Guatemala exhumes its past, and village honors victims
IXTUPIL, Guatemala - The daughters of Teresa Lopez Perez sought a proper farewell for their mother on familiar ground, not the hurried burial she had been given decades earlier under military bombardment in the hills.
With gentle tucks and pulls, the sisters wrapped her in vivid Maya attire - an embroidered blouse, or huipil, a hand-woven sash, or faja, and a traditional shawl.
The luminous garments cloaked their mother's bare bones - vestiges of vertebrae, limbs and other fragments.
Finally, they readied a multicolored headdress and meticulously positioned it on their mother's bare skull.
She had been dead for almost 35 years, killed during the darkest period of Guatemala's long civil war. The sisters sobbed over the remains, now encased in resplendent hues, set upon a white sheet in a wooden coffin.
"This is a sad day," Catarina Raymundo said. "But at least my mother is home again. She is no longer alone."
The return of Teresa Lopez
