by Dave Eggers
A soldier near the front charged among the prisoners to grab the woman by the hair. Hernández saw his chance and bolted off the path, gunfire echoing behind him. The boy hid in the vegetation and listened.
One by one, the soldiers killed the prisoners. Hernández heard the groans of the dying, a boy crying for his mother. The soldiers executed them with single shots from their rifles, one after another, 40 or 50 shots in total.
By nightfall, only corpses, animals and commandos inhabited the village. The squad bunked for the night in looted homes. Rain fell. Hernández crept back into town through the dark and mud. He passed the cadavers of his neighbors lying in streets and clearings. Huddled in tall grass, the boy heard the soldiers laughing.
“We finished them off, bro,” a commando said. “And we are going to keep hunting.”
Hernández eventually made his way back to Las Cruces.
Five prisoners had also survived the annihilating fury of the Kaibiles. It was a fluke: The three teenage girls and two small boys had apparently been hiding somewhere. They wandered into the center of the hamlet at sunset, when most of the villagers were dead. Commandos took them to a house that had been converted into the command post. The lieutenants decided not to kill the newcomers right away.
On the morning of Dec. 8, the squad set off on foot into the jungle hills, captives in tow. The commandos dressed the girls in military uniforms. Lt. Ramírez took charge of the 3-year-old boy; Santos Lopez Alonzo, the squad’s baker, carried the 5-year-old.
That night, three commandos took the teenage girls into the brush and raped them. In the morning, they strangled and shot them.
The squad spared both little boys. Both were light-skinned and had green eyes, prized features in a society stratified along racial lines.
Lt. Ramírez told Pinzón and the others that he was going to bring the younger boy to his hometown of Zacapa, in eastern Guatemala, and outfit him in the style of the region.
“I’m going to dress him up sharp, like a cowboy,” Ramírez said. “Cowboy boots, pants and shirt.”
Days later, a helicopter set down in a clearing. It was there to pick up Pedro Pimentel Rios for his next assignment. He went to Panama to serve as an instructor at the School of the Americas, the U.S. military base that trained many Latin American officers implicated in atrocities. The two boys were loaded aboard the helicopter and flown back to the Kaibil base.
In the jungle, the squad hiked on. They relied on the directions of the captive guerrilla they used as a guide. The prisoner was bound to a long rope, like a leash.
The commandos were low on provisions by now. While they sat around a fire on the side of the trail, Lt. Ramírez told a subordinate, Fredy Samayoa Tobar, that he felt like eating meat.
“Where am I supposed to get some meat?” Samayoa said.
“Go take a piece out of that guide and bring it to me,” Ramírez answered.
Samayoa drew his bayonet. He sliced a piece of skin about a foot long from the back of the captive guide. He brought the chunk of flesh to the lieutenant.
“Here’s your meat.”
“Oh no, no, no, you’ve got to execute him,” Ramírez said. “He’s suffering.”
The commando killed the guide. The lieutenant did not eat the meat.
The rampage ended near the town of Bethel, where the commandos plundered a grocery, stealing beers, cigars and water. They ran across some peasants and decapitated them.
By the time the squad returned to base, more than 250 people were dead. The Kaibiles christened the mission “Operation Brush-cutter.” They had mowed down everyone they had encountered.
Four days after the massacre, Lt. Carias, the commander in Las Cruces, led troops on trucks and tractors into Dos Erres. They looted vehicles, animals and property, then burned and razed the hamlet.
Carias met with terrified relatives of the missing. Some had been away from Dos Erres that day. Others lived in villages nearby. He blamed the guerrillas for the incident.
Anyone who asked too many questions, Carias warned, was going to die.
Chapter 3: Living Proof
Within just a few weeks, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala had figured out what happened in Dos Erres.
A “trusted source” told embassy officials that soldiers posing as rebels had killed more than 200 people. It was the latest in a stream of reports to the embassy blaming the military for massacres around the country. On Dec. 30, three U.S. officials went to Las Cruces, where interviews with local residents raised further suspicions.
