Digging for Truth

You get so used to extremity...

2009-04-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

I´ve been cooped up in the lab since my last post, but that doesn´t mean that I´ve been stuck in Guatemala City. My brother came to visit me for Holy Week (Easter Week), which is a huge event in this highly religious country. We went out to one of the most beautiful places I´ve ever been: a river gorge in the mountains where the river goes through a giant natural tunnel, called Semuc Champey. The little bit of water that passes over top of the tunnel has created dozens of natural swimming pools with crystal clear water. Needless to say, I was in heaven.

Also, two weekends ago I participated in a race with my friend Gabriela, with whom I run a few days a week at lunch time. We did a 10k (6.2 mile) race from the beautiful colonial town of Antigua up to a small town on the side of the Agua volcano. The farther we ran, the steeper it got! Gaby had convinced me to run the race with her, and I gave her a hard time afterward about the fact that the official name was the "Ascent to Santa Maria."

This really is all to say that although I am busy doing emotionally stressful work in a violent city, Guatemala is actually one of the most naturally beautiful places I´ve ever seen. I realized recently that I´ve failed to mention in my writing that I often escape to different corners of the country for a break. This, along with the strength and determination of so many Guatemalans in the face of this violence, is what makes me able to do the work that I do and want to continue doing it.

That said, I do want to share with you all a case that I just finished working on in the lab that has drawn my interest more than most. I analyzed the remains (bones) of a middle-aged couple, husband and wife, who were killed together in their home in the early 1980s. The husband´s bones were very eroded and for that reason I was not able to determine the trauma that caused his death. But the wife´s bones were slightly better preserved. I was able to see that she had a series of sharp trauma wounds on her collar bone and the back of her neck, most likely caused by a machete.

It was a compelling case, knowing that the victimizers (allegedly members of the Guatemalan army), broke into her home and hacked her to death along with her husband. This was, unfortunately, a common occurrence in rural Guatemalan during that time period. The bones, and the woman´s shirt which exhibited distinct cut marks that lined up with the cuts on the bones, were a startling reality check of what murder and genocide actually mean. This was a clear case of an individual´s rights being violated and justice being abused-- even if the couple were suspected of being involved in subversive political activities, they were clearly unarmed at the time of the attack and never given the opportunity to defend themselves in a court of law.

I suppose that what makes me enjoy being here in Guatemala so much is the extremity of all that I am living through here. One moment its the heart-wrenching reality of mass murder, and the next it´s diving off a rock into a natural pool below, or being cheered on by a group of Guatemalan girls as I chug up the side of a volcano in a race/"Ascent."

And although I sometimes (often?!?) question why the hell I live in a place like Guatemala, where violence is rampant and respect for human life is extremely undervalued, I also think it will be difficult for me to transition back to life in the United States. Although I have come to deeply appreciate the sense of security with which we live in most of the U.S., in some sense, life is a lot more boring there! This doesn´t mean that I will be down here forever, don´t worry, but it does mean that coming home will pose quite a personal challenge.

"You get so used to extremity that suddenly nothing else will do."
- White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Alta Verapaz

2009-03-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a trip to Alta Verapaz, a beautiful region of Guatemala with everything from coffee-growing highlands to hot flatlands covered in banana, rubber tree and African palm plantations owned by Guatemala´s elite. As I mentioned in my last post, my co-worker and I were on a mission to carry out follow-up investigations of cases that were made public by survivors and family members of massacre victims in the U.N.-sponsored truth commission.

The first massacres that we were interested in were from villages located in the eastern part of Alta Verapaz. This was my first trip as the official driver of the group, and it was complete with steep, winding, one-lane dirt roads (I will avoid numerating the near head-on accidents that I was almost in for my mother´s sake!). We even had to pass through a few rivers, which I have to admit was thrilling! (see photo to right). What we discovered upon reaching these rural villages was that of the cases we took on, none is left to be exhumed. This was for a variety of reasons, some of which were a reality check for me on the effects of war on civilian populations.

