I. “They came back to kill us”
February 16, 1982, Batz Chulultze’ hamlet, Chajul. At nine in the morning, a dozen dark spots dot the horizon. Gaspar Mendoza Ijom, the father of Engracia Mendoza Caba, an eight-year-old girl, grows frightened.
“Why are you counting the helicopters? That’s bad luck,” he scolds the children.
Today, he will be murdered by the Guatemalan Army. He will die from a straight shot to the head in front of his daughter. Decades later, Engracia will recall her reply:
“We’re just counting them. It’s like counting the birds.”
These are turbulent months. The Mendoza family fled the center of Chajul, one of three Maya Ixil municipalities in the deep, forested highlands of Guatemala, and settled in Chulultze’, a commune of seven families in seven small huts in the most rural neck of rural Chajul. They fled repression in the town center, where the Army assaulted and disappeared many people they knew, many of whom were also fleeing themselves.
That is why, as the helicopters circle back over the village in the late afternoon, their fear turns to haste. The neighbors’ calls are urgent: Return home, make food, and get ready, because we may have to leave all at once.
They prepare to flee from their own flight, deeper into the depths of the mountains.
One of Engracia's sisters, seeing the helicopters return, puts into words what everyone already senses.
“They came back to kill us.”
CIA operatives in Guatemala have come to the same conclusion. Less than two weeks earlier, in a report classified as “top secret” and dated February 5, 1982, they describe an imminent danger: “The Guatemalan military’s plans to begin sweeps through the Ixil Triangle area, which has the highest concentration of guerrillas and sympathizers in the country, could lead not only to major clashes, but to serious abuses by the armed forces.”
They are right: The horror of Engracia, of her family, of her village, is about to begin in earnest.
* * *
Forty-two years later, Engracia Mendoza will join dozens of Ixil survivors on their journey to Guatemala City from their hamlets and villages to inscribe their memories in the judicial record. Midway through 2024, they will testify in a trial against the man who commanded the assassins of thousands of civilians in dozens of villages in the early 1980s: the nonagenarian former general Benedicto Lucas García, younger brother of then-dictator Romeo Lucas García and architect of the counterinsurgency in early 1982 in Guatemala, at the height of the country’s war against communism. Benedicto will be accused of perpetrating, as Chief of the Army General Staff between mid-1981 and early 1982, a genocide against the Ixil, one of two-dozen Maya peoples in Guatemala.
The witnesses will recall the day when the Army, under Benedicto’s command, arrived in their community to burn, rape, and murder. They will have waited decades. They will point to the general.
Today, more than four decades after this frontal assault, almost no-one has admitted responsibility. There are those in Guatemala, especially the top military brass and conservative elite, who still deny it or gloss over it. In years when corruption and repression are consuming the Guatemalan judiciary, the little town of Chajul will stand as a skeletal monument to historical impunity and the abandonment of the victims. U.S. documents, an array of scientific and forensic reports, exhumations, and survivor testimonies presented at trial will point to one resounding fact: There are bones in Chajul. They come in all sizes, damaged by bullets or scorched by the flames.
They also point to another: There will be little to no political interest in exhuming them. But to understand why, one must first retrace the steps of the Lucas brothers, two strongmen among mighty military men.
II. The North and the Rumble of Helicopters
Rewind. January 30, 1980, Guatemala City. U.S. Ambassador Frank Ortiz just left a tense meeting with President Romeo Lucas García, a general who has held de-facto control of the Guatemalan state for a year and a half. These are some of the most repressive years in decades. In a diplomatic cable to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the U.S. embassies in Managua, San José, San Salvador, and Tegucigalpa, Ortiz reports that “the president appears to be in an embattled state of mind” and that he had “the most animated conversation I yet have had with him” since he presented his credentials in Guatemala City in July 1979. Romeo Lucas, he says, has adopted a “siege mentality.”
In 2019, two-dozen secret cables from U.S. intelligence and diplomatic sources will be handed over to the Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based association that advocates for the declassification of documents. Due to Guatemala’s minimal official records submitted to trial, internal communications between senior U.S. diplomats and intelligence agents in the 1980s offer a privileged window into negotiations and tensions between countries over the Lucas brothers’ military strategy: above all, their appetite for political violence.
In Washington, Jimmy Carter’s presidency is entering its final year. In Central America, his administration says, in the words of Ambassador Ortiz, that it is determined to prop up “moderate” political actors and “the functioning of a modern representational democracy.” It has suspended official military cooperation with Guatemala since 1977, citing serious abuses against the population by right-wing military governments. These are days when political assassinations, kidnappings, and torture regularly make headlines in international newspapers and human rights reports. Romeo Lucas has told the U.S. ambassador that he feels cornered by global public opinion; his country, he claims, is squarely in the crosshairs of international communism. “Guatemala,” the president declares, in the recollection of the ambassador, “will be last battle of communism before it reaches the very borders of the U.S.” The military man, the cable says, “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, the ambassador’s outlook has grown grim: “Guatemala is a bloodbath waiting to happen,” Ortiz writes in a letter to the next secretary of state, Edmund Muskie. “The extremists here, particularly those of the right, are probably as extreme as any that can be found,” he says. “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.” In a message to Muskie weeks later, on August 18, 1980, he adds that Romeo Lucas has accused U.S. officials of seeking to “strangle” Guatemala militarily and economically. The president, he says, would reject any offer of U.S. aid that would force him 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.”
