Mother and daughter separated in Salvadoran civil war are reunited

Mother and daughter separated in Salvadoran civil war are reunited

Human rights organization ProBúsqueda is trying to locate missing children taken by military

Madre e hija se encuentran tras 29 años de la guerra civil salvadoreña

Juan José Dalton San Salvador 4 DIC 2013 - 17:51 CET


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Josefina Osorio hugs her daughter Xiomara Patricia. / Claudia Marroquín[/font]

Unable to contain her tears, a Salvadoran mother on Tuesday hugged her daughter for the first time in 29 years after she believed she had lost her for good during the brutal civil war that terrorized El Salvador between 1980 and 1992.

It was an emotional and dramatic moment for Josefina Osorio and her now 31-year-old daughter, Xiomara Patricia.

“When the police took her from my arms, she was barely two years old,” Osorio recalled. She doesn’t remember the exact date or month, but knows that it occurred in 1984 when the army conducted a counter-insurgency operation in Cerros de San Pedro, San Vicente province in central El Salvador. The war was then at its height. The mountainous areas and rural cities harbored the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrilla insurgency. The army was trying to flush out the rebel fighters by conducting murderous raids on rural communities.

The Osorio family was captured and taken to a local police station where an officer snatched Josefina’s baby from her arms. “They are going to kill you so give me the girl and I will save her,” Osorio recalls the officer telling her. Years later, Osorio told her story to ProBúsqueda (Pro Search), a humanitarian organization that tries to reunite parents with children who were taken during the civil war.

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