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lizzzardbean's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Kidnapping, and Violence
Moderate: Torture
vbarsi's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
This is one of my favorite books of the year so far (I’ve read over 15 books as of May 2024). It combines history, forensic science, politics and religion, and cultural beliefs surrounding death with the anthropologists own personal stories and experiences of her life and her time doing forensic anthropology in Argentina and Guatemala. I think this is an incredible read, though it is gut-wrenching and challenging to read about the violence. It also shows how the United States is complicit in overthrowing democratically elected governments in favor of violent dictatorships, because it suits their financial interests. I will always think of Guatemala when someone tries to mention the United States as the moral compass of the world. Additionally Alexa highlights the corruption of the catholic church in Argentina and their ability to overlook or help the dictatorship with disappearing people. Overall, it was beautifully written, with amazing metaphors. The one quote that really hit me: “the work of mourning involves killing the dead or dying with them”. As someone who lost their dad at 10 years old this hit me in my feeeels. Will be recommending this to every person I know!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Genocide, Gore, Murder, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Gun violence, Child death, Confinement, Death of parent, Physical abuse, Death, Torture, Violence, Grief, Kidnapping, and Mass/school shootings
Moderate: Panic attacks/disorders
errie's review against another edition
challenging
informative
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mass/school shootings, Physical abuse, Racism, Child death, Genocide, Death, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Torture, Confinement, Violence, Death of parent, Gaslighting, Gore, Grief, Kidnapping, Murder, Police brutality, Trafficking, and War
yajairat's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Coming out of this reading experience with so much knowledge about the intersection of forensics and genocide. I liked that we focused on two specific periods in time, that gave us a dive deep into the atrocities/exhumations that occurred. Loved the interweaving of different genres, it didn't feel like one had more importance than the other. I also really love that we never lost the focus on the victims' humanity, and how the processes of exhumations were very community-focused.
This book made me feel angry, sad at how violence like this can happen (and still happen to this day), and moved at people's convictions and fight to achieve justice for those that are lost.
Some quotes, mostly historical facts about both genocides in Guatemala and Argentina:
"Guatemalans had been migrating to the United States for decades, but mass migration began in earnest in the 1980s, when the civil war entered a genocidal phase."
"many of those most closely affected by disappearance- parents, partners, even children- will not live long enough to see the return of their loved ones' bodies... forensic teams are racing against the clock to find and return the missing while there are still living mourners to grieve and bury them."
"Even after the team finds remains, it can take months and sometimes years to clear all the legal and bureaucratic hurdles for their return to families and communities."
"Don Jaime and other men from the community are standing by the edge watching, taking a break from shoveling. They are all wearing the same rubber boots as the dead man." - a reminder to me that this is all very recent and exhumations are still happening to this day
"armed conflict made things harder because, in addition to massacres, the military destroyed homes and livestock and forced people off the parcels of land that their families had managed to hold on to. The genocidal strategy targeted Maya communities and culture."
"In the nineteenth century, wealthy landowners and the government led a 'massive assault' on Maya lands, rapacious for profits from bananas and coffee... struggles for land continue in the twenty-first century, fueled by mining claims, tourism, and conservation projects."
"catastrophic violence can bring new forms of death rituals out of necessity." - reading about burials after bones have been discovered
"I was slowly learning that the soup pot of testimonio contains many ingredients: silence and words, the need to remember and the need to keep moving forward, a reckoning with the past and a demand for the future... testimonio can nourish the teller and the listener, family and community - and, maybe, change the world."
"Guatemala's troubles began in 1954 when the US government sponsored the overthrow of the democratically elected, left-leaning president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The coup d'etat was carried out in the name of fighting Communism and protecting the interests of the colossal American corporation the United Fruit Company, whose profits were threatened by Arbenz's land-reform policies." - this country was founded on evil acts and continues to enable atrocities around the world, the US is vile
"Green Beret and CIA advisers coached the military on brutal counterinsurgency tactics, and Guatemalan military commanders were trained at the US Army-directed School of the Americas."
"General Rios Montt wrought apocalyptic violence on Guatemala. Under plans like 'Fusiles y Frijoles', his government pursued a 'scorched earth' policy of destroying villages, burning crops, displacing people and slaughtering civilians"
"Rios Montt was the first former head of state to be found guilty of genocide in their own country. Ten days later, judges overturned the conviction on a technicality."
"The term 'disappearance' was coined in Guatemala and made infamous during Argentina's dictatorship, but the practice was first introduced by Nazis in the Second World War."
