XOLCUAY, Guatemala — On the last day of February 1982, Gaspar Tzuluch left his three children with his mother and hurried off to the market of a neighboring village to hawk his coffee yield. He returned to find nothing but a mountain of corpses.
The decayed remains of Tzuluch's mother and his children, ages 10, 8 and 3, were among 35 bodies a team of excavators pulled from shallow graves this week in Xolcuay, 155 miles northeast of Guatemala City.
Researchers believe the bodies constitute nearly all of Xolcuay's inhabitants. They say the villagers were killed by soldiers battling leftist guerillas at the height of Guatemala's 36-year civil war.
Tzuluch was among several family members on hand Tuesday to help researchers and excavators from Guatemala's Anthropological and Forensic Foundation identify the remains.
The 46-year-old calmly recounted how he had to flee Xolcuay and leave the bodies of his family to avoid capture by the soldiers still occupying the village.
After three days of hiding in deep mountain jungle, he said, he returned to find the bodies buried in hastily prepared mass graves.
Researchers confirmed Wednesday that they had identified 33 of the 35 bodies. The remains of the last two victims were to be taken to Guatemala City Thursday for testing and analysis, said Fredi Peccerelli, one of the foundation's forensic specialists.
The daylong dig Tuesday unearthed men, woman and children of all ages, all of whom were shot to death, Peccerelli said.
The foundation, which in recent months has led dozens of expeditions in search of buried corpses hidden in the Guatemalan countryside, had expected to find as many as 100 bodies in Xolcuay.
According to a 1996 report by the Guatemalan Truth Commission, more than 100 Indian villagers in and around Xolcuay vanished in February 1982, all thought to have been killed by a special government anti-guerilla team. Peccerelli said future expeditions are planned for areas near Xolcuay.
Some 200,000 Guatemalans, mostly rural Indians, died during a civil war that ended with a 1996 peace agreement.