Of the enemy, Lucas has informed the Carter administration that he sees “no possibility of defeating them in a clean and legal manner.”
The most blistering assessment by the Carter administration, among the documents submitted to the court, comes from the National Security Council. In a secret memorandum dated July 23, 1980, Latin America staffer Robert Pastor states: “The Guatemalan government is one of the most brutal regimes in the world.” Toeing the fine line between sarcasm and frankness, the officials add, “Their policy is to eliminate all communists, and their definition is so broad, it would probably include Zbig,” referring to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser and negotiator in Central America. “Moreover,” the unredacted section of the memorandum concludes, “it [Guatemala] is probably working to undermine the Salvadorean junta,” referring to the Revolutionary Government Junta, which, since staging a coup in October 1979, is ruling with an iron fist in San Salvador. A civil war is also taking root in the neighboring country.
The 1980 elections in the United States lay waste to the Carter administration and, incidentally, its strategy in Central America. By April 1981, Ronald Reagan has been in the White House for three months and is seeking to strengthen the hands of the military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador in their anti-guerrilla wars. He has made it a priority in the isthmus to overthrow the Sandinista government that took power by force in Nicaragua in 1979. But, according to the expert testimony of Kate Doyle of the National Security Archive, the new Republican administration concedes to Carter that state repression in Guatemala is a stumbling block for the U.S. Congress in Washington to lift the arms embargo and official military cooperation with Guatemala. The archivist concludes that Romeo Lucas’ government is too bloodthirsty for Reagan’s strategic purposes in Central America.
Evidence of this is a confidential cable sent on April 8 to regional U.S. embassies by senior State Department officials. “A U.S. administration perceived as hostile has been replaced by one viewed as sympathetic to Guatemalan problems,” they wrote, stressing “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, described in the report as a respected conservative in Washington and an emissary of the Reagan administration, the State Department plans to offer economic support, a campaign to improve Guatemala’s international image, and spare parts for military helicopters. In return, they want Romeo Lucas to stop “government involvement in the indiscriminate killing of political opponents and innocent non-combatants,” which, according to the U.S. administration, “impede our ability to maintain the level of military cooperation we would wish.”
At the end of April, they drafted talking points for Walters’ trip: “The killing of persons who are not clearly participating in the guerrilla organizations has been particularly damaging with our Congress and public,” says the April 28 draft. “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 has been in office as chief of staff for a month. The Guatemalan response is blunt: “President Lucas implied that the GOG [Guatemalan government] would continue to pursue the war as it had been conducting it in the past,” the new U.S. ambassador, Frederic Chapin, reports to Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a retired U.S. Army general. “President Lucas is unlikely to modify his government’s policy in order to curtail generalized violence. He believes that USG [the U.S. government] will have to make decision whether to sell helicopter spare parts on the basis of U.S. national security considerations, rather than on an anticipation that GOG will change its ways.”
Even with 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 the GOG [government of Guatemala] was indeed attempting to curtail generalized violence,” the ambassador admitted in private. The U.S. legislature did not lift the embargo on Guatemala until late 1983, more than a year after Guatemalan General Efraín Ríos Montt’s coup that overthrew the Lucas brothers.
Toward the end of 1981, the U.S. administration debates another maneuver: In a secret memorandum dated October 5, State Department human rights officer Robert Jacobs proposes taking distance from the Guatemalan government, with full knowledge of its abuses, in order for the United States to wash their hands. “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,” Jacobs says. He speaks of a “dirty war” similar to Argentina. 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 the GOG with security assistance,” he argues. “We can in the aftermath of the repression work to restore normal relations with the successors to President Lucas.”
From Algeria and Vietnam to Guatemala
As chief of the Guatemalan General Staff, Benedicto is a frequent figure in international headlines: He is a high-octane Army general and the executor of a fierce counterinsurgency campaign. In early 1982, in a report titled “Escalating violence besieges Central America,” the Washington Post describes him as “the flamboyant brother of President Romeo Lucas García” and gives a few highlights of his career: “Trained at Saint-Cyr, France, during the Algerian war and a veteran of several field commands, Benedicto Lucas transformed the Army’s tactics.” The New York Times and the Reagan State Department sketch the same figure; the Times reports his “fighting experience in the war in Algeria.”
The links between the Romeo Lucas García regime and the French counterinsurgency in Algeria, where the concept of death squads was meticulously honed, have not gone unnoticed in Guatemala. Three years ago, in 1979, the former mayor of Guatemala City, Manuel Colom Argueta, prior to his assassination in March, said in a speech at the public University of San Carlos that, “under U.S. auspices, the methods of Algeria” were being implemented in Guatemala. Excerpts from his speech will be included in an expert report submitted to Benedicto's trial by Canadian historian Marc Drouin. “A form of genocide previously unknown in Guatemala is beginning,” Colom Argueta added.
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. Benedicto appears as a common thread in the region’s history over the past half-century: According to the media outlet, he was a cadet in 1954, “when they tried to uphold the government of Jacobo Árbenz,” who was overthrown that year in a CIA-sponsored coup. He 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. A man on the front lines, at the heart of the combat.
Decades later, in 2016, while investigations into war crimes and crimes against humanity loom over him, he will recall to Plaza Pública his own titanic figure: “I am very well regarded in the Army, very respected and everything. I am invited to all the activities. All my colleagues congratulate me on Facebook and tell me I’m an icon. Of course, thank you, I'm very flattered, because I led by teaching and by example in the Army.”
