Bringing up the bodies in Guatemala

The Families

By the time Maria Luisa Col's husband Otto disappeared in 1983, it was an open secret in the villages around Coban that the military was kidnapping people. “There were those who knew and those who hadn't figured it out yet,” she said. “The ones who said, ‘Why would they take him? He wasn't involved in anything.’ They didn't understand that didn’t matter.”

She was 23 then, with four children. Now 58, she sat in a spare room of her house in Coban next to her friend, Marta Macz, 64. Macz’s brother had also disappeared during the war, and when they met years later, the two bonded over the grim rituals of searching and mourning. Both went to District 21 soon after the disappearances to look for their relatives. Both left empty handed; the soldiers on base denied any knowledge of their family members’ whereabouts.

Col spent the rest of the war in fear, certain she would be next. In other houses families refused to speak of their vanished children; others clung to hope. But in the years following the Peace Accords of 1996, which was struck between the Guatemalan government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), a leftist guerilla movement that became a sanctioned political party under the accords, things began to change. Fear faded and historical clarification commissions backed by the United Nations and Catholic Church began to expose the full scale of the government-sponsored killings. People like Col and Macz began to find each other, and to demand answers. 

“Very quietly, with a great deal of fear, people came forward to tell us there had been clandestine cemeteries,” said Aura Elena Farfan, director of Famdegua, an influential victim's organization based in Guatemala City. Farmers across the country reported wells full of bodies; fields that turned up bones when plowed. “But the government wouldn't give us any resources to exhume them. If the person you were looking for wasn't in the morgue, there was nothing you could do.”

The war hadn’t yet ended, but the FAFG moved in to fill the niche. The organization was the brainchild of Clyde Snow, an Oklahoma scientist generally credited with being the father of forensic anthropology — the discipline of telling people’s lives from their bones. After a long career that included excavations at Little Big Horn and identifying the body of Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, Snow had, in his 60s, adopted the idea that forensics held the key to untangling the brutal legacies of Cold War-era military dictatorships in places like Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala, where US-backed governments and intelligence services embarked on campaigns of so-called “forced disappearances” against their own people. In the late 1990s, after he had spent years in Argentina building a crack forensics team to investigate that country’s politically motivated atrocities, he went to Guatemala to do the same thing.

For the next two decades until his own death in 2014, Snow flew down to Guatemala several times a year, often bringing American forensics experts to give clinics on subjects like ballistics, bone development, or the decay of soft tissues. Still, he emphasized hands-on training over academic degrees: all the anthropologists and archaeologists I met at FAFG had been hired out of school and trained on the job.

Forensic science rests on the idea that nothing that passes through the world without leaving a trace. “[Snow] liked to say, “The bones are talking,” recalled Lionel Paiz, the FAFG's intense, chain-smoking Director of Archeology. “They talk softly sometimes, but they never lie.” Even an anonymous skeleton bears a record of the life and death of the person it belonged to. The size of bones reveal age and sex, while the grooves of a machete wound in a vertebrae, or the entry and exit holes of a bullet, can reflect a cause of death.

In the early years, the FAFG’s work in exhuming bodies was purely investigative; there was no ambition to generate evidence that might later be used in trials. The military was still too powerful, the prosecutor's office too weak, the picture of what had happened during the war too murky. Guatemala's civil institutions were not ready for trials, said Paiz. As he put it, you cannot eat a fruit before it is ripe.

Exhumations

For a brief period in the spring of 2012, the army let family members of the disappeared onto Creompaz to view the exhumations. People went hoping to spot a relative's clothing; some did. Marta Macz went and found herself “traumatizada.” In Pit XV she saw skeletons in tattered women's clothes piled in a heap; mixed with them were the unmistakable skeletons of children. It had been a comfort to the families of the disappeared, she said, “that we did not how they died.” Seeing the reality of what had happened in the District stripped that away. “The children,” she said, shaking with silent tears. “What did they do?”

Exhumations are often public affairs: standing above the archeologists down in the pit are crowds of family members — some curious, some suspicious, some possibly culpable. For Hernandez, the presence of an audience could be stressful, but it was also occasionally useful. Family members might notice a distinctive personal effect, like a hand-woven blouse or pair of pants, which could aid in identification.

After exhumation, the reassembled skeletons were loaded into boxes and sent to the Guatemala City office of the Ministerio Publico, the powerful UN-backed state prosecutor's agency, for analysis. Between 2012 and 2014, the archaeologists found so many bodies that the MP ran out of space in its storeroom. (The Creompaz exhumations are ongoing, but so far in the latest round, which began late last year, the FAFG has found only one body.) Today, boxes stacked to the ceiling crowd the entry hall of the FAFG lab, full of materials waiting to be identified so that victims can be buried.

