human rights Mary Mata May 28, 2012

Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory And Justice In Guatemala

(Editor’s note: This is a first of an eight part series)

by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, and Ana Arana, Fundación MEPI

Chapter 1: ‘You Don’t Know Me’

The call from Guatemala put Oscar on edge.

Prosecutors came looking for you, relatives in his rural hometown told him. Big shots from Guatemala City. They want to talk to you.

Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda had plenty to lose. Although he was living in the United States illegally, the 31-year-old had built a solid life. He worked two full-time jobs to support his three children and their mother, Nidia. They had settled in a small but cheerful townhouse in Framingham, Mass., a blue-collar suburb of Boston.

Oscar usually did his best to avoid contact with the authorities. But he decided to call the prosecutor in Guatemala City. She said it was a sensitive matter about his childhood and a massacre in the country’s civil war long ago. She promised to explain in an email.

Days later, Oscar sat at his computer in a living room full of toys, school trophies, family photos, a crucifix and souvenirs of his native land. He had arrived home from work late at night, as usual. Nidia, seven months pregnant, rested on a couch nearby. The children slept upstairs.

Oscar’s green eyes scanned the screen. The email had arrived. He took a breath and clicked.

“You don’t know me,” it began.

Prosecutor Sara Romero’s Letter to Oscar

The prosecutor said she was investigating a savage episode of the war, a case that had deeply affected her. In 1982, a squad of army commandos had stormed the village of Dos Erres and slaughtered more than 250 men, women and children.

Two small boys who survived were taken away by the commandos. Twenty-nine years later, 15 years after she had started hunting the killers, the prosecutor had reached an inescapable conclusion: Oscar was one of the boys who had been abducted.

“I know that you were much loved and well treated by the family in which you grew up,” the prosecutor wrote. “I hope you have the maturity to absorb everything I am telling you.”

“The point is, Oscar Alfredo, that although you don’t know it, you were a victim of this sad event I mentioned, just like the other child I told you that we found, and the families of the people who died in that place.”

By now, Nidia was reading over his shoulder. The prosecutor said she could arrange a DNA test to confirm her theory. She offered an incentive: help with Oscar’s immigration status in the United States.

“This is a decision you must make,” she wrote.

Guide to People in This Story »

Oscar’s mind raced through images of his childhood. He struggled to reconcile the prosecutor’s words with his memories. He had never known his mother. He did not remember his father, who had never married. Lt. Oscar Ovidio Ramírez Ramos had died in an accident when he was just four. Oscar’s grandmother and aunts had raised him to revere his father.

As the family told it, the lieutenant was a hero. He graduated at the top of his academy class, became an elite commando and won medals in combat. Oscar treasured the soldier’s red beret, his aging photo album. He liked to leaf through the pictures showing an officer with a bantam build and youthful smile, riding in a tank, carrying the flag.

The lieutenant’s nickname, a diminutive of Oscar, was Cocorico. Oscar called himself Cocorico the Second.

“You don’t know me.”

If the prosecutor’s suspicions were correct, Oscar didn’t know himself. He was not the son of an honorable soldier. He was a kidnapping victim, a battlefield trophy, living proof of mass murder.

Yet, as overwhelming as the revelation was, Oscar had to admit it was not completely new. A decade earlier, someone had sent him a Guatemalan newspaper article about Dos Erres. It mentioned his name and the supposed abduction. But his family back home convinced him the idea was preposterous, a leftist fabrication.

Far from the harsh realities of Guatemala, Oscar put the story out of his mind. The country he had left was among the most desperate and violent in the Americas. About 200,000 people died in the civil war that had ended in 1996. The right-wing military, accused of genocide in the conflict, remained powerful.

Now, the case was pulling Oscar into Guatemala’s struggle with its own tragic history. If he took the DNA test and the results were positive, it would transform his life in dangerous ways. He would become flesh-and-blood evidence in the quest to find justice for the victims of Dos Erres. He would have to accept that his identity, his whole world, had been based on a lie. And he would be a potential target for powerful forces that wanted to keep Guatemala’s secrets buried.

Guatemalans wrestled with a similar dilemma. They were divided over how much effort to devote to punish the crimes of the past in a society overwhelmed by lawlessness. The uniformed killers and torturers of the 1980s had helped spawn the mafias, corruption and crime that assail Central America’s small and weak states. The Dos Erres investigation was part of the battle against impunity, a fight for the future. But small victories had big potential costs: retaliation, political strife.

Like his country, Oscar would have to choose whether to confront painful truths.

This article first appeared in ProPublica.

With reporting fromHabiba Nosheen, Special to ProPublica, and Brian Reed, This American Life

[Photo by ugaldew ]

Background:
How We Reported Oscar’s Story
See source notes for Chapter 1.

E-book
“Finding Oscar” is availableas an e-book with a preface by Sebastian Rotella and exclusive afterword by author Francisco Goldman.

Our Partners

This story was co-reported with This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, which produced aone-hour radio versionairing this weekend onthese stations andavailable for download at 8 p.m. EST Sunday. Also co-reporting wasFundación MEPI in Mexico City, which published the story in Spanish.