International audience ; Military dictatorships and armed conflicts delineate the history of Latin America over the last four decades. Dead bodies were produced en masse before being confiscated , concealed or destroyed by those who carried out the crimes. Today, some of these corpses are being exhumed and identified. This special issue aims to specify and understand the challenges this process of exhumation represents for Latin American states, namely, the social and political life of these exhumed corpses in democratic post-conflict societies.
International audience ; Military dictatorships and armed conflicts delineate the history of Latin America over the last four decades. Dead bodies were produced en masse before being confiscated , concealed or destroyed by those who carried out the crimes. Today, some of these corpses are being exhumed and identified. This special issue aims to specify and understand the challenges this process of exhumation represents for Latin American states, namely, the social and political life of these exhumed corpses in democratic post-conflict societies.
International audience ; Military dictatorships and armed conflicts delineate the history of Latin America over the last four decades. Dead bodies were produced en masse before being confiscated , concealed or destroyed by those who carried out the crimes. Today, some of these corpses are being exhumed and identified. This special issue aims to specify and understand the challenges this process of exhumation represents for Latin American states, namely, the social and political life of these exhumed corpses in democratic post-conflict societies.
International audience ; Military dictatorships and armed conflicts delineate the history of Latin America over the last four decades. Dead bodies were produced en masse before being confiscated , concealed or destroyed by those who carried out the crimes. Today, some of these corpses are being exhumed and identified. This special issue aims to specify and understand the challenges this process of exhumation represents for Latin American states, namely, the social and political life of these exhumed corpses in democratic post-conflict societies, the possible performance of sovereignty that these dead bodies can activate and, in a broader context, the impact that the presence of corpses may have on the community of the living.Exhumations in Latin America gathers five different contributions, each enlightening particular aspects of the exhumation process in Guatemala, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay and Colombia, respectively. In the case of Guatemala, Clara Duterme explores this process as an element of 'transitional justice' in which tensions between different social actors arise. If community associations, governmental actors and victims all share the pursuit of justice as a common goal, their understanding of what compensation and reparation mean is not uniform. Departing from the discourse of local actors, Duterme focuses on concrete forms of compensation , showing how 'local justice' is sometimes more effective than legal justice. Exploring a distinct form of tensions occurring in Argentina, Laura Panizo analyses the impact of the exhumed corpses of the disappeared on the living bodies of the families and of the scientific investigators. The article analyses different conflicts that emerge when people cohabit with the 'reappeared' corpses. Moreover, digging into her personal experience, Panizo reflects on the extent to which her own body was, and is, affected by cohabitation with the exhumed corpses of the victims.
International audience Military dictatorships and armed conflicts delineate the history of Latin America over the last four decades. Dead bodies were produced en masse before being confiscated , concealed or destroyed by those who carried out the crimes. Today, some of these corpses are being exhumed and identified. This special issue aims to specify and understand the challenges this process of exhumation represents for Latin American states, namely, the social and political life of these exhumed corpses in democratic post-conflict societies, the possible performance of sovereignty that these dead bodies can activate and, in a broader context, the impact that the presence of corpses may have on the community of the living.Exhumations in Latin America gathers five different contributions, each enlightening particular aspects of the exhumation process in Guatemala, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay and Colombia, respectively. In the case of Guatemala, Clara Duterme explores this process as an element of 'transitional justice' in which tensions between different social actors arise. If community associations, governmental actors and victims all share the pursuit of justice as a common goal, their understanding of what compensation and reparation mean is not uniform. Departing from the discourse of local actors, Duterme focuses on concrete forms of compensation , showing how 'local justice' is sometimes more effective than legal justice. Exploring a distinct form of tensions occurring in Argentina, Laura Panizo analyses the impact of the exhumed corpses of the disappeared on the living bodies of the families and of the scientific investigators. The article analyses different conflicts that emerge when people cohabit with the 'reappeared' corpses. Moreover, digging into her personal experience, Panizo reflects on the extent to which her own body was, and is, affected by cohabitation with the exhumed corpses of the victims.