In the first village at which we arrived, we were able to meet with the leaders of the village, all of whom were men, as is the tradition in Mayan towns. We met with them in village school, a simple wood structure with a dirt floor, no walls and a palm thatch roof, where they told us that that exhumations of the massacre there had taken place nearly a decade beforehand, likely by another of the Guatemalan forensic anthropology organizations (there are three of us in total). We asked them about the victims who were named on our list, but were only able to collect limited information. Of all of the massacre survivors from the town, only one elderly man still lives there. Everyone else, fearing for their lives, fled to other nearby towns and never came back.

This is exactly what we found a few days later in the villages near Coban, in the western part of Alta Verapaz. All of the survivors and family members of victims of the killings were impossible to locate, because everyone fled to other places. Furthermore, the oppression by the military was so strong and long-lasting in the area that many people were displaced multiple times. So it´s not as easy as finding out that the survivors from on town now live in the next one over; they could be in any nearby town, or in the larger Cobán, or even in Guatemala City. Or as was the case with one family in the Panzós area, they may have even gone into exile in Canada, the United States, or Southern Mexico. An estimated 30,000 Guatemalans migrated to the United States between 1980 and 1990, for example, largely because of the war.

So after meeting with people in numerous villages throughout Alta Verapaz, my co-worker and I came away with next to nothing in terms of future exhumations. However, we did spend a long while speaking with a charming and sweet tailor in a small town, Don Policarpo. He is a leader of his community, who is interested in spreading the word about the availability of exhumations. He told us that he wishes that he could exhume his three uncles who were kidnapped and killed by the army, but he has no idea where to look; they were disappeared and never heard from again.

All in all, the trip reminded me of how much I enjoy traveling throughout the rural areas of Guatemala and getting to know the people there, albeit due to harsh and sad circumstances.

2009-03-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

After an embarassingly long hiatus from the blog world, I have finally decided to come back! I realize that I do have a lot to tell even when I feel like it´s just another day, another Quetzal (Guatemalan currency). And now is perfect timing for picking up again, because in an hour I´m heading out to the field and will have plenty of interesting stories to tell come this weekend.

I will be going to Cobán, Alta Verapaz, one of the most well-known coffee growing regions in Guatemala. While I´m sure that I´ll have some time to pick up some delicious blends, most of the trip will be spent carrying out the initial phases for forensic investigations in the region. In this case, we will actually be looking for massacre survivors who gave testimony in the truth comission sponsored by the United Nations. The Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH, for its Spanish acronym) just celebrated its 10th anniversary of publication. My job will be to go out to a few communities whose stories were published in the CEH, and talk with the surviving family members of the victims to see if they are interested in exhuming, identifying and then giving a proper burial to their loved ones.

This approach is somewhat opposite of how the process for exhumations normally works. Traditionally, local legal organizations make the initial contacts with communities and family members affected by the armed conflict. In these remote areas, news of exhumations travels by word of mouth (not by internet or written publication), and the legal organizations help family members file the necessary paperwork. Usually, it is not until then that we, the FAFG, become involved. In a sense, this is how it should be, because after all, this work is by and large a service to the families of the victims of the war. But due to the fact that this system relies largely on both word of mouth and the availability of the local legal organizations, it doesn´t always flow smoothly. Additionally, a colleague of mine just finished the comparison of exhumations that the FAFG has carried out with massacre testimonies described in the CEH truth commission; the idea now is to seek out the survivors from these cases to offer them the possibility of exhuming their victims.

So now I´m off; more to come over the weekend!

The Murder of the Carpenter

2008-10-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-05-30T12:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-06T19:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-04T06:44:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

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.

She Was the First One

2007-12-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

Nearly all of the two months that I’ve been here so far were consumed by the case that I mentioned in my last entry. We finished it up last week, and by the end I was feeling very confident in my work. I am enjoying the challenge of determining the ages of individuals, and am learning a ton from the many traumas that we come across.

I still find myself unaffected by the work, though every now and then I come across something that jolts me back into the reality of why we are here in the first place. The ropes that we find in graves which were used to strangle or hang people are one example; somehow this is a stronger trigger for me than the bones themselves. Nevertheless, what has affected me more than anything else so far was the last person of the 74 that I analyzed in my first case.

