The EAAF, to go by its Spanish-language acronym, is a group
of forensic anthropologists who have worked to identify the victims of
state-sponsored violence not just in Argentina, but nearly 30 other countries
around the world – ranging from Angola and Bosnia to El Salvador, Guatemala,
and even Iraqi Kurdistan. Its work is accessible not just to jurists and
professionals but, in a sense, also to tourists: the EAAF was responsible, for instance, for
excavating and identifying remains at the so-called Club Atlético
(pictured above and below) in the Buenos Aires barrio of San
Telmo. It’s not a conventional tourist attraction, but if one goal of
travel is to learn, the Club Atlético is an eloquent reminder of clandestine
atrocities that often take place just out of sight, but in our names, and sometimes just beneath our feet.
Readers of this blog, and my guidebooks to Argentina
and Buenos Aires, can meet at least one member of the EAAF team. Patricia
Bernardi (pictured below, at right) is a partner in La
Demorada, a stylish B&B cum art space in the village of San Antonio de
Areco, the “gaucho capital” of Buenos Aires province, less than two hours from
the Argentine capital.
One of the prime movers in creating the EAAF was U.S. forensic
anthropologist Clyde Snow,
whose work brought about several convictions in Argentina and elsewhere (in
Iraq, he testified against Saddam Hussein’s crimes). Snow also participated in
the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to identify the remains of Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid in San Vicente, Bolivia, as detailed in Anne Meadows’s Digging Up Butch and
Sundance.
Meanwhile, the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Social
Justice is creating the Clyde
Snow Social Justice Award to honor his human rights legacy, and is seeking
donations to create a permanent endowment. Snow himself will receive the first
award but, in the coming years, it will go to “individuals or organizations
around the world whose work contributes to the re-humanization of victims of
human rights abuses.”
In a better Argentina, perhaps, Maru might
have survived to be my concuñada – a Spanish-language term meaning my
brother-in-law’s wife – but I was not part of the family until five years
later. I do know her son, now my nephew, who has grown up to be a remarkably well-adjusted
professional despite losing his mother as a newborn. In October, my wife flew
to Argentina for a small family ceremony in the city of Tandil,
Maru’s birthplace, that included both him and Maru’s own mother.
My wife says that the identification and burial of Maru’s remains
has provided some sense of “closure,” to use a widely abused word. Real closure,
though, would come from identifying, trying, convicting and sentencing the
individual(s) who abducted, tortured and murdered her. Of course, 35 years
later, it’s no longer certain that those responsible are still alive
themselves.
For what it’s worth, our own daughter is a third-year
anthropology student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is presently
taking a class in forensic
anthropology there.
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