"Archives are the infrastructure of what Hanna Arendt famously described as the banality of evil, which depends on filing cabinets, index cards, passport photos, fingerprints, and legions of administrative staff to staple, paste, label, and file." - a reminder that state terror goes beyond the act of killing and disappearing. state surveillance has evolved to be even more inconspicuous
"under the supervision of the United States, the Guatemalan police upgraded to the Henry classification system, originally developed by British colonial forces in India... Starting in the 1960s, there are photos of protesters taken with cameras provided by the US Agency for International Development."
"the National Police acknowledge the 'valuable help' from USAID with 'arms, admonition, tear gas, special fingerprinting materials, office supplies and furniture, paint and even vehicles for the use of the different National Police Corps'."
"Policing is, in its most basic sense, a process by which a state builds an archive of society."
"an archive can later become a liability for a state that wants to forget."
"Surveillance expands at the same time that it becomes increasingly invisible and 'frictionless'."
"there is something intrinsically unsettling about students coming from around the world to study the bodies of people killed in a genocide.. we have to be [unsettled]... it is a sign that we remain ever-alert to the treatment of the dead, aware of the political and social contexts that create mass graves, and that we never forget that every set of remains is a missing person."
"We are the loads we carry, the looms we kneel before, the hours we spend scrolling. Life shapes us down to the bone." - stood out to me after reading about how our activities shape our own bones, thus exhumations between men and women aren't as black and white as they seem.
"the girl and her dog stay in the lab. She isn't kept in the lab solely to be a teaching skeleton; she is kept to give her story a different ending- one in which she claimed and wanted... each time her body is articulated, her story is told... This is not a funeral rite, but it is a ritual. This is not a proper burial, but it is a way to honor the dead. This isn't justice, but it is a form of testimony." - very somber story about a girl and her dog found
"I have come to Argentina because this is where forensic exhumation for human rights as we know it began. Forty years ago, the military dictatorship undertook a campaign of disappearance on a massive scale, kidnapping and killing up to thirty thousand people and secretly disposing of the dead."
"The junta commanded death squads but also the opera and popular magazines... At Videla's behest, New York public relations firm Burson-Marsteller ran a twelve-page supplement in The New York Times Magazine celebrating Argentina's 'untold natural riches' and 'vivacious, adaptable people' in a bid to improve the country's public image. In 1978, Argentina hosted the World Cup. While fans from around the world celebrated the Argentine team's victory in the streets, people being held in clandestine detention centers could hear the cheering crowds from their torture chambers." - again, genocide goes beyond the violence, optics play a huge role as well. as we are seeing Palestinians being murdered at this time, mainstream media is painting a completely different story
"At first, the coup received sweeping public support.. Argentina's most celebrated writer, Jorge Luis Borges greeted the junta by saying 'Now we are governed by gentlemen'."
"'how did your military superiors tell you to fight the enemy?' A journalist posed this question to a former sergeant ... 'Towards total extermination. Death, blood. They said that those guys, the subversives, wanted to destroy the Family.'"
"'Genocide' was used to characterize the atrocities of the Argentine dictatorship by the 1984 truth commission... For families of the missing and other activists, the term offers a decisive refutation of the dictatorship fiction that violence was equally perpetrated by guerrillas and the military in a two-sided 'Dirty War', a term used in junta propaganda." - relevant to today
"in the United States, families would never be allowed at a crime scene. In Argentina, things were different. Families of the missing had spearheaded the search for the disappeared."
"Women who had been afraid to hand a sheet of paper to a politician confronted soldiers armed with machine guns. Women who had once had little knowledge of politics became sophisticated strategists. They had become the political activists the military accused their children of being. 'Our children gave birth to us,' the Madres say." - las madres de plaza de mayo... a testament to the power of the people and collective action. a movement to look up to.
"Her daughter had been found; why had she come back? Esther replied that she would stay and fight for all the missing. 'I'll continue until they all appear, because all the disappeared are my children'.. it had gone from being an individual search to becoming a collective demand."
"Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.' Terror travels from a family to their neighbors, to the city, until everyone is afraid and silent. Torture is transmitted from one body to many bodies and finally to the social body of an entire country."
"It is interesting that suffering can enable people to grow as much as it can also destroy them. Our prayer must extend to all and be expressed in different forms, like a hunger strike, and political rally, a letter to the bishops, etc... we must regret nothing." - Said by Alice Domon, a Catholic nun who supported the mothers. While some members of the Catholic church were complicit in the genocide, I am reminded that there were members that stood by the marginalized
"To neglect a full recognition of the sacred and ritual aspects of exhumations is to suffer an emaciated understanding of what makes them significant and their crucial role in societies fractured by violence."
