Louisa Reynolds /

Pz

P

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He was a short 52-year-old man who was handcuffed and 
walked towards the door, followed by the guard in charge of 
taking him to the restroom during the recess.

Without the olive green uniform that invested him with the 
power to decide the fate of the people under his command, 
and dressed in a black suit and yellow shirt, he seemed quite 
ordinary. He was just a man, like any other, who was trying 
to hide his fear.

Carías recognized Petronila, the woman whose intense gaze 
had pierced the wall of lies behind which he had barricaded, 
himself and who had seen him cry when he admitted that 
the army had murdered the inhabitants of Dos Erres. As 
he walked passed her he said: “Look, you know me. I had 
nothing to do with the massacre”, as if he were pleading for 
mercy.

But with the same resolve that had led her to insistently 
press Carías, telling him to be a man and tell her the truth, 
almost three decades later she did not hesitate when her 
turn to testify arrived, and she told the judges how the sub-
lieutenant had done his best to hide the truth, had ransacked 
the murdered villagers’ homes and had sold their belongings.

“When I testified against Carías I remembered how much 
I had suffered. I had to suffer in silence”, she said after the 
trial, sitting in Ricardo Martínez’s garden, the man who had 
been warned to leave the village at once, a month before the 
massacre.

Based on the testimonies of women like Petronila, who 
had repeatedly gone to the military detachment to find out 
what had happened to their husbands, children, brothers 
and sisters, on August 2, 2011, Judge Iris Jazmín Barrios