The team flew over Dos Erres in a helicopter. Although the Guatemalan Air Force pilot refused to land, the evidence of an atrocity—burned houses, abandoned fields—was clear enough. In an unusually blunt cable to Washington, diplomats stated that “the party most likely responsible for this incident is the Guatemalan Army.”
The U.S. government kept that conclusion secret until 1998. No action was taken against the army or the commando squad. The United States continued to support Central America’s repressive but avowedly anti-communist governments.
It would be 14 years before anyone tried to bring the killers of Dos Erres to justice.
In 1996, more than three decades of civil war ended with a peace treaty between the rebels and Guatemalan military. Both sides agreed to an amnesty that exempted combatants, but allowed for prosecution of atrocities.
There was considerable doubt about whether the new government would succeed in bringing such cases. The perpetrators of some of the worst war crimes retained power in the armed forces or in rapidly growing criminal mafias. Drug cartels recruited ex-Kaibiles as triggermen and trainers.
An unlikely sleuth who challenged those dangerous forces was Sara Romero.
Romero was short and soft-spoken, her black hair parted in the middle. She looked more like a schoolteacher or a clerk than a frontline crime-fighter. At 35, she was a rookie prosecutor. She had graduated from law school the year before and been assigned to a special human rights unit in Guatemala City. Although the crimes of the war had gone unpunished for years, she was determined to pursue the investigations no matter the odds. If not, she thought, impunity would remain entrenched in Guatemalan society.
Romero was assigned the Dos Erres case. There had been hundreds of massacres during the conflict. United Nations investigators would eventually conclude that 93 percent of the casualties came at the hands of the military, and that the systematic slaughter of indigenous people constituted genocide.
Romero had little to go on. The military still insisted that the Dos Erres incident had been the work of the guerrillas. Because of the eyewitness account of Hernández, the 11-year-old survivor, the prosecutor was convinced of the army’s involvement. But she needed more.
Romero traveled to the scene, a rattling eight-hour bus ride north to the remote region. A pall of silence hung over the ruins. She interviewed survivors who had been away from the hamlet on the day of the slaughter. Many were afraid to talk. They whispered that they feared the wrath of Lt. Carias, who was still the area commander in Las Cruces. They suspected he masterminded the massacre because he had clashed with the residents of Dos Erres.
Romero found it hard to establish basic facts, such as the identities of victims. Trying to assemble a kind of census, she asked a former teacher in Dos Erres to list the names of all the children and their relatives she could remember.
Without confirmed victims and strong witnesses, Romero might never make a case. But she found a providential ally: Aura Elena Farfán.
Dignified and grandmotherly, Farfán had thick gray hair and a disposition that mixed sweet and steely. She led a human rights association in Guatemala City for victims of the conflict. Despite intimidation and threats, she had filed a criminal complaint accusing the army of mass murder in Dos Erres. In 1994, she had brought in a team of volunteer forensic anthropologists from Argentina to exhume the remains.
The Argentines—their skills honed by investigating their own nation’s “dirty war”
—worked quickly and in risky conditions. The army battalion in Las Cruces harassed them by playing loud military music and following them around. The exhumation initially identified the remains of at least 162 bodies, many babies and children retrieved from the well.
Farfán handed prosecutors a major breakthrough. She gave frequent radio interviews in the area urging witnesses to come forward. After one broadcast, U.N. officials told her a former soldier wanted to talk about Dos Erres. Farfán traveled to the man’s home. The activist took precautions, concealing her identity with sunglasses, a red hat and a shawl. A Spanish U.N. official followed from a distance to help ensure her safety.
The door opened. The tipster was Pinzón, the chubby, mustachioed former cook for the roving Kaibil squad. He was having breakfast with his children. After his initial surprise, he welcomed Farfán.