In January 1982, Benedicto tells the Washington Post that the Army has problems with judgment in the field. “There are irregular local forces that also aid the guerrillas and warn them of the Army’s coming,” he states. “Of course, these people are difficult to distinguish from most of the rest of the local population, but these organizational bases have to be won over or wiped out.” He adds: “Because of that, well, the population suffers.”
In late 1981, the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies give different shades to the military power of Brigadier General Benedicto Lucas, installed on August 15 as head of the Army. The U.S. Embassy paints a more pragmatic picture, describing a “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, where a fierce military campaign is already underway. The strategy, according to Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Taylor, resembles the Chieu Hoi, or “Open Arms,” a psychological operation implemented by the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
Reagan’s ambassador blames Benedicto’s subordinates for allegedly undermining this dual strategy by using “terror against villages as an instrument of anti-guerrilla warfare.”
U.S. intelligence, on the other hand, portrays a relentless officer in firm control. The CIA, the main agency and collaborator with the Guatemalan Army throughout the armed conflict, reports on December 5 “the largest offensive carried out so far by the Guatemalan Army,” led by Benedicto, resulting in the dismantling of an alleged guerrilla front, the death of around 55 combatants, the closure of their bases and tunnels, and the confiscation of weapons and food. By January 21, 1982, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) registers the transfer to the front lines of “active and aggressive” and “fanatically anti-communist” military brass. In her expert testimony, Doyle will state that the Lucas brothers’ counterinsurgency is at its “peak”, describing the transfer to the area of subordinates who “share the counterinsurgency vision of General Benedicto Lucas García.”
The general tells a similar story. In a memoir published in 2012, a year before the trial against Ríos Montt, he will write in chapter 14: “I assumed the position of Chief of the General Staff of the Army... I began traveling throughout the Republic, learning about the situation in each department, going to the areas of operations and leaving 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. 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.”
In his book, later submitted to court as evidence of his guilt, the general also mentions 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. When I arrived at the General Staff, that region was totally under guerrilla control, and there was a great deal of fear of entering it, so I ordered that detachments with sufficient troops be installed in the municipal centers, with fully mobile patrols.”
Otto Cuéllar, a former combatant who moved to the Ixil area from Guatemala City in 1981 to join the ranks of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), says that “all the villages, except for a few rare ones,” sympathized with the guerrillas and “organized themselves” to provide food and other supplies, but that the guerrilla forces in the Ixil area numbered only in the dozens. “It’s not that the entire population was fighting; the units were few and far between,” he will tell El Faro in an October 2024 interview, in an office in Nebaj, a town in the Ixil area. “It’s laughable, because some articles say that the guerrillas had 10,000 fighters in 1982. That’s ridiculous.”
Cuéllar, born in the capital, will become a member of the Cofradía Ixil of Nebaj, or ancestral Ixil leadership, in the years following the armed conflict. “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. That was the real operational force. Let’s suppose there were a few other squads here and there: There were about 120 [in Ixil territory and surrounding areas]. There were no more.”
With the operation underway, in an interview on February 9, 1982, with U.S. documentary filmmaker Pamela Yates, recorded in the testimony submitted by the Canadian expert Drouin, even Benedicto seems to contradict the future Benedicto.
“Guerrillas, as such, number between 1,500 and 2,000 scattered all over the country,” the general says. “Now there should be little more than 5,000 to 6,000 members of the Local Irregular Forces. I don’t think there are any more left.”
“How can you distinguish between guerrillas and campesinos, or between guerrillas and irregulars?“ asks Yates.
“Yes, that’s the biggest problem we face when we’re in the field,” replies Benedicto. “They politically trained the population, organized them, raised their awareness. And that led us to believe that we really had a big problem on our hands, and we attacked it. We are attacking it so that they will no longer support the guerrillas.”
“General [Benedicto Lucas] García has said that he intends to ‘pacify the country,’ by adopting the strategy of the French in Algeria and the French and Americans in Vietnam,” reports the New York Times in mid-March 1982. The report is signed by reporter Raymond Bonner: Two months earlier, together with the Washington Post, he uncovered the massacre of hundreds of civilians by the Salvadoran Army in El Mozote, a massacre that the governments of El Salvador and Ronald Reagan still deny months later. In Guatemala, Benedicto’s rise to military command has set off an earthquake: “He has revitalized the Guatemalan Army, taking the soldiers out of their fixed barracks into the rebels’ mountain strongholds,” Bonner writes. “Near Santa Cruz del Quiché [Guatemala], 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 concludes, “large numbers of peasants are often killed to deny the guerrillas their support.”
These are the months for which, in the waning years of his life, the commander will be brought before a Guatemalan High-Risk Tribunal.
“Come back one day for my bones”
February 16, 1982, Chajul. Upon arriving at the hamlet of Chulultze’, the soldiers attack in all haste, bombarding the houses and descending in ropes. With their boots on the ground, they set the homes ablaze and open fire as families try to hide in the bushes. “But it was impossible, because the helicopters were starting to land,” Engracia says 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 is speechless, frozen in shock, as she looks on. A friend and her sister Manuela —the latter with newborn daughter in arms— shake her out of her stupor and drag her to the last house that is not aflame.
