Guatemala is a lawless country where people kill with impunity. This began in the 1950s when the United Fruit Company, fearful of losing its holdings under government land reforms, encouraged CIA efforts to foster a military coup, destabilizing the country. Left-wing guerrillas took to the hills. Civil war raged for 36 years. Large areas of the countryside were razed and the rural population, mainly Mayan Indian, were massacred. Villagers were herded into churches, which were set on fire. Whole families were sealed alive in wells. Politicians were assassinated with impunity. Women were routinely raped before being mutilated and killed. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open and foetuses strung from trees. Life became very cheap indeed.
By the time the UN brokered a peace deal in 1996, over 200,000 had been killed, 40,000 “disappeared” and 1.3 million had fled the country or became internal refugees—all this in a country of little over ten million. Today the graves of entire massacred villages are being exhumed, yet no one has ever been held responsible for these crimes.
In 1998 the Catholic Church published a report saying that 93 percent of those who had perished in the preceding decades of genocide had died at the hands of the armed forces and paramilitary death squads. Ronald Reagan described the accusation of genocide as a “bum rap” and the bishop who wrote this report was bludgeoned to death on his doorstep. To placate foreign outrage, three army officers were convicted of his murder.
Once the civil war was over, the paramilitary squads were stood down and those in the army responsible for the sadistic repression were eased out. Three generations of killers now walk the streets of a country awash with guns. There are at least 1.5 million unregistered firearms in Guatemala and an estimated 84 million rounds of ammunition were imported in 2005 alone.
Many former paramilitaries found employment in the police force, corrupting it. Drug traffickers have moved in and organized crime has moved into the highest ranks of the government. In 2003, Amnesty International labelled Guatemala “a corporate Mafia state” controlled by “hidden powers”—an “unholy alliance between traditional sectors of the oligarchy, some new entrepreneurs, the police, military and common criminals”.
In 2005, the ombudsman’s office issued a report saying it had received information implicating 639 police officers in criminal activities in the past 12 months. The crimes range from extortion and robbery to rape and murder. As most of the population is afraid to report crime committed by the authorities, this figure is almost certain to be a considerable underestimate of police complicity.
“A key element in the history of Guatemala is the use of violence against women to terrorize the population,” says director of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights Eda Gaviola. “Those who profit from this state of terror are the organized criminals involved in everything from narco-trafficking to the illegal adoption racket, money-laundering and kidnapping. There are clear signs of connections between such activities and the military, police and private security companies, which many ex-army and police officers joined when their forces were cut back.”
Guatemala also has a particularly “macho” culture. A man can dodge a charge of rape if he marries his victim—provided she is over the age of 12. A battered wife can only prosecute her husband if her injuries are visible for over ten days. Having sex with a minor is only an offence if the girl can prove she is “honest” and did not act provocatively. And in some communities it is accepted that fathers “introduce” their daughters to sex.
Then there are the
The country’s largest gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, has now spread throughout Central America and northwards. From California, its tentacle have reached out across the United States. In 2005, it was held responsible for two killings in Long Island and is increasingly making its presence felt on the East Coast. In Guatemala, young women are often the victims of inter-gang rivalries. Usually the authorities dismiss the casualties as prostitutes.
But 19-year-old Manuela Sachaz was no prostitute. She was a baby-sitter, who had recently arrived in Guatemala City to look after Anthony Hernandez, the 10-month-old son of working couple Monica and Erwin Hernandez. Together they shared a small apartment on the second floor of a block in the Villa Nueva district of Guatemala City.
On 23 March 2005, the child’s mother Monica Hernandez came home from work. She had no key to the apartment and there was no answer from Manuela inside. She went to see her mother Cervelia Roldan to ask her if she had seen Manuela. She had not and together they went back to the apartment together and started calling out Manuela’s name, but there was no answer.
A middle-aged police officer lived in a nearby apartment. He came to the front door of his apartment block.
“It was about five in the afternoon,” Cervelia Roldan recalled, “but he was wearing just his dressing gown. He seemed very agitated and told us to look for Manuela in the market.”
When Erwin Hernandez arrived home and again got no answer, he broke a window and opened the apartment door. Inside he found the body of the baby-sitter and their child. Manuela was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The baby was sitting in a high chair, his breakfast still on the table in front of him. Both had been beheaded. The nanny had also been raped and mutilated. Her breasts and lips had been cut off, her legs slashed.
Three days later their police neighbour shaved off his beard and moved away.
“Neighbours told me later how he used to pester Manuela,” says Cervelia. She claims that, after the double murder, Manuela’s bloodstained clothing was found in the policeman’s house. The authorities dispute this. They say the blood on the clothing did not match that of the baby or his nanny.
Cervelia says she has seen the policeman in the neighbourhood several times since the killings.
“He laughs in my face,” she says. “What I want is justice, but what do we have if we can’t rely on the support of the law?”
In mid-December 2001 Maria Isabel Veliz was just a happy teenage girl with a part-time job in a shop. Earlier that year she had celebrated her 15th birthday by attending a church service wearing a white dress with flowers in her hair. She had a deep religious faith.
“Sometimes my daughter would visit me at work and pretend she needed to use my computer for her homework. But what she really wanted was to leave me a note telling me how much she loved me,” said her mother Rosa Franco, a secretary who had been studying for a law degree.
“She was proud of what I was trying to do,” said Rosa, who was left to raise her daughter and two younger sons alone. In a note written on Valentine’s Day that year, Maria told her mother to “always look ahead and up, never down”. That has been almost impossible since the day her daughter disappeared.
Rosa remembers every detail of the day her daughter vanished.
“As usual, she did not want breakfast—she wanted to stay thin—though I persuaded her to have a bowl of cornflakes before she left for work,” Rosa said. “I had given my daughter permission to work in a shop during the Christmas holidays, as she wanted to buy herself some new clothes. I wasn’t well that day and went to sleep early. When I woke up the next day and my daughter wasn’t there, I went to the police to report her missing. They said she’d probably run away with a boyfriend.”
That night, while watching a round-up of the news, Rosa recognized the clothing Maria Isabel had been wearing when she left for work the day before. The body of her daughter had been found lying face down on wasteland west of Guatemala City. Her hands and feet had been bound with barbed wire. There was a rope around her neck. Her hair had been cut short and all her nails had been bent back. Her face was disfigured from numerous punches, her body punctured with small holes. She had been raped and stabbed.
When Rosa went to the morgue and discovered the brutal details of her daughter’s injuries, she fainted.
“When I collapsed, they told me not to get so worked up,” says Rosa, who later suffered a heart attack.
Rosa then began pushing the authorities to find her daughter’s killers. She gave them telephone records showing that Maria’s mobile phone had been used after her death. And she tracked down witnesses who had seen her daughter being pulled from a car. The police accused Rosa of meddling and denounced her daughter publicly as a prostitute. Such smear tactics are often used to intimidate the families of murder victims.
Undeterred, Rosa continued to demand that the police investigate the death of her daughter. Instead they
