TIME: 7:00 PM CT, 8:00 PM EST | PLATFORM: Zoom | REGISTER: sforce.co/3rWrDf0

In the second half of the 20th century, Guatemala began to “disappear” its own citizens, a new stage in a long history of repressing its people. Over the course of three decades, military regimes in power forced the disappearance of political activists, opposition leaders, union leaders, and indigenous citizens, eventually culminating in the genocide of the Maya. Dr. Victoria Sanford, Professor of Anthropology at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, and Founding Director of the Lehman Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies, will trace the history of this brutal practice and show how it was instrumental in the perpetration of the genocide in Guatemala.

About Dr. Victoria Sanford

Victoria Sanford is Professor of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College. She is a member of the Anthropology Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Center and an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, City University of New York. Sanford is the author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala and a number of other books about violence and genocide in Guatemala. She is also the co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation's report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). In August of 2012, she served as an invited expert witness on the Guatemalan genocide in the Spanish National Court’s international genocide case against the Guatemalan generals. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University where she studied International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. She was a Bunting Peace Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University.