I. The Rumble of Helicopters
At nine in the morning, a dozen specks dot the horizon over the mountainous Guatemalan hamlet of Batz Chulultze’. Gaspar Mendoza Ijom, the father of an eight-year-old girl named Engracia Mendoza Caba, grows frightened.
“Why are you counting the helicopters? That’s bad luck,” he scolds the children.
It’s February 16, 1982. The Guatemalan Army will murder him. He will die from a single shot to the head, right in front of his daughter. Decades later, Engracia recalled her reply:
“We’re just counting them. It’s like counting the birds.”
Months ago, the Mendoza family fled the center of Chajul, one of three Maya Ixil municipalities in the deep, forested highlands of Guatemala. They settled in Chulultze’, a commune of seven families in seven small huts in the most rural neck of Chajul. They ran from the repression in the town center, where the Army was assaulting and disappearing their neighbors — many of whom were now fleeing, too.
When the helicopters circle back over the village late that afternoon, their fear turns to haste. The neighbors’ calls are urgent: Go home, make food, get ready. We might have to leave at any moment.
They prepare to flee from their own flight, deeper into the depths of the mountains.
One of Engracia’s sisters, watching the helicopters return, puts into words what everyone already senses.
“They came back to kill us.”
Just days earlier, U.S. CIA operatives in Guatemala reached the same conclusion. In a report classified as “Top Secret” and dated February 5, they described imminent danger. The cable warned that the Army planned to sweep the Ixil Triangle. It cautioned that the operation could lead not only to “major clashes,” but to “serious abuses” by the armed forces.
They were right. The horror for Engracia and her family is about to begin.
* * *
Forty-two years later, Engracia Mendoza joined dozens of Ixil survivors on a journey from their hamlets and villages to Guatemala City, determined to etch their memories into the judicial record. In mid-2024, they testified in the trial against the commander in charge of men who slaughtered thousands of civilians in the early 1980s: the 92-year-old former general Benedicto Lucas García.
Benedicto, as he’s known in Guatemala, is the younger brother of dictator Romeo Lucas García and the architect of the counterinsurgency in early 1982, at the height of Guatemala’s war against communism. He stands accused of perpetrating a genocide against the Ixil —one of two dozen Maya peoples in Guatemala— while serving as Chief of the Army General Staff between mid-1981 and early 1982.
The witnesses recalled the day the Army, under Benedicto’s command, arrived in their community to burn, rape, and murder. They waited decades for this moment. They came to point a finger at the general.
More than four decades after that frontal assault, almost no one has admitted responsibility. There are those in Guatemala —especially the top military brass and the conservative elite— who still deny it or gloss over it. The little town of Chajul stands as a skeletal monument to impunity.
U.S. documents, an array of scientific and forensic reports, exhumations, and survivor testimonies presented at trial point to one resounding fact: There are bones in Chajul. They come in all sizes, shattered by bullets or scorched by flames.
They also point to another fact: There is little to no political interest in digging them up.
II. A Bloodbath Waiting to Happen
On January 30, 1980, at the height of the Cold War in Central America, U.S. Ambassador Frank Ortiz reported a tense meeting in Guatemala City with President Romeo Lucas García. The general had held de facto control of the Guatemalan state for a year and a half. In a diplomatic cable to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Ortiz wrote that “the president appears to be in an embattled state of mind” and that he had “the most animated conversation I yet had with him” since presenting his credentials in July 1979. Romeo Lucas had adopted a “siege mentality.”
Decades later, the National Security Archive, a Washington-based organization advocating for document declassification, handed over two dozen secret cables from U.S. intelligence and diplomatic sources to the Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights. Given the scarcity of official Guatemalan records submitted to the trial, these internal communications offer a privileged window into tensions over military strategy.
In Washington, Jimmy Carter’s presidency was entering its final year. His administration said it was determined to prop up “moderate” political actors across Central America. They suspended official military cooperation with Guatemala in 1977, citing serious abuses by the right-wing military governments. These were days when political assassinations, kidnappings, and torture made regular international headlines.
At the time, Romeo Lucas told the ambassador he felt cornered by global public opinion. “Guatemala,” the president declared, according to the ambassador’s recollection, “will be the last battle of communism before it reaches the very borders of the U.S.” The cable notes that the general “was coming to the conclusion that Guatemala had almost no friends, and that soon Guatemala would have to take unilateral actions to assure its own security, regardless of foreign opinion.”
By June 20, 1980, Ortiz wrote to Secretary of State Edmund Muskie that “Guatemala is a bloodbath waiting to happen.” “The extremists here, particularly those of the right, are probably as extreme as any that can be found. The ultra-right resorts to violence because its paranoia, often self-induced, is so great that its reflexive response is to strike out murderously at perceived threats.”
Weeks later, on August 18, Ortiz reported that Lucas accused U.S. officials of seeking to “strangle” Guatemala militarily and economically. The president, Ortiz said, would reject any U.S. aid that forced Lucas to “follow a course that would deprive him of the ability to utilize measures that he believed were the only means to keep the extreme left from defeating him.”
