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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 leftist 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
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, 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
are Mayan victims,
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victims that are the descendants
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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, the police, the military,
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are the ones that committed
most of the crimes.
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Now the families,
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 is they want you,
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they want everyone to know
that their loved ones did nothing wrong.
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Now, my case was that my father
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,
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; it was too painful.
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But it wasn't till 1995 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,
to look for the bodies,
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to understand what happened
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
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 doing that, though,
we're looking for the bodies.
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And these are skeletons by now,
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most of these crimes
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
the body, document it, 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,
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
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 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 then we'll compare it with the
DNA of the families, of course.
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The best way to explain this to you
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
out of somewhere in 1999.
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And what you see there
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 is 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" 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 exhumation in 2003,
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where we exhumed 220 bodies
from 53 graves 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 from Iowa State University
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and went back to Guatemala
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, he was
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
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 noticed
that he was also in the diary.
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But it was amazing to see that he was
also executed on March 29, 1984.
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So that led us to think, hmm,
how many bodies were in the grave?
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Six.
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So then we said, how many people
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,
Moises and Zoilo.
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All of them executed on the same date,
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
was the DNA of those four families
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So we went and we looked for them
and we found them.
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And we identified those six bodies
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
called CREOMPAZ.
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It actually means, "to believe in peace,"
but the acronym really means
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Regional Command Center
for Peacekeeping Operations.
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And this is where the Guatemalan military
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
like Haiti and the Congo.
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Well, we have testimony that said that
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
and about two hours after we went in,
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we found the first of 84 graves,
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,
hands tied behind their backs,
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blindfolded, all types of trauma --
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these were people who were defenseless
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,
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
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
in helicopters to an unknown location.
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Well, guess what?
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The clothing from this grave matched 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,
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,
and 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 base.
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Now, Manuel Chen was three years old.
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His mother went to the river to wash
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
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,
with anthropology, 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 doing more than that.
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We're actually providing
evidence for trials,
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like the genocide trial that happened
last year in Guatemala
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where General Ríos Montt was found guilty
of genocide and sentenced to 80 years.
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So I came here to tell you today
that this is happening everywhere --
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it's 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 and decide
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that we're not going to have
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)