Guatemala: A forensic anthropologist who brings closure for the "disappeared"

Thanks to Mike from Central American Politics for drawing my attention to this TED talk by Fredy Peccerelli on his work as a forensic anthropologist in Guatemala, which is so relevant to this blog that I'm reposting it here. I can only echo his admiration for the work of these incredible, dedicated people.

Peru: Exhibition of victims' clothing

Forensic investigators in Peru have set up an exhibition of items of clothing in the hope that victims' relatives may be able to recognise them and thus identify some of the disappeared.

The exhumations at Los Cabitos army base in Ayacucho took place years ago (see here and here) but the majority of those disinterred have not been identified. Not a single former soldier is in prison for any of the killings that presumably took place at Los Cabitos, notes AP.

The exhibition will be shown in Lima (because many displaced people moved there), Ayacucho and Huancavelica. If people believe they recognise items, DNA tests can be then be used for confirmation.

Clothing of 53 victims exhumed at Peru base shown (AP)
Buscan identificar a 50 personas exhumadas de Los Cabitos (La Republica)

Argentina: RIP Clyde Snow

Forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow died just over a month ago aged 86. Sometimes known as the "Sherlock Holmes of bones", he played a key role in training Argentine forensic anthropologists to identify victims of the country's dictatorship. He also worked with remains in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Brazil and other countries outside Latin America. One of his major achievements was helping to identify fugitive Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

“Witnesses may forget throughout the years, but the dead, those skeletons, they don’t forget,” he told The Times in 2002. “Their testimony is silent, but it is also very eloquent.”

 Argentine human rights defenders expressed their gratitude to Snow.

Chicha Mariani, founder of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, told the Herald last week how grateful she was to him for his work: “He was such a good man, he dedicated so much of his time to us.”

The Argentine forensic team went on to advise others, including those from Peru, so Snow's pioneering work continues to contribute to clearing up atrocities all around the world.

Clyde Snow, Sleuth Who Read Bones From King Tut’s to Kennedy’s, Dies at 86 (NY Times)
Clyde Snow - obituary (Telegraph)
Stories in bones (The Economist)
Farewell to the Sherlock Holmes of bones (The Buenos Aires Herald)
Un hombre que hizo justicia con la ciencia (Pagina/12)

Argentina: Abuelas resolve three more cases

The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have resolved three more cases, although the ending is not a happy one. The Argentine forensic anthropology team (EAAF) has been able to confirm the identities of three pregnant disappeared women who were murdered before giving birth, bringing a search for their possible offspring to an end. Two of the women were found some time ago but the announcement has only been made now.

The Abuelas expressed their pain at the news but stressed that at least they now know the truth.

Mónica Edith De Olaso's remains were found next to those of her partner, Alejandro Ford, in the cemetery of Ezpeleta, in Quilmes. She was murdered on 24 June, 1977, when she was nearly 19 and three months pregnant. 

Alicia Tierra was buried in a cemetery in Rosario. She was six months pregnant and aged 23 when she was killed on 31 December 1976. 

Laura Romera and her partner, Luis Guillermo Vega Ceballos, were abducted on 9 April 1976 when she was four months pregnant. They both became victims of the "death flights" and their bodies were washed up on the coast of Uruguay and identified at the end of 2012.

El Equipo de Antropología identificó a tres embarazadas desaparecidas (infonews.com)

Paraguay: Trucks of terror

Spanish paper El Mundo has an interesting piece on the camionetas del terror in Paraguay. I've written previously on that icon of the dictatorship in Argentina, the Ford Falcon. In Paraguay, apparently, the equivalent was the Chevrolet Custom 10 in red, as donated by the US and used to transport those picked up by the security forces to police stations, prisons, detention and torture centres. For many, it was the last vehicle they would ever sit in. A survivor of the dictatorship describes the fear provoked by the sight of the red trucks cruising the streets of Asunción.

Now one of them has been recovered and will be displayed outside the memory museum in the Paraguayan capital (Museo de las Memorias de Asunción).

