When I Look into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror and Resistance

In the early 1980s, in the midst of Central America’s decades of dirty wars, Nora Miselem of Honduras and Maria Suarez Toro of Costa Rica were kidnapped and subjected to rape and other tortures. Of the nearly 200 disappeared persons in Honduras in those years, they are, remarkably, two of only five survivors. Fourteen years after their ordeal, Suarez and Miselem’s chance meeting at a conference on human rights was witnessed by Margaret Randall, leading to this book. Through direct testimony, vivid prose and evocative photographs, Randall recounts the terror, resistance and survival of Suarez and Miselem. The book details the abuses suffered by them, the ruses they used to foil their captors, the support they gave each other while imprisoned, the means they used to escape, and their attempts to reconstruct their lives.