57

 / The long road to justice

Pz

P

for Human Rights (COPREDEH) should be broadcast on 
all state-owned channels no less than ten times during the 
ensuing fortnight. The message was clear: Guatemala should 
never forget the name Dos Erres.

XXV 

What became of the children who were taken from Dos Erres 
by the army after the massacre? Ramiro Cristales, they boy 
cried himself to sleep under the bench in the church, testified 
in the Pimentel Ríos trial.

Although he was only five years old when the massacre 
occurred, he remembers clearly what happened on that 
day.  A solider, whose face seemed vaguely familiar, pulled 
him out from underneath the bench and he was taken to the 
mountains with the rest of the troop and given beans and a 
canned tamal to eat.  

A few days later, he watched, with a mixture of fear and 
curiosity, how a huge metallic, blue and white bird, landed 
noisily in the middle of the jungle. They boy had never seen 
a helicopter before.

They all boarded the strange flying object, which took him 
to an unknown location, where Santos López Alonso, the 
Kaibil soldier who had taken him from the church and fed 
him, began to teach him how to fish, swim and hold a rifle. 
That’s how the soldier began to earn the boy’s trust or maybe 
the boy, alone and homeless, simply had no one else to turn 
to. 

Originally, Ramiro was going to be adopted by Lieutenant 
Rivera Martínez, but he had changed his mind and López