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Guatemala is recovering from[br]a 36-year armed conflict.

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A conflict that was fought[br]during the Cold War.

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It was really just [br]a small leftist insurgency

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and a devastating response by the state.

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What we have as a result[br]is 200,000 civilian victims,

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160,000 of those[br]killed in the communities:

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small children, men, women, [br]the elderly even.

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And then we have [br]about 40,000 others, the missing,

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the ones we're still looking for today.

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We call them the Desaparecidos.

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Now, 83 percent of the victims [br]are Mayan victims,

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victims that are the descendants

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of the original inhabitants of [br]Central America.

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And only about 17 percent are of [br]European descent.

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But the most important thing here is that

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the very people who are supposed to [br]defend us, the police, the military,

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are the ones that committed[br]most of the crimes.

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Now the families,[br]they want information.

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They want to know what happened.

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They want the bodies of their loved ones.

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But most of all,[br]what they want is they want you,

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they want everyone to know[br]that their loved ones did nothing wrong.

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Now, my case was that my father[br]received death threats in 1980.

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And we left.

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We left Guatemala and we came here.

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So I grew up in New York,

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I grew up in Brooklyn as a matter of fact,[br]and I went to New Utrecht High School

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and I graduated from Brooklyn College.

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The only thing was that

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I really didn't know what [br]was happening in Guatemala.

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I didn't care for it; it was too painful.

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But it wasn't till 1995 that I decided[br]to do something about it.

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So I went back.

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I went back to Guatemala, [br]to look for the bodies,

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to understand what happened[br]and to look for part of myself as well.

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The way we work is that[br]we give people information.

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We talk to the family members[br]and we let them choose.

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We let them decide to tell[br]us the stories,

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to tell us what they saw,

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to tell us about their loved ones.

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And even more important,

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we let them choose to[br]give us a piece of themselves.

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A piece, an essence, of who they are.

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And that DNA is what we're [br]going to compare

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to the DNA that comes[br]from the skeletons.

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While we're doing that, though,[br]we're looking for the bodies.

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And these are skeletons by now,

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most of these crimes [br]happened 32 years ago.

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When we find the grave,

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we take out the dirt and eventually clean [br]the body, document it, and exhume it.

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We literally bring the [br]skeleton out of the ground.

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Once we have those bodies, though,[br]we take them back to the city, to our lab,

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and we begin a process of trying[br]to understand mainly two things:[br]

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One is how people died.

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So here you see a gunshot[br]wound to the back of the head

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or a machete wound, for example.

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The other thing we want to understand[br]is who they are.

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Whether it's a baby,

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or an adult.

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Whether it's a woman or a man.

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But when we're done[br]with that analysis

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what we'll do is we'll take a small [br]fragment of the bone

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and we'll extract DNA from it.

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We'll take that DNA

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and then we'll compare it with the[br]DNA of the families, of course.

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The best way to explain this to you[br]is by showing you two cases.

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The first is the case [br]of the military diary.

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Now this is a document that was smuggled[br]out of somewhere in 1999.

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And what you see there[br]is the state following individuals,

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people that, like you, [br]wanted to change their country,

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and they jotted everything down.

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And one of the things that they wrote [br]down is when they executed them.

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Inside that yellow rectangle, [br]you see a code,

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it's a secret code: 300.

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And then you see a date.

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The 300 means "executed" and the date [br]means when they were executed.

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Now that's going to come[br]into play in a second.

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What we did is we conducted[br]an exhumation in 2003,

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where we exhumed 220 bodies[br]from 53 graves in a military base.

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Grave 9, though, matched the family[br]of Sergio Saul Linares.

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Now Sergio was a professor[br]at the university.

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He graduted from Iowa State University

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and went back to Guatemala[br]to change his country.

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And he was captured on [br]February 23, 1984.

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And if you can see there, he was [br]executed on March 29, 1984,

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which was incredible.

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We had the body, we had the family's [br]information and their DNA,

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and now we have documents[br]that told us exactly what happened.

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But most important is about[br]two weeks later,

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we go another hit, another match

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from the same grave to Amancio Villatoro.

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The DNA of that body[br]also matched the DNA of that family.

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And then we noticed[br]that he was also in the diary.

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But it was amazing to see that he was [br]also executed on March 29, 1984.

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So that led us to think, hmm, [br]how many bodies were in the grave?

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Six.

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So then we said, how many people[br]were executed on March 29, 1984?

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That's right, six as well.

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So we have Juan de Dios, Hugo,[br]Moises and Zoilo.

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All of them executed on the same date, [br]all captured at different locations

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and at different moments.

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All put in that grave.

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The only thing we needed now[br]was the DNA of those four families

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So we went and we looked for them[br]and we found them.

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And we identified those six bodies[br]and gave them back to the families.

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The other case I want to tell you about

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is that of a military base [br]called CREOMPAZ.

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It actually means, "to believe in peace,"[br]but the acronym really means

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Regional Command Center[br]for Peacekeeping Operations.

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And this is where the Guatemalan military[br]trains peacekeepers from other countries,

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the ones that serve with the U.N.

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and go to countries[br]like Haiti and the Congo.

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Well, we have testimony that said that[br]within this military base,

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there were bodies, there were graves.

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So we went in there with a search warrant[br]and about two hours after we went in,

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we found the first of 84 graves, [br]a total of 533 bodies.

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Now, if you think about that,

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peacekeepers being trained[br]on top of bodies.

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It's very ironic.

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But the bodies -- face down, most of them,[br]hands tied behind their backs,

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blindfolded, all types of trauma --

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these were people who were defenseless[br]who were being executed.

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People that 533 families are looking for.

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So we're going to focus on Grave 15.

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Grave 15, what we noticed,[br]was a grave full of women and children,

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63 of them.

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And that immediately made us think,

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my goodness, where is there[br]a case like this?

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When I got to Guatemala in 1995,

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I heard of a case of a massacre[br]that happened on May 14, 1982,

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where the army came in, killed the men,

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and took the women and children [br]in helicopters to an unknown location.

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Well, guess what?

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The clothing from this grave matched the [br]clothing from the region

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where these people were taken from,

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where these women and children [br]were taken from.

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So we conducted some DNA analysis,[br]and guess what?

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We identified Martina Rojas [br]and Manuel Chen.

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Both of them disappeared in that case,[br]and now we could prove it.

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We have physical evidence that[br]proves that this happened

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and that those people [br]were taken to this base.

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Now, Manuel Chen was three years old.

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His mother went to the river to wash [br]clothes, and she left him with a neighbor.

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That's when the army came

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and that's when he was taken away in [br]a helicopter and never seen again

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until we found him in Grave 15.

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So now with science, with archaeology, [br]with anthropology, with genetics,

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what we're doing is, we're[br]giving a voice to the voiceless.

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But we're doing more than that.

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We're actually providing [br]evidence for trials,

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like the genocide trial that happened [br]last year in Guatemala

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where General Ríos Montt was found guilty[br]of genocide and sentenced to 80 years.

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So I came here to tell you today[br]that this is happening everywhere --

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it's happening in Mexico[br]right in front of us today --

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and we can't let it go on anymore.

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We have to now come together and decide

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that we're not going to have [br]any more missing.

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So no more missing, guys.

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Okay? No more missing.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)