Adoptee Screens New Documentary: Disappeared Children of the Salvadoran Civil War UPDATED

Nelson DeWitt was born in El Salvador. His brother, sister and father escaped to Costa Rica. His mother brought him across the border to Honduras when he was three months old. Later, she was killed and he was adopted at age two from Honduras to the US. Nelson says that there are seven to eight hundred cases of separated children from this war with around three hundred family matches made. About thirty of those cases are adoptees living in the US.

In 1997, when Nelson was 16 years old, his adoptive father got a shocking call. It was his biological father who was in Costa Rica and had been searching for him for the past fourteen years. He has since reunited with his biological family–dozens of people showed up for his reunion.

“DeWitt, who is making a documentary about his experience, learned that he is one of the hundreds of now-adult children who went missing during the civil war in El Salvador, which lasted from 1980 to 1992.

Many of these children wound up adopted after they were torn away from their families by soldiers, who sometimes kept them, other times funneled them into the lucrative adoption industry. DeWitt, who was raised by his adoptive parents in the Boston area, learned that he was one of these children after receiving a phone call from a long-lost family member. He learned that his birth parents were both revolutionary operatives in El Salvador. After his mother found herself hunted for by authorities, she fled with him to Honduras. She was likely killed soon afterward; by age two, he had been adopted out of a Honduran orphanage, en route to the U.S.

DeWitt’s film will be screened at KPCC’s Crawford Family Forum this Friday night. His story is in many ways universal among foreign-born adoptees who wrestle with their identity.

“I always wondered who I was,” he says in the trailer above, “and where I came from.”

As DeWitt (whose name at birth was Roberto) relates, his search for his roots and his identity began more easily than those of some adoptees, with a surprise long-distance call from Costa Rica to his adoptive parents’ home. As it turns out, his father survived the war, as did his two older siblings, whose grandparents spirited them away to Costa Rica for safety. He’ll talk about his experience in a discussion following the screening Friday.”

The Mohn Broadcast Center & Crawford Family Forum is located at 474 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, California, 91105.
A wartime adoptee’s search for the ‘missing child’ he became
[Multi-American 10/26/11 by Leslie Berestein Rojas]

Update: More details on his story are revealed in a November 3, 2011 Huffington Post article. ‘Identifying Nelson’: El Salvador Born, U.S. Man Searched For His Roots   by Jorge Luis Macias.

“Fourteen years after his adoption, a call from a human rights advocate to his parents, Tom De Witt and Margaret Ward, turned their world upside down. “When my dad received that call,” De Witt said, “he almost fainted.”

The caller, activist Robert Kirchner with Physicians for Human Rights, told the couple that their son had been born in El Salvador, not Honduras, and that his biological parents were revolutionaries in the civil war. He also revealed the circumstances of De Witt’s early life.

A few months later, De Witt traveled to his homeland in search of his past — and met the family who knew him as Roberto.

His documentary, which is made up of three 30-minute segments, honors the tireless efforts of his grandmother Lucila Angulo de Escobar, whom he calls Mama Chila, who never gave up searching for him with the help of the organization Pro Busqueda (Pro Search). Mama Chila died in August 2008.
“”In 1983, did you adopt a boy from an orphanage in Honduras?” Kirchner, an authority in forensic pathology and human rights violations who worked with the United Nations Truth Commission in El Salvador, asked Tom De Witt in 1997.

“My father was shocked,” Nelson De Witt recalled. “It was difficult for him to believe that someone was calling for me.”

As De Witt recalls, he and his brother Derek had just returned from summer camp to their home in New Hampshire when his mother said, “Don’t go anywhere. We need to talk.” He remembers his adoptive father saying, “They believe they have found your birth family. Your family is looking for you. You have a father in Panama and two brothers.”

De Witt remembers that his adoptive father didn’t say anything about his birth mother.

Groups such as Pro Busqueda have been searching for at least 700 Salvadoran children who, like De Witt, were placed for adoption with foreign families. At this point, some 330 of them have been found. One of them, Victor Contreras, is interviewed in De Witt’s documentary. Born in Morazan, El Salvador, Contreras survived the infamous massacre in the town of El Mozote on Dec. 11, 1981, when a Salvadoran army battalion killed 700 to 900 civilians.

For De Witt’s family, the search came to an end after his grandmother had spent 14 years asking God for a miracle in the name of her daughter. At Christmastime in 1997, De Witt met his biological father and dozens of family members he had never known existed.

“There were many tears. … It was a wonderful moment,” he said. “It was the warmest reception I’ve ever had in my life.”

He added, “When I found them, I found myself.”

De Witt said that, along with his childhood friend and director of the documentary John Younger, he raised $15,000 from family and friends to make his film.

“My parents were revolutionaries, they fought against the injustices of the government, and I did not know that,” said De Witt. “For me, it was important to know where I come from in order to know where I am going.”

“What will happen next? I don’t know,” he said.

REFORM Puzzle Piece