Critics have also questioned his professional credentials.Īll of which makes it awkward for the two parties to dig side by side in the jungle that day. To say that the headline-hungry Ticas’s methods are unorthodox is a vast understatement: He’s been filmed eating inside grave sites while excavating and celebrating his birthday in grave pits, and accused of delaying digs for extended periods of time. The preliminary work has been done by Israel Ticas, a self-taught “criminalist” retained by the office of then-Salvadoran Attorney General Luis Martinez. Half of the site has already been excavated - a fully dressed skeleton wearing a red basketball shirt and black pants is partially visible. They arrive at the Rosario de Mora grave site near the top of a steep hill and quickly unload their equipment. “We recently found 29 bodies in one grave.
The difference between the civil war and the current gang violence is mostly cosmetic, he sighs. “There were people left beheaded in the streets, people executed, people taken out of their homes, shot, and then dumped in a ravine,” he says. During and after the war, hundreds of gangsters, police officers, soldiers, and civilians have been killed and buried in clandestine graves in the area.Īs they hike, Oscar Quijano, the head of IML’s forensic anthropology unit, speaks about his early professional life during El Salvador’s civil war. Gangs continue to force residents of entire communities in the area around Panchimalco to flee their homes. Empty homes with bullet-riddled walls are a reminder of the violence that never ended. When the road ends, the IML team unpacks its equipment and begins the two-hour hike through a jungle that was once a killing ground. Parker never faced justice and ran successfully for the country’s Legislature. The UN report concluded that Parker, the former legal adviser to the military’s high command, had “altered statements in order to conceal the involvement of high-ranking officers” in the slaying of six Jesuits and their housekeepers in 1989. The convoy passes an old campaign poster for Rodolfo Parker, a man implicated in atrocities by the United Nations Truth Commission set up during the post-civil war peace accords in 1992. The forensics convoy finally arrives, and the group sets off along a route littered with reminders of yesterday’s civil war and today’s gang violence.