Up to that point, we had analyzed 73 individuals, all of whom were male. But number 74 was female. Since the order of analysis went in the order of archaeological excavation, which is to say from top to bottom, that meant that she was the first person thrown into the well on the military base. She was about 14 or 15 years old, and the thought of what possibly happened to her before she was killed bothered me greatly. Her body showed significant signs of trauma, but they were probably from the fall into the well; after all, she fell farther than anyone else. I was frustrated by the fact that we couldn’t find any other trauma on her that might help us determine the cause of her death. I found that in my head I was talking to her, wishing that she could talk back. I was also angry at the fact that her family had no interest in participating in an interview to help identify her, according to the cultural anthropologists of the FAFG who said they thought they knew who she was.

Coincidentally, a few weekends ago I went to the small town in the province of Baja Verapaz where she was from and where this military base was. A colleague of mine is from the town, and a group of us from work traveled up there for his wedding. It was a bustling, quaint and typical town of the Guatemalan highlands. The town center is a beautiful park surrounded by the municipality buildings, a market area and a tall, classically Latin American Catholic church. Most of the population is Mayan and continues to use colorful traditional dress.

Above all else, I was struck by how easily people from this town were “disappeared” during the armed conflict. It seemed to me that it would indeed be easy to physically capture someone, especially at night when the streets are quiet, but in such a small town how did these disappearances go unnoticed? How did they continue over the course of many years? I think it is actually more likely that they were noticed, but that most people were too scared to say anything knowing that the “walls have ears” in Guatemala. The FAFG of course found the 74 people in the well from the military base, but we have a list of more than 200 people from the town that went missing during the conflict.

I am starting to feel very at home at the FAFG, both because I love the work that I am doing and because I fit in well with the people who work here. But I am now off to DC to spend the holidays with my family, so I will resume in January with a photo slideshow!

My First Case

2007-11-25T22:37:00.000-08:00

For the past month, I have been working in the FAFG lab as the assistant to a forensic anthropologist, which has been an educative and fascinating experience. The two of us are responsible for reviewing a case of 74 individuals that were exhumed from an old military based in the province of Baja Verapaz. Nearly all of the skeletons are males between 15 and 45 years old. They were each dumped into a five-story deep well on the base, which made for a very difficult excavation carried out by the forensic archaeology team.

My job with this case is to place each skeleton in anatomical position, and start the process of reviewing the bones for determination of the individual’s age and signs of trauma. My colleague is responsible for the final determination of these, but throughout the course of the project I’ve taken on increasing responsibility. I am getting much more accurate at determining the age of death (using the pubic symphysis, rib ends and other skeletal elements), and at distinguishing between perimortem trauma (at or around the time of death) and postmortem trauma (any factor that affects the body after death). I find this to be especially difficult when it comes to ribs, which are brittle and often fracture as the body decomposes (postmortem trauma). In this case, almost all of the individuals exhibit perimortem blunt force fractures, including many broken ribs, from the fall into the well.

I have been surprisingly unaffected by the gritty nature of the work. I expected the experience to be more emotionally challenging than it has been to date, which I think this has to do mostly with two things: 1) arriving prepared. From past studies and experiences in Guatemala, mostly with Professor Anita Isaacs at Haverford, I learned about the country’s conflict, and even read witness testimony from the region of my current case. I knew what to expect when I arrived at the FAFG; and 2) lack of context in the laboratory setting. The social anthropologists and the archaeologists of the FAFG go out into the field to hear the stories of the disappeared, stand by the graves with the families, and bear witness to the positions that the bodies were in when they landed at the bottom of the grave. But in the lab setting, we get the “clean” version – the skeletons arrive in boxes and we lay them out on tables before examining the details and writing a report.

Moreover, it gets easier with time. One of the first cases that my colleague and I reviewed was that of a young man, about my age, whose skeleton exhibited multiple signs of trauma. We discovered that he was struck at least three times on the neck and back with a sharp-edged weapon – likely a machete – and that the attacker had to have come at him from the right side of his body. Somewhat strangely, he did not exhibit visible defense wounds on his hands or wrists, a possible indication that his hands were tied at the time of the attack.