The killers follow close behind.
These days, a CIA cable puts an asterisk to 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.”
Spanish lawyer Paloma Soria Montañez, an investigator of international gender crimes, will submit to the judicial record years later, in 2013, in anticipation of Benedicto’s trial, that “the Army massacred and executed people who fled to the mountains.” The expert adds: “There was no food, and they had to keep moving to avoid being located by the Army. (...) In most cases, massacres were carried out and houses, crops, animals, and any property that allowed the communities to survive were burned.”
Tucked in the last house in the village, the girls’ fear sets off 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 the care of an 11-year-old friend. One girl watching over the survival of another. 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 in the villages: “In mid-February 1982 the Guatemalan Army reinforced its existing force in the central El Quiché department and launched a Sweep Operation in the Ixil Triangle. 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 an alleged means of safe passage never extended to Engracia, her sister, or her father: “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 Campesino Race
Fast-forward. April 5, 2024, Guatemala City. Torre de Tribunales is a gray, gloomy fifteen-story courthouse towering over the center of the capital city, flanked by a multicolor cornucopia of street vendor stalls. A chorus of honking buses and motorcycles passes by, announcing the drop-off of men in suits for their hearings. In the morning, a man shines shoes alongside a handful of women in traditional Maya attire who laugh quietly amongst themselves. Against the fence in front of the building, someone has placed huge signs in the white and blue of the Guatemalan flag, with images of Maya Ixil people.
“The Ixil people demand to live in peace” and “We are the true Ixil people,” the signs declare. They end in a resounding chorus: “There was no genocide.”
In Ixil territory as in Guatemala City, the memory of the armed conflict remains, four decades later, a battlefield and an open wound. Among the Ixil, there are groups that actively deny that genocide took place in the area, some of them linked to the Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC), paramilitary groups organized by the military command in the area in the early 1980s. The Ixil ancestral authorities claim that Evangelical churches have become an echo chamber for the PAC, calling on the people to turn the page and forget the wrongs of the past.
On the top floor, the final link in a long chain of staircases and courtrooms connected by an excruciatingly slow elevator, the High-Risk Tribunal “A” has summoned former Chief of the General Staff Benedicto Lucas García. It is his first hearing on trial for genocide. The courtroom is packed today. Discernable among the crowd are Ixil women, human rights defenders, journalists, representatives of the international solidarity group NISGUA, and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The early commotion will fade away: Most hearings in the coming months will sit nearly empty.
“This is a case tried in the press,” declares one of Benedicto’s two public defenders accredited before the court. “He is practically already convicted. That is why it is important for the media to be here, to humanize my defendant.”
The defendant is not here. Neither he nor his two public defenders will grant an interview to El Faro despite multiple requests during the trial. Benedicto can be seen behind a camera, via video call, wearing a patient gown at the Military Hospital. This is how he will appear for months, without sitting in-person before dozens of witnesses. He has just undergone surgery for “some hernias,” his team reports. At 92, he is still a hardy man. In front of the camera, in the coming months, the old soldier will walk straight. He has not succumbed to senility, unlike the vast majority of his few comrades-in-arms still alive.
More than four decades after the barbarity, this courtroom will try those who remain. The perpetrators who remain. With the victims who remain.
This is the second judicial process for genocide in Guatemalan history. In May 2013, a Guatemalan tribunal convicted dictator Ríos Montt, becoming the first country to convict a former head of state in a national court for this crime. Shortly after the verdict, the Constitutional Court overturned the sentence and months of hearings, citing a procedural technicality. Ríos Montt died during his second trial. The case against Benedicto, brother of the dictator who preceded Ríos, evaluates a central thesis of the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights: Between coups and countercoups in the turbulent 1980s in Guatemala, a policy of extermination directed against the Ixil population transcended changes in military control.
“He identifies as an Indigenous person,” Benedicto’s defense attorney continues. “He is 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 makes no distinction or discrimination whatsoever.”
In recent years, human rights prosecutors have accused Benedicto of participating in a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity. These include historic cases such as CREOMPAZ, involving the forced disappearance of dozens of victims found in clandestine graves, bound hand and foot and blindfolded, at the military base in Cobán, Alta Verapaz, the defendant’s hometown. This case will be overturned in November 2024, leaving unpunished one of the largest cases of disappearance in the contemporary history of Latin America. Benedicto has suggested that the people died in the 1976 earthquake and their bodies were deposited there.
Then there is the kidnapping and torture of Marco Antonio Molina Theissen and the rape of his sister, Emma. In this second case, which was brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2003, he was sentenced in 2018 in Guatemala to 58 years in prison, although this was commuted to house arrest in 2023. On February 6, 2025, his lawyers will ask for the sentence to be overturned, arguing that the reparations measures are unconstitutional. While they say they do not dispute his guilt, the defense argues that it is not legal for the Court to have ordered Congress —as reparations— to pass a law creating a National Registry of Victims of Forced Disappearance.
Today, his lawyers have advised him not to make any statements until he has had time to read the 70-page indictment “slowly.” But when the court asks Benedicto to confirm his personal information and declare the legal status of these other cases, he nevertheless utters a few words in his own defense.
“I am desperate. At my age, I have been going back and forth to the courthouse for cases that I don't even recognize,” said the general, waving his hands in small circles to punctuate his frustration.
