El Salvador's missing children

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

During El Salvador’s brutal civil war hundreds of children were separated from their families. Some were seized by soldiers during military operations against left-wing rebels, and later found living with new families in Europe and North America. Others were given up for adoption by mothers forced into poverty or displaced by the conflict. Three decades on some of those adopted are trying to piece together their lives and find their birth relatives. Former BBC correspondent in Central America, Mike Lanchin, follows their dramatic stories. Mike meets Jazmin who was raised in France and two sisters who managed to locate the son of one of their younger siblings and Flor who has long struggled to understand why her birth mother gave her up.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a story from 1980s El Salvador of children caught in the middle of fighting between government soldiers and left-wing rebels.
0:15.0	The door opened and there was a soldier there with a big rifle and he just he didn't say anything he just shot me
0:27.2	it's a story of families torn apart in the nightmare of civil war.
0:41.0	My mom is to say the child is still alive. I can feel it. I have to find him. And a story of children growing up with broken identities.
0:47.0	I was like a ghost.
0:50.0	A ghost.
0:51.0	And this time I was lost.
0:55.0	I'm Mike Lanchin and I used to report from El Salvador for the BBC.
1:00.0	Now I'm going back there on the trail of answers to decades old questions
1:04.5	about the children who went missing during the country's 12 years of Civil War.
1:11.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. This lived and worked in El Salvador
1:30.0	after the end of its civil war in the 1990s.
1:33.0	But I'm not going to begin in that tiny Central American nation
1:36.8	sandwiched between Honduras and Guatemala,
1:39.6	but many thousands of kilometers away,
1:42.3	in rural France.
1:44.0	You can't get more French than this, preparing the batter for a very French dessert.
1:54.5	Do you like making crepe?
1:58.3	Yes.
2:00.3	And the children like it a bit.
2:01.8	Oh yes.
2:03.2	Jasmine is making creps for her husband and three children,
	...

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