Pinzón told her he had left the military and worked as a driver at a hospital. He had never been a full-fledged commando because he had washed out of training. As a lowly cook, he had been mistreated by the other soldiers. He was an outsider, a weak link in the warrior code of silence. Dos Erres haunted him.
“I wanted to talk to you because what I have right here in my heart, I cannot stand it anymore,” Pinzón said to Farfán.
Pinzón told the story of the massacre and named the members of the squad. The conversation lasted four hours. Farfán was overcome by a mix of disgust and gratitude. She couldn’t bring herself to shake the soldier’s hand. But his repentance struck her as genuine.
Pinzón soon introduced Farfán to another repentant veteran: Ibañez. She convinced both men to give statements to Romero. They recounted their stories coldly, without emotion. It would have been impossible to know the details of the massacre if the two had not testified. Because their information was fundamental, prosecutors granted them immunity and relocated them as protected witnesses. From the start, investigators had encountered obstruction and threats from the military. Now they had explosive firsthand testimony implicating the Kaibil rapid reaction squad.
They also had a startling new lead: the abduction of the two boys by Lt. Ramírez and Alonzo, the squad’s former baker.
Romero thought it was a miracle. Finding the boys was critical. They had to know the truth—they were living with the people who’d killed their parents. No other atrocity case had this kind of evidence.
In 1999, Romero and another prosecutor went to Alonzo’s home, near the city of Retalhuleu. Because her office had only meager resources, there was no police backup, no weapons. Romero was apprehensive about confronting a commando with such grave allegations. She knew the Kaibiles prided themselves on being killing machines.
When she saw the soldier resting in a hammock in front of his tumbledown house, her fear faded. He’s just a simple man, a humble peasant, she thought.
Family pictures in Alonzo’s home confirmed her suspicions that she was in the right place. Alonzo was a dark-skinned Maya. Five of his children resembled him. The sixth, a boy named Ramiro, had light skin and green eyes.
“My oldest son has a sad story,” Alonzo told the prosecutor.
Alonzo confessed. After the massacre, he had kept Ramiro at the commando school for three months. He brought the child home and told his wife he’d been abandoned. Alonzo said he had enlisted Ramiro, by now 22, in the army. He refused to disclose the youth’s location. When the prosecutor’s office inquired, the Defense Ministry asked Ramiro if he had a problem with law enforcement. Rather than cooperate, the ministry moved him from base to base.
Investigators worried that Ramiro would be in grave danger if the military knew he was living proof of an atrocity. Eventually, prosecutors found him and spirited him away. Ramiro told them he had memories of the massacre and the murders of his family. The Alonzo family had treated him badly, he said, beating him and using him as a near slave. During a drunken rage, Alonzo had once fired a rifle at him. Authorities convinced Ramiro to leave the army and got him political asylum in Canada.
The search for the other youth foundered.
Prosecutors learned that the boy’s name was Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda. His suspected abductor, Lt. Ramírez, had died eight months after the massacre. He had been using a truck to transport wood for a house he was building. The truck overturned as Ramírez rode in the bed, killing him instantly.
Questioned in Zacapa in 1999, a sister of the lieutenant disclosed that he had brought home the boy in early 1983, claiming Oscar was his son with an unmarried woman. Prosecutors found a birth certificate for him, but no sign that the mother actually existed. The sister admitted that she had heard the boy was from Dos Erres.
Oscar had left the country for the United States. His family did not want to help the investigators find him. Romero decided to call off the search.
Investigators made headway on other leads. They had identified numerous perpetrators from the commando squad. In 2000, a judge issued arrest warrants for 17 suspects in the massacre.
In the suffocating reality of Guatemala, however, the results were anticlimactic. Police failed to execute most of the warrants. Defense lawyers bombarded courts with paperwork, appealing to the Supreme Court. They argued that their clients were protected by amnesty laws, a claim that was inaccurate but effectively stalled the prosecution.
Romero had run up against the might of the military. It looked as if justice would elude her, just as Oscar had.
