UNCOVERING GUATEMALA'S SECRETS: FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY FINDS CIVIL WAR VICTIMS, TELLS THEIR STORIES
By JILL REPLOGLE

March 18, 2004 – (The Dallas Morning News) Juan Carlos Gática has spent the last four years of his life digging around cornfields in rural Guatemala for human bones.
Mr. Gática is an archaeologist, but instead of looking for remains of ancient Mayan civilizations, he searches for clandestine graves containing the victims of the country's 36-year civil war.

"At the beginning we didn't know where to start digging," said Mr. Gática, 32, glancing at the peaceful, shaded hillside that was part of a former military outpost near the town of San Juan Comalapa, in central Guatemala.

"But testimonies from locals helped us find the first clavicle."

Six months of work at the Comalapa site has uncovered bones and remains of more than 100 victims, only a fraction of the estimated 250,000 who were killed or who disappeared during the war, which ended in 1996 and pitted leftist guerillas against the Guatemalan military.

The Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala works with family members of victims to find their loved ones' remains and to provide crucial evidence for criminal cases against the killers. The work of the foundation, the largest of several forensic anthropology teams in Guatemala, was recently recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for its role in promoting human rights.

The foundation got its start in the early 1990s, thanks to Clyde Snow, a member of the American association. Before coming to Guatemala, Mr. Snow had helped form forensic anthropology teams in Argentina and Chile to investigate the murders and disappearances that took place in those countries during the "dirty wars" of the late '70s and early '80s. Mr. Snow's Guatemala team of eight anthropologists and archeologists, most of them still university students, carried out the country's first exhumation in 1992. Peace negotiations had barely begun in the country, and fear still reined strong. "Their youth allowed them to work without as much fear as others," said José Suasnavar, the Guatemala foundation's interim executive director.

Mr. Suasnavar said that while entire rural villages were being slaughtered during the war, many people in urban areas did not know or did not believe that such violence was taking place. "During the first exhumations, few gave credit to the magnitude of the massacres," he said. "There were still people who said the bodies could be victims of the 1976 earthquake."

Since that first exhumation, the foundation has found more than 2,000 bodies of men, women and children. Many of the corpses showed signs of torture and prolonged death, foundation officials said. Mr. Suasnavar said more than half of the victims uncovered to date are not registered in a U.N. truth commission report, which means the number of wartime deaths could be much greater than believed.

Guatemala's majority Mayan indigenous population bore the brunt of the violence that raged through the countryside in the early 1980s, the result of "scorched-earth" counterinsurgency campaigns led by Guatemala's army.

The U.N. truth commission attributed more than 90 percent of the human rights abuses committed during the war to the armed forces and paramilitary groups.

On Feb. 25, National Victims Day in Guatemala, the National Coordinator of War Widows commemorated the deaths and disappearances of their husbands, brothers, sons and daughters in Comalapa with a plaque displaying the names of more than 200 victims.

Margarita Paz hopes the exhumation at the army base will find her brother, who was kidnapped by soldiers in 1982. "I want to give him a sacred burial," Ms. Paz said.
Carmen Cumes is looking for the remains of her husband, who was taken from their home by soldiers on the night of May 8, 1980. "We asked in the municipality, we searched the ditches and hospitals, but to date, we still don't know what happened to him," Ms. Cumes said.

Social psychologists work alongside the forensic scientists, talking to victims' families and holding workshops on mental health and other Issues in the communities.

Some people suffer from alcoholism, anxiety sickness and memory loss as a result of trauma experienced during the war, said Sara Vasquez from the Mutual Support Group. "We have seen changes, but the fear still exists," Ms. Vasquez said.

Uncovering the truth is not without risk. Foundation officials said many forensic anthropologists and archaeologists in Guatemala have received threats and suffered intimidation for their work. The foundation's executive director left the country after he and his family received death threats in 2002. Despite the potential danger, the anthropologists vow to keep working. "How can we say to a family member that we're not going to work because we're threatened?" asked Mr. Suasnavar.

In Comalapa, the women of the war widows' group and other local volunteers assist Mr. Gática and his colleagues, and bring them lunch daily. Mr. Gática, from Guatemala City, has worked on numerous exhumations in rural areas. The young archaeologist explained his work as a series of emotional ups and downs: satisfaction when finding a grave, and pain as the victims' families try to identify their loved ones by the remaining bits of clothes that still cover their bones.

"My work is contributing to the process of recuperating the victims, and, besides that, the people in the communities now have more courage to denounce all the things that happened in their communities."

[Jill Replogle is Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News, a freelance writer based in Guatemala City, Guatemala.]