The first criminal accusation of genocide in Guatemala reached the Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2001, when the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR) denounced three consecutive regimes for their actions between 1978 and 1985: those of Romeo Lucas García, Efraín Ríos Montt, and Humberto Mejía Víctores. The indictment also covered the regions of Ixcán and Huehuetenango. Over time, due to legal strategy and lack of resources, they narrowed their focus to the Ixil area during the first two administrations. The Ríos Montt case was taken up first, and in 2018, the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights brought the case against Benedicto to trial.
Today in court, the general denounces a conspiracy against him 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, fled Guatemala and are now in exile. He adds to this list 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 the general sees it, people threatened by the justice system are pursuing him before the courts.
Above all, Benedicto says he is not a racist.
“My wife is an Indigenous-German cruce [crossbreed], and I am a protector of the campesino race,” he declares. ”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, in the 2016 Plaza Pública documentary, half-acknowledged: “The soldiers are very sincere and frank. That’s also why there couldn’t have been genocide here in Guatemala: because all [the soldiers] are campesinos. Ninety percent of those who fought were people from the villages and hamlets.”
In November 2019, the Public Prosecutor’s Office charged Benedicto, along with Manuel Callejas y Callejas, his former intelligence director, and César Octavio Noguera, former head of military operations, with committing acts of genocide against the Maya Ixil population in the highlands. Noguera died in 2020, while the court has declared Callejas, who has Parkinson’s Disease, unfit to stand trial. Benedicto is the last man standing. After years of delays, today’s hearing has finally been scheduled.
More than four decades after the barbarity, this courtroom will try those who remain. The perpetrators who remain. With the victims who remain.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office, as well as the plaintiffs, have made statements indicating that the Ixil Triangle, or the Ixil area, was designated a ‘red zone’ and that, for this reason, the intention was to exterminate the Maya Ixil people,” argues the defense attorney. “If we draw a parallel with today, we have red zones, Your Honor. And the fact that they are red zones does not mean that the State of Guatemala is going to sweep them up, murder them, and create situations to exterminate all the people living there.”
She returns to that same verb, the name of the operation for which Benedicto is now on trial: sweep. Operación Barrida; Operation Sweep. The Manual of Subversive Warfare, a publication of the Guatemalan Army submitted at the 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,” the manual reads.
“When you arrived in the red zone, the real red zone, which was marked by an imaginary line, from the moment you crossed that imaginary line, everything that existed there was already a potential enemy,” said a former soldier who was present during the operations in the Ixil area in 1982. He became a protected witness for the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights in 2014 and gave this statement in an extension of his testimony in 2018. “Whether it was a person, a child, a man, a woman, or an elderly person, they were considered enemies,” he added. “Also material things: Everything was considered the enemy. Even vegetation was considered the enemy.”
There is perhaps no better portrait of the rapid rot of the justice system in Guatemala than this: Miguel Ángel Gálvez, the high-risk judge who took the testimony of the former soldier, a jurist renowned for bringing cases of organized crime and historical impunity to trial, has been in exile since April 2023. He fled Guatemala amid threats and harassment against him and his family. The Foundation Against Terrorism (FCT), a group linked to former military personnel that describes itself as “legal snipers,” had put his face on a lottery card along with seven prosecutors, judges, and journalists such as Jose Rubén Zamora. Gálvez fled the country before suffering the same punishment. Regarding cases linked to the armed conflict that he handled, he told El Faro: “I understood that Guatemala is designed for impunity.”
“They claim that the entire Ixil people were labeled internal enemies, and that is not true,” continues Benedicto’s team. “The defense has analyzed the documents, including documents that are not in this case, but due to the type of crime and in order to establish an internal armed conflict, we have been able to obtain access. And no document determines that the Maya Ixil civilian population should be exterminated, or that they were labeled internal enemies.”
In 2012, in the case of the Río Negro massacres, 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 the words of military officials decades ago, when they could not have imagined the possibility of trials, let alone convictions. Major General Héctor Alejandro Gramajo Morales, who gave more than a dozen interviews to U.S. researcher Jennifer Schirmer, said in one of the conversations, published in 1991 in the Harvard International Review, that there were times of indiscriminate massacres: “We have 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.”
Drouin, the Canadian historian, writes in his expert report that Gramajo is referring to Benedicto’s period as head of the General Staff.
The defense also disputes the typification of the war in Guatemala, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, as an “internal armed conflict.” They prefer the term “confrontation,” arguing that, therefore, the acts of violence should not be judged under international law standards. “Armed conflicts that take place within states have remained outside the focus of international law, as they are considered to be the internal jurisdiction of each state,” says Benedicto’s team. ”Consequently, they are also outside its jurisdiction and the scope of application of the rules governing international armed conflicts.”
“Absolutely false,” human rights lawyer Alfredo Ortega tells El Faro. “It's one of the basic issues when you take a course in international humanitarian law: There are rules of war, whether in national or international armed conflicts. And they are very basic, such as the protection of the non-combatant population.”
Guatemala ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1950. The Penal Code also defines the crime. The 1996 Peace Accords refer to an “internal armed confrontation,” or enfrentamiento, though “conflict” and “confrontation” are used interchangeably by the Inter-American System. “They are playing with the connotation of terms, and it is a fallacy. Whether you call it war, armed conflict, or conflagration, a non-international armed conflict falls within the scope of international humanitarian law,” adds Ortega.
