When they lived in El Salvador, Cenia Elizabeth Muñoz and her husband Angel would turn off the lights every evening and hide from the gangs that operated near their house. “We had to be so quiet. If they know you are listening, or watching them, you are in trouble,” she says. “Our lives were always at risk.”
One night, the couple heard gunshots and crouched under their kitchen table to shelter while awaiting the police. “A young man had been killed near our house. We could hear his family crying. We could see his dead body lying in the street.”
After the couple wed in 2014, they had built their two bedroom house on land given to them by Angel’s father in San Pedro Perulapán, in the central region of Cuscatlán, hoping to have children one day. “But the gangs grew like a plague,” Muñoz recalls. “And our home was a bit isolated. We never felt safe. Gangsters hid around our house and our car. They controlled the city where we lived. You couldn’t go to the park or visit a friend in a different city that was controlled by a rival gang. They would make you show your ID card, and they might kill you.”
