Friends Who Disappear:
Memory, Justice, and Moral Reparation
After the Guatemalan Genocide
April 9, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Doheny Memorial Library, Room 241
Join us in person or on Zoom
A public lecture by Victoria Sanford (Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York)
2024-2025 Center Research Fellow
Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research
(Join us in person or online on Zoom)
Friends Who Disappear is about historical memory and documentary evidence of the Guatemalan state practice of forced disappearance of civilians during the military regimes following the 1954 US-backed overthrow of democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. It is also a forensic investigation into Dr. Marvyn Perez’s childhood abduction and torture by Guatemalan state forces. It is a story of survival and the search for safe haven, justice, and reparations. Marvyn was one of 5,000 urban and rural children disappeared by state forces during the Guatemalan Genocide of the 1980s. His experience is unique because he survived to share the story of his journey back from the abyss and his continuous struggle for justice.
In this lecture, Professor Sanford shares forensic experiences investigating forced disappearance in Guatemala and highlights contemporary justice-seeking efforts. This project is about the intersection of the lives of the disappeared with state terror, the trauma of migration, and the bureaucratic wall of denial that holds justice out of reach. At one and the same time, it is about the interconnectedness of young citizens in the Americas and beyond seeking to build a just world and future.
REGISTER HERE
Lunch will be served.
A public scholar, anthropologist and internationally recognized expert on the Guatemalan Genocide, Victoria Sanford is a writer, human rights advocate and Lehman Professor of Excellence at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of seven books including Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel & Her Father’s Quest for Justice and Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. She served as an invited expert in the Spanish National Court’s genocide case against the Guatemalan generals and in discrimination and indigenous land rights cases in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and Bunting Peace Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has also held fellowships at the US Institute for Peace, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Fulbright Scholar awards at the Universidad Libre and Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia, among others. She is the 2024-2025 Center Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research. To learn more about Dr. Sanford’s work, visit: https://www.victoriasanford.info/
Lecture image: (left) Panzos widow gazing at images of the disappeared from her community (2009 Book presentation in Panzos) ; (right) photos of Dr. Marvyn Perez and his sisters
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