Bukele Opened the Doors to El Salvador’s Most Secretive Prisons and a Documentary Crew Walked In With a Grieving Mother Looking for Answers

Eight years ago, Amelia’s mother watched her daughter disappear after being handed over to gang members by a classmate and never come home. She has been searching ever since, and she has not been searching alone. Another Salvadoran mother, whose own son never returned either, has been by her side through every painful step of that search. Together they are among the central figures of “Hasta Encontrarte,” a documentary directed by Colombian filmmaker Daniel Posada that premieres in Madrid on May 19th and has already generated considerable attention for the story it tells and the questions it raises about how the world understands El Salvador.

The film follows these mothers as they make dangerous journeys through gang-controlled territory, looking for the remains of their children in clandestine cemeteries, driven by the knowledge that closure, however devastating, is still better than the permanent uncertainty of not knowing.

The Mothers at the Center of Everything

Mari Puro is the documentary’s most prominent protagonist, and her story is the film’s emotional foundation. Her son Omar Franco was killed, and the man accused of his murder is currently held in El Salvador’s maximum security mega-prison, cut off from the outside world along with thousands of other gang members accused of terrorism. In one of the documentary’s most affecting scenes, Mari Puro stands at a prison gate and speaks face to face with the man accused of taking her son’s life, a conversation that the film’s director describes as one of the most powerful moments he has ever captured on camera.

Posada arrived in El Salvador with a different film in mind. He wanted to understand the gap between Nayib Bukele’s 85 percent approval rating inside the country and his reputation as a dictator in Spain, the United States and much of the international press. His resume includes work as a producer on the series “El Chapo,” and he describes his approach as one that favors thinking large. His first move was to pursue Bukele directly. The process was long, and somewhere along the way he met Mari Puro. The moment she told him her story, he understood that she was the film.

Posada has described Mari Puro’s account as the most effective way for audiences outside El Salvador to understand what it actually meant to live inside a country that carried the designation of the most violent in the world before Bukele came to power, with homicide rates, disappearances and sexual violence figures that placed it in a category of its own in the Western Hemisphere.

A Documentary That Has Pleased and Provoked in Equal Measure

Bukele appears in the film and sits for an interview in which he defends his government against accusations of arbitrary detentions, the imprisonment of innocent people alongside guilty ones, the denial of fair trials and the abuse of the state of exception he imposed four years ago and has renewed repeatedly since. The documentary has been praised for centering the voices of mothers whose grief has largely gone unheard, and criticized for giving Bukele a platform to defend policies that human rights organizations have spent years condemning.

Posada has been straightforward about his intentions and their limits. He describes himself as a filmmaker rather than a journalist, and says his goal was never to produce a balanced political document split evenly between supporters and critics of the president. His goal was to introduce the world to a group of women who had been conducting one of the most painful searches imaginable in near total obscurity, and Bukele’s presence in the film serves that goal by giving it a visibility it would not otherwise have.

After Bukele approved the project and agreed to be interviewed, El Salvador’s prison authorities allowed the film crew inside the mega-prison where gang members accused of terrorism are held in complete isolation. They also allowed Mari Puro to speak through a prison gate with the man accused of killing her son, a scene that stands as one of the most affecting in the entire film.

What El Salvador Looked Like Before and What These Women Have Lived Through

The mothers in this documentary belong to a collective called Bloque de Búsqueda de Madres Fe y Valentía, a group that has been operating without institutional support or meaningful NGO funding, conducting their searches largely on their own resources through some of the most dangerous territory in the Western Hemisphere.

The title of the film, which translates roughly to “Until I Find You,” refers to the persistence of women who continue searching even when they already suspect the answer will be unbearable, because finding their children, whatever condition they are found in, remains an act of love and a necessary step toward peace.

Posada has been clear about his priorities for the film. His primary objective is that the mothers themselves feel their story has been told with honesty and care, and that the world comes to know the Bloque de Búsqueda de Madres Fe y Valentía and the work they have been doing without recognition or resources. He has argued that if the international community genuinely wants to help El Salvador, the most direct path is to support these women rather than to debate the politics surrounding the country’s president, because the mothers have been left to carry out their search without the kind of institutional help that the scale of their loss demands.