Lessons from Guatemala’s painstaking search for the disappeared

Search for and identification of remains of civil war disappeared provides hope for families, but challenges persist.

San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala – Victoria Tubin was 10 years old when her father was disappeared by the Guatemalan military. It was September 1981 – the height of the country’s 36-year armed conflict – and Sebastian Tubin Poyon was entering his town of San Juan Comalapa when he never came home. Forty years later, like thousands of Guatemalans whose relatives went missing during the war, Victoria and her family have never given up their search. “I still feel the absence of my father,” she told Al Jazeera during a June 19 commemoration of the establishment of a memorial site at a former military encampment at the town’s entrance where her father was last seen.