Guatemala forms commission to search for ‘disappeared’ people

President-Elect Bernardo Arevalo listens to a question during a press conference in Guatemala City, Monday, Aug. 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Moisés Castillo)

Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo announced the creation of a new mechanism on Friday to search for 45,000 people who were “disappeared” in the country’s 36-year civil war.

The government presented the “Humanitarian Search Mechanism for People Disappeared during the Internal Armed Conflict,” a group combining public institutions and humanitarian organizations.

“We are starting on the path to find those among us who are missing, to heal an open historical wound,” the Arevalo said at an event in the Palace of Culture.

The Guatemalan civil war started in 1960 and came to a close in December 1996 with the signing of a peace deal between the government and left-wing guerrilla groups.

Over 200,000 were killed or disappeared, the majority due to the Guatemalan military or allied-paramilitary forces.

Creating the search mechanism, Arevalo said, will help “guarantee the right to truth, memory, and reparations.”

The leader clarified that it “doesn’t substitute the application of justice,” stressing that its role is limited to helping families locate their missing loved ones.

Pablo Estrada, the president of the Association of Family Members of Detained and Disappeared people in Guatemala (FAMDEGUA) said the new group represents “a small, brilliant light” after decades of searching for people “whose only crime was thinking differently.”

In recent decades, Estrada said his organization pushed for “over 160 exhumation processes,” leading to the recovery of 1,800 bone fragments of “victims of state terrorism,” though only 30 per cent were ultimately identified and returned to their families.

After denouncing the risks of searching for disappeared people, Estrada expressed hope that the mechanism “will have access to different military zones, brigades, outposts, and sites” previously closed to investigators despite “well-founded complaints” that they contain “clandestine cemeteries.”

One of the bases containing clandestine graves is an ex-military zone in the northern department of Alta Verapaz, one of several areas where “we have found not one but hundreds of people,” Estrada said.