She has a sister, Anita. Witnessing the disparity between the privileged and the poverty-stricken as well as the social unrest in El Salvador that ultimately resulted in civil war, Benítez observed firsthand the realities of life on each side of the great financial divide. Her brother-in-law, a surgeon in El Salvador, was kidnapped by guerilla forces during the civil war and was released only after his family paid what Benítez calls a "war tax." She was also privy to the personal, and often tragic, stories of the women who worked for her family. Poor, illiterate, and separated from their families by their efforts to earn a living, these women would ask Benítez to read and write letters to their families. She internalized their deeply troubling stories, using the lessons of El Salvador's people, culture, and volatile social history to create her fiction.
After returning to the United States permanently as a young adult, Benítez enrolled in college courses at Truman State University, where she earned both a bachelor's degree in education in 1962 and a master's degree in comparative literature in 1974. She married James Kondrick in 1980.
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