El Salvador Children Demand the Right to Know Their Origins
after separation during the Civil War
HAVANA TIMES – The children who were snatched from their birth families in the middle of El Salvador’s Civil War are now adults. A group of them are now struggling to adapt to a bittersweet process that still moves them: the joy of having found their families again, but also the sadness of knowing half their lives went by, decades of uncertainty, without being together.
The fathers, mothers, siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and other relatives are experiencing the same emotions. They saw those children disappear one day, ripped out of their homes, often by soldiers involved in an intricate network of human trafficking. Unbeknownst to the families, these children were then put up for adoption through unregulated channels.
During El Salvador’s civil war (1980-1992), hundreds of children who lived with their families in combat zones marked by frequent military operations, were snatched by soldiers under orders from officers who formed part of that trafficking network.
“The children were seen as booty, and a way of making money,” Ana Escalante explained to IPS. She directs the Probusqueda [pro-Search] Association, an organization that has worked since 1994 to investigate cases of children separated from their families in the context of the war and offered up for adoption in foreign countries.
Up until now, Probusqueda has documented 1.053 cases, among which are 475 people whose families were located; of these, 296 have succeeded in reuniting with their biological families in El Salvador. The most recent reunion occurred in April 2025, when two young women who now live in Great Britain came to El Salvador to meet their birth mother.
Another 92 Salvadorans who may have had ties to those who were adopted were located but have died. Angel Maria Ramos from Probusqueda is investigating the remaining 578 cases.
In addition to those who were ripped from their homes during military operations, there were also children whose parents were forcibly displaced due to the intense combat. Once they were out of the war zones, they were deceived by other figures in the trafficking network.
That network included lawyers and even personnel from supposedly humanitarian organizations, Escalante explained. They used trickery to convince the parents to give them their babies. Cases are known in which they had the parents sign blank pieces of paper, or sign with fingerprints if they were illiterate, all without knowing what they were authorizing.
Documents such as birth certificates were then falsified or altered, to make it all appear legal and aboveboard. The families who adopted these children had no knowledge of that fraudulent mechanism. Many of those children, now adults and professionals, live in cities in Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world. Their reencounters with their biological families are a whirlpool of joy, excitement, and nostalgia.
Truth Heals
“A reunion is something that’s very lovely, full of emotions, but behind that reencounter are many painful situations,” emphasized Ana Escalante, the Probusqueda director.
Witnessing the moment when an adopted person arrives in El Salvador to reunite with their biological father or mother after decades of forced separation is always a highly emotional event, especially when they melt into a long embrace, sprinkled with tears. Escalante affirmed that the reencounter isn’t just physical or emotional but also represents a step towards knowing the truth that has been hidden for so long.
“The truth is sometimes really painful, but in the end it’s also healing. These people, on knowing the truth, can heal, finally close those dark holes. But the families can never recover what was taken from them,” she stressed.
She added that these children had the possibility of growing up together in their family of origin stolen from them. They lost their roots and, clearly, their identities. There were even some adoptees who, when they learned the truth, preferred not to continue with the process of reuniting with their biological families, since that truth dragged up fears too difficult to process.
There are some 90 people currently in that situation, according to the Probusqueda data. The majority, however, put great effort into reuniting with their families. “In their testimonies, these people who were adopted say they couldn’t find their identity with the families they grew up with. That’s why they seek to learn their origin, which is also their right,” Escalante underlined.
Sarah’s (or Virginia’s) story
In truth, despite the joy of a reunion, the adoptees can’t forget the moments of yearning to know their real origin, their roots; to be able to answer the question of who they really are, and where they came from.
“I began to look (for my family) from the beginning, since I was old enough to look, but I ran into many dead ends,” Sarah Kanfer, a social worker currently living in New York told IPS. Sarah, now 40, began life in El Salvador as Virginia Lorena, the name her mother, Eusebia Portillo, gave the tiny baby that was born in 1985, in the heat of the Salvadoran civil war.
That conflict would eventually leave over 75,000 dead and 8,000 missing.
Sara’s birth mother was a woman from the rural community of San Luis de la Reina, part of the township of San Miguel Norte, in the east of the country. The ferocity of the combat forced her to relocate to the town, and later to move to the capital, San Salvador, where the little girl was born into a family of eight siblings.
Tricked by a ruse, the mother gave the baby over to her sister. The sister had made her believe that she and her husband were borrowing the baby for a little while, to show her to the people who would be the infant’s godparents.
Later the baby was put up for adoption and ended with a family in New York. Sarah stated that when she was only a little girl of five, she began to ask her adopted mother questions. She felt different as a Hispanic child in a community with little presence of minority groups. Her mother told her she had been adopted, she recalled.
“I always felt out of place. I felt alone. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere, even though [my adoptive family] loved me and provided me with everything. But there was always a need – something inside me pushed me to want to know who I was, and where I was from,” Sara confessed tearfully from New York, during an online interview.
After several failed attempts to find out her origins, in 2004 Kanfer found Probusqueda and contacted them through a social network. That was the beginning of a process that would culminate in 2024, when she at last traveled to El Salvador with her husband to meet her mother and other relatives.
The trip occurred after a prior DNA test that her mother and she had taken separately provided definitive proof of their family ties.
“They told me they’d found my mother – that was really incredible,” Kamfer recalled. She noted that her adoptive mother was always supportive of her efforts to find her.
Eusebia, 72, her biological mother, still relives the joy of having reunited with her daughter in November.
A lasting relationship
“We’re still feeling the joy of that moment of reunion,” Eusebia assured IPS, while sitting together with another daughter, Rosa Maria Portilla in the living room of the house where they now live, in the neighborhood called Miracle of Peace [Milagro de la Paz] in the city of San Miguel Norte.
Eusebia recalled: “My child was a tiny baby when they took her from me … you can’t imagine the joy when they told me that the DNA test had confirmed I was the mom.”
On June 9, one day before IPS visited her in San Miguel, Sarah Kanfer had returned to New York after a short three-day visit with her relatives in El Salvador, after learning that her mother and sister Rosa Maria were having some health problems.
Sarah Kanfer speaks very little Spanish, but they work out ways to communicate with each other.
“Sarah is very affectionate, very kind to all of us. She’s a love,” Rosa Maria, 34, stated. She told us that her sister would be back again in November, together with her husband and two children. Still, amid the happiness, Rosa Maria also resents the forced separation from her sister. “It was also sad for us, for all those lost years when we couldn’t grow up together, live together like sisters, play together, share our things,” she said.