Lucas informed the Carter administration that he saw “no possibility of defeating them in a clean and legal manner.”
In July 1980, the most blistering assessment by the Carter administration came from the National Security Council. In a secret memorandum, Latin America staffer Robert Pastor called the Guatemalan government “one of the most brutal regimes in the world.” Toeing the fine line between sarcasm and frankness, the officials added, “Their policy is to eliminate all communists, and their definition is so broad, it would probably include Zbig.” He was referring to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser.
By April 1981, Ronald Reagan had been in the White House for three months, and sought to strengthen the hands of the military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. He made it a priority in the isthmus to overthrow the Sandinista government that took power in Nicaragua in 1979. The new Republican administration conceded that state repression in Guatemala was a stumbling block for Congress to lift the arms embargo.
Evidence of this lies in a confidential cable sent on April 8 to American embassies. “A U.S. administration perceived as hostile has been replaced by one viewed as sympathetic to Guatemalan problems,” senior State Department officials wrote. They stressed “our desire to restore a close, cooperative relationship with Guatemala, but at the same time to avoid any potential conflict with existing human rights legislation.”
Ahead of a visit to Guatemala by General Vernon Walters, a respected conservative in Washington, the State Department planned to offer economic support, a campaign to improve Guatemala’s international image, and spare parts for military helicopters. In return, they wanted Romeo Lucas to stop “government involvement in the indiscriminate killing of political opponents and innocent non-combatants.”
They drafted talking points for Walters. “The killing of persons who are not clearly participating in the guerrilla organizations has been particularly damaging with our Congress and public,” they wrote. “Speaking frankly as a soldier, I doubt that the war can be won if the populace, especially the Indians, gets the impression that the government regards as its enemy everyone who is not actively its friend.”
By September 22, 1981, Benedicto Lucas had been in office as Chief of Staff for a month. The Guatemalan response to the U.S. overtures was blunt. “President Lucas implied that the [Guatemalan government] would continue to pursue the war as it had been conducting it in the past,” the new U.S. ambassador, Frederic Chapin, reported to Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
“President Lucas is unlikely to modify his government’s policy in order to curtail generalized violence,” added the ambassador. “He believes that USG [the U.S. government] will have to make [a] decision whether to sell helicopter spare parts on the basis of U.S. national security considerations, rather than on an anticipation that [Guatemala] will change its ways.”
Despite this knowledge, Walters and Romeo Lucas discussed the possibility of lying to the U.S. Congress. “Foreign Minister [Rafael] Castillo Valdez promised to provide the Embassy with information which Ambassador Walters could use with Congress in attempting to show that [Guatemala] was indeed attempting to curtail generalized violence,” the ambassador admitted in private.
Even so, the U.S. legislature did not lift the embargo until the end of 1983, more than a year after General Efraín Ríos Montt overthrew the Lucas brothers in a coup.
By the end of 1981, Reagan officials secretly debated whether to distance itself from Guatemala in order to wash their hands of abuses. “Only in time will we and the Guatemalans know whether President Lucas is correct in his conviction that repression will work once again in Guatemala,” wrote State Department human rights officer Robert Jacobs. In this “dirty war” similar to Argentina, he added, if repression leads to “the extermination of the guerrillas, their supporters, and their sympathizers, there is no need for the U.S. to implicate itself in the repression by supplying [Guatemala] with security assistance.”
“We can, in the aftermath of the repression, work to restore normal relations with the successors to President Lucas,” he concluded.
* * *
It’s hard to find an old photo of Benedicto Lucas García without a uniform or a gun. A documentary by Plaza Pública, “Benedicto,” shows his diploma from the School of the Americas, a U.S. training school attended by the top military leaders in Latin America during the Cold War. He was a cadet in 1954, “when they tried to uphold the government of Jacobo Árbenz” against a CIA-sponsored coup, then trained Cuban exiles who invaded the Bay of Pigs in 1961, this time on the side of the United States. In 1976, he led a plot in Guatemala to invade Belize. He founded the Corps of Paratroopers.
The Washington Post described him as President Lucas’ “flamboyant brother” who “transformed the Army’s tactics.” He was trained at Saint-Cyr, the elite French military academy, during the Algerian war; the New York Times went as far as reporting that he had “fighting experience in the war in Algeria.”
Ties to the French counterinsurgency, where the concept of death squads was meticulously honed, didn’t go unnoticed in Guatemala. According to expert testimony by Canadian historian Marc Drouin, in 1979, former Guatemala City mayor Manuel Colom Argueta declared that “the methods of Algeria” were imported “under U.S. auspices.” “A form of genocide previously unknown in Guatemala is beginning,” Colom Argueta added. In March of that same year, he was assassinated.
In 2016, as war crimes investigations closed in on him, Benedicto recalled his own stature: “In the Army, I am very well regarded, very respected and all that. They invite me to every activity here. All my colleagues congratulate me on Facebook and tell me I’m an icon. Of course, thank you, I feel very flattered, because I set the standard and the example in the Army,” he told Plaza Pública.