Las camionetas del terror llegan al Museo de las Memorias de Paraguay (El Mundo)

Book review: Carmen Castillo's Un día de octubre en Santiago

 

Carmen Castillo, Santiago de Chile: Ein Tag im Oktober (Rowohlt, 1981, trans. from the French by Anna Kamp) (out of print in German but used copies available; Spanish edition available for Kindle - no English translation, as far as I can tell)

I was walking home a few weeks ago when I passed a house with various old books laid out on the windowsill. It's quite common here to put unwanted items outside for people to help themselves if they want them, so of course I took a look at the rather bashed-up offerings and this caught my eye.

I initially thought it was a novel, but when I started reading I realised it was a memoir of a Chilean militant who went underground after the 1973 coup and eventually went into exile in France. Carmen Castillo was a member of the leftist Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) and married to its co-founder, Andrés Pascal Allende (nephew of Salvador Allende). She went underground with another MIR leader, Miguel Enríquez, who was killed by the DINA (secret police) on 5 October 1974. This is the "day in October" referred to in the title of the book. Castillo, who was pregnant, was wounded in the attack that brought down Enríquez. She was detained for some time but eventually allowed to leave the country. Her baby was born in England but only lived for a few weeks. She wrote the book while living in Paris.

Castillo describes her life in hiding, the torture undergone by her comrades, and what various people were doing on the 5 October, the momentous day when Miguel was killed. The book is only about 150 pages long and her prose is sparse, but not unfeeling. The passages about the torture suffered by the militants are difficult to read, but the admiration Castillo feels for the bonds of loyalty between her comrades is very clear. A more ambiguous character is "la flaca Alejandra", an MIR militant who works for the DINA following her capture. Castillo does not merely condemn this treachery, she describes Alejandra's physical condition and her explanation that, when the DINA take her out on the street to point out MIR members, her uncontrollable trembling alerts her captors to the fact that she has recognised someone.

The book is interesting for several reasons: Castillo knew many important figures in the MIR and describes them as personal friends, not just as historic personalities; for the same reason, it can be somewhat confusing for the reader even with the translator's notes. She is also writing from the perspective of exile and grapples with the question of returning to dictatorship-era Chile (which, in the end, she did not). I had never previously really considered the practicalities of guerrilla movements in the pre-digital age: the assigned meeting points and back-up meeting points, the secret messages, the struggle to secure a safe house, the need to be able to rely on one's comrades. In a note to them at the end of the text, Castillo writes that "this is not a political book, but it does tell a political story". She sums it up well.

Castillo later became a documentary filmmaker; I haven't seen any of her work, but I will now seek it out.

Argentine lecturer resigns over dictatorship acusations

Enrique Pérez Albizú, vice-deacon of the faculty of medicine at the university of La Plata, has stepped down from his post after a Mother of the Plaza de Mayo accused him in court of complicity with the dictatorship.

In the trial concerning the detention centre La Cacha, Adelina Dematti de Alaye said that surgeon Pérez Albizú had signed false death certificates which were then used by the military to cover up deaths in custody by attributing them to deaths in "shoot outs". Another 20 doctors are said to have done the same thing.

Renunció el docente acusado de vínculos con la dictadura militar (Tiempo)

Uruguay's army chief wants to "turn the page"

Uruguay has a new army chief, Juan Villagrán, replacing Pedro Aguerre. Villagrán has already stirred up controversy with his remarks about the disappeared.

On taking up his role, he said there was "no further information" about those disappeared by the State during the dictatorship. He added that "96% of those in the army joined after 1985, so they are not likely to know much about it". He denied that there was an internal order not to reveal any such information.

Subsequently, in an interview with Uruguayan paper El País, Villagrán said that "as a private individual", he believes it is time to "turn the page" on the events of the past. He said that the dictatorship is now a matter for historians; as far as the institution of the army is concerned, it has been dealt with.

Not surprisingly, the families of the disappeared were not so pleased by these statements. One relative, Oscar Urtasún, said that to turn the page, "it was first necessary to read the book". "We are the victims and he is part of the victimizers," he summed up.

