Following Antigone: Human Rights and Forensic Anthropology

In 1981, there was a military operation on the north of the province of Moraz\'e1n.

That was like a realist phone call, and the military wanted to move them away from there. So, after a few encounters, the

guerrillas left the area, together with a lot of civilians, and the army entered into the hamlet of El Mozote. So, there were a

lot of the population who had actually gathered. They separated women, children, and men into three different

groups. They reportedly killed all of them, burned their houses, burned their

crops, killed their animals, and repeated exactly the same procedures on five nearby

hamlets. The total number of the massacre victims is between 800 and 1,000 people. And unlike other massacres, this one was

documented at the time by the international press, by the New York Times and The Washington Post, which also

published photographs of the remains of the victims at the time\'97 a few weeks after the massacre. But the Salvadoran

government and the U.S. government, who were strongly involved in supporting the Salvadoran government during the civil war, both denied the existence of the

massacre and claimed there was no evidence to support it. The massacre was not investigated until almost the end of the

war.

In 1981, we were called by the legal office of the Catholic Church in El

Salvador to help with the legal work on the forensic side of the investigation of the massacre of El Mozote. So, the

preliminary investigation was particularly long because the people were buried in many different mass

graves all along these valleys and hills. So, one of the first things that we did was walk with the witnesses through all

of this area, trying to map and locate each of these graves.

Established according to that, who was buried there? He's Larry Atlandis.

[Background talking]

Our first goal is to apply forensic sciences into the investigation of human rights cases. Second, to bring all this evidence

into court so that physical evidence will accompany testimonial and documentary

evidence as well. We also want to assist the families of the victims in the right

to recover the remains of their loved ones so they can carry out the customary funeral rites and mourn their death.

Training is very important also for us, so we gave training on forensic sciences and criminal investigations, not only to

forensic experts but also to judges, lawyers, and human rights organizations involved in the process of investigating

human rights cases. Finally, we hope to provide evidence that will serve for the historical reconstruction of these

events so that governments or parties involved in them, that often want to destroy them or hide them, can no longer

do that.
EF was formed in 1984 when democracy

returned to Argentina, and we needed to incorporate the methods from traditional

physical anthropology and archaeology to recover the pasado.

Workplace and personas in 1500, Sofia PLC in tomorrow's syndication, Kimura, and

cemented in the third place. There was no

experience in Argentina, as well as in many other countries, of having to deal with a massive number of exhumations of

skeletal remains, which is a different thing than when you are assuming a complete body. It's a very quite simple

procedure in which you just lift the body and take it back to the laboratory. But those first exhumations were done in a

Very... unmethodological way, using bulldozers or keepers from the cemetery to recover the remains. When you're

exhuming skeletal remains, you have more than 200 bones to pick up from the grave, and absolutely, evidence such as

ballistic evidence and so on, that could be quite important in terms of determining the cause of death. And for

that, you need to recover it in a different way. And that's when archaeology comes in. In Argentina, we

have this problem that is quite common in Latin America and in other places, which

is that the forensic people often are part of the police or the judiciary. So,

when you're analyzing cases within the police or the judicial system, it's questioned by its actions during the

time in which they should have investigated this properly. There is a conflict of interest there.

This is why a new alternative, a new group of people, needed to be involved to

work on these kinds of cases. As democracy was moving on in the region, we worked almost

in all Latin American countries. We also started working in Africa a few years ago, and we work there in six or seven

countries right now, in some countries in Asia, and a few countries in Eastern Europe, mostly in the Balkan region. The

work that we do is normally divided into three different steps: the preliminary investigation, the archaeological section, and the

laboratory work. [Music]

In 1981, we were not allowed to work in El Mozote. We were told by the judge and

by the Supreme Court that we needed to wait until the civil war was over. Finally, in '92, we did one side there that

was part of the United Nations Truth Commission report that came in March '93. Immediately after that, there was an

amnesty law that blocked all kinds of investigation, including excavations. It was only seven years later, in the

year 2000, that we were allowed to come back to continue with the exhumations in El Mozote, so that the families could recover

the remains of their loved ones.

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Think a massacre had happened at the beginning of the war. The people will tell us what they never thought women

and children would be touched. So, when they knew the military operation was coming, the men left here because they thought

the army was going to go after that. So, during the night, when the army withdrew to their base, the men would come out of

The places where they were hiding, and they would bury their families wherever they found them. So, here we are,

interviewing mostly husbands that have lost their entire families, and the victims of the massacre, mostly women,

older people, or children. And the number of victims per family was something

that was completely incredible. When we were interviewing the relatives of the victims, we reached the point where we

would ask them, "How many members of your family did you lose?" Coming from Argentina,

the answer would normally be one or two. Here, people were telling us ten, twelve,

sixteen members of my family. And I remember asking them, "No, wait, I mean direct members of your family?" And they

would repeat, "Ten, twelve, sixteen. My wife, my six children, my sister, her children, my father, my

mother," and so on. This was completely new for us, and we were completely shocked by

it.

