Guatemala Turns To DNA To Help Solve War
Crimes
Guatemala
(Reuters) - Guatemala opened its first DNA
testing lab on Wednesday hoping that genetic
fingerprinting will help solve decades-old
civil war crimes as well as more recent
murders.
Guatemala's Forensic Anthropology Foundation
opened the $1.5 million laboratory funded by
international donations to identify victims
excavated from hundreds of mass graves from
the 1960-1996 civil war.
More than a quarter million people -- mostly
Mayan villagers -- were killed or
disappeared during the civil war that pitted
successive right-wing governments against
leftist guerrillas.
A U.N.-backed truth Commission found that
Guatemalan security forces committed more
than 90 percent of the killings but only a
few officials have been tried for war
crimes.
"This work will allow the families of the
victims to answer the questions we have:
what happened in Guatemala, who was
responsible, and how can we bring them to
justice?" said Julio Solorzano, desperate to
find out what happened to his mother who
disappeared in December 1980 after being
picked up by military police.
Solorzano gave his own DNA sample with an
oral swab which will go into a database of
victims' family members to be matched with
samples from thousands of bodies exhumed by
anthropologists.
While the bulk of the work will focus on
past crimes, Guatemalan authorities are
eager to use the lab to aid the country's
ailing justice system, which only manages to
prosecute 2 percent of the 6,000 murders
committed each year.
Since the end of the war, Guatemala's
population of 13 million has been overrun
with violence by youth gangs and Mexican
cartels increasingly using Central America
as a corridor to smuggle drugs north to the
United States. |
