Guatemala hopes DNA lab can unravel mystery of the `disappeared'

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Miami Herald

Posted on Friday, 10.31.08
Guatemala hopes DNA lab can unravel mystery of the `disappeared'
Guatemala opens a DNA laboratory to aid in the search for an estimated 45,000 Guatemalans who went missing during that country's 36-year civil war.

Photos BY EZRA FIESER
Special to The Miami Herald
GUATEMALA CITY -- Twelve years after Central America's longest civil war ended, Guatemalan anthropologists will soon open a DNA laboratory to identify tens of thousands of bodies of people who were killed.

The lab, eight years and $1.85 million in the making, is dedicated to the search for an estimated 45,000 Guatemalans who disappeared during the 36-year war. Drawing on technology used to identify victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York, the lab will match DNA from bones of unidentified corpses with DNA of blood relatives of victims.

~snip~
Guatemala's will be the second private lab in Latin America devoted to the search for the disappeared. An Argentine group earlier this year opened a lab to search for victims of that country's ''Dirty War.'' The disappeared, or desaparecidos in Spanish, is shorthand for the thousands of victims in Central and South American wars who were abducted by state forces, sometimes tortured, and later killed.

In Guatemala, many of the disappeared were activists, union organizers, students and intellectuals who were labeled political subversives and communists by the military and national police. Taken from their homes or snatched off the street and killed, their bodies were thrown into mass graves or buried in the city cemetery, marked as ```XX.''




Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/416/story/750206.html

[uppityperson]

1. k&r for the disappeared and Rigoberta Menchu

[DBoon]

2. Efrain Rios Monte was a friend of Ronald Reagan

he was an evangelical christian wide wide support from the US government and the US right wing.

According to Wikipedia:

Ríos Montt is best known outside Guatemala for heading a military regime (1982–1983) that was responsible in some of the worst atrocities of Guatemala's 36-year civil war. The war ended with a peace treaty in 1996. The civil war pitted left-wing rebel groups against the army, with huge numbers of Mayan campesinos caught in the crossfire. At least 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the conflict, making it one of Latin America's most violent wars in modern history.

...


Given Ríos Montt's staunch anticommunism and ties to the United States, the Reagan administration continued to support the general and his regime, paying a visit to Guatemala City in December 1982. <1> During a meeting with Ríos Montt on December 4, Reagan declared: "President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. ... I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice."1

Reagan later agreed, in January 1983, to sell Guatemala millions of dollars worth of helicopter spare parts, a decision that did not require approval from Congress. In turn, Guatemala was eager to resurrect the Central American Defense Council, defunct since 1969, in order to join forces with the right-wing governments of El Salvador and Honduras in retaliations against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Now what was that story about Obama and Ayers again?

[dipsydoodle]

3. K&R

.

[gratuitous]

4. Check John Negroponte's desk

I hear the desk supports are made from real human leg bones. At least, that's what some people are saying.