Based on a true story, Innocent Voices is a film about an eleven year old boy named
Chava and his friends who are trapped in the violence of the Civil War that devastated
El Salvador in the 1980's.
The film is a chilling portrait of how the forced recruitment of child soldiers inflicts
physical, psychological, and emotional trauma on innocent young lives.
Here we can see the struggle that Chava and his family, like many other families around
the world, must go through in order to survive one more night amidst the nightmarish violence
of a Civil War.
At the height of the Salvadorian Civil War, the Salvadorian government recruited young boys at the age
of twelve, while destroying their families and communities in the furtherance of armed
conflict.
Many human rights violations were committed such as rape, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings,
cruel and unusual punishment, and oppression of innocent civilians, just
to name a few.
In this scene we see a friend of Chava who has been forced to serve as a child soldier.
He has been brainwashed into believing that he is meant to kill.
Chava and his friends know that if they survive, the day will come in which they will too be
in a uniform.
The staggering toll of the Salvadorian Civil War is estimated to have been 75,000 dead and
over 1 million refugees, who fled to countries like the US.
Sadly, the trauma inflicted on many of these children would later lead to the rise of America's
most violent gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
Today there has been over 300,000 child soldiers recruited worldwide.
Even for those who survive, the emotional scars are deep and have toxic ripple effects
throughout society, so Innocent Voices is a reminder of the high price we all pay for
allowing the savagery of adults to destroy the human rights of children.