Louisa Reynolds /

Pz

P

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the school, he and his mother had been taken to the church, 
where a soldier had suddenly burst in and yelled: “You better 
pray because no one is going to save you this time!”

The soldiers gathered small groups of women, taking the 
youngest ones first, and dragged them out of the church. 
When it was his mother’s turn to go, Ramiro clutched her 
leg but a huge black boot sent him flying across the church. 

The door was slammed shut and he never saw her again. 
The boy hid under a bench and cried himself to sleep. When 
he woke up, the church was empty.

IX

By six o’clock in the evening the massacre had ended and 
Juan Pablo Arévalo and his neighbors lay inside the well that 
they had built with their own hands, covered by a layer of 
fresh soil.

When there was no longer any space in the well for more 
bodies, the peasants who arrived at the village were rounded 
up and shot in two small lagoons known as La Aguada and 
Los Salzares, where animals drank from and where the 
villagers often washed their clothes. The soldiers had been 
instructed not to allow anyone to leave Dos Erres, although 
César Franco Ibáñez heard that a little boy had escaped.

The next day, the Kaibil soldiers left the village, taking two 
teenage girls, and two boys aged 3 and 5, who remained silent 
when they were asked what their names were. They had not 
been chosen at random to escape the horrors that befell 
Dos Erres on December 7, 1982. These children had been 
born to peasant families from eastern Guatemala, where 
the population is predominantly light skinned, and that, in