“It has been alleged that my client supervised, organized, coordinated, or planned certain operations in the Ixil area,” his lawyer continues, arguing that any abuses would have been committed by subordinates of the accused, 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 its cable of February 20, 1982, the agency reported that the Army high command, led by Benedicto, was “highly pleased with the initial results of the Sweep Operation” and predicted success in “destroying the major EGP support area and will be able to drive 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 asserts firmly. She does not glance back at the courtroom audience, where Ixil onlookers have also gathered. “The Guatemalan Army was engaged in an intense struggle to maintain the Guatemalan state and protect the civilian population.”
The evidence presented by prosecutors casts a different light on the soldiers. During the trial phase, which will take place over the next few months of 2024, the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights will present documents and testimonies placing Benedicto in command of the criminal operations. They collected evidence of dozens of massacres, 90 forced disappearances, sexual violence, forced displacement, and the complete destruction of 32 villages. Prosecutors also collected 12 audio recordings as advance evidence between 2010 and 2017. There are a total of 844 victims in the case file. According to the plaintiffs, around 40 of them died before the first hearing, while waiting to testify.
More than four decades after the barbarity, this courtroom will try those who remain. The perpetrators who remain. With the victims who remain.
“The defendant was in charge of forming the zones, brigades, bases, and operations commands, including the Gumarcaj Task Force and the Mariscal Gregorio Solares Military Zone in Huehuetenango, which simultaneously operated within what was militarily considered the Ixil Triangle to carry out each of the operations that constituted massacres, bombings, killings, and subjection to conditions and other circumstances against the Maya Ixil people,” said a lawyer for AJR, a joint plaintiff in the case, in her opening statement.
Among the 50 documents in the case file are human rights investigations carried out at the time: 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. There are also the declassified documents from the U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies.
Prosecutors have collected military documents that include a dozen theses written in the early 1980s by officers of the General Staff to advance to higher ranks. One of the studies, “How to Eradicate the Subversion in the Department of Quiché,” establishes how the Army operated through October 1981. “It is necessary to take action to eliminate the motives that serve as the basis for communists in the countryside: social, economic, political, psychological, and military, which have been emphasized in the first chapters of this thesis,” writes an officer identified by the code “I 18 X81.” His recommendations include the “destruction of the local political-administrative organization” and “forcing subversive criminals to battle.”
As scientific evidence, they will present 43 expert reports from anthropologists, forensic scientists, archaeologists, photographers, and geneticists who identified the existence of mass graves and recovered the remains of victims. U.S. photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg, from Time magazine, will present photos from a visit to the Ixil region with the Army on invitation of Benedicto himself. He traveled by helicopter with another journalist, two gunners, and the general. In his testimony, Nickelsberg will confirm that 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!
In his memoir, Benedicto wrote that “elements of the national and foreign press were present in all operations.” Nickelsberg, for his part, wrote in the New York Times in 2017 that the general directed operations from “a simple and lethal logic: Anyone who fled from our white Bell helicopter was a guerrilla or a sympathizer.”
On July 31, 2024, almost four months after the first trial hearing, as the journalist describes to the tribunal that flight over the forests of Quiché, Benedicto listens silently with his arms crossed, showing no emotion, his face turned to stone.
“We kept looking at the dead”
Rewind. February 16, 1982. Leaving her sister behind in the house, Engracia and her friend take off running. They are indeed fleeing from the military.
“Girls, girls, where are you going? Come back!” shout the soldiers.
The two jump into a ravine and tumble into a river. Engracia feels drops running down her leg and realizes she is bleeding. They walk aimlessly for hours in the mountains, spending the night under a tree, soaked from head to toe, their eyes wide. At night, they duck a patrol: “They saw flashlights. [The soldiers] were wearing helmets. They saw many soldiers passing by. They stayed still,” recounts her interpreter. Engracia remembers, her gaze steady, “Thank God for watching over us, because if we had sneezed, they would have killed us.”
During Operation Sweep, U.S. intelligence agents recorded troop movements in their February 20 report: “The Army initially planned to assign three full battalions (three companies each) to the Ixil Triangle for the Sweep Operation, but has encountered problems in forming three new battalions and has had to move combat units from other areas into El Quiché.” The U.S. government declassifiers blacked out the following two and a half lines. The account continues: “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 companion spend the night close enough to Chulultze’ to hear those left behind. Without realizing it, they had walked in a circle in the woods. “The soldiers started shooting. I heard my sister scream because I know my sister’s voice, the way she screams, and the words she uses,” Engracia recalls. She recounts a supernatural experience: “After they shot all the families in that community, we were in shock. I felt like someone was touching me: touching my head, my shoulders, but I looked behind me and around me and there was no-one there. We were alone under the trees at night, and I asked my friend if she had felt the same thing she had, that someone was touching her. She said yes.”
“It must be the dead; it’s our relatives who are here with us,” says Engracia. “Probably because of what I saw, or because my dead came with me.”
By eight o’clock, the helicopters are back.
“I’m hungry, I want to eat,” Engracia groans.
“The soldiers haven’t come back,” her companion protests. “They’re probably still where we were, with our dead, in the house, and if we go there, they’ll kill us.”
An hour passes. Engracia’s patience is running thin. “If I die, then so be it, but I want to eat.”
