The Long and Difficult Struggle for Accountability for Great Crimes: The Guatemala Case

The death last year of forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow is an occasion for reflection on the long and difficult struggle for accountability for severe abuses of human rights. More than 30 years ago, Dr. Snow conducted the first exhumations of victims of such abuses to identify those who had died and to determine how they died. In the process, he began the training of those who followed in his footsteps and have made such exhumations a major source of evidence in accountability struggles worldwide.

Following a screening of the film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, dealing with Guatemala, one of the countries where forensic exhumations have played a crucial role, a panel discussion at Open Society Foundations honored the life and work of Dr. Snow. The panel featured the filmmakers, Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís; photographer Susan Meiselas, who worked closely with Dr. Snow in a number of places where he conducted exhumations, including Kurdistan; forensic anthropologist Fredy Peccerelli, who began his work with Dr. Snow; and moderator Aryeh Neier, another close collaborator with Dr. Snow.

Speakers

• Pamela Yates, director of Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, is a co-founder of Skylight Pictures, which creates feature length documentary films and digital media tools to advance awareness of human rights and the quest for justice.
• Paco de Onís, producer of the film, is a partner at Skylight Pictures. He has also produced documentaries for PBS and National Geographic.
• Susan Meiselas, a documentary photographer, has been published in the New York Times, The Times, Time, GEO, and Paris Match. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992 and is an advisory board member of the Open Society Documentary Photography Project.
• Fredy Peccerelli led forensic archeological investigations of war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is a founding member of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation. He has been directly involved in the investigation of hundreds of mass gravesites.
• Aryeh Neier (moderator) is president emeritus of the Open Society Foundations.