United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Central America and the Caribbean

Workshop on Forensic Anthropology in El Salvador

El Salvador, March 13, 2020. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) delivered a workshop on forensic anthropology aimed at doctors, dentists and other officials of the various regional headquarters of the Institute of Forensic Medicine of El Salvador.

The workshop took a theoretical and practical approach to meeting the scientific challenges involved in conducting searches and identifying persons in the context of investigating cases of forced disappearance.
This activity strengthens the integral strategies promoted by UNODC such as the classification of the crime of disappearance of persons attributable to individuals and organized crime structures in the criminal law, which are in force in El Salvador since December 2019.
The workshop was given by Liliana Segura Legal, a forensic anthropologist from the Attorney General's Office of Colombia. As a result of the activity, participants strengthened their knowledge in dealing with clandestine cemeteries, exhumation techniques, laboratory work and others.

The activity was carried out with the financial support of the Government of Canada, within the framework of the project "Institutional strengthening in cases of disappearances related to organized crime to reduce impunity in El Salvador", which aims to strengthen the general capacity of institutions to prevent, investigate and prosecute these cases.