Argentina's forensic anthropology is finding 'disappeared ones'

Argentina's forensic anthropology is finding 'disappeared ones'
By Dana MacLean

BUENOS AIRES, 5 February 2014 (IRIN) - In the decades since a brutal military crackdown in Argentina in the late 1970s, when thousands of disappearances occurred, the country has been driven by activist pressure to become a global leader in forensic anthropology, a field that holds lessons for other post-conflict countries trying to identify missing people, say experts.

“The trauma of disappearance is universal - not to know if your loved one is alive or dead, not to have a grave - that grief is universal for families everywhere,” said Luis Fondebrinder, a forensic anthropologist with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), an NGO based in Buenos Aires, the capital, that investigates large-scale disappearances.

Forensic anthropology - combining the sciences of archaeology and human biology to identify human remains in criminal investigations - has been used in Argentina to locate mass burial sites in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Tucuman, and Cordoba.

At the urging of human rights groups, Argentina was the first country to employ the technique on a large scale to investigate human rights abuses under a military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, in what became known as the “Dirty War”. Scientists have so far exhumed and identified around 600 of thousands of skeletons, using DNA samples provided by the families of missing persons.

More:
http://www.irinnews.org/report/99593/argentina-s-forensic-anthropology-is-finding-disappeared-ones