It's disappointing, but not surprising, to hear such statements from a high-ranking military officer in Latin America. How about leaving it to the victims to decide if they are ready to move on for a change?


Jefe del Ejército: "no debe quedar información" sobre desaparecidos (elpais.com.uy)
"Creo que hay que dar vuelta la página y mirar hacia el futuro" (elpais.com.uy)
Hijos de desaparecidos respondieron a jefe de Ejército (espectador.com)

Argentina: Remains of vice-governor of Tucumán discovered

It has been confirmed that the remains discovered in the Pozo de Vargas, Tucumán, include those of the former vice-governor of the province, Dardo Francisco Molina, who was murdered during the dictatorship. The identification was carried out by the Argentine forensic anthropology team EAAF.  He was found in a common grave from which a futher 12 victims have also been identified so far.

Molina, senator and vice-governor of Tucumán under Amado Juri, was relieved of his post following the 1976 coup. He was abducted on 15 December that year by an armed group identifying themselves as members of the federal police. The task force is said to have been under the control of the late Antonio Domingo Bussi. 

His daughter, Josefina Molina, said "He didn't go to Spain like they said, they tried to make him disappear but they couldn't. Dad is here". She also reiterated her commitment to finding out the details of what happened to him and pursuing justice.

Memoria y verdad en Tucumán (Pagina/12)

Argentina: More on museum project for ESMA

Pagina/12 provides more information on the memory museum project for the ESMA site in Buenos Aires.

The curators of the place of memory will be Alejandra Naftal - herself a former detained-disappeared person - and Hernán Bisman. Naftal was one of the founders of the Memoria Abierta archive. She explains that the museum project will draw on documentary evidence as well as legal, academic, artistic, journalistic and audiovisual sources, plus testimoney from the victims and relatives. The members of the navy "never talked and never told the truth", she said.

For Naftal, sites of memory are different to articles, books or films, because they are places of "authorised" truth. "You can argue, what is the truth, right? But we are determined enough to back up what we know with documentary sources. We use the testimonies from the courts, the trial of the Juntas in 1985 and the various trials of the ESMA from recent years".

In reply to the question of who the museum is for, Naftal replies "For many people. For millions. For those outside. For young people, old people, children, Argentinians, foreigners."

Daniel Tarnopolsky, of the Instituto Espacio de la Memoria who lost numerous relatives during the dictatorship, explains that the intention is not to "reconstruct" a detention centre in the ESMA. There will be no recreating torture equipment, for example. However it may be that, for example, the photos of Víctor Basterra can be shown in the places where they were taken.

Naftal says:The ESMA is the symbolic centre for Latin America and needs to have international exhibition standards.

Tarnopolsky says:
The ESMA is the Auschwitz of the [Argentine] dictatorship.

More detail in the full article:
“El museo será para millones” (Pagina/12)

RIP Juan Gelman

I was sorry to hear of the death of renowned Argentine poet, Juan Gelman (3 May 1930 – 14 January 2014).

Gelman had a deeply personal connection to the Argentine "dirty war": like many other intellectuals, he was forced into exile. Moreover, his son and pregnant daughter-in-law were disappeared by the military regime. Much later, Gelman was able to be reunited with his granddaughter. You can read previous posts on the Gelman family here.

A beautiful tribute using his own words on the front of Pagina/12 here:

Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, fierce critic of the 'dirty war', dies aged 83 (Guardian)
Renowned Argentine poet Juan Gelman, 83, dies in Mexico (BBC)
Cinco poemas de Juan Gelman (Ñ)
El hombre que hizo hablar a las palabras más allá de la muerte (Pagina/12)

Peru: Drawing our memory

 

The Peruvian forensic anthropology institute EPAF and Vicente Cueto have initiated a projected called "Pintemos nuestra memoria" (Drawing our Memory), in which relatives of the disappeared in Peru are given the diagrams of the human body used by forensic anthropologists in their work and encourage to draw on them. Rather than using them for their original purpose of indicating wound sites, they can become a simple, portable form of commemoration for the missing person. 

