SACRED SOIL

(Transcript)

00:00:10:00  Slug

00:00:08:00   Flute music

(Scrolling intro: White letters on black background:)

The following scenes were recorded for a projected film 

about the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.

Because of heavy rains we were unable to film an exhumation 

in the highlands where a great many massacres took place in the 1980’s.

All the scenes showing the process of exhumation and burial 

were filmed in Panabaj, near Lake Atitlan—the scene of a devastating

mudslide that took place in 2005.

00:00:33:06    ( Title)  SACRED SOIL

00:00:38:15    FADE IN PICTURE

00:00:22:25    V.O. FREDY PECCERELLI 

The FAFG is the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.  We are a scientific organization—non profit organization—that dedicates itself to the search of lost lives.

The FAFG recovers, analyses and tries to identify the people who died during the armed conflict. If anyone in Guatemala wants to look for family members, they will go to the prosecutor’s office and the prosecutor’s office will come to us, ask us to get involved in the case and then we will begin the search.  Sometimes this entails going into a community in the highlands and exhuming the bodies of a hundred people that were killed in a massacre.

00:02:09:18  Flute Music

More than half of our work is done in Quiche and a lot of that work is conducted in the Ixil area.  Nebaj was one of the hardest hit. It’s a very, very,  very,  poor, very isolated area of the country and it was completely devastated.

(Photos of Remains)

We recover remains with many machete wounds.  You’re talking true hate, you’re talking kill the enemy.  And whoever survives, make sure they are afraid.  And they were very successful.

 Other times it entails speaking to family members of a person who was forcibly disappeared in the city—to his colleagues, looking in archives, in newspapers; trying to pick up the trace of where this person was last seen and map out where he was abducted or she was abducted from and then try to pick up the trace. 

Obviously one of our goals is to provide evidence for trials.  It really shouldn’t be to bring specific people to justice or specific sides.  We believe that the evidence speaks for itself.

PHOTO

FREDY

What we do is look for lost lives.  And we use three main types of anthropology for that.  Social anthropology is applied to document the victims.  We will speak to the family members, conduct community meetings, and gather information about each victim.  This is the most important part at the very beginning because we need to know who we are

looking for.  This is because at some point we will have to seek documents that prove their existence before we can prove their death.  The second part would be archeology.  And doing archeology is basically the recovery of the bodies.  The archeologists at the Foundation will search for, hopefully find, excavate, clean and eventually exhume the remains from where they were buried or from where they lie.  After that we will take the remains back to the office in Guatemala City where the physical anthropologists will take over.  Here we will analyze the remains and try to establish the biological profile which entails determining sex, age, stature, types of trauma the person might have suffered during their life—illnesses, pathologies, things that will show up on the bone and this will allow us to reconstruct a biological profile of the victim that we can later compare to the biological profile that was provided by the social anthropologist at the very beginning.

INTERVIEW WITH TECHNICIAN  (in Spanish, sub-titled in English)

These are the bones of a female from 39 to 49 years of age.  From what we can see, the woman had evidence of births. She had many children.  In this area we can observe the marks of childbirth, as well as in this area.  In all the ribs we have here, all that is the thorax, we have trauma leading to death.  All these broken ribs are from trauma leading to death.  From number one to number ten on the left side.  They are contusions. The same as on the right side.  Everything we see here are lesions leading to death.  Where the lesions went through the bones, they affected vital organs; the heart, the kidneys… And so, this was the cause of death.  As I said, it’s not just one rib, but almost all the ribs that have contusions.  Here in this one, we can see perfectly well that the rib is totally broken.  This goes here.  The blow was so strong that it broke the rib in two. 

FREDY

By identifying the victims, we will give them dignity that was taken away from them, their families, and their communities as well.  … We can provide evidence of the crimes by establishing the cause of death and thirdly that we can properly document history through science, because in Guatemala, unfortunately, not many people—still today—know what happened or care what happened.  And from the 160,000 victims that are known dead we have only recovered about 5,000.  Recovering a thousand bodies a year, that’s another 35 years of work.  

One of the..the three main objectives of the foundation are to provide dignity through the identification of the victims.

