Louisa Reynolds /

Pz

P

36

They told the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of 
Guatemala (ODHAG), which had published the “Guatemala 
Never Again!” report on human rights violations committed 
during the armed conflict, in 1998, what they had seen. But 
even though ODHAG was sympathetic to the survivors’ 
plight, it was not carrying out exhumations at the time, so 
they turned to Famdegua, which decided to take on the 
case and requested support from the Guatemalan Forensic 
Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), which had been set up 
two years before by a group of young archaeologists from the 
University of San Carlos. 

But in those days, the foundation was desperately starved of 
resources and had so many exhumations on its hands that it 
was unable to help out. Famdegua then decided to turn to 
the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. 

In mid-1994, Argentinean anthropologists Patricia Bernardi, 
Silvana Turner and Darío Olmo went to Dos Erres 
accompanied by Aura Elena, a representative from the 
Attorney General’s Office and local justice of the peace, who 
needed to witness the exhumation in order to legally validate 
the findings.

It wasn’t hard to find the well as the guarumo branch that 
Saúl Arévalo had sunk into the well when he sat by the edge 
and silently wept for his father, had grown into a large, leafy 
tree that fed on the remains of the men, women and children 
who had been thrown into the well.

When the team reached a depth of two meters without finding 
anything, the representative from the Attorney General’s 
Office began to grow impatient and said that all they would 
ever find there would be dog bones. In the end, he left but 
the justice of the peace decided to stay and at midday a boy’s 
shirt containing a small skeleton, was unearthed.