Vince Heptig

A noticeable hush fell over the small crowd of Guatemalan indigenious people. They watched in horror as forensic anthropologist Luis Miguel Alonso painstakingly unearthed the body of a young Indian boy killed in a massacre in 1983. An evangelical priest gives a eulogy behind black trash bags containing the skeletal remains of eight people murdered in the early 1980’s during the Guatemalan army’s counter-insurgency campaign. They were among the 23 bodies unearthed by anthropologists in August in Chontala, a village in the western highlands of Guatemala. Indigenious women dressed in brightly-colored huipils dotted the green cornfield as a team of Argentine forensic anthropologists slowly uncovered evidence last August of a Mayan tragedy in the small village of Chontala. The village, in the western highlands of Guatemala, was part of the bloodbath by the army and civil patrols that engulfed this small Central American country during 1979-1985. Two residents of Chontala, in the western highlands of Guatemala, pray over eight bodies of members of their community. They were killed during the army’s counter-insurgency campaign in the

APF Fellow Vince Heptig lives in Guatemala City and has been photographing Guatemala’s refugees in Mexico and other locations. In addition to living in poverty, the new generation of refugee children has lost most cultural ties to its Mayan heritage. A child is carried by her mother, waiting in line for donated food at a refugee camp, La Gloria, in Chiapas, Mexico. Mateo Gomez in a sparse cornfield in a refugee camp in San Lorenzo, in Chiapas, Mexico. His son, also named Mateo, was born in the camp in 1985. They have little hope of returning to Guatemala. A young refugee, Luis, sits atop a bag of donated corn in his family’s hut in the Cieneguita camp, Chiapas, Mexico. An infant and her mother wait for food at the government’s re-education center outside of Nebaj, Guatemala. Baltazar, age 11, leans on his hoe behind a group of civil patrollers outside of Nebaj, Guatemala. An almost toothless Gaslisia Cano, 89, waits for help at the re-education center outside of Nebaj. ©1991 Vince Heptig Vince Heptig, a