In February 1985 Dona Carmen Romero was a third grade teacher in southern San Miguel province in El Salvador. It was then that her husband, Carlos, a member of the local textile factory's union, was abducted and killed by Salvadoran National Guard death squads. His body was found with signs of torture near a river. "We barely could recognize his features. His facial skin had been removed with sharp knives," Dona Carmen recounts. Soon, she and her two sons Pedro and Raul, ages eighteen and sixteen, were receiving death threats. About two months after the incidents the boys slipped across the border and flew to Washington, D. C.