Nine Minutes in the Fire, Eight Years For the First Light

It took eight grueling years for Guatemala’s Supreme Court of Justice to place charges on those accused in the 2017 tragedy at the shelter home Hogar Seguro where 41 young girls were killed after being locked in a dorm room fire. The facility’s name rings like a cruel joke: “Safe Home.”

The morning of the sentencing, this past August, the courtroom was filled to capacity with journalists, international observers, family members and many of the 15 survivors. The air heavy and hot, they sank into their plastic seats or clung to what wall space was left, painted in pale yellow from the windows’ tint. The few fans in the room were turned on minutes at a time because their jet-loud motors drowned out the voices in court. One man in the audience yelled for the judge to speak louder and was threatened to be kicked out.

One survivor, Elba Alina Contreras Escotoc, had been to many sessions before. She anticipated the cameras and all the extra eyes in the courtroom that day. She was wearing gloves covering her now-healed hands, a teal hoodie pulled tight over her head, oversized dark sunglasses. She spent time choosing where to sit, nervously whispering with other survivors and family members. She settled on the center of the first row.

Proceedings started with Judge Ingrid Cifuentes describing the events leading to the fire on March 8, 2017. It took hours for the judge to narrate the timeline constructed by the court and left much of the audience in tears as the graphic scene of the fire was described. One testimony recounted how, as the flames began to take hold on the facility, a woman police officer yelled “let them burn” from outside the locked doors. Late into the afternoon, Judge Cifuentes read out the sentencing.

On August 12, 2025 six former officials were sentenced to between six years to two decades in prison for child abuse, dereliction of duty, abuse of authority, and manslaughter. They include the then-director of Hogar Seguro, a Secretary of Social Welfare, the Defender of the Rights of Children at the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, and a National Civil Police deputy commissioner found guilty of ordering his men into the facility in the lead-up to the crime.

The court ordered the Public Prosecutor’s Office to now expand its investigation to include the notoriously corrupt then-president Jimmy Morales, on allegations ventilated on trial that he exchanged calls with those responsible and ordered the police to remain inside Hogar Seguro because the girls, along with the boys in the home, had tried to escape the day before the fire.

Time has changed the lives of the young women who survived, the lives of the families of the 41 girls lost, and of those who’ve decided to keep their memories alive. The sentencing was a milestone for some, for one survivor a chance to keep a promise to seek justice, and for others just the beginning of their fight.

As for those condemned, they have appealed the verdict and, in the meantime, have yet to spend a day in prison.

The memorial altar for the girls killed at Hogar Seguro, squarely in front of the National Palace of Culture at the Constitutional Plaza in Guatemala City, had been defaced 19 times by the day of the sentencing of six public officials for the crime. The grassroots Colectiva Plaza de las Niñas repainted it — again. They have led an effort for Guatemalans in the heart of the historic downtown Zone 1 to refer to the public square, the starting point for all highway kilometer markers across the country, as the Plaza of the Girls.

Virgen de la Asunción Hogar Seguro survivor Elba Alina Contreras Escotoc, who is now 22, spoke with El Faro English in her home in Guatemala City. Eight years ago, in the early morning of March 8, Elba was resting near a window with a friend, waiting to see if they’d get permission to bathe, eat, or even use the restroom, when she noticed one of the mattresses go up in flames and fire spread. Even as the girls yelled to be released, the doors of the dorm remained locked. From outside, Elba heard a voice say, “Let those hijas de la gran puta” —roughly, daughters of bitches— “burn.” Let’s see if they’re as good at getting out of there as they are at running away.”

For the next nine and a half minutes, Elba found herself trading places with her friend at the window for gasps of air, tapping each other when they couldn’t withstand the smoke. Eventually, her friend stopped responding to the tap and Elba began to pray. The last she remembers is a bright light bursting through the smoke and using the rest of her strength to run toward it.

“When I woke up from my coma, I realized it was my birthday,” recalled Elba.

One month had passed from the fire and she found herself recovering from deep burns in a hospital in the United States, surrounded by strangers. She was one of only 15 survivors. But her friend, Ashely Angelie Rodríguez Hernández, died. When Elba awoke, she was filled with anger and promised Ashely that she would never stop pursuing justice. “She was more than my friend, she was my sister,” she said.

