Cassidy McFadden, one of my friends from Bethel visited Roxanne, Ruthi and I at the seminary yesterday! She’s staying in Huehuetenango with an indigenous family, and decided to come see us in the City for a few days. It was wonderful to see her again. We ate supper together tonight and last night, and she got to see some of the sights in the city before she leaves tomorrow morning.
This afternoon the CASAS group visited the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFGA). The foundation’s primary work is to disinter many of the mass graves of the people killed by the government during the civil war in the 70s and 80s. Before they can dig up any of the graves, a formal complaint must be launched by the families of the victims, which often leads to court testimonies. Once they figure out where the graves are, they begin excavations. Sometimes the bodies are laid out nicely, with clothes and shoes and all limbs intact. Sometimes the bodies are simply tossed into the hole, with bullet or machete wounds or bone breaks or fractures or obvious signs of pre-mortem torture. Sometimes body parts are found in big plastic bags full of disarticulated bones. It can take anywhere from 2 months to 6 months to figure out the identity of a victim, using dental records, DNA from family members, and matching the missing people with government “kill squad” records.
Once the victim has been properly identified, there is a lengthy government court case, which make take years, before the remains can be returned to the family and given a proper burial, with all of the accompanying ceremonies, much to the relief and sadness of the families. Often, the families didn’t know what happened to their husbands, wives, or children – they only knew that one day, the army swept down on their town, and that was the last they saw of them. One of the saddest things I have ever seen was the rows and rows and rows of cardboard boxes filled with bones of the victims of government violence. Rows and stacks and rooms full. Hundreds of boxes, all with a name, a town, a processing date, and an FAFGA identification number, just waiting for their court cases to come through.
A bit of background – in the 1970s, there was a series of governmental overthrows, which began a series of guerilla attacks. The guerillas often hid in indigenous mountain towns because it was safer there. When the army figured that out, they began carpet-bombing the little towns, staking out, conducting random sweeps, trying to kill all of the guerillas. The guerilla force was about ten times smaller than the national army, but due to a long-standing racism against the indigenous people, the army had “lots of trouble” controlling the guerillas, giving them a reason to continue their genocide against the Maya. Kidnappings, murders, torture, rape, massacres became part of daily life. This lasted for about twenty years, and continues on a lesser, more hidden scale today. The majority of the Guatemalan people know little, if anything, about the civil war. It was “way up north,” and citizens who didn’t live there knew nothing of it, since the government controls most of the media outlets here. My Spanish professor didn’t hear about it until she went to college in 2003, twenty years after the fact! Tens of thousands were killed, and almost no one knows anything about it. Sometimes I feel like I know more Guatemalan history than the average high school educated Guatemalan, which is really sad for both parties.
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