The Bones of Guatemala’s Disappeared

The Bones of Guatemala’s Disappeared
by Anna-Cat Brigida

Two men carry a casket uphill in Santa Cruz, a predominantly Mayan rural town in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, 125 miles north of the capital. They are followed by a group of women wearing long patterned skirts and traditional huipil shirts.

They are on their way to pay their respects to Domingo Mo, a father and husband who died at the age of 32. After more than three decades buried in a mass grave dating back to the country’s civil war, the skeleton inside the casket no longer bears his likeness. Mo would have been 66 today.

Domingo Mo was one of more than 40,000 Guatemalans who disappeared during the country’s brutal civil war that was fought between the government and rebel leftist groups. More than 200,000 people—most of them indigenous Maya—were killed during the conflict, which ended in 1996.

. . .

“We do this work uncovering what happened in the past for the people who live today,” said Jose Suasnavar, the assistant director of Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation. “But we also do it because we want to prevent (these atrocities) in the future. If the human brutality of actions like these are not known, we are destined to repeat them.”

More;
http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2016/the-bones-of-guatemala/