On July 29, 1982, in El Rancho Bejuco, located in the Pacoj village of Santa Cruz El Chol, department of Baja Verapaz, 25 people were murdered. 80% were girls and boys. Newborns not yet registered are not counted in this figure. The names of the disappeared whose bones have not yet been found are not counted in this figure either. It is not known that some women were pregnant.
Only five people from the small village who were not there at the time of the executions survived that massacre.
The crime took place under the government of General Efraín Ríos Montt. Colonel Juan Ovalle Salazar led the operation. At his command were nine members of the civil self-defense patrols and military commissioners.
Many minors and women were raped.
One by one, those people were forced out of their houses. One by one, those twenty-five people were killed. And one by one they threw their bodies into a hole that the patrolmen had dug in the ground. To make sure none of them survived, they threw grenades at them.
It is half past ten in the morning on Thursday, May 26, 2022. Almost forty years ago. In courtroom number 7 of the High Risk Court “D” on the 14th floor of the Guatemala City Court Tower, five handcuffed former patrol members are sitting waiting for their first statement hearing. Some of them fall asleep intermittently. They have their heads down. They are around eighty years old. They barely look up from their shoes. The trial is delayed. Four more are yet to come. They come from the Pavón prison, where there was a raid tomorrow.
When they appear, only one of those men has his eyes high. He resents being photographed. She greets upon arrival by raising her chin. He walks stretched out on black sketchers sneakers. He could be any retiree from anywhere in the world. He has his arm in a sling and is the only one not handcuffed. He is Colonel Ovalle Salazar, the soldier who was in Rancho Bejuco.
Outside, behind the nine prison police officers accompanying them —one for each defendant— and who are stationed at a window chatting, the storm breaks out over Guatemala City.
The hearing starts two hours later than planned. The trial is part of the transitional justice process through which Guatemala tries to respond to the legacy of massive and serious violations of Human Rights.
The judge allows the officers to remove the men’s handcuffs. A woman sits between two of the defendants to translate from Spanish to Maya Achí in case they need to understand something. None will speak. The first hearing called was suspended because one of the former patrolmen had hearing problems. “To say that they are old men, that what are they being judged for, is to re-victimize the victims.” That’s what the lawyer Lucía Xiloj, a Quiche Maya, says.
The men have been detained since February 2022, accused of murder and crimes against the duties of humanity. In the forty years since the massacre, these men have moved on; with their lives ahead, with their families and jobs ahead, trying to forget that once they were something very similar to a monster and they killed 25 people. Finally, the hearing is suspended again. They will be summoned on June 3 to decide if they are linked to the process or not.
*
Fourteen levels below, in the same Court Tower, dozens of meters below, from hundreds of lawyers in bright suits and dark shirts below, below piles of files and files, from the weariness of those waiting at the doors of the courtrooms, police halls, beneath all that enormous and precarious judicial ecosystem, a twenty-year-old man walks around in one of the chicken coops where the defendants wait for their hearings. He looks like a tiger in a cage. He lies down on the bench, gets up and then walks from one end of the cell to the other. He approaches the fence and says that he belongs to the MS13, the Mara Salvatrucha. Between the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, it is estimated that these gangs are an army of between 15,000 and 20,000 members operating in a country of nearly 18 million inhabitants.
The boy says that he has already spent two years in the Pavoncito prison, one of the harshest in the country. He wears a rosary of green plastic beads around his neck, no tattoo. “We don’t get tattoos anymore,” he says. He wears an oversized pristine white National Football League jersey and baggy pants. He doesn’t answer why he was arrested. That is not counted, he says. Nor does he say that this cell, isolated from the others, is reserved for those charged with murder.
At that moment, another young man who does not seem to be older than fourteen, although he has to be of legal age to be there, is taken out of the dungeon, searched by a police officer and taken to court. Another, later, crosses a corridor guarded by an agent. He’s wearing jeans ripped to the waist and an open blue hospital gown, bleeding from his temple and down his torso.
The jails where the detainees wait are located in the basement, next to the parking lot, in the dark. All of Guatemala knows that subsoil: it came out day after day on television, from there the arrivals and departures of those prosecuted for corruption were broadcast.
This brutal colossus built in 1972, which is completed as an annex with the Palace of Justice, saw Ríos Montt enter a few years ago, in a theatrical way and broadcast to the whole world, lying on a stretcher and wearing huge sunglasses. He was to be tried for the murder of 1,771 unarmed indigenous people from the Ixil area. Ríos Montt, one of the bloodiest soldiers in Latin America, died unpunished at the age of 91, benefiting from the justice that he denied to his victims during his lifetime.
Until 2020, in this tower, with the support of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, 660 people were prosecuted for corruption, and more than 400 of them have been convicted. Many of them are the same ones who were once allies of those old military men. Today, most of the trials are of gang members, accused of murder, extortion, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, robbery or injuries. Children of exclusion from the same system.
*
A people’s knowledge of the history of their oppression is part of their heritage. The dictators of the 20th century continue to sleep at dawn. Guilty, but unpunished. Free.
They all leave the same: millions of bones under the ground, open mouths that no longer say anything, buried women who carry a child’s rattle in the pocket of their skirt, exasperating legal proceedings that rarely find a fair end, glove thieves white, kids from the margins who will never be at the center of anyone’s concerns, stories that are not going to go down in history.
What to do while the judicial truth does not exist. While the historical truth does not exist, when neither the collective truth nor the individual truth is achieved. Because the truth, if it is not sought and insisted on, like the rights that each people conquers, can be lost one day forever, just as peace can be lost on any given day.
With its precarious operation, its filthy basement, despite the open war waged by criminal networks and high officials within the system against officials committed to fighting impunity for corruption and organized crime, despite its Jurassic movement, the Tower is a space for common memory.
Those who until now lived with impunity, with a past of death or crime behind them, are arriving in its rooms. It is more than what others can say.
The fourteen levels of the Tower of Courts traverse Guatemala’s conflict with itself. From the last plant to its dark root, sinking into the humidity of its subsoil. Here its strata intersect, forming a history in progress that tries to be understood, placed black on white.
Victims and executioners. The order and the chaos. This building contains part of the pulse of this continuous present of which we are all a part.
Guatemala City, May 2022
This chronicle is part of the Cuenta Centroamérica project, in which three writers from Ibero-America, participants in the Central America Counts Festival 2022wrote about emblematic sites and characters of Guatemala City.
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