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 / The long road to justice

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the Interior Ministry in charge of carrying out extrajudicial 
executions, known in Guatemala as limpieza social or “social 
cleansing” operations, purportedly necessary to rid the 
country of undesirables such as suspected gang members, 
prostitutes and transvestites. 

Tzulma’s photograph is a poignant reminder of the fact that 
state-sponsored terror in Guatemala did not end when the 
Peace Accords were signed.

Aura Elena arrived after ten minutes, a woman with short 
hair, dark skin and deep set wrinkles, who nods when I ask 
her if Rubén Amílcar Farfán, a young man whose portrait 
is also included in this seemingly endless gallery of missing 
people, was her brother.

Rubén Amílcar Farfán was a final year Literature student 

at the public and left-leaning University of San Carlos 

(USAC) and was also a member of the Workers’ Party, at a 

time when being a sancarlista, as USAC’s students as known 

in Guatemala, and a sympathizer of a socialist party was 

reason enough for a young man to leave home at six o’clock 

in the morning on May 15, 1984, and never return home. 

Aura Elena worked as a nurse in Guatemala City’s Roosevelt 
Hospital when at ten o’clock in the morning sirens were heard 
in the street. “It seems like there’s trouble at the university”, 
said a doctor who was listening to the radio. That night, four 
strangers knocked on her door and told her that her brother 
had been abducted from the university campus and bundled 
into a vehicle.

Her family searched for him in every single morgue in the 
city, where they saw hundreds of mutilated bodies that had 
been found in garbage dumps, ravines or simply dumped by 
the roadside.