The Murder of the Carpenter

After a long sabbatical from the blogosphere, I am back, writing from Nebaj, a town in the northern, mountainous region of Guatemala´s highland province, the Quiché. I have been here for two weeks now completing a series of exhumations with a team of two archaeologists and a cultural anthropologists from the Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), where I am now a full-time employee. We´ll be here for another week, so I´ll be updating again soon with more stories from the field.

The single case that has struck me the most thus far was one of the first. It involved a seventeen year old young man who was massacred by the Guatemalan army in his own town. His father, Don Santiago, led us on a nearly 5 hour climb up a steep mountain in the Cuchumatanes mountain range, the highest in Central America. About an hour into the hike I was panting and gasping for oxygen in the thin air (we were at almost 2 miles of altitude), and convinced I wasn´t going to make it... but it turns out that I am far too proud let that happen! At the top, the view of the mountains was breath-taking. My FAFG friends described it as practically a scene from Heidi; sheep and goats grazed in fields of bright green grass and patches of pine forest. I took pictures of the adorable sheep, and was quite put off when dinner was served to us that night: lamb stew.

When we finally arrived in this extremely remote town of no more than about 20 families, Don Santiago led us quickly down to the site where he had buried his son after the murder. My friend and coworker, Jaime, conducted the antemortem interview, in which he asked Don Santiago a series of questions about his son, including his age, what he was like physically, what clothing he was wearing at the time of burial and any details he knew about the murder. This let us know what we should expect to find when we dug up the grave. Don Santiago told us that the military apprehended his son, and took him to nearby woods where they tied him to a tree and hacked off his limbs with a machete. This was probably a form of torture; perhaps they believed that he had information regarding the whereabouts of the leftist guerrillas in the mountains. But ultimately they killed this young man, and left him limbless to die.

The first time I visited the FAFG lab in 2004 with a group of Haverford students, it was a practically identical case that made me break down emotionally. And here I was now, four and half years later, hours from the nearest dirt road at the top of a mountain in Guatemala, about to dig up the body of an identical victim. For some reason - perhaps the thick skin that forensic anthropologists develop from dealing with this type of violent reality on a daily basis - I wasn´t overwhelmed. I was anxious to find the body in order to have physical proof of Don Santiago´s version of the story. And that is precisely what happened...

As we dug down into the earth, with a growing number of towns people crowded around watching us work, we discovered a young, male skeleton with obvious signs of serious injury. His entire right arm was located directly under his spine, an important indication that his limbs were dismembered before the burial. (This is the type of scenario that highlights the importance of the archaeologist context in forensic investigations; this information is lost as soon as the bones are removed). His wrist (the distal end of his ulna) had been completely severed with a sharp object, compatible with a machete wound. His left shin and both of his feet were completely missing. And while this is gory, it wasn´t these details that affected me as much as the discovery of a wooden tape measurer, a hammer and a blue and red carpenter´s pencil that we found with the body. Don Santiago had told us that he was a carpenter, and these were his tools. These details, and the signs from the bones that he was in his late teenage years, were what made this young man come alive for me - he was no longer a pile of bones but a person from this small town who was brutally murdered, with a father who missed him terribly.

Nevertheless, our stay in the town that night was lovely. Don Santiago´s relatives gave us their two-room, dirt-floor house to sleep in and chatted with us by candle light. There is no electricity in the town, and the darkness as the clouds covered the night sky was impressive. I slept soundly, and in the morning, Don Santiago led us back down the mountain. His spirits were high, despite the devastated reaction of his wife at the bottom of the mountain upon seeing the bones of her son. We left them alone with the remains for a few minutes, and then packed them up to be transported to the lab in Guatemala City, where I will clean and analyze them, and afterwards return them to Don Santiago and his family for a proper reburial.

P.S. I don´t have the cable for my camera with me so I can´t put photos up now! But they will be up as soon as I´m back at home in the city.

I felt particularly moved by and attached to a case that I spent a lot of time on in April and May. Perhaps this was because an independent photographer following the case had told me the story of the victims before I began analysis (we in the lab don´t usually know the stories in advance in order to avoid bias), or because the case was a mass grave of four children. Three of them were siblings and the fourth, a cousin.

According to the story, the parents survived the attack that killed three of their children and their nephew, and survived the war after years of living in a cave in the mountains. Their village (shown in the photo above) is in the highlands of Guatemala near Nebaj, Quiché, an area which is almost exclusively indigenous Maya (mostly Ixil and K´iché Maya). Because of massacres that the people of the town had heard about in nearby villages, when the Guatemalan army showed up, everyone fled. This particular family heard the army was coming from down the mountain, so they told their children to run up the mountain to a ranch they all knew of, where they would reunite.

On the way up the mountain, the parents heard the crying of their children, and then the firing of guns. They arrived to find their three children and nephew shot to death. The parents carried the lifeless bodies over an hour through the mountains to the place where they were buried. A few other siblings survived that day and were present at the exhumation (picture above) with the parents. But one of the youngest, a baby at the time, died of hunger as the family hid in the cave.

