Durante la guerra civil de Guatemala una base militar del norte del país se convirtió en un centro de tortura y cementerio clandestino que resume 36 años de represión contra miembros de comunidades indígenas, estudiantes y activistas. En medio de la barbarie las víctimas se fueron encontrando y trabajaron juntas. Tres décadas después, sus esfuerzos, que empezaron como una medida de sobrevivencia, se han convertido en la base para construir los casos legales contra los criminales responsables del dolor.

[Institutional voice]: On January 16th, 1992, El Salvador signed a Peace Accord that ended 12 years of war.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE: ALFREDO CRISTIANI’S SPEECH ON THE PEACE TREATY, FORMER SALVADORAN PRESIDENT)

[Institutional voice]: On December 29th, 1996, it was Guatemala’s turn.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE: ÁLVARO ARZU’S DISCOURSE, FORMER PRESIDENT OF GUATEMALA)

[Institutional voice]: After two decades, the war wounds are still open. Pie de Página’s Ximena Natera and Radio Nacional de Colombia’s Lorena Vega present War witnesses: voices against impunity, stories about the battles for memory and justice in El Salvador and Guatemala.

***

[Blanca Rosa Quiroa]: That was every day, after repression devastated the rural areas of the country, it arrived to the capital. In 1984, up to 10, even complete families, were abducted daily.

[Ximena Natera]: The woman speaking is Blanca Rosa Quiroa. She is short, with curly hair full on grey. We meet in Guatemala City.

[Blanca]: They would appear: 5, 3, 2, 1. Death people everyday, in the streets, at the bottom of trails, on the roads…

[Lorena Vega]: Blanca describes what it was like to live in 1980’s Guatemala, the hardest years of the conflict during the dictatorship of General Efraín Ríos Montt. The civil war that had affected rural areas for two decades, had reached the capital and materialized in the disappearance of thousands of citizens, including six relatives of Blanca.

[Blanca]: A complete family: mom, dad, three children and my husband’s sister-in-law.

[Ximena]: One of the missing is her son, Óscar Hernández. She saw him last on February 23, 1984. He was 22 years old.

[Blanca]: He was a volunteer firefighter. He worked as an electromechanical technician there and had a night shift as a volunteer.

[Ximena]: That night Óscar was on his way to the station, was about to arrive…

[Blanca]: He was shot and taken away. They (the firestation) notified us immediately.

[Lorena]: Blanca learned from witnesses that her son was alive when soldiers took him away.

[Blanca]: I knew about it half an hour after his abduction. We started searching hospitals right then. They said he had been shot so we thought he had been taken to one.

[Lorena]: But Oscar did not appear. Blanca’s search took her to the Police’s Criminal Investigation Unit, she filed a complaint. Her one-and-a-half-year-old grandson and daughter-in-law where there too.

[Blanca]: We arrived and the officer at the door asked us what we were doing there. We told him about the complaint:

”You got photos?”, Yes, I told him and he took my son’s picture out of my hands. ”Oh, it’s the fireman!” he said sarcastically. I stood there.

[Ximena]: Those first months, visiting hospitals, morgues, police stations, even jails, Blanca discovered that, like her, hundreds of mothers and wives were looking for their own.

[Blanca]: At first we would just look at each other and not even greet each other. We were afraid. Months went by, we used to see the same people, often at the same time so we started talking.

[Lorena]: This is how the Mutual Aid Group, GAM, was born. The first organization formed by victims families and friends.They would hold protests at the Presidential House, call on press conferences and publish advertisements in local media, drawing attention from authorities.

All this during the most violent years of the civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. 45,000 Guatemalans disappeared in that period of time.

[Blanca]: Police officers were always watching, we were sprayed with gas many times. And they even responded to our press releases, they used to say we were the guerrilla’s political arm.

[Ximena]: Blanca and GAM members were the first ones to break the silence and confront the regime. Contrary to what happened in El Salvador, with more than a thousand journalists covering the war, Guatemala’s state restricted the entry of international media and the war’s dimension remained hidden.

In 1992, GAM morphed into FAMDEGUA, the Guatemala’s Detained and Disappeared Relatives Association, presently leaded by Blanca alongside Aura Elena Farfan, her partner.