Pintemos nuestra memoria

You can hear one of the participants in the project discussing his grandfather and his drawing in this video in Spanish with English subtitles:

El Salvador family reunited

Here's a good news story to end the year on.

Salvadoran Josefina Flores Osorio has been reunited with the daughter, Xiomara, she had not seen since 1984. The reunion marked the 389th case of a "disappeared" child to be successfully resolved by the tiny charity Pro Búsqueda Association for Missing Children since the conflict ended 21 years ago. 

Margarita Zamora, a Pro Búsqueda investigator, said many investigations were still hampered by the military. "The army holds important details – dates, names and places – which would help us solve many more cases as families are often too traumatised to remember. We have been asking them for years to release their files, they always say yes, but these are just words."

 It's a fascinating story and, of course, a hugely significant event for the family involved.

El Salvador mother and daughter meet 29 years after civil war abduction (Guardian)

Places of memory in Chile: Memorial in Valparaíso

This is the monument for the detained-disappeared and persons executed for political reasons of the region of Valparaíso (Monumento a los Detenidos Desaparecidos y Ejecutados políticos de la Dictadura Militar de la Región de Valparaíso), Chile's second city and major port. And, as you can see here, it also acts as a convenient seat for students of the nearby university.

The memorial was designed by a team formed of sculptor Eliana Herrera, architect Hernán Bustamante and anthropologist Javiera Bustamante, who won a public competition. 

The stone base of the memorial contains the names of 177 victims of the dictatorship between 11 September 1973 and 10 March 1990.

The top part of the memoria resembles a wave and is formed of 86 iron sheets of varying heights. The designers said that it represented the sea as a source of life and symbolised a fragment of the history of Chile. The names of the men and women were "engraved there forever to defeat forgetting". 

Memorial por desaparecidos y ejecutados (El Mercurio de Valparaíso)
Emplazado en Avda. Brasil y Rodríguez:VALPARAÍSO INAUGURA MEMORIAL EN HOMENAJE A SUS 177 VÍCTIMAS DE DERECHOS HUMANOS (ddhh.gov.cl)

Places of memory in Santiago: Monument to the disappeared

Municipal workers in Chile were striking during my visit and there was a notice on the entrance to the main cemetery in Santiago saying that it was only open for funeral services, but the guards weren't stopping people going in, so I managed a quick visit to the monument to disappeared people and executed political prisoners.

Its full name is the Memorial del Detenido Desaparecido y del Ejecutado Político (memorial for detained-disappeared people and those executed for political reasons).

At the side of the monument itself are niches, some of them empty and some with victims' names and flowers.

The main monument itself is a large, stone wall with a list of victims carved into it. As with other such walls, the effect is largely due to the sheer number of names. In the very centre is president Salvador Allende.

The memorial is topped with a quotation from Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, who you can hear reading here.

 

I always really like seeing a memorial used, actually part of the fabric of life. In this case, at the bottom of the memorial are many notes, photos, little plaques, flowers, and so on. It's a sombre site but then, it is in a graveyard. The important thing is these victims did not previously have anywhere where their families could go to mourn them and to mark their lives, and now they do, and they are acknowledged in the chief cemetery of the capital city as being part of the country's history.

Places of memory in Santiago: Londres 38

I

In a pleasant, tree-lined street in the barrio París-Londres is Londres 38, a former detention and torture centre. It was approproated by the military regime following the coup, having previously belonged to the socialist party. It was used by the DINA (secret police) as a torture and holding centre for regime opponents, at least 98 of whom died there or afterwards. In front of the building, victims' named are embedded among the cobble stones (similar to the Stolpersteine in Germany).

 Visitors are free to walk around and take photographs; they receive a plan of the building with some information or can take a guided tour.

I was initially a little surprised at the condition of the walls, but of course it makes far more sense to see it like this than artificially spruced up. You certainly get more of a sense for the suffering that took place there; although it's also really amazing to think how central the location is. Ilovechile.cl writes that the building was known for the loud classical music coming from it - pretty chilling when you realise what that music was covering up.

