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Guatemala's recovering from
a 36-year-old armed conflict.
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A conflict that was fought
during the Cold War.
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It was really just a small
lefitst insurgency
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and a devastating response
by the state.
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What we have as a result
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is 200,000 civilian victims.
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And 60,000 of those
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--killed in the communities:
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small children, men, women
the elderly even.
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And then we have 40,000 others,
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the missing, 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
are Mayan victims
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--victims who are the descendents
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of the original inhabitants
of Central America.
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and only about 17 percent
are of 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 defend us,
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the police, the military,
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are the ones that commit
most of the crimes.
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Now the families,
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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, what they want
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is they want you, they want
everyone to know
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that their loved ones
did nothing wrong.
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Now my case was that my father
received 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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Brooklyn as a matter of fact.
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I went to ( ) 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
was happening in Guatemala.
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I didn't care for it,
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it was too painful.
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But it wasn't 'till 1995
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that I decided to do
something about it.
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So I went back.
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I went back to Guatemala,
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to look for the bodies.
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to understand what happened
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and to look for part of
myself as well.
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The way we work is that
we give people information,
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we talk to the family members
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and we let them choose.
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We let them decide to tell
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
give us a piece of themselves.
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A piece, an essence, of who they are.
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That DNA is what we're going
to compare
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to the DNA that comes
from the skeletons.
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While we're going that, though
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we're looking for the bodies.
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These are skeletons by now,
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most of these crimes
happend 32 years ago.
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When we find the grave,
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we take out the dirt,
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and eventually clean the
body, document it,
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And then we literally bring
the skeleton out of the ground.
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Once we have those bodies, though
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we take them back to the city,
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to our lab
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and we begin a process of
trying to understand two things:
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one is, how people died.
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So here you see a
gunshot 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, though
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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
with that analysis
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what we'll do is
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we'll take a small 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 we'll compare it with
the DNA of the families.
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The best way of explaining
this to you
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is to show you two cases.
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The first is the case
of the military diary.
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This is a document that
was smuggled out of somewhere
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in 1999.
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And what you see there
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is the state following individuals,
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people that, like you,
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 down was
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when they executed them.
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Inside that yellow rectangle,
you see a code
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it's a secret code:300.
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Then you see a date.
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300 means executed
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and the date means
when they were executed.
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Now that's going to come
into play in a second.
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What we did is we conducted
an excavation in 2003,
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where we exhumed 220 bodies
from 53 graves
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in a military base.
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Grave 9, though, matched the family
of Sergio Saul Linares
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Now Sergio was a professor
at the university,
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he graduted Ohio State University
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and went back to Guatamela
to change his country.
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And he was captured on
February 23, 1984.
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And if you can see there,
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he was executed on March 29, 1984.
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Which was incredible,
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we had the body
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we had the families information
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and now we have documents
that told us exactly what happened
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But most important is about
two weeks later,
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another hit, another match.
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from the same grave to
Amancio Villatoro.
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The DNA of that body
also matched the DNA of that family
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And then we also noticed
that he was in the diary,
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but it was also amazing
to see
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that he was also executed
on March 29, 1984.
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That led us to think,
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"hmm, how many bodies were
in the grave?"
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Six.
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So then we said,
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"how many people were executed
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on March 29, 1984?"
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That's right, six.
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So we have Juan (), Hugo,
Moises and Solo
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All of them executed
on the same date,
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all captured at different locations,
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at different moments,
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all put in that grave
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the only thing we needed now
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was the DNA of those four families
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So we went and we
looked for them,
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we found them
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and we identified those six bodies.
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and have them back
to the families.
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The other case I want
to tell you about
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is of a military base
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called Creompaz.
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It actually means,
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"believe in peace"
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but it really means
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regional command center
for peacekeeping operations.
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And this is where the Guatamalen military
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trains peacekeepers
from other countries,
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the ones that serve with the UN
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and go to countries like
Haiti and the Congo,
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well, we have testimony
that said that
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within this military base,
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those bodies, those graves
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So we went in there
with a search warrant
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and two hours after we went in
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we found the first of 84 graves
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a total of 533 bodies.
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Now if you think about that,
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peacekeepers being trained
on top of bodies.
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It's very ironic.
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But the bodies, face down, most of them
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hands tied behind their backs
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blindfolded, all types of trauma
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people who were defenseless
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they were being executed
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People that 533 families
were looking for.
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We're going to focus on grave 15.
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15, as we noticed,
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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
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
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that happened on May 14, 1982
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when the army came in,
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killed the men,
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and took the women
and children in helicopters.
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to an unknown location
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Well, guess what?
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the clothing from this grave
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matched the clothing from
the clothing from the region
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where these people
were taken from,
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where these women
and children were taken from
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so conducted some DNA analysis
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and guess what?
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we identified Martina Rojas and
Manuel chen
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both of them disappeared in that case
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now we could prove,
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and we have physical evidence
that proves
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that this happened
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and that those people
were taken to this space.
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Now Manuel Chen was
3-years-old
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his mother went to
the river to wash clothes,
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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 a helicopter
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and never seen again
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until we found him in Grave 15.
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So now with science,
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with archeology, with anthropology
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with genetics,
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what we're doing is
giving a voice to the voiceless
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But we're going more than that
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We're actually providing evidence
for trials
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like the genocide trial
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that happened last year in Guatemala
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where General Rios Montes
was found guilty
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of genocide and sentenced
to 80 years.
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So, I came here to
tell you today
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that this is happeninig everywhere
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this has happening
in Mexico 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
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and decide that we're
not going to have anymore 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).