Nebaj, Guatemala – A decade after the conclusion of the long civil war that ravaged this Central American nation, Guatemalans are literally trying to dig up their past.
Spurred by a surge of requests from victims’ families this year, dozens of forensic anthropologists have been fanning out across the countryside to search for remains of the 200,000 people – most of them Mayan Indian civilians – who were killed or abducted during the 36-year conflict.
Many were massacred by military forces and dumped into mass graves.
Others were buried hurriedly in unmarked, secret locations by relatives anxious to avoid rampaging troops.
About 40,000 victims simply disappeared after being seized by government operatives.
Nearly every day brings another grisly discovery: skulls of toddlers executed with gunshots to the head; corpses of young men whose necks are still looped with the garrotes used to strangle them.
Nearly every week brings another funeral packed with weeping relatives: once-youthful widows now wrinkled and gray, children long since grown to adulthood.
Meanwhile, in a cavernous, damp warehouse in Guatemala’s capital, investigators wearing protective masks and surgical gloves are combing through piles upon piles of mildewed documents from a recently discovered secret police archive, hunting for clues to the fate of the disappeared.
The current effort is hardly the first probe of wartime atrocities since peace accords ended the conflict in 1996.
But its scope and pace are unprecedented in a country where those responsible have enjoyed near impunity. Only two military officials have been imprisoned for war crimes, according to human rights activists, despite findings by a U.N. commission that government and allied paramilitary forces committed nearly all of the atrocities.
Much of the bloodletting occurred in the late 1970s, when the military-backed dictatorship that had been battling leftist guerrillas expanded its targets to include anyone critical of the government – including students, priests and union members.
But the slaughter reached its peak in the early 1980s, when the military launched a scorched-earth campaign through the countryside to eliminate any potential support for the guerrillas from the long-oppressed Mayan Indians. Hundreds of villages were burned, livestock destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.
The remains of fewer than 5,000 victims have been returned to their families.
Many members of civil defense patrols who carried out atrocities at the military’s behest still live among the communities they once terrorized.
