“If we do not find her at the end of the day she will be lost forever, I’m sorry for her mum,” says the forensic anthropologist and criminologist Israel Ticas, while looking at the thick vegetation around him. He is digging into the woods in a remote area controlled by the street gang the Mara Salvatrucha to find Reina Isabella Sanchez, a 20 years old girl who disappeared in 2013. She was the girlfriend of a policeman. Reina will never be located.
In the Northern Triangle, between El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in the last forty years, violence has become part of life. Beyond the average murder rate of a war zone, nowadays people are not just being killed, but they are actually vanishing.
The only Criminologist in El Salvador, mothers who can’t find their loved ones and Sicarios become the chorus of a painful melody revealing a grey area, where resilience, love, and dignity lay.