'You're not alone': Guatemalan anthropologist offers support for unmarked graves searches
CBC
Warning: This story contains distressing details.
The head of a Guatemalan forensic anthropology group is offering his support for Indigenous communities in Canada as they investigate unmarked burials linked to residential schools.
When he was nine, Fredy Peccerelli's family fled Guatemala's civil war to New York City after his father was threatened by government death squads, but he later resolved to return.
Today, after leading searches for the war's mostly Mayan victims for 26 years, he's known as one of Guatemala's foremost experts in the field, and he's willing to share his expertise with Indigenous communities here.
"You're not alone," he said.
"Your Mayan brothers and sisters have gone through this for the last many decades searching for their loved ones."
Peccerelli is the executive director and co-founder of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), that travels the country applying a multidisciplinary victim-identification system to seek, exhume, identify and return remains.
He was struck by the detection of more than 200 suspected unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia in 2021 and felt obliged to reach out.
"I immediately thought that the First Nations could use, should use and can develop their own forensic capacity," he said.
Guatemala is a mountainous Central American country, about one-tenth the size of Ontario, situated on Mexico's southern border. Its civil war began in 1960 and ended in 1996, pitting the country's military against leftist guerilla groups.
As part of the peace process, the United Nations-backed Commission for Historical Clarification was established to seek truth and reconciliation in Guatemala.
In 1999, the commission concluded agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against Mayan groups, finding the military treated the entire Mayan population as an enemy of the state.
The commission found roughly one in five of the conflict's more than 200,000 dead were subjected to human rights violations like arbitrary execution, forced disappearance and clandestine burial.
They're known as the disappeared.