The
Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation ( or FAFG) is an autonomous, non-profit, technical and scientific non-governmental organisation.
Its aim is to strengthen the administration of justice and respect for
human rightsHuman rights refer to the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the...
by investigating, documenting, and raising awareness about past instances of human rights violations, particularly unresolved murders, that occurred during
GuatemalaGuatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast. Its size is just under 110,000 km² with an estimated population...
's 30-year-long
Civil WarThe Guatemalan Civil War, the longest civil war in Latin American history, ran from 1960 to 1996. It had a profound impact on Guatemala.Several thousand people disappeared during the war and approximately 200,000 were killed. Felipe Cusanero became the first person to be sentenced for this in 2009...
.
Its main tool in pursuing this goal is the application of
forensic anthropologyForensic anthropology is the application of the science of physical anthropology and human osteology in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases where the victim's remains are in the advanced stages of decomposition...
techniques in exhumations of clandestine
mass graveA mass grave is a grave containing multiple, usually unidentified human corpses. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave...
s.
The
Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation ( or FAFG) is an autonomous, non-profit, technical and scientific non-governmental organisation.
Its aim is to strengthen the administration of justice and respect for
human rightsHuman rights refer to the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the...
by investigating, documenting, and raising awareness about past instances of human rights violations, particularly unresolved murders, that occurred during
GuatemalaGuatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast. Its size is just under 110,000 km² with an estimated population...
's 30-year-long
Civil WarThe Guatemalan Civil War, the longest civil war in Latin American history, ran from 1960 to 1996. It had a profound impact on Guatemala.Several thousand people disappeared during the war and approximately 200,000 were killed. Felipe Cusanero became the first person to be sentenced for this in 2009...
.
Its main tool in pursuing this goal is the application of
forensic anthropologyForensic anthropology is the application of the science of physical anthropology and human osteology in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases where the victim's remains are in the advanced stages of decomposition...
techniques in exhumations of clandestine
mass graveA mass grave is a grave containing multiple, usually unidentified human corpses. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave...
s. Its endeavours in this regard allow the relatives of the
disappearedA forced disappearance occurs when force is used to cause a person to vanish from public view, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty , thereby placing the victim outside the protection of law.According to the Rome Statute of the International...
to recuperate the remains of their missing family members and to proceed with burials in accordance with their beliefs, and enable criminal prosecutions to be brought against the perpetrators.
History
In 1990 and 1991, various groups of survivors began to report to the authorities the existence of clandestine graves in their communities, most of which contained the bodies of Maya
campesinos massacred during the "
scorched earthA scorched earth policy is a military strategy or operational method which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through or withdrawing from an area...
" policy pursued by the government in the early 1980s. The forensic services of the Guatemalan judiciary began to investigate some of these cases, but they failed to pursue them to their conclusion.
Consequently, in 1991, the survivors' groups contacted Dr.
Clyde SnowClyde Snow is a well known U.S. forensic anthropologist. Some of his skeletal confirmations include John F. Kennedy, victims of John Wayne Gacy, King Tutankhamun, victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, and Dr. Josef Mengele.Snow started his higher education at the New Mexico Military Institute were...
, a renowned
U.S.The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
forensic anthropologist who had previously overseen exhumations in
ArgentinaArgentina, officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America, constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires. It is the eighth largest country in the world by land area and the largest among Spanish-speaking nations, though Mexico,...
in the wake of that country's
Dirty WarThe Dirty War refers to the state-sponsored violence against Argentine citizenry and left-wing guerrillas from roughly 1976 to 1983 carried out primarily by Jorge Rafael Videla's military government...
and had helped found the
Argentine Forensic Anthropology TeamThe Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team is an Argentine not-for-profit scientific non-governmental organisation...
.
Snow arrived in Guatemala, accompanied by forensic anthropologists from Argentina and Chile, and began the dual task of conducting the first exhumations and training the future members of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team
(Equipo de Antropología Forense de Guatemala).
The Team was supported in its early years by a donation from the
American Association for the Advancement of ScienceThe American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation between scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for...
of the United States, and its first director was Stefan Schmitt, who has since worked on exhumations in
RwandaThe Republic of Rwanda is a small landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa, bordered by Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. Home to approaching 10 million people, Rwanda supports the densest population in continental Africa, most of whom...
and Former Yugoslavia. In July 1992 the EAFG carried out its first field project at San José Pachó Lemoa in El Quiché department.
The Team was restyled as a "Foundation" in 1997. That same year, the
Historical Clarification CommissionThe Historical Clarification Commission was Guatemala's truth and reconciliation commission.The creation of the CEH was ordered by the Oslo Accords of 1994 that sought to bring an end to the Central American nation's three-decade-long Civil War, during which an estimated 200,000 people lost their...
(Guatemala's
truth and reconciliation commissionThe Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a court-like body assembled in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid. Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings...
, set up as a part of the peace accords that ended the armed conflict) asked it to conduct four field investigations in order to secure physical evidence to back up the testimony it had heard from survivors; this evidence was included in the Commission's final report,
Guatemala: Memory of Silence.
By October 2004, the FAFG had investigated a total of 349 clandestine burial sites and had recovered 2,982 sets of human remains.
The current director of the FAFG is
Fredy PeccerelliFredy Peccerelli , a forensic anthropologist, is the Director and one of the founding members of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation in Guatemala City, a nongovernmental organization that exhumes mass graves of victims of Guatemala's civil war...
.
External links