A life stolen in the brutality of war
El Salvador’s civil war had many victims, including children stolen from families, writes MARKOS ALEMAN.
‘He never gave me the love of a father and he was always abusing me, even raping me.’
GREGORIA CONTRERAS
Abducted as a child in El Salvador
One of Gregoria Contreras’ first memories was the moment she last saw her parents. Fighting between government troops and guerrillas had broken out around the four-year-old girl’s family home in the countryside. The soldiers took advantage of the confusion and seized Contreras and her two siblings, who were under the age of two.
“We all fled the house and suddenly it all ended because they captured us and our parents disappeared,” said Contreras, now 35 and living in neighbouring Guatemala.
Contreras was just one of hundreds of children who disappeared under a variety of circumstances during El Salvador’s brutal, 13-year civil war, which left 75,000 people dead and thousands more missing. In most cases, the parents have yet to find out what happened to their children, while a few hundred of the missing have been identified after giving investigators DNA samples and other evidence.
Now, a human rights group, Probusqueda, is uncovering another macabre, and mostly unknown twist to the tragedy. In Contreras’ and at least nine other cases, lowto-mid-ranking soldiers abducted children in what an international court says was a “systematic pattern of forced disappearances.” Some of the soldiers raised the children as their own, while others gave them away or sold them to lucrative illegal adoption networks. In Contreras’ case, an army private spirited her away, raped her and gave her his own surname.
The crimes make El Salvador the second Latin American country proven to engage in such child abductions during internal Cold Warera conflicts. Argentina’s military kidnapped hundreds of children of political opponents, and the prosecution of those responsible three decades later led to the indictment of top officers, including army Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, then-head of Argentina’s military junta.
No one has revealed the full scope of the child abductions in El Salvador. The number of confirmed abductions will likely rise if the country’s Defence Department makes public files from the civil war era.
Contreras and eight other victims of military abductions successfully sued their government in the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights, demanding the military release more information. Three years later, the military hasn’t turned over the requested files and the officers, most of them retired, suspected of adopting stolen children have refused DNA tests.
According to Contreras and other sources, she, her siblings and nine other children were seized in 1982 as the U.S.-trained anti-guerrilla Atlacatl battalion clashed with rebels. A helicopter took away the boys, while the girls were driven away in trucks.
Army Pvt. Miguel Angel Molina ended up with Contreras and later registered her as his own daughter in the western Salvadoran town of Santa Ana, according to the InterAmerican court, which also found that he had raped her.
Molina later committed suicide.
The court found the Salvadoran government was responsible for the abductions of not just Contreras but also of her two siblings — Serapio Cristian, who was 20 months old at the time of his kidnapping, and Julia Ines Contreras, who was four months old. The court also found the government responsible for the abductions of three other children who were between the ages of three and 14.
“That soldier stole everything from me,” Contreras said. “He took away my parents, he took away my siblings, he took away my identity. I couldn’t live like a girl because he never gave me the love of a father and he was always abusing me, even raping me. I was only 10 years old and I couldn’t do anything.”
Victims and investigators said justice won’t be completely served until El Salvador’s government carries out the entirety of the court’s orders.
The armed forces remain the chief obstacle to justice, said Miguel Montenegro, director of the non-profit Human Rights Commission. “Here, there’s a strong power, a power exercised by old members of the armed forces,” Montenegro said.
For Contreras, the quest for truth has been long, bitter and incomplete.
She eventually escaped Molina and stayed with one of his relatives. With the help of another of Molina’s relatives, Contreras settled in Guatemala.
Her parents found her in 2006 after they appealed to Guatemalan officials and Probusqueda. Just recently, she reunited with her brother, who was also abducted and given to a soldier’s relative. She’s also started her own family.
But Contreras remains distant from her parents and has yet to find her sister.
“I recovered my identity,” Contreras said. “The other Gregoria doesn’t exist. I have my husband and my children. I don’t want anything more.”