“The bones are talking”

Saul Martinez for Al Jazeera America

Transforming the executive and legislative branches into democratic institutions that serve the common good is not going as smoothly as hoped. Fortunately, the struggle for justice related to civil war-era crimes and those of the post-war continue at a pace unexpected in a country with such weak political institutions.

Writing for Al Jazeera America, Saul Elbein has a very good article on the work of the Forensics Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), one of the organizations responsible for being able to bring accused human rights violators to court .

Since 1993 the FAFG has exhumed about 8,000 victims, and identified about 3,000. The identifications have been so popular that 12,000 families have come forward to give DNA. Photos on the wall of the organization’s lab show family members kissing the bones of recovered relatives.

But for the last four years, the evidence that the FAFG has exhumed in towns and military bases across Guatemala has been used to help prosecute military perpetrators. Since 2006, the UN-funded Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) has helped build the MP into a force powerful enough to go after mafias and war criminals alike. In 2011, the current wave of prosecutions began under Claudia Paz y Paz, a crusading attorney general at the MP who won convictions against five soldiers for their role in the killings at Dos Erres — a case that relied on FAFG forensic evidence. Since then, the MP has worked in tandem with FAFG in a number of cases. FAFG evidence has been used by the Ministerio Public to convict low level-officers and policemen for massacres and so-called forced disappearances across Guatemala. It also served a vital role in the 2013 genocide conviction (overturned the following year) of former dictator Rios Montt.

The case against Efrain Rios Montt worked its way through the Spanish courts until such time as Guatemala was ready to tackle the sensitive case itself. The FAFG certainly helped us better understand the dynamics of the country's civil war and provided some families with answers, often incomplete, as to what happened to their love ones. The FAFG was involved in the same type of work as the Spanish courts, never knowing if or when their findings would contribute to criminal cases in Guatemala.

Terrific work.