[Lorena]: For most families, searching through files was not enough. In the early 90s they started doing what no state entity wanted to assume: locating clandestine mass graves and recovering anonymous bodies in rural areas.

[Blanca]: Watching us work, made people lost their fear, some started showing us mass grave sites: look here Doña Blanca… look there Doña Aura… and so we knew where our relatives where and we wanted to get them out. We would go and see the place first, then map it out, make a memo and present it in court, then search for witnesses and take them to court to present their statement.

Then we would talk to the anthropologists, go with them to the burial site, asked the owner for permission, make them sign the paperwork present it to the authorities and then came the exhumation.

[Ximena]: Their first great discovery was in Antigua Guatemala​​, one hour away from the capital.

[Blanca]: It turned out that it was an ancient burial, from the way the people were buried (…), it was 500 years old.

[Lorena]: With each new finding Famdegua received more tip-offs.

One of their biggest cases was the recovery of 201 human bodies, they had been massacred in Dos Erres, a village in Petén, in the northern region during december of 1982.

(AUDIO NEWS ABOUT MASACRE DOS ERRES)

[Lorena]: This finding triggered the first high profile trial for war crimes in the country, after one decade of legal battle, seven soldiers were sentenced to 6 thousand and 30 years of prison. 30 years for each of their victims.

(AUDIO SIGNATURE OF PEACE, SPEAKS ÁLVARO ARZÚ)

[Ximena]: Guatemala’s Civil War ended on December 29, 1996 after a decade of approches between the Army and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, a counterinsurgency group that emerged from dissident factions within the army. The war lasted over 36 years and had been very unequal. At one of the most critical points 300 thousand soldiers faced six thousand guerrilla members.

[Lorena]: Guatemala’s was the last standing war in Central America and international pressure influenced its end. A key voice for peace at the time was that of Rigoberta Menchú, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE, RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ RECEIVES NOBEL PRIZE)

[Ximena]: Famdegua’s work did not end with the peace treaty.

In 2002 Famdegua received a tip off that turned their attention to former 21 Military Zone in Cobán, Alta Verapaz. Today the base is known as Creompaz, a base housing UN peacekeeping training operations.

[Lorena]: What the organization discovered there became the biggest forced disappearance case from the war and the reason we traveled to Guatemala.

[Blanca]: We knew about all the (disappeared) people in Cobán. We had done many exhumations there and people would say of those missing: they took him to the base and never left.

(MUSIC)

[Ximena]: It is early in the morning, we are in San Lucas Chiacal, a small rural town in San Cristóbal, Alta Verapaz. Its inhabitants are Poq’omchi, one of 23 Mayan ethnic groups in the country who suffered brutal repression during the war.

(LOURDES CAL SPEAKS)

[Lorena]: The woman speaking is Lourdes Cal, originally from Cobán, she works with Truth and Life association, providing psychosocial support to victims of the armed conflict.

Lulu’s job consist of visiting communities affected by the military intervention and collecting testimonies of those who survived. Today, Lulu becomes our interpreter.

[Ximena]: There are over a dozen people gathered at Felisa Moranmo’s house garden. Lulu explains to them that we are journalists trying to understand how their community experienced the conflict.

The people, mostly women between 40 and 60, are reluctant.

(LOURDES CAL SPEAKS IN MAYAN LANGUAGE)

[Lorena]: At the end they accept. We enter Felisa’s house and sat at the center of a large bedroom, around a small wooden table.

[Lorena]: Good morning, could you tell me your name…?

[Lorena]: The first to do so is Felisa. She is 58 years old and was 21 years in 1981.

[Felisa speaks poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** The first thing that happened was that they came and kidnapped my husband. 1981, that is how the problem started here.

[Ximena]: The disappearance of Samuel, Felisa’s husband, was the beginning of a decade of scorched earth policies by the Guatemalan state, aimed to end the guerrilla. The offensive was called rifles and beans.

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** They told us that we were guerrilla fighters, and we, I swear, were not guerrillas. We did not have weapons, the only thing we had (in our arms) was children, trying to protect them.

