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Exhumed bones may offer clues to Guatemala's `disappeared'
Working in a shabby public cemetery, anthropologists are pulling skeletons from an enormous well, hoping the bones will provide clues to what happened to thousands of ``disappeared'' people during the longest and bloodiest Central American civil war.
In what looks like a giant crime scene, the anthropologists -- from the Foundation of Forensic Anthropology of Guatemala, a private group founded in 1994 -- are sifting skulls, femurs and ribs to find signs of violence. The bones are nearly three decades old, dumped here during the height of the civil war, but they still carry signs of trauma: a gunshot or machete hack to the skull.
An estimated 200,000 people were killed in the 36-year-old civil war, a truth commission later found. Among the dead were 45,000 people said to be ``disappeared'' -- abducted, then killed, their bodies never again seen. Many were urban residents, including public university students, activists, writers and poets who opposed the military dictatorships.