were a few ways in which we were able to combine the historical and the legal causes of the violations. One was a historical analysis through research done by a technical team of 12 academics from various disciplines that included sociologists, anthropologists, and economists. Christian Tomasson went to various universities and invited them to recommend people for this group. This group worked for several months collecting input on various topics like the History of Racism against the Maya, like the history of various kinds of social, political, economic, cultural discrimination and social exclusion. The history of the state and the militarisation of the state were subjects for research. At the national level this provided important contextual information to be able to understand human rights violations. We also needed to know what had happened in the various localities; the regional characteristics of this conflict down to the village level. So all the 15 field officers were asked to prepare a regional context report for their own regions in terms of the history of social differences, land battles, labour organisation, and cooperative movements. All those social movements had been exterminated by the scorched earth policy in the early 80s. This could assist in better understanding the lives of these communities beyond just being victims of massacres. The commission also produced a series of about a hundred illustrative cases of about 5-6 pages each which were illustrative of not only the types of violations and repressions, but also gave a sort of history of the person, why were they targeted, what were they doing, and what kind of movements were they involved in. My last point is that I think all of these materials, put together, this made the report a much better report and though the information cannot be used in judicial cases it can be used to provide background context to the human rights violations for the genocide trials in Guatemala. I will end there. Truth Commissions: the Best Practices 53