Memories from Guatemala

Reuters ran a story on Sunday that brought back memories when I was with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and we investigated the disappeared in Guatemala. Contrary to the film classic Repo Man, the disappeared didn't just go to the future. After days of taking the testimony of the mothers of the disappeared, we received an anonymous tip from a junior military commander, who confessed that all the relatives of these women had been murdered. Now in a mass grave at the La Verbena cemetary a mass grave has been discovered that is said to contain around 1,000 bodies thought to be the victims of the extrajudicial killings by the army and the police during the most violent years of the civil war that ran from 1960-1996.

The project is one of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation, who worked in Bosnia after the 1992-95 Balkan conflict. Fredy Peccerelli, who runs the project, revealed things I didn't even know. The people who were taken prisoner were questioned, interrogated and tortured. If they knew little, they were killed quickly. If they knew a lot,they were held first for three to six months. The last detail would have made it possible to locate some of the victims while they were alive but this didn't happen. According to the U.N.-backed truth commission over 80 percent of the murders during the civil war were committed by the army.

The Forensic Anthropology Foundation says the bodies were buried under concrete lids in a grave of four large pits thought to contain 40,000 bodies. The remains will be cross-checked against a new DNA database of family members of the disappeared to finally identify the victims and give them a proper burial.

Anthropologists working with local indigenous people have already found the remains of thousands of people massacred and buried in the Guatemalan countryside. Over a quarter of million people were killed or disappeared during this conflict. It is only now that some of the evidence is appearing about those who were murdered in the urban areas.