In 1984, the now-acclaimed Canadian photojournalist Larry Towell was an aspiring writer who turned to photography during a human rights fact-finding mission to Central America.
At the time, the Ronald Reagan administration in the United States was justifying its support for military dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala as anti-communist containment.
Mainstream news coverage of the conflicts in these countries was sporadic and often superficial. This made it difficult for North Americans to understand the scope of American involvement in the region and obscured the extent of human rights violations.
