AP News, December 22nd, 2006
A mother and daughter separated decades ago during El Salvador's brutal civil war have become among the first to find each other _ and the answers they longed for _ thanks to a DNA database.
Angela Fillingim, 21, grew up in Berkeley knowing she had been adopted from El Salvador but with few other clues to her beginnings. She got insight when she met her biological mother, Blanca Argelica Rodriguez Campos, during a six-day visit ending Wednesday in the Central American country.
"My grandmother says I look just like her when she was my age," Fillingim said, beaming down at photos taken during the visit that show Rodriguez Campos and Fillingim's half brother Henry, who bears the same wide grin Fillingim sees in the mirror.
As many as 10,000 children were adopted out of El Salvador during its 1980-92 civil war, according to Eric Stover, director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
The DNA Reunification Project was started by Stover and the Rev. Jon Cortina, co-founder of a Salvadoran association that helps reconnect children with their long-lost parents. It is administered by the Human Rights Center and the California Department of Justice.
Dozens have learned of their families through human rights workers following adoption paper trails, but only two, Fillingim and a young man in El Salvador, have been matched with help from the database, which now has about 800 entries from birth parents looking for their children.
"There's no stronger human force on earth than a mother or father looking for a missing child," Stover said. "This database was set up to help them do that."
Sometimes it's the adopted children, now adults, who take the initiative.
Since she was a teenager, Fillingim had wondered about her birth mother: who she was, what lay behind the decision to give up her child. Last year, during a visit to El Salvador to get to know the country, she found out about the Salvadoran group and gave it a DNA sample.
In January, the group learned her mother's name and hometown, using adoption records. After months of searching and taking DNA samples, it found a match in Rodriguez Campos. And Fillingim heard the story she had longed to learn.
The family had been pushed out of the mountainous Chelatenango region by the military and leftist guerrillas who had found support from villagers.
Rodriguez Campos was 24 years old, working in a factory and sewing clothes for American department stores, when she found out she was pregnant, Fillingim said.
Poor, away from home, with a war tearing the country apart and no support from the child's father, she decided her baby would be safest away from El Salvador.
"One of the first things she asked was whether I could forgive her," Fillingim said. "I told her I could only thank her. I've had a wonderful life, I've gone to college, I've had so many opportunities."