Yeah, I've always worked at the request of an organization. It could be a local human rights organization, or an

international one, such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. It could be a local judiciary who will call us to

work, or an international tribunal, such as ICTY in La Hague, permission to\'97

exhumations from a legal standpoint. In most of the countries where we work, it

is strictly a condition survey by a judge, or sometimes by a truth commission that

has their capacity. Now, a half also has this rule that it's not to do with the

law, but it has to do with our principle, in which, if the families don't want us

to intervene, we just don't work on those cases. At the start of the investigation,

we conduct extensive interviews with the families, in which, among other things, we explain them the different steps of the

work that we do. But we go over that again when we are actually about to start the exhumation.

We're treating a grave as if it

is a crime scene, so everything that its theory can eventually, or potentially, be

something that can help you to understand what happened and how it happened.

So that's why you have to work very, very slowly in order to find everything that

it's there. Don't move it. Record it. Measuring each of the findings, unannounced. Coat on this: 206 pounds and

32 teeth, and you don't want to miss any of them. You have to recover them properly. Often in these cases,

the skull has been fractured, normally by a gunshot wound to the head. So, there are many pieces of our skull that

you have to recover to reconstruct it later in the laboratory. The two sometimes fall out of the socket and

They are around. There might be bullets also around that you need to recover, so

we also use metal detectors. We also screen all the soil that is immediately above, at the same level, and underneath

the main back of evidence. In the case of

ammo, I'll pull up the convent, a very small room where we found 140 bodies, mostly skeletons of our

children, with the witness saying where the bodies were left. There, then the house was set on fire, and the first

thing that collapsed was the roof over the bodies. And then, a few days after, because the smell was too strong, the

soldiers that were stealing the plates dumped part of the adobe walls above their remains of the roof, and that's

exactly how we found Robert Eaton Daryl.

The first thing is you give a code, you give a number to that skeleton. That will remain with that

skeleton until you can put a name to it, until you can identify, basically, those remains. And you take a number of

measurements so that you have it located properly within the working area. You look at the clothing, you try to see if

there\'92s something inside pockets or something, so that you won\'92t miss it. That, for example, sometimes you may find personal effects and then be very

important to identify the person, or coins that are very important to date an event.

I think the work is important for

the families of the victims because when someone disappeared from your family, what the families always told us is they

cannot rest until they find the remains of their loved ones. First of all, they don't know if that

person is dead or alive. And even though most families, of course, know that, as the years go by, and they have

no information that most likely they are dead, but they could not decide this by themselves. They need to either have the

remains and reburied them properly, and have a grave where they can go, or they have to have some kind of official

acknowledgement and information about what happened. So, they cannot rest until they have one of the two cells, and

that's why, when we were able to identify the remains of one disappeared person,

for us, it's a major event.

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At the laboratories, it's basically two things we try to establish. One is the cause and manner of death, and the other one

we try to identify the remains. Some of

the bones, you can determine the age of the individual, when the person died, the sex, the ancestry, the laterality. If there

was a woman, if she had given birth or not. Sometimes the cause of death, if you'd have affected bones, sometimes you

can eventually see the presence of in under custody, and you see fractures that are in the process of healing. You may

sometimes believe that that person had been beaten while still alive, but close to the moment after.

This in child, I\'92m putting, and I\'92m also saying it\'92s a

she. The deceased\'92s teeth, small side.

And the chin is more rounded. So its around 5 years old plus or minus 16 months. I don\'92t know where the posterior part of the skull is

appear like fire, so it may be completely destroyed by fire.

I went to Argentina in 1984, at the request of the truth commission there and some local human rights organizations to help on the

process of exceeding and analyzing human skeletal remains. Clyde trained us in

these disciplines of forensic anthropology and forensic archaeology, and helped to form our team, as well as

other teams that later developed in other countries. Might be worth X-raying, although

kind of think it\'92s fire; can\'92t really be sure.

[Unintelligble[

We reconstruct, for example, the bones, and that\'92s where we call perimortem fractures. That is to say, fractures that

occurred around the moment of death. In the case of gunshot wounds, this will help us to locate the entrances and the

exits of a shot, and that\'92s sometimes very important in terms of manner of

death. Cause of death is what caused the person to die. For example, that the person has been shot, but the manner is

how that happened. Was this an accident, a mass suicide, or was this a homicide? By locating the entrance of a gunshot

wound, sometimes that can provide us information in terms of manner of death. If the entrance of a gunshot wound is

in the back of the head, that\'92s very unlikely to be an accident or suicide. It\'92s much more likely that that is a

homicide.

