Refugees Even After Death: Refugees Even After Death:
A Quest for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation
The photographs in this exhibit were taken between May 2000 and July 2001. For six of those fourteen months I was the staff photographer for the Forensic Anthropology team of the Office of Peace and Reconciliation of the Quiché Catholic Diocese in Guatemala.
In Guatemala, Peace Accords were signed in December 1996, bringing to an end - at least on paper - 36 years of civil war between a coalition of four rebel organizations and the Guatemalan Army and government. According to the United Nations sponsored Truth Commission, over 200,000 civilians were killed during the years of the conflict; 93 percent died at the hands of the military and related security forces. Over 40,000 people were disappeared; their whereabouts are still unknown. The Truth Commission further concludes that the United States trained, aided, and directly supported the Guatemalan military throughout the armed internal conflict.
The height of the violence occurred between 1979 and 1984, when the military carried out what was termed a "scorched earth policy" in northern and northwestern areas of the country. They targeted mostly indigenous, rural populations in their effort to eliminate potential civilian support for the guerrillas. By the Army's own account, over 450 villages were completely wiped off the map. Massacres of women, children, and the elderly occurred on a regular basis, and of those who survived, well over 200,000 fled the country, while one million were displaced internally. Of Guatemala's 22 provinces, Quiché was the hardest hit by the violence.
Since 1993 there has been a growing movement to acknowledge and come to grips with what happened: to search for the disappeared, to carry out exhumations, to promote truth and reconciliation, and to bring charges against those responsible for the atrocities.
The forensic team with which I worked was one of four teams doing exhumations in Guatemala at the time I took these photographs. This team worked only in Quiché and from March 2000 through July 2001 it worked exclusively in the large municipality of Nebaj. Nebaj is made up of dozens of villages, and is home to Mayan indigenous people of both the Ixil and Quiché language groups.
Many of the survivors of the repression spent 12 to 15 years hiding in the mountains as part of the Communities of Population in Resistance (CPRs) of the Sierra, and only in the past two to six years have they returned to their communities of origin, or moved to other areas of permanent resettlement. Since coming out of hiding, they have requested that the remains of their loved ones be exhumed and have sought justice for the victims of the violence.
The first third of the photographs in this exhibit are of exhumations undertaken over a two-week period in May 2000 near one particular village. One day in August 1982 thirty-two people were killed by an Army patrol as they were fleeing their homes into the nearby mountains. After hearing that soldiers had massacred residents of a neighboring community, the villagers quickly gathered their children and a few possessions and fled, only to be surprised by a group of soldiers coming from the opposite direction. The survivors were able to bury some of the dead on the mountainside where the soldiers had left them. They literally paused in their flight to hurriedly dig shallow graves under the cover of night.
Most of the remaining photographs are of exhumations of clandestine cemeteries created by people who spent weeks or months in hiding in different areas of the mountains. During that time, they buried their loved ones on hidden ridges and forested slopes after soldiers or paramilitary forces killed them, or they died of hunger or illness.
The last eight photographs were taken in late July 2001. The remains of 121 people, exhumed over the course of a year and a half in twenty-two villages of Nebaj, were returned to their family members. A huge mass was held, and the coffins were carried in a procession through the principal streets of the town of Nebaj. After four days and three nights of preparing and watching over the remains, and fifteen to twenty years hidden in shallow graves in the mountains, these victims of war were finally laid to rest in the village cemeteries, close to their families.
The principal objective of the exhumations is to return the remains to the surviving family members so that they can bury them in a cemetery with a proper ceremony and a traditional mourning process. It is also to have a record of what happened, to preserve the "historical memory," to literally uncover the truth. The work is done in such a way, and some of the photographs are taken as evidence, so that if they choose to, family members can bring charges against those responsible for these crimes. All of the remains are taken to the team's lab where they are cleaned, reconstructed, and photographed; then a lengthy report is written and the remains are finally returned to the families for reburial.
The families present at one of the exhumations documented in this exhibit are serving as witnesses in a case recently brought against former military dictator General Efrain Rios Montt in the Guatemalan courts. Rios Montt, who is currently head of the Guatemalan Congress and Secretary General of the ruling Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) party, presided over the single most violent and heinous period of the civil war in 1982 and 1983. He is accused of crimes against humanity and genocide.
There is a lot of interest in seeing the exhumations go forward. This comes not just from family members and other survivors, but also from Guatemalan and international human rights organizations, the Catholic Church, and some foreign governments. There is, however, strong resistance to this work from sectors aligned with the military and from within the current government. Unfortunately there has been a recent increase of threats and human rights violations directed against those involved in this kind of work. These threats and actions are and will continue to be a reflection and reminder of the violent and tragic reality lived by the majority of Guatemalans over the past several decades.
This exhibition would not have been possible without the blessings and assistance of the Office of Peace and Reconciliation of the Quiché Catholic Diocese in Guatemala, and the generous support of the Daniele Agostino Foundation, Amnesty International U.S.A., and Rights Action.
- Jonathan Moller, August 2002