Guatemalan anthropologists are excavating mass graves at a former military outpost near Cobán, Alta Verapaz, searching for the remains of 200-300 people.
The bodies are suspected to belong to people who were disappeared during the country’s internal armed conflict, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
The former outpost – Now a UN peacekeeper training centre – has five mass graves nearby, said the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala’s deputy director José Suasnavar.
“In the fifth pit, which we are working on now, we have already found 14 skulls,” he said at a press conference earlier this week.
A search warrant drawn by the First Court of High Risk allowed Attorneys of the Public Ministry (MP) and researchers at the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala to go to the site, and they have been working there since the 27th February.
“It is very uncertain, determining the number of bodies that can be located in the former military detachment, because there are indications that there are more graves in the region,” Suasnavar said.
Aura Elena Farfan, director of the Association of Relatives of Detained-Disappeared of Guatemala, said the action for excavation was initiated by relatives who complained about their disappeared family members.
“During the years 2004 and 2005, many people approached us from Cobán to ask for help,” she said. “At that time, we started soliciting the MP for an intervention, to clarify the facts.”
Suasnavar said since the institution began the process of exhumations in 1992, the bones of 6,000 victims have been found; 65% of the remains have been identified.
According to a UN-sponsored Truth Commission, about 250,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared during the 36-year armed conflict. Most of them were indigenous, and the commission attributed 93% of all atrocities to state and paramilitary forces.
08 March 2012
http://www.argentinaindependent.com/all/guatemala-mass-graves-excavate-at-former-military-outpost/
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