Naming Guatemala’s disappeared

At the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, high-throughput technologies are helping identify people who disappeared during decades of conflict, bringing long-awaited answers to families who have never stopped searching.

Founded in 2008, a little over a decade after Guatemala’s 36-year civil war ended and left more than 200,000 people dead or disappeared, the organization was created to investigate mass graves, identify human remains and return them to families.

Its teams combine archaeological fieldwork with forensic anthropology and advanced genetic analysis. They now coordinate one of the largest human identification (HID) programs in the world. To protect her privacy, Elena Morales’ name has been changed. But stories like hers are at the core of FAFG’s work.

FAFG’s reach is not limited to Guatemala. The organization has helped Mexico open two HID labs and also has projects in Syria, Colombia and El Salvador, says Fredy Peccerelli, the forensic anthropologist who founded FAFG. It is also planning initiatives in Libya, Ethiopia and Sudan.

For Peccerelli, that mission is personal. He was nine years old when his family fled Guatemala at the height of the conflict in the late 1980s. In college in the United States, he read I Rigoberta Menchu, written by a Mayan woman who had won the Nobel Peace Prize. “It made me want to go back,” he recalls.

At a scientific meeting, Peccerelli heard anthropologist Clyde Snow speak about exhuming the past from Guatemala to Kurdistan. The first image Snow projected showed young Guatemalans excavating a grave. “At that very second, it was like I was hit by lightning,” Peccerelli recalls. “I was like, ‘that’s it. That’s what I want to do.’” While earning his anthropology degree, he volunteered for digs in his native country, eventually founding FAFG.

For bone fragments, the laboratory uses a freezer mill to pulverize samples into a fine powder at extremely low temperatures using liquid nitrogen. Once the bone has been ground, the EZ1&2 Investigator kit is used to extract DNA.

Before 2021, that extraction step was carried out manually and took about three days to obtain DNA from 54 samples. Today, the same number of samples can be processed in about three hours.

For a laboratory handling thousands of family reference samples and skeletal remains each year, the time saved helps FAFG move cases through the identification process more efficiently, while families may already have spent years searching for answers.

Such inhibitors can reduce or halt enzyme activity during the polymerase chain reaction, decrease the efficiency of the reaction and lead to false-negative results.

To create DNA profiles, the laboratory relies on different kits, including the Investigator 26plex QS Kit. The kit amplifies a large panel of short tandem repeats (STRs), short sequences of DNA that repeat consecutively in non-coding regions of the genome. Its internal PCR control functions as a quality sensor, helping the laboratory assess the quality of the amplification process.

For especially challenging or degraded samples, the laboratory turns to the ForenSeq DNA Signature Prep Kit, which enables deeper analyses through combined STR and single nucleotide polymorphism profiling. When a sample must be processed quickly, FAFG can switch to the TissueLyser instead of the freezer mill, eliminating the need for liquid nitrogen during bone pulverization.

When Fernando Granados, a Forensic Investigator from the Department of Family and Victims Support at FAFG, reached out to Morales almost a decade after she first approached the organization, her first reaction was anger and frustration. After so much time had passed, she felt that her request for help had been ignored.

Granados explained that FAFG had initially found no matches and suggested expanding the circle of family members who could provide DNA. A relative helped contact other family members living in Belize, who agreed to provide samples. Around the same time, FAFG had also unearthed new remains. Within a few months, the missing family members were finally identified.