No more Mother’s Day for many in Bukele’s El Salvador

May 10 ceased to be a day of celebration. “That day he came to visit me… and that night they told me he had been captured,” says Silvia Yolanda García Ábrego about her son, Mauro Salvador Martínez García. Since then, more than three years have passed without knowing whether he is alive.

A single mother, 58 years old, she cares for a daughter with a disability while gathering, however she can, money to send packages to prison. Sometimes, she says, she has to choose between one child and the other. Her demand is direct to President Nayib Bukele: to free those who, she insists, are innocent. “We demand that they give us back our innocent children; let those who should pay, those who caused harm before, pay. Our children are not criminals. They are innocent, and they are the ones who are suffering.”