SANTA AVELINA, Guatemala — Juana García Gómez, 75, wept over two coffins placed side by side in the sports hall of the Santa Avelina school in the western highlands of Guatemala.

Inside one lay the remains of her brother Juan, who had been abducted at age 50 more than three decades earlier. He had been found days after on the side of a rural highway, killed by a firearm.

The second coffin bore the name of her mother, María, who, at 90, had demanded the release of her son from a nearby military detachment. Instead, the soldiers beat her.

Her most serious injury was a broken femur; she died shortly after learning the fate of Juan, with gangrene in her leg.

The two coffins were among 172 containing exhumed remains of people who had died as a result of a military strategy carried out by the government in the Maya highlands during the bloodiest period of the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.