Oscar-nominated ‘Argentina, 1985’ focuses on the nation's dark history. An American forensic...

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."Taking on human rights cases across the globe
When Snow arrived in Argentina, Ruiz said, he had a difficult time finding pathologists and scientific experts who had not been compromised by the military regime.

So Snow decided to recruit graduate students who were too young to be influenced by the dictatorship; many were as young as the young victims they were digging up.

One founding member of the Argentina team profiled in the documentary is Luis Fondebrider. At age 19, he took a window screen from his mother's house to sift dirt and collect human remains with Snow.

During their first exhumation in July 1984, the forensic team uncovered the bones of a woman with a gunshot wound to the head.

Snow says in the documentary that this first encounter with the remains of a victim made another young team member, Patricia Bernardi, cry. But a few minutes later, Bernardi returned to the site where a medical student was carefully digging around the skull with a spoon. They had very limited resources, so she had asked her teammate for the spoon to make coffee.

That's the moment, Snow says in the documentary, when he realized he had a forensic team capable to do the job.

Ruiz's documentary focuses mainly on three of the members from the initial team — Fondebrider and Bernardi, as well as Mimi Doretti — as they follow in the footsteps of Snow and search for victims of people missing outside of Argentina.

One of the sites they inspect is the village of El Mozote in El Salvador, where U.S.-trained Salvadoran soldiers killed almost 1,000 people as the military fought left-wing guerillas — the site of the largest single massacre in the modern history of Latin America.

Looking back at the founding members, Ruiz describes their investigative work as the “Where’s Waldo” of the forensic world.

“You can pick a conflict from the last three or four decades, and the Argentine forensic anthropology team has labored behind the scenes,” he said. “They are collecting evidence for human rights trials, corroborating events; and most importantly, working very closely with families who lost loved ones.”

The documentary "El Equipo" is currently showing in different festivals and will premiere on “Independent Lens” from PBS this fall. "