By January 1982, Benedicto told The Washington Post that the Army had a problem with discretion on the ground. “There are Local Irregular Forces that also help the guerrillas and warn them about the Army’s arrival,” he said. “Of course, these people are difficult to distinguish from the majority of the rest of the local population, but these organizational bases have to be persuaded or we have to finish them off.” He added: “Because of this, well, the population suffers.”
After he became head of the Army on August 15, the U.S. Embassy described a pragmatic “two-pronged” strategy of aggressively pursuing the guerrillas while extending “an olive branch” to civilians in refugee camps and former guerrilla collaborators in the highlands. According to Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Taylor, it resembled Chieu Hoi, or “Open Arms,” a psychological operation implemented by the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
At the same time, the Embassy privately accused Benedicto’s subordinates of undermining this dual strategy by using “terror against villages as an instrument of anti-guerrilla warfare.”
On the other hand, intelligence agencies portrayed a relentless officer in firm control. On December 5, the CIA, a close collaborator with the Guatemalan Army, reported that Benedicto was leading “the largest offensive carried out so far,” resulting in the dismantling of an alleged guerrilla front. By January 21, 1982, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) noted that Benedicto sent “active and aggressive” and “fanatically anti-communist” lieutenants to the front lines. In her expert testimony, Doyle wrote that the new promotions “share the counterinsurgency vision of General Benedicto Lucas García.”
The general told a similar story. In a memoir published in 2012, a year before the trial against Ríos Montt, he recalled that he left “precise instructions on what had to be done from then on to confront the guerrillas.” “Fixed detachments were replaced by mobile patrols in conflict areas, supplied by air via helicopters and parachutes,” he continued. “I gave strict orders to the Air Force to support the patrols at any time with air support and supplies in their districts, without any excuse, especially in the west, where there was the strongest guerrilla presence.”
The book was submitted to court as evidence. Benedicto wrote of the “Ixil Triangle, as it was called in operational terms, formed by the municipalities of [Santa María] Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal, and [San Gaspar] Chajul in the department of Quiché, where the Ixil language is spoken, but I could see that they did not understand each other or took me for a fool.” He claimed that Ixil lands were “totally under guerrilla control” upon his arrival, so he concentrated troops in the town centers.
Otto Cuéllar, a former member of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) from Guatemala City who moved to the Ixil area in 1981, disputes this account of total guerrilla control. In an interview with El Faro in October 2024 in Nebaj, he recounted that “all the villages, except for a few rare ones,” sympathized with the guerrillas and provided food and other supplies, but that there were only dozens of actual combatants.
“It’s laughable, because some articles say that the guerrillas had 10,000 fighters in 1982. That’s ridiculous,” said Cuéllar, who is now a member of the Cofradía Ixil of Nebaj, or Ixil leadership. “A platoon was made up of, at most, 20 combatants. There was a platoon from Nebaj, a platoon from Cotzal, a platoon from Chajul, a platoon from Uspantán, and a platoon from Sacapulas. Let’s suppose there were a few other squads here and there: There were about 120. There were no more.”
In early February 1982, with military operations underway in the area, Benedicto told U.S. documentary filmmaker Pamela Yates that “the biggest problem we face when we’re in the field” was distinguishing between guerrillas and sympathizing campesinos. The enemy “politically trained the population, organized them, raised their awareness,” said the general. “That led us to believe that we really had a big problem on our hands, and we’re attacking it so that they will no longer support the guerrillas.”
In March, reporter Raymond Bonner —who months earlier uncovered the massacre of hundreds of civilians by the Salvadoran Army in El Mozote— wrote in the New York Times that Benedicto “intends to ‘pacify the country.’” The general “has revitalized the Guatemalan Army, taking the soldiers out of their fixed barracks into the rebels’ mountain strongholds,” he wrote. “Near Santa Cruz del Quiché, the army has established an impressive field quarters unlike anything seen in El Salvador.” Santa Cruz is less than 100 kilometers from the Ixil region.
“Unfortunately,” Bonner concluded, “large numbers of peasants are often killed to deny the guerrillas their support.”
For these brutal months, the commander would eventually face a Guatemalan High-Risk Tribunal in the final years of his life.
* * *
Back in Chulultze’, soldiers descend by rope and set homes ablaze and open fire as families try to hide in the bushes. “But it was impossible, because the helicopters were starting to land,” recounts Engracia through an interpreter in the Chajul variant of Ixil, her first language. This “created a lot of wind that moved all the bushes and the branches of the trees.”
The soldiers find her father Gaspar and shoot him in the forehead. Engracia looks on speechless, frozen in shock. Her sister Manuela —the latter with her newborn daughter in her arms— and a friend shake her out of her stupor and drag her inside the last house that is not on fire. The killers follow close behind.
A CIA cable describes Benedicto’s orders: “Chief of Staff Lucas has cautioned his men not to harm innocent peasants, but he acknowledged that because most Indians in the area support the guerrillas it will probably be necessary to destroy a number of villages.”
