During El Salvador’s brutal civil war, hundreds of children were separated from their families. Some were seized by soldiers during military operations against left-wing rebels, and later found living with new families in Europe and North America. Others were given up for adoption by mothers forced into poverty or displaced by the conflict. 

Now, three decades on, some of those adopted are trying to piece together their lives and find their birth relatives.

Mike Lanchin, former BBC correspondent in Central America, follows the dramatic stories of two women and one man who were adopted from El Salvador as young children during the war, which ended in 1992. Over two episodes, he watches their stories unfold: Jazmin, raised by a French family, wonders why her adoptive parents never explained the circumstances of her adoption; Flor remembers a soldier shooting her in the stomach, but has no memory of why she was separated from her parents; and Nelson, who grew up in the US, had no idea that his aunts in El Salvador were looking for him.