“We have tomate extranjero [tamarillos]. We’ll eat those,” replies her companion. “I’m sure we can find some corn in the fields we have there. But let’s wait a while for the soldiers to leave.”
One of the helicopters arrives to drop off food for the soldiers. The girls, still wet, are shivering. But they resist the temptation, moving away from the road and eating tamarillos and wild herbs in the shelter of the treeline.
Engracia and her companion return to the river where they fell the previous afternoon until, late in the morning, they wonder what has become of their families: “We decided to go back to see if anyone was 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 had been hanged. 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 had their ears cut off and had been dumped in the courtyard of the house. Their hands were cut off, their necks were cut. Others had been 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 summary executions and sexual violence against Maya women and girls by the Guatemalan Army during the government of Romeo Lucas will be widely documented by the Historical Clarification Commission almost two decades later, in 1999: Around 97 percent will be committed by soldiers or paramilitaries. According to the Spanish expert Soria, “given the overwhelming evidence of sexual and other acts of violence against women and girls, it was impossible for the high command not to have been aware of them.” “It is precisely because of their status as protectors of identity and their role in the biological and cultural reproduction of their peoples that Maya women and girls were targeted in the conflict through the use of sexual violence,” the expert states. This violence, she adds, “was designed to break marital and social ties, creating ostracism with terrible consequences that still define these communities today.”
The terror inside the house is soon interrupted: “The soldiers weren’t very far away, because they started shooting,” recalls Engracia. ”Without hesitating, we ran away crying.”
IV. The Last Counteroffensive
Fast-forward. November 6, 2024, Guatemala City. Today, Benedicto turns on the camera from the Military Hospital, sporting a navy blue cap emblazoned with five capital letters: “TRUMP”.
Yesterday, U.S. voters sent Donald Trump back to the White House.
“The Farce of Genocide” reads the title of a book that Benedicto’s defense team has strategically placed, as if for the cameras, in the center of their table in the courtroom. It is the cherry on top of a thick stack of documents that were not presented during the oral debate. The trial does not assess the findings of the Historical Clarification Commission or the Archbishopric of Guatemala —which concluded that genocide did, in fact, take place— but rather the former general’s alleged responsibility for acts of genocide against the Ixil population.
The trial seems to be winding down. For months, it has been neglected in the press and national debate. Today, all that remains is for the defense to present its conclusions before the judges begin deliberations. But two decisive factors have been overlooked: An appeals court will interrupt, accepting the general’s argument that the tribunal has not been impartial; and Attorney General Consuelo Porras, who presents herself as the standard-bearer of an arch-conservative agenda, will try to bring under her control a process that has gotten out of hand.
Benedicto is 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, has presented herself as the general’s legal representative. She has been Benedicto’s shadow in court, appearing on camera or at the High-Risk Tribunal with her platinum-blonde hair flawlessly straightened and her lips pursed in disdain.
The defense says it questions the impartiality of the court for accepting the written report of an expert witness, Peruvian General Rodolfo Robles Espinoza, who was scheduled to testify earlier this month. But at the last second he did not appear, leaving only his previously submitted statement. Benedicto’s team seized on this to request a change of court, even though the Judicial Power Law empowers the tribunal to admit his written expert testimony.
This strategy is standard fare 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.
Now, in Benedicto’s case, too, High-Risk Tribunal “A” refuses to recuse itself. They are now just a couple of days away from the verdict; these are no longer days for arguing about which court should hear the case, say the judges.
After more than 90 hearings, the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights has requested a sentence of 2,860 years in prison for committing acts of genocide, forced disappearance, and crimes against humanity against at least 800 victims in 23 massacres, as well as for 42 cases of disappearance. The defense has spends days presenting its conclusions. They argue that the state, not Benedicto, should be blamed for the crimes. The general’s wife arrives in the courtroom, dressed in Maya attire, praying to God with her hands over one of the public defenders, who reverently bows her head and closes her eyes.
On November 13, the trial comes to a grinding halt. The defense informs the tribunal that an appeals court has granted a temporary injunction to discuss whether or not to change the court. The tensions reach new heights when one of the three judges, Lilian Patricia Ajam, faints mid-hearing. The court says it will resume the hearings when she returns, but the next day it does not. Nor the next day, nor the day after that...
The knot of appeals grows more tangled at the same pace as a cloud thickens over the victims’ quest for justice. A deep pessimism sets in among the plaintiffs and associations close to the victims, who, from the outset, see the setback as a clear sign of a boycott of the process from the highest levels of the judiciary.
More than four decades after the barbarity, this courtroom will no longer try those who remain. Not the perpetrators who remain. Nor with the victims who remain.
In the last two weeks, Attorney General Consuelo Porras has sprung into action: She has dismantled 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 has dismissed prosecutor Erick de León, who for years was in charge of the Ixil genocide case against Benedicto. She has also transferred four assistant prosecutors working on the case, leaving only one member of the original team. In total, in the last two months of 2024 and the first weeks of 2025, she will remove or transfer more than a dozen prosecutors from the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights, replacing them with state’s attorneys with no knowledge of the case files.
At a press conference on November 14, the victims and the Association for Justice and Reconciliation denounce Porras’ interference and her filing of lawsuits against prosecutors handling the case. The Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights has kept a tight lid on the impact these events could have on the judicial process. At the office and with the press, a gag order and self-censorship reign.
