Putis, Peru: Two weeks after completing the exhumation of the largest mass grave found in Peru’s history, the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF) returned to Putis today to begin work on exhuming four additional graves thought to contain victims of a December 1984 massacre.

EPAF was reappointed by the local prosecutor’s office in Ayacucho to conduct the exhumations, which will take place over the next 20 days.

The Putis massacre occurred after hundreds of villagers were displaced from their homes in late 1984 and rounded up by soldiers. A group of 123 villagers were taken to Putis and shot on December 13, 1984. Braving extreme conditions and drug traffickers, EPAF spent two weeks in May extracting almost 60 skeletons and the remains of about 10 more bodies from the largest of five mass graves in the area.

Meanwhile, Jose Pablo Baraybar, Director of EPAF, will speak this week at an international human rights conference in the Philippines. Dr. Baraybar has been invited to lecture on forensics of impunity, and talk about his experiences exhuming mass graves of victims of murders and disappearances in Peru, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

The two-day conference is being held June 16-17 at the Vista Marina Hotel in Subic Bay. It is sponsored by the Philippine Judicial Academy (PHILJA) and the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), in conjunction with a Seminar Workshop on Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances. It’s goal is to to acquaint Filipino prosecutors about efforts abroad to hold human rights violators accountable, noting that the Philippines has seen rising cases of such violations since the Arroyo administration took power in 2001.

About 30 prosecutors from the Department of Justice and a number of human rights activists and workers have been invited to join the conference.

Read EPAF’s press release on the exhumations.

Read the full article about the conference.