Guatemala's history is alive today

PRI's The World asks Did War Change Guatemala's faith? Evangelicalism would have spread in anyway, like it has everywhere else, but there is no doubt that it was aided by the counterinsurgency programs launched by the Guatemalan and US governments during the 1970s and 1980s. In addition to governmental initiatives, there was a concerted effort on the part of evangelicals in the US to support similar growth in Guatemala to aid in the battle against communism. See Virginia Garrard-Burnett on religion in Guatemala.

The New York Times Magazine tells the story of Fredy Peccerelli and the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) in The Secrets in Guatemala's Bones.

From February 2012, when the archaeologists first arrived at the base, until December 2013, they worked seven days a week, uncovering more brutality than they’d ever seen in one place. One grave held 64 men and boys, pressed helter-skelter into a still life of death: skulls face down, broken into pieces; a tangle of pants and legs akimbo, some with thick ropes encircling their ankles. Just yards away, in another grave, lay 41 women with 22 children under the age of 4. The work was delicate: Skulls can fracture. The earth shifts. Move the dirt too roughly, and it swallows bones into its folds and mixes them with other bodies. An errant stroke can brush away a remnant of a blindfold, a piece of rope, a cranium fragment with a bullet hole, the bullet itself: the criminal evidence needed to prosecute a murder.

Fredy's story has been told many times but it's a really good one that should be told over and over again. I'm really disappointed to learn of the increasing financial difficulties of the FAFG. It looks like funding peaked in 2013 at the time of the genocide trial but now events in Europe and elsewhere have caused unfortunate budget cuts to this most important organization.