Pro-Busqueda continues to search for El Salvador's disappeared children

Anna-Cat Brigida profiles Margarita Zamora and Pro-Búsqueda for Oxy in She's Finding El Salvador's Lost Children.

Zamora began working with Pro-Búsqueda as a volunteer on a committee for family members after her father opened a case in 1997. In 2003, one of Pro-Búsqueda’s founders, Ralph Sprenkels, who has since left, approached her to see if she would work for the group full time. At the time, the organization was weighing whether to hire family members of disappeared children. Lived experience might help them connect with other families but could also be emotionally draining or lead to biased investigations.

Sprenkels says he decided in favor of Zamora “because she combined, and still combines, three special qualities: a keen mind for research, strong empathy with the relatives of disappeared children, and extraordinary stamina based on healthy realism and a roll-up-your-sleeves attitude,” Sprenkels says.

For the past 15 years, she has collected testimony and documents to track each family’s case. She doesn’t always tell her clients that she is going through the same search. “But because of her way of listening, she earns a lot of trust,” says Zamora’s investigative unit colleague Theresa Denger. The cases live in Zamora’s “heart and mind,” Denger says, praising her colleague’s infallible memory for details of each case.

Pro-Búsqueda has solved 440 cases of missing children from the Salvadoran civil war. Here is another historical example where the U.S. has been complicit in the separation of children from their families, as several of the disappeared children were adopted by parents in the U.S. and Europe.

Ralph Sprenkels, who is cited in the quotes above, recently published After Insurgency: Revolution and Electoral Politics in El Salvador, which I hope to get to this summer.

I shared some thoughts with Anna-Cat in the article as well.