“The Army massacred and executed people who fled to the mountains,” where “there was no food, and they had to keep moving to avoid being located,” expert witness Paloma Soria Montañez, a Spanish lawyer and investigator of international gender crimes, would later write. “Houses, crops, animals, and any property that allowed the communities to survive were burned.”
Huddling in the last house in the village, the girls make a snap decision.
“Go. I don’t have the strength to keep hiding. I know I'm going to die here; I can feel it,” says Manuela resolutely, entrusting her younger sister Engracia to an 11-year-old friend. For decades, this friend will ask Engracia never to identify her by name in any account.
In a cable dated February 20, four pages with several redactions of still-classified information, the CIA describes what is unfolding: “The commanders of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and eliminate all sources of resistance.” The report adds a lifeline never extended to Engracia or her family: “Civilians in the area who agree to collaborate with the Army and who seek Army protection are to be well treated and cared for in refugee camps for the duration of the operation.”
“You still have life, I’m sure of it,” whispers Manuela, bidding farewell. “Get out of here, and come back one day for my bones, for my body.”
III. The Protector of the Campesinos
Torre de Tribunales is a gloomy fifteen-story courthouse peering over downtown Guatemala City. One morning in April 2024, honking buses and motorcycles dropped off men in suits for their hearings, a man shined shoes on the sidewalk, and a group of women in traditional Maya attire chatted quietly amongst themselves. Against the fence in front of them, someone placed huge signs in the white and blue of the Guatemalan flag, with images of people in traditional Maya Ixil attire.
“The Ixil people demand to live in peace” and “We are the true Ixil people,” the signs declared. They ended in a resounding chorus: “There was no genocide.”
Decades after the armed conflict, memory is still a battlefield for the Ixiles. To this day, groups linked to the former paramilitary Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC) actively deny that genocide took place. The Ixil ancestral authorities claim that Evangelical churches have become an echo chamber for the PAC, calling on people to turn the page and forget the wrongs of the past.
Inside, on the top floor of the courthouse, High-Risk Tribunal A held its first hearing in the trial against Benedicto for genocide. The courtroom, sitting at the end of a long chain of stairs and hallways, was packed with Ixil women, human rights defenders, journalists, and representatives from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. But the initial buzz faded; most of the hearings after the trial started in April 2024 were nearly empty.
“This is a case tried in the press,” declared one of Benedicto’s two public defenders. “He’s practically already condemned. That’s why it’s important for the media to be here, to be able to humanize my client.”
But her client wasn’t there. He was behind a camera, via video call, wearing a patient’s gown from the Military Hospital. He would do this for months, never facing the dozens of witnesses in the flesh. He just had surgery for “some hernias,” his team reported. In front of the camera, the old soldier would sit up straight, refusing to succumb to senility, unlike the vast majority of his few surviving comrades-in-arms. Neither he nor his two public defenders granted an interview to El Faro despite multiple requests.
Four decades after the barbarity, the time came to try those left standing. The surviving victims bore witness.
This is the second genocide trial in Guatemalan history. In May 2013, a tribunal convicted dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, making Guatemala the first country to convict a former head of state for genocide in a national court. Shortly after, the Constitutional Court overturned the sentence on a technicality. Ríos Montt died during his retrial. The case against Benedicto rests on a central thesis: that between the coups and countercoups of the turbulent 1980s, the policy of exterminating the Ixil population transcended the changes in command.
“He identifies as an Indigenous person,” declared Benedicto’s defense attorney. “He’s a member of a Cofradía in the Verapaces. Throughout his life, he has ensured that the human rights of Indigenous peoples and all human beings are not violated, because he does not discriminate whatsoever.”
In recent years, prosecutors have accused Benedicto of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the CREOMPAZ case, involving the forced disappearance of dozens of victims found in clandestine graves at a military base in Cobán, Alta Verapaz, the defendant’s hometown. Benedicto has suggested that the victims, who were bound by hands and feet and blindfolded, died in the 1976 earthquake and their bodies were simply deposited there. The case was overturned months later in November 2024, leaving one of the largest cases of disappearance in contemporary Latin America unresolved.
There’s also the kidnapping and torture of Marco Antonio Molina Theissen and the rape of his sister, Emma. For this case, Benedicto was sentenced in 2018 in Guatemala to 58 years in prison, which were commuted to house arrest in 2023. On February 6, 2025, his lawyers appealed the sentence. They didn’t dispute his guilt; they argued that it was unconstitutional for the court to order Congress to pass a law creating a National Registry of Victims of Forced Disappearance.
His lawyers advised him not to make any statements until he read the 70-page indictment. But when the court asked Benedicto to confirm his personal information, he offered a few words in his own defense.
“I’m at my wits’ end. At my age, I’ve been going and going and going to court for cases I truly don’t even recognize,” the general said, waving his hands in small circles to punctuate his frustration.
The first criminal accusation of genocide in Guatemala reached the Public Prosecutor’s Office over two decades ago, in 2001, against three consecutive regimes —Romeo Lucas García, Efraín Ríos Montt, and Humberto Mejía Víctores— and covering the regions of Ixcán and Huehuetenango.
