Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala, Chapter 3

(Editor’s note: This is the third of an eight part series)

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

Chapter 3: Living Proof

Within just a few weeks, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala had figured out what happened in Dos Erres.

U.S. Embassy Cable from Dec. 28, 1982

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.”

U.S. Embassy Cable from Dec. 31, 1982

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 front-line 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.

Guatemala: Memory of Silence, U.N. Report

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.

How We Reported Oscar’s Story:
See source notes for Chapter 3.

This article first appeared in ProPublica.

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

[Photo by ugaldew ]

Read Chapter 1 HERE.
Read Chapter 2 HERE.

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.

The Faces of Dos Erres
by Sebastian Rotella andKrista Kjellman Schmidt, ProPublica, May 25

Slideshow
Oscar’s Story

by Sebastian Rotella andKrista Kjellman Schmidt, ProPublica, May 25

Timeline

The Dos Erres Massacre and the Hunt for Oscar
by Krista Kjellman Schmidt and Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, May 25

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