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 / The long road to justice

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When they reached eight meters they found eight male 
skeletons but they were forced to halt their work as the soil 
was too saturated with rainwater, and the sides of the well 
could collapse any minute, burying the anthropologists and 
the peasants who were assisting them. They had to wait until 
the rainy season was over and continue the exhumation the 
following year. By June, a total of 162 bodies had been found. 

Patricia Bernardi had a vast experience in the exhumation 
of massacre sites and graves thought to contain the remains 
of missing people. She had exhumed the remains of the 
disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War and the Pinochet 
dictatorship in Chile, as well as the 900 victims of the El 
Mozote massacre committed by the Salvadoran army in 
1981. However, she says that she Dos Erres case shocked her 
above all others due to the huge number of infants that were 
found in the well.

A total of 162 skeletons were found: 64 men, 24 women, 
and 74 children, as well as the tiny skeletons of two unborn 
fetuses that were slain in their mothers’ wombs before they 
were even born. They embodied the future of Dos Erres, 
stifled forever in the depths of the Arévalo well. 

The roots of the guarumo tree had to be painstakingly 
extricated from the heap of bones, some bones crumbled 
as they had been eaten away by jejenes, a variety of tiny 
mosquitoes, and the children’s remains were fragile by nature, 
“like eggshells”, says Bernardi, as their bones were not yet 
fully developed. All of this made the task of disentangling the 
mass of femurs, skulls, shinbones and tiny bone fragments 
extremely hard and painstaking work.  

The approximate age of the victims was established based on 
their dental structure, whereas clothing was the best clue to