International audience ; Military dictatorships and armed conflicts delineate the history of Latin America over the last four decades. Dead bodies were produced en masse before being confiscated , concealed or destroyed by those who carried out the crimes. Today, some of these corpses are being exhumed and identified. This special issue aims to specify and understand the challenges this process of exhumation represents for Latin American states, namely, the social and political life of these exhumed corpses in democratic post-conflict societies, the possible performance of sovereignty that these dead bodies can activate and, in a broader context, the impact that the presence of corpses may have on the community of the living.Exhumations in Latin America gathers five different contributions, each enlightening particular aspects of the exhumation process in Guatemala, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay and Colombia, respectively. In the case of Guatemala, Clara Duterme explores this process as an element of 'transitional justice' in which tensions between different social actors arise. If community associations, governmental actors and victims all share the pursuit of justice as a common goal, their understanding of what compensation and reparation mean is not uniform. Departing from the discourse of local actors, Duterme focuses on concrete forms of compensation , showing how 'local justice' is sometimes more effective than legal justice. Exploring a distinct form of tensions occurring in Argentina, Laura Panizo analyses the impact of the exhumed corpses of the disappeared on the living bodies of the families and of the scientific investigators. The article analyses different conflicts that emerge when people cohabit with the 'reappeared' corpses. Moreover, digging into her personal experience, Panizo reflects on the extent to which her own body was, and is, affected by cohabitation with the exhumed corpses of the victims.
In the first weeks of the Spanish civil war, there occurred massive popular assaults against the Catholic Church in those cities which did not fall to the Nationalists rising, the Church having been widely (and correctly) perceived as hostile to the Republic and sympathetic to the generals who sought its overthrow. As rumors of priests firing on the populace from church towers circulated wildly, churches and convents were rapidly sacked and burnt. Supporters of the Republic killed religious personnel in large numbers—certainly well into the thousands—while desecrating and destroying church paraphernalia and cultic objects en masse.
Following the close of Spanish Civil War (1936–39) a dictatorship was installed by Francisco Franco which saw his narrative of the conflict embedded in the landscape of an ideologically divided nation through monuments and mass graves. The dictatorship was followed by the period of Transition (1975–81) whereby amnesty was negotiated leaving the crimes of the past ensconced in private memory. The recent wave of exhumations of mass graves aim to shed light on the hidden buried world containing legacies of Spain's recent past. This paper examines the experiences of participants in exhumations with expertise in the disciplines of history, archaeology, forensics, and psychology. It contrasts their narratives of silence and lack of awareness about Spain's mass graves with the work of exhuming the Disappeared, understood by members of the exhumation movement as a pedagogical mechanism of social memory that operates through the resignification of the dead as a counternarrative of the past.
Within the last 50 years, present day Zimbabwe, (Figure 1), formerly Rhodesia, a Southern African country, has gone through various pogroms resulting in the death of over 50,000 people in total both within and outside the country. The massacres consist of the Liberation War (1966–1979); political violence characterized by every election since 1980; the Matabeleland Democide (1982–1987); and the diamond conflict in Marange, Eastern Zimbabwe (2006–2018). These various episodes of violence have produced a myriad of human body depositional sites which include mine shafts, mass graves at schools and hospitals, burials at detention centres, pit latrines, and caves. This paper will analyse the disagreements and antagonism between professional archaeologists and vernacular exhumers that emerged during various limited exhumation of mass graves within the country. The paper will conclude by offering avenues of approaches to mass graves exhumation as the material evidence might in future, subject to judicial inquiries, contribute towards truth telling and peace and reconciliation.
Exhumation may be defined as the legally sanctioned excavation and recovery of the remains of lawfully buried or – occasionally – cremated individuals, as distinct from forensic excavations of clandestinely buried remains conducted as part of a criminal investigation and from unlawful disinterment of human remains, commonly referred to as 'bodysnatching'. The aim of this article is to review the role of exhumation – so defined – in the activities of CEMEL, the Medico-Legal Centre of the Ribeirão Preto Medical School-University of São Paulo, in international, regional and local collaborations. Exhumations form part of routine forensic anthropology casework; scientific research in physical and forensic anthropology; and forensic casework conducted in collaboration with the Brazilian Federal Police; and are carried out as part of humanitarian investigations into deaths associated with the civil–military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. This article aims to offer a non-technical summary – with reference to international comparative information – of the role of exhumation in investigative and scientific work and to discuss developments in their historical and political context.
Exhumation may be defined as the legally sanctioned excavation and recovery of the remains of lawfully buried or – occasionally – cremated individuals, as distinct from forensic excavations of clandestinely buried remains conducted as part of a criminal investigation and from unlawful disinterment of human remains, commonly referred to as bodysnatching. The aim of this article is to review the role of exhumation – so defined – in the activities of CEMEL, the Medico-Legal Centre of the Ribeirão Preto Medical School-University of São Paulo, in international, regional and local collaborations. Exhumations form part of routine forensic anthropology casework; scientific research in physical and forensic anthropology; and forensic casework conducted in collaboration with the Brazilian Federal Police; and are carried out as part of humanitarian investigations into deaths associated with the civil–military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. This article aims to offer a non-technical summary – with reference to international comparative information – of the role of exhumation in investigative and scientific work and to discuss developments in their historical and political context.