[Lorena]: Soon after, neighbors from nearby communities began to knock on their doors, fleeing the army.

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** They came here saying that the soldiers were burning the houses and then we had no choice but to start fleeing and running for the mountains.

(FELISA SPEAKS IN POQOMCHÍ)

[Lorena]: Her family roamed the mountains for 14 months.

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** Sometimes people were hiding in groups, sometimes we would find big groups: 25 men, women and children, killed when reached by the soldiers.

[Ximena]: In there, the soldiers would them, sometimes with dogs and every night they would change from their hiding spots. Men would try to plant corn on the mountain but the soldiers destroyed over and over the crops.

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** The moment came when we could not find anything. Our children began to die from hunger.

[Lorena]: Did you lose children on the mountain?

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** She says that when she went arrived to the mountains was 7 months pregnant. She gave birth there, so she remembers well that it was 14 months… the period she had her baby. She did not produced any milk and it was time for him to start eating solid food, they had nothing to give him and the baby died.

[Isabella Calgue]**:** My name is Isabela Calgue

[Lorena]: Isabela lived in the mountain as well. She fled the community with her husband after a group of soldiers burned her house down. It was punishment for having more corn and animals than her neighbors. The soldiers were suspicious and accused them of supporting the guerrilla.

[Isabella speaks poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** I had the advantage that I was a just married. I didn’t have a baby. I was running, running, running, on the mountain I did not have the slow down or carrying someone, so we managed to climb farther.

When they could not get us and we moved further, they bombed the mountain with helicopters. They followed us with bombs.

[Ximena]: They lived there for two years. In the flight, Isabela lost ten family members, including his mother, who was murdered with a machete by the soldiers.

[Isabella speaks poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** It was what they would do when they spot you. Many children were left behind. Kill them all, squarely: children, adults, old people. Kill them with machetes.

[Ximena]: Why did they leave the mountain?

[Isabella speaks poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** The people on the mountain were dying. We were running out of food and we heard that someone people were already surrendering to the army. It was the only option.

[Ximena]: Soon after the death of her infant son, Felisa surrendered to the soldiers.

[Felisa speaks poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** The only reason I fled to the mountain was to protect my children but they were dying, I no longer felt the obligation to keep running.

[Ximena]: Her family was taken as prisoners to a camp inside the 21st military zone in Cobán. They were relocated three months later to a new place for 6 months, under the total control.

[Felisa speaks poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** They were observed all the time, never left alone.

[Lorena]: One afternoon soldiers detained his brother and took him away. She didn’t hear from him again. Felisa suspects they took him back to the 21st military zone and that he was murdered there.

[Ximena]: Felisa and her family spent the next few years in half a dozen camps. Known as Modelo Villages, concentration camps run by the military. Those were meant to be reeducation centers, to form their ideology away from the guerrilla and closer to the regime.

[Lorena]: They did forced labor: building houses and drains. Barely received any food and after some months the people were forced to vacate the camps, move to a new one and start from scratch.

[Ximena]: Isabela Calgue was also interned at the camps, her good health draw attention from the guards.

[Isabela speaks poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** They told me that must I have been part of the guerrilla, they saw me as a threat.

[Lorena]: She was subjected to constant harassment and interrogations, to exercise to a point of weakness and they forced her to watch over a small groups of women and accuse those who rebel. At the villages, the disappearances were part of the routine. That is how Felisa remembers it:

[Felisa speaks poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** There kept coming to take the men. A very selective thing. They took the men and never came back.

[Ximena]: Abelino Cal lived a somewhat different story, during the first army incursions into his community, the soldiers took his father. The family went to the base a couple of times, asking, trying to recover him but shortly after his younger sister was also arrested.

(AVELINO SPEAKS POCOMCHÍ)

[Lorena]: Avelino then fled to the mountain and stayed there for four years until he was able to reach a refugee camp from the Catholic church. He never surrendered to the army.

[Ximena]: Over the years, military control dwindled in the region. In 1987 Avelino returned to his community but the village had disappeared.

[Lorena]: Felisa does not remember when she returned home.

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** It is difficult to place in time many of the things that happened because we were disconnected all the time, the only thing we wanted was to protect ourselves.