In recent years, she has felt public stigma and intimidation for being vocal in her fight for justice. She attributes part of her resilience to the years of therapy given to her through a non-profit organization when she returned to Guatemala. The day after the sentencing, Elba described feeling like she could finally let it go. “It is now known that from the very beginning we were telling the truth, and the only thing we were doing was defending that truth,” she says.

Luis Fernando Ruiz Ramirez, left, the lawyer for Luis Armando Perez Borja. Next to him is Carlos Rodas, the former Secretary of Social Welfare, as the two men listen to the final statement of a survivor.

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Organizers of Colectiva Plaza del Las Niñas and volunteers, in show of support for the survivors of Hogar Seguro, hung banners and put up wheat pastes along Sixth Avenue, Guatemala City’s primary pedestrian street cutting through the historic downtown district, on July 5, 2025. “It wasn’t the fire, it was the state,” insinuates one flyer. “Girls are not to be touched, raped, burned, or killed,” reads another.

The Guatemalan court found that, the day prior to the fire, 100 adolescents attempted to escape their mistreatment at the home meant to care for at-risk youth. They were rounded up by National Civic Police officers, who used pepper spray, handcuffs, and threatened to use live ammunition. For hours the following morning, Hogar Seguro administrators detained 56 girls in a locked 23-by-20-foot dorm room as punishment. The room had only two dozen foam mattresses, they were banned access to bathrooms, and dozens of officers were placed on guard around the building. A mattress was set on fire in an attempt to get the attention of the guards, but the court found that the doors were knowingly kept closed.

Autopsies detected fentanyl, morphine, and quetiapine. When the children attempted to flee on March 7, 2017, some had to cross rivers filled with sewage, but the police returned them to the facility and locked them in. They spent the night dirty, wet, and without shoes. Although they were given food, they did not eat, fearing that it had been laced with sleeping pills. The girls died hours later, on March 8, International Women’s Day.

“We are their voice now. They are no longer here, but we are,” one survivor told the court. Remote and concealed declarations were allowed to be submitted to safeguard the survivors.

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In the first image, Dacia Ramírez, 42, mother of Achly Gabriela Méndez Ramírez who was killed during the fire at Hogar Seguro, held her daughter’s favorite dress in her home in Jutiapa, Guatemala on August 3, 2025. She chooses to not hang photographs of her in the home to avoid the pain they bring her. Only a small drawing of her can be found outside their bedroom. Ramírez keeps her daughter’s few possessions in boxes hidden away. She opened them for the first time in eight years in the days before the August 12 sentencing and carefully sifted through photographs, sentimental pieces and documentation surrounding the tragedy. Dacia held her daughter’s death certificate detailing that she had died with burns across 90 percent of her body.

Every time she goes to court, Dacia wakes at four in the morning to get her three boys ready for the nearly three-hour bus ride from rural Jutiapa to the Supreme Court of Justice, a gargantuan grey building in the capital’s center. The sentencing on August 12 marked 121 hearings. Dacia had lost count on how many she attended, paying around five dollars —a meal for two— on bus fares each way, but always with her mother Marta by her side for support.

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Achly was 15 when she was killed. She had been a youth firefighter in her town and was once crowned Señorita Carnaval at the Hogar Seguro pageant. When she was young, Dacia would kiss her on the nose and affectionately call her mi pulga, “my little flea.” Only days before her death, Achly had told Dacia that she had written her a letter, but it was taken into evidence by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has refused to release it to her mother.

Dacia says that Achly was buried on a plot of land belonging to her father’s side of the family, which has now requested that she be exhumed and buried elsewhere.

After the sentencing, the sun set on families and supporters gathered at the Plaza of the Girls for a memorial. Candles of white, yellow, ruby red, and purple-black wax —the four colors of corn at the heart of Maya cosmovision— were offered into the fire at the center of the freshly fixed-up altar in front of the presidential palace. A modest crowd announced in unison, “Here with us” with the enunciation of each of the 41 names. New crosses for the girls were laid out and the once-cracked plaque commemorating their lives was sealed over the flames.

Carmen Urías, the mother of Mayra Haydeé Chután Urías, was among those grieving. “For all the girls they killed and burned, the sentencing was not enough,” she said. “It should have been 50 years for each girl lost.”