One major challenge for next year is to improve the amount of identifications. In most countries in which this massive

human rights problem occurred, most bodies are still not identified, and for that, we need to improve access to DNA

analysis. DNA has made an enormous revolution in our field, allowing us to

have many more identifications. However, it\'92s still very expensive when DNA needs

to be extracted from bones of skeletal remains. It is a complex process, more complex than when it\'92s done

directly from soft tissue, and not all the laboratories are equipped. So basically, we\'92re

still relying now on the help of some very nice laboratories that donate their work to do this, but it can, of course,

accommodate only a very limited number of cases. So, a major technical thing would be

using new technology that, for example, is being developed now to identify the victims of the World Trade Center. We\'92re

hoping that all those new tools are going to be transported into the human rights field. 29:31
Unfortunately, in human rights in general, there are very few cases in which the perpetrators are brought to trial. And so that our

evidence, accompanied by the witness testimony, will be used. In Argentina, it wasn\'92t used.

On the trials against the home team members, that happened in 1985 when we

were part of the teams working in the Balkans from the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. That

evidence is being currently used, and more recently now, evidence has been used in the trials against the Derg

regime members in Ethiopia as a witness.

Mr. Clyde Snow has been called as a witness In the proceedings against the three first Quinta\'92s professor. All processes

organization national as a witness for the prosecution. The bones of the skull

as we found them, were being very fragmented, along with the fragments we also found seven

pellets from shotgun badly deformed, but of a size consistent

with the load of double-aught buckshot used in shotguns such as the Otago, which

is used as a standard police and army security

weapon in Argentina. Because of a very fragmentary condition

of the skull, we had to reconstruct it in order to study the patterns of injuries.

We concluded that the range at which this shot was fired was in the general

range of around one meter, or perhaps a little less than a meter. When we exhumed

this skeleton, we did not encounter the small bones of a human infant inside the

pelvic or bones of the mother. On the other hand, we did see in the pubic

bones, a group known as the preauricular sulcus, which indicates that

the individual has given birth to a term

or near-term infant. Putting all this information together, we were able to

identify the individual as Liliana Carmen Barea, who disappeared on her way

home from work on the 5th of October in 1977.

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Some families want to see the remains, and we are always open to that. And if they want us to explain to them also how we

identify that person, why we decide that those remains correspond to that person, we also do that. Not amazing moment for

them, not easy for us too, because you see them suffering. You see how they have these completely mixed feelings about, in

one way, finally they have an answer, but the answer is sad: their relative is dead, obviously. And that is the end of

finding him or her alive. And what is it that you\'92re actually showing them? You\'92re showing them the skeletal remains of

their relative. We\'92ll often\'97 the skull is fractured and broken, other bones as well.

Is showing them bullets, pieces of clothing, or personal effects, if any.

If we can imagine seeing your father, your mother, your child\'92s skeleton in that way, I

think that\'92s one of the most difficult and impossible things to watch and to

understand.

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The consequences of the work of us? Well, first of all, it is that the families were able to recover the remains of the

loved ones, and so they reburied them. The second main consequence was that this

was an extremely controversial case. For years, there was this big battle:

basically, on one side, the Salvadoran government and the US government saying

that this was assured, that there was no evidence of a massacre, and then the families of the victims and witnesses

saying this was a massacre, that these people were just killed, eliminated by the

Salvadoran army. The evidence that we found in this case and the location of the evidence was crucial, indicating that

this was a massacre. Not only did we find 141 individuals, of which the majority were children,

all covered with bullets, with approximately 250 fragments of bullets, but also we found an equal number of

cartridge cases on the other side of the room, with fragments of bullets in holes inside the floor, and a number

of other details and elements of evidence that, all put together, strongly indicated that this was a massacre and

that there was no evidence indicating the possibility of combat.

The remains that we accumulated, as well as the ones consumed in 2000 and 2001, are most of them put on a

monument that the community has built in El Mozote, and they have

dug up a big wave in which they keep on putting the coffins with the remains, as we are assuming them here. But here it

was a particularly moving ceremony in December 2001 when we went, because not only were the remains reburied, but also

there was a sense of history and a sense of 20 years of how long it takes and how

many things need to be done sometimes to uncover the truth, to bring part of that

truth back to the people that actually have suffered from what happened, and they have witnessed this. When you pass

and you live through a dictatorship, you need to repair it in a way. A lot of

things have been completely broken, and even if you're not directly affected, I think that I'm telling the truth and

bringing that truth to the public knowledge is really important, not only for the families of the victims but also

for each member of our society that has experienced it. It brings solace, I think,

to all of us, and I think that all the members of the team feel that very strongly, and that\'92s what sort of kept us

together all these years and made us also go to another country to do the

exactly the same work.
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