[Ximena]: By the time Avelino and Felisa were able to return to their communities in early 1990s, the war was entering its final stretch.

(MUSIC)

[Lorena]: Although it was known much later, between 1979 and 1984, at least 600 massacres were committed against the indigenous communities. Over 200 thousand people died during the whole conflict , 45 thousand more disappeared and there were 100 thousand displaced.

[Ximena]: After the peace agreements in 1996, victims’ organizations focused their efforts on the search for the disappeared and the possibility of bringing criminals to justice.

[Blanca Quiroa]: The first report was filed in 2002.

[Lorena]: Although the rumors about the crimes in Cobán moved around since the early 90s, it was then when a witness, willing to speak, knocked on Famdegua’s door.

[Blanca]: He searched for us to tell us that: this and that had happened, that he had been there doing military service.

(Ximena): The witness appeared before a local prosecutor from Cobán flanked by the organization. He recounted that in the 80s, the military zone, now Creompaz, had been a torture center and a place for soldiers to bring in civilians that never left.

[Blanca]: But they never started a process. The file was lost.

[Lorena]: They resubmitted the complaint several times but only in 2011, 9 years later, the case was handed to local prosecutor Allan Stowlinsky, who became interested.

[Blanca]: You could only access the place with a search warrant from a judge’s order and he said: Doña Blanca, tell Doña Aura Helena, she was the president at that moment, that we are going to go in (to Creompaz) next week.

[Lorena]: The prosecutor filed the request for the search warrant.

[Blanca]: But chances are that the next day he was killed.

[Lorena and Ximena]: The prosecutor?

Blanca: Aha.

[NEWS FRAGMENT]: 36-year-old prosecutor Stowlinsky appeared mutilated, he had been kidnapped, hours before, on his way to pick up his son in northern Guatemala.

[Ximena]: The crime, attributed to Los Zetas cartel, stopped the process until February 2012. The case was transferred to the country’s capital by Attorney General’s order, Claudia Paz y Paz, who is recognized for promoting investigations on some of the war crimes.

[Blanca]: She gave us an opening to enter. She was the one who gave the order for the raid at the base.

[Lorena]: With the order in their hands, on February 2 Blanca and traveled the 212 km between the Capital and Cobán. But at the entrance …

[Blanca]: We could not enter, they stopped us at the door because we took the memorial as military base number 12, and as it is now called Creompaz, then that’s why they returned us.

[Ximena]: Back in the capital they did all the paperwork again. They returned on February 27 accompanied by the witness who 10 years earlier had filed the complaint.

[Blanca]: We went in and the gentleman with us (witness who served) took us to the first place and said - where I stand you are going to see -, he was going to disguise as a member of the MP.

[Lorena]: Was I afraid?

[Blanca]: I think so, like we were afraid because we knew that the Army was there, he said: where I stand there you will see. Overall, it stopped in several places and we had the anthropologists and excavators and once started and in the first place began to come out a skull, a leg and so on.

[Lorena]: In Creompaz they found an immense cemetery. That day they worked from 10 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon.

[Blanca]: You had to leave because there was no light and you could not work, because as was the side inside and as where the bases and detachments are very large places.

[Ximena]: Military base 21, today Creompaz, which led the counterinsurgent intelligence operations in the 1980s and 1990s, is an extensive complex located on the periphery of the city.

[Blanca]: There are the facilities where the Army offices are, more for inside are the troop dormitories, toilets, soccer fields and everything. You have to walk about a kilometer maybe to where the first excavation was.

[Lorena]: The search process was conducted by the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala. For two years, the archaeologists worked two shifts, seven days a week in the recovery of bones.

They found 84 graves that kept the remains of 565 people, men, women and children.

[Blanca]: Most were indigenous people from around the town, both here from San Cristóbal and Santa Cruz, from the Pacayas, from there from Cobán, from several villages, most were men, only from a place called Pambache In one night in a truck the Army went to get 92 men out.

[Lorena]: Most of the bodies were bound hand and foot, gagged, blindfolded and showing signs of torture.

[Blanca]: Many were hanged, had barbed wire in the neck and rolled with a piece of iron made tourniquet. Many of the people were hanged, they were not killed with a firearm.

