More than 3 years without knowing about their children: the pain of being a mother in El Salvador

No clock can measure this wait: “They told us they would return in 15 minutes… and it has already been more than three years,” says Dora Gladys Mejía through tears, mother of two young men who were detained. Since then, she has lived without answers: she does not know if they are alive, if they are eating, if they are enduring. Her voice does not demand politics; it demands her children. And in that imposed silence —where even speaking can mean disappearing— the deepest cost of a security model that, for many, arrived in the form of absence is laid bare.