By Celia Medrano (*)
More than 150 clandestine cemeteries have been found in El Salvador since 2014. We can say that the whole country could be a 20,000-square-kilometer mass grave. the remains of a missing person could be found anywhere.
El Salvador’s «Comisión de la verdad» (Truth Commission) recorded that over 4,000 forced disappearances took place in the period from 1980 to 1992. Human Rights Organizations recount between 7,000 and 9,000 people who disappeared during the 12 years of armed conflict. The figure could be much higher, given that many, mainly because of fear, they never reported the facts.
For the family of a missing person, the hope of someday finding his dear one never ends, neither does the pain of knowing that as time passes the chances of finding your relative alive are increasingly distant.
The Statute of the International Criminal Court states that enforced disappearance is a crime against humanity and defines it as: «… apprehension, arrest or kidnapping of people by a State or a political organization, or with their authorization, support or acquiescence, followed by refusal to admit such deprivation of liberty or to give information about the fate or whereabouts of these people, with the intention of leaving them outside the protection of the law for an extended period… ”
In follow-up to Judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and of recommendations of different international institutions, in recent years there have been Significant advances in the post-Salvadorian conflict-oriented period of those who were forcibly disappeared, as well as reparation for their family members.
However, the Salvadorian State has pending for the ratification of the
Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, the Convention International for the protection of all persons against disappearances and the Convention on the imprescriptibility of war crimes and Crimes against humanity.
The prevalence of yesterday’s impunity haunts the Salvadorians today. Almost 30 years have passed since the cessation of armed conflict, it seems that this year would leave behind the pain of the victims and their families. nonetheless, this is not the case. The voices of relatives of the disappeared from the past continue to demand justice in the present. To their voices are added new voices that do not come from war, but that arise from new pains and new searches, from new impunities and Statistics that make El Salvador one of the most violent countries in the world.
The Attorney General’s Office for the Defense of Human Rights has registered 46 cases of enforced disappearance in the last three years. The Attorney General of the The Salvadoran Republic has received 7 complaints in the same period. The Police is the instance most denounced as responsible for the cases, with 63% of the complaints.
Records of people reported missing by violence during the 2019 exceeded the threshold of what the World Health Organization considers as an epidemic and was placed at a rate of more than 48 per 100,000 inhabitants.
We are talking that in El Salvador there are 9 disappearances of persons daily. A number that exceeds the average of last year of 6 homicides per day. Most of the victims are adolescents and young people from 12 to 30 years of age, with an estimation of 60% of the 3,212 reported as missing by the Attorney General of the Republic in 2019, typified in criminal law as “deprivation of liberty”. Only 25% of these people were found alive and 10% are found dead; for the remaining 65% there is no progress in the research.
Like the cases of Forced disappearance still pending since the war, they are hundreds of families who hope to someday locate their missing loved ones in the context of current violence. Institutions are overtaken by the dimension of this situation. Meanwhile, the numbers continue to rise.
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*Celia Medrano is a Central America journalist who specializes in Human Rights, approach to Education for Peace and Public Management.