EXT.ROOF OF FAFG- INTERVIEW WITH FAMILY MEMBER (In Spanish with English subtitles)

After twenty years they found the remains.  On the one hand it is a sin, but at the same time, we thank God first of all and the Foundation which accomplished all this work.  Even if it is only the bones, we know they are our friends and relatives that we are burying.  Since it is being done legally, when we bury them, we will have a death certificate.  Because it has been difficult in various things regarding certain documents and certain papers.  It has been difficult for us.  When we have them legally, we can obtain certain documents pertaining to the death certificate. We will have them.  We won’t have problems then.

FREDY

That dignity will be seen, ah, when the family members can walk through the plaza of their town with their dead loved one on their shoulders for the whole town to see and to finally lay this person to rest in a cemetery, a legal cemetery, conduct proper funerary customs, and when they have a specific place to take flowers to.  It’s very important for Mayan communities to have proper communication between the dead and the living.  With all these graves and all of these killings in the country the bodies that were hidden or were buried illegally or wrongly all over the country, that very important communication between the dead and the living is not proper.  It exists, but it is not the way it should be.  So, being able to give the remains back to the families reestablishes that communication between the dead and the living and that’s part of the dignity that we speak of.

The Foundation has evolved now, quite a bit. We are not only focusing on investigations that are directly related to the conflict. We realize that what we know, our experience can serve other purposes. This is the community of Panabaj in Santiago Atitlan, Solola, in Guatemala.  In this case we re trying to recover the victims that were buried in a mudslide that occurred on October 5^th, 2005 during tropical storm Stan.  On that night, trees and big boulders came crashing down the mountain and covered around 50 houses that were in this area.  The total area here, east of the buildings is 37,242 feet.  If the depth is.. the average depth is about 3 meters, we are talking about over 111 thousand cubic meters of soil that have to be removed.  It’s a very, very big undertaking.

What’s happening now is that we are searching for these victims. The procedure is basically the same. The social anthropologist will speak to the family, try to establish who the boy was, his height, color of his hair and since this occurred only thirteen months ago, a short time ago, we were expecting that the bodies would have quite a bit of flesh on them.  And we were prepared so we bought a refrigerated 48 foot container to store the bodies under cool temperature so they wouldn’t decompose any further.  We established a three-table morgue.  We contacted a forensic pathologist and we fortunately have been able to find the first one who is a 14 year old boy… And the only reason we were able to find this boy was because his father saw him when the mud swept him away and he got pushed into a hole in the ground. So we dug with the normal archeological techniques, found his hole and began to excavate the hole further down and we umm.. we found the boy.  He was covered by a door.  And the imprint of his leg was left on the door. The body that we had here yesterday was very well preserved.. only the left foot was saponified or badly decomposed that it disarticulated.  The rest of the body was very well preserved.  The internal organs were all there.  The hair was very well preserved.  And so we conducted an autopsy on the body.  We found aaah, dirt, mud and rocks in the boy’s throat and some small rocks and mud in his stomach. Umm   This is all very consistent with the fact that this boy asphyxiated when the mud engulfed him basically, covered him.  
 We put all the information together.  Information gathered by the social anthropologists, the archeologists, the physical anthropologists and in this case the forensic doctor and there was absolutely everything the family told us, from his height, his age, the state of his teeth, and the lack of any ante-mortem trauma.  Everything coincided with what they said so we identified him as Cruz Ixbalam.

EXT.MORGUE ending with crucifix.

FREDY

There’s many many difficulties.  For example, one of the things that worries us the most is that the longer we wait, a lot of the investigations we carry out were… are a result of crimes that were committed 25 years ago.  A long time has passed. People’s memories fade.  Sometimes the location of the graves is lost.  Sometimes the witnesses or the family members are lost.  They die, because it happened so long ago.  That’s a very big obstacle and that’s why we insist on conducting more and more investigations every year because we have waited too long.  Obviously, fear is a big obstacle.  Although a quarter of a century has passed… a lot of people in the communities are still very, very  afraid. They were told, if they ever told anyone about what happened, the violence would come back.  And they believe it because they’ve lived it.  And it is not the first cycle of killings that the Mayan indigenous people have gone through so…. When they finally come to us for… for an investigation of this sort, it takes a lot of courage and it takes a lot of trust on their behalf in us.

