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45 Years after the National Guard of El Salvador Killed Efraín Arévalo, His Family Bids Him Farewell

Mario Orellana, 58, consoles Fresia Arévalo, his wife of 56 years and Efraín Arévalo’s third daughter, as other family members read letters to their deceased father. Mario and Fresia migrated to the United States during the war and now live in Salt Lake City, Utah. Mario has known the Arévalo family since 1976 and lived through Efraín’s disappearance. He has also accompanied the family on their search for Efraín for the past 45 years. “We had already resigned ourselves to never knowing anything about what happened to him, but now that we have an answer, we want to bid him a proper Christian farewell, as his mother and wife would have wanted,” Mario says. In 2017, Carlos Efraín Orellana, the son of Mario and Fresia, met Angelina Godoy, director of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington, and told her about his grandfather’s 1977 disappearance. In June 2019, Godoy requested the declassification of CIA documents on enforced disappearances involving El Salvador’s National Police and National Guard that occurred between January 1975 and December 1980. In September 2022, these documents confirmed that Efraín was killed in 1978. Photo credit/ El Faro.

December 14, 2022

El Faro English | Víctor Peña: “45 Years after the National Guard of El Salvador Killed Efraín Arévalo, His Family Bids Him Farewell” cites reporting from UWCHR’s Unfinished Sentences project. 

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