Over time, due to legal strategy and lack of resources, they narrowed their focus to the Ixil area and the first two administrations. In November 2019, prosecutors charged Benedicto, along with Manuel Callejas y Callejas, his former intelligence director, and César Octavio Noguera, former head of military operations. Noguera died in 2020, while the court declared Callejas unfit to stand trial due to Parkinson’s Disease. Benedicto is the last man standing.
Four decades after the barbarity, the time came to try those left standing. The surviving victims bore witness.
The general calls the cases against him a conspiracy orchestrated by human rights activist Helen Mack —whose anthropologist sister was murdered in 1990, leading to the first conviction of military personnel in a Guatemalan court for war crimes— and former Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who brought Ríos Montt to trial. Both women, threatened by political elites, are now in exile.
Third on this list is Juan Francisco Solórzano Foppa, a former prosecutor and tax administrator whose work contributed to the resignation and imprisonment of former President Otto Pérez Molina, another retired general. Foppa remains in Guatemala, but has been brought to court repeatedly in recent years, including his conviction in 2023 as part of a crackdown against the lawyers of jailed journalist Jose Rubén Zamora.
As he sees it, people threatened by the justice system are pursuing him in court.
But above all, Benedicto says he isn’t racist. “My wife is an Indigenous-German cruce [crossbreed], and I’m a protector of the campesino race,” he told the court. ”I have been a defender of Indigenous people since I was born. I grew up among them.” In 1982, the New York Times reported that the Army was forcibly recruiting Indigenous men, a fact that the defendant half-acknowledged to Plaza Pública: “There couldn’t have been genocide here in Guatemala because [the soldiers] are all campesinos. Ninety percent of those who fought were people from the villages and hamlets.”
His defense disputes that the Ixil region “was designated a ‘red zone,’” or that it had “the intention to exterminate the Maya Ixil people.” “If we draw a parallel with today, we have red zones,” said his attorney, referring to areas with high levels of urban crime. “And the fact that they are red zones does not mean that the State of Guatemala is going to sweep them up [or] exterminate all the people living there.”
“No document determines that the Maya Ixil civilian population should be exterminated, or that they were labeled internal enemies,” she added.
The operation led by Benedicto was called Operación Barrida or Operation Sweep. The Manual of Subversive Warfare, a publication of the Army submitted at trial, states that the Army defined red, pink, and white zones to categorize populations that were friendly or hostile to the armed forces, including non-combatants. “If the fight were conducted solely with the destruction of armed elements in mind, then the Subversive Political-Administrative Organization would be left free to continue developing and exerting increased influence over the population,” reads the manual.
“When you arrived in the real red zone, which was marked by an imaginary line, from the moment you crossed it, everything that existed there was a potential enemy,” said a former soldier stationed in the Ixil area in 1982 who became a protected witness. “Whether it was a person, a child, a man, a woman, or an elderly person, they were considered enemies,” he added in a sworn statement to the court. “Everything was considered the enemy. Even vegetation was considered the enemy.”
In 2012, in a separate ruling on massacres in Río Negro, the Inter-American Court found that “the Guatemalan Army identified members of the Maya Indigenous people as ‘internal enemies’ because it considered that they constituted or could constitute the social base of the guerrillas.”
Even more revealing are military officials’ own words decades ago. Major General Héctor Alejandro Gramajo Morales, who gave more than a dozen interviews to U.S. researcher Jennifer Schirmer, said in 1991 in the Harvard International Review that there were times of indiscriminate massacres: “We’ve created a more humane and less costly strategy, to make it more compatible with the democratic system. We instituted civil affairs [in 1982], which provides development for 70 percent of the population, while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent.”
One of the odder arguments by the defense is to dispute that the war in Guatemala, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, was an “internal armed conflict.” They prefer to call it a “confrontation,” which they say makes any acts of violence a matter of “internal jurisdiction” beyond “the rules governing international armed conflicts.”
Human rights lawyer Alfredo Ortega called this argument “absolutely false.” “There are rules of war, whether in national or international armed conflicts, and they’re very basic, such as the protection of the non-combatant population,” he told El Faro. “They’re playing with the connotation of terms, and it’s a fallacy. Whether you call it war, armed conflict, or conflagration, a non-international armed conflict falls within the scope of international humanitarian law.”
Benedicto’s lawyers also suggested that abuses could have been committed by subordinates, without his knowledge. “There may even be excesses on the part of personnel who are under the authority of a hierarchy, but that does not mean that, if someone does something illegal, it has to be reported to you. Not necessarily. And if it is, it has to be recorded that it was reported, and proven.”
The CIA had something to say about the chain of command. In February 1982, the agency reported that the Army high command was “highly pleased with the initial results of the Sweep Operation” and predicted success in “destroying the major EGP support area and [driving] the EGP out of the Ixil Triangle.” The U.S. agency concluded, “The well-documented belief by the Army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the Army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants or non-combatants alike.”
