Engracia Remembers the Ixil Genocide: “If I had sneezed they would have killed me”

This is the testimony of Engracia Mendoza Caba, a witness in the genocide trial of retired Guatemalan general Benedicto Lucas García, in an interview given to El Faro on October 31, 2024. She spoke in Chajulense, a variant of the Maya Ixil language. Her two translators rendered her account in mostly third-person Spanish, which was then translated into English. At the end, it includes three questions from El Faro and Mendoza’s responses. These are the memories of the horror lived by Engracia Mendoza and her family.