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Guatemala is recovering from
a 36-year 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
is 200,000 civilian victims.
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160,000 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
about 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 that 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 commited
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
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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
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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
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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And 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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And 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 exhume it.
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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, to our lab,
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and we begin a process of trying
to understand mainly 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
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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, of course.
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The best way to
explain this to you
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is by showing you two cases.
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The first is the case
of the military diary.
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Now this is a document
that was smuggled
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out of somewhere 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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And then you see a date.
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The 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 family's information
and their DNA,
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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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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
also matched the DNA of that family.
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And then we also noticed
that he was also 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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So 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 as well.
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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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and 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 that of a military base
called Creompaz.
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It actually means,
"to believe in peace."
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but the acronym 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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there were bodies,
there were 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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These were people who
were defenseless,
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they 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,
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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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where 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 we 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 it,
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we have physical evidence that
proves 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, we're
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).