Digging up Truth in Guatemala. VICTOR BLUE

ESTRELLA POLAR: WAR CRIMES EXHUMED, James Victor Blue
Photos by Victor James Blue/ WPN

We stop along the trail behind the pack mules that will be carrying out skeletons. When Moncho, a social anthropologist, adjusts his headphones, I ask him what he’s listening to. "Cannibal Corpse." Perfect.

I am traveling with a team from the Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation way the hell up in Ixil Maya territory. We are going to the tiny community of Estrella Polar to exhume the mass grave of a massacre committed by the Guatemalan Army there 20 years ago in which 96 people were killed. It was a textbook example of the genocide that took place in Guatemala during the 36-year civil war, but because of the continued fear and impunity in Guatemala, the Foundation had been unable to exhume this site, one of the most important and well documented, since the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords. Finally a couple months ago permission was granted and even though it was the rainy season, a bad time to undertake a massive exhumation, the decision was made to press on.

I met up with the team after a 6 hour bus ride to Nebaj, the capital of the Ixil Mayan people in highland Quiche Guatemala. It consisted of five forensic anthropologists, two archaeologists, and three social anthropologists. They spent an hour or so in the office of the local authorities, signing the official papers legally enabling them to carry out their work. From there we went straight to a series of sketchy bars and cantinas, where I was introduced to the almost unquenchable thirst of the forensic anthropologists. I suspect it comes from uncovering the dirty state secrets of the genocide that took place here.

The next day we left for the exhumation, a 4-hour drive on winding dirt roads through the verdant green highlands, eventually descending into the lower and more jungle like coffee growing zone. Both pickups successfully crossed the rain-swollen river, after carrying a ton of equipment across a swinging hammock bridge.

We drove for another 30 minutes taking in the scenery, when the driver of a big truck stopped us on the road to tell us our friends ahead had been in an accident. We drove on, and found all the occupants standing on the road, looking down at the lost pickup, which had gone over a ravine. Alvaro, better known as “Tio” or uncle, had been driving when the road under the wheels crumbled away. The trucked flipped one and a half times, hit a tree and came to rest about a hundred fifty feet down. Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt, although everyone was well shaken. It took a couple hours to get the truck out with a backhoe. We cranked it up and drove it to the town of Chel, all the while billowing white smoke.

By early evening we made it to the camp, about a 15-minutes hike from the exhumation site. We had just put our tents up when a mean thunderstorm hit, and we began the nightly game of keeping the water out of our stuff.

The village of Estrella Polar sits at the foot of a mountain string. It is an immensely poor village, the sight of a land invasion years ago; the current residents are not the survivors of the victims. In fact, they oppose the exhumation, adding to the tension at the site.

Thursday we descended to Estrella with a large group of relatives of victims of the massacre who had come from different parts of Guatemala where they had been displaced by the war.

Next to a concrete monument that marked the edge of the grave they performed a Mayan ceremony to ask for guidance and blessings for the work to be performed, and for the souls of their loved ones beneath. They burned candles and pine needles, and chanted prayers.

The social anthropologists as well as representatives of the civil society groups that had requested the exhumation gave a talk about the exhumation process, what to expect, etc. We would end up wishing someone would have told us a little better what to expect ourselves.



On Friday the actual dig began.

On March 22, back in 1982, only days after Efrain Rios Montt had taken power in a coup and initiated his scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign, soldiers arrived in the early morning at Estrella Polar. They forced all the men from the village into the small Catholic church. There they locked them inside and tossed in grenades, then finished off the survivors with bullets to the head. Now, 23 years later, the men who had come to look for their lost fathers and brothers threw themselves into the dig. When one showed even a hint of tiring, another came along behind him, took over and swung one of the pickaxes used to break up the dark earth. It was only an hour or so until they encountered the first bone.

The digging continued for the next couple days as the anthropologists and the family members worked to define the edges of the grave and locate the cluster of remains. All the while, the social anthropologists conducted interviews of the survivors and family members, looking for clues that would help identify the remains they would uncover.



By Sunday I had put down my cameras for most of the day and dropped myself into the hole to help unload buckets and buckets of earth. Once the level of the remains was determined we worked to widen the space, so they could work around the bones.

Alan, the head of the anthropology lab at the Foundation, was concerned we would not find the main group of remains, but as the work went on, it became clear that they were right under us.

The Ixil women descended each day with lunch for us and two police officers dispatched from a nearby town to provide security for the dig and the anthropologists, not a hollow gesture considering the number of death threats the Foundation receives each year for their delicate work.

At night we returned to the camp, which we shared with ECAP, an NGO that provides psychological accompaniment to the families during the exhumation process.

All went fine until late Monday. The grave had been widened, and the anthropologists had begun to work in earnest, preparing to exhume the first of the 17 bodies they had found. The remainder of the 96 lay beneath them.



The work had progressed well all day, when storm clouds began to gather. As we had rigged up a huge tarp to cover the site, no one was particularly worried when the first of the rain began to fall. The rain became fiercer, and started to run in gullies down the hill from the village. A flash flood ensued, and the grave was filled with water in minutes.

Inside of 10 minutes, the whole site was a lake, with the 17 exposed skeletons reburied under water and mud. Everyone was in shock, heartbroken. It was bad enough that in a couple of minutes, the Foundation had suddenly lost everything they had worked for the in last week, including one of their pickups. Even worse was having to turn to the family members and explain to them that the exhumation could not continue, that it would have to be suspended until the dry season at least.

All had waited for over 20 years for this moment. To bury their loved ones, to light candles for them, to visit them in their local cemetery. But even more important, to have them, to end the doubt, to reclaim them from their assassins and try and release all the years of pain and fear through the ritual of their burial. Only to have it all washed away in a few minutes. Quietly they helped cover the grave back over, to wait for another day.

c James Victor Blue

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