Louisa Reynolds /

Pz

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However, the survivors of the massacre still find it hard 

to understand how the army came to the conclusion that 

a peasant community with no ties to guerrilla groups was 

an enemy that deserved to be annihilated in such a brutal 

manner. 

“I swear I never saw a guerrilla combatant in Dos Erres. We 

were all honest and hard working people. The army threw 

children into the well. Are children guerrillas?” says Antonio 

García Montepeque, one of the uncles of Ramiro Cristales, 

the little boy who survived the massacre, hiding under a 

bench in the church.  

Sociologist Manolo Vela Castañeda, who also testified in the 

two trials, wrote a report on the Dos Erres case that describes 

how the massacre occurred: “The army did not engage 

in battle, no soldiers were killed or wounded, no guerrilla 

combatants were found, no weapons, no propaganda. All 

they ended up with were dead civilians. The enemy was 

invisible and could be anyone: an old man, a child, a pregnant 

woman. Any of those people could kill them. That’s why they 

had decided to kill everyone, regardless of who “everyone” 

included”.

Vela wrote a PhD thesis on the Dos Erres massacre during the 

years when the investigation had ground to a halt, in order 

to explain to Guatemalan society how the army managed to 

see in the faces of 201 civilians an enemy of the State that 

needed to be exterminated. After Attorney General Juan Luis 

Florido was replaced by Amílcar Velásquez Zárate in 2008 

and the investigation finally moved forward, he received a 

phone call from the Attorney General’s Office asking him if 

his thesis could be re-written as a report that could be used 
in court.

Vela arrived in court in 2011, when Carías and the three 
Kaibil soldiers faced trial, and again this year when Pedro