Still Life With Bones

Alexa Hagerty, a social anthropologist, recounts her fieldwork with forensic teams in Guatemala and Argentina, where she learns to exhume and identify the remains of people killed by state terror. Part memoir, part ethnography, the book traces how forensic science, family grief, and ritual intersect in the long search for Latin America's disappeared. Hagerty frames forensic exhumation as occupying the crossroads of two ways of understanding a dead body: as scientific evidence of crimes against humanity and as someone loved and mourned.

Hagerty trains with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) at an exhumation site in El Quiché, a mountainous province where soldiers detained and killed villagers during the 1980s. Guatemala's armed conflict, known locally as La Violencia, lasted from 1960 to 1996 and left 200,000 dead, 45,000 disappeared, and more than a million displaced. A United Nations truth commission determined the state committed genocide, with over 80 percent of victims being Maya. The forensic challenge is staggering: Even 30 teams working 30 years could not exhume all the mass graves.

In the field and lab, Hagerty learns to read bones, placing skeletons in anatomical order and searching for marks of trauma. The dead flicker in and out of personhood; she can scrub femurs without thinking, but holding a child's loose teeth causes a girl to materialize so vividly it verges on hallucination. At the exhumation site, Don Jaime, a local man whose brother was disappeared, gives a public testimonio, a form of witnessing about experiences of violence. Hagerty later accompanies the burial of Doña Asunción and her six-year-old son Oscar, killed by soldiers in 1982. The ceremony blends forensic practice, Catholic prayer, Evangelical Christianity, and Maya Cosmovision, a worldview in which the dead require proper burial and ongoing care. Manuel, Doña Asunción's surviving son, ends the ceremony by holding up his mother's photograph and asking whether there is any compensation for all he has lost.

The book broadens to examine the infrastructure of state terror through the Historical Archives of the National Police, approximately 80 million pages documenting surveillance, torture, and disappearance, discovered in a Guatemala City police compound in 2005. Hagerty traces the violence to the 1954 U.S.-backed coup against democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, carried out to protect United Fruit Company profits. General Efraín Ríos Montt, who had close ties to the United States, carried out scorched-earth policies in the early 1980s; he was convicted of genocide in 2015, but the conviction was overturned ten days later. Hagerty recounts the assassination of anthropologist Myrna Mack Chang, stabbed 27 times in 1990 for documenting the conflict's impact on highland Maya communities.

In the FAFG lab, Hagerty encounters a teaching skeleton, an unidentified body used for forensic training: a girl found at the bottom of a well on a military base, with 73 other bodies above her. Her family refused to claim her, so the team keeps the skeleton, telling her story to each new group of students. Hagerty also details the Sepur Zarco case, in which 15 Q'eqchi' women, members of an Indigenous Maya people in Guatemala, brought a landmark lawsuit against military officials for systematic sexual violence during the armed conflict. The court found the officials guilty in 2016, the first time a Guatemalan court prosecuted conflict-related sexual violence.

Hagerty recounts the Dos Erres massacre of December 1982, in which Kaibiles, the Guatemalan Army's elite special forces, disguised themselves as guerrillas and killed more than 200 people over two days. Forensic investigators exhumed the well where bodies had been dumped, recovering 171 remains including 67 children. At the 2011 trial, the perpetrators were each sentenced to 6,060 years. Hagerty connects this violence to the present, noting that former Kaibiles moved into narcotrafficking after the 1996 peace accords failed to dismantle the unit.

Hagerty then moves to Argentina, where forensic exhumation for human rights was pioneered. Alone in a Buenos Aires apartment, she experiences insomnia, anxiety, and intrusive images from her work in Guatemala. She reflects on Maya relationships with the dead, in which dreams serve as communication between the living and the deceased, and describes three figures from a Guatemala grave appearing in her room before vanishing.

She provides historical context for the Argentine dictatorship. The military seized power in 1976 under General Jorge Rafael Videla and operated approximately 800 clandestine detention centers. Hagerty travels to Tucumán in northern Argentina and descends into Pozo de Vargas, an industrial well where the military dumped bodies from 1975 to 1979. About 10 feet in diameter and an estimated 130 feet deep, the well has been under excavation for over a decade by the local forensic team CAMIT without reaching the bottom.

In the Buenos Aires lab of the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF), a pioneering forensic human rights team, Hagerty washes and analyzes bones. After the dictatorship fell in 1983, botched cemetery excavations using heavy machinery destroyed evidence. Forensic pioneer Dr. Clyde Snow recruited local students for the first scientific exhumation, and these students formed the EAAF. In the landmark 1985 trial of junta leaders, Snow presented evidence proving that Liliana Carmen Pereyra had been executed, not killed in combat. The junta was found guilty, paving the way for human rights trials across Latin America.

Hagerty meets Ana María Careaga, a psychoanalyst and human rights activist who was abducted at 16 and tortured in a clandestine detention center, then released seven months pregnant. Ana María's mother, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, was among the founding Madres de Plaza de Mayo, mothers of the disappeared who gathered every Thursday at Buenos Aires's central square demanding information about their missing children. Navy intelligence officer Alfredo Astiz infiltrated the group and, on December 8, 1977, marked those to be abducted with a kiss at the Iglesia Santa Cruz church. Twelve people were disappeared over the following three days, including Esther and group leader Azucena Villaflor. The infiltration only strengthened the Madres' resolve.

Hagerty examines what exhumation means for families, challenging the assumption that recovering remains brings closure. Camilo, whose father was disappeared when Camilo was an infant, says that finding bones "closes the story" but also opens something: "The question is, the beginning of what?" (150). He could not recognize his father in the articulated skeleton until a forgotten home movie revealed the tension between the living body onscreen and the still bones. Other families describe receiving remains piece by piece over years. The Madres split into two factions partly over disagreements about exhumation, with one group rejecting the practice.

In the book's final chapters, Hagerty's physical deterioration accelerates: rashes, headaches, a frozen shoulder, and panic attacks. She examines a skeleton bearing the trauma of a death flight, the dictatorship's practice of throwing sedated prisoners from planes, and reflects on how once bones are buried, their material testimony is lost. She develops her central argument: Exhumations are not merely scientific or legal procedures but sacred practices of caring for the dead. Drawing on anthropologist Robert Hertz's 1907 argument that violent deaths demand special ritual transition, she contends that even when bodies are never found, the act of searching is meaningful: "Their power is in the searching, not just the finding" (222).

The epilogue notes that Snow died in 2014 and asked that some of his ashes be placed in Guatemalan earth with victims of La Violencia. The FAFG completed the exhumations of La Verbena, Guatemala City's public cemetery where the team searched bone repositories for remains of the disappeared. The EAAF was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 and is now headquartered in a former navy-run clandestine detention center in Buenos Aires, converted into a Memory and Human Rights Space. Hagerty's research has shifted to investigating the human rights implications of surveillance technologies, connecting the police archive's paper files to today's algorithmic systems.