On July 28, 1982, three people were illegally captured and violently disappeared by Salvadoran military and state security agents: Patricia Emilie Cuéllar Sandoval, a US and Salvadoran citizen; her father Mauricio Cuéllar; and Julia Orbelina Pérez, a household worker in the Cuéllars’ home. Had Patricia survived the dictatorship, she would have been my aunt.

Forty-two years after their disappearance, our families still have no answers as to their whereabouts or the location of their remains. All we have left to remember them is their names, along with those of twenty-five thousand other victims of the armed conflict, in the Monument to Memory and Truth in San Salvador.