The last time Mirna Urías saw her son Merlon, he was 18 years old, wearing black shorts and a brown shirt. It was the night of March 30, 2022. She remembers seeing him kneeling with three friends, while a group of police officers with long guns guarded them. Merlon wasn’t handcuffed, but he was crying with his hands behind his back, clutching his fingers. In the distance, his mother shouted to him: “Son, don’t worry, we’re going to prove you’re innocent.” Then, the officers took him inside the police station, and she never saw him again.
Four years and two months have passed since that arrest. Merlon is now 22 years old, and his mother only hears about him when officers in balaclavas tell her, through a thick glass partition, that the young man is still alive behind prison walls. Nothing more. Mirna is one of the thousands of Salvadoran women who have spent years wandering the country’s prisons in search of their children, shrouded in official silence.
On Sunday, May 10, Mother’s Day, a group of women gathered in front of the San Salvador Cathedral, not to celebrate the holiday, but to make their pain visible. They announced that, faced with the state’s opacity, they have decided to form a collective to try to be heard. The movement, named Mothers for Freedom, is currently made up of about a hundred women, although Mirna, their spokesperson, assures that they will soon number in the thousands.
“We have no proof of life,” Mirna recounts. “I only know that my son hasn’t died because every two or three months a guard tells me that he’s been moved to a different cell. At least that way I know he’s moving within the system.” A report by the National Civil Police (PNC) on those detained in the early stages of the state of emergency, which this newspaper has obtained, records Merlon’s arrest on charges of belonging to terrorist groups. His mother, however, maintains that the young man is not a gang member, but rather that he had been working in sugarcane harvesting for two years.
Being a mother in El Salvador often means searching. If the figures that President Nayib Bukele has published on his social media are accurate—the only ones available, since the rest remain classified—there are 80,000 missing persons in the Central American country due to gang violence over the last three decades; that is, at least one in every 100 Salvadorans. For every victim, there is at least one person searching. Mostly women; almost always mothers. Adding to this historical tragedy is the fact that, in the last four years, another 92,000 people have been swallowed up by the prison system, held incommunicado in jails where absolute opacity reigns.
