Our podcast, Emancipated: Voices and Images from the Archive, continues with the third chapter of Toña’s Crossing the River and Other Stories of Fight and Resistance from El Salvador, a series produced by our archival researcher Marta Valier and co-hosted by Rosie Rios and Marta Valier, using oral histories with people who lived in El Salvador during the Liberation War (1980–1992). This chapter centers on El Rescate human rights representative Linda Garrett’s encounter with Salvadoran political prisoner Héctor Bernabé Recinos Aguirre, illegally detained for more than four years for organizing the first national strike in 1980. Recinos Aguirre co-founded the Committee of Political Prisoners of San Salvador (COPPES) while Garrett worked on the Index of Accountability, a database used by the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, linking military officers to human rights violations committed during the war. This episode discusses the significance of accountability, reparation, and the weight of impunity on both the old and younger Salvadoran generation.

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