“Many soldiers sacrificed themselves under terrorist siege in an effort not to harm women, children, and the elderly,” the public defender firmly asserted. Throughout her opening remarks, she kept her gaze fixed on her written statement, away from the courtroom audience, where Ixil onlookers were gathered. “The Guatemalan Army was engaged in an intense struggle to maintain the Guatemalan state and protect the civilian population.”
In the ensuing months, the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights presented documents and testimonies placing Benedicto in command. The plaintiffs assert that Benedicto was in control of the Gumarcaj Task Force and the Mariscal Gregorio Solares Military Zone in Huehuetenango, which operated within the Ixil Triangle. Among the 50 documents in the case file are a report by Amnesty International, a 1981 country report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and another report on a request by the Commission to visit Guatemala, which was denied by then-President Romeo Lucas García.
Forensic reports identify the existence of mass graves and remains of victims. The complaint includes dozens of massacres, 90 forced disappearances, sexual violence, forced displacement, and the destruction of 32 villages. There are 844 victims in the case file, around 40 of whom died before the first hearing.
Four decades after the barbarity, the time came to try those left standing. The surviving victims bore witness.
Prosecutors also collected a dozen theses from the early 1980s by officers of the General Staff seeking higher rank. One study establishes how the Army operated in Quiché through October 1981, calling for “action to eliminate the motives that serve as the basis for communists in the countryside: social, economic, political, psychological, and military.” The recommendations include the “destruction of the local political-administrative organization” and “forcing subversive criminals to battle.”
There was also firsthand testimony. U.S. photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg, from Time Magazine, presented photos from a trip with the Army, on an invitation from Benedicto, as he was known to extend to the international press. He traveled to the Ixil region by helicopter with another journalist, two gunners, and the general. Nickelsberg said he observed the soldiers firing on non-combatant civilians on the commander’s orders. “Dale, dale!” Nickelsberg says Benedicto shouted to his men — Shoot, shoot!
On July 31, 2024, almost four months after the first trial hearing, as the journalist described that flight over the forests of Quiché, Benedicto listened silently with his arms crossed, showing no emotion, his face turned to stone.
* * *
Leaving her sister behind, Engracia and her friend run out of the house. “Girls, girls, where are you going? Come back!” the soldiers shout.
The two throw themselves into a ravine and land in a river. Engracia feels liquid trickling down her leg and realizes she is bleeding. They walk for hours, aimless in the mountains. They spend the night under a tree, soaked from head to toe, afraid to close their eyes.
In the dark, they evade a patrol. “They saw the flashlight beams. The men wore helmets. They saw many soldiers pass. They stayed still,” her interpreter recounts. Engracia remembers it with a steady gaze: “Thank God for watching over us, because if we sneezed, they surely would have killed us.”
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence records troop movements: “There are two infantry battalions and one additional company of airborne troops presently involved in the sweep, and two additional companies are expected to arrive in the area within the next few days. The majority of the units presently operating in the Ixil Triangle are from the Mariscal Zavala Brigade, headquartered in Guatemala City.”
Engracia and her friend pass the night close enough to Chulultze’ to hear those who stayed behind. Without realizing it, they walked in a circle in the dark.
“The soldiers started shooting, and I heard my sister scream,” Engracia says. “I know my sister’s voice, the way she screams, and the words she uses.”
After the soldiers shoot the families in the community, silence falls. Engracia and her friend are in shock. Engracia feels someone touching her head, her shoulders. She looks back, but no one is there. Just the two girls alone under the trees. “It must be the dead,” they decide. “It’s our relatives who are here with us.”
At dawn, around 8:00 in the morning, more helicopters arrive. One drops off food for the soldiers. The girls, still wet, are shivering. “If I die, so be it, but I want to eat,” she groans. But they resist the temptation, moving away from the road into the treeline. They find tomate extranjero (tamarillo), wild plants, and raw eggs. Late in the morning, the girls wonder what has become of their families and decide to go back to see if anyone is still alive:
“From a distance, we watched to see if the soldiers were still there, but there weren’t any. All we saw was that there were people, and they were moving. We were happy walking toward the house, but when we got closer, we were shocked and scared by what we saw: The people were moving because they were hanging. There were men and three women, among them my sister: I found my sister dead; she was hanging and moving.
“I saw other dead women lying naked on the bed. Other people had their ears cut off and were dumped in the courtyard of the house. Their hands were cut off, their necks were cut. Others were suffocated. Other people who were sitting, apparently alive, had already been shot and were dead. We kept looking at the dead. They probably raped the women because some were hanging without their cortes [skirts].”
The Army’s summary executions and sexual violence against Maya women and girls were widely documented by the Historical Clarification Commission. “It was impossible for the high command not to have been aware,” says the Spanish expert Soria. They were targeted “precisely because of their status as protectors of identity and their role in the biological and cultural reproduction,” and “to break marital and social ties, creating ostracism with terrible consequences.”
The terror inside the house is soon interrupted. “The soldiers weren’t very far away, because they started shooting,” says Engracia. ”Without hesitating, we ran away crying.”
