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.

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.