A Legacy of Truth: Forty Years of Investigating the Forcibly Disappeared

Left: Eric Stover at the first exhumation of a mass grave near Chichicastenango, Guatemala in the early 1990s. It was believed to contain the remains of villagers who had been executed by the military. He is asking permission, from family members who believe the grave contains their loved ones, to remove the remains so they can be taken to a hospital to be examined. Right: Forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow shows a Guatemalan judge bullet fragments embedded in the skull of one of the first victims exhumed from unmarked graves near Chichicastenango. Photos by Photo by Pamela Blotner & Eric Stover.

Eric Stover has spent much of his life with communities searching for an answer to the agonizing question, Where is my child?

From Argentina, Guatemala, and El Salvador to the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Iraqi Kurdistan, Stover has sat with families in their deepest grief — often taking the first step in answering that harrowing question with a simple cheek swab, or a sample of blood or hair.

“One of the strongest human forces is a mother or father looking for their disappeared child,” Stover said, reflecting on the common threads he’s encountered in his global work.

The United Nations has memorialized August 30th as the International Day of the Victim of Enforced Disappearances for the last twelve years, and this year will commemorate the 30th Anniversary of the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances.

Stover, whose work has shaped UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center for the last 26 years, has been at the forefront of identifying victims of enforced disappearances. Since the early 1980s, he has worked with forensic scientists and geneticists to identify the remains of the missing, collect evidence for courts, and set the historical record straight on the plight of the disappeared.