It is estimated that the internal armed conflict in Peru produced more than 69, 000 victims and 15,000 disappeared persons. To this day, the families of those 15,000 disappeared live with the uncertainty of not knowing the whereabouts of their loved ones and the constant fear that as time goes by any remaining information about their whereabouts will be lost. This project will collect forensic information for more than 2,000 cases of disappearance, to be used in future investigations.
Peru's internal conflict disproportionately affected rural, indigenous, Quechua-speaking and impoverished Peruvians, preventing the exercise of their rights to truth and justice, and since the end of the conflict bureaucracy and lack of resources have hampered the progress of investigations. To this day the families of the disappeared live in uncertainty as they seek to recover the remains of their sons, husbands and friends; the emotional and psychological cost cost of this trauma.
The Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team collects and stores forensic information on a special database to be used in future investigations of disappearance cases, and we attempt to collect data for as many cases as possible. However, forensics is only one part of our mission. In addition to forensic anthropology, we engage in advocacy work so that human rights violations such as those that occurred during the Peruvian internal conflict will not be repeated.
The project will collect ante-mortem information on new cases and update existing cases already in our database. During the collection of information, EPAF will implement communication campaigns to clarify the purposes and scope of the new Law on the Search for Disappeared Persons from the Period of Violence 1980-2000 and provide relevant information about investigations carried out by the state, the progress of the investigations and what can be expected from their efforts.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
