In Colombia, a painstaking effort at closure

These days, she's sifting through a much more recent, and grisly, past. The 27-year-old forensic anthropologist is a member of one of 12 exhumation teams working to recover and, they hope, identify the remains of thousands of victims of Colombia's civil war.

Less glamorous than she had imagined, Martinez's role is nonetheless important in Colombia's nascent peace process, in which families are slowly coming forward to seek the truth, and some sort of closure.

Since April 2006, the investigative teams have exhumed 1,536 bodies, of which 172 have been identified, according to the federal attorney general's office. With an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 victims of right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing rebels missing, she is unlikely to run out of work.

This year, Martinez has excavated dozens of grave sites in 15 states, from the jungles of Putumayo to the sweltering lowlands of Arauca to the crisp mountain climes of northern Colombia's Sierra Nevada -- wherever the paramilitaries and rebels committed their many atrocities.

"I never thought I would be doing this, but there is very little pure archaeological work in Colombia that pays anything," said Martinez, a native of Santa Marta who works for the Department of Administrative Security, Colombia's equivalent of the FBI. "Working for the state, I'm interpreting clues and reconstructing history. And I prefer a job outdoors."

Martinez's routine is far from the deliberate, scholarly pace she once imagined. One day in June, she spent 13 hours digging up three graves in the mountains southeast of this coastal port, accompanied by a 50-man armed guard, four confessed paramilitary killers and a pit bull terrier named Canela trained to detect decomposing bodies.

"Male, 18 to 25 years old," Martinez said, examining a collarbone and dictating to an assistant taking notes. Looking like a displaced graduate student, she was standing waist-deep in a grave on the Girocasaca Ranch, a notorious paramilitary killing ground about 10 miles from Santa Marta.

Paramilitary militias were formed by ranchers and farmers in the 1980s to defend against leftist rebels, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but in many cases turned to violent crime. Under a demobilization accord with the government, thousands of militia members began surrendering their arms in 2003.