When I received this case in the lab, the four bodies arrived in a box that normally holds one adult skeleton. Analysis allowed me to determine that there were two girls, about ages eight and ten, and two boys, about ages four and seven. I found bullet fragments with three of the four bodies, but because the bones were highly eroded, I only found evidence of trauma on the eight-year-old girl. She had been shot in the head (picture below with trajectory of the bullet), and based on the location of the bullet fragments, probably in the stomach as well. (To the right is a photo of the teeth of the four year old; all erupted teeth are baby teeth and you can see that his six-year molars are developing but not yet erupted).

Some people ask why, especially in cases like this one, the family would bother requesting an exhumation – after all, they themselves buried the children, right? Having not spoken directly with this family I cannot answer for them, but in many cases the reasons are simple:

The acts of violence that took place were kept secret for years as the war raged on and rural Maya continued to be persecuted under the Guatemalan military´s genocidal policy of extermination (tierra arrasada policy) against the population. Survivors lived under repression and in fear of authority. When loved ones were killed, they dug secret graves in haste before fleeing. The point of digging up these bodies is to rebury the deceased with proper, ceremonial burials and to denounce violent acts publicly, an experience which is powerful and affirming for survivors who have lived for years with these painful secrets. The exhumation process, in which the reburial in the last stage is essential, helps bring closure to family members of victims and contributes to empowering survivors.

While working on this case, I often wondered why I wasn´t more saddened by it. Especially because I couldn´t help but realize that the kids were from my generation; we would have been about the same age now. But more than anything I was frustrated by the fact that erosion prevented me from seeing the gun shot wounds on the bodies of three of the children. I knew they had been shot – and had bullet fragments in my hands to prove it – but I couldn´t connect them to fatal injuries on the body. I wanted to be able to prove conclusively that these children were shot and killed, which I was only able to do for the eight-year-old girl.

Yet, knowing that the parents of the kids were in Nebaj waiting for the return of their four little ones, I felt satisfied with and even proud of my work on this case. The implications of it went far beyond my frustrations of not being able to determine the cause of death, to helping to heal a pain that no one should ever have to know.

(Above: Clothing of the eight-year-old girl).

Special thanks to Roberto Mercatante and Ben Schilling for use of their photos.

The Haverford Visit

In March, Haverford College professor Anita Isaacs brought a group of students to Guatemala for 10 days and asked me to assist with the trip. I first came to Guatemala four years ago as a student of Anita’s on the same trip, and that summer came back to the country to do field work for her. So traveling with the group and contributing to the new Haverford generation’s experience of Guatemala was meaningful to me. I went with the group to Santiago Atitlan and the department of Chimaltenango, where the group was able to speak with people who were directly affected by the violence of the armed conflict and with professionals who are working for justice and truth in the current post-conflict setting. The trip was intellectually stimulating and refreshing.

I hosted the Haverford group in a visit to the FAFG forensic lab, where they were able to see the bones of those who fell victim to the armed conflict. We then went to an exhumation in a small town in Chimaltenango. I was proud of the Haverford group for not only going out to witness the exhumation, but also for grabbing shovels and helping dig up the dirt where we eventually found the skeletons of two Mayan women and a baby that had been reportedly killed by the Guatemalan military in 1982.

It was here that I had the most emotional experience of my time in Guatemala to date. Upon arriving at the exhumation site, Anita made quick friends with Don Andres, an 82 year old man from a very rural part of Guatemala and the father of the two young women in the grave and the grandfather of the baby. He told us that he wasn’t able to eat anything in days leading up to the exhumation. He paced around the grave site as the younger men from the community and the Haverford students dug, insisting that this was the exact spot where he was told that his daughters were laid to rest. Yet despite Don Andres’ anxiety, his warmth, sincerity, and above all his extreme affection for his deceased eldest daughter shone through. He spoke openly with the group about the day his daughters and grandson were killed, the experience of being forced to live under the control of the military – including in a military run civilian camp next to the barracks – for several years, and why he decided to ask the FAFG to exhume his loved ones so many years later.

After a full afternoon of digging, one of my FAFG colleagues calmly mentioned that we must be getting close – dark soil started appearing, which was a result of a high concentration of organic matter, and the sound of the pick axe was all of a sudden quite hollow. Not 30 seconds afterwards, bright green threads of traditional Mayan clothing were uncovered in the grave.

It was late in the day by the time this occurred, and my colleagues explained to the family members present that the actual exhumation would have to take place the following day. Don Andres listened attentively, then lit two candles to leave at the site over night. He then sat down on the edge of the grave and started to cry. We had seen Don Andres tear up off and on throughout the day as he talked with us, but this time he was not just crying but wailing. The mental health accompaniers who had come to assist the family for the exhumation sat with him to calm him down and assure him that it was best to leave the work for the next day. Don Andres eventually calmed down, and we were assured by one of the FAFG cultural anthropologists that this was actually a healthy part of the process for Don Andres.

