that their biological families were lost.

Decades later, one group is tirelessly working to reunite these missing children with their biological relatives. Pro-Búsqueda, the subject of Barnert’s Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador, was founded in the years following the Peace Accords that brought a negotiated end to the twelve-year civil war. By 2020, Pro-Búsqueda had resolved 443 of 994 cases registered with the organization, while demanding reparations from the perpetrators of these crimes.