31

 / The long road to justice

Pz

P

that fine ear that appeared to be hiding behind every tree, 
ready to betray anyone who dared to speak. The fact was 
that Carías found out and warned him that if he dared to 
say another word about what had happened in Dos Erres, 
he would disappear from the face of the earth, just as his 
daughters had disappeared. With tears in his eyes, Catalino 
burt the photographs of his daughters and brothers. 

Petronila López Méndez, the woman who had seen a 
dismembered body in her dreams three days before the 
massacre, was left widowed and had to find a way of 
supporting her one-and-half year old son David, and her 
sixteen-year-old daughter Alicia, who was pregnant with the 
child of a young man who had also gone to Dos Erres and 
had never returned.

Petronila had no choice but to do farm work, like the menfolk, 
and while she planted corn seeds in La Cuarta Agarrada, 
a farm located nine kilometers away from Las Cruces, she 
could feel the presence of the same watchful eye that had 
spied on Catalino while he talked to the foreigners who had 
landed in a helicopter. For many years, she never dared to 
repeat what Carías had confessed.

For many years, the survivors of Dos Erres and their 
family members were eaten alive by a vulture of silence, as 
Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo wrote in the 1960s. 
They learnt that silence was the key to survival.

XIII

“Memory. Truth. Justice”. These are the words that can be 
read on a wide placard carried by a group of men and women 
depicted on a light blue background, in a mural that frames 
the front door of the Association of Family Members of the