The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.
5 October 1990, 11:50 AM - CODEFAM
This group was formed on 9 September 1981 out of the roots of the war in El Salvador by families of captured, disappeared, and assassinated persons. It was originally called Comite. Later, on 14 March 1983 Marianella Garcia Villas was assassinated in Las Bermudas. She was a worker who fought for human rights, and at the time of her death she was investigating the use of chemicals in bombing by the military. She was accompanying ninety families who were escaping from a strong military operation when she was wounded and captured. First she was taken to a military school, then to a military hospital, where she was tortured – burned on the legs and arms, raped, and forced to swallow a grenade which then was exploded. She was a founder of the Human Rights office which PVC just visited, and CODEFAM works in her name today.
(Later we were to meet a young girl named Marianella. Her mother, whose first husband was disappeared, tells us that the child was born just a few months after Marianella Garcia Villas' assassination, and that when she went to register the birth, the authorities questioned her sharply as to whether she was sure that she wanted to give her daughter such a controversial name. She answered them proudly that yes, that was her deliberate intention.)
"The work of the committee is three-fold: 1. to struggle for the defense of human rights, with priority on freeing political prisoners; 2. to struggle to clarify the whereabouts of the disappeared and to enforce existing laws in El Salvador to discontinue this practice; and 3. to bring those persons who are responsible for the violations of human rights to trial and punishment.
