Now is the time. President Obama: Open the files on El Salvador’s Disappeared!

Dear friends,

As you have heard last week, President Obama moved to declassify US records regarding Argentina’s “Dirty War” in which over 30,000 people were disappeared by the military. We are calling on President Obama to open the files on El Salvador’s 10,000 disappeared by the military during the civil war. Your support today will make it possible for President Obama and the U.S. Congress to hear this call directly from the Salvadoran children who survived the disappearance of their loved ones.

The Mauricio Aquino Foundation’s Our Parents Bones’ campaign is taking a delegation of children of men and women who were kidnapped and forcibly disappeared by the military in the 1980s to Washington DC on April 13-15. They will be asking Congress and the State Department: “Where are the files on our parents? Where is the truth on El Salvador’s Disappeared?”

Coming just a few weeks after President Obama’s action to open files on the “Dirty War” in Argentina, your support of this delegation is a critically important and timely way to help extend this moral stance from the United States. Your support today will not only help achieve our government’s atonement for sending military aid to a dictatorship that destroyed our families and caused our diaspora, it will help bring closure to the thousands of children who only seek to know the truth of what happened to their parents and where they are buried.

With your assistance, the stories of the children of the disappeared will be told in Washington—to Congress, to the human rights community–for the first time in history by surviving children Alexandra Aquino-Fike, Sara Aguilar and Jimmy Ortiz. The Human Rights Ombudsmen of El Salvador, attorney David Morales, who is championing the plight for the Disappeared in El Salvador will accompany us as well. Solidarity voices from human rights experts at the Due Process of Law Foundation, the University of Washington’s Human Rights Center and the Washington Office on Latin America will also be joining us.

Friends, the decades-long demands of tireless activists are beginning to force cracks into the wall of silence surrounding the disappeared. With your solidarity we know we can bring the truth to light.

For those of you who helped by contributing, we thank you. For those of you still considering a gift of support, we hope we can count on your help.

With a grateful heart,

Sylvia

Sylvia Rosales-Fike
Vice Chair, The Mauricio Aquino Foundation

P.S. Your donation to the The Mauricio Aquino Foundation is tax deductible by IRS designation as 501(c) as a tax exempt entity and incorporated in the State of California.