When we go into a community, we will revisit several times and get to know the key people in the community or witnesses or family members. The trust is established between the dead, the living and the foundation.  Ceremonies are carried out so that the dead don’t harm us and allow us to find them, give us the information they have and this is asked by us and by the family members.  Being in those ceremonies, together, from the very beginning, begins to establish that trust.  Secondly, it’s treating them as equals.  We are there for them.  This process is not ours. .  Our organization is here to help them search for their family members. And eventually when we finally touch the remains of their family members, that’s very important.  When we move that sacred soil, because the soil—it’s always sacred—but when the family’s blood spills on it, there have to be certain rituals that have to be carried out and not just anyone can do this.  So it’s a process, but eventually they trust us because we live with them, they work side by side with us a lot of the time. We don’t try to impose any clinical psychology on victims that have been dealing with this for the last 25 years.  And we also believe that when someone decides to do this, its reliving the event all over again so we relive it with them because when we hear them speak and then we see the atrocities that were committed, you can’t help but to relive it with them.  So all of that put together is what allows the families, the communities, to trust us.

WIDE SHOTS OF FIELD WORK

FREDY

There is so much work to do in Guatemala that with the obstacles we have always had, we just have to keep going.  Lack of funding, death threats, difficult sites, witnesses dying, the lack of a DNA lab.  If we stop to have all the conditions proper, we would never do anything in Guatemala. 

People in these communities have been going through this for 25 years and we are—the work we do in this entire process is the first sign of hope for them and for us.  It’s not only for them.  It’s for us as well.  It’s for my children, and I truly believe that the way to change Guatemala is to discover and uncover its past.  We’ve only now begun to do this.  We cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated anymore. It has to stop somewhere.

Phone messages, they’ve broken into my house twice, they have shot at my house. My  brother and my sister have been, and my brother-in-law, have been held at gunpoint and given messages to me and to the organization.  It’s difficult.  We all have body guards that were assigned to us by the government or the national civil police and we don’t even know if they could be informers. It’s a very difficult situation to be in but the people who are doing this have to understand that this is not one man’s effort or one organization’s effort.  This is thousands of communities coming together, finding, requesting for their rights to be respected, for their relatives to be exhumed.  And they just won’t take no for an answer anymore.  So this is a process that has gained strength. It is a process that we don’t control.  Doing something to one of us or to the organization is not going to stop this.  We know that, and that gives us some courage.

It’s.. it’s not easy in many ways. It’s not easy emotionally; it’s not easy because of the death threats.  It is by far though, the most gratifying thing in the world.  I couldn’t think of doing anything else.

W.S.FIELD 

00:21:05:08  Flute Music

00:21:08:21 SCROLLING POSTSCRIPT

July 2008

With the DNA Laboratory now established, Mr. Peccerelli plans a national outreach to families of victims of the internal armed conflict, to create a database holding facts and oral tissue samples collected from family members.  This database will represent the genetic identity of all Guatemalans and will facilitate reliable identification of the victims.

This technology will also be a useful tool in supporting criminal investigations and humanitarian investigations in cases of natural disasters.

At present, Mr. Peccerelli is negotiating with the National Prosecutor’s Office of Guatemala to carry out this project.  He hopes for the collaboration of the respective authorities so that after three decades, the dream of thousands of Guatemala families of recovering the remains of their loved ones will be realized.

Photographed, Directed and Edited

                     By

      Olivia Lucia Carrescia

     Produced by

Olivia Lucia Carrescia

            And

Holly Martin Montufar

Many thanks to the people of Panabaj, Santiago Atitlan, Solola and Chicoy Alto, Patzun, Chimaltenango for allowing us to document their stories.

Photographs courtesy of

Jonathan Moller

Miguel Dewever-Plana

Olivia L. Carrescia

Sacred ceremony recorded in 2007 at El Triunfo, Choatalum, San Martin Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango, Guatemala.

Courtesy Flavio Montufar.

Barro flute a and b

Carlos Periquez

@1994 Sonoton

@OLC Productions 2008