But soon they lose their bearings. They fall into the hands of soldiers, where they spend four days without food or water. On Saturday, February 20, 1982, a stranger rescues them.
“Doña Engracia,” her interpreter translates, “could no longer stand up. Her other companion could walk a little. The man saw that she couldn’t move and that she had chills; she was shaking. The man wrapped her up and carried her. He took them to another place, a shack. He bathed them in warm water.”
IV. The Last Counteroffensive
On November 6, 2024, Benedicto turned on the camera from the Military Hospital sporting a navy blue cap emblazoned with five capital letters: “TRUMP”. Just hours before, voters in the United States sent Donald Trump back to the White House.
“The Farce of Genocide,” read the cover of a book that Benedicto’s defense team placed, as if for the cameras, at the center of their table in the courtroom, on top of a thick stack of documents not presented during the debate phase. The Historical Clarification Commission and the Archbishopric of Guatemala concluded that a genocide did take place against the Ixil population. The point of the trial was to weigh the retired general’s alleged responsibility for those acts.
Up to that point, the trial seemed to be winding down. For months, it was neglected in the press and national debate. All that was left was for the defense to present its conclusions and for deliberations to begin. Two decisive factors would tip the scale: An appeals court jumped in, accepting Benedicto’s argument that the tribunal has not been impartial before a sentence could be issued. At the same time, Attorney General Consuelo Porras, who presents herself as the standard-bearer of an arch-conservative agenda, tried to get a handle on a process that got out of hand.
Benedicto was accompanied by Karen Fischer, a far-right lawyer known for her support of military personnel accused of war crimes and for her accusations, without presenting any evidence, of electoral fraud in 2023. Fischer, a lawyer for the ProPatria League close to the Foundation Against Terrorism, presented herself as Benedicto’s legal representative. She was one step behind him in court, appearing on camera or at the Tribunal with her platinum-blonde hair flawlessly straightened.
The defense called into question the impartiality of the court for having accepted the written report of an expert witness, Peruvian General Rodolfo Robles Espinoza, who was scheduled to testify just days earlier. But at the last second he didn’t appear, leaving only his previously submitted statement for the record. Benedicto’s team seized on this to request a change of court, even though the law empowers the tribunal to admit his written expert testimony despite his absence.
This strategy is common for the defense in cases of crimes against humanity in Guatemala. A decade ago, in the 2013 genocide trial, Ríos Montt's defense team filed a challenge against the same High-Risk Tribunal, which was rejected until, after the verdict, the Constitutional Court sided with the convicted former dictator and ordered a new trial.
In Benedicto’s case, too, High-Risk Tribunal “A” refused to recuse itself. The judges reasoned that they were only days away from the verdict.
After more than 90 hearings, the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights requested a sentence of 2,860 years in prison. The defense spent days presenting its conclusions, arguing that the state, not Benedicto, was to blame for the crimes. His wife arrived in the courtroom, dressed in Maya attire, with her hands over one of the public defenders, who reverently bowed her head and closed her eyes.
Then, on November 13, the trial came to a grinding halt when the appeals court granted an injunction to discuss whether or not to change the court. As tensions continued to mount, one of the three trial judges, Lilian Patricia Ajam, fainted mid-hearing. The court said it would pick back up its hearings when she returned, but the next day it didn’t. Nor the next day, nor the day after that...
The appeals multiplied and a deep pessimism set in among the plaintiffs and associations close to the victims. They read the setbacks as a sign of a boycott from the highest levels of the judiciary.
Four decades after the barbarity, the time had come and gone to try those left standing. The surviving victims would bear witness.
In just two weeks, Attorney General Consuelo Porras sprang into action, dismantling the Specialized Unit for Cases from the Armed Conflict, without which none of the cases for war crimes and crimes against humanity from the last decade could have been brought to trial. She dismissed prosecutor Erick de León, who for years was in charge of the Ixil genocide case against Benedicto.
Porras has also transferred four assistant prosecutors working on the case, leaving only one member of the original team. In the last two months of 2024 and the first weeks of 2025, she removed or transferred more than a dozen prosecutors from the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights, replacing them with state’s attorneys with no knowledge of the cases.
The warning shots appeared much earlier: Miguel Ángel Gálvez, the renowned organized crime judge who took the protected witness soldier’s testimony, fled Guatemala in 2023. The Foundation Against Terrorism (FCT), a group linked to former military personnel that describe themselves as “legal snipers,” put his face on a lottery card along with seven prosecutors, judges, and journalists, including Jose Rubén Zamora. Gálvez left for exile. “Guatemala is designed for impunity,” he told El Faro.
At a press conference on November 14, 2024, victims denounced Porras’ interference and her filing of charges against prosecutors from the case. Self-censorship gripped the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights, which kept a tight lid on the impact these events could have on Benedicto’s case.
