Defending Human Rights From Below Ground Level

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The New York Sun

Mercedes Doretti’s work unearthing the bodies of people killed during the military dictatorship in Argentina helped bring some of the generals responsible to justice, but the Brooklyn resident, a recipient of one of this year’s prestigious Macarthur Foundation Fellowships, wasn’t satisfied at that. During the more than 20 years since the dictatorship ended, Ms. Doretti has traveled around the world as a part of a team of anthropologists who do the horrifying and often thankless task of digging up the clues of far-flung tragedies. Sometimes those responsible for massacres and genocidal attacks are held accountable because of the evidence they produce. Just as often, they are not, she says.”Most human rights abuses go unpunished,” Ms. Doretti, a native of Buenos Aires, said in an interview from the Brooklyn offices of the nonprofit organization she cofounded, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.

By studying the bodies of people killed by their own governments, the organization has helped transform the field of forensic anthropology into an important tool for defending human rights and punishing those who violate them. She “makes witnesses out of bones and seeks justice on behalf of populations whose immense losses have been omitted from the historical record,” a statement by the Macarthur Foundation, which is giving Ms. Doretti a $500,000 no-strings-attached grant today, said. Ms. Doretti has traveled to Ethiopia, the Balkans, and East Timor, but says the worst tragedy she has seen was in Guatemala, where she helped exhume the victims of the El Mozote massacre. There, she said her team untangled a pile of bones belonging to 140 people — 34 of them children and one a pregnant woman — who had been gathered into a small room and shot to death by soldiers during the civil war. “That one was extremely difficult,” Ms. Doretti said.

She plugs on, however, motivated by her experiences during the dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, when two of her friends were “disappeared” and her family received death threats. The grant Ms. Doretti will receive from the Macarthur Foundation will help her organization’s plans to go to more countries in Asia and Africa, where they would like to build DNA testing labs, she said. Also, she said she would share the money with others on her team working on research and use it to produce more documentaries — a key element of the organization’s work.


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