I looked on with the Haverford group, tears in our eyes and lumps in our own throats witnessing the pain of a loving father, but knowing that we as outsiders could not truly understand it. As one astute Haverford student later commented, no political reparations or peace accords would ever be sufficient to erase this pain. Unfortunately, this is how hundreds of thousands in Guatemala have suffered. And personally I have found that this sentiment is directly expressed by many victims, who when asked what they most want, say that just want to know where their family members are. They want to find their bodies and give them a proper burial. They want to restore dignity for their husbands, brothers, sisters and children who were violently killed. This is where the FAFG comes in, and is why I feel so strongly about what I am doing here in Guatemala. Exhumations bring closure to family members of victims of the country’s war-time past.

Do it for the children

I’ve now gotten used to the rhythm of my case work in the lab of the FAFG. Take a case out from Evidence, clean the bones, clean the clothes that came with the body, determine age, sex, trauma and other factors affecting the bones, type up my report, wait for my supervisors to review my work, and finally take the case up to the photo lab for photographic documentation. I am analyzing about two cases per week.

Lately, it seems that I have been dealing almost exclusively with children. About two thirds of the cases I’ve worked on in the last month have been bodies of kids ranging in age from six months to 16 years. And I haven’t been the only one; I’ve noticed an unusually large number of kids’ skeletons in the lab recently.

More than anything, this has made me realize how much war affects children, whether directly or indirectly. Many children in Guatemala were murdered along with their parents in massacres carried out as part of the “scorched earth” policies of the early 1980s, in which entire rural towns were wiped off the map by the military or paramilitary groups because they were thought to be sympathizers of leftist guerillas. Other children died of starvation either hiding in the woods with their families when their towns were attacked, or because armed groups had surrounded their towns and refused to let most people and goods in or out.

Children’s bones are quite different than those of adults because they are constantly in development. This makes analysis of such cases more difficult but also fascinatingly interesting (for those of us who are into that kind of thing, I guess!). Each stage of bone development happens within a specific age range in all children, which makes establishing age ranges relatively easy. For example, the femur (thigh bone) has growth plates at each end that develop separately from the shaft, and eventually attach in the final stages of development. So if the growth plate, or epiphysis, is partially attached to the shaft, we know that the individual died between 14 and 19 years of age.

Yet teeth, especially in younger kids like the ones I’ve been dealing with recently, are the most accurate estimators of age for children. And that is precisely what made me realize just how wretched of a thing these deaths are. I was playing with a 3 year old recently and I couldn’t help but stare at his teeth. Seeing his baby teeth in his mouth as he talked to me affected me greatly. It was deeply saddening to think of pre-school aged boys like him being killed. Yet ultimately, this feeling is what drives me to do this work in the first place.

Conclusion: Homicide

I returned to work after the holidays and was thrilled to find out that I have been made the assistant to the two laboratory directors. This means that I will be working directly under two very talented forensic anthropologists to assist them in analyzing cases and carry out research to increase the accuracy of our forensic findings.

A couple weeks ago, the FAFG received its first case from the new government agency, INACIF (the National Institute for Forensic Sciences). Human skeletal remains were found scattered in the woods of a small town about an hour’s drive from Guatemala City. There wasn’t much left of the body; only the skull, hip bones, and some arm and leg bones remained. They all had signs of severe animal chewing, most likely by dogs, but because the skull and hip bones were still well intact, it was easy for us to create a biological profile for this individual. (Thanks, dogs!). The bones had small maggots crawling throughout them, which we sent off to a lab to be tested by an entomologist. This will allow us to determine the minimum time since death based on the stage of life of the maggots.

The individual turned out to be a man in his 30s or early 40s who had been struck at least three times: once in the left side of his jaw, another time on the left side of his head, and once on his left forearm (radius). The latter was probably a defense wound, which meant that the man put up a fight. Regardless, we found enough evidence to conclude that this was indeed a homicide.

As interesting as this case was, it was a grave reminder for me of the violence that persists in Guatemala more than 11 years after the signing of the Peace Accords (December 1996). War powers that were never fully dismantled after the conflict – despite the recommendations of the Peace Accords – combined with a barely functional judicial system and police force, have left Guatemala violent and relatively unstable. It is sometimes easy to ignore this, especially for the hundreds of thousands of tourists that visit Guatemala each year, but a quick glimpse at a newspaper gives a stark view of what’s actually happening.

The level of violence in the country, especially here in Guatemala City, is felt by all who live here, including me. Fortunately I have had no problems to date, but I take many precautions with regards to when and where I go in the city. Three months of this has left me tired and feeling a bit trapped! I simply don’t have the freedom that I do in DC. But I just joined a women’s soccer team with a dedicated coach that practices three times a week, so that´s providing me with just the outlet I needed.