"in the face of violence and terror and breakdown, even at the bottom of the well, there is something- a movement of life, and impulse for justice, a kind of pulsating love. It can be blocked and slowed, and often is, but it will never be eradicated or killed because it flows through everything; ecstatic, electric, unstoppable."
This book made me feel angry, sad at how violence like this can happen (and still happen to this day), and moved at people's convictions and fight to achieve justice for those that are lost.
Some quotes, mostly historical facts about both genocides in Guatemala and Argentina:
"Guatemalans had been migrating to the United States for decades, but mass migration began in earnest in the 1980s, when the civil war entered a genocidal phase."
"many of those most closely affected by disappearance- parents, partners, even children- will not live long enough to see the return of their loved ones' bodies... forensic teams are racing against the clock to find and return the missing while there are still living mourners to grieve and bury them."
"Even after the team finds remains, it can take months and sometimes years to clear all the legal and bureaucratic hurdles for their return to families and communities."
"Don Jaime and other men from the community are standing by the edge watching, taking a break from shoveling. They are all wearing the same rubber boots as the dead man." - a reminder to me that this is all very recent and exhumations are still happening to this day
"armed conflict made things harder because, in addition to massacres, the military destroyed homes and livestock and forced people off the parcels of land that their families had managed to hold on to. The genocidal strategy targeted Maya communities and culture."
"In the nineteenth century, wealthy landowners and the government led a 'massive assault' on Maya lands, rapacious for profits from bananas and coffee... struggles for land continue in the twenty-first century, fueled by mining claims, tourism, and conservation projects."
"catastrophic violence can bring new forms of death rituals out of necessity." - reading about burials after bones have been discovered
"I was slowly learning that the soup pot of testimonio contains many ingredients: silence and words, the need to remember and the need to keep moving forward, a reckoning with the past and a demand for the future... testimonio can nourish the teller and the listener, family and community - and, maybe, change the world."
"Guatemala's troubles began in 1954 when the US government sponsored the overthrow of the democratically elected, left-leaning president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The coup d'etat was carried out in the name of fighting Communism and protecting the interests of the colossal American corporation the United Fruit Company, whose profits were threatened by Arbenz's land-reform policies." - this country was founded on evil acts and continues to enable atrocities around the world, the US is vile
"Green Beret and CIA advisers coached the military on brutal counterinsurgency tactics, and Guatemalan military commanders were trained at the US Army-directed School of the Americas."
"General Rios Montt wrought apocalyptic violence on Guatemala. Under plans like 'Fusiles y Frijoles', his government pursued a 'scorched earth' policy of destroying villages, burning crops, displacing people and slaughtering civilians"
"Rios Montt was the first former head of state to be found guilty of genocide in their own country. Ten days later, judges overturned the conviction on a technicality."
"The term 'disappearance' was coined in Guatemala and made infamous during Argentina's dictatorship, but the practice was first introduced by Nazis in the Second World War."
"Archives are the infrastructure of what Hanna Arendt famously described as the banality of evil, which depends on filing cabinets, index cards, passport photos, fingerprints, and legions of administrative staff to staple, paste, label, and file." - a reminder that state terror goes beyond the act of killing and disappearing. state surveillance has evolved to be even more inconspicuous
"under the supervision of the United States, the Guatemalan police upgraded to the Henry classification system, originally developed by British colonial forces in India... Starting in the 1960s, there are photos of protesters taken with cameras provided by the US Agency for International Development."
"the National Police acknowledge the 'valuable help' from USAID with 'arms, admonition, tear gas, special fingerprinting materials, office supplies and furniture, paint and even vehicles for the use of the different National Police Corps'."
"Policing is, in its most basic sense, a process by which a state builds an archive of society."
"an archive can later become a liability for a state that wants to forget."
"Surveillance expands at the same time that it becomes increasingly invisible and 'frictionless'."
"there is something intrinsically unsettling about students coming from around the world to study the bodies of people killed in a genocide.. we have to be [unsettled]... it is a sign that we remain ever-alert to the treatment of the dead, aware of the political and social contexts that create mass graves, and that we never forget that every set of remains is a missing person."
"We are the loads we carry, the looms we kneel before, the hours we spend scrolling. Life shapes us down to the bone." - stood out to me after reading about how our activities shape our own bones, thus exhumations between men and women aren't as black and white as they seem.