In FAFG's brightly lit forensics lab, located on a shady avenue in a residential neighborhood in Guatemala City, an etched glass portrait of the late Snow is flanked by charts laying out different stages of cranial development. Desks sport morbid paraphernalia — a skull paperweight atop a stack of files, a skeletal arm poking from a pen organizer.

“You learn to look at a body not as a person but as a material,” said Daniel Jimenez, a bespectacled anthropologist in a FAFG lab coat. On long plastic picnic tables in the middle of the room he and another anthropologist were assembling two skeletons from a site just west of Guatemala City in the manner of children working on a difficult jigsaw puzzle. Jimenez examined one of the skulls, which had holes in both temples. “It becomes a material. You know bone responds in predictable ways to bullets, to other trauma.” He held up a rib cracked down the middle.

The profile that Jimenez creates of the skeleton will eventually be compared against profiles of missing individuals. Investigators will also use the FAFG DNA lab to compare the genetic records of the dead against lists of the missing. Since 2009, FAFG has held two nationwide drives to provide free DNA testing to family members of the disappeared, hoping that the possibility of identifying their loved ones will bring people forward. For years, ads promoting DNA testing have overlooked the highways and bus stations in the capital city and on the road to Coban. “Where are the disappeared?” ask a row of faceless cartoon figures, next to a number to call.

The arrests provoked a backlash from family members and supporters of the military, which remains popular in Guatemala — a 2013 survey by the daily Prensa Libre found that 81 percent of Guatemalans believed the army was doing a good job. The Guatemalan right has long denied that there was a “genocide” and contested the claim that 200,000 people died in the war. On January 8, as the Creompaz pre-trial hearings opened, family members of the military protested with placards bearing slogans like “My grandfather is a hero, not a criminal” and “If not for them, Guatemala would be communist.” 

In the Creompaz case and others, military apologists either disputed the forensic evidence — sometimes claiming that the dead were excavated from a community churchyard or were victims of a 1976 earthquake — or denounced the FAFG and MP as activists with an agenda. This tension came to a head in 2014, when Fredy Peccerelli, the Foundation's Bronx-raised Guatemalan director, spoke about the Creompaz findings at a TED Conference, claiming that “the very people who are supposed to defend us, the police, the military, are the ones that committed most of the crimes.”

After this, the defense in the Creompaz pre-trial hearings moved to have the FAFG removed from the case and to discredit Peccerelli as an impartial expert. On social media, one group tarred Peccerelli, whose father fled Guatemala in the 1980s, as the son of a leftist “terrorist.” That group’s leader, Richardo Mendez Ruiz, is the son of the late Colonel Mendez Ruiz, a former commander at Creompaz who died four days before the MP arrests. The younger Mendez Ruiz has dismissed the MP's investigation of the military as baseless and politically motivated — his organization filed a criminal complaint against the MP's Lopez for “abuse of authority” and bribery. “Send the FAFG to find Jimmy Hoffa,” Mendez Ruiz said, with a slight smile, “and there he'll be.”

Since all the MP trials rely on the positive identification of victims and proof that they were murdered, FAFG evidence is vital. Despite a FAFG media blackout in the wake of Peccerelli’s comments, Paiz, the director of FAFG’s archeology department, still was willing to comment on the role he thinks the exhumations play in Guatemalan society. “The wounds still haven’t healed here,” he said. “They closed on the surface, but they're full of pus because they were never cleaned, never disinfected. And cleaning it is going to be hard, it's going to hurt like a son of a bitch. But if you can't push through, it will hurt more.”

For the families of the disappeared, many of whom clung for decades to the hope that their loved ones would eventually return, the effect of the exhumations has been bittersweet. “I felt a hate in my heart, but also a great happiness,” Macz said of the 2014 discovery of her brother. After FAFG found him beneath Creompaz, she was able bury him in the tomb that her mother had bought for him before her own death. “All my mother wanted was to see her son again,” Macz said.

If this is good fortune, then her friend Maria Luisa Col has had even less of it. Though she gave DNA to help find her husband, Alberto, his body was never recovered. Perhaps he was buried beneath another site; perhaps his remains are among the many packed in boxes in the FAFG or Ministerio Publico, waiting to be identified. Perhaps something else entirely had happened to him.

Sitting next to Macz in a spare room at her house in Coban, beneath a collage of pictures of Alberto, Col idly picked a stray piece of thread from the older woman's huipil, winding it around her fingers as she recounted her husband’s last words to her. “I'll never forget,” she said. “He said, ‘I'm going. Take care of my kids.’” She steadied herself. Did they have any last thoughts on the trials in the capitol? “May justice arrive in Guatemala,” Macz said. Col leaned forward. “We just want to know what you’ve done with our families.”