Meanwhile, the defense continues to accumulate appeals against aspects of the process, thickening the knot. On November 28, the First High-Risk Appeals Chamber accepts the recusal against High-Risk Tribunal “A” and rules that the case should be transferred to Tribunal “B” so that the trial may start from scratch at oral debate. What little remains of the prosecution counters by asking the Supreme Court to correct the entire blunder and order the trial to continue from the beginning of November, as planned. But the high court does not lift a finger.
In January 2025, the presiding judge and one of the auxiliaries of Tribunal “B” refuse to hear the case. By February, they manage to form the court with substitutes. But the plaintiffs challenge one of the judges, accusing her of having ties to the military. She refuses to leave the case, leaving in limbo both whether the second court should be formed and whether the recused judge can hear arguments.
A month earlier, in December 2024, Benedicto requested to be released on house arrest. But the changes of court are dizzying: First, when he petitions High-Risk Tribunal “A,” they respond that they cannot resolve the matter because they have already been removed from the case. At his request. This petition, too, will have to wait in line.
Five months later, in early April 2025, AJR’s lawyer Mario Trejo says that everything is still on hold. The change of court has not yet been resolved. According to a photo of the court’s calendar, shared with El Faro by Trejo, a date for review has not even been set for this year.
“The little I lived through, saw, and suffered”
Rewind. February 17, 1982, Chulultze’. The girls flee the house in terror and lose their bearings. They soon fall into the hands of soldiers. Engracia will later say that, during their four days in detention without food or water, an unknown man will rescue them on Saturday the 20th.
“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. He told them, ‘Come, I’ll take you and get you treated.’”
On February 16, the Guatemalan Army killed Engracia Mendoza’s father and sister. During the operation, they also shoot her mother, Melchora Caba Sánchez, leaving her with a bullet in her hip and forcing her to cook for the soldiers. Years later, she will die. The family will attribute her death to the bullet. The Prosecutor’s Office will present no further record of the Chulultze’ massacre beyond Engracia’s testimony.
Years later, the remains of the victims and their relatives will be exhumed. But even then, Engracia will not be able to identify them. “They have already been exhumed, but I don't know which ones they are, because [the military] burned everything,” she will say on April 29, 2025, in a WhatsApp call.
The hamlet of Chulultze’ will become private property.
“That’s the little I lived through, saw, and suffered,” she will later remember in her living room, wearing ornate golden earrings and a traditional huipil blouse embroidered with birds, her eyes glistening.
V. The Fog of Memory
In the midst of Operation Sweep, on February 20, 1982, the CIA reports its first results: “Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed,” the operatives write. “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. The Army has found that most villages have been abandoned before the military forces arrive. An empty village is assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to.”
Buried in between phrases announcing the apparent grand success of the operation, U.S. operatives level their most direct criticism of the incursion: “The Army has yet to encounter any major guerrilla force in the area. Its successes to date appear to be limited to the destruction of several ‘EGP-controlled towns’ and the killing of Indian collaborators and sympathizers.”
“I don’t want my people to suffer again”
Fast-forward. October 31, 2024. Today an Army helicopter has landed in Chajul. It will take six people to a hospital in Guatemala City from Finca La Perla, a plantation where Ixil campesinos have detained the owner. The news site chajul.com announces on Facebook that “a minority group of locals from La Perla... opposed payment” 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, such as TV Azteca, label the campesinos as ”alleged invaders.”
Engracia Mendoza, now a member of the Ixil ancestral authority in Chajul, tells a very different story: “They came to remove people from the Xiamac area. But the people don’t want to leave, because they arrived there a long time ago and have built their homes there. Their parents and grandparents worked there, and they demanded pay for time worked with the boss, but he doesn’t have the conscience to support the people.”
There have been more bones in Chajul.
It is the afternoon before All Saints’ Day. A layer of fog covers the center of Chajul. Its cobblestone, paved, and dirt streets weave together small adobe houses and shops on an urban hillside in a green-black forest. Soon, the residents will begin their annual pilgrimage to the cemeteries to visit their dead. Engracia’s first-cousin, Lucas Mendoza, mayor in the late 1980s and now an Evangelical pastor, points to the white pillars of the San Gaspar Chajul Municipal Hall, a building with brown wooden trimming that was once the headquarters of a regime of terror.
“People were hung between the columns,” he says in a calm, almost administrative tone.
In the heart of the municipality, in a small shopping center near the plaza, the new mayor of Chajul, Gregorio Benjamín Soto, walks quickly, cell phone to his ear, a pistol strapped to his belt. He is a tall, burly man, with two companions in tow. He hangs up the phone and approaches us curiously. He 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 Romeo Lucas García.
Lucas Mendoza handles 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 victimizing themselves,” Soto interrupts, launching into an intense monologue. “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 extends both hands to each person present and smiles. “Alright, I have to go; I have a meeting,” he concludes, before vanishing between buildings and fog.
Just this morning, Engracia Mendoza once again shared her testimony of the massacre of her family members. “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. 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.”
It is not that Engracia wants to remember the murders; in fact, every time she recounts them, she becomes ill. Her daughters have asked her not to talk about it anymore. The older girl who survived alongside her still carefully guards her secret today, even from those close to her. “Not all of us want to talk about what we saw, but I will,” says Engracia. “My heart tells me that I have to do it. I want to speak about it, so that others don’t suffer. I don’t want my people to suffer again. If I don’t say it, who will?”