Carlos Mauricio was a professor at the University of El Salvador in June 1983 when he was kidnapped from his classroom, forced into an unmarked van and taken to National Police headquarters, where he was tortured for two weeks. Upon his release, he fled to the U.S.

In 2002, he was one of three plaintiffs who successfully sued two former Salvadoran Ministers of Defense for their responsibility in his imprisonment and torture. The generals were ordered to pay $54 million. In 2002, Carlos founded the Stop Impunity Project, which works to bring an end to the impunity enjoyed by human rights abusers in El Salvador.

Carlos has worked closely with the School of the Americas Watch to close this Pan American training facility. Last year, for the sixth time, he took a caravan from San Francisco through twelve cities across the country to the annual vigil to close the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Carlos has also taken part in SOAW delegations to Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile in 2006, and Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in 2007. He was instrumental in persuading the governments of Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia to stop sending troops to the School of the Americas.

In 2006 and 2007 Carlos lived in Burma, closely monitoring the human rights situation. In 2007, he visited Cambodia, to meeting with representatives of human rights and museums of historical memory to research the Cambodian struggle against impunity. In 2008 and 2009 he lived in Peru, closely following the trial of ex-president Fujimori, as well as the indigenous uprising in the Amazon.

In November 2009, as a member of a delegation invited by President Mauricio Funes, and together with representatives of Amnesty International, the Center for Justice and Accountability, he attended ceremonies in San Salvador to commemorate the assassinations of the six Jesuit priests and their two housekeepers.

In his efforts to build a Museum of Memory in El Salvador, he is currently working with an organization of former political prisoners and torture survivors and returns to El Salvador regularly.

I’m in fasting in Washington DC to call attention to a serious problem, a problem of humanity: that deportations are unfair because they separate families. Nor is it moral to deport parents of young people born in the United States, this is against the fundamental right of children to have a family, right under the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child, established by the United Nations.