There was a moment of silence after we decided this, in which time I thought about the unfortunate final moments of this young war victim. Then my colleague looked up from the sliced vertebra in his hand and said “que bonito” (“how pretty”). I was taken aback by this comment, which came from a purely scientific standpoint. But I quickly snapped back into forensic mode – “sí, que bonito,” I said. And it’s true, the human skeleton is beautiful, and being able to discern slight marks in it that determine the difference between life and death is indeed astonishing.

Some 40 individuals later, I found myself saying the same thing when we were able to determine the sequence of two gun shot wounds and a blunt-force injury to someone’s skull.

Perspectives on Death

2007-11-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

Before arriving in Guatemala, I made the transition from the world of human rights advocacy to that of forensic science. Although I majored in anthropology during my time at Haverford College (graduating in 2004), the subfield of forensic anthropology is not often taught at the undergraduate level. Over the past year I have gained more experience in the field through coursework and an internship with Dr. Douglas Ubelaker at the Smithsonian Institution, and a month of training at Mercyhurst College. Prior to that, I spent two and half years working in human rights advocacy at the Latin America Working Group. The move from that field to forensics was marked largely by the difference I saw in perspectives on death.

People in the human rights field tend to be highly sensitive to death. Successful human rights advocacy involves drawing attention to wrongful death and gross mistreatment of individuals, and is often accomplished by conveying an appalled reaction to such acts. In most senses, this response is appropriate; what is more serious than death?

Yet in the forensic field, death is a given. Every case that a forensic specialist takes on involves a person that has died. Dark senses of humor abound in this profession, and initially during my transition I was surprised by the lack of emotional response conveyed by forensic anthropologists when in the face of traumatic death. But I am coming to understand the medical and scientific lens that one must look through in order to successfully complete forensic work, which is important on both a personal and professional level. A sense of humor helps too, even if a dark one!

Despite their differences, both human rights advocates and forensic professionals have the common goal of obtaining justice and dignity for the deceased, who can no longer speak for themselves. It is difficult for me, however, to have to choose between these two fields. Having now completed three weeks with the FAFG in Guatemala, I couldn’t be happier to be part of an organization whose work is both scientific in nature and dedicated to human rights and justice. The case that I am currently working on, for example, involves the skeletal analysis of 74 people who were killed on a Guatemalan military base during the time of the war. In my next entry I will discuss the (sometimes gory!) details of this project.

Welcome!

2007-11-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

This blog is meant to be a space for me to relay stories from the grave(site) for those would like to follow along as I practice forensic anthropology in

Guatemala

under a Fulbright fellowship.

So what exactly is forensic anthropology? Think: bones. Anthropology is the study of the human condition, including physical remnants of human life and culture. Forensics refers to efforts that contribute to legal investigations, although it is most commonly associated with figuring out how someone died. Thus, forensic anthropologists have the unique role of excavating human remains and providing a detailed analysis of the bones for identification of victims and associated legal investigations.

Last week I arrived in Guatemala to spend ten months working with the Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG, for its Spanish acronym). The Foundation is a well-recognized forensic institution dedicated to the monumental task of identifying victims of the country’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. More than 200,000 people were killed in the conflict and over 50,000 were “disappeared.” Many of those who lost their lives were indigenous Mayan.

For at least the first few months of my time with the FAFG, I will be assisting in laboratory analysis of human remains. Using clues from different bones of the body, we can create biological profiles that consist of an individual’s sex, height, and approximate age. We then look for evidence of trauma on the skeleton. Keen examination of bone trauma perimortem – at or around the time of death – can distinguish between various types of injury that may have been the cause of death, such as sharp trauma induced by a knife or machete, gun shot wounds, or blunt trauma that would result from bludgeoning.

Many people wonder why it matters that we – quite literally – dig up the past. The short answer, on which I will into go more detail in the future, is threefold: the need for closure for families of the deceased, exposure of the truth of what took place in Guatemala, and justice and reconciliation for a war-torn society. Forensic anthropology, when practiced in such a context, is a science in the service of human rights.