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

[Judi Lynn]

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.

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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.''

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