13

 / The long road to justice

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and join the local Civil Defense Patrol or PAC, a paramilitary 
structure created in 1982 under the Ríos Montt dictatorship, in 
order to boost the army’s efforts to combat insurgents.

The men hated these patrols because they were seemingly 
unnecessary, as no one had ever seen a guerrilla combatant 
in Las Cruces, let alone in Dos Erres, and the grueling 12 
hour shifts (from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock in 
the afternoon), forced them to leave their homes unprotected. 
But even elderly men who were half deaf and could no longer 
walk upright were forced to comply. Everyone, without 
exception, had to take part, even if they were lying in bed 
with fever, as anyone who dared to disobey orders could be 
accused of being a communist sympathizer. And that was 
the worst possible thing that could happen to someone. It 
meant being intercepted along the road by an invisible hand 
and disappearing without a trace.

In that atmosphere of fear and paranoia, a common way 
of settling the score with a neighbor with whom one had 
an ongoing feud was to whisper in the ear of sub-lieutenant 
Carlos Antonio Carías, head of the military detachment 
in Las Cruces, that he or she was a communist. Without 
bothering to investigate the matter or check out the facts, 
that person would simply disappear and would never be seen 
again. 

Ricardo Martínez González was one of the men who was 
forced to patrol the vicinity and was well aware of the fact 
that orders issued by the army could not be disobeyed. One 
day, on his way to Las Cruces, he was stopped by a group of 
soldiers, one of whom walked barefoot. They demanded that 
he should run to the village and bring back a pair of size forty 
boots, or else his family would suffer the consequences.