- [Voiceover] La Cuki Alarcon was late to work
on the night that his roommate disappeared,
which is why he's still around to tell what happened.
Outsiders called them all homosexuals,
but the sex workers, some who lived as women all the time,
others who dressed as women, primarily on the job,
called each other crazies.
(light orchestral music)
As Alarcon reached the opposite corner,
he could see his friends were still there.
He hesitated for a minute before crossing the street
and that's when he realized the Locas were not alone.
Four tall men in ski-masks were throwing them
in the back of a green truck,
clubbing them with the butts of their guns.
This was the beginning of the civil war
that consumed El Salvador until 1992.
The United Nations' NGO's, journalists
and scholars have sought to uncover what happened
to many of the more than 75,000
who were killed or disappeared during the conflict.
But no one has ever investigated
what happened to Alarcon's friends.
There was his roommate Cristi,
whom he remembers as a gentle 26 year old,
who would bring him gifts of coats or shoes,
from trips she would frequently take
to Guatemala or Mexico.
Another was Veronica, from San Bartolo,
near the Honduran border,
who was so pretty what her clients would sometimes
insist on having their pictures taken with her.
Carolina was so well put together
that she'd sometimes get into trouble.
She looked all woman, Alarcon said
and her clients would get violent
when they discovered she was trans as she undressed.
Alarcon is one of the only witnesses
to their disappearance as who is still alive.
But the story of that night is well remembered.
It's been passed down
from generation to generation
of trans-sex workers in the country's capital.
It's been retold so many times,
it can sometimes be hard to separate fact from legend.
Passed down in the same way many families retell
the haunting mysteries that still linger from the war.
Alarcon hid from the men rounding up his friends that night
by throwing himself to the ground in a small garden.
He tried to slink away after watching the men
pile his friends into the truck,
but more armed men were patrolling
the surrounding streets.
When the coast was clear,
he went back to work on the corner.
Within minutes, a client had come and picked him up.
Alarcon figured he'd see Cristi in a day or two,
which is how long the cops usually held sex workers
after a routine vice raid.
But Cristi never came home,
none of them did.
Alarcon went to the police stations to try and find her,
he even hired a lawyer, but the cops made fun of him
and hinted that his friends were already dead.
El Salvador's 12 year civil war
had its roots in political battles
that had been going on for half a century
and in 1980, it blew up into
one of the last bloodiest conflicts of the Cold war.
Bodies were being dumped at a rate of more than 150 a week,
which the US Embassy would tally in regular
Violence Week In Review cables,
even as the US grew closer with the El Salvadoran regime.
"The death squads' victims
"were killed in the usual fashion,"
reported a cable from the US Embassy to Washington.
"Kidnapped by a group of armed men who appear to civilians,
"taken away in ubiquitous pick-up trucks,
"shot or strangled or both,
"then dumped along the roadsides."
But those who lost their friends
believe they died because of politics.
The most intriguing part of the legend
of the disappearances from the savior of the world
and the part that is probably
the most impossible to pin down,
is that they were killed to cover up a government secret.
They were taken that night, the story goes,
in a hunt for two sex workers who had evidence of a crime,
evidence they'd stolen from an american.
Some of the Locas thought the american was a diplomat,
while others believed he was a reporter.
No one really knew why he was in the country,
but they all knew what he looked like.
He was a big spender who always tried two at a time.
The two he picked up shortly before the raid,
stole his briefcase.
Inside were some cameras that the Locas believed
had been used to photograph some kind of government crime.
All of this might be easily shrugged off
as the kind of conspiracy theory
that proliferates in wartime,
except several sources said they heard it
from people directly involved.
La Cuki Alarcon said the american came to his bar,
offering a reward to get his cameras back.
Another sex worker, who asked not to be named,
said she'd been warned that a hunt for the thieves
was underway by a sergeant in the National Guard,
who was a regular client.
Several told us that one of the thieves had a wife,
a sistander woman named Sonya,
who lived in San Salvador for at least another 30 years
and would sometimes talk about how the authorities
eventually dug the briefcase out of her patio
with the cameras still inside.
Everyone believes both thieves escaped,
but they're a lot of different stories about
what happened to the ones who disappeared,
beneath the savior of the world.
They're tortured by having their fingernails pulled out
and their breasts torn off,
or they were dragged to death by horses
at the infantry barracks.
They were dumped in a hole,
on the road to the notorious Mariona Prison.
The men said to have taken the locals away
wore no uniforms,
so there's no way to be sure which force had taken them.
El Salvador is filled with stories like these,
people turning into ghosts because
unanswered questions are all that remains of them.
And this story particularly hangs over
the trans-sex workers, still trying to survive
in San Salvador, where gang violence
and random hate crimes have claimed
at least as many lives as the war once did.
(people yelling in the background)