 Upstairs during my visit there was a small exhibition of photographs.

The building is not huge and although very interesting, it doesn't provide a great deal of background. If you're unsure of the history, think about joining a tour or read up beforehand. The site is free to enter but please consider making a donation if you visit.

Londres 38 (derechoschile.com - info from the Rettig report, in English)
Londres 38 (ilovechile.cl)

Chile: CNN interviews Manuel Contreras

To coincide with the 40th anniversary of the coup, CNN Chile interviewed the former head of the Chilean secret police (DINA), Manuel Contreras. In the interview, Contreras denies that there were human rights abuses in Villa Grimaldi; accuses former president Michelle Bachelet of lying about her own torture experiences; and says all the "disappeared" were killed in armed actions and are buried in the main cemetery (cemeterio general).

Manuel Contreras: "Los detenidos desaparecidos están en el Cementerio General" (CNN Chile)

Argentina: 30th anniversary of El Siluetazo

Nothing to make you feel old in blogging terms like doing a "30th anniversary" post and realising you did a 25th anniversary one as well...

Anyway, 21 September is the 30th anniversary of the public art event known as the Siluetazo ("big silhouette"). This was part of the Marcha de la resistencia of 1983, a huge demonstration in support of human rights and democracy which took place under the military regime. By 1983, the junta was weakening and protest was easier than it had previously been, but still, it was not a risk-free undertaking. Activists cut out life-size silhouettes to draw attention to the issue of disappeared people. The idea was simple but highly effective. The symbol has become one of the lasting icons of the dictatorship and has been referred to and re-used in various contexts (see, for example, here).

It is remembered largely through the work of photographer Eduardo Gil, and an exhibition of his work opens tomorrow at the Centro provincial de la memoria in La Plata.

The image for this post was sourced from this excellent article, published earlier this year, on the origin and impact of the Siluetazo. There are more, larger images there.

Chile: 40 years on

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the September 11 coup in Chile and there has been a predictable flurry of memory-related stories.

Amnesty International UK is hosting an updated version of photojournalist Julio Etchart's 1988 exhibition Chile's 9/11 at the Human Rights Action Centre in Shoreditch, London, on weekdays from 9-20 September (you can see some of the images here).

Hugh O'Shaughnessy recalls witnessing the coup as a journalist in Santiago.

Joyce Horman, whose husband was killed by the military regime and became the subject of the well-known film Missing, continues to fight for justice for the disappeared. An event celebrating the judges, lawyers and human rights activists who led efforts to illuminate this dark period of history will be held at the Charles Horman Truth Foundation in New York on Monday.

Meanwhile, the family of Victor Jara has filed suit in Florida under federal laws allowing legal action against human rights violators living in the United States. The former officer accused of his murder, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, moved to the United States in 1989 and became an American citizen.

Chilean judges have made an unprecedented apology for their profession's involvement in the regime. Chilean courts rejected about 5,000 cases seeking help on locating missing loved ones abducted or killed by the authorities.

Chilean president Sebastian Pinera called for those with information about the disappeared to come forward.

Reuters and AFP also consider the legacy of the dictatorship as the anniversary approaches.  The BBC features the work of muralists who defied the regime.

Argentina: Disappeared of African descent

The Buenos Aires Herald drew my attention to research being undertaken by anthropologist Pablo Cirio of the university of La Plata on the Afro-Argentine disappeared. Little attention has so far been given to this small group - certainly I've never seen anything on desaparecidos of African descent in Argentina - but Cirio has apparently already uncovered ten cases. Cirio argues that the disappearances should be seen in the context of the "historic disappearance" of the community, first from Africa and then from the official history of Argentina. He points to, for example, remarks by dictatorship-era interior minister Albano Harguindeguy about Argentina being "one of the three whitest countries in the world". The research is at an early stage, but sounds promising.

The forgotten Afro-Argentine disappeared (Buenos Aires Herald)
Estudian casos de afroargentinos víctimas de la última dictadura como parte de su "desaparición histórica" (Telam)