It was an unplanned, serendipitous thing, but on our recent trip to Guatemala we got a chance to visit the Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG). Joel Van Dyke, who directs the Strategy of Transformation, wrote about FAFG recently.FAFG is an organization that investigates human rights violations of the civil war in Guatemala through forensic examinations. Forensic anthropologists exhume mass graves, and identify the bodies and determine the cause of death to enable possibility for criminal prosecutions to be brought against the perpetrators. FAFG has currently exhumed more than 5,000 of the 200,000 skeletal remains.

We met with the Rob, the photographer responsible for photographing all the skeletal remains and Jennifer, one of the forensic scientists responsible for assembling the skeletons and determining cause of death. There is a tremendous level of science and unbelievable tedium involved in all of this, including DNA testing. It is mindboggling. But there is also a human side that is hard to miss in all this.

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