COMADRES

[2] Under the order of Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, the Salvadoran military gained more power and raided/killed indigenous villages and people.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary death squads engaged in a deadly spiral of political violence.

On October 15, 1979, a group of moderate officers ousted the dictator Carlos Humberto Romero and formed the Revolutionary Government Junta (JRG).

In January 1980, right-wing violence broke out against the JRG, including bombings against government newspapers, kidnappings and murder.

At the same time, the U.S. State Department received warnings that right-wing death squads were allying with the military against the government”.

[6] The committee was made up of mothers and family members of people who were imprisoned, disappeared, or killed for political reasons.

Within the Latinnews Archive, two representatives of Comadres mentioned “indiscriminate military bombing campaigns of civilian targets causing an unknown number of deaths”.

[8]Comadres (CoMadres) is the committee of mothers and relatives of prisoners, the disappeared and the politically assassinated of El Salvador.The offices of the committee were subject to police raids by the government, and the members were allegedly subject to systematic rape in order to destroy the organization.

[10] It was difficult to track the number of deaths since they banned reporters and human rights representatives from entering the affected areas.

It was established in December, 1977, with the help of the Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador and the Archbishop Óscar Romero,[11] to discover the truth behind the missing relatives of the membership.

Amongst these women were important leaders such as María Teresa Tula, Alicia Panameño de García, and Sofia Aves Escamillas.

[5] María joined COMADRES in hopes of helping her husband out of jail after his incarceration for leading a sugar mill strike in 1978.

[5] Sofía joined COMADRES after her son and husband were murdered to due their engagement in peasant and labor organizing.