"the girl and her dog stay in the lab. She isn't kept in the lab solely to be a teaching skeleton; she is kept to give her story a different ending- one in which she claimed and wanted... each time her body is articulated, her story is told... This is not a funeral rite, but it is a ritual. This is not a proper burial, but it is a way to honor the dead. This isn't justice, but it is a form of testimony." - very somber story about a girl and her dog found
"I have come to Argentina because this is where forensic exhumation for human rights as we know it began. Forty years ago, the military dictatorship undertook a campaign of disappearance on a massive scale, kidnapping and killing up to thirty thousand people and secretly disposing of the dead."
"The junta commanded death squads but also the opera and popular magazines... At Videla's behest, New York public relations firm Burson-Marsteller ran a twelve-page supplement in The New York Times Magazine celebrating Argentina's 'untold natural riches' and 'vivacious, adaptable people' in a bid to improve the country's public image. In 1978, Argentina hosted the World Cup. While fans from around the world celebrated the Argentine team's victory in the streets, people being held in clandestine detention centers could hear the cheering crowds from their torture chambers." - again, genocide goes beyond the violence, optics play a huge role as well. as we are seeing Palestinians being murdered at this time, mainstream media is painting a completely different story
"At first, the coup received sweeping public support.. Argentina's most celebrated writer, Jorge Luis Borges greeted the junta by saying 'Now we are governed by gentlemen'."
"'how did your military superiors tell you to fight the enemy?' A journalist posed this question to a former sergeant ... 'Towards total extermination. Death, blood. They said that those guys, the subversives, wanted to destroy the Family.'"
"'Genocide' was used to characterize the atrocities of the Argentine dictatorship by the 1984 truth commission... For families of the missing and other activists, the term offers a decisive refutation of the dictatorship fiction that violence was equally perpetrated by guerrillas and the military in a two-sided 'Dirty War', a term used in junta propaganda." - relevant to today
"in the United States, families would never be allowed at a crime scene. In Argentina, things were different. Families of the missing had spearheaded the search for the disappeared."
"Women who had been afraid to hand a sheet of paper to a politician confronted soldiers armed with machine guns. Women who had once had little knowledge of politics became sophisticated strategists. They had become the political activists the military accused their children of being. 'Our children gave birth to us,' the Madres say." - las madres de plaza de mayo... a testament to the power of the people and collective action. a movement to look up to.
"Her daughter had been found; why had she come back? Esther replied that she would stay and fight for all the missing. 'I'll continue until they all appear, because all the disappeared are my children'.. it had gone from being an individual search to becoming a collective demand."
"Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.' Terror travels from a family to their neighbors, to the city, until everyone is afraid and silent. Torture is transmitted from one body to many bodies and finally to the social body of an entire country."
"It is interesting that suffering can enable people to grow as much as it can also destroy them. Our prayer must extend to all and be expressed in different forms, like a hunger strike, and political rally, a letter to the bishops, etc... we must regret nothing." - Said by Alice Domon, a Catholic nun who supported the mothers. While some members of the Catholic church were complicit in the genocide, I am reminded that there were members that stood by the marginalized
"To neglect a full recognition of the sacred and ritual aspects of exhumations is to suffer an emaciated understanding of what makes them significant and their crucial role in societies fractured by violence."
"in the face of violence and terror and breakdown, even at the bottom of the well, there is something- a movement of life, and impulse for justice, a kind of pulsating love. It can be blocked and slowed, and often is, but it will never be eradicated or killed because it flows through everything; ecstatic, electric, unstoppable."
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence and Murder
Moderate: Sexual violence
pinkvogue's review
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Violence, and Death
dinosaurari's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture, Violence, Genocide, and Murder
allygogo's review
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Torture, Murder, Violence, and Genocide
shann32's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Beautifully written, deeply informative, and a unique insight into a job that is full of contradictions and difficult emotions.
Reading this has given me a new perspective on aspects of global conflict and mass murders that have occurred and are currently occurring around the world. The narrative focuses strongly on the lasting and complex impacts that genocide has on the survivors and people who are left behind when family members are dissappeared.
Reading this has given me a new perspective on aspects of global conflict and mass murders that have occurred and are currently occurring around the world. The narrative focuses strongly on the lasting and complex impacts that genocide has on the survivors and people who are left behind when family members are dissappeared.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Murder, Child death, and Death
Moderate: Torture, Sexual violence, and Violence
kefink's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
slow-paced
5.0
Resonant and deeply moving. Absolutely a must read.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Genocide, Grief, Violence, Medical content, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, and War
vigil's review
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Grief, Genocide, Death, Violence, Blood, Murder, Injury/Injury detail, Pregnancy, Torture, Police brutality, Gun violence, and Child death