The defense began filing its own slate of counter-appeals. On November 28, the First High-Risk Appeals Chamber accepted that the case should be transferred to a new trial court, Tribunal “B,” to start from scratch at oral debate. The few remaining of the original prosecution team countered by asking the Supreme Court to correct the entire blunder and order the trial to continue as if nothing had happened, from the beginning of November, as planned. But the high court didn’t lift a finger.
In January 2025, the president of Tribunal “B” refused to hear the case, forcing the court to field substitute judges. But the plaintiffs accused one of these new judges of having ties to the military. She refused to leave the case, leaving in limbo both whether the second court should be formed and whether the recused judge can hear arguments.
To boot, in December 2024, Benedicto requested house arrest. But the changes of court were dizzying: High-Risk Tribunal “A” rebuffed his request, reminding him that they were frozen from the case at his request. That petition, too, would have to wait in line.
Five months later, in early April 2025, plaintiffs’ lawyer Mario Trejo showed a photo of the court’s calendar to El Faro. A date to begin loosening the log jam hadn’t even been set for this year.
* * *
In four days in February 1982, soldiers killed Engracia’s father and sister. They also shot her mother, Melchora Caba Sánchez, leaving her with a bullet in her hip and forcing her to cook for them. Years later, she died. The family believes her early death was linked to the lasting effects of the bullet in her body. Engracia’s testimony is the only record of the Chulultze’ massacre collected by prosecutors.
Years later, when the remains of the victims and their relatives started to be exhumed, Engracia couldn’t identify them. “They’ve already been exhumed, but I don’t know which ones they are, because [the military] burned everything,” she said in April over WhatsApp.
The hamlet of Chulultze’ is now private property.
“That’s the little I lived through, saw, and suffered,” she concluded in her living room, wearing ornate golden earrings and a traditional huipil blouse embroidered with birds. Her eyes glistened.
V. The Fog of Memory
In the ashes of Operation Sweep, the CIA reported that “several villages have been burned to the ground and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.” “When an Army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed,” they continued. “There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to.”
Buried in between phrases trumpeting the success of the operation, U.S. operatives leveled a frontal criticism: “The Army has yet to encounter any major guerrilla force in the area,” but had engaged in “the killing of Indian collaborators and sympathizers.”
* * *
On October 31, 2024, an Army helicopter landed in Chajul to take six people to a hospital in Guatemala City from Finca La Perla, a plantation where Ixil campesinos detained the owner. A local news site announced on Facebook that locals “refused to pay” for land, “resulting in the death of security guard Juan Pérez and many people injured on the side of the locals.” Media outlets in Guatemala City labeled the campesinos as ”alleged invaders.”
Engracia Mendoza, now a member of the Ixil ancestral authority in Chajul, tells a different story: “They came to remove people from the Xiamac area. But the people don’t want to leave, because they arrived a long time ago and built their homes there. Their parents and grandparents worked there, and they demanded that the boss pay them for their work, but he doesn’t have the conscience to support them.”
More than forty years later, there are new bones in Chajul now.
It was the afternoon before All Saints’ Day. A layer of fog covered the center of Chajul, where the urban hillside looks carved out of a green-black forest and cobblestone, paved, and dirt streets weave together small adobe houses and shops. Residents were beginning their pilgrimage to the cemeteries to visit their dead. Engracia’s first-cousin, Lucas Mendoza, mayor in the late 1980s and now an Evangelical pastor, pointed to the white pillars of the Municipal Hall, once the headquarters of a regime of terror.
“They used to hang people between the columns,” he said in a calm, almost administrative tone.
Near the plaza, the tall, burly new mayor, Gregorio Benjamín Soto, cut quickly through the hall of a small shopping center. He had a cell phone at his ear, a pistol strapped to his belt, and two companions in tow. Soto won the municipal elections in 2023 with the Valor party of Zury Ríos, a presidential candidate close to the military whose father, Efraín Ríos Montt, led the March 1982 coup against the Lucas brothers. He ended his call and approached curiously.
Lucas Mendoza handled introductions: “They’re journalists from El Faro. They came to learn about Chajul, our history, and the context of the 1980s...”
“What I think is that people have to stop playing the victim,” Soto interjected. “I was born in ’82 and grew up during that time. But that’s over now. If the guerrillas killed your relative or if the... We have to move on! What people don’t need is for more organizations to come to Chajul to give them something. We need someone to give us a word of encouragement: You can do it!”
He smiled, shook hands, and vanished into the fog.
Earlier in the morning, Engracia Mendoza invited us into her home to hear her testimony. “Mr. Benedicto Lucas is still strong. He continues to insult us, because when we entered the court, he said, ‘Here come the guerrillas, here come the dirty people.’ We have to keep putting up with humiliations and not say anything, because we want to see justice,” she said. “I’m aware that in the prison where they will send him, if the verdict is favorable, he will have a television, he will live well. He will have good food. But deep in our hearts, we will know that justice has been done.”
Engracia becomes ill with every telling. Her daughters beg her to stop. The older girl who survived with her still guards her secret from those closest to her. “Not all of us want to talk about what we saw, but I will,” said Engracia. “My heart tells me that I have to. If I don’t say it, who will?”