[Ximena]: Through the analysis of clothing and the testimonies of survivors and relatives, the anthropological team was able to establish that the bodies corresponded to victims of the armed conflict.

They determined that they had died between 1981 and 1988, that many bodies corresponded to military incursions into indigenous communities such as the Río Negro massacre among others, as well as activists and students who had disappeared in the cities.

[Lorena]: Of the 565 remains, 150 have been identified by DNA tests.

[Blanca]: There were a lot of big sticks and I think they grew so much with the fertilizer of all the people they buried there.

(MUSIC)

[Ximena]: Felisa Moranmó always suspected that her husband could be in Creompaz but it took 35 years before they got any news. In 2016 his remains were recovered from clandestine graves.

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** They took the bones to the capital and managed with the DNA to identify that my husband had been one of those found there. They asked for our saliva sample so they could identify it and it appeared.

**[Lorena]: **Mrs. Felisa, what did it mean for you to find your husband?

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** It was a way later to reassure me that in the end I already knew where I was and that I can already be very sure that those responsible for his death were the military.

[Ximena]: Inside the graves was also Avelino’s father.

[Felisa speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** There was no way of thinking that they had taken him elsewhere.

the facilities already identify us as military zone number 21 and supposedly the vision and functions were different but what I am sure of is that this is still the same.

[Lorena]: Do you think they continue to persecute indigenous groups?

[Avelino Cal speaks in poqomchí and Lulu translate]**:** Maybe the war is not openly like that at the time, but I understand that the system continues to destroy the peoples. The Government has never been responsible for repairing this damage and it is a way to end the peoples that were affected during the war.

He is indifferent, he is even looking for a way for this to remain unpunished.

(MUSIC)

[Ximena]: The offices of the Association of Relatives, Detainees and Missing Guatemala, Famdegua, are in a one-story house in the center of the Capital. The entrance is guarded with security cameras and by a guard who receives visitors at the door.

In the meeting room, a large room with large windows, dozens of photographs hang from the high walls. They are black and white portraits: men and women, all young. There is no room for more and many others are piled up on the floor.

[Lorena]: In a corner, there’s Oscar’s photo: he wears his fireman’s uniform, looks straight at the camera and does not smile. Blanca says that most of the photos were taken from official IDs.

In 34 years of search Blanca has helped many families to recover their own, but Oscar has not had news.

She tells us what it meant to her to discover the Creompaz graves, which is considered the largest forced disappearance case in Latin America.

[Blanca]: They are a lot of mixed feelings because I said at the beginning, I know that my son is not here, but now there is an illusion, feeling that, and I hope because there are still many there, I hope that my son is possibly there , at least there.

[Ximena]: Although Blanca found support in other victims, the search impacted her family’s relationships. His youngest son was 7 years old at the time and resented that his mother was so long away.

[Blanca]: He suffered a lot, the disappearance of his brother affected him a lot. He said, when he entered adolescence, he told me that I had forgotten him, that I was only in the street and that when he needed me and that I had only had one son. It is a hard feeling, so great rejection and now it has changed, but I think that, for the same reason, he is 10 years old, he is single, he stays in the house.

He helps me, sometimes he comes here when there is no one to drive us, he comes and goes with me to the exhumations and everything.

[Lorena]: The continuous search for her son and for those of thousands more has defined her life for more than three decades. The disappearance, he says, is a crime that not only ends with the life of a person, it destroys any possibility of the future.

[Blanca]: I say many times that the most aberrant crime on earth is the forced disappearance of a person because it is a cycle of life that did not end and a duel that never closes, because if we do not find them, we do not bury your bones are never going to close that duel and the cycle of life, because they were healthy, they were not sick, it was not an accident, their cycle never ended.

(MUSIC)

***

Institutional Voice: In the next chapter

[Fafg expert]: Here we have two gunshot wounds and then we are going to have this type of injury.

Recover loved ones, one by one:

The Creompaz case is fought in the courts of Guatemala. While the courts are advancing at a slow pace, civil society and the families of victims are racing against the clock to find, identify and return the disappeared to their homes.