Chapter 4: Strange News from Home
In the summer of 2000, Oscar was living near Boston when he received a perplexing letter.
A cousin in Zacapa sent him a copy of an article published in a Guatemala City newspaper. It described Romero’s search for two young boys who had survived the massacre and had been raised by military families.
“AG Looks for Abducted of Dos Erres,” the headline declared. “They Survived The Massacre.”
The story went on to explain that prosecutors had identified both young men. Prosecutors believed that one of them, Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, was living somewhere in the United States. It was quite possible that he had been too young to remember anything about the massacre or his abduction by the lieutenant, the prosecutors said.
The newspaper ran a family photo showing Oscar as an 8-year-old. The article reported more information about Ramiro than about Oscar because prosecutors had succeeded in finding and questioning the older boy before helping him win asylum in Canada.
There was a recent snapshot of Ramiro as a military cadet, holding a rifle and wearing the uniform of the army that had slaughtered his family. The story mentioned the investigators’ suspicion that the two boys, who both had light skin and green eyes, were brothers.
“The order was to finish off all the inhabitants of Dos Erres,” the article said. “No one can explain why Lt. Ramírez Ramos and Sgt. Lopez Alonzo made the decision to take the boys.”
Oscar was mystified. He called an aunt in Zacapa.
“What is this all about?” he asked. “Why is my photo in the paper?”
The aunt had seen the article. She told him she didn’t know what to make of the allegations, except that they were false. She insisted that the lieutenant was Oscar’s father, period. The story struck her as an attempt by leftists to smear the name of an honorable soldier.
In the persistent ideological strife of Guatemala, that was plausible.
Many families affiliated with the military and right-wing political parties felt that the left had distorted the narrative of the civil war. They complained that Guatemalan and foreign critics exaggerated the abuses of the armed forces while playing down the violence by guerrillas.
Oscar’s aunt convinced him that the allegations were too bizarre to be credible.
“If I really have a brother like they are claiming, let him find me,” he told her. “He’ll know if he’s my brother or not.”
Oscar’s memories of his early childhood were hazy. He had never known anything about his mother. He had no real memories of the lieutenant. The boy grew up
in a two-room house on an idyllic farm in the hot and dry region of Zacapa, where his family raised cows and grew tobacco. The family matriarch was Oscar’s grandmother, Rosalina. She had taken charge of his upbringing after the death of Lt. Ramírez. Oscar considered her his mother.
Rosalina was affectionate and strict. Oscar always had chores. He milked the cows at 5 a.m., worked in the fields after school, tried to make cigars—though he never quite got the hang of it. He loved life on the farm, riding horses, roaming the countryside. His aunts made sure he was clean and neat for school.
The Ramírezes were strivers. One of Oscar’s uncles was a prominent local doctor. Two aunts were nurses. The family and their neighbors and friends idolized Oscar’s father, the lieutenant, for his battlefield exploits and his generosity. He had helped pay for the education of his siblings. He had brought fellow fighters from his mercenary days in Nicaragua to settle in Zacapa. The community had even named a soccer field at a military school in Ramírez’s honor.
Curiously, though, Oscar had shown no interest in following in the lieutenant’s footsteps. His aunts urged him to go to military school, but he had an independent streak. He didn’t like taking orders.
Oscar got a vocational high school degree in accounting. It was hard to find work. After his grandmother died, he skirmished with relatives over an inheritance. He decided to seek his fortune in the United States. So in late 1998, Oscar made his way north like so many fellow Guatemalans. He flew to Mexico and slipped illegally across the border into Texas.
After a brief stay in Arlington, Va., Oscar settled in Framingham, Mass. The suburb west of Boston had a growing community of Central Americans and Brazilians. He found a job in the produce section of a supermarket. The pay and benefits were solid, and nobody bothered him about his immigration status.
Oscar’s new life soon consumed him. He reunited with Nidia, his teenage sweetheart, who had arrived from Guatemala. In 2005, they moved into a small duplex in a weathered residential complex.